Abstract
In the course of this chapter, I argue that Rousseau’s work not only provides the foundation of the Guy Debord’s critique of the “society of the spectacle” but also offers an alternative to the simple opposition that defines much of the contemporary political theory as a critique of representation. In concluding the chapter on Rousseau, I argue that it is the question of the spectacle of the festival that opens onto Rousseau’s novel and asymmetrical figure of the social contract.
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Notes
- 1.
This critical history focusing on the relation between the individual and the collective figures prominently in the beginning of Ernst Cassirer’s The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. Peter Gay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) and in Peter Gay’s Introduction to his English translation of this text, as well as in the second chapter of Jean Starobinski’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1971). Here, I have bracketed a significant section of contemporary work that does not fit this mold, such as Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading, Louis Althusser’s “Rousseau: The Social Contract (The Discrepancies),” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Poetique de l’histoire, and Etienne Balibar’s “Apories Rousseauistes: subjectivité, communauté, propriété, ” which have in various ways largely determined the terms of my engagement with Rousseau’s texts.
- 2.
Most significantly, see for instance Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, section XIII; Ernst Cassiere, The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau; Hyppolyte Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine, Vol. 1 l’Ancien Régime.
- 3.
Locke’s definition of property, in The Second Treatise of Government, as a removal from “the common” (i.e., the state of nature) through labor is perhaps the most definitive statement of its kind. Property in this sense, including the person and his or her natural rights, predates the genesis of positive law; a notion of property before the law, however, is possible only to the extent that Locke presupposes the violence of original acquisition, which rather than property was originally simply “possession.” To a large extent, my reading of Rousseau’s notion of the people in what follows sketches out a “sharing before the law,” placing emphasis on both meanings of the term “before.”
- 4.
This undecidability is even more pronounced when one begins to take seriously, as Rousseau himself certainly did, the relation of the autobiographical and the political work, which unfortunately is far too frequently obscured by what de Man refers to as the “division of labor among interpreters.” Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 135.
- 5.
Quoted in Gay’s introduction to Cassirer’s The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Gay points out, however, that Vaughn, prefiguring Cassirer’s argument in one principle respect, ultimately reconciles the two positions, citing a “journey of growth from individualism to collectivism.” In Cassirer’s The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau, trans. Peter Gay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 10–11.
- 6.
From Maine’s Popular Government, quoted in Gay’s introduction to The Problem of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 4.
- 7.
Burke, Reflections, 225. In Political Theology, Carl Schmitt points specifically to Rousseau’s depiction of popular sovereignty as the quintessential political-theological moment, precisely because it is the moment politics appears as secular, and therefore for the first time fully represses its continued relation to the order of theology. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
- 8.
See Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Praeger, 1960); William McGovern, From Luther to Hitler (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1941); Peter Viereck, Metapolitics (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004); Ernest Seillière, Romanticism, trans. Cargill Sprietsma
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1929).
- 9.
McGovern, From Luther to Hitler, 582.
- 10.
No longer the divine transcendence associated with the divine right of kings, Hobbes’ sovereign is immanently transcendent because it is a secular, “partial” transcendence; a human being like any other functions as if he or she were divine. Hobbes’ sovereign is, therefore, both inside and outside the law in a very novel fashion.
- 11.
See in particular, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire and Multitude, as well as Negri’s Insurgencies.
- 12.
Apart from his Preface to Rousseau’s Dialogues in 1962, Foucault has said very little explicitly concerning Rousseau. When Rousseau does appear, much like in the work of Negri, it is typically as a figure for modem theories of empty juridical formalism inherent in the notion of sovereignty.
- 13.
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (New York: Penguin, 2004), 31–3.
- 14.
While Foucault’s “biopolitics” is “massifying” – that is, functions in view of policing the health of the populace as a collective body – this earlier notion of “biopower” operates in view of producing the individual as a subject. This takes place by a subjection to a “microphysics” of disciplinary power that has a tangential and non-necessary relation to the juridical practices. In this respect, it is interesting that what is at stake in the transition to popular sovereignty, according to Foucault’s logic in Society Must Be Defended, is a substitution of the person of the sovereign for the body of the citizen.
- 15.
In an article entitled “Approximations: Towards an Ontological Definition of the Multitude,” Negri makes precisely this point in terms of the opposition between the people and the multitude: modem sovereignty constructs itself by virtue of an original decision on the separation between the people and the multitude, a description of sovereignty that holds true for not only Hobbes but for Rousseau and Hegel as well. The conclusion is that the indivisibility of a sovereign people is predicated on an original division between people and multitude. In the process, the sovereign people is reduced to the mechanisms of representation, transformed into a mere juridical formalism, while the multitude remains an ontological reality situated outside the operations of the political-juridical representations of the state. In terms similar to the biopolitical crisis described by Giorgio Agamben, this crisis of democracy is nothing other than the logical extension of this original division between the people and the multitude as the original operation of sovereignty. It is this ontological, non-representational notion of the people that I will attempt to call into question through an inquiry into Rousseau’s notion of the spectacle.
- 16.
Nancy does not simply oppose one form of association to another. “Society,” he writes in “The Inoperative Community,” “was not built on the ruins of a community. It emerged from the disappearance or the conservation of something (…). So that community, far from being what society has crushed or lost, is what happens to us – question, waiting, event, imperative – in the wake of society.” In The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Conner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 11. Much of what Rousseau says about the community and the spectacle demonstrates the fact that community is not lost, but an event that happens outside, or even after, society.
- 17.
Etienne Balibar, “Apories Rousseauistes: subjectivité, communauté, propriété,” in Les Cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg 13 (Spring 2002).
- 18.
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 254.
- 19.
In Man and Citizen, which was first published in 1969, Judith Shklar argues that because nature “is no longer an option open to men,” one must substitute the “family” for the “state of nature” (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 5. No longer an opposition between the individual and the collective, what emerges is a reading of Rousseau in terms of the opposition of two different human associations, the oikos and the polis. Extending Shklar’s suggestion, one could say that the opposition between Rousseau’s different notion of human association pivots on the relation between the oikos, the space of biological reproduction, and the city, or the polis as the location of political existence. If the model of the unitary nature of the polis of antiquity comes to stand for the political order in which biological life is completely consumed by political existence, modem society by contrast is fallen to the extent that these terms have been separated, and to the extent that biological life or natural man is included in politics strictly by exclusion.
- 20.
In a section of Rousseau et la science politique de son temps, Derathé argues that the state of nature must exist not necessarily as state of the individual in solitude, but as a state of natural independence prior to a contractual political engagement. The commonplace of the state of nature, as will be discussed in more detail below in the discussion of the relation between Rousseau and Hobbes, functions first and foremost as a refutation of the notion of natural subordination, such as proposed by Bousset. Following Locke and Hobbes, Rousseau will argue that it is the sovereign who remains in a state of nature with other sovereigns. It is precisely this question that Rousseau was hoping but failed to resolve in his writings on perpetual peace and the state of war.
- 21.
It is impossible to find any appropriate equivalents for the French term le spectacle. As I argue below, it is the central concept for making sense of Rousseau’s notion of community. Allan Bloom, in his translation of Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, alternates between “entertainment” and “theatre” which, although not a terrible solution to the question of translating the term, makes the logic of the text all but illegible.
- 22.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 100.
- 23.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 94.
- 24.
Rousseau, Discourses, 3.
- 25.
Quoted in Cassirer, The Problem of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 47, (emphasis added).
- 26.
Rousseau, Discourses, 6.
- 27.
“Nous sommes abusé par l’apparence du bien” in OC, III, (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 1240; or, in Gourevitch’s translation, “We are deceived by the appearance of right.” Rousseau, Discourses, 5.
- 28.
On this point, see the initial chapter of Starobinski’s La transparence.
- 29.
In a chapter of Allegories of Reading entitled “Self (Pygmalion),” de Man argues that Rousseau conceives of primitive man in terms of a self-reflexive spectator, a “spectator to himself,” and therefore already implies an internal division which is the opening that will be exploited at the moment of self-division. De Man, Allegories of Reading, 165.
- 30.
Rousseau, Discourses, 9.
- 31.
Rousseau, Discourses, 10.
- 32.
Rousseau, Discourses, 8.
- 33.
While Negri wastes no opportunity to denounce Rousseau in particular for his “formalist” or juridical notion of sovereignty, he insists nonetheless on a Rousseauism that, as I am arguing, cannot even be ascribed to Rousseau himself: the non-representational immediacy of the political sphere.
- 34.
Quoted in Gourevitch’s Introduction, xxxviii. In a similar vein, much of the controversy surrounding the historical speculations as to whether the “illumination” on the road to Vincennes just prior to the writing of the Discourse was a historical reality or a retroactive staging of a fictional event rests on whether or not one believes Diderot’s account that he had advised Rousseau to write against the arts and sciences once Rousseau had arrived at his prison cell at Vincennes.
- 35.
Jean Starobinski, La transparence et l’obstacle, 13.
- 36.
Rousseau, Discourses, 6.
- 37.
The Social Contract, in Rousseau’s Political Writings, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987), 91.
- 38.
Bouchardy’s note in OC, III.
- 39.
Rousseau, Discourses, 27.
- 40.
Rousseau, Discourses, 24.
- 41.
Rousseau, Discourses, 5.
- 42.
Rousseau, Discourses, 5.
- 43.
Strauss, History and Natural Right, 256.
- 44.
Henry Phillips, The Theatre and Its Critics in Seventeenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 133 et passim.
- 45.
Phillips, The Theatre and Its Critics, 133.
- 46.
Bloom’s introduction to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, trans. Allan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), xx–xxi.
- 47.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 116.
- 48.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 4.
- 49.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 131.
- 50.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 5.
- 51.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 69.
- 52.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 93.
- 53.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 94.
- 54.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 95.
- 55.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 115.
- 56.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 115.
- 57.
Louis not only ruined Fouquet, but took the team responsible for creating Fouquet’s estate, Vaux-le-Vicomte – Louis Le Vau, Charles Le Brun and Andre Le Notre – to go to work on his father’s little hunting lodge at Versailles.
- 58.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 116.
- 59.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 118.
- 60.
Rousseau, Social Contract, 91.
- 61.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 64.
- 62.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 16.
- 63.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 78.
- 64.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 64.
- 65.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 81 (emphasis added).
- 66.
Interestingly, Rousseau distinguishes between the orator and the actor: the orator of the public or political sphere “speaks in his own name” represents only himself, his role and person, appearance and reality being the same; and fulfills the role of man and citizen.
- 67.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 17.
- 68.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 67.
- 69.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 111 (emphasis added).
- 70.
Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 12.
- 71.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 29.
- 72.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 5.
- 73.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 25–6.
- 74.
Rousseau’s famous critique of Moliere’s Misanthrope and the bourgeois penchant for a “love interest,” which had become common in the comedies of the day both operate in view of demonstrating how the individual in a society fundamentally emerges according to a logic of exchangeability. Paradoxically, each individual becomes separate from each of the other individuals precisely to the extent they are fundamentally transposable.
- 75.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 159.
- 76.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 159.
- 77.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 126.
- 78.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 126.
- 79.
Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 127.
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Carson, C. (2017). The Divided People. In: The Aesthetics of Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33963-4_3
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