ABSTRACT This book deals with the role and place of the general will in modern and contemporary p... more ABSTRACT This book deals with the role and place of the general will in modern and contemporary political thought. This project is carried out at the crossroads of the history of ideas and political philosophy. It extensively develops historical and philosophical themes, showing modifications to the idea of the general will in the writings of thinkers who sometimes represent very distant epochs. The author tracks down the birth and the development of the idea of the general will in ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary times, devoting most of the book to the thoughts of Jean Jacques Rousseau and nineteenth and twentieth century British idealists.
Rousseau's general will is mostly interpreted as promoting social unity at the expense of plu... more Rousseau's general will is mostly interpreted as promoting social unity at the expense of plurality. Conversely, this article argues that the general will depends on, and preserves, plurality for its formation and legitimacy. The general and the particular are not fixed opposites, for Rousseau, but are interdependent and contextually defined. The Rousseauian universal anticipates Laclau's notion of universality. The absence of any natural foundations for society deprives the universal of any pre-given identity. Likewise, the Laclauian universal names the lack of ultimate ground for society. To prevent either sectarianism or despotism, the universal has to be constructed politically. Rousseau's contingent general will supplements the lack of universality, as diverse groups and individuals construct common values and political objectives that unify them across divisions without suppressing their difference. Due to its originary lack, the general will remains for ever incom...
Chantal Mouffe’s writings have been innovatory with respect to democratic theory, Marxism and fem... more Chantal Mouffe’s writings have been innovatory with respect to democratic theory, Marxism and feminism. Her work derives from, and has always been engaged with, contemporary political events and intellectual debates. This sense of conflict informs both the methodological and substantive propositions she offers. Determinisms, scientific or otherwise, and ideologies, Marxist or feminist, have failed to survive her excoriating critiques. In a sense she is the original post-Marxist, rejecting economisms and class-centric analyses, and also the original post-feminist, more concerned with the varieties of ‘identity politics’ than with any singularities of ‘women’s issues’. While Mouffe’s concerns with power and discourse derive from her studies of Gramsci’s theorisations of hegemony and the post-structuralisms of Derrida and Foucault, her reversal of the very terms through which political theory proceeds is very much her own. She centres conflict, not consensus, and disagreement, not finality. Whether philosophically perfectionist, or liberally reasonable, political theorists have been challenged by Mouffe to think again, and to engage with a new concept of ‘the political’ and a revived and refreshed notion of ‘radical democracy’.
Dans un préambule, Rousseau indique son programme et sa méthode : «Je veux chercher si, dans l'or... more Dans un préambule, Rousseau indique son programme et sa méthode : «Je veux chercher si, dans l'ordre civil, il peut y avoir quelque règle d'administration légitime et sûre, en prenant les hommes tels qu'ils sont, et les lois telles qu'elles peuvent être. Je tâcherai d'allier toujours, dans cette recherche, ce que le droit permet avec ce que l'intérêt prescrit, afin que la justice et l'utilité ne se trouvent point divisées.» Selon lui, l'autorité politique doit reposer sur la légitimité et la sûreté des institutions, la nature humaine, mais aussi les sociétés telles qu'elles sont, c'est-à-dire mal organisées. Chapitre 1-''Sujet de ce premier livre'' Rousseau fait cette constatation : «L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers [«enchaîné»]. Il poursuit : «Comment ce changement s'est-il fait? Je l'ignore. Qu'est-ce qui peut le rendre légitime? Je crois pouvoir résoudre cette question.» Il indique que cette aliénation sociale est un fait millénaire, et qu'il ne prétend pas l'expliquer. Mais il se propose de chercher ce qui pourrait être producteur de légitimité dans l'ordre politique. S'il admet qu'on puisse avoir perdu sa liberté naturelle en entrant dans la société, et vivre dans une obéissance aliénante, il évoque la possibilité d'y échapper afin de retrouver la liberté politique et civile. La légitimité de cette liberté n'est pas d'ordre naturel, elle émane de conventions humaines : c'est le projet du «contrat social». Chapitre 2-''Des premières sociétés'' Rousseau considère que la société politique «la plus ancienne et la seule naturelle» est la famille. Si ses membres restent ensemble, c'est par soumission volontaire à une convention sociale, la cohésion étant obtenue par la dépendance des enfants vis-à-vis de leur père, qui est d'ordre naturel : ils lui obéissent parce qu'il subvient à leurs besoins ; quand ceux-ci cessent, ils prennent leur indépendance. En effet, la nature de l'être humain veut qu'il s'occupe d'abord de sa propre conservation, qu'il soit soumis ou qu'il soit son propre maître. On observe ainsi le premier processus d'aliénation sociale par lequel on cède sa liberté contre l'obtention de services pratiques. Si les liens familiaux sont marqués par l'amour du père pour ses enfants, les liens entre l'État et le peuple sont motivés par la jouissance du pouvoir de la part de l'État. Rousseau évoque Grotius et Hobbes, pour lesquels le droit est l'affirmation de la domination des plus forts sur les plus faibles, ceux-ci ayant intérêt à se soumettre aux autres pour assurer leur survivance. Et cela irait de pair avec l'idée que le chef est un être d'une nature supérieure à ceux qu'il domine. Avant Grotius et Hobbes, Aristote avait établi que certains individus sont naturellement faits pour la domination tandis que d'autres le sont pour l'esclavage. Mais, pour Rousseau, c'est confondre l'objet et la cause : un esclave naît esclave, et alors «perd tout jusqu'au désir de sortir» de son état ; en conséquence, s'il veut rester esclave, c'est parce qu'il l'est déjà, et non par une libre décision ou par une prédisposition naturelle à l'être. Cette aliénation ne provient que d'un acte social et non d'un état de nature (même si l'on naît souvent esclave du fait des normes sociales, on ne choisit jamais naturellement de le devenir). De même, tout être fictif qui aurait été le premier ou le seul de la condition humaine pourrait toujours se considérer comme maître parce que sa situation lui fait croire à sa liberté (ainsi Adam, le premier homme, ou Robinson seul sur son île). Rousseau constate que «l'état de nature» a été remplacé par la société, dans laquelle, aucune autorité politique légitime n'ayant existé de toute éternité, n'étant venue ni de la nature (par exemple, de l'autorité paternelle), ni de Dieu, mais de la volonté des humains, règne un injuste contrat où le fort a subjugué le faible. Chapitre 3-''Du droit du plus fort'' Soumettre la puissance au droit, et faire que la justice soit forte implique une démystification de l'expression «droit du plus fort» qui est un oxymore car elle appose deux expressions appartenant chacune à un ordre différent : celui de la réalité physique et celui de la moralité. La force ne peut André Durand Faites-moi part de vos impressions, de vos questions, de vos suggestions ! Contactez-moi Peut-être voudrez-vous accéder à l'ensemble du site :
were given a relatively free choice of subject matter, and the chapters are grouped into relative... more were given a relatively free choice of subject matter, and the chapters are grouped into relatively broad sections: ‘Identités’, ‘Politique et société’, ‘Musique et beaux-arts’, ‘Réception et interprétation’. All of Rousseau’s major works are explored here; if anything, only the Rêveries are comparatively underrepresented. Conversely, Rousseau, juge de Jean-Jacques is discussed in several chapters; and Rousseau’s thinking on aesthetics and particularly music is now fully integrated into the critical landscape, as the third section shows. Among many fine discussions, several articles nevertheless stand out. Jean-François Perrin’s detailed study of the notion of friendship in Rousseau’s work around 1757–58 makes full use of the correspondence, triangulating it with Rousseau’s published works, with intriguing results that show the variance between the two. Bruno Bernardi considers Rousseau’s place in the genealogy of the concept of public opinion, between, and irreducible to, either a pre-Kantian and specifically early modern form of ‘opinion’, or the later, more critical sense of the term that we would more readily attribute to Burke and Kant. O’Dea examines the concept of intérêt, removed by Rousseau from an Augustinian context and operative both in Rousseau’s aesthetics and in his moral philosophy, revealing interesting connections between the two. Philip Robinson considers the ‘other Rousseau’, a view of the creative artist that transcends the more narrowly defined doctrine of imitation, which Rousseau nevertheless needs and defends in his critical writings. Jacqueline Waeber’s close study of Rousseau’s work as a musical copyist suggests how this seemingly mundane activity is central to Rousseau’s self-conception as a creative artist, as an antimodel to which he is nevertheless firmly attached. Rousseau’s self-perception is crucial to Ourida Mostefai’s chapter, which considers Rousseau’s posture of failure; and the selfwritings are well served by a discussion by Shojiro Kuwase and in Philip Stewart’s more wide-ranging study of what he sees as a ‘plénitude expansive’, which is, paradoxically, ‘ancrée en lui-même’. There are fresh readings and compelling insights in each one of the chapters, and the book is essential for all those with an interest in Rousseau.
Abstract Jean-Luc Nancy identifies Rousseau as the first to conceive community as a lost state of... more Abstract Jean-Luc Nancy identifies Rousseau as the first to conceive community as a lost state of immediacy and transparency. Rousseau’s conception has allegedly shaped the western ideal of an immanent community. Nancy deconstructs that ideal, arguing that immanence would suppress community; its oneness would block the being-with which enables our ontological being-in-common. This article argues that Rousseau never posits a lost community but actually explores, like Nancy, the political closure of immanence. Man’s distinguishing trait of perfectibility, which renders him finite, always open to change for better or worse, rejects the self-enclosure of immanence as does the constant willing of the general will which defines a community’s political life. If citizens could form an immanent whole, they would have nothing left to will, reaching an inhuman situation without liberty, reflection and responsibility. A community’s vitality, as Rousseau’s discussion of Poland suggests, does not come from closure to the outside but from openness to what potentially disrupts it. That openness, by raising the question of communal legitimacy, underlies the shared responsibility of citizens to ensure their free and equal coexistence. Rousseau’s theory, I conclude, thus supplements Nancy’s ontological reflection by considering the antagonism and struggles endured by ontic communities as they confront the chances and risks arising from their finitude.
Rousseau's paradox of how a multitude wills itself into the status of a sovereign people, by deci... more Rousseau's paradox of how a multitude wills itself into the status of a sovereign people, by deciding to join the contract before existing as a people, with a general will to make that decision, presupposes the absence of any ultimate social grounds and the contingency of identities and structures. These presuppositions make Rousseau an unacknowledged precursor of Laclau's post-structuralist politics, refuting the view that Rousseau's politics seeks a totally transparent and harmonious state beyond the questioning and ambiguity defining the political. The people's will grounds the social contract's legitimacy but that will lacks any preconstituted form and clear guidelines for discerning it. It provides a groundless ground. Rousseau's legislator supplements that lack, representing the people in its absence, helping it frame suitable legislation. The people only requires the lawgiving representative because of its constitutive incompleteness: it thus resists full representation. If it already possessed a common will and identity, the lawgiver and the contract would become irrelevant. The undecidability of autonomy/ heteronomy, representative/represented, fiction/reality highlighted by Rousseau's legislator affirms the impossibility of political closure as the condition of freedom and change. The people's incompleteness supports rather than jeopardises its sovereignty, allowing it to reconstitute itself in the open-ended quest for democracy.
Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Dec 1, 2022
This article stages a dialogue between Nancy's post-phenomenology and Ahmed's queer phenomenology... more This article stages a dialogue between Nancy's post-phenomenology and Ahmed's queer phenomenology to examine the conditions, ethos, and politics of world creation as well as the habits, obstacles, and inequalities which resist it. It argues that Nancy's understanding of sense as the event of the mutual exposure of bodies reveals what exceeds dominant worldviews, how bodies extend the world beyond prevailing spatialisations, but that it does not sufficiently examine what prevents us from sensing that event as a call to world creation. Conversely, Ahmed analyses how the spatial orientation of bodies restricts exposure, causes uneven access to the world, supresses Nancean sense. Her account of disorientation illuminates how we could experience the world as ungrounded and susceptible to creation but struggles to explain what would enable the sharing of this event so that it does not reconfirm the dominant orientations of whiteness and heterosexuality. Reframing disorientation in terms of Nancy's relational ontology and its spatial conception of justice rethinks the non alignment of bodies and spaces as freeing the circulation of sense so that alternative worlds could appear. In this way, disorientation can be read as potentially opening the passage from injustice to justice, from orientation to creation.
Recent theories of community (Nancy, Agamben, Esposito) aim to think the term beyond its definiti... more Recent theories of community (Nancy, Agamben, Esposito) aim to think the term beyond its definition as the ownership of shared identity, language, culture or territory. For Esposito, to reduce community to a property whose possession distinguishes members from non-members undermines the commonality the term implies. The common opposes what is proper or one's own; it belongs to everyone and anyone. Rather than securing identity and belonging, community, defined by its impropriety, disrupts them so that we are in common. While his work successfully illustrates the incompatibility of the common and the proper, it leaves unanswered the question of how communities come to experience their impropriety. Through a comparison with Rancière's improper community, we can identify and gesture beyond this limit. Its members intervene in proper communities by exercising the right to decide on common matters despite officially having no right to do so. Their actions, by demonstrating the openness of the common to anyone and everyone, turn its privatisation into a shared wrong that connects community with non-community. By supplementing Esposito's work with Rancière's, we see how communities relate to what they have deemed improper in a way that both challenges and revitalises their sense of commonality.
It is widely recognized that although Jean-Jacques Rousseau mainly uses the idea of alienation in... more It is widely recognized that although Jean-Jacques Rousseau mainly uses the idea of alienation in the sense of giving away or selling, ' his presentation of man in society foreshadows, to some extent, the concept of alienation as it is elaborated by Hegel and Marx. Friedrich Engels was the first to identify Rousseau as a precursor of Marx, detecting a dialectical interpretation of history in Rousseau's depiction of man's political development in the Discourse on Inequality. He argues that the revolutionary stages of that development perform "a negation of negation."2 On the one hand, the institutional and governmental changes of history alienate man from the equality and independence of nature, finally leading to an extreme situation of slavery and despotism, and, on the other, by making all men equal again through their common enslavement, they provide the conditions necessary for man to unite in order to overcome that oppression and reach a higher state of unity. Engels believes that, for Rousseau, that unity is to be found in the principles of the Social contract. While his reading importantly emphasizes, as Jean Starobinski remarks, the coherence of Rousseau's political thought, it is important to remember that Rousseau insists on the hypothetical character of his account of history and therefore conceives revolutionary change as a mere possibility rather than as a predetermined outcome.3 Marx, for his part, did not share Engel's reading of the Discourse, preferring to read Rousseau, like Hegel, as a philosopher of the Enlightenment committed to the abstract natural rights of man, whose realization, during the course of the French Revolution, marked the political victory of the bourgeoisie.4 Both Starobinski and Bronislaw Baczko, while not wishing to present Rousseau as a Marxist before the fact, implicitly question Marx's account of him, suggesting the deep connection between his conception of history as a series of class struggles checked by the rule of capitalist ideology and Rousseau's depiction, in the second part of the Discourse, of the development of private property and social inequality.5 They argue that Rousseau does not necessarily provide a philosophical or sociological theory of alienation, but a phenomenological description of social man's alienated condition. Man's alienation comes from what they view as the inauthentic world of appearances where man can only perceive himself and define his needs and desires through the medium of others. Man becomes estranged from the immediacy and autonomy of his natural existence to live totally externalized in the gaze of his fellow men. Starobinski highlights the correlation between man's moral alienation and his economic progress: man's loss of control over the product of his labor coincides with his progressive loss of autonomy and increasing subjection to the will of others. In line with a Marxist interpretation, both Starobinski and Baczko interpret civil man's alienation as an "accidental" phenomenon resulting from social corruption and depravity. They consequently identify in Rousseau's political writings a desire to transcend our alienated state and reach a mode of community that recovers, on a rational and conventional basis, the immediacy and transparency of the irretrievable state of nature. While fully acknowledging the significant parallels that exist between Rousseau and Marx, this article aims to demonstrate how Rousseau's depiction of the human condition perhaps approximates more to the reworking and transformation of Marx's concept of alienation provided by Jacques Lacan and subsequently developed by Slavoj Eizek. It is the key differences between the social and political theories of Rousseau and Marx that link Rousseau more closely to these twentieth century thinkers. First, unlike Marx, as Robert Wokler affirms, Rousseau gives great importance to language as determinant of man's behavior and identity, seeing his alienation in the unstable and ambiguous realm of signs as the condition of his insertion into the social. …
The resistance throughout Jean-Franqois Lyotard's work to the reduction of phenomena to simpl... more The resistance throughout Jean-Franqois Lyotard's work to the reduction of phenomena to simple oppositions or binary sets alerts us to the necessity of hesitating before interpreting in that binary way his thinking on difference and equivalence, particularity and universality. His first major philosophical work, Discours, figure,1 criticized the tendency of structuralism to reduce difference to the oppositional movement of language. Radical difference emerges within the textual space in the form of figures, whose unsystematic meaning disturbs linguistic clarity by not yielding to its demand for categorization into conceptual oppositions. The persistence of this notion of radical difference2 in Lyotard's thinking frustrates any attempt to force his philosophy into a binary structure where difference opposes equivalence or the particular opposes the universal as discrete terms. Instead, it works to foreground the complex interaction of these terms, which repudiates the outright valorization of one over the other. Lyotard, however, frequently attacks what he views as the deceptive principle of equivalence governing liberal democracies that tries to make diverse activities, discourses, or values conform to a facile notion of specular identity. This reduction of difference to the same strives to conceal the political inequalities generated by the system through its exclusion and disavowal of diversity.3 While critics commend Lyotard's deconstruction of oppressive forms of unity and his insistence on the intensity of differences, they reproach him for not addressing the question of how a politics of difference can be integrated and maintained on a wider scale.4 This essay aims to respond to these reservations by demonstrating how Lyotard's politics of difference reinscribes a notion of equivalence as its necessary obverse, that is, as its condition of (im)possibility. Equivalence,5 in this context, does not amount to sameness, but to its inconceivability, that is, to the inherent incompletion that marks all identities, protecting them and preventing any one of them from subsuming all the others as the authentic identity underlying their multiplicity. At the center of Lyotard's political thinking, the equality of incompletion founds the justice of plurality. I shall explore this inter-penetration of equivalence and difference, the particular and the universal, with reference to The Differend: Phrases in Dispute,6 principally focusing on its last two sections where Lyotard more explicitly elaborates its political implications. The Differend Before developing my own line of argument, I shall remind readers of the basic tenets of Lyotard's approach in The Differend. The Differend adopts the phrase as its primary focus of analysis: "What escapes doubt is that there is at least one phrase, no matter what it is."7 Any refutation of this statement ends up proving it because "There is no phrase is a phrase."8 The inevitability of a phrase does not make it a meaningful unit in itself; its meaning is an effect derived from a process of phrasing. Before being integrated into a sequence, the phrase can be understood as a singular occurrence, an empty marker of an event. A phrase occurs without determinant rules or criteria for its mode of linkage. However, any phrase automatically presupposes another one; each one being linked to the next in an infinitely extended series. The need to link phrases therefore proves unavoidable. While linkage is necessary, the mode by which it takes place is purely contingent. The heterogeneous nature of phrases opens them to numerous modes of linkage. By connecting them, we inevitably deny other legitimate possibilities of connection. This gives rise to a differend where the singularity of a phrase becomes dissimulated by its inescapable articulation in a defining sequence. The modes of linkage are called genres. Genres provide rules or criteria that help to select the linking phrase among the many choices. …
The Discourse on Inequality disputes the human–animal hierarchy in its denunciation of social ine... more The Discourse on Inequality disputes the human–animal hierarchy in its denunciation of social inequality as unnatural. Stripping away social artifice, it reveals a deep physical continuity between man and animals. As embodied creatures, they share mortality and vulnerability. Human animality does not, however, negate human difference. Man differs from animals through perfectibility: the freedom to change. That difference comes from the lack of any specifically human property, thereby challenging rather than confirming anthropocentric hierarchies. Any properties seen to distinguish man from animals are in fact improper, contingent and artificial. Human impropriety renders man always dependent on external relations for his development. Compassion, vital for a Rousseauian approach to animal ethics, allows man to experience this relationality, transporting him towards others as he identifies with their suffering as recalling the finitude and vulnerability shared by all creatures. For Ro...
ABSTRACT This book deals with the role and place of the general will in modern and contemporary p... more ABSTRACT This book deals with the role and place of the general will in modern and contemporary political thought. This project is carried out at the crossroads of the history of ideas and political philosophy. It extensively develops historical and philosophical themes, showing modifications to the idea of the general will in the writings of thinkers who sometimes represent very distant epochs. The author tracks down the birth and the development of the idea of the general will in ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary times, devoting most of the book to the thoughts of Jean Jacques Rousseau and nineteenth and twentieth century British idealists.
Rousseau's general will is mostly interpreted as promoting social unity at the expense of plu... more Rousseau's general will is mostly interpreted as promoting social unity at the expense of plurality. Conversely, this article argues that the general will depends on, and preserves, plurality for its formation and legitimacy. The general and the particular are not fixed opposites, for Rousseau, but are interdependent and contextually defined. The Rousseauian universal anticipates Laclau's notion of universality. The absence of any natural foundations for society deprives the universal of any pre-given identity. Likewise, the Laclauian universal names the lack of ultimate ground for society. To prevent either sectarianism or despotism, the universal has to be constructed politically. Rousseau's contingent general will supplements the lack of universality, as diverse groups and individuals construct common values and political objectives that unify them across divisions without suppressing their difference. Due to its originary lack, the general will remains for ever incom...
Chantal Mouffe’s writings have been innovatory with respect to democratic theory, Marxism and fem... more Chantal Mouffe’s writings have been innovatory with respect to democratic theory, Marxism and feminism. Her work derives from, and has always been engaged with, contemporary political events and intellectual debates. This sense of conflict informs both the methodological and substantive propositions she offers. Determinisms, scientific or otherwise, and ideologies, Marxist or feminist, have failed to survive her excoriating critiques. In a sense she is the original post-Marxist, rejecting economisms and class-centric analyses, and also the original post-feminist, more concerned with the varieties of ‘identity politics’ than with any singularities of ‘women’s issues’. While Mouffe’s concerns with power and discourse derive from her studies of Gramsci’s theorisations of hegemony and the post-structuralisms of Derrida and Foucault, her reversal of the very terms through which political theory proceeds is very much her own. She centres conflict, not consensus, and disagreement, not finality. Whether philosophically perfectionist, or liberally reasonable, political theorists have been challenged by Mouffe to think again, and to engage with a new concept of ‘the political’ and a revived and refreshed notion of ‘radical democracy’.
Dans un préambule, Rousseau indique son programme et sa méthode : «Je veux chercher si, dans l'or... more Dans un préambule, Rousseau indique son programme et sa méthode : «Je veux chercher si, dans l'ordre civil, il peut y avoir quelque règle d'administration légitime et sûre, en prenant les hommes tels qu'ils sont, et les lois telles qu'elles peuvent être. Je tâcherai d'allier toujours, dans cette recherche, ce que le droit permet avec ce que l'intérêt prescrit, afin que la justice et l'utilité ne se trouvent point divisées.» Selon lui, l'autorité politique doit reposer sur la légitimité et la sûreté des institutions, la nature humaine, mais aussi les sociétés telles qu'elles sont, c'est-à-dire mal organisées. Chapitre 1-''Sujet de ce premier livre'' Rousseau fait cette constatation : «L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers [«enchaîné»]. Il poursuit : «Comment ce changement s'est-il fait? Je l'ignore. Qu'est-ce qui peut le rendre légitime? Je crois pouvoir résoudre cette question.» Il indique que cette aliénation sociale est un fait millénaire, et qu'il ne prétend pas l'expliquer. Mais il se propose de chercher ce qui pourrait être producteur de légitimité dans l'ordre politique. S'il admet qu'on puisse avoir perdu sa liberté naturelle en entrant dans la société, et vivre dans une obéissance aliénante, il évoque la possibilité d'y échapper afin de retrouver la liberté politique et civile. La légitimité de cette liberté n'est pas d'ordre naturel, elle émane de conventions humaines : c'est le projet du «contrat social». Chapitre 2-''Des premières sociétés'' Rousseau considère que la société politique «la plus ancienne et la seule naturelle» est la famille. Si ses membres restent ensemble, c'est par soumission volontaire à une convention sociale, la cohésion étant obtenue par la dépendance des enfants vis-à-vis de leur père, qui est d'ordre naturel : ils lui obéissent parce qu'il subvient à leurs besoins ; quand ceux-ci cessent, ils prennent leur indépendance. En effet, la nature de l'être humain veut qu'il s'occupe d'abord de sa propre conservation, qu'il soit soumis ou qu'il soit son propre maître. On observe ainsi le premier processus d'aliénation sociale par lequel on cède sa liberté contre l'obtention de services pratiques. Si les liens familiaux sont marqués par l'amour du père pour ses enfants, les liens entre l'État et le peuple sont motivés par la jouissance du pouvoir de la part de l'État. Rousseau évoque Grotius et Hobbes, pour lesquels le droit est l'affirmation de la domination des plus forts sur les plus faibles, ceux-ci ayant intérêt à se soumettre aux autres pour assurer leur survivance. Et cela irait de pair avec l'idée que le chef est un être d'une nature supérieure à ceux qu'il domine. Avant Grotius et Hobbes, Aristote avait établi que certains individus sont naturellement faits pour la domination tandis que d'autres le sont pour l'esclavage. Mais, pour Rousseau, c'est confondre l'objet et la cause : un esclave naît esclave, et alors «perd tout jusqu'au désir de sortir» de son état ; en conséquence, s'il veut rester esclave, c'est parce qu'il l'est déjà, et non par une libre décision ou par une prédisposition naturelle à l'être. Cette aliénation ne provient que d'un acte social et non d'un état de nature (même si l'on naît souvent esclave du fait des normes sociales, on ne choisit jamais naturellement de le devenir). De même, tout être fictif qui aurait été le premier ou le seul de la condition humaine pourrait toujours se considérer comme maître parce que sa situation lui fait croire à sa liberté (ainsi Adam, le premier homme, ou Robinson seul sur son île). Rousseau constate que «l'état de nature» a été remplacé par la société, dans laquelle, aucune autorité politique légitime n'ayant existé de toute éternité, n'étant venue ni de la nature (par exemple, de l'autorité paternelle), ni de Dieu, mais de la volonté des humains, règne un injuste contrat où le fort a subjugué le faible. Chapitre 3-''Du droit du plus fort'' Soumettre la puissance au droit, et faire que la justice soit forte implique une démystification de l'expression «droit du plus fort» qui est un oxymore car elle appose deux expressions appartenant chacune à un ordre différent : celui de la réalité physique et celui de la moralité. La force ne peut André Durand Faites-moi part de vos impressions, de vos questions, de vos suggestions ! Contactez-moi Peut-être voudrez-vous accéder à l'ensemble du site :
were given a relatively free choice of subject matter, and the chapters are grouped into relative... more were given a relatively free choice of subject matter, and the chapters are grouped into relatively broad sections: ‘Identités’, ‘Politique et société’, ‘Musique et beaux-arts’, ‘Réception et interprétation’. All of Rousseau’s major works are explored here; if anything, only the Rêveries are comparatively underrepresented. Conversely, Rousseau, juge de Jean-Jacques is discussed in several chapters; and Rousseau’s thinking on aesthetics and particularly music is now fully integrated into the critical landscape, as the third section shows. Among many fine discussions, several articles nevertheless stand out. Jean-François Perrin’s detailed study of the notion of friendship in Rousseau’s work around 1757–58 makes full use of the correspondence, triangulating it with Rousseau’s published works, with intriguing results that show the variance between the two. Bruno Bernardi considers Rousseau’s place in the genealogy of the concept of public opinion, between, and irreducible to, either a pre-Kantian and specifically early modern form of ‘opinion’, or the later, more critical sense of the term that we would more readily attribute to Burke and Kant. O’Dea examines the concept of intérêt, removed by Rousseau from an Augustinian context and operative both in Rousseau’s aesthetics and in his moral philosophy, revealing interesting connections between the two. Philip Robinson considers the ‘other Rousseau’, a view of the creative artist that transcends the more narrowly defined doctrine of imitation, which Rousseau nevertheless needs and defends in his critical writings. Jacqueline Waeber’s close study of Rousseau’s work as a musical copyist suggests how this seemingly mundane activity is central to Rousseau’s self-conception as a creative artist, as an antimodel to which he is nevertheless firmly attached. Rousseau’s self-perception is crucial to Ourida Mostefai’s chapter, which considers Rousseau’s posture of failure; and the selfwritings are well served by a discussion by Shojiro Kuwase and in Philip Stewart’s more wide-ranging study of what he sees as a ‘plénitude expansive’, which is, paradoxically, ‘ancrée en lui-même’. There are fresh readings and compelling insights in each one of the chapters, and the book is essential for all those with an interest in Rousseau.
Abstract Jean-Luc Nancy identifies Rousseau as the first to conceive community as a lost state of... more Abstract Jean-Luc Nancy identifies Rousseau as the first to conceive community as a lost state of immediacy and transparency. Rousseau’s conception has allegedly shaped the western ideal of an immanent community. Nancy deconstructs that ideal, arguing that immanence would suppress community; its oneness would block the being-with which enables our ontological being-in-common. This article argues that Rousseau never posits a lost community but actually explores, like Nancy, the political closure of immanence. Man’s distinguishing trait of perfectibility, which renders him finite, always open to change for better or worse, rejects the self-enclosure of immanence as does the constant willing of the general will which defines a community’s political life. If citizens could form an immanent whole, they would have nothing left to will, reaching an inhuman situation without liberty, reflection and responsibility. A community’s vitality, as Rousseau’s discussion of Poland suggests, does not come from closure to the outside but from openness to what potentially disrupts it. That openness, by raising the question of communal legitimacy, underlies the shared responsibility of citizens to ensure their free and equal coexistence. Rousseau’s theory, I conclude, thus supplements Nancy’s ontological reflection by considering the antagonism and struggles endured by ontic communities as they confront the chances and risks arising from their finitude.
Rousseau's paradox of how a multitude wills itself into the status of a sovereign people, by deci... more Rousseau's paradox of how a multitude wills itself into the status of a sovereign people, by deciding to join the contract before existing as a people, with a general will to make that decision, presupposes the absence of any ultimate social grounds and the contingency of identities and structures. These presuppositions make Rousseau an unacknowledged precursor of Laclau's post-structuralist politics, refuting the view that Rousseau's politics seeks a totally transparent and harmonious state beyond the questioning and ambiguity defining the political. The people's will grounds the social contract's legitimacy but that will lacks any preconstituted form and clear guidelines for discerning it. It provides a groundless ground. Rousseau's legislator supplements that lack, representing the people in its absence, helping it frame suitable legislation. The people only requires the lawgiving representative because of its constitutive incompleteness: it thus resists full representation. If it already possessed a common will and identity, the lawgiver and the contract would become irrelevant. The undecidability of autonomy/ heteronomy, representative/represented, fiction/reality highlighted by Rousseau's legislator affirms the impossibility of political closure as the condition of freedom and change. The people's incompleteness supports rather than jeopardises its sovereignty, allowing it to reconstitute itself in the open-ended quest for democracy.
Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Dec 1, 2022
This article stages a dialogue between Nancy's post-phenomenology and Ahmed's queer phenomenology... more This article stages a dialogue between Nancy's post-phenomenology and Ahmed's queer phenomenology to examine the conditions, ethos, and politics of world creation as well as the habits, obstacles, and inequalities which resist it. It argues that Nancy's understanding of sense as the event of the mutual exposure of bodies reveals what exceeds dominant worldviews, how bodies extend the world beyond prevailing spatialisations, but that it does not sufficiently examine what prevents us from sensing that event as a call to world creation. Conversely, Ahmed analyses how the spatial orientation of bodies restricts exposure, causes uneven access to the world, supresses Nancean sense. Her account of disorientation illuminates how we could experience the world as ungrounded and susceptible to creation but struggles to explain what would enable the sharing of this event so that it does not reconfirm the dominant orientations of whiteness and heterosexuality. Reframing disorientation in terms of Nancy's relational ontology and its spatial conception of justice rethinks the non alignment of bodies and spaces as freeing the circulation of sense so that alternative worlds could appear. In this way, disorientation can be read as potentially opening the passage from injustice to justice, from orientation to creation.
Recent theories of community (Nancy, Agamben, Esposito) aim to think the term beyond its definiti... more Recent theories of community (Nancy, Agamben, Esposito) aim to think the term beyond its definition as the ownership of shared identity, language, culture or territory. For Esposito, to reduce community to a property whose possession distinguishes members from non-members undermines the commonality the term implies. The common opposes what is proper or one's own; it belongs to everyone and anyone. Rather than securing identity and belonging, community, defined by its impropriety, disrupts them so that we are in common. While his work successfully illustrates the incompatibility of the common and the proper, it leaves unanswered the question of how communities come to experience their impropriety. Through a comparison with Rancière's improper community, we can identify and gesture beyond this limit. Its members intervene in proper communities by exercising the right to decide on common matters despite officially having no right to do so. Their actions, by demonstrating the openness of the common to anyone and everyone, turn its privatisation into a shared wrong that connects community with non-community. By supplementing Esposito's work with Rancière's, we see how communities relate to what they have deemed improper in a way that both challenges and revitalises their sense of commonality.
It is widely recognized that although Jean-Jacques Rousseau mainly uses the idea of alienation in... more It is widely recognized that although Jean-Jacques Rousseau mainly uses the idea of alienation in the sense of giving away or selling, ' his presentation of man in society foreshadows, to some extent, the concept of alienation as it is elaborated by Hegel and Marx. Friedrich Engels was the first to identify Rousseau as a precursor of Marx, detecting a dialectical interpretation of history in Rousseau's depiction of man's political development in the Discourse on Inequality. He argues that the revolutionary stages of that development perform "a negation of negation."2 On the one hand, the institutional and governmental changes of history alienate man from the equality and independence of nature, finally leading to an extreme situation of slavery and despotism, and, on the other, by making all men equal again through their common enslavement, they provide the conditions necessary for man to unite in order to overcome that oppression and reach a higher state of unity. Engels believes that, for Rousseau, that unity is to be found in the principles of the Social contract. While his reading importantly emphasizes, as Jean Starobinski remarks, the coherence of Rousseau's political thought, it is important to remember that Rousseau insists on the hypothetical character of his account of history and therefore conceives revolutionary change as a mere possibility rather than as a predetermined outcome.3 Marx, for his part, did not share Engel's reading of the Discourse, preferring to read Rousseau, like Hegel, as a philosopher of the Enlightenment committed to the abstract natural rights of man, whose realization, during the course of the French Revolution, marked the political victory of the bourgeoisie.4 Both Starobinski and Bronislaw Baczko, while not wishing to present Rousseau as a Marxist before the fact, implicitly question Marx's account of him, suggesting the deep connection between his conception of history as a series of class struggles checked by the rule of capitalist ideology and Rousseau's depiction, in the second part of the Discourse, of the development of private property and social inequality.5 They argue that Rousseau does not necessarily provide a philosophical or sociological theory of alienation, but a phenomenological description of social man's alienated condition. Man's alienation comes from what they view as the inauthentic world of appearances where man can only perceive himself and define his needs and desires through the medium of others. Man becomes estranged from the immediacy and autonomy of his natural existence to live totally externalized in the gaze of his fellow men. Starobinski highlights the correlation between man's moral alienation and his economic progress: man's loss of control over the product of his labor coincides with his progressive loss of autonomy and increasing subjection to the will of others. In line with a Marxist interpretation, both Starobinski and Baczko interpret civil man's alienation as an "accidental" phenomenon resulting from social corruption and depravity. They consequently identify in Rousseau's political writings a desire to transcend our alienated state and reach a mode of community that recovers, on a rational and conventional basis, the immediacy and transparency of the irretrievable state of nature. While fully acknowledging the significant parallels that exist between Rousseau and Marx, this article aims to demonstrate how Rousseau's depiction of the human condition perhaps approximates more to the reworking and transformation of Marx's concept of alienation provided by Jacques Lacan and subsequently developed by Slavoj Eizek. It is the key differences between the social and political theories of Rousseau and Marx that link Rousseau more closely to these twentieth century thinkers. First, unlike Marx, as Robert Wokler affirms, Rousseau gives great importance to language as determinant of man's behavior and identity, seeing his alienation in the unstable and ambiguous realm of signs as the condition of his insertion into the social. …
The resistance throughout Jean-Franqois Lyotard's work to the reduction of phenomena to simpl... more The resistance throughout Jean-Franqois Lyotard's work to the reduction of phenomena to simple oppositions or binary sets alerts us to the necessity of hesitating before interpreting in that binary way his thinking on difference and equivalence, particularity and universality. His first major philosophical work, Discours, figure,1 criticized the tendency of structuralism to reduce difference to the oppositional movement of language. Radical difference emerges within the textual space in the form of figures, whose unsystematic meaning disturbs linguistic clarity by not yielding to its demand for categorization into conceptual oppositions. The persistence of this notion of radical difference2 in Lyotard's thinking frustrates any attempt to force his philosophy into a binary structure where difference opposes equivalence or the particular opposes the universal as discrete terms. Instead, it works to foreground the complex interaction of these terms, which repudiates the outright valorization of one over the other. Lyotard, however, frequently attacks what he views as the deceptive principle of equivalence governing liberal democracies that tries to make diverse activities, discourses, or values conform to a facile notion of specular identity. This reduction of difference to the same strives to conceal the political inequalities generated by the system through its exclusion and disavowal of diversity.3 While critics commend Lyotard's deconstruction of oppressive forms of unity and his insistence on the intensity of differences, they reproach him for not addressing the question of how a politics of difference can be integrated and maintained on a wider scale.4 This essay aims to respond to these reservations by demonstrating how Lyotard's politics of difference reinscribes a notion of equivalence as its necessary obverse, that is, as its condition of (im)possibility. Equivalence,5 in this context, does not amount to sameness, but to its inconceivability, that is, to the inherent incompletion that marks all identities, protecting them and preventing any one of them from subsuming all the others as the authentic identity underlying their multiplicity. At the center of Lyotard's political thinking, the equality of incompletion founds the justice of plurality. I shall explore this inter-penetration of equivalence and difference, the particular and the universal, with reference to The Differend: Phrases in Dispute,6 principally focusing on its last two sections where Lyotard more explicitly elaborates its political implications. The Differend Before developing my own line of argument, I shall remind readers of the basic tenets of Lyotard's approach in The Differend. The Differend adopts the phrase as its primary focus of analysis: "What escapes doubt is that there is at least one phrase, no matter what it is."7 Any refutation of this statement ends up proving it because "There is no phrase is a phrase."8 The inevitability of a phrase does not make it a meaningful unit in itself; its meaning is an effect derived from a process of phrasing. Before being integrated into a sequence, the phrase can be understood as a singular occurrence, an empty marker of an event. A phrase occurs without determinant rules or criteria for its mode of linkage. However, any phrase automatically presupposes another one; each one being linked to the next in an infinitely extended series. The need to link phrases therefore proves unavoidable. While linkage is necessary, the mode by which it takes place is purely contingent. The heterogeneous nature of phrases opens them to numerous modes of linkage. By connecting them, we inevitably deny other legitimate possibilities of connection. This gives rise to a differend where the singularity of a phrase becomes dissimulated by its inescapable articulation in a defining sequence. The modes of linkage are called genres. Genres provide rules or criteria that help to select the linking phrase among the many choices. …
The Discourse on Inequality disputes the human–animal hierarchy in its denunciation of social ine... more The Discourse on Inequality disputes the human–animal hierarchy in its denunciation of social inequality as unnatural. Stripping away social artifice, it reveals a deep physical continuity between man and animals. As embodied creatures, they share mortality and vulnerability. Human animality does not, however, negate human difference. Man differs from animals through perfectibility: the freedom to change. That difference comes from the lack of any specifically human property, thereby challenging rather than confirming anthropocentric hierarchies. Any properties seen to distinguish man from animals are in fact improper, contingent and artificial. Human impropriety renders man always dependent on external relations for his development. Compassion, vital for a Rousseauian approach to animal ethics, allows man to experience this relationality, transporting him towards others as he identifies with their suffering as recalling the finitude and vulnerability shared by all creatures. For Ro...
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