I SHALL GIVE YOU ONE final lecture today, and stop after this lecture. In this final lecture, I would like to talk to you about Rousseau once again and about the second Discourse once again. I would like to do something somewhat detailed on Part I of the second Discourse.
Last time, we saw the theoretical effects produced in Rousseau by the completely unprecedented dispositive of his genesis, a discontinuous genesis. We saw that these theoretical effects concern a certain number of possible concepts, ideas, and notions that are not made explicit, that are not thematized and, a fortiori, not systematized by Rousseau: hence possible concepts in the free state, in a state of theoretical divagation. We saw that these concepts – they can be so described – designate something which, vis-à-vis the old object of natural law theory, is very plainly a new object: it is what can be called the ‘object history’, with, of course, all the scare quotes one likes.
We saw, you will recall, the theoretical premises thanks to which this unprecedented dispositive of the genesis was literally imposed on Rousseau. It was imposed on him thanks to his radical critique of the false origin as circular and, correlatively, thanks to the fact that the true origin was posited as separate from the false origin, as pure, since this true origin is the pure state of nature. The simple critical redoubling of the origin, its division, thus had two effects, one triggering the other: first, the discontinuous dispositive of the genesis, of the process of denaturation and socialization; and, second, what I am calling the possible concepts implied by the provocation of the novelty of this dispositive.
However, these concepts, which I would group around the object history – these concepts are merely practised by Rousseau, rather than thought by him. To take just one example: the concept of accident observable between the state of pure nature and the state of peace, or between the state of peace and the state of war – in other words, the cosmic accidents, to begin with, followed by the accidental discovery of metallurgy, which Rousseau calls ‘this fatal [funeste] accident’.1 Rousseau practices the concept of accident, inasmuch as he writes the word ‘accident’, but he does not think the concept that he practices; he brings it into play, but does not reflect on it, on its theoretical meaning. He does not bring it into relation with his other concepts. That is what reflecting a concept would mean.
The consequence is that the concepts that we have brought out around the object history are visible for us, as a result of the analysis we have brought to bear on the structure of the dispositive and of the process of socialization/denaturation, and as a result of our comparative analysis of this dispositive, which we opposed to the classical dispositive of natural law philosophy – and only on that condition. It is only because we have analysed the implications of the dispositive of this process that these concepts are visible for us, but these effects are not visible in the same way [au même titre] for Rousseau in his text. It is not that these concepts or effects are invisible in and of themselves; it is not that they do not figure in Rousseau’s text, for they do figure in the logic of his text. Rousseau, however, fails to see them, and fails to see them for a simple reason: he directs his gaze elsewhere. We may say that these effects escape him, in both senses of the word: objectively, because he produces them without explicitly wanting to; and subjectively, because he does not pay enough attention to their existence to reflect it theoretically.2
The fact is that Rousseau trains his attention on completely different concepts, which he has forged to make his system function. Indeed, we can say that the concepts that make Rousseau’s system function are one thing, and the concepts that the system necessarily produces thanks to its very special sort of theoretical distraction (which we analysed last time) are quite another. Put differently, in order to bring out what is unprecedented in Rousseau, we have so far analysed, above all, the principle of the redoubling of the origin and the effect of that redoubling, the discontinuous structure of the process, and the effects of this effect, namely, the concepts induced by this structure.
We must, however, go on to see how Rousseau makes his system function with his explicit concepts. Since I cannot, in this final lecture, analyse the whole of the process depicted in the second Discourse, I shall take one precise example, the example of the first moment, the example of the pure state of nature, and ask the following question: How does Rousseau manage to produce a representation of this state? What determinations does he attach to it? What is their inner logic? What is the logic of this discourse, and what is the discourse of this logic? I am going to follow Rousseau’s text very closely in certain passages; however, to follow it closely, one does well to observe it from a certain distance. I shall therefore remind you that the state of pure nature has to meet – after all that we know, all that has been said about the origin – two requirements.
The first requirement is that the state of pure nature has to escape from the circle of the result projected onto the origin; that is, from the circle of the social result projected onto the pre-social, the non-social, from the circle of society projected onto the state of nature. For this reason, the state of pure nature must be a radical absence [néant] of society. It must be the absolute degree zero of society. Thus it must be separated, in the strong sense, from everything involving society, from every existing social result. In other words, between society and this radical absence of society, which will be a state, a nil [néant] state, of society, there must be a radical separation: not a de facto separation – this is the important point – but a de jure separation, such that the state of nature contains in itself, de jure, this separation itself. The first requirement is that separation not be imposed on it from outside, but result from its inner essence. It is not all that easy to meet this requirement in the representation of a real state.
The second requirement might be stated as follows. The state of nature must be the true origin, must, that is, be an origin in a mode altogether different from that of the false origin; hence it must be an origin in a mode external to the circle. The state of pure nature as origin must therefore contain, in a form to be defined, non-social determinations corresponding to the radical absence of society, determinations which, albeit radically separate in the sense just mentioned, are nevertheless originary, are the origin without being the cause of the contradictory process of socialization and denaturation; and are also the origin, while being, this time, the cause of the denaturation of the denaturation, of the negation of the negation, in short, of the restoration of the state of nature on new foundations at the moment of the social contract. There we have the two requirements.
We shall now see, in detail, how these two requirements are staged [mises en scène] by Rousseau; in other words, how the origin is realized, a term that must be understood in the strong sense. That is, we shall see how Rousseau confers reality, or something that has the appearance of being a reality, or the signification of being a reality, on the origin, in a concrete theoretical figure, in something anticipating what Hegel will call a Gestaltung, that is, a concrete figuration. I say ‘in a concrete theoretical figure’. Why theoretical? Because these are concepts that are realized in what Rousseau narrates; that is, concepts embodied in the dispositive of a figure. Why a concrete figure or figuration or mise en scène?. Why concrete? Because the existence of the concepts has to take on the form of empirical existence so that the origin is truly an origin, existence of the essence; so that space, trees, springs, animals, human individuals, hunger, sleep, death, and so on wind their way through the text. Why a figuration or figure? Because the natural empirical elements figuring concepts have to maintain relations among themselves such that they can ensure the efficacity, hence the theoretical effects, of the system of concepts. Why figures? In order to figure a theoretical system, a system of concepts that command one another.
I believe that this is how we have to read the text of Rousseau’s second Discourse. We have to read it not as a naive history, like the stories reported by travellers who have seen savages somewhere in the world and recount the lives of men dispersed in the big forest, with the dispersion of this story’s details; rather, we have to read it as a systematic conceptual figure in which the dispersion that is narrated, and its details, are simply the ultimate effect of the system.
This is how I would like to try to read this text. To begin, I shall set out from Rousseau’s general thesis, expounded in the state of pure nature. In the state of pure nature, men are free and equal. I take that as my starting point in order to ask the question of the forms of existence of these two concepts. The answer is as follows: men are free and equal in the state of nature on two conditions, to which the division of my study into two parts corresponds. First condition: men are free and equal in the state of nature on the following condition: that man’s relationship to nature is immediate, that is, without distance or negativity. Second condition: that man’s relationship to man is nil in the state of nature.
Two parts, then. Part I of this exposition: man’s relationship to nature is one of immediate, constant adequation.
Rousseau’s general thesis may be put this way: between natural man and the physical nature in which he lives, there exists immediate, constant harmony, an instantaneous harmony excluding all distance and all negativity, a constant adequation excluding all variation. His thesis is obviously opposed to the grand classical thesis that depicts man, deprived of everything, confronting a hostile nature. You remember the myth of Protagoras, which has it that Prometheus saw that man was naked and exposed to the cold, whereas the animals were covered with fur.3 Well, Rousseau’s man is naked too, and the animals in the world around him are also covered with fur, yet Rousseau’s man does not shiver and is not cold; he is not cold because it is not cold outside. We shall see why it is not cold outside later, but we may say that, for man, nature takes the place of fur.
It is only in the next part of the second Discourse, after the big cosmic accidents that will bring the state of pure nature out of its endless circle, when seasons appear, when trees start to grow – it is then that nature becomes distant and hostile, and that man has to ‘wrest’ (the word is Rousseau’s)4 his subsistence from it at the price of hardships and labour. At this point, man, in his relation to nature, enters into distance and, through distance, into negativity, into mediations, and thence into language, reason, civilization, and progress. In the state of pure nature, however, man exists in direct proximity to nature, in non-distance, in adequation. If we admit, as a definition of freedom, a thesis of the kind Hegel defends – ‘to be free is to be at home’, bei sich – we may say that this definition accords rather well with the state of pure nature described by Rousseau. Man in nature is at home like a fish in water, we shall say, like an animal in its natural habitat, in its element, at home. Man, who is nature, is in nature, is naturally at home, and is therefore free.
The whole opening section of the second Discourse tends to confer a concrete figuration on this thesis, as we shall see in the detail of the text as we discover the successive characteristics of man as animal, of man’s body, and of man’s needs. ‘I shall suppose [man]’, says Rousseau, ‘to have been at all times formed as I see him today’, stripped, however, of ‘the supernatural endowments he may have received and all the artificial faculties that he was able to acquire only through a long process [progrès]’.5 This man, shorn of, stripped of, the results of the progress of history, is no longer anything but animality. Man is, therefore, an animal, but an animal of a special sort. He is the generic animal, rather than a determinate animal; for what distinguishes him from a particular animal is that he is the animal ‘the most advantageously constituted of all’.6 We shall soon see how this constitution that is the most advantageous of all is defined.
What does ‘being an animal’ mean for Rousseau? To be an animal is to be a machine that renovates itself by itself, thanks to the information it receives from the external world through its sensory organs. To be an animal is to ensure the life of one’s machine by satisfying its needs; to be an animal is therefore to have needs, and an animal’s needs are physical needs. This term is crucial, for an entire segment of Rousseau’s thought is based on the distinction between physical and moral needs. Physical needs are simple needs: hunger, thirst, the need for sleep or a female: such are the sole needs that Rousseau grants to animals. They are called simple because they can be satisfied immediately; we shall see why in a moment. Man so defined, as an animal, a subject of simple needs that can be satisfied immediately, is distinct from the animal as such in that the animal has specific instincts, whereas man may well, says Rousseau, have none at all.
This makes man an animal of a very special kind, an animal that is not an animal, but what might be called the realization of animality in general, when its particular determinations are left out of account. Each species has only its characteristic instinct, Rousseau says, and ‘man, who perhaps has none peculiar to himself, arrogates them all’.7 Thus man is not defined as an animal by a specific instinct and by specific objects corresponding to this specific instinct, but by the absence of instinct, which is not a pure void, but, on the contrary, a positive capacity to appropriate all the instincts of all the animals.
What is the significance of this specific difference? We may say right away that man is no longer limited to a single instinct, as is every animal species; that is, man is not limited to a single object to satisfy his needs. With all the instincts at his disposal, man is all the more independent of nature. For example, an animal is so constituted that its instinct leads it to look for a particular kind of shelter; man can make do with shelters of all kinds. An animal’s instinct leads it to look for certain kinds of food; man can make do with food of all kinds. As Rousseau puts it, man therefore ‘finds his sustenance more easily than do any of the rest’ of the animals.8 The multiplication of instincts in man thus multiplies the answers to man’s needs in nature and augments man’s adequation to nature; in the same measure, it diminishes the negative character of the nature confronting man. Once man appropriates the universality of the animals’ instincts, he appropriates the universality of their objects and will at all times find in nature what he needs to satisfy his own instincts.
So much, then, for man’s general nature, which is animality.
Let us now see how this becomes more precise when we consider man’s body, the first form of naturalness and animality. What characterizes man’s body in the state of pure nature is its physical independence, the fact that it needs no external help, no physical help from outside. The whole man is in his body. There is no distance between man and nature, there is no distance between man’s body and nature, with the result that man possesses a body that needs no supplement or tools, but directly satisfies itself. ‘A savage’s body is the only tool he knows’,9 Rousseau says; his tools are its members. All the stronger by necessity, since it does not have tools as modern man does, man’s body consequently develops all the more in that it alone provides for his needs. Natural man has the advantage of ‘always carrying, so to speak, [his] whole self with [him]’;10 and nature reinforces this form of physical independence. Natural man as Rousseau depicts him for us is strong, and all the stronger in that he must do without any supplement. He therefore concentrates all his strength in his body; his faculties are multiplied, his vision is more acute than civilized man’s, as are his hearing, his sense of smell, and so on. In contrast, his sense of taste and his sense of touch are much coarser. You know all these passages; I shall not labour the point.
Man’s relation to the body, which, as we see here, implies direct contact with nature, is manifested in another form as well, in the form of illness and death. However, the presence of illness and death does not come between man and his body, as it does in social life. Rousseau gives us two reasons for this. First, illnesses, in a conception modelled after the one Plato develops in The Republic11 – illnesses appear as social institutions, as so many results of the evolution of society. Rousseau complacently develops this thesis. ‘The history of human ailments could be written by tracing that of civilized societies.’12 In the state of pure nature, consequently, since society does not exist, since refined foods do not exist, since fatigue, griefs, alcoholic beverages, and the passions do not exist, the man of the state of nature is never sick. Savages know no ailments other than injury and old age. Their ‘surgeon’ is ‘time’, their ‘regimen’ is natural life.13 They know neither gout nor rheumatism and are consequently spared all illness.
As for death, it is not an evil for man in the state of nature. Why? Here we have another very interesting point: because death is an event that goes unnoticed, because it is a natural event that nature takes pains to hide. Rousseau here develops a Lucretian conception of death:14 death does not exist, death has no natural being, because no one can perceive it, neither the dead man, who dies without knowing it, without knowing what death is and without fearing it, nor his neighbours, because he does not have any; death thus has no witnesses, neither the one who dies nor the one or the ones who might otherwise see him die. Old people, says Rousseau, ‘expire in the end without anyone noticing that they have ceased to exist and almost without noticing it themselves’.15 This absence of death is the effect of an absence of consciousness; it is the absence of expectation, the absence of any representation of the future, the absence of fear. Animals will never know what it is to die, and since man is an animal, he does not know what it is to die, for this knowledge of death and fear of death suppose an anticipation, the sense of the future that men no more have in this period than animals do.
Thus man is not dependent on the nature of his own body as if it were an obstacle, whether in the form of sickness or death, nor is he subject to the nature of his body as if it were something alien to him. Hence his body is not an obstacle, but the means of his independence, the body of his independence and freedom. Freedom is the body in harmony with itself in an existence in which man’s body is in harmony with nature. That is what we shall go on to see now, with respect to needs – for the body feels needs.
Here we observe the same immediacy, the same independence; no obstacles, no distance. Thus we see that needs are satisfied immediately, because they are immediate needs, physical needs. I told you that Rousseau draws an essential distinction between physical or immediate needs and moral or social needs, which are mediated needs; the latter take the detour of an idea or a man, that is, of a representation or an external mediation, and end up multiplying needs and creating artificial needs. Immediate needs, in contrast, are animal needs; they are natural impulses, needs for natural things, physical needs. Man in the state of nature has no desire other than his own physical needs: ‘his desires do not go beyond his physical needs’.16
The relationship of need to nature, to its satisfaction, is therefore realized without any intermediary, without the detour of ideas, without the detour of a need for men, without the detours of tools. Need is the pure movement of the body turning towards an object of satisfaction found in nature. ‘The only goods in the world he knows’, says Rousseau, ‘are food, a female, and repose.’17 Nature answers this immediate need, which does not take the detour of an idea, the imagination, or a passion, immediately, through abundance. ‘His modest needs’, says Rousseau, ‘are easily within reach.’18 This concept is crucial: the object of need is to hand. Hegel, describing paradise, picked up on this concept with the notion of Handgreiflichkeit, the ‘ready to hand’. Man has only to stretch out his hand, says Rousseau, and his needs are satisfied. He also says: ‘The products of the earth furnished all the necessary support and prompted him to make use of them by instinct.’19 He also says: ‘The condition of nascent man … was the life of an animal initially limited to pure sensations, scarcely profiting from the gifts supplied him by nature, much less imagining he could wrest anything from it.’20 Man does not have to wrest anything from nature; he need only stretch out his hand, and his needs are satisfied. Thus his needs are modest, but immediately satisfied. His instincts are multiple, since man does not have a specific instinct, so that he can find an object to satisfy his needs at all times. Trees are abundant and, it seems, short, since they will begin to grow when the state of nature ends, making it hard to pick fruit because their branches are so high. Nature is thus in easy reach, immediately; it is not an obstacle standing in the way of needs, but the immediate answer to them; and it is an answer that asks nothing in return: that is, men do not have to work.
It will be objected: But are there no wild animals in this idyllic nature? Rousseau considers the hypothesis. And it will be objected: Are they not an obstacle? Rousseau responds with three arguments.
Firstly, man lives on fruit; he therefore does not have to hunt wild animals in order to eat them.
Secondly, man quickly learns to avoid them; he is more resourceful than they are, and need only climb trees to avoid them. Thus man does not have to face off with wild animals in the event that they attack him.
Third argument – this is a series of interlinked arguments – wild animals do not attack man, because they mean him no harm and he means them no harm. Between men and animals, who are all sentient creatures, there exists a commonality of nature, which is the compassion of sensitivity, the compassion of pity. Animals are sensitive to men, men are sensitive to animals; everybody spares everybody, reciprocally. Pity appears here, for the first time, as the abolition of animals’ difference from men.
This harmony between man and external nature, about which I have just told you a little something, appears in Rousseau’s text; it is here that we see things becoming systematic, as the condition of the harmony between man and his own body. It is because man is in harmony with nature that he is in harmony with his own body. It is because nature invites him to engage in natural exercise that his body develops. It is because nature responds to his immediate needs with healthy, abundant food that the human body is not sick. It is because nature is not a problem for man that man does not need the mediations of thought, imagination, reflection, and so on, that he does not think about death, that he does not think about his own death, and that he therefore has no problems of life or death with his body.
This immediate harmony is a harmony without distance; it is the harmony of instinct satisfied by nature. [On the one hand,] no difficulties, no problems, no distance, no negativity; hence, on the other hand, no need for reflection. Since nature is the tacit answer to the problems of nature, everything in the state of pure nature is resolved this way, at a pre-reflexive level, thanks to the pure movement of nature prior to all reflection. This phrase of Rousseau’s – ‘the pure movement of nature, prior to all reflection’21 – is uttered about pity, but it holds for all the determinations distinguishing the man of the state of nature. Man does not need to reflect, he is in a pre-reflexive state; man does not need to anticipate, for the future does not exist for him; time does not exist for him; and, since his needs are satisfied at once, immediately, man has, Rousseau says, ‘no idea of the future’, no curiosity, no philosophy.22
The amusing example he gives is that of the Carib, who is not a man of the state of pure nature, but a man of the subsequent state of nature, whom he cites with even better reason – who, he says, when he has slept in a bed for a night, sells it in the morning, with no thought for the fact that he will need a bed to sleep in that evening. Thus he lives outside any notion of time.23 And, since the world ‘sleep’ has been mentioned: if man is a creature without explicit consciousness, if man is a creature who does not know time and who lives in the ongoing repetition of immediacy, his truth in the state of pure nature is, ultimately, sleep. Man, says Rousseau, loves to sleep. ‘The savage must love to sleep, but he must sleep lightly, like animals, which think little and may be said to sleep whenever they are not thinking.’24 Thus, under these conditions, if we suppose that man never thinks, he must sleep a good deal. Here again, we cannot help but recall that, a little later, Hegel will, in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, elaborate an entire argument about sleep as the harmony of nature with itself.25 This is prefigured in Rousseau.
Such, then, is natural man’s relationship to external nature. Man is an animal who, as such, feels only simple physical needs and can satisfy his needs with fruit that is in easy reach. The adequation between man and nature therefore supposes, first, in man, the form of existence known as animality, that is, simple physical needs; second, in nature, a form of existence such that it is everywhere and at all times in easy reach. You can see that a certain number of determinations have been posited; but they necessarily call for others.
It is here that we first encounter the concept of the forest as a form of existence of nature necessitated by Rousseau’s theoretical requirements in order to satisfy – a form of existence, a way nature has to be made – in order to satisfy, everywhere and at the same time, man’s two basic physical needs, hunger and sleep. It is trees which, in Rousseau’s text, provide, precisely, fruit and shade for sleeping or as a refuge. Here, however, we must attend to the logic of the system, which imposes a whole train of consequences on Rousseau. So that nature can thus fulfil the conditions for human freedom everywhere, the forest must cover the whole globe: there has to be a forest as far as the eye can see or, let us say, as far as the concept can reach. Still better: the forest must not just be everywhere, but must be the same at all times. This makes it necessary that nature remain constant so that adequation remains constant.
This requires, then, that there be no seasons and that there be no more difference in natural time than in human time; that there be no difference in natural time, this difference being the seasons (nature without seasons, in other words, is a nature without time). It requires that nature no more have time than man has time, that the absence of time in the one case correspond to the absence of seasons in the other. It requires that there be, in both cases, repetition of the same, immediate continuity of the same; that there be, in nature, no more distance within nature itself than there is distance within man, between man and his body, or than there is distance between man and his body, on the one hand, and man and external nature on the other.
Thus we have a forest as far as the eye can see and a forest without seasons. Rousseau, accordingly, makes the earth’s axis coincide with the ecliptic again in order to abolish seasons, since he explains that it was when the Lord tilted the earth’s axis that seasons appeared.26 In the same way, Rousseau shortens the trees to put fruit in easy reach of all hands, in order to produce the nature that the existence and state of pure nature call for.
So much for the first condition, the relationship between man and nature.
I now turn to the second condition, the second moment in this exposition: men’s relations to each other.
I have already told you that, for the state of nature to realize its concept, men’s relations to each other had to be nil. For Rousseau, it is a question of realizing, in the proper sense of the word now, the null state [l’état néant] of society in the state of pure nature. It is a question of producing the concrete figure of the non-relation of men among themselves. How can a non-relation be endowed with existence? How can a non-relation, a nothingness, be concretely figured? Such is the problem that Rousseau confronts and resolves. He resolves it by means of a whole series of conditions that he will expound in the result, and the characterization of men as solitary and dispersed: solitary by essence and condition, and dispersed so that nothing can come along to break this solitude.
What is the foundation for this solitude and this dispersion? How does Rousseau found all that, and, at the same time, realize all that? The operation is divided [se dédouble] into two moments; this act of foundation is divided into a negative condition that is de jure – this is important – and a positive de facto condition. Everything with a bearing on law will be negative, and everything with a bearing on facts will be positive.
I begin with the negative de jure condition. The negative de jure condition consists in the rejection of the theory of man’s natural sociability. This theory of natural sociability is, as you know, one of the major theoretical stakes of the philosophical-political polemics for which natural law provides the stage. The important thing is that we witness a historical reversal between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. At a certain moment, in the beginning, between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century, it can be said that one’s attitude towards the social contract and the theory of natural sociability constituted the touchstone for the philosophical-political positions adopted in a certain domain. That is, broadly speaking, the avant-garde, those in the opposition, the anti-feudal theorists, were at once for the social contract and against natural sociability. Hobbes, for example, is opposed to the theory of natural sociability. In contrast, natural sociability is invoked in this period, as a rule, by philosophers who defend the feudal order and refer to Aristotle. And, for the feudal party, the theory of natural sociability is always the correlate of a theory of men’s natural inequality.
In the eighteenth century, however, we see a spectacular reversal with regard to the theory of natural sociability. We see a revival of this theory based on bourgeois, not feudal positions, as may be observed, for example, in Pufendorf, Physiocrats such as Mercier de la Rivière, the Encyclopaedia (I refer you to Diderot’s article ‘Society’), and so on. We find, consequently, a slightly different presentation, which remains substantially the same, but is inserted into a theoretical apparatus that confers a completely opposed political meaning on it.
To provide some idea of the prehistory and continuity of the theory of natural sociability, we have to say, very, very briefly, a word about the way it presents itself in Aristotle. We find this sentence in Aristotle’s Politics: ‘Man is by nature an animal made for civil society.’27 Even if people did not need one another – need in the physical, material, utilitarian sense – they would still feel the desire to live together. In truth, common interest assembles us as well, but civil society is less a society of life in common than a society of honour and virtue. Natural sociability in Aristotle is thus divided [se dédouble] into two forms of sociability: utilitarian sociability and virtuous sociability.
We find the same thesis and, broadly, the same distinction, but drawn with much greater precision and force, in the eighteenth century, in the Encyclopaedists and, after Pufendorf, in the Physiocrats. The idea that man is naturally sociable because he needs society, that man is made for society, becomes, in the eighteenth century, the idea that man is naturally sociable because he needs society in two senses. First, man needs society materially, as a means of satisfying his own needs, which he would be incapable of satisfying by himself. This is, accordingly, a utilitarian need, material and utilitarian. What is more, second, man needs society to satisfy his need for man, that is, for friendship and for society in the moral sense of the word. Here, for example, is what Pufendorf says: ‘The social attitude is cultivated by men in order that by the mutual exchange among many of assistance and property28 [this is, then, utilitarian], we may be enabled to take care of our own concerns to greater advantage.’ He adds: ‘Nature has ordained a certain general friendship between all men, of which no one is to be deprived.’29 Thus we have the twofold theory of man’s material need and moral need. Man needs man materially and morally.
We find a blanket rejection of this twofold theory in Rousseau. For him, man does not naturally need man; that is, man is not at all affected by such a spontaneous need deriving from his nature, grounded in his nature. Man naturally needs neither the material assistance of men, hence society, to satisfy his needs, nor men’s moral society, friendship, or companionship. In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau repeatedly returns to this theme: nature has done little to prepare men’s sociability. Rousseau renounces natural sociability as a foundation for natural law. He founds this natural law on pity and self-love, ‘with no need here to introduce the principle of sociability’.30 Thus he openly declares his opposition to the thesis of natural sociability.
These positions are obviously of the very first importance. For it was essential, for Rousseau, setting out from the premises we saw last time, to avoid conceding anything at all to the thesis of natural sociability in either of its forms – man needs man because he loves him and, equally, man needs man because he is useful to him – lest he lapse into that for which he criticized his contemporaries and predecessors: the circle of the bad origin, the circle of the result projected onto the origin. By attributing sociability to men, for whatever reason, one brings society straight into the state of pure nature, which must remain a state of non-society. That is why Rousseau must at all costs reject the two foundations of society, material need and moral need.
He acquits himself of the task with great consistency (we are here in law [droit], though it is a question, precisely, of doing away with all law) in two famous theories. [First,] the theory which has it that physical needs, taken by themselves, far from uniting men and bringing them together, disperse them – an astonishing, paradoxical theory, one that makes sense only as a counter to, and refutation of, the utilitarian theory of the Encyclopaedists (that is, of the whole eighteenth century), which has it that men’s natural needs, their material needs, bring them together. Rousseau says: ‘It is claimed that men invented speech in order to express their needs; this seems to me an untenable opinion. The natural effect of the first needs was to separate men and not to bring them together … the necessity to seek their subsistence forces [them] to flee one another.’ These passages are drawn from the ‘Essay on the Origin of Languages’.31 There we have the first thesis: men’s physical needs disperse rather than assembling them.
The second theory in which Rousseau acquits himself of this task is the theory which has it that the only relation among men in the state of pure nature is not that of a need for man (sympathy, human love, and the like), but the negative relation of compassion, the negative relation of pity, which is a relation existing among all sentient creatures, men and animals. Rousseau thus rids himself of this danger by clearing the decks with this twofold negative theory, which ensures that man has no need at all for man, whether material or moral.
But that is not all. It is not all, and Rousseau does not believe that he has settled the score with the theory of sociability once he has rejected its theory of man’s material need and man’s moral need (sympathy, friendship, love, and so on). Rousseau in the second Discourse, and this is quite unexpected, also criticizes at considerable length something that plays, in him, the role of a theory of what might be called perverse sociability, the role of destructive sociability, which he descries in Hobbes as the theory of man’s wickedness. Thus Rousseau describes natural man as ‘wandering in the forests, without work, without speech, without a dwelling, without war, and without ties, with no need of his fellow men and no desire to harm them’.32 The desire to do harm that appears in this short quote, a desire that is placed side by side with war, that figures after war, is here situated at the same level as man’s need for his fellow men.
For it is possible, at the limit – and this is what Rousseau does – to present the desire to do harm, if it is natural in man, as a form of bond that would unite man with man in competition, violence, and war. If one grants that man is naturally inclined to harm man, one grants that man needs man in order to be a wolf to man – to be not his friend, but his savage beast; one grants that man needs man as the object of his wickedness. And one could make this aggressive instinct a form of sociability, the perverse form of sociability, an unsocial sociability that would impel men to live in society solely in order to tear each other to pieces and do each other harm.
Such is the thesis that Rousseau pretends to ascribe to Hobbes, taking pains to refute it at the same level as the other two theses about sociability. He refutes it, of course, by repeating his major argument against Hobbes: that he projects onto the origin of society passions which develop only with society itself, and imagines that war might be waged from man to man on the basis of a perverse instinct present in every individual, whereas war presupposes constant relations. Rousseau generalizes: what is said about wickedness could and should be said about goodness too, for virtues as well as vices, to be worthy of their name, presuppose established relations among men: the material relations of social constraints reinforced by intellectual relations and relations of passion.
At the limit, therefore, man in the state of nature can no more love man than he can hate him, can no more desire man’s welfare than he can wish him harm. In the state of nature, man can no more be called good than wicked, since the state of pure nature is prior to all relation between men, is separate from, and foreign to, any relation; it does not so much as contain the germ of a relation in any form of sociability whatever, right side out or inside out, positive or perverse. ‘In the state of nature’, says Rousseau, since men ‘have no kind of moral relationships to each other’, and no common ‘duties’, they can ‘be neither good nor evil’:33 ‘savages are not wicked precisely because they do not know what it is to be good.’34 Rousseau concludes his critique of Hobbes by saying: ‘There is, moreover, another principle that Hobbes failed to see … the one natural virtue … I speak of pity.’35 With that, we have come to pity, that enigmatic concept that necessarily surges up to counterbalance the three forms of the theory of sociability.
So much for the de jure conditions, which are negative. That is, Rousseau rejects every form of sociability in man.
We must now turn to the de facto conditions, which will be positive. For man’s solitude is not founded on a negative de jure condition alone; it is also founded on a positive de facto condition.
For once sociability and need have been declared unthinkable in the following terms – ‘it is unimaginable why, in [the] primitive state, one man would need a fellow man any more than a monkey or a wolf needs its fellow creature’36 – the following riddle remains to be explained. Granted, men do not naturally feel any friendly or hostile inclination towards each other, no inclination leading them to unite. Granted, as well, that men do not naturally feel a need to turn to other men to satisfy their physical needs. It remains to explain why they are not forced to do so and why they can dispense with this. This point is crucial, since we know, from the subsequent process of socialization, that men gradually began to become sociable because they were forced to come together by harsh natural conditions, and that, once brought together by nature’s inclemency, they began to associate in brief encounters, followed by more enduring associations, in order to satisfy their needs. Thus it remains to explain why men, who do not have the slightest natural need for society, are not forced into society in the state of pure nature; why they can remain dispersed and, consequently, can remain solitary.
They can do so because there is no distance between their physical needs, which constitute all their needs, and the object that satisfies them. Men are not forced into society, that is, into coming together, because nature is always present and immediately close, and is always and at all times the ever-ready answer to the demands of need. It is this immediate proximity between man and nature, between need and its object, which makes it possible to understand why needs disperse men. Men’s dispersion is the obverse [l’envers] of nature’s proximity. Men are distant from one another because nature is close to each of them, anywhere and everywhere.
The limit situation in which this paradox and this effect of reversal appear is the imaginary one – for it practically never occurs in the state of nature – in which two men find themselves disposed by some chance event to seize the same piece of fruit in order to meet their needs, and to quarrel over it. From this situation – the origin, you will recall, of the state of war in Hobbes – Rousseau simply draws the following conclusion: the men would have no reason to enter into competition; on the contrary, each would have every reason to go look for his fruit on a different tree.37 Far from coming together to help each other or tear each other to pieces, the men would go their separate ways of their own accord, both in order to satisfy their needs and because such satisfaction is possible everywhere.
But while men may well part from each other, they never part from nature, which is always equally close to them. Ultimately, that is why their physical needs can part them. Men part because they avoid each other, and they avoid each other because they have nothing to gain from coming together; they can avoid each other because nature never parts from them. Nature is their real society.
Setting out from this twofold condition, in which fact reinforces right, in which the positive de facto conditions reinforce the negative de jure conditions, Rousseau turns his efforts to the details of his panorama, until he has eliminated every possible trace that might suggest the possibility of interhuman relations. This is the work of a theoretical craftsman; it is not as easy to accomplish as all that …38
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For man does not need man; yet he doubtless does need woman. The physical need for females is one of man’s animal needs. How does Rousseau extricate himself from this dilemma, how does he get out of this predicament? He gets out of it by means of a series of very long considerations which effectively prove that it is not easy to get out of it.
He gets out of it, first, by means of a distinction between the physical and the moral in love; that is, by means of a distinction comparable to the one which led us to distinguish moral need from the physical need we discussed a moment ago – that is, he simplifies the form of sexual need to an extreme. He makes it an animal need, without representation, without imagination, without consciousness of the future, even, at the limit, without self-consciousness, and without a capacity for identification – that is, without recognition of one’s partner.
Rousseau gets out of it, second, by attributing morality in its entirety – that is, sentiments, ideas, relations, and ties – to society, while attributing the physical alone to the state of nature. Yet that does not change the fact that man needs woman. Rousseau gets out of it, third, thanks to the physical anonymity of natural man’s love. Any woman is good for natural man, Rousseau says, speaking of the sexual encounter; he speaks, however, of man, and does not say that any man will do for any woman (this point of view could not yet be made reciprocal in this period). ‘[F]or him, any woman is good.’39 This is crucial, because, at the limit, an individual woman does not exist in the sexual encounter. In the sexual encounter, one’s partner is unidentifiable. In other words, after the encounter with one’s partner, one no longer knows who one’s partner was. In other words, man no longer knows who he went to bed with.
Finally, Rousseau gets out of it by means of the thesis – a fundamental thesis, because it is directly opposed to the thesis which Locke defended at length – that woman has, between conception and childbirth, no reason to bind herself to the man she has encountered. As you may recall, Locke made it a duty of natural law for a man to remain by a woman’s side between conception and childbirth and during the children’s upbringing, until such time as the children were capable of leaving the family home.40 All that was based on natural law and was inscribed in Locke’s nature.
Rousseau explains that a woman has no reason to bind herself to the man she has encountered, and that a man has no reason to bind himself to the woman he has encountered, because, in any case, they do not know what has happened, for one thing and, for another, are incapable of recognizing each other. Neither knows who the other is and they cannot find each other again. Moreover, since they roam through the forest, they lose sight of each other as soon as the first tree comes along.
All this is coherent – could, at a pinch, be coherent in an imaginary world. The only real problem is that represented by the children, since it must be admitted that the woman nurses them, so that they remain with their mother for a certain time, leaving as soon as they can. This is a real problem, which Rousseau will draw on, which he will turn to account later, when he says that it is likely that the invention of languages was due to children. Languages are invented by children, the first rudiments of language are invented by children, and then they are able to talk to their mothers.41
On this whole question, I refer you to Note L of the second Discourse; you will see how adamant Rousseau is.42 Whether his theses are more or less convincing is another matter; at any rate, he engages in an extraordinarily sustained theoretical effort to reduce anything in sexuality that might resemble the beginnings of a human relationship to zero, or to nearly nothing. To reduce this relationship to nearly nothing is to reduce it to a very precise concept in Rousseau, the concept of the pure, fortuitous encounter.
It will be granted, on the strength of Rousseau’s premises, that the encounter in sexuality is fortuitous inasmuch as men who are dispersed can encounter each other only by chance. Sexual life, however, is a physical need that brings individuals together. This meeting, however fortuitous, must therefore be without duration. That is how Rousseau gets out of trouble. It will be granted that the sexual encounter is without duration if the instant of the encounter coincides with the instant of the sexual act, which is purely animal, that is, takes place between partners who have no means of representation, imagination, or identification at their disposal that might enable them to recognize their partner or anticipate subsequent events.
This category of the encounter, which we have just seen emerging in connection with sexuality – the encounter as chance event without duration or sequel, as instantaneous chance event – is the category in which Rousseau thinks, in general, everything that can transpire between men in the pure state of nature. Men live dispersed, they live in solitude, but it sometimes happens that they encounter each other by chance, and it is by chance by definition, it is by definition that it does not last, it is by definition that it never has consequences, that it has no sequel. For men never meet twice and, if by chance that should happen, it would be the first time for them, since, unable to make comparisons, they are unable to identify themselves; unable to identify themselves, they are unable to recognize each other; unable to recognize each other, they are unable to remember each other, and so on. At the limit, ‘the first time’ itself means nothing at all.
Obviously, there are very many passages on the encounter in the second Discourse. ‘[W]ithout fixed dwellings or any need for each other, they might meet up scarcely twice in their lives, without recognizing or speaking to each other.’43 ‘[N]early the only way to meet up again was to keep each other in sight.’44 ‘[F]inding almost certain refuge in the trees, [man] may take on or leave any encounter, and make the choice between flight or combat’, and so on.45 There are very many such passages.
To come, now, to the most interesting passage: if a man were ever to find himself in a position to take another man captive, Rousseau explains in a passage that I am going to read to you, and to want to reduce him to slavery, in short, to bind the man to himself by means of fear, the slave would only have to wait for his master to fall asleep at the foot of a tree, and he would be free; he would flee into the forest, where he would never be seen or captured again, since, by definition, the forest is where men never see each other twice:
If someone chases me away from one tree, I am at liberty to go to another one; if someone harasses me in one place, who will stop me from going elsewhere? [My master] would have to resolve not to let me out of his sight for an instant … [S]uppose his vigilance momentarily slackens? Suppose an unexpected noise makes him turn his head? I slip twenty paces into the forest, my chains are broken, and he never sees me again in his life.46
We may conclude from this that, on condition that the sexual encounter is reduced to the minimum, Rousseau thinks, in the form of the encounter between men in the infinite space of the forest through which they roam, the absence of all bonds between men. The encounter is the punctual event that has the property of effacing itself, leaving no trace behind, surging up out of nothingness to return to nothingness, with neither origin nor result. Later, after the state of nature has been surpassed, the forced, enduring encounter obviously takes on a completely different meaning in Rousseau, but, from the theoretical standpoint, it is quite symptomatic that there figures, in the state of nature, an encounter in the zero state, just as there figures a society in the nil state, and that Rousseau assigns these two concepts the same condition of existence: the infinite space of the forest, a space without place.
There we have, then, with a few details, all the determinations that Rousseau is obliged to deduce as so many a priori conditions in order to answer the question of the state of pure nature. This question is: What must man be, what must nature be, and what must man’s relationship to nature be for men to have no relations among themselves, for the state of pure nature to be a state of the radical absence of society?
Here are the essential features of the answer: man must, first of all, be an animal who realizes the concept of generic animality, in that he has only physical needs that can be immediately satisfied. That is the first condition. The second: nature must stand in immediate proximity to man, must at every step offer him ‘storehouses and shelter’,47 as Rousseau puts it, in easy reach, always more abundant than his needs, everywhere and at all times.
This is where the deduction of the forest begins, since the tree is the synthesis of storehouse and shelter, shade and refuge – as well as the deduction of the universal forest, so that man can find something to eat everywhere in it. The deduction of the forest, however, goes beyond this omnipresence, this omni-generosity. It is more than the immediate answer to physical need; it is the space of men’s dispersion, an infinite space, a space such that it prevents all encounters from producing the least tie. The forest is the space of non-recognition, of non-identification, of non-identity.
Positively, therefore, the forest is defined as the immediate object of man’s physical need; negatively, it is defined as the form of space that allows men to avoid being forced into society. It is a space without place in which men are subject to divagation, in which they do not run the risk of binding themselves to other men because they cannot bind themselves to space. The universality of the fullness of the object and of the void of the encounter and place: that is what the forest is. Because the forest realizes this double requirement, it is, in the strong sense, the concept of the conditions of existence of the animal man in the state of pure nature. When it ceases to be in conformity with its concept, when trees grow taller, when seasons appear, man will no longer be at home in nature. He will be obliged to wrest his subsistence from it; places will appear in the space of the forest; men will be forced to come together; and the process of socialization will begin.
A condition of existence of the state of pure nature, the forest is also the concept of its endless repetition, its repetition without difference. The forest is repetition, always the same, in all places and at all times, space without the difference of places, time without the difference of seasons; it is the counterpart of the instantaneous repetition – without the difference of memory, without the difference of signs and ideas – of physical need in man. This speculary face-to-face between man and the forest, man and nature, is itself an immediate repetition of adequation without difference. It is this twofold immediate repetition, commanded by [sous] the immediate repetition of its adequation, which allows the system to function. It is this face-to-face and the double repetition which allows the system to function in Rousseau, but on one absolute condition: pure repetition. Thus the state of pure nature is the state of the simple reproduction of its conditions of existence. Nothing happens in it. It merely repeats itself; it contains no productive [efficace] difference, no principle of development, no driving contradiction. It cannot leave itself; it lasts indefinitely.
That is what Rousseau says in the second Discourse. ‘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.’48 ‘[T]he generations multiplied unproductively, and because each began anew from the same point, centuries passed by in all the crudeness of the earliest ages, the species was already old, and man remained ever a child.’49
This powerlessness to leave itself here appears, in Rousseau’s text, as a consequence of the determinations of the concrete figure. In fact, it is the principle governing them. What Rousseau here deduces is, in the form of powerlessness to leave itself, the concept of the true origin’s separation; he simply rediscovers what he ‘deduces’ here, because it is the very concept that it was a question of realizing – the separation of the true origin from the false origin, hence the origin as separate.
Thus we see the origin as separate now, as realized in this Rousseauesque figure. The question that arises is the following: If the origin is radically separate, in what sense can it still be called an origin, and of what can it be said to be the origin? Do we not have to do, rather, with a beginning – a beginning, moreover, with no sequel?
Precisely because this beginning with no sequel has had a sequel, it is not a beginning, but an origin. And this beginning with no sequel was only able to have a sequel because the sequel was not its sequel; this beginning with no sequel thus contained something enabling it to have a sequel [de quoi avoir une suite] that was not its sequel. That is why Rousseau can consider it to be an origin – because of this ‘something enabling it to have a sequel’.
The fact that its sequel is not its own is revealed rather clearly by the endless circle in which the state of pure nature goes round and round. Only accidents can break this circle and initiate a forced development. This forced development must, however, be a possible development; in other words, natural man must have a nature and be capable of modifying his nature in response to the pressure and constraint of circumstances. This nature is known: it is animality. This capability has a name: it is what Rousseau calls perfectibility, a faculty peculiar to man which, virtually, dissociates him from the immediacy of generic animal instinct and endows him with the power to change and acquire new dispositions and new faculties: intelligence, reason, ingenuity, arms, but also the social passions, and so on.
What is originary in the state of origin would thus be something like perfectibility. If, however, we consider the state of pure nature, we observe that the perfectibility attributed to the man of the state of pure nature is nil in the state of pure nature and without effect there. What I have just said about perfectibility might also be said about freedom, which is the second peculiarly human faculty.
To this point, Rousseau has offered us a certain image of natural man’s freedom, something like the identity of subject and substance, of man and nature, an image that mobilized only the concrete givens required by the system. Now, however, we see another determination of freedom suddenly surge up in the text: intellectual freedom, the power to will and to choose, and intellectual awareness of willing and choosing. Here too, we have to do with the same surprise: that which is affirmed about intellectual human freedom is, in the state of pure nature, of no effect and non-existent.50
Perfectibility, freedom: Rousseau thus attributes to man original qualities that have the disconcerting feature of being original and non-existent in the state of origin. The same holds for pity. The case of pity is very interesting, inasmuch as it is, according to Rousseau, the sole natural virtue – let us take this to mean the sole natural social faculty prior to reflection and reason – yet a negative social virtue, inasmuch as pity is a feeling that brings a relationship between man and another sentient creature, man or animal, into play; but this relationship is not a positive social relationship. The effect of pity is not to bring men together, but to prevent men from harming other men or animals. That is why Rousseau discusses it in connection with Hobbes, immediately after examining the hypothesis that there exists a sociability based on the desire to do harm.51 He opposes to it the feeling of the desire not to do harm known as pity. In question here, however, is a simple abstention that is not enough to constitute the beginnings of a society, since it does not bring men together. We may say about pity that it is the concept of relation in non-relation.
Be that as it may, it seems that pity, unlike perfectibility and freedom, is well and truly active in the state of pure nature, that is, the origin, since Rousseau says that it can temper the desire for self-preservation in natural man. However, to this affirmation, which would, moreover, seem to be of no great consequence, since men practically never encounter each other, we may oppose a logic that is internal to the theory of pity. This logic is developed at length in Emile. It may be summed up as follows: pity presupposes a complex process in which there intervene, first, a personal experience of suffering, hence a memory of suffering, hence a certain memory of personal suffering and, second, an imaginary identification of the ego that is suffering or has suffered with the ego of others who are suffering at present.52 This process, however, in order to be possible, brings into play a system of memory, anticipation, projection, and imagination – above all, imagination and abstraction – of which natural man is altogether incapable.
We can, consequently, only conclude that, although Rousseau attributes pity to the state of origin, pity is nil and without effect in the state of the origin, in the state of origin of pure nature, because the conditions of its realization do not obtain.
Here, then, are the elements that constitute the origin. We have, first, the animal nature of man with his faculties and needs, as well as his passion, self-love. This animality is active in the state of nature, in the origin. However, since man is neither sociable nor reasonable, since, by his nature, he does not speak, his animality contains no internal principle of development. Everything has to come to him from the outside.
Next, we have the pity that figures in the origin. It is the relation of non-relation; it is the community of abstention in suffering. Hence it is inactive or even non-existent in the state of nature.
Next, we have freedom, as intellectual power or intellectual awareness. It is inactive and non-existent in the state of nature.
We have perfectibility, the general principle of the possibility, of the virtuality, of the development of all the human faculties. It is by definition inactive in the state of nature.
Of these four elements, one, the first, animality, is immanent in the state of nature and active in the state of nature. It therefore figures in the origin and exists there. The other elements display the paradoxical characteristic of being attributed to the origin without existing in the origin, without functioning there, without producing any effect there, without changing anything at all there. These are, therefore, attributes of the origin that are present by their attribution and absent by their existence.
What do they do in the origin? They are, in the origin, in abeyance [en attente], in reserve for later, in order to intervene in the process of socialization and denaturation and, above all, in order to intervene in the act of the denaturation of denaturation. We may say that, by conferring this status of virtuality in reserve on them, Rousseau has found the way both to respect the separation of the origin and to get around it. In short, Rousseau has found a way to think a separate origin which is, after all, an origin, in a very special mode.
I mean by this that we could level at Rousseau the criticism that he levels at Hobbes, that of projecting the result onto the origin: for instance, of projecting freedom and pity, which can be conceived of as social faculties, onto the origin. Rousseau, however, could reply that neither freedom nor pity plays any role in the origin and, consequently, does not determine what happens in the origin or what will emerge from the origin. Freedom and pity are inscribed in the origin, but they serve no purpose there. They are inscribed there for later, so that modifications of them may be inscribed, in their turn, in the process of socialization and denaturation; but, above all, they are inscribed there for their reprise, their reprise in the denaturation of denaturation, new foundations in the social contract.
For it is in the social contract that the origin acquires its meaning. It is in the social contract that freedom intervenes, after the long history of its loss, as an intellectual act in order to invest the universal dependency of men – the universal dependency of men resulting from the whole process of socialization – with the meaning of a community based on right [communauté de droit]. It is in the social contract that pity, which has become natural law and morality thanks to the development of reflection, will intervene to assign the act that founds the community the objective of equality and freedom for everyone. It is in the contract – hence at the end of the risky process constituted by the process of socialization – that freedom and pity intervene as origin.
At this point, certain things must be made more precise. The form now taken by this intervention of the origin is that of the reprise, that is, the form of a new beginning of a beginning; but, nota bene, of a beginning that has never taken place. We can utter this sentence because what is reprised in the contract is freedom and pity as origin, whereas, in the origin, freedom and pity are non-existent. We can utter it, as well, when we recall the enigmatic sentence of Rousseau’s in which, referring to the state of pure nature, he writes that it perhaps never existed.53
This is perhaps the meaning of the origin in Rousseau from the moment it is subjected to the radical critique of the origin as circle. To be the true origin, distinct from the false origin, it must be separate; this is its first meaning, separation. The figuration of the pure state of nature, as we have seen, is the realization of this separation. To be an origin, however, albeit separate, to be a true origin, the origin must be virtual; to be at once separate and an origin, the synthesis is virtuality. The origin must be virtual, in abeyance, in reserve; it must therefore be non-existent in the positioning of it as origin.
The figuration of the pure state of nature realizes the contradiction just mentioned, that of positing something non-existent as a virtuality for later. This is the second meaning of the origin, that is, a virtuality for later; the first is separation. But, if so, the existing, active origin can only be the real reprise of the origin, the reprise and repetition of the origin, but the reprise of a meaning that has never taken place. The repetition of an event that has never taken place, the new beginning of a beginning that has never taken place, since all that was non-existent in the origin. This is the third meaning of the origin: reprise.
If we go on to ask what this origin as separate, virtual, and reprised might well be, we find another concept to designate it in Rousseau: the concept of loss. If the origin has never taken place, it is because it is lost. If it is reprised, if it is the repetition of something definite that has never taken place, it is because it is lost. If it repeats that which has not taken place, it is because it repeats what is lost. It is perhaps here, ultimately, that Rousseau is most profoundly self-consistent: in the idea that the loss I just spoke of is consubstantial with the origin.
We can read, black on white, the idea that the loss I just spoke of is consubstantial with the origin in the two contracts of which Rousseau elaborates the theory – this strange redoubling of the contracts: there are two contracts in Rousseau just as there are two origins – the contract that brings the second Discourse to a close and the one that is the subject of the treatise called The Social Contract. For what is the contract? It is the reprise of the origin. What becomes of the contract in the second Discourse? We see the ruse of the rich lead to the establishment of laws, and then, after experience demonstrates their disadvantages, to the designation of magistrates, that is, political authorities. And what is the result of this whole process? It is the establishment of despotism, the end of law, a return to the state of war, and so on ad infinitum. This begins over and over again, ad infinitum.
Thus we see how the reprise of the origin is lost, to be reprised again and lost again, without end. Thus we see the circle of the identity of the origin and its loss reconstituted before our very eyes, not at the origin, but in the reprise of the origin, which is, precisely, the whole origin; this in the second Discourse. In The Social Contract, we see, behind the dialectic of the universal alienation, in the contract, of the general will and law, another dialectic that is the exact obverse [envers] of the first: the dialectic of the death that stalks every body politic and precipitates it into despotism – hence the same loss. The reasoning is different, but the theme is the same.
Here, perhaps, is the point that most overtly opposes Rousseau to the natural law philosophers with respect to the conception of the origin and, by way of the origin, the conception of their theoretical objects and, by way of their theoretical objects, the conception of their relationship to politics.
By ‘relationship to politics’, I do not just mean declared positions or the political significance of theoretical systems. We know that Rousseau opposed absolute monarchy and advocated an egalitarian democracy of free and equal small craftsmen living in what he calls ‘independent commerce’. By ‘relationship to politics’, I mean that, but I also mean something more, something that distinguishes Rousseau from his predecessors and all his contemporaries when we take their different positions into account: a certain relationship to his own political positions, a certain way of thinking and positing his own political theses.
It is by way of this idea that I would like to return, due allowance made, to the words I hazarded about Machiavelli vis-à-vis the natural law philosophers who, faced with an absolute monarchy already in power, thought in the accomplished fact, whereas Machiavelli thought the fact to be accomplished.54 For, due allowance made, Rousseau too, with completely different objectives, does not think in the accomplished fact; rather, in criticizing the accomplished fact, he thinks, in a certain way, the fact to be accomplished. To be sure, he, by no means, thinks as a realistic politician, as Machiavelli does. That is, he does not think this fact to be accomplished as a practical act to be accomplished, with certain essential political premises. Rather, he thinks it as a moralist and a philosopher who tries to adjust theoretical notions in an attempt to take the measure of a possible essence.
Now here is what I think is important: every possibility always seems to Rousseau to be suspended over an abyss. Every contract always seems to Rousseau to be sapped by its own death. Every reprise [reprise] always seems to Rousseau to be condemned to its own loss. If the origin only exists as lost, although nothing is ever lost, it is because we must take history as it has made itself and men as they have made themselves, and then go to work to re-appropriate it [reprendre], to re-appropriate history, in order to put it on different foundations, yet with no precedent, without benefit of any guarantee whatsoever that might provide protection against death and loss.
This position obviously presupposes a certain view of history and politics and, however paradoxical this may be for someone who never talked about it, a certain view of political action. If we were to go into an analysis of this point, we would discover that what characterizes Rousseau’s utopianism, his conception of the fact to be accomplished, is an extraordinarily acute awareness of its necessity and its impossibility, that is, of its precariousness.
That a utopian should criticize accomplished fact, that he should criticize the existing world, is common coin. That a utopian should erect, on his criticism of the accomplished fact, his criticism of the existing world, a utopian theory of the fact to be accomplished, of the world to be constructed – that too is common coin, it is business as usual. But, precisely, the modality that distinguishes Rousseau’s thought from that of other utopians is the critical self-consciousness in his utopia itself. It is the criticism brought to bear on the thought of utopia itself at the very moment in which the thought of utopia is thought. It is the origin thought as loss. Thus, among all the reasons that have made Rousseau effective in history, I believe that we must, for theoretical and political reasons, make a rather exceptional place for what is rather exceptional: his critical utopianism – Rousseau’s acute awareness of, simultaneously, the necessity, but also the precariousness, of his audacity.