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.
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 :
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. …
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.
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 :
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. …
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