Rousseau and Radical Democracy (Continuum Studies in Philosophy)

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Author: Kevin Inston

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Rousseau and Radical Democracy

Continuum Studies in Philosophy Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA Continuum Studies in Philosophy is a major monograph series from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the whole field of philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research. Aesthetic in Kant, James Kirwan Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion, Aaron Preston Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus, Christopher Brown Augustine and Roman Virtue, Brian Harding The Challenge of Relativism, Patrick Phillips Demands of Taste in Kant’s Aesthetics, Brent Kalar Descartes and the Metaphysics of Human Nature, Justin Skirry Descartes’ Theory of Ideas, David Clemenson Dialectic of Romanticism, Peter Murphy and David Roberts Duns Scotus and the Problem of Universals, Todd Bates Hegel’s Philosophy of Language, Jim Vernon Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, David James Hegel’s Theory of Recognition, Sybol S.C. Anderson The History of Intentionality, Ryan Hickerson Kantian Deeds, Henrik Jøker Bjerre Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political Theory, Alison Assiter Kierkegaard’s Analysis of Radical Evil, David A. Roberts Leibniz Re-interpreted, Lloyd Strickland Metaphysics and the End of Philosophy, HO Mounce Nietzsche and the Greeks, Dale Wilkerson Origins of Analytic Philosophy, Delbert Reed Philosophy of Miracles, David Corner Platonism, Music and the Listener’s Share, Christopher Norris Popper’s Theory of Science, Carlos Garcia Postanalytic and Metacontinental, edited by James Williams, Jack Reynolds, James Chase and Ed Mares Rationality and Feminist Philosophy, Deborah K. Heikes Role of God in Spinoza’s Metaphysics, Sherry Deveaux Rousseau and the Ethics of Virtue, James Delaney Rousseau’s Theory of Freedom, Matthew Simpson Spinoza and the Stoics, Firmin DeBrabander Spinoza’s Radical Cartesian Mind, Tammy Nyden-Bullock St. Augustine and the Theory of Just War, John Mark Mattox St. Augustine of Hippo, R.W. Dyson Thomas Aquinas & John Duns Scotus, Alex Hall Tolerance and the Ethical Life, Andrew Fiala


Kevin Inston

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Kevin Inston, 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-2845-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Inston, Kevin. Rousseau and radical democracy / Kevin Inston. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 978-1-4411-2845-4 1. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778–Political and social views. 2. Democracy–Philosophy. I. Title. JC179.R9I65 2010 321.8–dc22 2010003796

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Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations and Reference Key to Cited Works by Rousseau Introduction

viii ix 1

Part 1 Rethinking the Political: Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality Chapter 1 The Negativity of Nature Clearing the Grounds of the Social Rousseau’s Post-Foundationalism: His Critique of Natural Law Denaturalizing Society Society as a Discursive Construct De Man’s Political Pessimism: The Ambiguity of Language The Political Effects of Discourse The Importance of Naming Conclusion

15 16 19 21 26 27 30 31 36

Chapter 2 Perfectible Man as the Subject of Lack Human Division: ‘Man Studying Man’ The Subject of Lack Identity and Difference Pity and Difference Language and Identity Perfectibility: Man’s Open-ended Identity Perfectibility as the Condition of Ethics and Politics

37 38 41 42 45 47 50 52

Chapter 3 Constructing Political Identities Antagonism and Social Formation Laclau’s and Mouffe’s Theory of Antagonism The Antagonistic Split between Self and Other The Undecidability of Being and Appearing Surplus Production: Social Alienation The Specious Contract: A Critique of Utopianism Discourse and Being: A Critique of Ideology

57 58 61 63 65 68 71 73

vi

Contents The Constitutive Force of Alienation Conclusion

Chapter 4 An Ethics of Democracy The Deadlock of Civil Relations: The ‘Joys of Domination’ Joyless Domination: The Second State of Nature The Abyss of Freedom Traversing the Fantasy Man’s Moral Openness An Ethics of Pity The Limits of Pity Pity and an Ethos of Contestation Conclusion

77 79 81 82 85 87 88 89 92 95 98 103

Part 2 Towards a Radical Democracy: Rousseau’s Social Contract Chapter 5 Rethinking the Universal Rousseau’s Critique of Strict Universalism Social Plurality Relational Identities Protecting Plurality: The Civil Religion Conclusion

107 109 115 118 120 122

Chapter 6 Constructing the General Will Disagreement and Agreement The General Will and Hegemony The Undecidability of the General Will The Citizen and the Contract Total Alienation Forced to be Free: The Non-totalitarian Character of the Pact

124 124 126 132 133 136 139

Chapter 7 The Democratic Paradox: The Legislator Heteronomy as the Condition of Popular Autonomy Representing the Unrepresentable Fiction and Political Reality: The Lawgiver’s Invocation of the Gods Conclusion

144 146 150

Chapter 8 Rousseau’s Radical Democracy Democracy: The Impossible Ideal The Democratic Horizon Democracy and Pluralism

163 163 166 168

155 161

Contents The Sovereign and the Government Public Assemblies: The Empty Space of Power Politics and the Political The Undecidability of the Decision: The Question of Justice The Democratic Promise

vii

169 173 175 177 181

Conclusion

188

Notes Bibliography Index

191 214 221

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Felicity Baker for her critical and invaluable readings of earlier germinations of parts of this book and for her encouragement and generous advice throughout. I would also like to express my gratitude to Michael Sheringham, Ernesto Laclau and Jason Glynos for their input in the project. I am particularly indebted to Nina Parish for her meticulous and painstaking reading of the final manuscript and to Ruth Austin whose help greatly facilitated the ultimate stages of preparation. Parts of the book have been delivered as papers at various conferences and have significantly benefitted from discussion and comments received there, notably the PSA Annual Conference, the University of Swansea, 2008, ‘Ontology and Politics’, Queen Mary University of London, 2008, ‘Rousseau and Revolution’, University of Aarhus, 2009. Some of the material from Chapters 3 and 4 was published in my ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Post-Marxist” Critique of Alienation’, Philosophy Today, fall 2006, 349–367. Parts of Chapter 5 appeared in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ernesto Laclau and the Somewhat Particular Universal’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 35, no. 5 (2009), 555–587. Chapter 7 is a modified version of ‘Representing the Unrepresentable: Rousseau’s Legislator and the Impossible Object of the People’, Contemporary Political Theory (forthcoming). I would like to thank Philosophy Today, Sage Publications and Palgrave Macmillan for granting me permission to reuse this material.

Abbreviations and Reference Key to Cited Works by Rousseau

Œuvres Complètes (OC hereafter) under the direction of Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Pléiade, 1959–1995), five vols. PFC

GP DOI

PE E EOL

F GM LA

PF D SC

Constitutional Project for Corsica in Rousseau Political Writings, F. Watkins (trans.) (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1953)/ Projet de Constitution pour la Corse, OC, vol. 3, 1964. Considerations on the Government of Poland in Rousseau Political Writing./Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, OC, vol.3. Discourse on Inequality in The Social Contract and Other Discourses, G. D. Cole (trans.) (London: Everyman, 1993)/Discours sur l’inégalité, OC, vol. 3. Discourse on Political Economy in The Social Contract and Other Discourses./Discours sur l’économie politique, OC, vol. 3. Emile, B. Foxley (trans.) (London: Everyman, 1993)/Emile, ou de l’éducation, OC, vol. 4. 1969. Essay on the Origin of Languages, J. H. Moran and A. Gode (trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966)/Essai sur l’origine des langues, OC, vol. 5, 1995. Fragments OC, vol. 2, 1964 (my translation). Geneva Manuscript (first version of The Social Contract) in The Social Contract and Other Discourses./Manuscrit de Genève, OC, vol. 3. Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre, A. Bloom (trans.) (Ithaca, NY: University of Cornell, 1960)/Lettre à d’Alembert, OC, vol. 5. Political Fragments (my translation)/Fragments politiques, OC, vol. 3. Rousseau Juge de Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, OC, vol. 1, 1959. The Social Contract in The Social Contract and Other Discourses Du Contrat social, OC, vol. 3.

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Introduction

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political writings express an unwavering commitment to thinking through the principles that could engender a free and equal coexistence for humanity. Chantal Mouffe indirectly affirms the continuing importance of those writings, when she argues that the objective of today’s Left should be to extend and deepen the democratic revolution initiated 200 years ago, for it is not possible to find a more radical principle for organizing society than the idea that all human beings are free and equal.1 This book establishes a deep connection between Rousseau’s theory, conceived in the period immediately before the Revolution which inaugurated modern democracy, and today’s highly influential theory of radical plural democracy developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.2 This connection remains largely unexamined by Laclau and Mouffe themselves and their growing body of followers; their scant and often oppositional references to Rousseau show a concern to distinguish their work from his.3 Aletta Norval, on the other hand, a key exponent of the post-structuralist thought of Laclau and Mouffe, clearly identifies Rousseau, along with Marx, as belonging to the nascent stage of radical democracy.4 According to Norval, contemporary theories of radical democracy are unified by their critique of the limits of liberal democracy and that critique has its starting point in the writings of Rousseau and Marx. While today’s radical democrats support the liberal values of freedom and equality, they argue that we must deepen and radicalize them. Rather than construing those values as abstract rights beyond dispute, as liberal democrats tend to do, we need to recognize them as political, that is, open to interpretation and questioning. We can always contest and rethink the nature of social identities and political formations in the name of freedom and equality: Rousseau’s account of democracy is important for contemporary theorists of radical democracy, not so much for its distinctive view of the general will, which is found wanting in much contemporary thought, but for its particular criticisms of the liberal tradition. His critique of representative democracy and understanding of self-government challenge key assumptions of liberal democracy, especially the notion that liberal democracies

2

Rousseau and Radical Democracy can be reduced to the periodic selection of deputies through the ballot box. His conception of self-rule – the active giving of consent to rules by citizens – means that a political order providing opportunities for such participation in public affairs must be more than a mere form of government. For contemporary radical democrats, this is an article of faith.5

As well as insisting on the necessity of democratic participation over and above voting, Rousseau also emphasizes the citizens’ need for freedom from economic dependency to secure the autonomy required for the making of democratic decisions: a major requirement for the theories of present-day radical democrats. While Norval’s brief account of Rousseau’s political thinking acknowledges its importance for his successors, she also foregrounds the key differences separating his thinking from theirs. One of the principal aims of the present study is to demonstrate how those alleged differences are often based on common misassumptions. Rousseau’s general will, for insistence, ‘found wanting’ by modern political philosophers, is in many ways highly pertinent to the current political context. A new reading of Rousseau in the light of the work of Laclau and Mouffe must first consider how recent theories of radical democracy are believed to differ from, and surpass, his political thinking. Today’s theorists supposedly part company with Rousseau with regard to his view of the political.6 In their opinion, both Rousseau and Marx understood politics negatively as something that should be eventually transcended ‘in favour of a self-regulating, transparent society’7: This desire to transcend politics and to institute a non-political transparent social order is problematised as undemocratic by contemporary radical democrats. As Macpherson’s early writings make clear, it is no longer a question of rejecting liberal democracy tout court. Rather, a nuanced, deconstructive critique of liberal democracy has been articulated, which recognises that some liberal norms are crucial to the development and deepening of democracy.8 For radical democrats, such as Laclau and Mouffe, Rousseau’s thinking offers a homogenizing account of popular sovereignty that seeks to eradicate plurality, critique and ambiguity: ‘Rousseau feared the threat of particular interests leading to the inability to discern the common good, and opted for ‘solidarity bonds’ of a small-scale community, instead of the partially shared identities that citizens of a complex post-industrial polity can construct through democratic public life’.9

Introduction

3

Laclau and Mouffe distinguish their theory from earlier theories by insisting on the necessity of actively promoting diversity, difference and dissensus so as to avoid a sterile state of political immobility and closure. The growing range of groups and social actors who have populated the political landscape since the 1970s, and who have aimed to participate in, and transform, society, led Laclau and Mouffe to formulate, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, their idea of radical and plural democracy.10 The struggles of such groups over issues of racial, ethnic and gender identity pointed to the need for their articulation. They call articulation ‘any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice’.11 The articulation or the bringing-together of diverse groups would increase their potential to effect change in social structures and institutions, without assigning one group a privileged status in that process. ‘If Laclau’s and Mouffe’s project is ‘radical’, it is because one of its goals is to expand egalitarian effects into more and more areas of the social. If, on the other hand, it is called ‘plural’, it is because the relative autonomy of the demands of different groups has to be accepted and articulated into a larger common movement, what is called a chain of equivalence’.12 Laclau and Mouffe therefore seek to rework the idea of the popular control of public decisions in terms of pluralism. What goes unrecognized is that Rousseau’s theory, despite being written in a period where the political arena was less visibly socially and culturally diverse, prefigures many of the aspirations of Laclau’s and Mouffe’s project. Given Rousseau’s awareness of the importance of context in conceiving institutions and structures for a specific society, his political writings in general must be read from the perspective of the problems and the social situation of the twenty-first century.13 Rousseau’s philosophy is not hostile to plurality but actually seeks to preserve it as an essential part of any legitimate regime. The general will does not instate an oppressive form of unity that excludes difference and questioning but actually depends on them for its formation and constant renewal. On the other hand, Rousseau views what he terms partial associations – what we term today interest groups – as a potential threat to the construction of the general will but only to the extent that the dominance of one such group to the exclusion or elimination of the rest would suppress the constitutive force of difference and critique. Such a situation would lead to despotic rule; the fear of which motivates all of Rousseau’s political writings. We must also reject the idea that those writings locate their endpoint in a state of social transparency where the different components of society would relate to one another unambiguously and would thus be closed to

4


being put into question and redefined by politics. That reading of Rousseau fails to acknowledge the transformative role that he ascribes to the political. One of his central theses is that the corruption and oppression that characterize man’s historical development are not caused by any essential human attribute but by the illegitimate and aberrant institutions of society. This argument allows us to imagine the reverse situation in which politics can contribute to redefining and shaping human identity in accordance with more legitimate principles of freedom and equality. On this point, Rousseau shares Laclau’s and Mouffe’s understanding of the political as the ontological dimension of any social order, since it informs how we think and act; it creates social reality.

Towards a Definition of Radical Plural Democracy Laclau’s and Mouffe’s observation that the political forms the ontological level of the social underpins their conception of radical, plural democracy. Their conception derives from Claude Lefort’s seminal theorization of modern democracy.14 Lefort conceives the centre of power in democracy as ‘an empty place’. This basic feature of democracy supplies the condition of possibility for its radicalization. Lefort explores the transition from pre-democratic to democratic societies. In pre-democratic societies, power was incorporated in the body of the person of the prince who, as a representative of God, guaranteed sovereign justice and reason. The social body had a non-egalitarian and hierarchical structure founded on the principle of divine will. With the democratic revolution, the site of power becomes an empty space, stripped of any reference to a transcendental guarantor which could ensure social unity. As a result, sovereignty lies with the people, but the people cannot govern itself directly, so the place of power must always remain, by necessity of its structure, an empty place, and any group or person occupying it can do so only temporarily. This creates a dissociation of the agencies of power, knowledge and the law, as their foundations are no longer pre-established by a fundamental logic. Consequently, the principles governing the social order are subject to an infinite process of contestation and reformulation. The absence of a world-transcending principle of political organization allows for radical democratic politics: it indicates the openness of society to questioning and redefinition by diverse identities and discourses. In short, that absence reveals the political nature of the principles by which we construct society – their contestability – and their contingency: the fact that any social order is historically articulated.

Introduction

5

The ambiguity that Lefort locates at the heart of democracy helps to explain what Laclau and Mouffe mean by radical democracy. ‘Radical’ does not mean providing a definitive answer to the question of how to order the social field; rather, they maintain that any social order will be provisional and therefore susceptible to modification or change. The attempt to resolve political ambiguity completely would be undemocratic, as it would eradicate contestation and revision. Nor does it imply ‘radical’ in the sense of a pure, true democracy where the governed and their government become fused into one. ‘Radical’ refers to the fact that we can only preserve democracy if we take account of its radical impossibility. The lack of fundamental foundations grounding democracy defines it as structurally incomplete; that incompleteness allows us to rethink social relations as being open, plural and infinitely renegotiable. Radical democracy thus accepts contingency, conflict and ambiguity as the condition of its existence, and reveals that the non-closure of politics gives hope of freedom and transformation. The fact that the democratic invention ends the organic unity of society does not dissolve unity altogether, but merely deprives it of a pre-defined basis. Unity must be instituted through a process of political competition and questioning, and through recognition of the essential division and conflict at the origin of the social. The ordering of society does not represent a necessary, pre-determined structure, but the contingent result of contestation. Laclau and Mouffe understand the antagonistic dimension of the political as an insuperable element of any society and the condition of possibility of democracy. As Lefort observes, without any inherent logic for social unity, what comes to distinguish one society from another is its regime, its specific organization of human existence. In this sense, any society contains a reference to its political definition.15 That places the political at the heart of society. The political (as distinct from politics, the space of social institutions and practices) is connected to the moment of radical indeterminacy which accompanies the instituting of any regime and which ‘shows the impossibility of establishing the social as an objective order’.16 The centrality of the political – the centrality of the disputable and modifiable nature of any regime – forms one of the principal ideas of radical democracy. Norval identifies two further principal ideas: ‘an emphasis on the construction and articulation, rather than mere aggregation, of interests and identities’ and ‘the attention given to the process of subject formation in general, and the constitution of democratic identities in particular’.17 Radical democrats insist that political institutions do not simply reflect

6


already given identities and interests, but actually play a constitutive role in constructing and shaping them. Democracy is much more than a type of government; it is a mode of being, a way of life that embraces the open and unfixed character of social phenomena. The fact that democracy amounts to more than a procedure for gathering and calculating interests requires us to examine how subjectivity is formed and how democratic identities come to be constituted. Given that, for Laclau and Mouffe, the political plays a primary role in the building of social reality, there can be no essentially predetermined and historically privileged subject. They favour a relational conception of identity: the identity of any subject is defined through its difference from other identities. As any identity is always founded on difference, it is never complete; so the subject is fundamentally split: it never quite becomes ‘itself’. The differential nature of identities makes the political ubiquitous. The impossibility of wholeness allows the subject to identify with different discourses and make decisions which redefine her position within the social field. In short, the subject’s incompleteness gives her the freedom to refute the current regime and how that regime depicts social reality as she endeavours to reconstruct her identity in line with new social demands and desires. Even while they recognize the need for shared values and common interests, Laclau and Mouffe focus on the disruptive and destabilizing potential of democracy. Their rejection of an ontologically fi xed conception of humanity, and their insistence on the constitutive force of difference in politics, foreground the inescapability of conflict. They thus repudiate the utopian dream of a state of perfect harmony free from power, antagonism and struggle. Democratic politics should not seek totally to overcome conflict and antagonism, but to organize society so that it opens the way for disagreeing about the interpretation and implementation of democratic principles. Any denial of the antagonistic dimension of the political would restrict the potentially generative and productive effects of democracy.18 For democratic politics to survive, we have to acknowledge that no limited social actor can represent the true consciousness of society, that is, can stand in for the totality. The impossibility of a universal agent of social change and the growing diversification of the social and political field prompted Laclau to re-conceptualize the relationship between the universal and the particular. The lack of any transcendental principle of unity means that the universal can no longer be understood as the ultimate ground for social identities and structures. However, without some reference to a wider common framework, particular identities would never be able to enter into association with one another and any attempt to secure

Introduction

7

their rights and beliefs might entail the risk of supporting a highly divisive and sectarian state. Laclau, anxious about a recent tendency to discard the universal, but at the same time rejecting the pure and essentializing conception of it, reconceives it as an empty place, as the name of the absence of any fundamental ground. The fact the universal has no a priori content supplies the precondition of democracy as different groups compete to define the principles or values which provisionally give coherence to social diversity. Recognizing that the universal has no content of its own implies perceiving an essential asymmetry between the particular forces that vie to occupy the place of power and their claims to representing the social in a universal sense. Democracy entails the ambitious task of trying to fill the gap between empty universality and the particular bodies that come to incarnate it, while keeping that gap permanently open to allow the people to redefine their political objectives in the light of unpredictable events and social changes. Laclau’s and Mouffe’s radical democratic project is nourished by this tension, their effort to retain consciously the asymmetry between the particular and the universal.19 Such a project only becomes feasible, if we accept the contingency of any political enterprise and accept that the universal dimension corresponds to an empty horizon rather than some underlying essence or logic.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Modern Radical Democrat Rousseau asserts that ‘there has never been a real democracy, and there never will be’ (SC, 239/404). That limpid statement of the impossibility of a pure democracy, where the people and the government would be perfectly unified, gives lie to the common assumption that his political theory seeks a state of fullness and transparency free from power, ambiguity and difference. The unrealizable character of pure democracy does not lead Rousseau to reject democracy tout court, however, democracy appears in his thinking in two forms. First, he conceives democracy in the limited sense of a mode of government, by which he means direct democracy where the people govern themselves without any mediation. Second, more importantly, he relates democracy to sovereignty; this redefinition of democracy is considered ‘his greatest innovation’.20 For Rousseau, democracy acts ‘as the ground of inscription’ for any legitimate political order, for, in the absence of a natural or divine justification for civil society, civil institutions and structures can only be sanctioned by the will of the people.21 He

8


argues that when democracy is actualized as a regime, it collapses into its opposite: a situation of tyranny and social fragmentation. By attempting to close the gap between the governed and their government, the regime of direct democracy abolishes the space within the social sphere which is necessary for reform or change to occur. Rousseau, through his critique of the democratic regime as ultimately undemocratic, becomes a precursor of Laclau’s and Mouffe’s radical democratic theory. As noted, they believe that we can only preserve democracy, if we accept its own impossibility as a perfect political system. So Rousseau, like today’s theorists, acknowledges the central ambiguity at the heart of democracy: sovereignty can only lie with the people, but the people cannot rule itself in an unmediated fashion and the space of power is therefore an empty place that no limited force can fully occupy. The impossibility of democracy disallows, on the one hand, its actualization as an ideal but, on the other, endows it with critical force which, by foregrounding the constant breach between political desire and its translation into social systems, incites political activity. Political life is nourished by the structural incompletion and division that inaugurates and perpetuates our search for ever greater freedom and equality. Rousseau’s critical discussion of democracy contains all these implications.

The Argument To examine Rousseau’s importance for current debates in democratic theory obviously requires the perspective of those debates and therefore my approach is diachronically focused. By comparing the writings of Rousseau and those of post-structuralist political theorists, I aim to shed new light on the meanings of both objects of study. I start from an understanding of texts as embedded in an endless array of codes, cultural discourses and other texts rather than as autonomous and unique entities. In this sense, the words of a text can be read not only in terms of the meanings assumed to exist in the text itself but also in terms of meanings extending far beyond it into wider discourses and contexts. As readers, we do not passively consume the meanings of texts but actively produce them from their words or signifiers.22 My comparative approach therefore conceives meaning as relational and open-ended rather than self-contained and closed. So against charges of anachronism, I stress how signification is not bounded in time and space but permanently susceptible to redefinition, being produced in a network of multiple temporalities and contexts which cannot be fi xed

Introduction

9

in any simple chronology.23 We can thus never claim to have established the meanings intended by the author or to offer a pure reading of any text, because our interpretation will always be traced through with other discourses and texts. As we shall see, Rousseau’s own philosophy uncovers the limitations of a strict causality as a way of explaining historical development, by highlighting the difficulty of clearly separating cause from effect. So our reading of earlier texts is always filtered through today’s perspectives and likewise, recent texts never exist in isolation from those which precede or surround them. This is not to imply that more recent texts will automatically elucidate or even correct the ideas of earlier ones. Rather, they engage in a process of reciprocal critical elucidation which denies either of them primacy as the source of meaning. While the political theories of Lefort, Laclau and Mouffe help to reveal the positive aspect of many areas of Rousseau’s philosophy which have caused despair among some of his most influential readers, his philosophy supplements their theories by offering a fuller account of what fostering an ethos of democratic change and renewal might involve. Through this comparison, the insistence in Rousseau’s thought on the absence of natural foundations, the symbolic character of society’s institution, the division between human beings and their political context – ideas which have been interpreted pessimistically – can be read as affirming the incompleteness, questioning and change constitutive of democratic politics.24 Likewise, Rousseau’s philosophy enriches our understanding of post-structuralist approaches. Post-structuralists tend to privilege the political moment of the institution of new regimes and the construction of political identities over ‘the ordinary ongoing business of politics’.25 Rousseau also reflects extensively on the conditions of possibility for a democratic constitution of society, but says more about the types of commitments, obligations and identifications required of us not only to become democratic citizens but also to sustain and constantly revitalize that position. He theorizes more fully the role of the individual and institutions in the process of democratization and the duties shared by citizens in deepening and reinvigorating their democratic bonds. My reading does not define Rousseau simply as a precursor of recent theorists but also as an important interlocutor for them. I therefore establish connections between them not to justify a return to Rousseau, for any close reading of his work would highlight its timeless complexity, but to emphasize the affirmative dimension of his thought for today’s democratic theory and landscape. In Chapter 1, we begin our exploration of Rousseau’s conception of the political with a discussion of his hypothetical account of nature as the social

10


origin in The Discourse on Inequality (Discourse hereafter). He reaches that hypothesis by subtracting social content to show how nature differs radically from society and cannot be known in any definite or positive form. Rousseau’s political theory and that of the post-structuralists share the same basic premise: the absence of any natural or fundamental foundation for society. That absence does not eliminate the question of social foundations but makes it the more urgent by indicating how social grounding will always be contingent and therefore modifiable. The lack of natural grounding for social phenomena and identities underlies Rousseau’s conception of them as symbolic constructs. Rousseau, like Laclau and Mouffe, stresses the centrality of language for defining the social sphere. Our relation to society is always mediated through language: we therefore never accede to social objects as things in themselves but as representations or ideas which remain forever open to reinterpretation. By depriving society of any necessary content, the image of nature highlights its absent fullness or incompleteness which enables its permanent reconfiguration. The lack of nature defining society also defines us as human. In Chapter 2, we consider how Rousseau distinguishes man from animals by his freedom to change – his perfectibility – coming from his essential indeterminacy. Rousseau’s conception of man adumbrates Laclau’s and Žižek’s elaboration of the Lacanian subject of lack as the political subject. In both cases, the subject’s lack of fi xed identity allows him to identify with different discourses as he redefines his identity to integrate changing social demands and desires. Chapter 3 explores how man, without any natural sociability, constructs a political identity. The Discourse analyses the split inhabiting all identities: the split between the identity itself imagined as offering fullness and stability and the process of identification which presupposes a lack of identity whereby fullness and stability become impossible. That split indicates how social structures never completely determine us, leaving us free to strive for more legitimate modes of identification. The non-convergence of man and the social, rather than limiting political responsibility and activity, actually generates it. Society, constituted through division, never achieves plenitude and total harmony. Man, through history, tries to deny that division as he subscribes to an illusion of eternal peace. That illusion blinds him to his manipulation and exploitation by the wealthy few. The rhetoric of the Discourse estranges us from the civil establishments and relations which we have accepted as natural, highlighting their contingent and often violent foundations. It cautions how a dream of concord and fullness, by repressing rather than contending with the political in its antagonistic dimension,

Introduction

11

could prevent us from recognizing the need to defend our freedom and equality from oppressive forces. The division formative of the political – the impossibility of total stability and order – raises the question of the ethical. Chapter 4 examines how the Discourse and Emile suggest a mode of ethics in the form of pity. We identify with another’s pitiable situation only if we recognize our difference from that person – our freedom from suffering – which gives us the strength to offer support. We explore how the affect of compassion could help cultivate a democratic ethos of contestation. Compassion should foster identification with the socially marginalized who represent society’s false universality, its distance from its horizon of universal justice. It thereby calls on us to respond to that injustice through political action. An ethics of pity proves compatible with radical democracy; it shows how our common differentiation rather than a common essence requires our participation in a social contract committed to extending and protecting freedom and equality. Rousseau surpasses Laclau and Mouffe, by offering a more detailed account of the ethical commitments and identifications which radicalizing democracy might entail. Part 2 focuses on The Social Contract and its inquiry into the conditions of possibility for a democratically instituted society which defines the people as the sovereign. Chapter 5 discusses how the lack of natural social grounding leads Rousseau and later Laclau to conceive the universal as devoid of predefined content, as an empty space. That lack does not destroy the question of the universal since individuals and groups can assert their right to be treated as equal only in a context of shared values and norms. Rather, it emphasizes how the universal must be constructed politically through common laws and rights which remain open to being contested by the particular. The particular and the universal share a tense coexistence where neither term can exist without the other. This chapter therefore counters the view that Rousseau’s political theory privileges universality over particularity or even banishes the latter. Chapter 6 develops this argument by illustrating how Rousseau’s conception of the general will does not conflict with today’s multicultural society but offers an account of how communities in dispute and with no essential belonging can construct commonalities. Difference and antagonism underlie Rousseau’s general will. Without different and conflicting opinions, Rousseau says there would be no need to build a general will in the first place. Its identity remains permanently split between its function as a universal principle of social formation and the particular decision which temporarily represents it. Like Laclau’s and Mouffe’s conception

12


of hegemony, the general will represents a contingent union of antagonistic forces into a collective project of social reform. Rousseau develops his notion of the general will with a description of the non-conformist citizenship necessary to avoid political stagnation and apathy and ensure the ongoing willing and renewal of what we share in common. His analysis of citizenship supplements Laclau’s theory of hegemony which says very little about the relations among citizens. Chapter 7 discusses the role of the legislator in producing from a ‘blind multitude’ a democratic people capable of writing its own laws. To fulfill this task, the people already need the experience of living under good laws to learn what those laws entail. Rousseau’s partial solution to this paradox is the legislator, a unique kind of political representative. We normally maintain that representation is democratic, when it faithfully reflects the popular will. Rousseau shows the inadequacy of this view: in situations of crisis, the representative has to mould or even create that will to engender democratic participation. Rousseau’s discussion of people formation highlights the radical uncertainty accompanying the institution of a new regime and the role of fiction in concealing it so that the people invests in that institution despite its uncertain foundations. However, that concealment can never be total: uncertainty is constitutive – we only need to form a political association because of our basic disunity. It therefore constantly returns, making the people a site of questioning, contestation and transformation. The ambiguity of the people as the sovereign authority, we argue in Chapter 8, affirms a democratic form which accepts its inherent incompleteness as the possibility of freedom and transformation. Democracy assumes the identity of a promise in The Social Contract. Like any promise, it remains permanently susceptible to betrayal and therefore imposes the need for vigilance and interminable critique so as to resist non-egalitarian practices and institutions. Supplementing the idea of radical democracy with Derrida’s notion of democracy to come, we show how that risk also represents a chance as it challenges citizens to think about, and revise, what constitutes democracy. Democracy, in The Social Contract, is conceived as an ongoing project of renewal which calls on our perfectibility to respond to unforeseen events and also to avoid political stagnation and apathy. Both the Discourse and The Social Contract enjoin us to acknowledge, and go beyond, the limitations of the present, to strive for a more democratic future.

Part 1

Rethinking the Political: Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality


Chapter 1

The Negativity of Nature

Derrida, in ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, the locus classicus of post-structuralism, contrasts two attitudes towards the lack of any fi xed centre or ground for structures: an affirmative one found in Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger which celebrates that lack as allowing for plural and open-ended interpretations and a ‘negative, Rousseauistic’ one which conceives it as the loss of immediacy and fullness.1 Rousseau’s texts, Derrida maintains, confront the impossibility of their own metaphysical quest for ‘full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play’.2 Blinded by nostalgia and even remorse for lost innocence and transparency, Rousseau supposedly denies the inherent contradiction between his own yearning for the certainty of a final foundation and the lack which that yearning implies. While the two attitudes both disclose the absent presence of a definite centre, they represent, for Derrida, varying degrees of critical awareness. Whereas Nietzsche embraces the openness and intellectual freedom which that absence creates, Rousseau, we are told, perpetually flees from it: his philosophy targets closure, and absolute presence only constantly to retrace their impossibility. Rousseau’s disclosure of any system’s inherent incompletion – an idea central to the post-structuralist political philosophy of Laclau and Mouffe – appears accidental, contradictory to the alleged logic of his thinking.3 Focusing on Rousseau’s political theory, we reappraise the view that his philosophy undermines its own conditions of possibility. If his theory sought a perfect state of transparency and plenitude, it would aim to eliminate the questioning, contestation and transformation characterizing a dynamic notion of politics.4 In this light, Rousseau’s thinking would seem hostile to its own object of study: the political. By contrast, Rousseau’s political philosophy, we argue, is premised on the ontological presupposition of a fundamental lack of natural foundations for society. 5 Rather than disavowing that lack, his theory, we assert, conceives it as constitutive

16


of the political: the absence of any natural society at once raises the question of social institution and also precludes any definitive answer to it, thereby defining politics as the ongoing attempt to respond to this question. Without definite grounds, the social remains open to permanent redefinition. This ontology of lack makes Rousseau a precursor of Laclau and Mouffe’s political theory. The absence of objective social grounds, Laclau and Mouffe argue, provides the condition of radical democracy which recognizes how every area of social life can be questioned and revised in the pursuit of greater freedom and equality. Far from being nostalgic for a bygone era of natural plenitude, Rousseau’s thinking remains central for understanding and interpreting the issues preoccupying current political debates.

Clearing the Grounds of the Social Rousseau’s inquiry into the foundations of society in the Discourse begins, like that of many philosophers before him, with an account of the state of nature: the social origin.6 Unlike previous accounts, Rousseau’s account, however, does not provide a natural explanation for society’s establishment, but rather problematizes any such explanation. He reaches his state of nature by ‘setting aside the facts’, indicating its overtly fictional quality: Let us begin by setting aside all the facts, for they have no bearing on this question. This kind of inquiry is not like the pursuit of historical truth, but depends solely on hypothetical and conditional reasoning, better suited to explain the nature of things than to show their actual origin. (DOI, 50/132–132) Rousseau stresses the hypothetical and conjectural character of his inquiry. His account of nature does not aim to resolve the question of what the social foundation actually is but rather to analyse what resolving that question would entail. Through that analysis, he ends up showing the impossibility of any ultimate resolution. To conceive the foundation would require us to accede to a point beyond society and yet that process makes sense only from the perspective of society. ‘As all reflection is born of comparison’, we reflect on nature as the social ground only from within the social context, but once in that context, we can never know nature as a fact or an actual state (EOL, 32/396). What makes possible


17

any thought of nature – the comparative force of society – also makes impossible any exact knowledge of it. We always think about the foundational moment retrospectively, once that moment is absent. Foundations cannot therefore be grasped in any primary or pure form. Their primacy or purity has to be understood metaphorically, since their identity is always-already traced through by the state they supposedly found and precede. Rousseau’s strategy for imagining the origin highlights this paradox, by disrupting the causality which places nature (the cause) before society (the effect). To imagine our natural state, Rousseau starts from civilization and works backwards, emptying society of any positive content (language, laws, governments, morality, family life, etc.). As a result, nature emerges as an asocial and atemporal realm. We cannot therefore conceive nature in any absolute form: its conception comes from its difference from the social, from what it is not. Through this negative process, society’s instituting moment represents a lack; it becomes contingent. That contingency presupposes an understanding of natural man as radically independent and free. His independence means nothing more than his lack of relations with others and his freedom signifies the absence of any external constraint. Likewise, his natural goodness designates his amorality rather than any basic awareness of right and wrong. Moral dilemmas only occur in society through the confl icts of interest caused by human interaction. By defi ning natural man negatively vis-à-vis his social other, Rousseau indicates our lack of natural sociability. Nature, we learn, has taken so ‘little care to unite mankind by mutual wants and to facilitate the use of speech, that she has contributed very little to make them sociable, and has put little of her own into all they have done to create such bonds of union’ (DOI, 70/151). Rousseau’s hypothesis of our asocial beginning is central for understanding his political philosophy and its emphasis on our collective autonomy. As unity is not naturally given, we have constantly to imagine and construct it through acts of association; we become responsible for determining with others the space we share together. Rousseau’s theory of social contract rests on this assumption: if we possessed a natural bond, we would not need to form a people through conscious agreement to a social pact, as we would already exist as a unity. Society, being grounded on an asocial base, always remains a fragile construct which requires a sustained and common effort to ensure its perpetual reconstruction. By subtracting factual content, Rousseau’s account of nature clears the grounds of the social, stripping it of any objective or natural basis.7 His

18


inquiry into what founds society reveals the radical uncertainty surrounding that issue: For it is no small undertaking to separate what is originary from what is artificial in the present nature of man, to have a proper understanding of a state that no longer exists, and perhaps never did and probably never will, but about which we should nevertheless have accurate notions in order to judge our present state properly. (DOI, 44/123) The critical force of Rousseau’s account of nature comes from its undecidability, being simultaneously real and imaginary.8 It takes the impossibility of knowing for sure what grounds society as the very possibility of investigating the question of grounding itself. Nature, as a state ‘which no longer exists, may never have existed and probably never will’, represents the social foundation as present to us in its absence. We must have ‘accurate notions’ of nature, or more precisely of its uncertainty, so not to perceive society as a natural phenomenon which is closed to change. No society is ever complete because it cannot fully explain its founding moment. To conceive society completely, we would need to reach a point beyond it which would allow us to consider it as a whole. Rousseau’s image of nature reveals that point as lacking: our knowledge of social grounds is always partial and therefore contestable. The truth of that image lies in its disclosure of society’s inherent incompleteness, of the openness of our current condition to questioning and transformation. So Rousseau’s inquiry does not principally concern the empirical level of social reality: he explains ‘the nature of things’ by subtracting facts. That subtraction creates a state in which the social institutions we take for granted lose all necessity. As we shall see, the Discourse explores less what those institutions are and more how they have come to be constructed in certain ways to produce certain social consequences. It aims to teach us that apart from the impossibility of returning to nature, there is nothing inexorable in our historical development. Rousseau’s description of his mode of analysis in the Discourse has similar objectives to Laclau and Mouffe’s approach which also concerns ‘conditions of possibility’ rather than ‘facts’.9 Their approach stresses how ‘social phenomena are never finished or total. Meaning can never be ultimately fixed and this opens the way for constant social struggles about definitions of society and identity, with resulting social effects’.10 The political theory of Rousseau and that of Laclau and Mouffe are premised on the absence of any fundamental foundation for society. For Rousseau and these modern theorists, that absence affirms


19

the permanent possibility of change. ‘The nature of things’, in Rousseau, paradoxically proves to be their very lack of nature.11

Rousseau’s Post-Foundationalism: His Critique of Natural Law So Rousseau’s metaphorical portrayal of nature foregrounds how the origin constantly refuses causal reduction. Derrida usefully analyses the complexity of this issue in Rousseau’s writing, demonstrating the impossibility of establishing the precise point of origination: the origin always presupposes an anterior moment which negates it. He interprets that complexity as resisting Rousseau’s ‘declared intention’ of reaching ‘zero degree’, or a final foundation.12 As can be discerned from the argument so far, our current study accepts his analysis of the origin, but disagrees with his certainty about Rousseau’s intention: Rousseau clearly states that he does not seek to ‘show the actual origin’ (DOI, 50/132–133). Other commentators, by contrast, maintain that Rousseau consciously rejects the idea of fundamental foundations, classifying him as an ‘anti-foundationalist’.13 We shall demonstrate how Rousseau’s philosophy cannot be reduced to either a foundationalist or anti-foundationalist logic but could be interpreted as post-foundationalist.14 His classification as an anti-foundationalist largely comes from his critique of the idea of natural law advocated by his predecessors:15 the belief in a universal law which is set in nature and constantly true.16 While Rousseau’s political thinking is useful for refuting those foundationalist theories, both early and modern, which assume that society is ‘grounded on principles that are undeniable and immune to revision and located outside society and politics’,17 he does not, we argue, postulate the complete absence of foundations, as the label ‘anti-foundationalist’ implies. If he rejected foundations completely, The Social Contract’s inquiry into the principles which could found ‘a safe and legitimate rule of administration’ would become irrelevant (SC, 181/351). Rousseau, we argue, offers a more nuanced critique of foundations which asserts the impossibility of final and objective social grounds as the condition of our endless attempts to ground society in plural and open ways. This reading of Rousseau aligns him with today’s post-foundationalists (Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau) who also emphasize the necessary contingency of any social grounding. For post-foundationalists, that contingency does not eliminate the question of social foundations but makes it all the more important, since it

20


suggests how no grounding of society can be impartial and indisputable. This observation provides an important starting-point for understanding Rousseau’s insistence on the radical uncertainty of nature as society’s foundation and for critiquing those readings of Rousseau which despair of that uncertainty. We find an anti-foundationalist tendency in Vaughan’s and Strauss’s readings of Rousseau. Rousseau, Vaughan rightly maintains, ‘is under no (. . .) illusion’ of natural laws which are actually present and binding. He then less accurately advances that Rousseau ‘sweeps away the idea of natural Law, root and branch’.18 Rousseau does not simply negate the idea of natural law since its negation, as we shall see, would end up affirming it: a critique of something completely inexistent would be redundant. Rather he weakens its ontological status as society’s absolute ground, redefining it as an absent presence haunting all attempts to make legitimate positive laws. Strauss understands Rousseau’s alleged anti-foundationalism more negatively than Vaughan. For Strauss, the importance Rousseau accords to history and culture in shaping the self and society causes a moral dilemma: the notion of a perpetually changing being necessarily precludes a philosophy of ‘the good’ which is eternal and true.19 Consequently, Rousseau, to his mind, only proposes principles of political right which protect individuals against one another without supplying a positive ethos for a harmonious community. Rousseau’s recognition of the absence of nature contributes to the crisis of modernity which, claims Strauss, lies in the death of the universal standards of right and wrong. Civilization, in Rousseau, marks the definitive loss of nature and, as a result, any objective foundation for the moral good.20 That loss prompts Strauss to reduce Rousseau’s idea of justice to a matter of human agreement. Such a reduction categorizes Rousseau as a relativist or more detrimentally as an ethical nihilist for whom justice depends entirely on the general will’s conventions. If this were the case, the content of justice ‘may include anything the will of the people adds up to, whether that be respect for liberty and equality or principles of tyranny and genocide’.21 The absence of objectivity does not render Rousseau’s political theory nihilistic. That absence, we argue, defines a legitimate regime as one which admits its openness to questioning and contestation as opposed to the illegitimacy of a totalitarian regime which claims total order and mastery. In this light, Rousseau’s political theory would reject the absolutism of tyranny and genocide as wholly unjust. We become responsible for our community because we can never know definitely if its current organization is ultimately legitimate. Consequently, we have to scrutinize and modify laws


21

regularly in the pursuit of justice. The almost contentless character of justice – its irreducibility to any predefined set of laws and norms – indicates the permanent susceptibility of any legislative system to improvement and reformulation.22 Rousseau’s critique of natural law is more subtle than an attack on the idea of foundations generally. If Rousseau’s thinking simply negated his predecessors’ theories, then he would not alter the terms of the debate: either natural law would exist as a grounding principle or it would not. A purely oppositional stance would define earlier theories as the positive side of the debate of which his theory would constitute the negative. Rather his critique subverts the basic premises of natural law philosophy by showing the necessary contingency of any foundation. Our reading thus counters those which assert the presence of definite transcendental standards in Rousseau’s political theory. That assertion, by restricting the radical openness and critical freedom which the lack of objectivity enables, risks realigning Rousseau with his predecessors from whom he carefully differentiates himself. The image of nature does not offer a model to be imitated by the social contract but reveals society’s inherent contingency, its lack of natural justification.23 Rousseau’s thinking, by diverting attention from existing foundations to their conditions of possibility, could be seen, however, to contain a quasi-transcendental dimension. The ‘quasi’ signifies how the grounding act is inseparable from the absent ground and also how it therefore always emerges from within a particular empirical context. ‘There is in the State no fundamental law’, states Rousseau, ‘including the social compact itself’, which the people cannot ‘revoke’ (SC, 273/436). Rousseau recognizes the need for social grounds but denies that they are ontologically fi xed. Society’s foundations have to be constructed but that construction can never be total. If we could establish society fully, then it would be possible to return to the perfect order of nature, thereby eradicating the need for politics and ethics. Rousseau excludes this possibility from the outset (DOI, 51/133).

Denaturalizing Society Rousseau’s critique of natural law reveals the self-defeating character of earlier theories. These theories devised a pre-social state in order to analyse written laws rationally and criticize them when they were unjust. However, their accounts of nature tended to confuse natural and written law to the

22


extent that the latter appeared so ‘natural’ that it was beyond criticism. They projected back into the conception of ‘nature’ a highly developed, fully socialized form of humanity, ‘a moral being (. . .) intelligent, free, and considered in his relations to other beings’ (DOI, 45–46/124). Rousseau’s critique unsettles the binary opposition of nature and society assumed by these theories. The articulation of nature – which connotes spontaneity and universality – with the law – which involves conscious formulation and agreement – becomes incoherent. We cannot conceive natural law without recurring to social precepts which automatically remove it from nature: It is impossible to comprehend the law of nature, and consequently obey it, without being a very subtle casuist and a profound metaphysician. All of which is to say that man must have employed in nature, a capacity which is acquired only with great difficulty, and by very few persons, even in a state of society. (DOI, 46/125) Their ideas of natural law are problematic, being ‘derived from kinds of knowledge, which men do not possess naturally, and from advantages of which they cannot have any idea until they have already departed from that state’ (DOI, 46/125). Rousseau undermines his predecessors’ attempt to find the grounding principle of society from outside society itself in nature: any concept of natural law is always-already traced through with the conventions, norms and values which it supposedly precedes and founds. Social foundations cannot completely transcend society and are therefore always historically constructed. The foundation and what it founds refuse chronological schematization; they mutually presuppose one another. We reflect on society’s grounding law only once its absence appears through the conflicts caused by human interaction: ‘notions of natural law, which it would be more appropriate to call the law of reason, only develop when the earlier development of the passions are making all its precepts powerless’. The idea of ‘a social treaty dictated by nature’ is a ‘mere fantasy’, for its precepts ‘are always unknown or impracticable’ (GM, 171–172/284). It is precisely the lack of a natural and irrefutable basis for society which inaugurates our endless attempts to ground society as a whole. The ‘fantasy’ of a law which is eternally true does not simply vanish but becomes the imaginary horizon of any system of legislation. The incoherence of natural law as a concept leads Rousseau to replace it with two pre-reflexive principles: self-love (amour de soi) or the drive to self-preservation, and pity – whose natural correlate designates our innate reluct ance to harm others unless they endanger our lives. These


23

harmonious principles do not predetermine our social condition, as the violence of human history, in the Discourse, demonstrates. Natural man, as a purely physical being, follows these principles instinctively. Self-love preserves the individual, while pity, restraining the potential aggression of self-love, preserves the entire species. However, the equilibrium between our needs and nature’s ability to satisfy them excludes conflict. That equilibrium creates a symbiosis between man and nature, eliminating the difference necessary for reflection. So the principles of pity and selfpreservation are not laws which we consciously obey but instincts. Natural pity does not involve identification with another’s suffering, merely working to prevent conflict. Our non-differentiation from nature precludes identification with others, since any identificatory act entails comparison. Once in society, our relation with ourselves and the world, as we shall see, becomes forever mediated by language. That mediation stops these principles from operating spontaneously. As social beings, we act on reason not instinct. Natural justice thereby becomes political justice. Securing our safe and legitimate coexistence – the impetus behind the instincts of selfpreservation and pity – requires us to invent laws and institutions. In the absence of any pre-established guidelines or transcendental principles, it falls to society to construct itself, to ground its own grounds. In the shift to civilization, justice has changed in its source but not in its goal: it still regards the common good but is now enacted only through endless questioning and critical reflection.24 Justice thereby loses any definite content. The inconceivability of natural law as an empirical reality allows for our socialization. If we had an ‘innate’ or natural sense of law, political laws and institutions would become superfluous (GM, 173/286). The impossibility of returning to nature, Froese observes, ‘makes morality possible, since we have to reintegrate ourselves into our existing environment. Each time we do this we create new tensions which must be resolved, and so this process of integration is an ongoing one. Rousseau’s idealism depends on the impossibility of its fulfilment’.25 The lack of objective standards does not undermine morality and politics, as Strauss implies, but rather inaugurates it. Because of that lack, we have to decide how to devise and implement laws which foster our safe and free coexistence; we have to reconstruct the pre-reflexive natural principles politically. That process, as The Social Contract shows, proves complex: the translation of those principles into laws and institutions is not beyond question, involving constant renegotiation in response to unforeseeable events. Natural law, in Rousseau’s thinking, represents society’s absent ground which each attempt at grounding society seeks but ultimately fails to

24


establish. While there can be no ultimate principle of social grounding, the lack of such a principle supplies the quasi-transcendental condition of empirical foundational acts. If that lack were not conceived in a quasitranscendental way, the possibility of a natural society would persevere, thereby contradicting Rousseau’s central thesis that societies should be based on laws and agreements chosen by the general will.26 Rousseau’s critique of natural law thus explores what an essential definition of foundations excludes and what a contingent one enables. It reframes the question of society’s ground in terms of conditions of possibility rather than what that ground comprises. Earlier depictions of our natural state, Rousseau maintains, were not radically different enough from society to provide critical comparison. They reinforced the prevailing status quo, by making empirical reality reflect some deeper fixed level of human essence. Natural law theories tended to collapse civilization and nature into one, thus foreclosing the political critique that they sought to generate. By importing into nature social faculties and institutions, they represented a state of pre-political independence to demonstrate the benefits of unrestricted political dependence: The philosophers who have inquired into the foundations of society, have all felt the necessity of going back to a state of nature; but not one of them has got there. Some of them have not hesitated to ascribe to man, in such a state, the idea of just and unjust, without troubling themselves to show that he must be possessed of such an idea, or that it could be of any use to him. Others have spoken of natural right of every man to keep what belongs to him, without explaining what they meant by ‘belongs’. Others again, beginning by giving the strong authority over the weak, proceeded directly to the birth of government, without regard to the time that must have elapsed before the meaning of the words ‘authority’ and ‘government’ could have existed among men. Every one of them, in short, constantly dwelling on wants, avidity, oppression, desires, and pride, has transferred to the state of nature ideas which were acquired in society; so that speaking of the savage, they described the social man. It has not even entered the heads of most writers to doubt whether the state of nature ever existed. (DOI, 50/132) For Rousseau, his predecessors accept as self-evident the meanings on which civilization is built. Rousseau’s analysis aims to interrogate those meanings, to reveal their openness to redefinition. That analysis has an ontological quality: it is not limited to studying social phenomena within


25

their given context but studies how those phenomena came to exist, questioning whether they needed to exist at all.27 That quality takes his analysis beyond existing social reality towards the uncertainty of its institution. By asking how society got founded rather than what its foundations are, it does not take society for granted but shows how the question of its institution can never be fully resolved by specific political practices and norms. His inquiry into the origin of civilization resists the historical and political closure of previous theories. If society’s oppression and corruption found their cause in human nature, we would have to accept them as irremediable. Those theories therefore reinforced rather than criticized given reality. The absence of social phenomena in Rousseau’s nature highlights their historical and malleable identity. To investigate society’s establishment entails examining the meanings on which it is based. As we shall see, one of the main assumptions of Rousseau’s political theory is that social objects acquire meaning only through language. Meaning, for Rousseau, is not naturally given, coming from words and their relations with other words not from objects in the outside world. Rousseau’s analysis of man’s social development in the Discourse therefore explores how human existence has come to be organized around such concepts as government, authority, strong, weak, just and unjust and how the meaning of those concepts have been fi xed in certain ways. Rousseau’s metaphor of nature, through its ‘ungrounding’ of society, unsettles those meanings, exposing them to reinterpretation. The instability of the social realm surfaces in the transition from nature to civilization which produces ‘a multitude of relationships without measure, without rule, and without consistency. Men are continually deforming and changing them, and for every one who tries to fi x them there are a hundred working to destroy them’ (GM, 169–170/282). Our social insertion exposes us to an excess which indicates society’s lack of objectivity. Recognition of that excess subtends our attempts to regulate and contain it through laws and conventions. As The Social Contract underlines, we have to construct associations which unite us in the common effort to defend our freedom and equality while recognizing their fragility – being grounded on an absence – which requires their constant renewal and protection. Rousseau’s understanding of society as fundamentally indeterminate prefigures Laclau’s and Mouffe’s conception of it as possessing no ‘underlying principle fi xing’ its configuration.28 Rousseau and these modern theorists highlight the social sphere’s inherent openness. By depriving society of any natural justification, Rousseau’s image of nature ‘reactivates’ the uncertain foundations of civilization’s ‘sedimented’ structures

26


and organizations.29 For Laclau and Mouffe, the process of reactivation reveals the contingency of any institution and sedimentation describes the reverse process by which that contingency becomes forgotten so that the institution appears necessary and natural. The Discourse, by illustrating how corruption and inequality result from bad socialization rather than nature itself, produces a ‘reactivating’ effect, revealing society’s ultimately ungrounded character. Let us recapitulate. The negativity of nature – its subtraction of any social content – emphasizes its radical difference from society. That negativity does not signify nothingness, but rather the negation of determinacy: society, without any final and total ground, can never be fully determined, remaining always available to reconfiguration. Rousseau criticizes previous philosophers for not looking beyond the given in order to reactivate the political moment of social construction. While their theories of nature naturalized society, Rousseau’s theory ‘de-naturalises’ it. Nature, despite its fictional quality, is necessary for understanding the present moment as a mere possibility rather than as an inexorable outcome.

Society as a Discursive Construct Without a natural foundation, Rousseau regards social phenomena as discursively produced: a basic presupposition of poststructuralist political theory. The identity of objects comes from their definition in a particular discourse and is not therefore predetermined. Rousseau’s understanding of social formation as contractual emphasizes his discursive conception of society. Any contract requires the consent of those involved, leading Rousseau to reflect on the device used to elicit that consent: language. The contract’s rules, laws and institutions need language for their formulation and also to persuade us to agree to them. Rousseau makes language central in determining our behaviour and identity, concluding that it is so inextricably linked to society’s establishment that we never know whether language is a social institution or whether society itself is a linguistic construct: ‘I leave it to anyone who will undertake it, the discussion of the difficult problem: which was more necessary, the existence of society to the invention of language, or the invention of language to the establishment of society’ (DOI, 70/151). For Rousseau, the construction of what we share in common – the building of society – depends on language because ‘general ideas cannot be introduced into the mind without the assistance of words, nor can


27

understanding seize them except by means of propositions’ (DOI, 68/149). The meanings of a language, being socially rather than naturally based, result from ‘common consent’ (DOI, 65/147).30 The consensual character of meaning underlines its political dimension, its permanent openness to reformulation. An object’s agreed signification informs how we conceive and act on it; it defines what we accept as reality. Names do not reflect pre-given features of an object but actually produce that object as a meaningful phenomenon, supplying its identity and unity.31 The particular ideas attached to the names of ‘man’, ‘the people’, ‘community’, we demonstrate, derive from their representation within political discourses. Redefining those objects is crucial for reconstructing society in more egalitarian and open ways. For Wokler, the centrality of language for society’s institution distinguishes Rousseau’s work from that of Marx whose thinking the Discourse otherwise prefigures.32 What differentiates Rousseau from Marx, associates him more closely with Laclau’s and Mouffe’s postMarxism. They also stress how identities are not essential but discursive, based on differences. Society’s discursivity means that it can always be redefined by different discourses. While they foreground the instability of meaning, that instability does not presuppose a state of undefined chaos. The meanings supporting social identities and relations need to become temporarily fi xed to build social unity, and it is this fi xing process which provides the task of politics. We shall use Laclau’s and Mouffe’s concept of discourse to show the affirmative aspect of Rousseau’s understanding of society as symbolically constructed and thereby to correct de Man’s pessimistic interpretation of it.33

De Man’s Political Pessimism: The Ambiguity of Language De Man shows how Rousseau’s overt fictionalization of nature as the origin of society does not, as Althusser assumes, detract from the political importance of his thought.34 What links the metaphorical first part of the Discourse to the ‘conceptual’ account of history of the second is the fact that society is founded on the metaphorical character of language. For Rousseau, de Man maintains, language is self-referential: it does not refer to actual objects in the world but to words or ideas.35 The meanings which organize our sense of reality can therefore never be taken literally, providing us with a concept of an object rather than the object itself. De Man interprets this lack of literalism as undermining informed political and ethical judgement because it enables deceit and corruption. Society’s

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metaphorical basis, he argues, allows us to instate unjust political institutions which create the illusion of equality within inequality and sameness within difference. However, he ignores how it equally obliges us to critique those institutions because, without objectivity, their legitimacy remains forever in question. Like Strauss, de Man avers the absence of irrefutable foundations in Rousseau’s thinking, representing him as an anti-foundationalist. For both theorists, that absence undermines political responsibility. De Man’s analysis thus fails to see how the lack of definite foundations actually produces politics and ethics. In this way, despite its emphasis on contingency and ambiguity, his interpretation appears conservative, leaving intact the foundationalist quest for neutral and objective social grounds as the positive goal of politics. De Man analyses society’s symbolic character through Rousseau’s allegory of the naming of man in the Essay on the origin of languages (Essay hereafter) (EOL, 12–13/381–382). Rousseau imagines how the name ‘man’ arises. On first encountering other men, primitive man’s solitary existence causes him to fear them, prompting him to denominate them as ‘giants’. That denomination is not based on man’s outward appearance but on the primitive’s inward feeling of distrust at meeting a stranger. Fear makes him misperceive others as stronger and larger than himself despite their physical similarity. The name ‘giant’ does not refer to the objectivity of size, but to a subjective feeling based on others’ hypothetical danger. This hypothesis can never be empirically proven or disproven, permanently remaining a mere possibility. The term ‘giant’ is a metaphor, connecting the external aspect of size to the internal emotion of fear. That term might come from error but it is not a lie; other men are not bigger but the primitive is fearful. ‘The blindness of metaphor’, de Man asserts, lies less in its misrepresentation of objectivity than in its conversion of man’s hypothetical fear into fact or a literal truth.36 This error of taking metaphor for fact is necessary, de Man argues, for the general functioning of language, allowing meaning to appear literal despite its fictional basis. De Man rightly concludes that Rousseau does not object to meaning’s metaphoricity but to the total denial of it. As we have just seen, Rousseau begins his own account of history by setting aside facts to highlight society’s contingency. Regarding the term ‘giant’, the conversion of possibility into fact seems innocuous: man gains or loses very little from the invention of this term. It becomes more sinister when this poetic term, based on affect, is replaced by the abstraction of ‘man’, based on quantitative comparison. Over time, the primitive observes his physical likeness to others, leading him to designate


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them with the equalizing term ‘man’. This term, by producing the illusion of identity, domesticates his initial fear coming from a sense of difference. By falsely privileging identity over difference, it eventually facilitates political corruption by making possible the establishment of laws and institutions which claim to safeguard the equal rights of everyone while only protecting the rights of a few. Throughout the second part of the Discourse, we witness man exploiting language’s ambiguity – its representational or non-literal quality – in order to persuade others to consent to unfair political institutions.37 The blindness of metaphor allows for deceit and manipulation, as fact and fiction become interwoven. For de Man, this undecidability causes ethical and political paralysis, for we can never take any claim or promise literally and therefore the consequences of any decision remain always undecided. By contrast, we argue, it actually inaugurates ethical and political responsibility. While de Man stresses how any social organization is contingent, he overlooks the questioning and redefinition which that contingency enables. Social organizations are not purely contingent, which would mean that any mode of organization would do even an authoritarian one. Rather they are necessarily contingent: they remain constitutively incomplete and that incompleteness enjoins us to reflect on the legitimacy of our social bonds, and revise them accordingly, in response to events which reveal the restrictions of the present. Politics, for Rousseau, is not about providing uncontroversial criteria for social organizations but in acknowledging the uncertainty of all criteria and the need for constant scrutiny and critique. This interpretation of Rousseau refutes those readings which have sought to identify him as the father of twentieth-century totalitarianism.38 Totalitarian regimes present themselves as the truth of society, thereby denying the scope for contestation and transformation which Rousseau’s theory affirms. The absence of objectivity does not simply produce error and deception but also the responsibility to think critically about the decisions we make precisely because there are no guarantees. This paradox reminds us that, for Rousseau, the most effective political remedies are homeopathic, that is, internal to the disease being cured: ‘we should (. . .) try to extract from the evil itself the remedy which can cure it’ (GM, 176/288). Starobinski describes this as ‘the fundamental insight’ of Rousseau’s political philosophy.39 Society’s metaphorical basis excludes, on the one side, the certainty of legitimacy, and, on the other, includes the ongoing obligation to question and change any regime in the defence of liberty and equality; it provides the condition of our political agency.

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The Political Effects of Discourse Laclau and Mouffe also affirm this positive dimension of a discursive conception of the social.40 They do not reduce discourse simply to language but ascribe to it, following Wittgenstein, a ‘material’ dimension.41 The activity of building a house, for instance, combines linguistic communication and physical cooperation and therefore produces a language game. Likewise, the social contract encompasses both the enunciation of agreements, laws and obligations and also the citizens’ active and willing participation. In society, we never encounter objects in the brute fact of their existence: they are always integrated into a discourse. For example, a plot of land can be at once someone’s property, an area of recreation, or an ecosystem. In each case, it is not the land’s physical existence which changes but its defining context. Objects, to become social, need to be meaningful and their meaning depends on the discourse representing them. From a neoliberal perspective, the land might symbolize the owner’s right to invest in and develop it for private gain, whereas from an ecological perspective, it might represent an important natural habitat which requires protection. The land’s meaning becomes politically constructed in ways which suggest different forms of action such as commercial projects or resistance to such projects through conservation campaigns. The meaning which prevails will supply the object’s social determination. A discourse is not therefore purely linguistic but ‘an articulatory practice which constitutes and organises social relations’.42 Their theory of discourse, highlighting the link between thought and action, demonstrates how language is not an isolated region within society, but is coextensive with it: Rousseau’s Discourse already recognizes this. Language, for Rousseau, is essential for socio-political development because it ‘represents the movement from the particular to the general’.43 General ideas have ‘no models of them to be found in nature’ (DOI, 69/150), entering the mind only ‘with the aid of language’ (DOI, 68/149). Rousseau’s discussion of general ideas indicates their lack of concrete reality; it highlights the absence underlying them. For example, if we attempt to imagine ‘a tree in general’, we ‘never attain to (our) end’: we can imagine only a particular tree which can never ‘literally’ or fully represent the genus: ‘Every general idea is purely intellectual; if the imagination meddles with it ever so little, the idea immediately becomes particular’ (DOI, 68/150). The very being of ‘tree’ possesses no direct mode of representation; it partially appears only in the form of particular representations. General ideas thus lack essential unity, providing the names under which


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we build relations between disconnected elements. Rousseau’s recognition of the lack underlying symbolization has important consequences for his political theory. Politics, as The Social Contract underlines, concerns primarily the general but, as his theory of language demonstrates, the general always eludes full objectification. This generalizing process takes us beyond the natural to the moral realm. Language is ‘both the precondition and result of abstraction’.44 Rousseau’s discussion of the general’s ‘purely intellectual nature’ highlights the tension in his political thought between the abstract idea of a community based on universal freedom and equality and its particular and therefore always incomplete realization. This tension, as we shall see in Part 2, necessitates the constant willing of the general will. Politics begins, for Rousseau, when we seek to generalize our particular wills through a common association based on mutual rights and obligations. What we understand as general does not pre-exist its political institution: it has to be constructed. That construction, being founded on a void, will only ever be partial and thus modifiable. Rousseau’s theory of language indicates the failure inscribed in any attempt to supply a totalizing definition of society. As we shall explore in Chapter 5, Rousseau refutes Diderot’s notion of a general human society. Any understanding of that society is always rooted in the particular norms and values of the context in which it was conceived and therefore can never claim full generality. The universal, because of its abstraction, does not ground the particular but actually depends on it for its representation.

The Importance of Naming Rousseau’s image of nature shows how society, as a general ideal, has no necessary content or foundation. What grounds society remains, in Lefort’s words, an ‘enigma’ which no particular set of principles or practices can unravel.45 There is no external and objective point from which we could survey society as a totality. Politics, as the interpretation and management of the general, becomes very complex in the light of Rousseau’s linguistic theory: its object eludes complete representation. Laclau draws attention to this political ambiguity, maintaining that society gets founded on impossible objects of discourse and is therefore always precarious and susceptible to change.46 As what is common to us lacks any essential identity, we can think about it only with reference to words such as ‘community’, ‘society’, ‘the nation’, ‘the people’ which represent the whole in its absence: ‘Purely

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abstract beings (. . .) are only conceivable by the help of language’ (DOI, 68/150). Laclau calls these words empty signifiers – a concept he adapts from Lévi-Strauss.47 Empty signifiers are ‘metaphors with no corresponding facts’ and yet those metaphors give unity to the social field by expressing its missing totality.48 Rousseau’s metaphor of nature functions like an empty signifier: its negativity or emptying process reveals society’s absent plenitude, thereby creating a space in which we can begin to reimagine its terms of legitimacy. Its clearing of social grounds repoliticizes ‘society’, highlighting the unnecessary and unnatural character of the inequality and oppression which have come to define it. By symbolizing the whole, empty signifiers orient political activity, bringing together divergent forces in the attempt to fix the meaning of those signifiers and build society accordingly. They promise fullness, by ‘accounting for a common identification without (yet) a common identity’.49 For example, Chapter 7 examines how, in The Social Contract, the name of the ‘people’, authorizing the pact of a not yet instituted sovereign community, names a lack. The empty signifier ‘the people’ ‘relates the whole to the whole’ by signifying ‘the lack of any general association’ which the multitude must ‘make up for’ by devising, and consenting to, the social contract (GM, 176/288). So the Discourse, on the one hand, recognizes the ‘common consent’ necessary to fi x the unstable meanings of social phenomena and construct society, and, on the other, through that recognition, destabilizes their meaning so that they can acquire new acceptations. This tension appears in the opening scene of the Second Part of the Discourse where man uses language deceptively to found the fiction of property. Rousseau underlines the fictional origins of this founding moment through a speech act: ‘The true founder of civil society was the first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying, “This is mine”, and came across people simple enough to believe him’ (DOI, 84/164). 50 The use of prosopopoeia in this scene and elsewhere to condense capital moments of historical change evidences society’s discursive basis. It disrupts the self-evident appearance of property, by reactivating its arbitrary moment of institution. The concept of property has no objective reality, since ‘the earth belongs to no one’ (DOI, 84/164). The invention of that concept, despite its fictional roots, engenders a whole series of social relations and organizations which give meaning to, and structure, civil society. It subtends the birth of moral inequality and its divisive social order. ‘By defining territory as one’s own, one is simultaneously denying the claims of others to it. “This


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is mine” also means “This is not yours” ’.51 Without the abstract notions of ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ – notions unknown to the isolated savage – civil institutions such as moral love – the pinning of desire on one person to the exclusion of others – family settlements, the division of labour, the specious contract, the roles of master/servant could not evolve. Rousseau’s exposure of property’s symbolic character proves central for refuting the idea that social inequality is natural to man: I hear it constantly repeated that, in such a state [nature], the strong would oppress the weak; but what is here meant by oppression? Some, it is said, would violently domineer over others, who groan under a servile submission to their caprices. This is indeed what I observe to be the case among us but I do not see how it can be inferred of men in a state of nature, who could not easily be brought to see what we mean by dominion and servitude. One man, it is true, might seize the fruits which another had gathered, the game he had killed, or the cave he had chosen for shelter; but how would he be able to exact obedience, and what ties of dependence could there be among men without possessions? (DOI, 81/161) As there are no abstract concepts such as ‘possession’ in nature, there can be no oppressive, hierarchical structures either. We understand basics such as food and shelter as our ‘belongings’ only after distinguishing ourselves from others. Meaning is not therefore predetermined, being always retroactively produced. Its retroactive character leaves it forever unstable, as the constant feuding over property, in the Second Part of the Discourse, suggests. We eventually apply the idea of possession, which becomes so deeply entrenched in our psyche that we forget its symbolic value, to others over whom we have ‘no natural authority’. ‘Property’, whose meaning is undetermined, need not necessarily cause oppression and exploitation: it could equally signify self-ownership – a notion directly opposed to enslavement. The Discourse, by ‘de-instituting’ property, facilitates its redefinition in The Social Contract. The Social Contract aims to redefine it so that it no longer signifies power over others through the accumulation of wealth but rather the equal right to self-ownership and the cooperation which preserving that right entails. That redefinition underlies the contract’s emphasis on each citizen’s responsibility to protect himself and his community from despotism. The Discourse, by uncovering the metaphorical derivation of institutions, urges us to think critically about the meanings we take for granted.

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Redefining those meanings could transform society morally and politically, since, as Wokler asserts, for Rousseau: It was from the ways in which we ascribe sense and especially attribute moral significance to our behaviour and the behaviour of others that society was constructed, and from the linguistic base of the specification of terms stemmed the moral emblems of specialisation of roles, and ultimately the fixation of social man in an abstract world of his own making.52 If the meanings we attribute to ourselves and our environment determine our understanding of reality, the reformulation of those meanings forms an essential part of reassessing that understanding. What Žižek calls ‘the radical contingency of naming’ makes that reformulation possible. As Rousseau’s accounts of the naming of ‘man’ and ‘property’ illustrate, an object’s identity is produced retrospectively by the act of its denomination. The names ‘man’ and ‘property’ do not designate permanent, objective features of pre-existent objects, but actually bring those objects into consciousness. For Žižek, we never fully conceptualize objects, because their identity depends on the contingent moment of their naming which defines their identity as a lack.53 This understanding of names, as just ‘conventional signs’ (DOI, 67/148), liberates them, ‘from [their] univocal conceptual attachments’, opening them to varying content through time.54 The gap between the name and its content enables the Discourse’s redefinition of man and society. Whereas in his predecessors’ accounts, ‘man’ was ‘naturally’ attached to inequality, selfishness, greed, and conflict, Rousseau’s image of nature detaches it from those ideas to redefine it in terms of equality, freedom and peaceful independence. As the meanings of objects, for Rousseau, come from ‘common consent’, the conceptual change in their description must coincide with a change in public perception. The success of any ‘redescription’ entails persuading ‘people that a given evaluative term applies in circumstances in which they may never have thought of applying it’; it requires them ‘to employ the given term in the appraisal of social and political life’.55 Public opinion, as Rousseau’s treatise on the theatre indicates, connotes both the realm of received ideas and prejudices and also a force which can transform the collective ethos (LA, 22/21).56 The Discourse appeals to public opinion in its dynamic mode. Reaching and inflecting that opinion through discourse forms an essential component, for Rousseau, of a healthy government’s life (EOL, 72–74//428–429).


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Rousseau discusses how in ancient democracies discourse played an affirmative role in shaping and representing public needs and desires. That discussion questions de Man’s narrow focus on the negative political consequences of a discursive understanding of society. In those democracies, ‘persuasion’ fulfilled the role of ‘public force’. The government had to address its people eloquently to inform its consciousness and persuade it of its right to govern. In an authoritarian regime, however, ‘public force’ replaces ‘persuasion’, as the people exists at the whim of its ruler. ‘Public discourse’ is reduced here to ‘sermons’ (EOL, 72/428). The powerful use language merely to issue orders not to raise popular awareness. Abizadeh believes that Rousseau’s ideal political language is a ‘transparent’ one which disavows its metaphorical quality.57 I disagree with this conclusion: it is precisely an authoritarian political discourse which, argues Rousseau, ‘needs neither art nor metaphor’. It presents itself as unquestionable and thus transparent, speaking to citizens through commands displayed ‘on placards on street corners or by soldiers in their homes’. As ‘no longer anything is changed except by arms and cash’, the constitutively unfixed quality of meaning is denied (EOL, 72/428). The government therefore treats its regime as an indisputable fact. By contrast, democracies, concerned with evolving popular needs and demands, exploit language’s generative and metaphorical force to depict social reality in ways which both sensitize citizens to change and also register, and represent back to, them the change in their self-understanding. Indeed, the legislator of The Social Contract uses discourse to constitute a ‘people’ from ‘a blind multitude’. His discourse has to express ‘objects’ which are too ‘general’ and ‘remote’ to ‘translate’ easily into ‘popular language’ in order to persuade the multitude to identify themselves as a democratic people before their democratic identity has been established (SC, 215–216/383). His discourse cannot depict reality ‘transparently’, as it represents a transformation which is not yet actual.58 The Discourse also aims to transform opinion radically, addressing humanity in its entirety in the hope of eradicating ‘ancient errors and inveterate prejudices’, to show ‘how far even the natural inequalities of mankind are from having that reality and influence which modern writers suppose’ and ‘how much greatly the inequalities of mankind must be increased by the inequalities of social institutions’ (DOI, 80/161). As the ‘purely collective idea’ ‘humankind’ signifies no ‘real union among the individuals which constitute it’, it can always be redescribed in more open and egalitarian ways (GM, 171/283). ‘Humankind’, as an empty signifier, can act as the name under which relations can be imagined between beings where there were none, under which new identities and perspectives can

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be acknowledged as equal. This process of renaming involves ‘setting aside all the facts’ – the subtraction of the given – to enable the advent of the new. Rousseau’s image of nature performs this function.

Conclusion The impossibility of returning to the total harmony and order of nature makes possible our empirical attempts to found society in plural and diverse ways. If we could restore nature, we would regress to its closed universe which reproduces itself in a repetitive and unreflective manner and, as a result, the issue of how to institute and organize society would vanish.59 Natural law, imagined as the ultimate social ground, does not, however, disappear without a trace in Rousseau’s thinking but remains present in its absence. Its absent presence reveals society’s missing fullness, opening the gap between what is and what could be. It thus calls on us to think about ways of bridging that gap. The negativity of nature supplies the affirmative condition of our freedom to reject the present moment and its determination of social truth and reconstruct it in line with current aspirations and demands. As Laclau asserts, ‘the impossibility of universal ground does not eliminate its need. It just transforms the ground into an empty place that can be filled in a variety of ways (the strategies of this filling is what politics is about)’.60 Society, stripped of necessary content, can always be imagined and arranged in ways which go beyond given reality. The absence of nature underlies Rousseau’s discursive conception of the social: our understanding of reality depends on the meanings we attribute to social phenomena and those meanings are based on common consent rather than any predefined essence. While society’s symbolic basis excludes objectivity and produces the risk of deceit and manipulation, it also creates the obligation to critique and modify the discourses through which we construct the social because we can never literally know what society is and whether its current order is totally legitimate. This ambiguity does not cause a state of paralysis or an ethos of ‘anything goes’: the lack of any final and definite foundation defines a legitimate state as one which avows its own contingency, its own susceptibility to contestation and revision. Awareness of that ambiguity entails awareness of the impossibility of the totalitarian dream of full social determinacy and consequently of the continual effort required to (re)produce society. Rousseau’s image of nature, by showing that there is nothing inevitable about our current situation, urges us to take responsibility for the fact that ‘we ourselves are the exclusive creators of the world’ and it therefore falls to us to improve that world.61

Chapter 2

Perfectible Man as the Subject of Lack

This chapter analyses how Rousseau refutes an ontologically fixed conception of humanity: we are determined by our indeterminacy, our openness to change. Rousseau’s notion of pre-social man surpasses his predecessors’ theories in that it is non-teleological: it opposes the idea that there is a design or purpose in the natural phenomenon of man, a finality whereby he was always going to rise above other animals to a completed humanization in society. Human faculties like imagination and perfectibility are not actualized in natural man and ‘could never develop of themselves, but must require the fortuitous concurrence of many foreign causes that might never arise, and without which (man) would have remained forever in his primitive conditions’ (DOI, 82/162). This important postulate explains Rousseau’s conception of nature as the radical negation of the social: to say that there is no great design that predestined man to achieve civilization means that man and society have no natural essence and are thus permanently open to reconfiguration. Society and man therefore coincide in their lack of nature. That lack, we argue, conditions our freedom as political actors to participate in the building of social reality. The ‘foreign causes’ necessary to trigger human development indicate the constitutive role of otherness and difference for socialization. Without natural sociability, we acquire a social identity only by identifying with the outside. Because we are fundamentally indeterminate, that act of identification never produces a complete identity, it always partially fails. That failure, like the impossibility of a total social foundation, enables us to redefine ourselves as we adapt to change. Natural man’s full presence and total independence represents the absent fullness of social man. He does not however provide the model on which to mould ourselves: he exists as an instinctual animal-like creature. Rather his depiction serves to highlight our defining perfectibility which leaves us always free to change. Our lack of natural sociability means that, on the one hand, political institutions play an important role in shaping our identity and, on the other, that they never fully determine us because of our constitutive lack.

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Perfectibility opens a permanent gap between man and society in which he can challenge and revise any regime and its description of reality. As we are fundamentally asocial, the Discourse focuses on the conditions of possibility for socialization to occur rather than on specific social identities. Our purely physical and isolated existence in nature prevents any self-awareness: self-awareness requires comparison with others. Rousseau’s political theory therefore understands identity as relational: an identity is defined by its difference from other identities. Constituted on difference, the human subject is fundamentally split. That split provides the condition of our insertion into history. So any identity we assume represents an identification rather than some deeper essence. Rousseau’s analysis of our socialization shares affinity with Lacan’s theory of the subject of lack. Laclau and Žižek derive their understanding of the subject as the site of political decision from Lacan’s theory. By emphasizing the unacknowledged similarity between Rousseau’s and Lacan’s conception of subjectivity, we further critique the view that Rousseau’s philosophy targets presence and transparency. Far from seeking to unveil man’s ‘forgotten present’, or to promote ‘a direct connection of mind to mind’, his philosophy stresses the alterity formative of human agency.1 The fact that political practices or regimes, for Rousseau, are not rooted in some immutable human essence defines them as perfectible as the subjects who participate in them. Their perfectibility makes critique and questioning central for a vibrant political community, since the otherness underlying our identity enables us to transform, and be transformed by, the political sphere.

Human Division: ‘Man Studying Man’ What ‘deprives us’, Rousseau argues, of knowing ‘the real foundations of society’ is ‘our ignorance of human nature’. That ignorance ‘casts so much uncertainty and obscurity on the true definition of natural right: for the idea of right, says Burlamaqui, and more particularly that of natural right, are ideas manifestly relative to the nature of man’ (DOI, 45/124).2 As we have seen, Rousseau problematizes the idea that we can ‘deduce’ the ‘first principles’ of the science of state from nature, by demonstrating the difficulty of precisely separating cause and effect. Complete knowledge of human nature therefore proves impossible: first, because of the phenomenon of historical change in humankind and, second, because acquiring that knowledge entails the paradox of man studying ‘Man’. Man can attempt to know himself only by turning himself into an object, by


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considering himself as an other. That division between subject and object, self and other, provides both the condition and limit of knowledge of the human: What is crueler yet is that, since all the advances of the human race continually move it ever further from its primitive state, the more new knowledge we accumulate, the more we deprive ourselves of the means for acquiring the most important knowledge of all. Thus it is, in one sense, by our very study of man that the knowledge of him is put out of our power. (DOI, 43/122–123) We never know ourselves totally, that is, achieve self-presence, because knowledge and identity are conditional on the division or splitting of the self. Self-reflection occurs only once our unmediated natural plenitude has been broken. That break produces a gap in our knowledge, an unconscious sphere. The question of who we really are or what our nature is remains obscure and forever uncertain: ‘Of all the human sciences the most useful and most imperfect appears to me to be that of humankind: and I will venture to say, the single inscription on the Temple of Delphi contained a precept more difficult and more important than is to be found in all the huge volumes that moralists have ever written’ (DOI, 43/123). The self and the social are interwoven in Rousseau: knowing ourselves fully proves unreachable and yet necessary to be able to understand what constitutes society. This paradox suggests, we shall argue, that a legitimate mode of political organization is one which accepts its own uncertainty, its intrinsic perfectibility: a radically democratic mode. Man remains absent from any study of him. Rousseau’s recourse to metaphor in studying humanity in the Discourse responds to this problem. His metaphor of natural man represents his absence in any positive form. To devise that portrait, Rousseau, we have noted, starts from social man as he is ‘today’ and strips him ‘of all supernatural gifts and artificial faculties’ (DOI, 52/134). Natural man can be understood only through what he is not, through his difference from civil man. Just as foundations never completely separate from what they found, natural man is traced through with his social other: he virtually contains the social attributes of perfectibility, imagination, amour propre. Our natural being is present in its absence. Our primordial freedom from any moral or political constraints makes man irreducible to his social context. That irreducibility calls for selfcritical inquiries into the human which do not simply take man’s current identity and values as an eternal truth but acknowledge their historical and

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cultural limitations. Those limitations should incite us to invent innovative ways of studying and representing humanity. Rousseau’s overtly metaphorical account of man stresses its hypothetical, conjectural, and, thus, inherently incomplete character. His discussion of the paradox of man studying ‘Man’ reinforces what we said in Chapter 1 about the discrepancy between the name and its content. ‘The collective idea’ ‘humankind’, which lacks any essential unity, has been articulated throughout history, the Discourse shows, in ways that mask its openness (GM, 171/283). As de Man stresses, the equalizing force of the term ‘man’ underlies the chimerical equality and justice propagated by the rich to secure their interests at the expense of the poor. Rousseau’s exploration of the political ramifications of the historical construction of ‘Man’ answers before the fact Laclau’s and Mouffe’s call for studies of the human to show how ‘Man’ has been produced in modern times, how the human subject [. . .] appears in certain religious discourses, is embodied in juridical practices and is diversely constructed in other spheres. An understanding of this dispersion can help us to grasp the fragility of humanist values themselves, the possibility of their perversion through equivalential articulation with other values, and their restriction to certain categories of the population – the property-owning class, for example, or the male population.3 Conceiving man’s identity as a discursive construct rather than as a pre-given entity does not exclude the necessity of studying humanity, but focuses that study on how human identity gets defined within a particular discourse and what the effects of that definition are on institutions and values. The Discourse bespeaks the authoritarian and reductive way that civil institutions represent us, thereby pressing us to seek new modes of representation. Our basic indeterminacy leaves our identity always vulnerable to being defined through oppressive political programmes and ideologies which negate our universal freedom, by restricting it to certain groups. The Discourse incites us to employ that freedom to redefine ourselves in ways which acknowledge our perfectibility, our openness to redefinition. As our lack of natural sociability prevents us from being totally identical to the regimes with which we identify to acquire a social identity, we can always challenge our representation at the level of the social system. This point makes Rousseau a precursor of Lacan’s theory of subjectivity and its recent elaboration in the political theories of Laclau and Žižek.


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The Subject of Lack Just as Rousseau’s image of natural man refutes the essentialist and closed character of his predecessors’ theories, Lacan vehemently opposes any notion of ‘a subject articulated around a positive essence, which is transparent to itself and fully representable in theoretical discourse’.4 This refutation of the subject as a completely autonomous, undivided being which is identical to itself, does not do away with the idea of the subject altogether. The impossibility of the subject’s achieving full identity conditions his perseverance as a potential site of questioning, redefinition and creative action. Rousseau and Lacan locate man’s essence in his very lack of one. For Rousseau’s conception of humanity, affirms Strong, ‘absence is central. There is literally nothing to humans in the state of nature. The defining quality of the human is not to be defined or fixed’.5 Rousseau’s depiction of our historical emergence bears much comparison with Lacan’s theorization of our emergence as subjects. Our entry into language, they both maintain, coincides with our entry into society. For Rousseau, pre-historical man lives in symbiosis with nature which satiates his every need. That symbiosis excludes the comparison necessary for selfawareness. As his world is immediately present to him, he feels no necessity to symbolize himself and his needs to others. The act of symbolization rests on a feeling of absence. Only once natural calamities have caused a breach in his world, threatening his life and forcing him actively to secure his survival, does he begin to use imagination. Consciousness of death awakens the faculty of imagination which allows for representation, making man aware of his eventual absence in the world, of his incompleteness. Anticipating his possible absence, he also anticipates his potential to become other than he is. That feeling of lack inaugurates human agency. Man tries to fill the gap in his world and retrieve nature’s mythic fullness by inventing signs to represent the world from which he has been severed. We formulate laws, institutions, and governments to substitute nature but those substitutes paradoxically generate further problems and expose other lacunae for which we have continually to compensate. Society can never replace nature, always requiring man’s active and endless participation. Man is therefore implicated in an interminable process of substitution as he tries to recreate his lost plenitude. Likewise, Lacan’s theory of the subject starts with an infant, who, like natural man, is not aware of himself as an individual, living in symbiosis with his mother and the outside.6 His gradual detachment from the mother leaves a remainder, an imaginary sense of completeness that the

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subject, then, strives to (re)attain. The subject endeavours to become whole again by identifying with the images surrounding him in society. Those images tell the subject ‘who he is’, giving him a sense of identity, supposedly fi lling the lack that provides the condition of his subjectivity. Those external images are internalized by the subject as if they already belonged to him, forming the basis of his most intimate self. So identity – which for both Rousseau and Lacan means identification with somebody or something – coincides with alienation. Our identity is therefore fundamentally split. How we understand ourselves, who we think we are, always come from outside, prompting Lacan to talk about ‘the self’s radical excentricity to itself with which man is confronted’.7 In both Lacan and Rousseau, our pre-social wholeness is a fiction that can only be imagined from within the mediate realm of society. The idea of an authentic self just like the idea of an authentic society emerges as mythic – an empty horizon towards which we constantly strive. That myth, as we shall explore in the following chapter, becomes dangerous when we try to realize it as fact, endeavouring to eliminate the difference which confers identity in the first place.

Identity and Difference For Rousseau and Lacan, identity is constituted on difference. Strong centralizes this often neglected dimension of Rousseau’s thought, asserting that ‘our commonality – the stuff of humanity – requires difference and there is no identity that is not that of difference’.8 We begin to perceive ourselves as separate entities after natural disasters have ruptured our oneness with nature, putting our lives in question. The obstacles nature places in our way cause us to measure ourselves against our environment: The way different beings and phenomena impinged on him and on each other must naturally have engendered in man’s mind awareness of certain relationships. Thus the relationships we denote by the terms great, small, strong, weak, swift, slow, fearful, bold, and the like, almost insensibly compared at need, must have at length produced in him a kind of reflection, or rather a mechanical prudence, which would indicate to him the precautions most necessary to his security. (DOI, 85/165) Identity and meaning arise from the comparison, or the building of relations, between objects. Reflection coincides with action. We no longer


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simply react to nature but actively transform it. Our objectification in the permanent changes we make to our environment provides the starting point for self-reflection. By shaping inert matter, we sense our separateness from the objects we fabricate.9 This launches the subject–object continuum that locates the self in relation to the wider whole. The ‘new intelligence’ developed through interaction with nature makes man ‘sensible’ of his superiority over other animals and ‘by looking upon his species as of the highest order, he prepares the way for assuming pre-eminence as an individual’(DOI, 85–86/165). So man grasps himself as an individual only by examining himself as an object, by separating from himself. Rousseau’s account of the individual is not that of an isolated being which is self-contained. The self is always produced through division and differentiation; its formation requires otherness. The Discourse, while indicating the importance of individuation for human development, emphasizes its inherent danger: man, in the second part of the Discourse, comes aggressively to negate the difference and division grounding his individuality, striving to dominate and suppress others as he attempts to attain an image of himself as undivided and whole. The feeling of difference necessary for association can also block association if the individual takes it as a sign of his total disconnection from others, or as a threat to his individual ‘pre-eminence’. Rousseau’s natural man ‘is a thought experiment that strips away all social influences in order to conjure up a condition of complete non-differentiation. Because these creatures are not differentiated from each other, they cannot have anything in common. There is no need to unite with others who are exactly alike’.10 This experiment therefore redefines ‘the common’ as an absence we need to reflect on and compensate through collective endeavour. It reveals otherness as the condition of the need for political association, for exposure to otherness produces both a sense of self and the desire for identification. Without difference, the need for identification would be annulled, and yet its formative dimension means that it can never be overcome to achieve complete identity. Any identity remains inseparable from the otherness on which it is built and is therefore necessarily contingent. The contingency of identity, Laclau maintains, comes from the fact that the conditions of possibility of any identity constitute its limits: we only need to identify with something because we lack an essential identity in the first place.11 Alienation and identity formation coincide for Rousseau. Our socialization entails alienation, as our originary indeterminacy assumes determinate content. The self’s alienated character appears in Rousseau’s account

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of primitive festivals. That account shows how the construction of the self is always externally mediated (DOI, 88–90/168–169).12 With the development of human settlements, neighbouring families assemble to enjoy collective dancing and singing. Through this interaction, we become exposed to the other’s gaze and by looking at, and comparing ourselves with, one another, we become aware of individual differences. The individuating force of that gaze deepens man’s sense of self. Only by having our image reflected in others, can we achieve an imaginary feeling of unity. It is imaginary because we can see ourselves as unified only through another’s perspective. The festival awakens amour propre in man: a transformation of the natural principle of self-love. Whereas self-love is an ‘absolute’ feeling concerned exclusively with our own preservation, amour propre is a relative feeling, designating our capacity for comparison, preference and emulation. Despite the negative repercussions of amour propre depicted in man’s destructive rivalry in society, it has no predetermined moral outcome, providing ‘the vehicle of socialisation, which takes place through the play of recognition, interaction and meaning, at all levels, from politics to love and sexuality’.13 Amour propre is essential for our development because identity is relational: we only identify ourselves as a delimited subject through comparison with others. As the condition of self-consciousness, we cannot overcome otherness to achieve self-presence. ‘As soon as amour propre has developed’, writes Rousseau of the adolescent Emile, ‘the self in its relation to others is always with us, and the youth never observes others without coming back to himself and comparing himself with them’ (E, 246/534). Man takes cognisance of his independence once it has been disrupted by his exposure to alterity, that is, once he has become alienated from it through social interaction. Alienation in the other’s gaze paradoxically allows us to feel that we exist in our own right: ‘the savage lives within himself; the social man, outside himself, lives only in the opinion of others and it is, so to speak, from their judgement alone that he gets the sense of his own existence’ (DOI, 116/193). We become individuals by being divided between self and other. Our sense of self does not inhere entirely within us but emanates from without. The difference constitutive of our identity does not mean that we are enslaved to others for self-understanding, for their identity is equally contingent and does not therefore hold any answers. Rather, we shall argue, our shared lack enables us to shape and be shaped by one another, to decide which identities and discourses to identify with, to take responsibility for how we define ourselves in relation to our community.


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Pity and Difference The affirmative aspect of division for socialization appears in Rousseau’s discussion of pity. That discussion foregrounds the centrality of difference for identification, showing how even the relationship with the self is always mediated. In natural man, pity is nothing more than the refusal of violence and conflict. It does not urge him to succour others because his oneness with the outside makes comparison impossible. Pity becomes humanized once we reflect on our difference from others.14 Our natural unity prevents us from developing the intellectual capacity to distinguish our suffering from that of another person. Without that distinction, we cannot see the necessity of identifying with them, of helping them, as they do not yet exist as separate entities in our eyes. Awareness of difference generates a longing for union: ‘We develop social feeling as we become enlightened. Although pity is native to the human heart, it would remain eternally dormant unless it were activated by imagination’ (EOL, 32/395). Imagination is awakened by absence: we imagine something only because it is not present to us. Imagination’s importance for pity implies that our experience of the other is not only alien to us but also the experience of the self. The condition of self-reflection is the becoming other of the self. Pity relies on our ability to objectify ourselves, to imagine ourselves simultaneously as self and other. It therefore depends on division: ‘How are we moved to pity? By getting outside ourselves and identifying with a being who suffers. We only suffer as much as we believe him to suffer. It is not in ourselves but in him that we suffer’ (EOL, 32/395). Compassion does not involve our immediately feeling the other’s pain; for such immediacy would foreclose all self-other awareness. ‘If my experience of your suffering is immediate, my response to your suffering is also immediate, namely to flee from the pain that your suffering engenders’.15 To identify with someone, we have to acknowledge our difference from them – our lack of suffering. We suffer as if we were the pitiable, by imagining ourselves as that other. By objectifying ourselves, we become conscious of our agency. On acknowledging that we are not actually suffering, we also acknowledge the strength to help. That feeling of strength coincides with a feeling of vulnerability: we experience our lack of suffering not simply as a lack but also as a sign of our potential to suffer in the future like those we pity. Reason can lead us to refuse the interdependence of identification and difference, to conceive self and other as binary opposites. It can prevent us from responding compassionately as we interpret our freedom from pain to mean that we are not implicated in the other’s plight and therefore not

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obliged to help (DOI, 75/156). Pity, when functioning dynamically, entails a simultaneous feeling of connection with, and detachment from others, as the condition of interaction. We shall extend our discussion of pity in Chapter 4 where we consider how Rousseau’s conception of it suggests a mode of ethics compatible with democracy. An ethics of pity indicates how our common differentiation rather than a common essence necessitates our participation in a social contract whose ultimate goal is to increase equality and freedom. Reason may potentially block compassion, but without reason, pity would not become humanized: ‘He who has never been reflective is incapable of being merciful or just or pitying. He is just as incapable of being malicious and vindictive. He who imagines nothing only has the sensation of himself; he is isolated in the midst of mankind’ (EOL, 32/395–396). Full presence would exclude moral reflection or rather reflection altogether. The irruption of difference marks our insertion into the reflexive social sphere. What is alien or unfamiliar to us develops our intellectual capacity, prompting us to question the given and renegotiate the relation between ourselves and the world: Reflection is born of comparison, and it is the plurality of ideas that leads to their comparison. One who sees only a single object has nothing to compare. And those who have only seen from childhood a narrow range of objects and always the same ones are also incapable of such comparisons. Long familiarity deprives them of the attention requisite for examining those objects. But when something strikes us as novel we want to get to know it. We seek relations with what is already known to us. Thus we learn to consider what is before our eyes and experience of the strange leads us to examine the familiar. Apply these thoughts to primitive man and you see the reasons for their barbarity. Never having seen anything beyond their immediate milieu; they did not even understand that. They did not even understand themselves. They had the concept of father, a son, a brother, but not that of man. Their hut contained all of their fellow men. Stranger, beast, monster: these are all one to them. Apart from themselves and their family, the whole universe would count as nothing to them. (EOL, 32/396) Identity is therefore always relational, constructed on its difference from other identities. Incapable of comparing themselves with the beyond, primitive tribes could not understand themselves as a community. This ignorance of otherness renders those tribes homogeneous and also apolitical:


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without difference, there is no need to form a general will because we have no notion of a wider whole for which to make decisions. As we shall see in our discussion of The Social Contract, Rousseau’s political thinking does not therefore oppose difference and plurality in favour of a small static alpine community. Plurality and difference make politics necessary. A perfectly unified community would be a dead one from which all reflection, critique and change had disappeared. Like our natural state, it would just reproduce itself infinitely without ever evolving. What disrupts unity incites us to think about who we are and how we coexist. That disruption – what Laclau calls ‘dislocation’ – confronts us with the contingency of the given – its groundlessness – paving the way for new interpretations and courses of action.16 Identities, constituted through alienation, are thus fundamentally incomplete or ‘dislocated’. An experience of otherness can re-emerge at any time to contest an identity’s apparent coherence, opening it to modification and change.

Language and Identity To make comparisons, we require the classificatory function of language. While ideas do not precede their invention as linguistic signs, language, being conceptual, cannot occur without ideas. This conundrum raises the irresolvable question of antecedence, of language’s uncertain origin: ‘for if men need speech to learn to think, they were in greater need of the art of thinking, to be able to invent that of speaking’ (DOI, 66/147). Reflection only occurs through language. To grasp an object, we have to turn into a word or, as language is conceptual, an idea. Signification, as seen in Chapter 1, is metaphorical and yet essential for our socialization (EOL, 12–13/381–382). We cannot clearly disassociate the reflective and passionate realms of our identity. To create links between our passions and externality, we have to transpose them into ideas, filter them through language: ‘As ideas and feelings succeeded one another, and heart and head were brought into play, men continued to become socialised, their connections extended and their bonds tightened’ (DOI, 90/169). Without reflection, our passions would remain self-enclosed, leaving us ‘isolated amidst humankind’ (EOL, 32/396). Their translation into language gives them moral import, enabling us to relate what we feel to other areas of our existence. This process takes us from the particular to the general. Once inner sensations become conventional signs, we can identify them as attributes we potentially share with others: ‘It is only

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after long training, after much consideration as to his own feelings and the feelings that [Emile] observes in others, that he will be able to generalise his individual notions under the abstract idea of humanity and add to his individual affections those which may identify him with the race’ (E, 234/520). Reflection allows us to identify not simply with empirical beings but with the abstraction of humanity. Linguistic abstraction develops us intellectually and emotionally, by connecting us with the absent whole whose contemplation forms the basis of political activity. It differentiates us by producing categories through which we classify one another and, through that differentiation, possibly creates the desire for union. Our becoming meaningful and therefore social – since meaning is relational – destroys our symbiosis with the world. Yet without linguistic mediation, what lies beyond us would be meaningless, it ‘would count for nothing’. We share in a world only because we have a common language to designate it. Communication with others involves our objectification in language. We never attain full presence because self-knowledge depends on linguistic abstraction. We cannot decide as individuals what words signify; their signification derives from common consent, from a shared system of meaning. Rousseau refutes Condillac’s hypothesis that language originated in the ‘domestic intercourse between mother and child’ partly because the logic of that hypothesis depends on the self-contradictory idea of a personal language: It is further to be observed that the child, having all his wants to explain, and of course more to say to the mother than the mother could have to say to him, must have borne the brunt of the task of invention, and the language he used would be of his own device, so that the number of languages would be equal to that of the individuals speaking them, and the variety would be increased by the vagabond and the roving life they led, which would not give time for any idiom to become constant. For to say that the mother dictated to her child the words he was to use in asking for one thing or another, is an explanation of how languages already formed are taught, but by no means explains how languages were originally formed. (DOI, 65/147) No one creates a language from scratch: we are born into linguistic systems with their already implanted meanings, rules and prohibitions. So the idea that language emanated from the mother–child relationship does not hold up: it only explains the transmission of established languages not


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their origin. We cannot get to a point beyond language: even the idea of the pre-linguistic requires language for its formulation. The origin of language always remains unknown. We represent ourselves using meanings that predate and transcend us as individuals. If language were of ‘our own device’, ‘the number of languages would be equal to that of the individuals speaking them’. It would therefore lack the constancy and consistency essential for constructing common meanings. In the Discourse, language supplements our pre-conceptual oneness with nature. The sense of familiarity it creates is metaphorical: we relate to the world conceptually. The act of symbolizing expresses both a feeling of separation and a wish for integration. Our desire to recover the fullness of nature is already inscribed with failure, emanating from a feeling of lack, and therefore nourished by its non-fulfilment. Only from within the mediate realm of society, does the myth of plenitude become significant. Society as a totality is unrealisable: comparison or difference, as the basis of reflection, means that we always conceive the whole from a particular perspective. The whole is therefore never fully present to us. Social man’s reflective character excludes completion. He and society converge in their being marked by a lack. The centrality of language for human development furthers the link between Rousseau and Lacan. For both theorists, we represent ourselves through language and, yet, language, being fundamentally figurative, has no essential relation to us. Man appears in discourse as a lack: absolute knowledge of him is ‘out of our power’ (DOI, 43/123). What constantly pushes us to represent is the promise of achieving total self-knowledge. As the allegory of the naming of man shows, there is no one word which completely and reliably represents us. We grasp ourselves only metaphorically, lacking any true identity or meaning. The image of nature reveals the unobtainable character of the plenitude we crave. The connection with Lacan’s theory of subjectivity helps illustrate the affirmative dimension of Rousseau’s insistence on man’s lack of natural sociability. That lack has often caused despair among Rousseau’s commentators because, as we have seen, it eradicates the possibility of providing man with timeless moral standards: we remain open to constant redefinition.17 By contrast, that lack, we argue, supplies the condition of our subjectivity: it allows us to engage critically with the social sphere as we determine and revise the normative standards by which we live. The fact that ‘nature has fi xed no exact limits’ makes man, for Rousseau, ‘accountable for his own actions’ (E, 337/640–641). As we cannot furnish humanity with indisputable standards, we become moral in a dynamic sense: we are

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forced to be free, that is, self-critical, reflective and responsible because there are no natural sanctions to ensure order and legitimacy. Our undivided pre-social existence defines us as amoral: we remain in a state of quasi-animality, following invariable behavioural patterns which preclude the need for reflection and decision-making. Our permanent severance from nature triggers our human potential and has a positive dimension. Likewise, for Laclau and Žižek, the lacanian subject’s intrinsic incompletion affirms an open-ended and dynamic understanding of subjectivity.18 Lacan’s theory assumes political import, they argue, because it emphasizes the subject’s dependence on identification. That dependence implicates the subject in the socio-political field as she identifies with discourses and institutions to construct an identity to negate her lack. So the subject of lack is an active and productive impossibility, rather than just an impossibility: our failure to achieve full identity engages us in perpetual identity construction, as we attempt to transcend the limits of our current social representation to find more just representations which respect our present hopes and desires. Their affirmative reading of Lacan’s subject informs my reading of Rousseau’s concept of perfectible man.

Perfectibility: Man’s Open-ended Identity Rousseau’s idea of perfectibility as the trait which distinguishes man from animals has much in common with Laclau’s and Žižek’s conception of the subject. Perfectibility designates our capacity to contend with, and adapt to, those events that challenge our construction of the universe. Likewise, Laclau and Žižek maintain that the subject emerges in those moments of dislocation where our experience of reality becomes disrupted, urging us to decide how to adapt and reinvent the self in the quest for social continuity or transformation.19 Both Rousseau and these modern theorists conceive the subject in non-substantive and non-deterministic ways. Rousseau’s neologism ‘perfectibility’ refers not to a goal of biological adaptation or moral perfection but to our potentiality or our ‘almost unlimited’ freedom to change, a consequence of our essential indeterminacy. Man progresses and develops in response to the vagaries of history, only because he is fundamentally indeterminate, not being governed by instinct: There is one further highly specific, distinctive, and indisputable feature of man, and that is his faculty of perfectibility [se perfectionner] – a faculty that, with the help of circumstances, successively develops all the others


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and that in man inheres as much in the species as in the individual, whereas an animal at the end of a few months already is what it will remain all its life, and its species will be at the end of a thousand years what it was in the first of those thousand years. (DOI, 60/142) The lack of fi xed nature underlying our freedom prevents it from being total: our autonomy – our right to self-determination – always contains a relation of heteronomy. Being indeterminate, we determine ourselves by identifying with social norms and institutions. We are therefore never entirely self-determining. Awareness of that fundamental indeterminacy defines our metaphysical dimension: ‘Nature lays her commands on all animals and the beast obeys. Man feels the same impression but he recognises himself as free to acquiesce or to resist; it is above all in consciousness of his freedom that the true spirituality of his soul is displayed’(DOI, 60/142). Rousseau locates our spirituality in the consciousness of freedom, rather than in freedom itself. That distinction is important, showing how Rousseau does not conceive freedom as a positive state of autonomy and fullness, but as an active principle that involves awareness of our lack of nature as the condition of our capacity for self-improvement. Our ‘metaphysical side’ does not target a state of self-presence, being developed by what exceeds our grasp. It does not lie in the revelation of an essence but in the absence of one. Perfectibility is a virtual faculty in natural man whose repetitive and ordered life renders it redundant. Natural disaster such as floods, terrible storms, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes disrupt man’s felicitous, and yet subhuman, existence, forcing him to employ his perfectibility in an attempt to overcome these crises through human association (EOL, 40/402). The break that these storms cause to the continuity of nature exposes us to the unknown. Our humanity – our perfectibility – is always activated when we confront what is alien. That confrontation triggers the faculty of imagination essential for our becoming perfectible.20 Imagination ‘is only aroused by what is new’ and is nourished by absence (E, 118/384). Unlike the real world, the world of imagination is ‘boundless’, enlarging the field of ‘possibility, whether for good or ill, and therefore stimulates and feeds desires by the hope of satisfying them’ (E, 52/304). Like all human faculties, its moral worth depends entirely on how we deploy it (D, 815–816). Transcending the givens of the senses, imagination transports us towards the unperceived, thereby prompting our intellectual and emotional progress. However, being unrestricted, it also induces us to desire to excess, as we ignore our limits, imagining ourselves indestructible and immune to moral redress.

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Perfectibility, as a possible source of enlightenment, gets induced by the unrepresentable. Man becomes perfectible, when imagining what transcends cognition, when apprehending death, or more precisely (for death amounts to nothingness) its anticipation. Finitude disrupts nature’s atemporality, producing the idea of the future. The future – understood as what is not yet determined – is always imagined. Imagination broaches history: ‘Destitute of all enlightenment’ savage man’s ‘desires never go beyond his physical wants. The only goods he recognises in the universe are food, a female and sleep: the only evils he fears are pain and hunger. I say pain, and not death: for no animal can know what it is to die; the knowledge of death and its terrors being one of the first acquisitions made by man in departing from his animal state’ (DOI, 61/143). To develop beyond his originary nothingness, to accede to his potentiality, man has to picture his absence in the world. Man identifies and associates with his fellow beings, after anticipating the total isolation of death and the lack which that isolation terrifyingly discloses. We only think about our existence once it has been threatened with destruction. Our potentiality would remain forever dormant, if we never sensed a gap in our universe which we needed to fill. Nature’s total unity suppresses that potential. All human endeavours are circumscribed by this constitutive negativity, which at once enables our originating powers, by creating the openness necessary for transformation to happen and also hinders them, by eliminating the possibility of complete mastery.

Perfectibility as the Condition of Ethics and Politics Rousseau therefore defines man by what exposes him to perpetual redefinition: perfectibility. Determining the human as potentiality suggests, on the one hand, how man never achieves total humanization and, on the other, how he can always question and revise how he understands his humanity.21 We remain caught between the identity we have acquired and our capacity to strive for a new one. Our perfectible character does not simply refer to a purely hypothetical future but also indicates our ability in the here and now to break with oppressive structures and call for, and implement, social change. It reminds us there is nothing inevitable in our historical development. Despite or more precisely because it is without positive moral content, perfectibility inaugurates ethical and political responsibility: ‘it was this faculty, causing over centuries his acumen and his errors, his vices and his virtues to flourish, which eventually makes man a tyrant over himself and


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nature’(DOI, 60/142). If man had to be a certain substance, ethical questions would disappear, there would only be tasks to be done. Perfectibility, as the previous quotation illustrates, is irreducible to the binary categories of right and wrong: it is at once the source of man’s ennoblement, allowing him to raise himself above animality and use his freedom and also his debasement, equally allowing him to abuse that freedom and consequently fall below animality, as he oppresses others and himself: Why is man alone liable to grow into a dotard? Is it not because he returns to a primitive state; and that, while the brute, which has acquired nothing and therefore has nothing to lose, still retains the force of instinct, man, who loses, by age or accident, all that his perfectibility had enabled him to gain, falls by this means lower than brutes themselves? (DOI, 60/143) Our primitive state does not provide the telos of our moral development. It is the loss of that state which founds the liberty necessary to make truly ethical decisions. The fact that we do not instinctively do what is right imputes us with the responsibility to judge and evaluate what constitutes the best course of action. We possess no set rules or pre-given norms on which we can base our judgment and be sure of its justice: If you understand that man is active in his judgments, that his intelligence is only the power to compare and judge, you will see that his freedom is only a similar power or one derived from this; he chooses between good and evil as he judges between truth and falsehood; if his judgment is at fault, he chooses amiss. What then is the cause that determines his will? It is his judgment. What is the cause that determines his judgment? It is his intelligence, his power of judging; the determining cause is himself. (E, 291/586) We retroactively provide the grounds which justify the decisions we make. This self-grounding dimension renders us accountable for our judgments and decisions; it makes us free. It produces us as ethical subjects who remain forever perfectible by depriving us of objective standards which would permit us unfailingly to make the right choice. Reflection on the moral involves awareness of the immoral. The two categories are mutually constitutive and therefore not clear and distinct, always requiring an act of judgment for their distinction. Our perfectibility means that we cannot abnegate our responsibility by blaming some rule of

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necessity or the natural state of things because we create our own moral order: ‘What could divine power itself have done on our behalf? Could it have made our nature a contradiction, and given the prize of well-doing to one who was incapable of evil? To prevent man from wickedness, should Providence have restricted him to instinct and made him a fool? (E, 292/587). A dynamic understanding of moral freedom admits room for error, misjudgement and questioning, and, through that admission, insists on our unrelenting responsibility to engage with, and perfect through critique, our common ethos. The freedom to change underlying ethical responsibility indicates the undecidability of the good–evil opposition: ‘Absolute good and evil are unknown to us. In this life they are blended together; we never enjoy any perfectly pure feeling, nor do we remain for more than a moment in the same state’ (E, 51/301). This undecidability provides the condition and the limit of our political decisions. It therefore does not leave us in a moral vacuum, for it urges us to think carefully about what is right, to face up to any regime’s perfectibility – its permanent susceptibility to both degeneration and improvement – as the basis of our personal and collective duty to prevent its stagnation or descent into corruption. We have thus to come to terms with the necessary contingency of all identities and institutions: ‘The principle of all action is in the will of a free being. We cannot go beyond this. It is not the word freedom which is meaningless but the word necessity’ (E, 291/586). Necessity is meaningless because, by its very definition, it precludes the active process of interpretation which meaning formation involves. In a state of necessity, we would just exist, like natural man, never reflecting or progressing. Our liberty, coming from the absence of necessity, implies the necessarily contingent nature of all identities: their perfectibility. We cannot overcome contingency, as it provides the condition of our agency but we can try to negate it through conformism whereby we just passively consume rather than engage with the claims made about our society. Our fundamental indeterminacy, depriving us of any predefined moral telos, leaves us vulnerable to authoritarian determinations and that vulnerability underlines the urgency of ethical and political critique. Let us summarize. Perfectibility bestows man with ‘the quality of a free agent’. Freedom, for Rousseau, comes from our not being governed by instinct, giving us power over our actions and choices. The self-mastery it enables paradoxically coincides with an awareness of our limits: our perfectibility is activated when our mastery of ourselves and universe is challenged by a crisis, forcing us, in the absence of any pre-ordained course of action, to invent strategies to overcome that situation. ‘Freedom and


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repose’ are thus ‘incompatible’ (GP, 954–955/161). Our humanizing trait becomes most urgent in a state of deep uncertainty about our identity and our construction of the world. Freedom is inalienable, providing the cause behind any choice or act and, as such, even choosing to try to alienate it requires freedom. We therefore cannot logically give freedom away. Rousseau reproaches Hobbes, Grotius and Pufendorf for not acknowledging its inalienability. They conceive freedom as a possession that we can exchange for peace and security. Pufendorf maintains that if we can transfer our property to the custody of others through the conventions of contractual law, we can contract away freedom to another (DOI, 105–106/184). Rousseau views his logic as highly flawed, since unlike property, which is extrinsic to man, liberty is intrinsic to him and thus cannot be alienated: ‘To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties [. . .] Such renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature, to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts’ (SC, 186/356). So even if we decide to devolve our freedom to a supreme ruler, we never fully escape the responsibility which that decision incurs, we still have to confront and contend with its consequences. Using our freedom entails selecting which laws, which institutions, which discourses to subject ourselves to, as we determine our identity and that of the social sphere. It thus paradoxically entails restricting the indeterminacy which allows for that freedom in the first place. While subjectivity and subjection mutually presuppose one another, the idea of our basic freedom must persist. If we do not conceive freedom as inalienable, it becomes difficult to contest oppression and slavery.22 We therefore cannot simply agree to obey a master or any regime without compromising our humanity. Despotic states, albeit vainly, instate strict laws, codes and standards in the pursuit of absolute obedience. This regime’s drive to full determination goes against but cannot eradicate the indeterminacy essential to our liberty. Our defining perfectibility rejects the idea that our political objective should be to establish total conformity and order. The ambiguity of perfectibility founds our moral autonomy: a situation in which we did not risk misjudging the good would render the need to make decisions and judgments redundant. We would be amoral like natural man. Man, without freedom, would ‘renounce his person, his life, his reason, his very self, all the morality in his actions, and, in a word, (would) cease to exist before death, in spite of nature which puts him in direct charge of his own preservation and in spite of his conscience and his reason which prescribe to him what he ought to do and what he ought to

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avoid doing’ (E, 332/839). The absence of nature in us and society founds our freedom: no social system can claim to define our identity fully and, likewise, no social actor can claim complete control of the social field.23 The perfect coincidence of the self and the social would reproduce the unreflective monotony of nature: ‘There was no education or progress; the generations multiplied unproductively, and because each began anew from the same point, centuries passed by in all crudeness of the earliest ages; the species was already old, and man remained a child’ (DOI, 80/160). Their dislocation, far from paralysing political activity, enables us to imagine and construct our community in ways which break with the given. Our fundamental perfectibility requires a political form which embraces critique, contestation, and change as fostering human potential. As we shall examine in the next chapter, Rousseau’s hypothesis of history shows how our political development through time has thwarted rather than nourished that potential.

Chapter 3

Constructing Political Identities

This chapter examines Rousseau’s hypothetical representation of human development from primitive to civil societies, focusing on how political subjectivity gets constituted. As man is essentially perfectible and the condition of his perfectibility is his originary indeterminacy, the constitution of his social identity cannot be conceived as a wholly self-determined process. Our lack of natural sociability means that social structures and institutions do not reflect some deeper human essence. Rather they help construct and mould how we understand ourselves and our context without ever overcoming the lack which supplies the condition of their existence. That lack founds the anthropological hope which mitigates the historical pessimism of the Discourse, indicating how we are never fully determined by our social context and therefore remain always open to new and possibly more democratic identities. Rousseau’s portrayal of the negative influence of political corruption and injustice on human psychology also implies the reverse scenario in which politics could positively transform how we think and act. The affirmative force of the Discourse lies, then, in its insistence on our permanent susceptibility to change. Man’s political development correlates to a process of misidentification as he sees the corrupt institutions of civilization as offering him the possibility of fullness and freedom. Given our natural lack of identity, the Discourse does not propose an alternative and authentic mode of identification, but through the theatrical scenes and violent figures mapping our historical evolution, it incites us to identify with our misidentification, or more precisely, with our otherness vis-à-vis social structures: that otherness provides the condition of new identifications. The rhetorical level of the Discourse, we shall argue, figures the split inhabiting all identities; the split between the identity itself imagined as providing stability and plenitude, and the process of identification which reinscribes the originary lack of identity whereby stability and plenitude are impossible. Rather than causing despair, this split liberates us from society’s determinant force by enabling us to demand and invent more legitimate forms of identification.

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Rousseau’s theorization of the construction of political identities refutes those readings which categorize him as an anti-political thinker whose philosophy supposedly targets a society of full consensus without difference and ambiguity.1 If this were the case, Rousseau’s work would exemplify what Mouffe and Honig consider a general tendency in political philosophy to seek a good order based on irrefutable foundations whereby politics would become superfluous.2 Any denial of the political – society’s permanent susceptibility to being grounded and regrounded – risks foreclosing the possibility of imagining and effecting radical change.3 Our discussion of how the Discourse clears the ground of the social to allow for the new already refutes Rousseau’s characterization as antipolitical. We further that refutation by analysing how Rousseau’s hypothesis of human history indicates the way civil society’s exploitation and oppression become institutionalized because man disavows the political. He identifies with an ideology of total harmony and perpetual peace which eventually inures him to his gradual enslavement to the interests of the rich few. He internalizes his inequality and oppression to such an extent that it appears natural to him. The Discourse reactivates the breach between the political discourses determining our social condition and their underlying lack. That reactivation highlights the contingency of social relations which leaves them infinitely renegotiable and malleable. Its hypothetical history therefore shows the dangers of the anti-political logic which eventually governs our social development, culminating, as we shall see in Chapter 4, in the violence of the second state of nature. That stage marks the return, in its most terrifying form, of the antagonism which civil society’s ideology of perfect harmony and peace represses.

Antagonism and Social Formation As we observed in Chapter 2, the coincidence of alienation and identity formation in our socialization undermines the idea of a totally autonomous and whole self. Our identity is constituted on alterity and therefore never becomes complete. The political persists because of our constitutive split: the question of who we are and our relation with the wider sphere is without any definitive answer. Man remains forever perfectible because he never achieves oneness with society. We are urged to use our perfectibility to formulate and identify with new political programmes and strategies to withstand society’s failure to become a totally stable whole. We become political agents on realizing how the social is ultimately ‘without measure,


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without rule, and without consistency’, when confronted with what challenges our sense of mastery (GM, 169/282). Social formation, for Rousseau, is born of division. It is for this reason that he asserts that the perfect equilibrium of man’s golden age, harmoniously located between civilization and nature, ‘could never have really existed for humankind. When men could have enjoyed it they were unaware of it; and when they could have understood it they had already lost it’ (GM, 171/283). We reflect on the relation between the parts and the whole, that is, on the political, when sensing the absence of unity. If the ‘perfect independence’ and ‘liberty without rules’ of this age had ‘remained united with primitive innocence’, it would have been ‘harmful to our most excellent faculties’: The earth would have been covered with men between whom there would have been almost no communication, we should have made contact with one another at some points without becoming united at any; each one of us would have remained isolated among others, each one of us would have thought only of himself; our understanding would have been unable to develop; we should have lived without feeling anything, and we should have died without having lived; all our happiness would have consisted in not being conscious of our wretchedness; there would have been neither kindness in our hearts nor morality in our actions and we should never have enjoyed that most delicious sentiment of the soul which is the love of virtue. (GM, 171/283) We see again how the objective of Rousseau’s philosophy is not to fulfil ‘the dream of full and immediate presence’ without ‘contradiction and difference’: the fulfilment of that dream, if it were possible, would destroy all reflection on what constitutes society.4 Instead, it emphasizes the necessity of division or difference for our political engagement in defining the absent whole. Even man’s golden age does not represent a transparent totality without conflict, already displaying the signs of the friction at the core of civilization. The pre-political groupings of this primitive phase are confined to the family; contact with outsiders causes warfare. The harmony and peace of this period does not emanate from any essential unity but from the fact that the narrow confines of the family keep men apart: These barbaric times were a golden age, not because men were united, but because they were separated. Each, it is said, considered himself

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master of all. That might be, none of them knew or wanted to control anyone beyond those who were at hand. His needs, far from drawing him closer to his fellows, drove him from them. If you wish, men would attack each other when they met, but they rarely met. A state of war prevailed universally, and the entire earth was at peace. (EOL, 33/396) Nascent society is based on a division between inside and outside; that division is not yet political because men are unaware of it. They therefore do not question their relation to what lies beyond their immediate milieu. Ignorant of the outside, they cannot understand themselves as a community; they are ‘not bound by any idea of common brotherhood’ (EOL, 31–32/395). The desire for commonality is contingent on a feeling of difference. Community does not exist at this stage in Rousseau’s thinking because man is still to experience the separation necessary to prompt thought on what unites him with others; he remains apolitical:5 This accounts for the apparent contradiction seen in the fathers of the nations: so natural, and so inhuman: such ferocious behaviour and such tender hearts; so much love for their families and such antipathy for their species. All their feelings, being concentrated on those near to them, would be intense. Everyone they knew would be dear to them; enemies the rest of the world, whom they did not see at all, of whom they were ignorant. They hated only those with whom they could not be acquainted. (EOL, 33/396) The question of the political – how to institute a society – does not arise here: any conflict or violence is restricted to the outside, not yet affecting relations internal to the small family groups. What constitutes, we shall argue, a political association or community is paradoxically a dissociative operation: antagonism.6 The advent of conflict among men – whose most extreme manifestation is the war of all against all – exposes the lack of any ‘natural and general society’ (GM, 176/288). That lack at once inaugurates the search for order and cohesion and also prevents their full realization as a perfect state. Without the abstraction of language, primitive tribes cannot conceive the beyond and therefore do not judge themselves relative to a wider whole. They are yet to imagine themselves as a particular society with a territory and identity to protect. The war that prevails does not therefore destroy the peace of this period, since the extended families have very little to lose. Man polices borders and creates lines of defence only after fabricating the oppositions of mine/yours, inside/outside, difference/equivalence,


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general/particular and recognizing how those oppositions are not fi xed in advance but are disputable. Our golden age, far from offering a utopian vision of natural harmony and unity, shows how harmony proves inseparable from disharmony. Just as natural man virtually possesses the faculties essential for his socialization, primitive society is already inscribed with the conflict and disorder – the presence of a threatening outside – which eventually causes its politicization. Rousseau, like Laclau and Mouffe, we argue, highlights the importance of antagonism for social formation. Using Laclau’s and Mouffe’s theory, we foreground this often overlooked aspect of Rousseau’s thinking.7

Laclau’s and Mouffe’s Theory of Antagonism Laclau and Mouffe conceive antagonism as both the condition and limit of political identities and structures. In their conception, antagonism does not designate a clash between two social groups with already fully constituted identities and interests, but rather defines a relation whereby the other’s presence is experienced as preventing me from attaining a full identity.8 That experience is shared both by the antagonist and the object of the antagonism. The relation at once restricts my identity but also, through that feeling of restriction, somehow fulfils it on an imaginary level: it retroactively generates the illusion of its possible completion. The other thus simultaneously represents both an obstacle and the key to my missing fullness, causing me to experience my subjectivity as both absent and potential. Antagonism occurs, then, because social agents feel restricted in the realization of their identities and interests by an oppressive state or government who are held responsible for that restriction. The absent plenitude that the antagonistic relation symbolizes prompts disparate social actors to associate with one another, to build common strategies and projects as they endeavour to actualize their thwarted potential through resistance to the antagonistic force. That association, being constructed in relation to a constitutive outside, is never complete, always allowing for the possible rearticulation of the bonds and interests which temporarily provide the basis of its unity.9 The Discourse, by portraying the gradual domination and exploitation of the poor majority by the rich few, creates an antagonistic frontier in the text which calls for the formulation of egalitarian projects of political change. Both the bogus contract of the rich and the legitimate one of The Social Contract are grounded on extreme antagonism: a state of

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all out war. However, the bogus contract denies its antagonistic origin, promising eternal peace so as to blind the poor to their manipulation by the rich. The Social Contract, however, makes no such promise, ceaselessly underlining the pact’s fragility and consequently, argues Baker, the need for citizens’ permanent vigilance against the ascension to power of antidemocratic forces which take their private will as the complete embodiment of the general will.10 Far from promoting an ideal state of complete consensus, Rousseau’s social theory acknowledges the threat of conflict which requires the ongoing defence of democratic institutions. For similar reasons, Mouffe expresses concern about the liberal goal of a neutral space of undistorted dialogue and universal rational agreement. In her opinion, that goal represses rather than confronts the issue of antagonism: ‘To negate the political does not make it disappear, it only leads to bewilderment in the face of its manifestations and to impotence in dealing with them’.11 Rousseau’s hypothetical account of our social development warns against the dangers of that negation. Rousseau’s thinking therefore avers the permanence of the political. Group identity, like that of the individual, is not self-contained, resulting from a blurring of the inside and the outside as one group defines itself through its difference from another. Antagonism – the mutually exclusive and inclusive nature of identities – conditions the politicization of society and man, since if tribes or communities could evolve totally autonomously of one another, then there would be no danger of confrontation and dispute and, as a consequence, no need to invent political programmes and strategies to forestall that danger. Rousseau’s important statement that from the moment one human group became an organized society, all the others would have to follow suit for self-preservation foregrounds this tension (DOI, 99–100/178). We organize ourselves into communities with identities and territories to defend once we become conscious of an outside force threatening the internal life of our grouping. It is only because the limits between groups are contingent, that is, not totally fi xed and therefore prone to sparking conflict, that the question of how to construct and configure legitimate social relations arises. Žižek offers a critique of Laclau’s and Mouffe’s theory of antagonism which helps clarify more precisely how that theory will inform our reading of Rousseau. He criticizes their theory by emphasizing that social actors are not simply antagonized by an external other. Starting from the premise of the Lacanian subject which is fundamentally and ontologically divided, he argues that antagonisms represent a projection of our inherent division on to the outside. The subject’s identification with external


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objects is predicated upon, and blocked by, a basic lack of identity.12 The impossibility of full identity generates antagonism at the heart of the subject: its irreparable split between self and other. His critique aims to correct a weakness in Laclau’s and Mouffe’s theory: their idea of antagonism between opposed subject positions implies that antagonism could at some point be overcome in the form of total emancipation. This conclusion contradicts their insistence on any society’s inherent incompleteness. Laclau accepted Žižek’s critique, leading him to foreground how both the subject and social structures are fundamentally dislocated. Their dislocation – their incompleteness – provides the condition of (im)possibility of the subject’s agency.13

The Antagonistic Split between Self and Other Employing Žižek’s modification of Laclau’s and Mouffe’s concept, we shall consider how our political development is governed by the illusion of recapturing our ‘lost’ fullness and how we eventually hold others responsible for that loss to defend ourselves against the divisions necessary for our humanization. Civil man represses the political dimension of antagonism, succumbing to the illusion of a totally harmonious and peaceful world without properly dealing with the social failings which generate the need for that illusion in the first place. That repressed dimension constantly returns in history in the form of oppression and violence. As observed in Chapter 2, Rousseau stresses the importance of limits for agency. Our perfectibility is activated when we confront obstacles to our self-determination, giving us a sense of ourselves as-not-yet-realized. The coincidence of limits and agency means that antagonism is not simply an external relation in Rousseau’s thinking but exists at the core of the subject. Crises call upon our defining trait of perfectibility to enact change or reform by inducing us to recognize our potential through a feeling of lack. The affirmative dimension of antagonism lies in its triggering of perfectibility: the source of our capacity to withstand failure and conflict through association. The conflict, division and competition of politics already exist in an embryonic form within primitive societies. We examined in the previous chapter how man first identifies with others during primitive festivals. Alienation in the other’s gaze gives him a sense of his individual self, causing him to desire social recognition. His exposure to otherness discloses his lack of unity which he initially compensates through integration in a

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group. The desire for recognition therefore derives from a simultaneous feeling of difference from, and identification with, others. As primitive societies labour for the common subsistence, only producing enough to satisfy the needs of its members, the scope for conflict is restricted. An economy of subsistence prevents the material inequalities which eventually give rise to the feuding of history. Amour propre – our ability for comparison and emulation – has no intrinsic moral value. Its awakening in man makes him feel incomplete. That feeling of incompleteness, on the one hand, accelerates the development of our faculties and passions and, on the other, can cause aggression, as we attempt to deny that feeling through a destructive game of rivalry with others. We detect the beginnings of this rivalry in the primitive festival. After comparing himself with others, man develops notions of beauty and merit which produce the idea of preference and eventually the desire to be preferred to others: Each person began to gaze on the others and want to be gazed upon himself, and what came to be prized was public esteem. Anyone who best sang or danced; he who was the most handsome, the strongest, the most skilful, or the most eloquent came to be the most highly regarded, and this was the first step towards inequality and also towards vice. These first preferences gave rise, on the one side, to vanity and scorn, and on the other, to shame and envy; and the ferment produced by these new leavens eventually led to concoctions ruinous to happiness and innocence. (DOI, 90/169–170) Our growing ability for comparison and classification occasions moral love, which intensifies the competition among us. Sexuality is not purely physical but entails a desire for public esteem, hence its moral dimension: ‘The physical aspect is that general desire that inclines one sex to unite with another. The moral aspect is what determines this desire and fi xes it exclusively on one single object’ (DOI, 77/157). By fi xing desire on a single human being, we attenuate our feeling of estrangement, allowing us to experience the other as a subject rather than simply as an object. That experience fuels man’s desire for recognition as he begins to will others to acknowledge and respect his subjectivity in the same way.14 The self-awareness, preference and exclusion that structure moral love also structure social interaction in general. While moral love supplies the emotional support of our inter-subjective relations, it can also engender conflict and division. Man begins to perceive others as blocking access


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to a particular love object and consequently to the social esteem associated with that object: ‘From seeing each other, people cannot do without seeing each other even more. A tender and sweet sentiment steals into their souls and, at the least opposition, becomes a raging fury; jealousy awakens with love; discord triumphs, and the sweetest of passions receives the sacrifice of human blood’ (DOI, 89/169). The passion of love becomes perverted into aggression as man attempts to affirm his social standing, by excluding or even annihilating his neighbours in the competition for his desired mate. Comparison with others, Starobinski remarks, makes us aware of them in order to try, in time, to surpass and overcome them.15 Man reaches an impasse whereby he wants others to prefer him to themselves but not everyone can be the most preferred. This demand paradoxically incites him, albeit vainly, to attempt to destroy others in the quest for self-validation, when it is they who actually validate his self in the first place. His destructive mode of self-assertion represents an attempt to deal with the unsettling advent of the other’s enigmatic desire in his world, which occurs after the prolonged interaction of the festivals. His sense of existing in the other’s gaze leads him to question what they want from him. The cause of his desire is precisely that gaze which brings his existence to consciousness, but does not explain or define it, thereby making him aware of his own lack of integration. As the jealousy and exclusiveness of moral love show, he contends with this ambiguity by attempting to repress it and turn himself into the sole object of the other’s desire (DOI, 77/157).16

The Undecidability of Being and Appearing By observing that others possess attributes and talents that he does not have, man experiences his subjectivity as both absent and present. He starts to emulate those attributes and acquire those skills believed to render him desirable to others, to bring him the esteem that the performers received at the festivals. By trying to fulfil others’ desires, he becomes other than he is; he attempts to appear to be what he thinks they want. Emulation of our fellow men catapults our personal and collective development. Identifying with them and seeking to win their respect express a desire for community. Affirming the self in the eyes of others initially functions to integrate us in, rather than separate us from, the wider whole. The destructive force of amour propre takes effect, when the illusion of wholeness acquired through social interaction predominates, pushing us to substantiate that

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illusion by negating the relative status of the self through domination of, rather than inclusion in, society: Behold all the natural characteristics called into action, every action, every man’s rank and fate settled, not only as to the amount of possessions and power to help or harm, but also as to his intelligence, good looks, strength or skill, merit or abilities; and because only these traits could elicit esteem, it soon became necessary to have them or purport to have them. It was soon to one’s advantage to be other than one actually was. Being and appearing became two quite different things, and from this distinction, emerged striking ostentation, deceitful cunning, and all vices that follow in their wake. (DOI, 95; 174) Rather than setting up a binary opposition between appearance and being, as some have argued, this quotation implies that they are undecidable.17 Our identity, being constituted on otherness, never represents an authentic inner being. It always remains undecidable between who we are and how we appear. Alienation in the other’s gaze makes it possible for us to be something but at the cost of remaining forever split between self and other. The uncertainty of being and appearing is illustrated by the importance of the primitive festival for self-formation. The context of the festival defi nes those characteristics we fi nd attractive in others as performative, opening them up to imitation, enabling us to emulate them. Being and appearing become ‘two quite different things’, once we deceive others as we seek to win public esteem without making the effort to earn it. Deception involves trying to pass appearance off as being itself. Man wants others to authenticate his sense of self, to acknowledge it as proof of his social worth. He not only desires what he thinks others desire, but also requires his person to become their desire. Over time winning esteem paradoxically is based on my ability to dominate and surpass my equals instead of my ability to relate to them in an egalitarian way. Exposure to otherness makes me aware of the incompleteness of my identity and also generates an illusion of wholeness. We eventually try to actualize that illusion by suppressing the otherness from which it arises. We are inauthentic not because we are divided between self and other, since that division is constitutive of identity itself but because of our aggressive denial of that fact. The question of authenticity arises only if unauthenticity is possible. Consequently, authenticity cannot be associated with the immediacy and passivity of nature, since, as Froese rightly argues, ‘a self


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that is not an agent can be neither authentic nor inauthentic. As soon as one begins to develop language and/or use tools, one must relinquish the direct experience of nature, but this is by no means an inauthentic experience’.18 The construction of the self is always externally mediated; man possesses no authentic inner core, remaining forever partially alienated from any identity he assumes. Whereas that partial alienation enables him to adapt and change his identity through history, it also facilitates corruption, making it impossible to know if individuals are what they purport to be. Rousseau does not therefore propose an authentic identity to combat deception. Nor does he dissolve entirely the categories of authenticity and unauthenticity. An inauthentic self could be understood as one which pretends to be so complete that it believes itself totally detached from others. Recognition of my difference should not pose a threat to my identity but should prompt me to realize my agency, my capacity for independent thought and action. As we shall see, the theatrical scenes and violent figures which plot our historical development reveal our alienation from the social institutions and identities we take for granted, thereby urging us to realize our autonomy. The presence of others creates the image of my possible fullness by exposing my identity as both absent and potential. While that image proves productive to the extent that it can incite us to improve ourselves by acquiring attributes and skills worthy of public approval, it can also cause conflict as we blame others for our feeling of absence. Here, we are reminded of Žižek’s re-working of Laclau’s and Mouffe’s notion of antagonism: we project our inner-division on to the outside so as to deny the impossibility underlying our desire for fullness. Without an authentic self, we depend on others’ for our self-validation. That dependence can foster a desire for community, if we appreciate how our identity is always worked out in an intersubjective context. In the Discourse, however, it induces aggression and exclusion as man vainly pursues absolute supremacy. Striving to win communal respect entails the possibility of disrespect: ‘Once man learned to appraise one another and formed the idea of esteem, everyone claimed a right to it, and no one could then be denied it without taking affront’ (DOI, 90/170). Public approval becomes an issue only once we learn to fear disapproval. Rather than questioning whether our behaviour warranted approval or not, we come to demand it as an unconditional right, taking revenge on any party which refuses it: ‘punishments had to be more severe as the occasions for giving offence became more common and the terror of revenge had to stand in for the check of laws’ (DOI, 90/170) The need for morality arises simultaneously

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with immorality: again, cause and effect cannot be neatly separated. Any moral imperative works only because we acknowledge our tendency to be immoral and the need to resist that tendency. This paradox can cause self-transgression: a situation in which we simultaneously affirm an ideal and transgress it.19 We transgress ourselves when we start harming one another to gain esteem. Love of the self becomes coupled with destruction of the self as we endeavour to suppress or destroy one another so as to affirm ourselves. We thereby attack the source of the affirmation we crave.

Surplus Production: Social Alienation Rousseau describes two major stages in man’s alienation. The first designates the creation of human settlements and moral love which ends our natural independence and produces the self-other relation. The second designates what Rousseau describes as ‘the great revolution’ in our history: the invention of metallurgy and agriculture (DOI, 92/171). The first phase of alienation indicates the constitutivity of otherness for our socialization. By sensing my difference from others, I also sense the need to identify with them. The second phase undermines that self-other awareness, by establishing boundaries which segregate individuals. These two phases distinguish between the alienation necessary for socialization and the alienation caused by a society based on the fallacy of a sovereign self whose identity and interests exist independently from his community. Civil man sustains the illusion of his own sovereignty by attacking or suppressing his equals, blinding himself to his potential to shape the self and the social through free and equal association. The invention of agriculture and metallurgy engenders civilization because mutual dependence on industry and art gives rise to claims to property and destroys natural equality. We saw in Chapter 1 how Rousseau describes ‘the true founder of civil society’ as the first to claim territory as his own, excluding others by that act. ‘This is mine’ also means ‘this is not yours’. The idea of property helps to create and perpetuate the fiction of a totally independent self. By refusing others access to my land and not sharing the yield of my labour with them, I refuse to see any connection with them. The divisive force of property conceals the permanent tension between self and other, identity and difference, the particular and universal which inaugurates the open-ended search for non-oppressive associations.


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The division of labour segregates men as they are assigned distinct tasks to produce objects for exchange. This stage of man’s development bears comparison with Marx’s understanding of alienation: with the division of labour, man loses control over the product of his labour and thereby no longer works for his own benefit or that of his community but to increase his employer’s profit: But from the moment one man needed the help from another, and as soon as they found it useful for one man to have provisions enough for two, equality evaporated, property was introduced, and work became mandatory; vast forests were transformed into sunny open country that had to be watered with the sweat of man, and where slavery and adversity were soon seen to germinate and ripen with crops. (DOI, 92/171) The perfection of agriculture and metallurgy destroys the natural equilibrium between what man needs and what he wants. The natural differences of age, strength and ingenuity, hitherto unimportant for man’s fate, eventually cause inequalities of wealth as certain men draw on their innate advantages to increase their productivity. As there is nothing in nature to ensure a balance between the consumption of foodstuffs and the use of iron, the division of labour enables man to pass from an economy of subsistence to an economy of production whereby he produces more than he needs. 20 As labour is not divided according to necessity, some products will periodically be in greater demand than others: ‘The farmer had a greater need for iron, or the blacksmith had a greater need for wheat; and in labouring equally, the one earned a great deal and the other barely had enough’ (DOI, 94–95/174). Producers exploit those who fi nd themselves without goods by charging them higher prices. Economic inequality and imbalance teaches man the art of profit- making. This exploitative situation is inherently contradictory. The division of labour means that no one can be self-sufficient: the people whom I exploit for profit are actually my equals, since I depend on them for my own material security: ‘each became in some degree a slave in becoming the master of the other: if rich, they stood in need of the services of others; if poor, of their assistance; and even a middle condition did not enable them to do without one another’ (DOI, 95/175). The point when man relies most on others is the point when he disavows that reliance, by taking advantage of them. Rousseau exposes the symbolic and imaginary character of social hierarchies which civil man ignores, taking literally the supremacy of the rich. That exposure

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opens our eyes to the fallacious power structures of our society, urging us to think afresh about our material relations. The surplus of production widens the gap between what we need and what we want. It signifies both an excess and a lack: an excess to the extent we produce more than we need and a lack to the extent it creates a desire for more. It helps reinforce our feeling of lost unity and, consequently, the longing to restore that loss. Like the other’s gaze at the festival, the surplus, by generating an excessive lack, reveals human potentiality. However, whereas, in the festival, I experience my potential subjectivity by identifying with others, I now experience it by identifying with an abstract symbol of wealth. In the first case, my value as a subject comes from my ability to relate to others and, in the second, it comes from the act of possession which involves the dispossession of others. My ownership of wealth becomes, so I believe, my means of retrieving my missing wholeness. The surplus, as both an object of excess and lack, symbolizes the absent plenitude of nature. Owning that surplus is supposed to restore the natural equilibrium it destroys. This paradox highlights the importance of imagination in our development. We attach great value to an object whose superfluity makes it ultimately valueless. Possessing wealth – a source of social inequality and segregation – becomes a means of attaining social esteem. We imbue abstract symbols with imaginary power and prestige. So, paradoxically, the surplus at once figures a gap in our world and also the missing object whose appropriation, we imagine, will close that gap. Far from leading to unity and integration, surplus production causes disputes among men as they fight to possess it. The labour of the farmer or the blacksmith should have given him property rights. However, that right is not necessarily recognized by others, since property, being symbolic, has no objective grounding: Even those who had been enriched by their own industry could not base their right to their property on better credentials. They might have said ‘I built this wall; I earned the right to this field by my own labour’. They might well be answered with ‘Who gave you the boundary lines? And on what basis do you demand payment from us for work we never requested from you? Are you unaware that vast numbers of your fellow men suffer or perish from need of things that you have to excess, and that you required the explicit and unanimous consent of the whole human race for you to appropriate from the common subsistence anything besides that required for your own?’ (DOI, 97/176)


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This quotation reinforces the discussion in Chapter 1 of how the discursive nature of society generates rather than paralyses political activity, underlining the contestable and renegotiable identity of all social phenomena. A discursive understanding of society does not negate material reality but demonstrates how that reality gets organized through discourse. Whether we define the farmer’s yield as his property or as part of the common subsistence will affect the material conditions of both the farmer and the community. The surplus therefore raises the question of property because it is not clear to whom it belongs, and what its purpose is. It not only leads to a quantifiable excess of foodstuffs or iron wares, but also to an excess of meaning in man’s world. Its superfluity – the fact that man has no immediate need for it – excites his imagination as he gradually identifies the ownership of wealth with self-fulfilment. We develop intellectually by being exposed to what disrupts the unity of the given, prompting us to reappraise it.21 Just as man’s self-understanding deepens as he experiences the other’s enigmatic gaze, so the notion of property rights arises with the advent of a surplus which cannot be apportioned to one individual without causing loss to others.

The Specious Contract: A Critique of Utopianism Developing society turns on a constant dialectic of loss and gain, lack and excess. The propertyless find themselves forced to either ‘receive or steal their subsistence from the hands of the rich’ (DOI, 98/177). Because of property’s precarious status in nascent society – its lack of any natural or legal sanction – owners are vulnerable to constant attack. Rousseau’s image of early society is reminiscent of Hobbes’s bellicose state of nature. However, for Rousseau, that war is not natural to humans: it occurs with socialization: Thus, the encroachments of the rich, the thievery of the poor, and the unbridled passions of everyone, stifling natural pity and the ill-hushed voice of justice, made men greedy, ambitious, and wicked. Between the right of the strongest and the right of the first occupant there arose a perpetual conflict that only ended in fights and murders. Nascent society made way for the most horrible state of war. (DOI, 98/177) Man ‘degraded and ravaged’ reaches an impasse, unable to return to the tranquillity of nature or to renounce his acquisitions, he faces mass

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destruction. In this general war, the rich ‘bore all the costs’ as ‘the risk of life was common to everyone but the risk of property theirs alone’, so their need to overcome this crisis was greatest. They devise the first political institution: the specious contract (DOI, 98/177). It is specious because it only serves the interests of one of the consenting parties, while posing as mutually beneficial. Rousseau condenses this major change into a speech act: ‘Let us join’ said he, ‘to guard the weak from oppression, to restrain the ambitious, and secure to every man the possession of what belongs to him: let us establish rules of justice and peace that everyone is obliged to conform to without favouring any one person, and that will make amends, as it were, for the caprices of fortune by subjecting the powerful and the weak equally to reciprocal duties. In short, rather than train our forces against each other, let us unite them together in one supreme power that will govern us all according to wise laws, protect and defend all the members of the association, fend off common enemies, preserve us in everlasting concord’. (DOI, 98/177) Many of the principles advanced by this contract are similar to those contained in Rousseau’s own theory of social contract: they both propose a general association which protects everyone’s interests through mutual obligations and reciprocal rights. Unlike the bogus contract, Rousseau’s social contract, however, never promises ‘everlasting concord’. This refutes Mouffe’s conclusion that the social contract claims to transcend antagonism completely and instate a transparent community.22 For Rousseau, we need to consent to a contract based on consciously-willed terms and laws because conflicts and tensions persevere in any state: ‘For a country which never evaded the laws and no one made a bad use of the powers of a magistrate would require neither laws nor magistrates’ (DOI, 110/188). If the social contract pledged eternal concord, it would deny its own conditions of existence, it would aim to dissolve itself. What makes the contract necessary – the absence of natural sanction – also makes it contingent: it can be always rescinded. The contract’s legitimacy remains permanently in question, requiring the citizens’ continual efforts to live by and defend its egalitarian terms by actively willing the general will. So it is only in the bogus contract that we find a utopian promise of a totally harmonious community. The Discourse offers a critique of that promise.23 The desire for a utopia is nourished by what makes its realization impossible. We dream of a perfect society because a crisis (the general state of war) reveals it as absent in the here and now. That dream promises


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to eliminate the negativity from which it originates and acquires its raison d’être. To conceal the violence underlying the need for the pact, the rich contractors speak of ‘common enemies’ or the ‘ambitious’ who need to be fended off. The war, being led by all and against all, cannot, however, be blamed on an isolated group. The ambitious or common enemy are actually the wealthy themselves who seek to establish their property rights at the expense of the needy. This ruse projects all antagonism outside the pact itself, thereby repressing the internal tensions and conflicts which require our participation in a pact based on common agreement. The contract’s self-contradictory character comes through in its pledge to engender complete social stability and the peaceful enjoyment of property for everyone by banishing common enemies. So universal and eternal peace can only be realized through exclusion and violence. This contradiction, argues Stavrakakis, explains why utopianism often causes totalitarianism, being driven more by the will to annihilate an enemy than to reconcile individual freedom and social cohesion.24 That drive eventually characterizes civil relations in the Discourse: domination and subjugation rather than equality and peace ensue from the first contract. For Rousseau, politics, as The Social Contract demonstrates, consists in the complex negotiation of personal freedom with the equality of laws, not in the elimination of an imaginary enemy. The Social Contract never mentions an external enemy but acknowledges the possibility of conflict from within the state itself. Antagonism, Mouffe maintains, only has potentially generative effects when recognized as internal rather than completely external to a social unity. By accepting it as internal, political communities realize their susceptibility to questioning and reconfiguration and also their responsibility to respond to tensions when they arise. That acceptance could also avoid seduction by the totalitarian dream of total order.25 The continuing feuding over property after the advent of the contract reveals the impossibility of locating the threat of antagonism totally outside and the need for individuals to account for their actions, to admit their own role in perpetrating the war. The first political institution negates the antagonistic dimension of the political and consequently the endless vigilance and critique which active participation in any contract implies.

Discourse and Being: A Critique of Ideology The rhetorical level of the Discourse reinscribes the gap between discourse and being. Through violent figures, it juxtaposes the utopian aspect of

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the contractors’ pledge of peace and justice (discourse) with the actual oppression and constraint resulting from the contract (being). The Discourse exposes this discrepancy in a violent image. Man’s gullibility causes him to seek emancipation in an agreement which actually leads to his enslavement: ‘All ran headlong for their chains in the belief they were securing their liberty’ (DOI, 98/177). The dramatic effect of this image uncovers the chasm between the seductive discourse of the wealthy and its non-egalitarian consequences, between what we take for reality and the real, between our dream of plenitude and emancipation, and the servitude and oppression of civil society which form the obverse of that dream. The speech act ‘this is mine’ which founds the fiction of property functions in a similar fashion. It undermines the self-evident appearance of property, and reintroduces the gap between fact and right which allows us to reappraise our understanding of reality. Our passive acceptance of discourse as a transparent reflection of reality eventually leads us to treat social inequalities as natural. We wish for a perfect society which would be as effortless and harmonious as the pure state of nature. However, any contract, as a discursive construct, requires its participants to struggle to make it real, to move from thought to action; it requires our critical engagement with its terms and obligations. The disruptive force of the Discourse alienates us from the civil institutions we unquestioningly take as a necessary part of reality, revealing their fictional character. It thereby reinstalls the non-identification or otherness which could make us think afresh about the conditions by which we live. The alienating or ‘dislocating’ effect of the Discourse’s rhetoric reactivates the contingent foundations of society and discloses its potential for refounding. The use of theatrical scenes and figures, by overtly fictionalizing key historical events, refuses any passive acceptance of history as an objective fact and prompts reflection on the distance between our abstract understanding of society and its empirical existence. So the Discourse foregrounds the ineliminable distinction between being and discourse which, for Lefort, underlies any social institution.26 We shall now consider Lefort’s theorization of that distinction because it helps explain the confluence of fact and fiction in Rousseau’s interpretation of reality and also shows how his political theory, far from totalitarian, is useful for actually considering how democracy differs from totalitarianism. A society, argues Lefort, relates to itself as a whole only by producing a representation of its unity. The founding of any society therefore occurs at a symbolic level but also has to include an imaginary element for it to be treated as reality by its members. While society imagines itself as unified,


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this unity can never be realized because of the social conflicts and differences which necessitate the production of that image in the first place. Society can therefore never become identical to its own image of itself, as its institution happens on the basis of a gap between its imagined wholeness and its real divisions, between discourse and being. Just as man only studies ‘Man’ by turning himself into an object of knowledge, so society only grasps itself as an idea or representation. That representation emerges from within the social itself and, yet, through its claim to grasp society in its entirety, refers to an indefinite beyond. Both man and society never account for the fact of their being, they are never completely reconciled with themselves, since they establish some form of identity only through a process of self-externalization, of representing themselves to themselves. This process therefore presupposes division. Lefort distinguishes between the fundamental division which founds any social order and the empirical divisions which are internal to that order. He states that Marx was the first to glimpse the illusion of society – the idea that it cannot explain is own institution. Retrospectively via the work of Lefort, we find this idea already present in Rousseau’s theorization of our social condition which emphasizes its intrinsic incompleteness.27 For example, Rousseau’s thinking, as we have seen, identifies two forms of alienation: the alienation or otherness which constitutes the self and the social and the secondary one which occasions the rivalry between equals in history. The first type of alienation cannot be eradicated as it generates the political: the question of the form and institution of society. However, our historical alienation through civil conflicts can be reduced by politics through the creation of laws and programmes which foster social unity; that reduction requires us to face up to, and deal with, the disagreement and antagonism which conditions our search for an egalitarian and free association. Social divisions get concealed, Lefort maintains, through ideology which has ‘the function of re-establishing society “without history” at the very heart of historical society’.28 Ideology gives timeless, and therefore illusory, certainty to a regime’s principles and practices which are always historically and culturally produced and often instated through struggle and conflict.29 Because ideology, as a discourse on society, comes from within the social itself and cannot appeal to any external support, it risks appearing as a particular discourse serving the interests of a specific group rather than those of the entire community. It therefore potentially compromises its own aims. By attempting to defend against the divisions which produce the desire for social cohesion, it actually reveals, through that defensive

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action, the permanent threat they cause to society. It cannot function without allowing a breach to appear between itself as just a particular discourse and what it actually speaks about.30 That breach opens the social sphere to redefinition by new discourses that privilege other interests and values in configuring society. The specious contract’s promise to instate eternal peace by defending against a common enemy has a similar function to what Lefort calls from his modern perspective totalitarian ideology. Totalitarianism, he asserts, responds to the modern problem of an authority without any transcendental guarantor, by trying ‘to weld power and society back together again, to efface all signs of social division, to banish the indeterminacy that haunts the democratic experience’.31 As the people always have different and opposing views, the attempt to impose absolute unity frequently rests on oppression and violence, on the negation of politics itself. The specious contract aims to erase the boundaries between the warring factions to unite them in ‘a supreme power’ in a bid for absolute order. It employs similar strategies to totalitarian ideology to the extent that it denies the conflict underlying the pact by projecting it onto the ‘outside’. Through identifying the disruptive element with a common enemy, it strives to encourage subservience among the people, for anyone who questions the contract is by default considered an outsider or an enemy. Through this ruse, the contractors’ discourse facilitates man’s gradual acquiescence to his oppression. Rousseau’s account of history exposes the false contract’s pledge of peace as deceitful. The ideology of that contract, despite its universal claims, appears, to borrow Lefort’s words, ‘as a generalised lie, as a discourse in the service of power, the mere mask of oppression’.32 The Discourse perpetually marks the gap between civil society’s ideological representation as a unified whole and how that society is: We could see the leaders foment everything that weakens assemblies of men by disuniting them, everything that might give society an air of seeming concord and sow in it seeds of real disunity, everything that might inspire distrust and mutual hatred in different social orders through conflict between their rights and their interests, and by these means strengthen the power that curbs them all. (DOI, 113/190) The leaders create the chimera of harmony to prevent awareness of the tensions requiring our active participation in a contract committed to reconciling individual and collective freedom. It paradoxically aims to


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ensure unity by fostering disunity. Its ideology therefore blinds us to the need to construct a general will, which depends, as we shall see, on the recognition of differences, to forestall the ascension to power of a selfinterested faction. While any society recurs to ideology to give certainty to its self-founding principles, the profoundly democratic society promoted by The Social Contract does not claim, unlike that of the false contract, total mastery of the social field. By periodically enabling citizens to reflect on and question the decisions and laws of the general will, it avows the impossibility of its ever being identical to the discourse which represents it and therefore never promises eternal peace. It appreciates how, stripped of any transcendental guarantor, power, legitimacy, identity and unity are always contestable. Rousseau’s distinction between the bogus contract and the legitimate one adumbrates Lefort’s distinction between totalitarianism and democracy. The principal difference between them, he maintains, is that totalitarianism seeks to determine the social field fully, to reduce society to its ideological description whereas democracy preserves indeterminacy, highlighting the chasm between society’s ‘unified self-conception and its real divisions’.33

The Constitutive Force of Alienation Democratic politics therefore views the constant gap between discourse and being as the condition of the people’s right to question and revise its understanding of itself as a society. ‘Political alienation’, writes Ingram about Lefort’s philosophy, ‘the condition in which one cannot identify entirely with society and how it is governed, is irreducible. Yet precisely this alienation guarantees the transcendent status of a society’s animating principles: society’s inability to correspond to its idea of itself provides the terms in which its actual arrangement can be contested’.34 Ingram opposes Rousseau’s thinking to that of Lefort, maintaining that his theory of the general will aims to eradicate political alienation outright.35 Our reading already undermines this view by showing how the non-convergence of man and the social in Rousseau’s philosophy underlies our freedom to redefine ourselves and our context. The Discourse’s rhetoric emphasizes that non-convergence. The paradoxical image of man running headlong into his chains to secure his freedom reveals the split in the construction of his political identity between the act of identification and the ensuing identity. The institution of hereditary rule offers another relevant example. We first agree to the

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specious contract for the legitimate reason of protecting our freedom. Through time, we become so used to our subservience to the rich that we no longer esteem freedom. Consequently, we come to see power as their property rather than at the disposal of our community. We therefore disavow the purely symbolic quality of power: the fact that our leaders are not identical to power, but merely represent it: ‘the eyes of the people were so bedazzled that their leaders had only to say to the least of men “Be great, with all your posterity”, and that man forthwith appeared great in everyone’s eyes as well as in his own’ (DOI, 110/188). The performative force of this speech act – its grounding of hereditary rule – eventually gets masked as man takes it as a factual description. Rousseau revives its performative dimension, but, this time, by contrast, to ‘unground’ hereditary rule by exposing its arbitrary origins. He thereby warns again against the dangers of interpreting any discourse as transparent or literal, stressing the need for any society to adopt a self-critical attitude to its own self-representation. The poetic writing of the Discourse reactivates the contingency of our acts and decisions throughout history, highlighting the difference between the social as a realm of rule-bound practices and the political as the elusive moment of grounding/ungrounding. It thus strives to repoliticize the structures and relations we take for granted, evoking the uncertainty of any political institution. History does not occur in a linear, inexorable fashion but represents possibility itself. We can never claim total control of the change we enact: real change, by its very nature, breaks continuity, opening up to an imagined, and thus underdetermined, future. We only grasp its full impact retrospectively, after the event. This dimension of deferred effect structures the portrayal of history in the Discourse. We agree to the first contract without any a priori knowledge of its outcome or success. We then elect a government once experience has taught us the deficiencies of the pact: its susceptibility to abuse (DOI, 101/180). The government supplements the contract by apparently offering the security and defence of freedom which the contract itself was supposed to give us. Through this act of supplementation, we both affirm and negate the contract’s failure to fulfil its promise. History is composed of a series of substitutions which seek to compensate society’s lack – its absence of natural grounding. Those substitutes never restore plenitude, constantly referring back to the absence they allegedly fill. The recurrence of that lack activates our agency or perfectibility. In Chapter 2, we argued that we feel our humanity or perfectibility most urgently when faced with unforeseeable events which call upon us to invent strategies and make


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decisions. The unforeseen character of these events means that there are no pre-established guidelines or rules to follow in order to contend with them; we have to create them, using our perfectibility. That experience distances us from the current status quo, allowing us to react to the new. We remain accountable for our decisions and actions because we understand their impact retroactively, because we never know fully in advance their consequences.

Conclusion Rousseau’s overt fictionalization of key historical changes reduces the rich man’s ideology to nothing more than a discourse whose attempt deceptively to mask social divisions behind a façade of eternal peace and unity discloses its own vulnerability to contestation and revision. It exposes the split between the process of instituting and the institution itself, between the act of identification and the identity itself. ‘The concealment of this split’, argues Laclau, ‘is deeply rooted in Western metaphysics and in the political philosophy deriving from it’. Recognizing that split, he maintains, has produced ‘a historical mutation’ which reinscribes the distinction between ‘presencing and what is present’, between ‘political ordering and the actual order which was implemented’, indicating the scope for radical critique and transformation. 36 Derrida, as we have observed, links Rousseau’s philosophy to the metaphysical tradition critiqued by Laclau. Our reading counters this view: while human history, for Rousseau, tries to hide that split, his theoretical and poetic account of that history continually reinscribes it, showing the inherent non-closure of politics, the impossibility of a fi nal and indisputable foundation for society. The use of violent figures and theatrical scenes in the Discourse emphasizes the dichotomy between the people’s desires and their translation into politics. By exposing our misidentification with unjust institutions, these fictional devices suggest the constructed nature of identity and its susceptibility to re-articulation. Rousseau does not offer us an alternative form of identification: there is no authentic self or society: even humanity’s golden age contains tensions. Rather the Discourse forces us to identify with the gap or space of non-identification existing between us and society as the condition of new identifications. It thereby resists the work of ideology which blinds us to the perfectibility of ourselves and our world, reducing us to an inhuman state of unreflective conformity. Recognizing our perfectibility

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entails recognizing the difference between the fact of our current self and society and the right to strive for a better self and society. In this way, the disruptive force of the Discourse’s rhetoric perhaps responds to what Strong describes as the problem, for Rousseau, of how ‘to retain’ or rather, perhaps, to represent ‘our original nothingness as an interior quality of the human itself,’ for that nothingness extends the possibility of our always being otherwise.37

Chapter 4

An Ethics of Democracy

We have argued that our lack of natural sociability means that we are never one with society and this lack provides the condition of our polit ical engagement with it. In the absence of any realizable ideal, we remain always free to question and change any regime in response to new demands and identities. Rousseau’s use of rhetoric in the Discourse reactivates the contingency of civilization, estranging us from those institutions and values which we treat as necessary, by disclosing their openness to contestation and revision. Our socialization involves struggle and also sacrifice as we renounce our unlimited freedom to do what we want and internalize norms and laws to become a member of a community whose identity, like our own, never gets definitively established. We therefore have to separate from ourselves to imagine ourselves part of a wider whole. This division conditions our social integration, leaving us always partially alienated from the order to which we look to understand who we are and our relation to our community. Our difference from society gives us the critical distance, as The Social Contract underlines, necessary to will the laws shaping the whole. To participate in this process, I cannot simply focus on the general will: I must be aware both of my limits as a particular will among many so that I try to transcend them and identify with the common cause and also of the limits of my community so that I participate in its perpetual construction. The shift from the competitive self-interest ruling civil society in the Discourse to the egalitarian social contract requires us to change radically. We have to accept how our particular interests and desires may conflict with the general needs of the community and periodically relegate them as we will the terms by which we coexist. If our interests were naturally compatible, we would never reflect on what constitutes society and seek to institute it through laws and agreements. This antagonism prevents society from becoming a fully integrated whole. While its inherent incompleteness enables freedom and transformation, it also indicates the uncertainty

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underlying our quest for universal justice and equality. This friction, for Lefort, Laclau and Mouffe, inaugurates the democratic experience of a society without ultimate foundation in which ‘what is instituted never becomes established, the known remains undetermined by the unknown, the present proves undefinable’.1 Democracy’s ambiguity and indeterminacy raises the ethical issue of how to organize our communal relations in the absence of any essential unity. An ethos of ‘everlasting concord’ would disavow the contestation and frictions nourishing democratic politics as would a set of objective norms claiming to guarantee the good life. The Discourse provides a powerful reminder of how such an ethos does not eliminate antagonism but simply represses it only for it to return in more extreme forms. An ethics of democracy needs to work within the tensions defining democracy itself. This chapter examines how the affect of pity could be channelled into cultivating a democratic ethos which urges us to respond to society’s incompleteness, its distance from its ideal of universal justice, through association with the socially marginalized who expose that distance. As we saw in Chapter 2, pity indicates how our difference from others provides the basis for our identification with them. Rousseau’s theorization of pity, particularly regarding its role in Emile’s moral education, could shed light on democracy’s ethical implications. On this point, Rousseau’s thinking supplements Laclau’s and Mouffe’s work. Laclau and Mouffe independently reflect on the ethical and while that reflection begins, as we shall see, to think through an ethics of democracy2, it never really analyses the types of commitments and identifications a radical democracy aiming to increase freedom and equality might entail.3 Rousseau’s account of pity explores more fully citizens’ ethical responsibilities. Its emphasis on difference and insufficiency as central for association conceives a way out of the deadlock of civil relations, and could help provide the ethical support for the democratic community imagined by The Social Contract.

The Deadlock of Civil Relations: The ‘Joys of Domination’ Rousseau’s analysis of civilization depicts the violence ensuing from a denegation of difference and the pursuit of total mastery. Against his predecessors, Rousseau claims that civil society is born of a desire to protect freedom rather than of voluntary servitude.4 However, through history, we gradually acquiesce to our oppression or more precisely enjoy it, falling for the illusion of tranquillity through subjection. Rousseau identifies a


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self-transgressive tendency in our conduct: we constantly transgress the ideals we affirm. The Discourse explains the ‘the sequence of miracles’ by which ‘the strong’ ‘submit to serve the weak’ and the people ‘purchase imaginary repose at the expense of real felicity’ (DOI, 50/132). Reality, for Rousseau, always contains an imaginary dimension. That dimension, we argue, enchains us to our self-defeating attempts to achieve fullness and mastery through voluntary servitude. As we recall, man acquires his sense of self through identification with others. While comparison with others allows me to apprehend myself as an individual, it also makes me aware of my incompleteness, my dependence on them. The individual self is thus partly imaginary, being produced through the division between self and other. My feeling of difference from others should lead me to identify with them as I seek to compensate that feeling through association: if we were totally alike, the question of our commonality would not arise. However, with time, I deal with that feeling by violently excluding or dominating them to fuel my dream of an undivided and supreme self. I fantasize that if it were not for them, I would be complete. So to affirm myself, I suppress and attack those on whom I actually partly rely for my sense of self. This act of self-transgression is both painful and pleasurable: pleasurable because it feeds my fantasy of fullness and painful because far from liberating me from those who supposedly rob me of wholeness, it enthrals me even more to them: ‘one thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they’ (SC, 181/351). Domination requires an object to dominate; absolute domination would annul itself, for, by depriving the object of its independence, it would render the need for domination redundant. I therefore dominate my fellow kind only because their freedom becomes threatening to me, bringing my lack of freedom to consciousness. For example, civilization’s uneven development means that ‘Some peoples came solely to be ruled by their laws; others soon came to obey masters. Citizens wished to preserve their freedom; subjects, however, irritated at seeing others enjoying a blessing they had lost, thought only of making slaves of their neighbours’ (DOI, 108/186). Rather than resisting my subordination, I vainly try to restore a feeling of lost mastery by oppressing my neighbours. 5 I thus deny how my neighbours do not enjoy freedom at my expense or possess it de facto but follow laws to protect it. My dream of mastery is subverted by the acts of exclusion and subordination which seemingly support it. Those defensive acts actually express my sense of being threatened by others which they supposedly defend against.

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The deadlock of civil relations is sustained by the ‘ joys of domination’. Our quest for power is libidinally rather than rationally motivated: The rich, for their part, had hardly learned the joys of domination before they disdained all other ones, and using their current slaves to subdue new ones, they dreamed only of subjugating and enslaving their neighbours, like those ravenous wolves that, having once tasted human flesh, reject all other nourishment and thenceforth desire only to feed on man. (DOI, 96/175–176) Rousseau, unlike his predecessors, vehemently rejects the idea that slavery is a natural consequence of civilization, illustrating the flawed logic of a pact of submission whereby a people agrees unconditionally to obey a master. This ‘empty and contradictory convention’ establishes, ‘on the one side, absolute authority, and, on the other, unlimited obedience’, lacking ‘the equivalence of exchange’ necessary for a valid contractual agreement. Rousseau explains ‘the nullity of (this) act’: the master, possessing absolute authority, has the right to do as he pleases and so, unbound by any convention, cannot breach the pact (SC, 189/356). Rousseau, refusing any rational explanation for our willing enslavement, examines, in the Discourse, the affective aspect of submission and domination, the pleasure we reap from the pain of being dominated and dominating. A fantasy of complete mastery governs civilization as man strives to retrieve the missing fullness others supposedly block. That fantasy produces jouissance or enjoyment: the unconscious pleasure we take in what we consciously experience as displeasure:6 ‘Citizens allow themselves to be oppressed only so far as they are impelled by blind ambition; and fi xing their eyes below rather than above themselves, they relish domination more than independence, and agree to wear chains for the sake of in turn imposing chains on others’ (DOI, 79/188). This quotation reveals man’s split identity between, in this case, his ideal and his transgressive enjoyment.7 We seek supremacy by the self-contradictory means of voluntary servitude. Far from undermining our fantasy of wholeness, our selfenslavement actually nourishes it.8 By subjugating ourselves, we reinforce the idea that it is others who thwart our desire for mastery, thereby denying the lack of natural authority which makes us all responsible for ensuring our society’s freedom and which deprives anyone of us supremacy. I enjoy my own oppression despite the suffering it causes me because it creates the mirage that somewhere along the chain of domination and subjugation there is a master who, unrestricted by other wills, enjoys total authority.


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By oppressing my equals for my master, I experience by proxy that unconstrained enjoyment I associate with him. ‘Fixing (my) eyes below rather than above’, I deny his dependence on my slavery and believe that he, possessing absolute power, is not entangled in the dialectic of subjecting and subjection in which I find myself. I thereby ignore how his power cannot be absolute for it rests on my willingness to effect his orders.

Joyless Domination: The Second State of Nature By submitting to a master, we protect ourselves from the impasse of our desire for fullness which is kept alive by its non-fulfilment, by its impossibility: we desire fullness only because we sense its absence. Our identity is always socially mediated: even the master relies on others for confirmation of his self. The quest for harmony and order through servitude ends in unrest and oppression. Man’s political development culminates in a second state of nature: ‘Here all private persons return to their first equality, because they are nothing; and subjects having no law but the will of their master, and their master, no restraint but his passions, all notions of good and all principles of equity again vanish’ (DOI, 114/191). Our attempts to achieve superiority over our equals paradoxically reduce us to nothing, restoring, through our common enslavement to a despot, the equality we have repressed (DOI, 112/189). Behind the dream of an omnipotent master lurks an impotent figure whose authority rests entirely on the arbitrary law of the strongest: Here, everything is brought back solely to the law of the strongest, and hence to a new state of nature differing from the one with which we began in that the one was the state of nature in its pure form and the other the fruit of excessive corruption. There is so little difference, moreover, between the two states, and the despot so fully dissolves the contract of government that he remains master only as long as he is the strongest; when he is driven out, he has no right to protest against violence. (DOI, 114/191) The despot rules through ‘force alone’ and ‘it is force alone that overthrows him’. His unconstrained authority dissolves into unconstrained violence: ‘The popular insurrection which kills or dethrones the Sultan is as a lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and fortunes of his subjects’ (DOI, 114/191). The fantasy of ‘eternal concord’

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propagated by the specious contract terminates in the conflict and chaos which necessitated that contract in the first place. A Utopian fantasy, notes Žižek, always comprises at once a beatific side, a stabilising dimension – a dream state of perfect order – and a profoundly destabilising dimension which prevents its actualization.9 If a community adopts as its reality a utopian dream of concord, then it has to disavow the antagonism intrinsic to this dream. However, we cannot separate the two coordinates of fantasy, since that fantasy gains its force from the antagonism which makes it both necessary and impossible. So it is therefore only valid in so far as an element in the present stops its realization. The second state of nature reveals how the pure state of nature cannot be literally imitated in society and any attempt to do so neglects the frictions and uncertainties which require political commitment. ‘The flaws’, writes Rousseau, ‘which make social institutions necessary are the same as make the abuse of them unavoidable’ (DOI, 109/187). Any repression of the antagonistic dimension of the political always returns, confronting us with extreme violence and oppression.10 Rousseau’s hypothetical history alerts us to the indeterminacy underlying any political institution which, on the one hand, allows us to claim freedom and equality as we define the terms of our association and, on the other, leaves any struggle for democracy unfinished and in constant need of renewal and defence. We, therefore, cannot resign ourselves to the abuse of laws and power but must militate against them. The second state of nature, not differing that greatly from the first, indicates the lack of any natural social grounding inaugurating our attempts to construct society and enabling its constant reconstruction. Like the speech acts and figures discussed in the previous chapter, it forces us to identify with this traumatic and yet liberating lack which defines us as ‘the builders and agents of change of (our) own world’, urging us to ‘realize that (we) are not tied to or by any objective necessity of history, to any institution or way of life – either in the present or in the future’.11 At the final stage of history, we ‘traverse’ or pass through fantasy, glimpsing how our dream of tranquillity in servitude was just that – a dream.12 We confront, in the words of Žižek, the loss of the loss: ‘when faced with breakdown in the hitherto stable order, ‘loss of loss’ names the experience of how this preceding stability was itself false, masking internal strife’.13 This alienating experience could provoke in us the urgent need to rethink how we understand reality. The possibility of a more legitimate regime arises from within this turbulent state, which, without laws and conventions, reveals, like the first state of nature, society’s absent fullness. ‘The conversion of legitimate


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into arbitrary power’ establishes the relation of ‘master and slave, which is the last degree of inequality’ whereby ‘the government is either entirely dissolved by new revolutions, or brought back again to legitimacy’ (DOI, 109/187). Engels’s dialectical interpretation of the Discourse argues that this negation of tyranny produces synthesis: our common oppression allows us to realize our power to overthrow our oppressor and reach a higher state of unity whose principles The Social Contract supplies.14 This reading, observes Starobinski, overlooks how revolutionary change, for Rousseau, represents a possible rather than predetermined outcome.15 Noting this observation, I argue that this negation does not engender synthesis but uncovers nature’s founding negativity: the absence of any final and indisputable social grounding. A legitimate transformation could happen only if we renounce our fantasy of a master and appreciate our collective responsibility in building and perfecting our communities. Our society’s legitimacy depends on our efforts to contend with difference and antagonism as we both protect and extend freedom and equality.

The Abyss of Freedom At the end of the Discourse, the abyss of freedom emerges which is ‘liberating and enslaving, exhilarating and traumatic, enabling and destructive’.16 That abyss – the lack of any ultimate constraint – both enables liberty and also radical attempts to negate it. Faced with the unknown, a people is at its most vulnerable to being seduced by authoritarian figures whose claims to embody social truth seem to offer a way of immediately filling the void left by the loss of a regime. Former struggles against non-egalitarian forces have to be frequently remembered so that we are always ready to resume them, if necessary, and also to keep alive and deepen the desire for emancipation. ‘Having broken the chains that were being prepared for them’, writes Rousseau of the people of Poland, ‘they feel the heaviness of fatigue. They would like to combine the peace of despotism with the sweets of liberty. I fear that they may be seeking contradictory things. Repose and liberty seem incompatible to me: you must choose between them’. In a state of radical uncertainty, a people dreams of an ideal regime immune to abuse and strife. Whereas that dream of perfection can help project it beyond social negativity – beyond the absence of any ideal in reality – so that it can begin to imagine a better future, such a dream can equally lure it into forgetting to act on the current imperfections, to continue resisting. Not to relinquish the battle against despotism, the Poles, argues Rousseau, must

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recall how ‘at the heart of the very anarchy which you hate were formed the patriotic souls who have saved you from the yoke of slavery’ (GP, 161/954– 955). They need, Žižek would argue, ‘to tarry with the negative’, that is, to endure the indeterminacy involved in committing themselves to a not yet existent order without losing sight of the struggles and aspirations which unite them as a people.17 Democratization entails our affective investment in a political form which, not purporting definitively to magic away instability, promotes questioning, contestation and revision. This difficult transition indicates the simultaneously retroactive and future dimension of democratic institution which, as we shall see in Chapter 7, Rousseau’s discussion of the lawgiver explores. To become democratic, a newly formed people must be able to write its own laws without yet possessing the experience or understanding to do so. That experience can only be acquired by having already lived democratically. This irresolvable paradox opens the people to the promise of a more free and equal future and also to the uncertainty of ‘a society in which power, law and knowledge are exposed to a radical indetermination’.18 This promise, as Rousseau’s fear for the Polish people suggests, contains the threat of its own betrayal. That threat means that we must never take for granted the freedom and equality for which we have fought but must carry on fighting for them before we ‘sense these advantages’ only ‘when they are already lost’ (GP, 161/955).

Traversing the Fantasy To overcome the deadlock of civilization, we must accept how society is always-already divided and it is that division underlying our attempts to imagine and construct it as a whole. Instead of vilifying others, the Discourse enjoins us to seek, what Žižek would call, ‘ “solidarity in the common struggle” when I discover that the deadlock which hampers me is the deadlock which hampers the Other’.19 I realise how the alterity which I believe blocks society’s full constitution is actually ‘the positive condition’ of my desire for fullness.20 To go from rivalry to the egalitarian social contract, we have to see how our common differentiation actually necessitates our cooperation in willing and fulfilling the laws and obligations of the pact. Rousseau’s analysis of pity helps theorize a relation to others which acknowledges difference as the basis of identification. Building on Žižek’s reflection, Mouffe calls for an ethics of democracy ‘which strives to create among us a new form of bond that recognizes us


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as divided subjects’, which ‘does not dream of an impossible reconciliation because it acknowledges that not only the multiplicity of ideas of the good is irreducible but also that antagonism and violence are ineradicable’. The ethical issue of how to contend with that violence and antagonism, she maintains, should preoccupy democratic politics.21 An ethics of pity, I argue, answers this call: ‘pity is a potent expression of the divided self’,22 rooted in what Mouffe would describe as ‘the impossibility of the complete reabsorption of alterity’.23 My claim that Rousseau’s analysis of pity could help think through the ethical challenges of democracy refutes Mouffe’s own claim that Rousseau, among other Enlightenment thinkers, is behind the current belief in an ethics of human reciprocity which purports to eliminate completely the hostility from which ethical concerns often derive.24 Before exploring what an ethics of pity involves, we shall consider why an ethical form which posits complete harmony and full reconciliation is incongruous with democracy. For Lefort, the democratic revolution, as we recall, produces a new mode of social institution in which power becomes ‘an empty place’.25 The fact that power is no longer embodied in the person of the prince or linked to any transcendental authority strips society of ‘a final guarantee or source of legitimation’; social unity cannot be presupposed but has to be struggled for. ‘What remains is a society without clearly defined outlines, a social structure that is impossible to describe from the perspective of a single, or universal, point of view. It is in this way that democracy is characterized by “a dissolution of markers of certainty.” ’26 Awareness of the absence of any definite grounding inaugurates the democratic form which accepts that ‘there is no law that can be fixed, whose articles cannot be contested, whose foundations are not susceptible of being called into question’.27 Democracy’s acceptance of disagreement, division and contestation as generative of unity prevents its realization as a harmonious whole. This ambiguity challenges us ‘to distinguish between the just and unjust, the legitimate and illegitimate’ while affirming how ‘this can only be done from within a given tradition, with the help of the standards that this tradition provides’ and how ‘there is no point of view external to all tradition from which one can offer a universal judgement’.28

Man’s Moral Openness Rousseau’s political thinking also affirms the absence of a completely impartial perspective from which we could survey morality and politics.

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It does not prescribe a model for the good life.29 Social man, being historically and culturally produced, constantly differs from himself and therefore ‘one ought not to seek among us what is good for men in general, but only what is good for them in this time or that country’ (LA, 17/16). What allows for moral freedom, we argued in Chapter 2, is the absence of any impartial and strictly universal standards which could guarantee us from error, misjudgement and wrongdoing. Good and evil ‘are always blended together’ (E, 51/303). Human development in the Discourse foregrounds this undecidability: we do not progress unambiguously towards either improvement or deterioration. For example, to our ‘unremitting rage’ for self-distinction, ‘we owe the best and the worst things we possess, both our virtues and vices, our science and our errors, our conquerors and philosophers’ (DOI, 112/189). De Man, criticizing Derrida for his claim that Rousseau conceives progress as clearly bifurcated between good and bad, argues ‘it would be difficult to match the rigour with which Rousseau always asserts, at the same time and at the same level of explicitness, the simultaneous movement towards progress and retrogression’.30 This undecidability constitutes the political decision and ethical responsibility, as ‘we can never be completely satisfied that we have made a good choice since a decision in favour of some alternative is always to the detriment of another one’.31 Because of this deep uncertainty, we always remain accountable for our decisions and actions and should therefore adopt a self-critical attitude towards them. The impossibility of a single definition of the good not only stems from man’s and society’s inherent perfectibility but also paradoxically from his natural goodness. Man, ‘having no moral relations or determinate obligations one with another could not be either good or bad, virtuous or vicious’ (DOI, 71/152). He starts out as morally neutral and that neutrality suggests his irreducibility to any predefined moral order. As a purely physical creature, his goodness refers, then, to how the pre-reflexive principles of self-preservation and pity keep him from harming himself and others. Rousseau follows Hobbes in attributing the instinct of self-preservation to man but departs from him by also attributing pity – man’s innate repugnance at seeing suffering. Both thinkers assert the absence of moral categories in nature but Hobbes draws moral conclusions from this fact to which Rousseau objects: Above all, let us not conclude, with Hobbes, that because man had no idea of goodness, he must be naturally wicked; that he is vicious because he does not know virtue; that he always refuses to do his fellow-creatures


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services which he does not think they have a right to demand; or by virtue of the right he justly claims to all his needs, he foolishly imagines himself the sole proprietor of the whole universe [. . .] Hobbes did not reflect that the same cause, which prevents a savage from making use of his reason [. . .] prevents him from abusing his faculties. (DOI, 72/153) For Rousseau, as we have argued, to be virtuous, we have consciously to choose to do what we consider right both for ourselves and others and the need to make that choice coincides with an awareness of our own tendency for vice and the will to resist it. The natural absence of morality does not cause immorality: laws and moral codes are necessary only because of conflicting and violent passions and ‘we would do well to inquire if these evils did not spring up with the laws themselves’ (DOI, 77/157). So the question of antecedence – whether laws come before crime or crime before laws – remains irresolvable. Laws are internally compromised, drawing their necessity from the crimes and vices which they are supposed to stop. Transgression of the law paradoxically reinforces the law. Whereas man’s ignorance of virtue, for Hobbes, presupposes his malevolence; for Rousseau, it presupposes ‘the peacefulness of his passions’, his ‘ignorance of vice’, his amorality (DOI, 72/154). For Rousseau, our basic amorality suggests our moral autonomy rather than any specific moral order for us. This point differentiates him from Hobbes. The Hobbesian natural man, conscious of his mortality, eventually realizes how the pursuit of power jeopardizes his survival and consequently seeks security in a sovereign figure. His unrestricted pre-political independence necessitates a state of unrestricted dependence on external authority. Peace, for Hobbes, can only be maintained through coercion, through the constant enforcement of laws which protect us from one another.32 The egoism Hobbes judges intrinsic to man rules out the possibility of a democratic society which negotiates individual freedom with civic freedom, the right to self-determination with equality before the law; a society which allows us to take responsibility for defining, and how we are defined by, our context. In Hobbes’s state, citizens experience laws as an external command issued by a sovereign. For Rousseau, a state which is imposed on its people would eventually descend into unrest. In The Social Contract, Rousseau addresses this problem through man’s total alienation: his voluntarily giving of all his rights to his community. Through this act, we conceive the law not as some externally imposed sanction whose enforcement secretly incites us to transgress it but as a source of social improvement to which we freely consent. Everyone becomes equal before the law, being both sovereign and subject. Total alienation, by excluding

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any social position beyond the law, frustrates our fantasies of a master who enjoys unconstrained freedom. The promise of a better future now lies primarily in the making, fulfilling, and revising of the laws which define us as a community. Rousseau’s insistence on our basic amorality leaves open the question of the political – society’s form and mode of institution – by refusing any simple causality between our pre-social and social situation. It leads him to rework the sublime maxim of rational justice ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ – the moral basis of the Hobbesian state – as the ‘less perfect’ but ‘more useful’ maxim of natural goodness ‘Do what is good to yourself with as little possible harm to others’ (DOI, 76/156). This reformulation takes account of the impossibility of reducing self to other, difference to the same. I cannot expect others automatically to live by my moral precepts; I cannot calculate the others’ reactions and behaviour in terms of my understanding of the good. That irreducibility, by excluding complete identification which, were it possible, would destroy the critical distance necessary for self-other awareness, keeps alive the question of how to respond to others.

An Ethics of Pity Rousseau’s theorization of pity defines the ethical as a concern for ‘what sort of community [we can] have as divided subjects’.33 An ethics of pity is premised on the fact that ‘we are united through our common alienation from the world’34: ‘Man’s weakness makes him sociable. Our common sufferings draw our hearts to our fellow creatures; we should have no duties to humankind if we were not men. Every affection is a sign of insufficiency; if each of us had no need of others, we should hardly think of associating with them’ (E, 218/503). We are therefore not brought together by a feeling of plenitude. Plenitude, as the metaphor of nature shows, would isolate us from humanity. If we were ‘self-sufficing’ we would feel no necessity for association: ‘I do not understand how one who has need of nothing could love anything, nor do I understand how he loves nothing can be happy’ (E, 218/503). A feeling of disconnection from others prompts us to identify with them. An ethics of pity entails giving up the fantasy of others as blocking wholeness and an awareness of how society is always-already divided and therefore requires a collective effort to improve it. Pity, projecting us beyond ourselves, provides the basis of ‘all social virtues’: ‘what is generosity, clemency, or humanity but compassion applied


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to the weak, to the guilty, or to humankind in general? Even benevolence and friendship are, if we judge rightly, only the effects of compassion, constantly set upon a particular object: for how is it different to wish that another person may not suffer and to wish him happy?’ (DOI, 75/155). Pity supplies a vital component of our potential for goodness, allowing us to relate to others in a non-oppressive fashion, thereby counterbalancing the violent power struggle characterizing history for Rousseau and nature for Hobbes. As the first diversion of self-love, pity acts as a ‘brake’ on its potential violence, deflecting the drive to self-preservation from the individual to the living. Lacoue-Labarthe stresses the ethical and political dimension of these passions which substitute morality and law in nature and need reactivating through reason in society. He likens them to Aristotle’s tragic passions – fear and compassion – ‘the two transcendental (and antinomical) affects of sociality’. Self-love (fear) designates ‘the affect of dissociation’ and pity ‘the affect of association’. For Lacoue-Labarthe, they ‘are responsible for regulating or “moderating” the excess of two equally disastrous possibilities: either the war of all against all or a totally fused community’.35 Their interdependence reinforces our analysis in Chapter 3 of how the dissociative operation of antagonism underlies the building of political associations. This tension confirms how compassionate identification begins from separation and difference rather than from perfect symmetry. Despite being constitutive, that tension contains a risk: if the dissociative dimension prevails, pity degenerates into vanity and pride as we experience the other’s suffering as vindication of our superiority. To avoid this risk, we must generalize the feeling of pity to encompass humanity. We must conceive the other’s suffering as an injustice which raises the universal question of justice. Pity’s legitimate functioning requires abstraction: the movement from the particular to the general. Imagination, which humanizes pity, makes that abstraction possible. As animals have no imagination, pity is a virtual faculty in their case. Without imagination, pity, as an associative force, would remain dormant and enclosed upon the self, ‘for it is only through the imagination that we can feel the sorrows of others’ (E, 231/517). ‘Habit overpowers imagination’ for ‘what is always before the eyes no longer appeals to imagination’ (E, 118/384; 231/517). Imagination, stimulated by difference and absence, indicates how compassionate identification does not involve immediacy and presence: ‘We only suffer as far as we suppose he suffers; the suffering is not ours but his. So no one becomes sensitive till his imagination is aroused and begins to carry him outside himself’ (E, 220/505–506). To feel another’s pain, we have to detach that pain from

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ourselves and acknowledge it as belonging to that other; identification rests on a degree of non-identification.36 That non-identification enables intersubjectivity: the complete convergence of subject and object would immobilize all reflection and lock man permanently in his primordial insularity. Pity never reduces the other to the same. Imagination, reflection and judgment awaken pity and also limit its force, by excluding the paralysing effects of total identification. By distancing the pain of the pitied, these faculties prevent the observer from merging with the other’s suffering. Recognition of difference is not only crucial for self-protection but also for the protection of the pitied: the subject has to feel his own strength – his freedom from suffering – to realize his ability to aid and defend the sufferer: ‘To pity another’s woes we must indeed know them, but we need not feel them. When we have suffered, when we are in fear of suffering, we pity those who suffer; but when we suffer ourselves, we pity none but ourselves’ (E, 228/514). Awareness of my lack of suffering prompts me to imagine how I potentially could suffer like the person I pity. That lack at once distances me from the sufferer as I apprehend my strength but also connects me to him, by indicating our shared vulnerability. Compassion transports me beyond not only myself to an empirical other but also towards humanity. My link with humanity emerges negatively through my realization of my freedom from suffering which provides the positive condition for my realization of wellbeing as an aspiration common to humankind, and to all acts of human solidarity. Compassionate identification defines my self-love – my drive to self-preservation – as a mark both of my strength and my vulnerability, of my independence from, and dependence on, others. While ‘our weakness’ engenders association, our combined strength promotes and safeguards the freedom and equality of that association. Pity, when functioning legitimately, brings us to experience difference, lack and insufficiency as calling for solidarity. Its ethical dimension reveals the fullness of community as present in its absence, as each particular case of suffering represents a violation of our humanity and our common concern for human welfare.37 As we saw in Chapter 1, general ideas have no objective reality, acquiring representation only through the particular. Pity assumes ethical import through its generalization and extension to humankind (E, 258/548). This process prevents pity from deteriorating into weakness, whereby we take others’ suffering as a sign of our strength to exploit and dominate them rather than to help them through cooperation. Once each individual example of suffering is linked to ‘the abstract idea of humanity’, it denotes the absence of justice: ‘the virtue which contributes most to the common good’ (E, 258/548). Justice,


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like any general idea, cannot be reduced to any particular content but can be conceived, writes Laclau, as ‘the positive reverse of a situation lived in negative terms: deprivation, dislocation, disorder, etc’.38 Likewise, justice, for Rousseau, is not something we consciously enjoy and therefore cannot ‘inspire enthusiasm’ in itself but becomes a pressing question only when we realize its absence (GP, 955/162). Exposure to others’ suffering connects us to humanity through the injustice it discloses, pricking our conscience from which, asserts Rousseau, the quest for justice arises. By generalizing pity, we confront the gap between what is and what ought to be which inaugurates all ethical experience and reflection.

The Limits of Pity The ethical dimension of pity therefore discloses that gap as a call to contestation and action. Pity loses that dimension when taken as a ‘pure feeling’, as an end in itself. Rousseau condemns this failure to see the distance between the feeling of pity and the wider political concerns it invokes, when discussing theatre audiences’ empty compassionate displays: I hear it said that tragedy leads to pity through fear. So it does but what is this pity? A fleeting and vain emotion which lasts no longer than the illusion which produced it; a vestige of natural sentiment soon stifled by the passions; a sterile pity which feeds on a few tears which has never produced the slightest act of humanity. Thus, the sanguinary Sulla cried at the account of the evils he had not himself committed. Thus, the tyrant of Phera hid himself at the theatre for fear of being seen groaning with Andromache and Priam, while he heard without emotion the cries of so many unfortunate victims slain daily by his orders. (LA, 24/23) Pity is not weakened by the fact that, in the theatre, we react to imaginary scenes of suffering, since our emotions can reach ‘the same level of pain’ as those evoked by real scenes. It is weakened because the emotions ‘are pure and without mixture of anxiety for ourselves. In giving our tears to fictions, we have satisfied all the rights of humanity without having to give anything of ourselves’ (LA, 25/23). As we saw in Chapter 2, reason can block pity as we interpret our own absence of suffering as the precise reason for not needing to help. Conversely, in the theatre, far from blocking pity, we actually give ourselves over to it but the result remains the same: it does not induce ethical and political action.

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Compassion in itself does not therefore trigger the search for justice. In these vain acts of pity, the spectator experiences an imaginary state of completion and fullness which forestalls critical reflection: When a man has gone to admire fine actions in stories and to cry for imaginary miseries, what more can be asked of him? Is he not satisfied with himself? Does he not applaud his fine soul? Has he not acquitted himself of all that he owes to virtue by the homage which he has just rendered it? What more could one want of him? That he practise it himself? He has no role to play; he is no actor. (LA, 25/23–24) The spectator takes his expression of pity as a transparent expression of his humanity, ignoring the discrepancy between the feeling of compassion and the absent fullness which inspires it, between the particular example of suffering and the universal concern for human wellbeing it symbolizes. By relieving in an illusory fashion his conscience, by creating a mirage of a harmonious whole, the denial of that discrepancy closes the individual to humanity in the same way that the harmony and order of nature does: Thus the most advantageous impression of the best tragedies is to reduce all the duties of men to some passing and sterile emotions that have no consequences, to make us applaud our courage in praising that of others, our humanity in pitying the ills that we could have cured, our charity in saying to the poor, God will help you! (LA, 26/24) Rousseau objects to how spectators identify with the resolution of tragedy on stage as mirroring reality, as reflecting an image of a self fully reconciled with its world. Full reconciliation would deprive us of any ‘role’, of any need to be ‘an actor’. Our compassion for the characters on stage does not induce a feeling of insufficiency, of vulnerability in us but confirms our imaginary sense of plenitude. By producing the illusion of a complete self whose lack of division excludes any obligation to others, compassion loses its critical force. Rousseau’s account of pity in the theatre does not undermine its importance for our moral development, or our claim that his theorization of it could help think through the ethical implications of democracy. Rather, it reinforces them, by stressing the impossibility of an ethical system which is in itself and for itself ethical, and the need for us to take responsibility for our responses to situations, that is, not to be satisfied with them as confirmation of our humanity but to think critically about what they demand of us as perfectible subjects. So our responsibility to


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others lies in our responsiveness to them not only regarding the emotions they incite in us but also how we interpret and translate those emotions into actions. Ethically charged compassion does not establish a comfortable self-other relation whereby we mutually affirm one another’s human status but a relation which questions that status and demands action to validate it, to connect with humanity. Pity’s ethical dimension therefore emerges by disrupting our vision of a seemingly concordant moral order to expose the lack therein which generates the desire for community. That disruptive experience should invoke contestation as we confront the limitations of the status quo, its failure to fulfil the common good. Individual instances of injustice and suffering reveal the need for a collective effort to improve society as we realize its distance from its horizon of universal justice. We observed in Chapter 1 how Rousseau conceives the best political cures as homeopathic, that is, as being contained in the diseases themselves. This observation applies to an ethics of pity: if we can blind ourselves to others’ suffering through either reason or sterile compassionate displays, we can equally acknowledge them, for to be able to deny others, we need to have acknowledged them at some point. To bring us to this acknowledgement, to shock us out of our apathy and insensitivity to others, our secure image of reality would need to be unsettled so that we confront what we have suppressed. The poetic force of the theatrical scenes of the Discourse aims to produce this effect. Those scenes counter the stultifying effect of conventional theatre we have just discussed, by disturbing the reader’s remote and safe position, and transforming her into a spectator of an event which shatters any belief in a seamless world. To evoke pity, Rousseau vividly describes a scenario of a man who is trapped behind bars while witnessing a wild beast tearing a child from its mother’s breast and then brutally killing it: ‘What terrible agitation must be felt by this witness of an event in which he has no personal stake! What agony he must suffer at seeing this sight, and being unable to do anything to help the fainting mother or the dying child’ (DOI, 74/154–155). The shock-impact of this dramatic scene stalls the work of reason, which could enable us to insulate ourselves from the terror of this event and its urgent call to action. Unlike classical theatre, it offers no resolution, inducing in us the anxiety of not being able to help, and the sense of injustice which that helplessness provokes. This poetic device reinforces the theoretical discussion of pity, by inciting us to feel compassion, and the compulsion to act on it, to resuscitate its associative force which we have repressed. In dynamic forms of theatre, asserts Rousseau, ‘not everything must be said to the eyes, but the

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imagination must be excited’ (LA, 121/110). This statement applies to the scene we have just analysed and also to the adolescent Emile’s moral education which is designed precisely to excite his imagination so that he sees beyond the illusory equality and justice of civil society to the real inequalities and injustices which bespeak the specious universality of that realm. Rousseau’s discussion of Emile’s education shows us how an ethics of pity is not premised on any pre-given humanity: acceding to our humanity involves consciousness of our freedom, of the fact that we are not bound by any regime and its determination of social truth. Natural man is not yet human precisely because he, like other animals, unreflectively obeys the principles of self-love and pity. Pity assumes its ethical import once we use our perfectibility to rediscover our responsiveness to our equals.

Pity and an Ethos of Contestation The analysis of Emile’s education suggests how pity could be channelled into a democratic ethos of contestation. Pity’s potentially contestatory force exposes society’s deficiency, by engendering identification with those marginalized or excluded by the state.39 It enjoins us to take responsibility for that deficiency as citizens who belong to, and also authorize, that state. From this perspective, we see how an ethics of pity could be germane to a democratic form which understands its inherent incompleteness as constitutive of freedom and change. This ethics urges us to recognize how any particular injustice, if ignored, would compromise our civic duty to define and defend the terms of our coexistence. Emile’s education emphasizes society’s contingency. Rousseau describes the early phase of that education as ‘purely negative’ since it seeks not to teach ‘virtue and truth’ but to guard against ‘vice and the spirit of error’ (E, 68/323). It cultivates nature or more precisely the negativity of nature, as conceived in the Discourse, which implies the setting aside of the facts, the subtraction of social influences ‘so that living in the whirl of social life [. . .] [Emile] is not carried away by the passions and prejudices of men’ (E, 260/550). Rousseau imagines Emile without the preconceptions and illusions of given reality, and consequently receptive to humanity in its ability to change and progress beyond its current condition. Emile’s moral education begins when he becomes adolescent and enters society. Pity develops, and provides the ethical support, of his social relations. His education fosters a critical attitude in him towards the structures and institutions taken for granted by his society, an awareness of


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his freedom to ‘force his own way to happiness, without interfering with the happiness of others’ (E, 221/507). Emile’s socialization combats the self-defeating quality of human interaction in the Discourse whereby we seek fulfilment in others’ deprivation, whereby we enjoy dominating and being dominated because of the illusion of mastery it creates. He learns to see the constructed character of society’s hierarchies and power relations – their lack of natural foundation – apprehending the gap between the state’s official discourse of unity and justice and the real inequality which that discourse hides. He acquires this political awareness through the pity awakened in him by ‘the sorrowful picture of suffering humanity’ (E, 220/505). He is encouraged to identify with humanity not in its social determination but in its destitution: By nature men are neither kings, nobles, courtiers, nor millionaires. All men are born poor and naked, all are liable to suffering of every kind; and all are condemned at length to die. This is what it really means to be a man; that is what no mortal can escape. Begin then with the study of the essentials of humanity, that which really constitutes humankind. (E, 219/503) Human finitude plays a fundamental role in raising Emile’s ethical consciousness: others’ potential loss and suffering provides the affirmative condition for realizing the need to relate and respond to them. We sense our self-love most acutely when sensing our vulnerability, or moreover, our possible destruction. ‘The idea of destruction’ is complex because ‘no one knows what it is from his own experiences to die’. However, once we have acquired the ‘idea of complete destruction’ and ‘know that this moment must come for each of us’, we acquire a keen sense of ourselves and our life drive, knowing ‘there is no escape’ from death (E, 225/511). Anticipation of death as the limit experience of human endeavour urges us to extend our self-love to others, as we cooperate to promote our common survival. Compassion humbles our self-love, by tying it to finitude. The threat of loss and the desire for human flourishing are closely allied in Emile’s socialization. That alliance underlies Rousseau’s warning against educating Emile through society’s institutional life, its rituals and practices before he is able properly to judge them: Do not cause the seeds of pride, vanity, envy to spring up in him through the misleading picture of the happiness of mankind; do not show him to

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begin with the pomp of courts, the pride of palaces, the delights of pageants; do not take him into society and into brilliant assemblies; do not show him the outside of society till you have made him capable of estimating it at its true worth. (E, 219/503) Society’s highly formalized events reflect back to it an image of itself as whole, concealing the real divisions and confl icts underlying that image. Before Emile enters this world, he learns about its symbolic character, thereby avoiding civil man’s mistake in the Discourse of taking mere possibility as fact. Premature exposure to these scenes of enjoyment would inspire antipathy in him, causing him to accuse others of ‘usurping a right which is not theirs, of seeking happiness for themselves alone’. Just as historical man attacks his equals, believing they enjoy plenitude and mastery at his expense, Emile would become equally vengeful, if he were subject to images of greatness and fulfi lment before being equipped to interpret them. Those images would disconnect him from humanity, heightening his sense of exclusion, leading him to see others as so fulfi lled and complete that they ‘have no need of him’ (E, 219/504). Being denied the recognition from others he desires, he would blame them for his feeling of lack. His initiation into society through scenes of deprivation and suffering, however, encourages him to compensate that lack by identifying and associating with others. His difference constitutes his agency. Emile does not therefore study society through the state’s official life but through compassion for ‘the suffering of the unfortunate’, ‘the labours of the wretched’, for those marginalized by the social system (E, 222/507). Identifying with the marginalized allows him to judge ‘the true worth’ of society’s ‘outward appearance’ as a unified whole. That truth consists in the exclusion and inequality through which the system maintains itself: ‘In the civil state there is a vain and chimerical equality of rights; the means intended for its maintenance themselves serve to destroy it’. To sustain that chimera, society has to repress its sacrificing of ‘the many’ to ‘the few’, ‘the common weal to private interest’ (E, 237/524). As Rousseau’s depiction of history in the Discourse illustrates, the repressed eventually returns. Emile’s moral education serves to reactivate the repressed, to uncover society’s false universality, to enable him to understand how ‘the universal spirit of the laws of every country is always to take the part of the strong against the weak, and the part of him who has against him who has not; this defect is inevitable and there is no exception’ (E, 237/524). Emile sees through society’s ‘mask’ to the exploitation and oppression which simultaneously


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supports and subverts it. The affect of pity thus becomes disruptive, turning what the system excludes against the system itself, giving lie to its alleged wholeness and fairness. Pity becomes subversive only if we accept the absence of any objective and indestructible basis for society, if we confront the precarious and ungrounded nature of our social position. Without this recognition, pity could sensitize us to inequality only to confirm our sense of privilege and superiority. To prevent this negative consequence, Emile is trained never to take for granted the social order, but to be ‘thoroughly aware of the fact that the fate of these unhappy persons may one day be his own, that his feet are standing on the edge of the abyss, into which he may be plunged at any moment by a thousand unexpected irresistible misfortunes’ (E, 222/507). Just as the Discourse’s rhetoric provokes us to ‘disidentify’ with the fictions of history through which we understand ourselves and our social relation, Emile is instructed ‘to act in such a way that he is not a member of any class, but takes his place in all alike’ (E, 224/510). Alienation from society’s predefined roles and classifications allows him to hear pity’s call to action, to struggle for real equality against the state’s chimerical equality. The force of pity should disrupt the security of who and what we are, pushing us to question whether our identifications and allegiances place us among those who permit suffering and oppression to continue. Rousseau’s discussion of Emile’s education therefore stresses how compassion can repoliticize seemingly self-evident civil relations. We have argued for the importance of the respect of difference in Rousseau’s thinking. That respect does not signify a levelling out of all social differences: this would counter Rousseau’s vehement refutation of inequality. Rather, it entails consciousness of the often vertical and antagonistic character of those differences: There is, so our wiseacres tell us, the same amount of happiness and sorrow in every station. This saying is as deadly in its effects as it is incapable of proof; if all are equally happy why should I trouble myself about any one? Let every one stay where he is; leave the slave to be ill-treated, the sick man to suffer, and the wretched to perish; they have nothing to gain by any change in their condition. (E, 224/509) Repoliticizing society’s differences and divisions is as central to Emile’s socialization as it is to the Discourse’s rhetoric. Emile is taught not to acquiesce to hierarchies but to contest them. While seeing rank as purely symbolic and relating to people on the level of humanity, he never overlooks

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the poor’s exploitation and subjugation, the injustices caused by social stratification: Let the cause of the poor be his own, let him help them not merely with his money, but with his service; let him work for them, protect them, let his person and his time be at their disposal; let him be their agent; he will never all his life long have a more honourable office. How many of the oppressed, who have never got a hearing, will obtain justice when he demands it for them with that courage and firmness which the practice of virtue inspires; when he makes his way into the presence of the rich and great, when he goes, if need be, to the footstool of the king himself, to plead the cause of the wretched, the cause of those who fi nd all doors closed to them by their poverty, those who are so afraid of being punished for their misfortunes that they do not dare to complain? (E, 254/544) So Emile works for his community or more precisely for those the official contours of the community exclude. The excluded represent society’s incompleteness and the need for political action to compensate it. Emile’s work challenges the current regime, disclosing its fallacious equality by giving voice to those disenfranchised by it. His duty involves bringing that concealed inequality back into existence at the level of state discourse by making an official demand for equality. That demand, which renders visible a wrong previously unseen or ignored, disrupts the apparent fairness of the existing order through its egalitarian logic. Emile learns to link the moral and the political: the moral issue of promoting the fairest and freest coexistence for all involves critiquing and perfecting political institutions (E, 236/524). His responsibility to the poor does not therefore simply reduce to giving money. It calls for creating a new space of representation for them in institutions which have formerly neglected them. Emile is taught to be permanently aware of the restrictions of society’s institutional life. Moral reflection and political action thus converge: Emile’s ‘kindness is active’, teaching him not to turn away from strife, antagonism, and injustice but to react to them by alleviating suffering, encouraging reconciliation, and seeking justice (E, 256/545). His education confronts him with the tensions and conflicts which prevent society from achieving plenitude, and through that confrontation, he realizes his agency or perfectibility. Pity, once generalized, represents social incompleteness as a demand for social improvement. An ethics of pity thus responds to Laclau’s assertion that as well as institutionalizing contingency, the radicalization of democracy also


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necessitates bringing to ‘the historical arena social actors who have been excluded from it’.40

Conclusion Rousseau’s analysis of Emile’s socialization guides us to use our imagination positively not only to identify with the suffering of those marginalized and oppressed by the state but also to imagine their release from that suffering, to imagine a better future for them. Like Emile’s imagination, ours has to be ‘startled’ and ‘surprised’ to face up to the inequalities our stable image of the world unjustly ignores (E, 223/507). The Discourse, with its violent imagery and overt fictionalization of history, aims to produce this effect, shocking us out of our blindness to injustice and exploitation and inciting us to desire and strive for change. This affirmative use of imagination counteracts the negative consequences of our dream of tranquillity in servitude which ends in the violence of the second state of nature. To project ourselves beyond injustice and inequality, we have to keep in mind the limits underlying our image of a better future. The ‘disproportion’, argues Rousseau, ‘between our desires and our powers’ creates unhappiness (E, 52/305). However, the solution does not consist in restricting our desires because that restriction would thwart human flourishing. Imagination produces that disproportion: ‘The world of reality has its bounds, the world of imagination is boundless, as we cannot enlarge the one, let us restrict the other’ (E, 52/305). To reduce the gap between the imaginary and the real does not assume a return to nature in its blissful innocence and peace but the recognition of the impossibility of that return, of nature’s negativity as both the condition and limit of imagining a perfect and just society. The metaphor of nature reveals ‘the distance between an unachievable fullness and what actually exists’, inducing ethical and political reflection on what is required of us to contend with that distance.41 Imagining perfection enables us to respond to the current imperfections of our society, to take responsibility for its failure to live up to its ideal self-image, as we aspire to a more democratic future based on freedom and equality. Restricting imagination involves accounting for the antagonisms and uncertainties which stimulate our political imagination in its desire to overcome them. Emile’s moral education indicates the self-estrangement essential for the development of a more democratic self which is willing to shape and be shaped by its community. We have to alienate ourselves from the prejudices,

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norms and illusions which have previously informed our relation to reality in order to escape from the deadlock of civilization as depicted in the Discourse and imagine that relation afresh. Becoming responsive to those silenced and excluded by our societies, to recognize how their plight implicates and compromises us as human beings, calls on us ‘to change our way of being’. As Žižek explains from a twenty-first century perspective: We cannot go directly from capitalist to revolutionary subjectivity: the abstraction, the foreclosure of others, the blindness to the other’s suffering and pain, has first to be broken by a gesture of taking the risk and reaching directly out to the suffering other – a gesture which, since it shatters the very kernel of our identity cannot fail to appear extremely violent.42 Žižek’s observation recalls how the feeling of compassion acquires its ethical charge when evoking ‘anxiety’ in us. Reaching out to others compels us to give something of ourselves, to negotiate our identity through commitment to a wider whole (LA, 25/24). We have to realize how the competitive self-interest of our existing state does not preserve the self but jeopardizes it by enslaving us to the interests of the few, and blinding us to our capacity to cooperate for the interests of the many. To distance ourselves from the prejudices and fantasies which stop us from looking critically at who we are and how our self-understanding limits our social relations, we should, argues Rousseau, extend our amour-propre – the cause, in its extreme version, of our egotism – to others. Through that extension, we acknowledge the desire for self-recognition as universal and that universality indicates our shared incompleteness. That incompleteness reminds us that none of us represents the authentic self of the other, of the vanity of our attempts to achieve fullness and mastery through subjugation and exclusion. We love others because of our insufficiency and that love is ‘the source of human justice’, symbolizing how ‘no one has natural authority over another’ (E, 236/547). As none of us can legitimately claim to represent the truth of our community, we share the task of interpreting and realizing in the form of laws, values and practices what we have in common. Rooted in incompleteness and division, our communal bonds remain forever fragile, requiring us actively to struggle to protect and renew them. The Social Contract theorizes the political principles through which we can begin to strive towards the horizon of a more democratic society. We now turn our attention to this work.

Part 2

Towards a Radical Democracy: Rousseau’s Social Contract


Chapter 5

Rethinking the Universal

Rousseau’s theory of social contract has received much hostile commentary, especially from those who detect in it a blueprint for totalitarian democracy, arguing that Rousseau’s emphasis on social unity and caution concerning partial factions threatens the plurality and tolerance of diversity characterizing liberal democracy.1 Our discussion of Rousseau’s Social Contract, in this chapter and beyond, will refute this reading by analysing how unity and plurality, general and particular, do not mutually exclude one another, but rather depend on one another for their legitimacy. Drawing on Laclau’s theorization of a contingent universal, we will show how the interdependence of the particular and the general in Rousseau’s thinking affirms a contestatory mode of democratic politics which eschews the totalitarian aim of establishing a society without tensions and ambiguity. In defence of Rousseau against his detractors and their criticism of his stress on unity, Arblaster argues that ‘these critics do not always ask themselves whether any society may not need a degree of unity in order to be a society at all, or how much diversity even a liberal society can tolerate without falling apart’.2 Laclau’s political thinking identifies a similar blind spot in those theories which see the idea of universality as being opposed to a politics of difference. Such theories fail to recognize how a particular cultural group can affirm its right to be acknowledged and treated as equal only in a context based on shared values and mutual rights.3 Our discussion of Rousseau’s definition of the universal and particular illustrates how his general will defends against the rifts and oppression which occur when particular individuals and groups do not recognize themselves as belonging to a wider whole. The general will thus relies on, and works to preserve, plurality by encouraging groups and individuals to construct common goals and objectives in the pursuit of a society geared towards maximizing freedom and equality. For both Rousseau and Laclau, a situation of unbridled plurality, where particular wills pursue their interests without reference to the universal, does not engender diversity but actually

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jeopardizes it, since, in the absence of any collective will, there is nothing to stop one particular group from trying to acquire dominance at the expense of all others. For Rousseau, a larger structure of rights and obligations – the social contract – needs to be instated to protect the particular from the persecutory terror of despotism whereby diversity would become dissolved into the nothingness of the second state of nature. Rousseau’s and Laclau’s political theories are linked by their central proposition that plurality can survive only in a state which promotes universality. ‘Laclau’s insistence on the need not only to reformulate, but to salvage the concept of universality in the first place, is targeted against the particularism that threatens multiculturalism, and the politics of difference advanced by it’.4 Likewise, Rousseau’s insistence on the need for a general will comes from a concern to defend society from the rise to power of private wills which seek to dominate public life by suppressing multiple viewpoints and identities. Rousseau’s political thought already indicates the tense interaction of the particular and universal which Laclau’s deconstruction of their classical relationship highlights.5 They both refuse to understand the universal as some underlying essence preceding and unifying the particular, but equally acknowledge how the very idea of the particular implies a relative status to something wider, implies a notion of the universal.6 As we have noted, Rousseau’s linguistic theory suggests the mutual implication of the universal and the particular. We can never imagine a tree in general; it only acquires representation through particular examples. However, any particular example to be identifiable as a ‘tree’ depends on the abstraction of the genus with which it bears no essential relation. We saw in Chapter 1 how Rousseau’s metaphor of nature, as the social origin, indicates the lack of any fundamental foundation for society. The negativity of nature represents what is universal or natural to man as lacking any pre-established or necessary content. The universal does not, however, disappear but rather re-emerges as an absent presence that we need to think about and supplement through collective political endeavour. It is only because the universal is without any pre-given and immediate content that it exists as a question at all, thereby inaugurating political activity as the open-ended attempt to provide an answer to that question. Similarly, Laclau re-conceives the universal as an ‘empty place’, as naming the lack of any ultimate social grounding.7 Just as the absence of nature in Rousseau’s political theory founds his idea of a social contract which establishes the ruled element, the people, as the ultimate authority in the state, so Laclau’s idea of an empty universal supplies the precondition of his conception of democracy as an ongoing struggle among diverse groups provisionally to


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fix the principles and values of social cohesion.8 For Rousseau and Laclau, universality has to be constructed politically so that individuals and groups with no essential belonging form associations which resist oppression and promote equality and freedom. That construction is important for forestalling two extremes: sectarianism and totalitarianism. Rousseau and Laclau therefore conceive universality and particularity as imbricated and deeply interconnected. Recognizing their interconnection is central to Rousseau’s social contract, which aims to integrate individual freedom within a common framework of mutual dependence, and to Laclau’s theory of hegemony to be explored in the following chapter. Our reading of Rousseau’s Social Contract, in terms of the deconstructive insights of Laclau’s theory, refutes the opinion that it targets a self-regulating society which suppresses particularity. We thus argue against the view that: ‘Rousseau failed to comprehend that the very possibility of democratic legitimacy depends on the ability of particular interests to construct politically what they share in common. If they cannot, then the regime will not hold. Universally obeyed democratic institutions permit social interests to pursue their particular goals, constrained by their commitment to the institutional norms of a polity’.9 Laclau himself also suggests a similar idea, likening Rousseau’s general will to the Marxist notion of a universal emancipatory class: both supposedly seek a form of equality which surpasses all difference.10 By contrast, the general will, we argue, is a contingent political construct whose identity remains open to questioning and redefinition.11 Rousseau’s political theory does not, we argue, endeavour to subsume the particular within a universal order which outlaws diversity and imposes uniformity. His theory actually highlights the permanent tension existing between universality and particularity and incorporates that tension into the social contract to defend against either a situation in which a particular will claims to represent social truth to the exclusion of all other wills or one of social fragmentation where any common interest is totally denied, leading to a violent state of chaos. In Rousseau, the interdependence of the universal and the particular supplies a condition of possibility for political legitimacy, since it ensures the particular’s freedom to question and redefine the general terms of its coexistence with others.

Rousseau’s Critique of Strict Universalism Rousseau rejects, in his essay ‘The General Society of the Humankind’, a notion of strict universalism, where what is universal precedes and

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transcends difference and is not shaped by political activity (GM, 169– 177/281–289). Departing from Malebranche and Diderot, he refuses to conceive the universal as an essence subtending the particular. He makes the identity of the general will – the universal aspect of his political thinking – dependent on its socio-cultural context, thereby questioning both Malebranche’s idea of the general will as God’s will – the ultimate order and reason of the universe12 and Diderot’s general society of humankind.13 Rousseau offers a more plural, contingent and open-ended understanding of universality. As Riley sates, ‘the générale, for Rousseau, is always somewhat particulière’.14 Rousseau’s account of universality therefore responds, before the fact, to Mouffe’s statement that in radical democracy, ‘universalism is not rejected but particularised; what is needed is a new kind of articulation between the universal and the particular’.15 Rousseau’s critique of the pure rationality of Diderot’s universalism begins to rearticulate the relation between them.16 Diderot, in his article ‘Droit naturel’, argues that there is a general will of and for humanity. That will corresponds to a rational universal morality which takes effect once the passions have been silenced. By contrast, Rousseau’s general will does not inhere in humanity but is contextually defined. It does not therefore predate particular wills but actually depends on their agency for its construction. Constructing the general involves the ‘denaturing’ of individuals’ self-enclosed tendencies so that they develop and act on common interests while still preserving their autonomy. The preservation of their autonomy is imperative for his understanding of a general will constantly open to re-evaluation and change. On entering the contract, citizens do not simply agree to follow the laws that they authorize but also to critique and potentially change them in the continual quest for justice: hence Rousseau’s emphasis on the dimension of will in the general will. Both Malebranche and Diderot, by giving the universal automatic primacy over the particular, tend to diminish that dimension. For Rousseau, the term ‘will’ signifies how ‘civil association is the most voluntary act in the world’ and ‘to deprive your will of all freedom is to deprive your actions of all morality’ (SC, 186/356). Freedom supplies our moral aspect, enabling us to decide what is right for us and others. Because our freedom comes from indeterminacy, it logically entails the possibility of errors of judgment; without that possibility the question of moral responsibility becomes meaningless. The uncertainty of any decision therefore necessitates the ongoing critique of the general will. To preserve freedom, Rousseau emphasizes the need to conceive the particular and the universal as interdependent. Conversely, Diderot’s general


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society separates them: ‘If a general society did exist elsewhere than in systems of philosophers, it would be [. . .] a moral being with qualities separate and distinct from those of the particular beings who constitute it, somewhat like chemical compounds which have properties that do not belong to any of the elements composing them’ (GM, 172/284). The scientific character of this simile helps elucidate Rousseau’s refutation of a strictly rational conception of the universal. Rousseau’s political thinking affirms the affective or subjective dimension of social formation: the need for citizens to identify with, and invest in, their political union. A general society, existing in total abstraction from its members, would prove an inhuman affair. It would deny us the freedom which determines our humanity, logically preceding us and therefore excluding our voluntary participation in its construction and running: an idea central to Rousseau’s social contract. In short, it would bar plurality and change: There would be a universal language which nature would teach to all men and which would be the first instrument of their mutual communication. There would be a sort of central nervous system which would ensure the correspondence of all the parts. Public good and evil would not be merely the sum of particular goods and evils, as in simple aggregation, but it would reside in the liaison which unites them; it would be greater than this sum; and public felicity, far from being established on the happiness of individuals [particuliers], would itself be the source of that happiness. (GM, 172/284) Rousseau therefore judges purely imaginary the vision of a transparent community with a universal language through which members would unambiguously relate to one another. A context of undistorted communication would preclude the very need to reflect on and attempt to define the common, as it would automatically be present to us. While Rousseau theorizes an association which does not simply aggregate particular wills but partly generalizes them, he never seeks to transcend or efface their particularity. That particularity provides the condition of the individual’s need to construct and take part in a general will and therefore cannot be entirely overcome. Moreover, Rousseau consistently underlines, throughout his political writings, the importance of national and social specificities which should not be subsumed by cosmopolitan universalism (GP, 953–1056). So the general will acquires its legitimacy from its acceptability to the citizens forming part of it; otherwise, it would not represent a voluntary

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act of association (GM, 174/286). Its success therefore depends on our ability to see its relevance for our particular needs and context. For Riley, Rousseau suppresses the above passage from the published version of The Social Contract because it ‘amounts an assault on généralité which would be fatal not just to Diderot and Malebranche but to his own political aims as well’.17 It would be ‘fatal’, only if we interpreted Rousseau’s theory of general will as seeking full generality. Rather it confirms how that theory does not banish or repress the particular but recognizes its centrality for constructing, and, sustaining, the general will. The general will, we argue, unifies disparate elements so that they identify themselves as part of a wider association while still retaining the autonomy necessary to question and (re)construct their commonality. Diderot’s idea of a pure and completely rational universal will would abolish the need for a social contract based on consciously willed terms and conventions, since we would naturally know what we could expect from each other. Unlike Diderot, Rousseau does not believe that the general will is immediately dictated by reason and understanding. If he did, he would not, Riley observes, have maintained that ‘the general will is always right’ but ‘the judgment which guides it is not always as enlightened’ (SC, 212/380).18 The nuances of Rousseau’s account of the general will expose how it is split between, on the one hand, its function as the ‘universal’ principle by which citizens decide the common goals and activities of their society and, on the other, the contingent, and therefore contestable, nature of the particular decision defi ning it.19 The friction between the rightfulness of the general will and the uncertain judgment underlying it opens the space of critique, questioning and ambiguity central to democracy. The Social Contract does not, I argue, aim to surmount this tension but makes it the condition of the citizens’ democratic freedom. Diderot’s account of a fully rational universal ignores this tension. To avoid the errors induced by our particular will, we should, Diderot avers, listen to our inner voice which would prescribe what is universally right. This idea presumes a human essence which emerges through passion-silencing reason. In Chapter 2, we observed how Rousseau eschews a fi xed conception of human identity and how that anti-essentialism supports his belief in the potential of civic education to reconstitute identities in terms of democratic principles. Identities are non-natural, always constituted through identification. So Diderot’s idea of an inner voice which directly speaks the universal is flawed, overlooking how even the relationship with the self is always socially mediated. For this reason, listening to that voice


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does not provide an infallible guide since it is ‘formed by the habit of judging and feeling in the bosom of society and according to the laws, it cannot, then, serve to establish them’ (GM, 174/287). The inextricable link between language and society undermines the idea of a voice of universal reason which is uncontaminated by social prejudices or illusions. ‘Speech’, asserts Rousseau, ‘represents thought by conventional signs, and likewise, writing represents speech’ (F, 1249 (my translation)). We comprehend our inner voice through meanings based on common consent and those meanings are certainly not unambiguous. That voice cannot be apprehended, then, in any primary and pure form. It becomes impossible exactly to distinguish internal from external thoughts, judgments which are universally valid from those resting on the particular assumptions of a given culture. We thus cannot conceive an inner voice which grounds the contexttranscending laws of a general society because any voice is only intelligible through communal signifying systems, and those systems already assume the existence of society. The idea of an inward voice of pure reason would be prone to restricting moral and political critique, since it could convince us that we are obeying universal justice while merely following local laws. To think about the general, we have to ‘separate from [our]selves’, to acknowledge ourselves as one particular will among many (GM, 174/286). We need to be aware of the limits of that will – the potential conflicts and differences it causes for our social relations – to recognize the necessity of reaching common agreements. Thought of the general arises only when we compare ourselves to others. To believe we can directly accede to it through internal thought is dangerous, as it could lead us unreflectively to accept our society’s norms and values as universally just, however legitimate they may be. That belief, by denying the otherness which subtends the desire for identification, could even cause us violently to impose on others our particular will as the incarnation of the general will. By neglecting the tensions and differences which bring us to think about what we share in common, Diderot’s notion of a general society does not foster social critique. That notion therefore paradoxically risks limiting our humanity – our freedom to change – by engendering the passive acceptance of the current order as fully embodying the universal. So Diderot’s universalism becomes self-defeating by possibly entrenching the localism it aims to avoid. For this reason, the general, for Rousseau, has to be produced politically through the formation of common projects and laws whereby individuals retrospectively identify their commonality. Rousseau, as we have seen, refutes the idea of a universal ground for

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particular identities and institutions; rather it is the generalization of those identities and institutions which constitutes universality within society. As Bertram affirms, ‘far from the particular association in which human beings participate being an application in the specific case of general moral principles, Rousseau argues that the ideas of universal morality can only arise as a generalisation from particular experiences and histories’.20 Rousseau’s account of the general will emphasizes the limits of any universality and consequently its scope for contestation and modification by the particular. It thus politicizes the ‘universal’. For Rousseau, the interconnectedness of the particular and the universal allows for a dynamic relation whereby each term can mould and be moulded by the other. Neither term can therefore be conceived in an absolute form. An absolute particular is meaningless since its particularity implies a relation to something that transcends it; likewise the question of universality only makes sense relative to a particular perspective:21 ‘We conceive of the general society on the model of our particular societies; the establishment of little republics makes us dream of the great one and we only begin to be men after having first been citizens’ (GM, 175/287). Our own society provides the starting point for imagining the universal. The desire for universality therefore emanates from an absence which small societies, through their particularity, reveal. The universal, devoid of any essence, gains representation through the particular.22 This undermines the conceptual hierarchy which privileges the universal over the particular. What is ‘universal’, what constitutes us first as citizens and then as human, is not pre-given, being retroactively posited through the generalization of the particular. As a generalized particularity, universality is never fully achieved. The universal and particular are therefore not mutually exclusive in Rousseau’s thinking but inhabit one another. Their imbrication preserves the dimension of will in Rousseau’s conception of the general will. Citizens have the power to choose which interests or discourses become generalized. The general will is not imposed on particular wills but has to be willed by them. The importance of the particular for the formation of the general questions Riley’s statement that Rousseau conceives généralité as good and particularité as bad.23 This simple opposition counters the complex and non-essentializing nature of Rousseau’s ethical thinking which refuses to reduce principles to a rigid system of value. Neither the general nor the particular is inherently good or bad; their moral outcome depends on how they are constructed socially. They become dangerous when considered in isolation of one another.


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Social Plurality Rousseau’s critique of Diderot’s idea of a general human society highlights how we think about the universal only because it does not exist in some preestablished form; if it did, the need for politics, as the on-going attempt to organize our coexistence legitimately, would vanish. Rousseau’s insistence on the interpenetration of the universal and the particular leads him to understand the construction of social unity as essential for safeguarding diversity. The misreading of The Social Contract, as a doctrine for dictatorial rule which imposes moral uniformity on its members, largely stems from a misconception of what is seen as Rousseau’s wish to eliminate entirely what he terms ‘partial associations’: If, when a people being furnished with adequate information, held its deliberations, the citizens had no communication with one another, the general will would always result from the large number of small differences, and the decision would always be good. But when intrigues arise, and the partial associations are formed at the expense of the great association, the will of each of these associations becomes general in relation to its members, while it remains particular in relation to the state [. . .] The differences become less numerous and give a less general result. Lastly, when one of these associations is so great that it prevails over all the rest, the result is no longer a sum of small differences but a single difference; in this case, there is no longer a general will, and the opinion which prevails is merely a particular one. (SC, 203/371–372) Rather than attacking interest groups or political parties outright, this quotation warns against a situation in which political diversity has been eradicated. The term ‘partial association’ signifies here those groups or organizations which endeavour to subjugate others by foisting their moral or political beliefs on them, thereby trying to reduce plurality, implied by the term ‘small differences’ to a ‘single difference’, or what we call totalitarian rule.24 Many critics conclude from the previous quotation that ‘the Social Contract bans any communication among citizens in the process of determining the general will’ and that this ban contradicts the idea of a language of freedom in the Essay.25 We shall argue that this condition comes from Rousseau’s concern to prevent one interest group from dominating public affairs so that multiple viewpoints are expressed about the general will. However, before developing this reading, we need to correct the

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too hasty assumption that communication among citizens plays no role in establishing the general will. That assumption ignores the first part of the conditional clause – ‘being furnished with adequate information’ – on which the reference to ‘no communication’ rests. To inform citizens sufficiently before they make their final deliberations would require communication. As we have seen, Rousseau does not believe in some infallible inner voice which would automatically deliver the common interest. Our internal thoughts are always externally mediated.26 For this reason, our consciousness needs to be politically informed to encourage, as far as possible, critically enlightened judgments. Rousseau therefore insists on the importance of discourse for raising public awareness. As we noted in Chapter 1, the Essay advocates the ‘art’ and ‘metaphor’ of the public oratory of ancient democracies for representing social change to citizens. It contrasts this dynamic and poetic use of language which both records and inflects popular demands and needs with the unquestionable decrees issued by authoritarian regimes which represent the state as closed to contestation and transformation by citizens.27 Beyond the official context of public oratory, Rousseau also examines how citizens could elaborate their understanding of the common good in a more informal and inter-subjective setting such as the circles of his home, Geneva. These ‘assemblies’ emerged from ‘civil discords, during which the necessity of affairs obliged [Genevan citizens] to meet more often and to deliberate calmly and coldly’ (LA, 99/91). In the circles, male citizens gather to engage in ‘grave and serious discourse’ about ‘country’ and ‘virtue’ ‘without fear of ridicule’.28 Unfettered by norms and strict moral codes, citizens ‘even dare to be themselves’ and when ‘the conversation becomes less polished, reasons take on more weight’. The political force of these gatherings comes from their autonomy vis-à-vis the state, providing a space without normative constraints in which citizens can test out different and radical ideas about public matters. The circles do not establish a consensual and harmonious exchange between participants but actively encourage disagreement and debate so that participants review and defend their respective viewpoints: ‘They cannot get away with fine phrases for answers. They do not humour one another in dispute; each, feeling himself attacked by all the forces of his adversary, is obliged to use his forces to defend himself; it is thus that the mind gains precision and vigour’ (LA, 105/96). Despite being unconstrained, citizens do not behave irresponsibly but rather investigate, through their disputes, to what extent they speak for others and others speak for them. In short, they learn to account for their political opinions and not simply to conform to state orthodoxy, to see


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their community from multiple perspectives and to appreciate the need to engage with those perspectives as members of the very community about which those perspectives speak. The circles foster a non-conformist attitude by urging their members to express themselves openly while also exposing themselves to the possibility of being rebuffed and thereby called upon to justify their claims about their community. They are forced to think and act freely and responsibly. A non-conformist spirit, as we shall see, forms a central part of the democratic life imagined by The Social Contract whereby citizens are obliged to keep their laws alive and alert to changing social needs and desires. The imperative to avoid blind subservience to state propaganda or to the private interests of partial associations underlies Rousseau’s suggestion that communication among citizens should cease while they make their final deliberations on the different definitions of the general will, previously communicated to them. This suggestion is not that extreme considering that we, today, vote in silence in polling stations. Like the metaphor of nature, the procedure for deliberation removes social influence as far as possible, encouraging citizens to reflect independently on their society in its absence. That removal aims to get them to think the general will beyond its past and current determinations, beyond established reality, so as to engender plural viewpoints, for difference, as we shall see in the next chapter, is essential for discerning the common interest. Rousseau does not object to ‘partial associations’ outright but to their prevailing in public matters at the expense of the diversity necessary for encouraging autonomous thought on the common.29 Quoting Machiavelli, Rousseau suggests that some ‘divisions’ can be ‘advantageous’ to the state, because, we shall argue, they can often make us think again about what unites us and revitalize our communal relations as a result. They discourage unquestioning obedience to the status quo. However, ‘those which stir up sectarian groupings and followers are harmful’, because they produce the reverse effect, dulling critical reflection through indoctrination. In an ideal situation, the state would foreclose the possibility of despotism by prohibiting all partial factions. But that solution proves unrealizable: ‘Since [. . .] the founder of a Republic cannot help enmities arising, he ought at least to prevent them from growing into sectarian groupings’ (Rousseau quotes the Italian from Machiavelli, History of Florence Book VII, SC, 204/372). What Rousseau proposes instead of prohibition is the proliferation of difference: ‘But if there are partial associations, it is necessary to multiply their number and prevent inequality from existing among them, as was done by Solon, Numas and Servius’ (SC, 204/372). By promoting

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plurality, whereby identity is defined differentially rather than by a desire for sameness, we can prevent one group from persecuting others. A multiplicity of differences grants the numerous interest groups relative equality, for the distinctions between them become more frequent and smaller, thereby decreasing the likelihood of one group’s domination of another. Preserving difference thus proves central to Rousseau’s political theory. He only opposes particular identities when they deny their particularity and impose themselves as the universal.

Relational Identities Rousseau’s extended discussion of the general will in the article Political Economy reinforces the idea that plurality is constitutive of any society: Every political society is composed of other smaller societies of different kinds, each of which has its own interests and rules of conduct, but these societies, which everyone perceives, because they have an external and authorised form, are not the only ones that actually exist in the state; private individuals united by a common interest make up as many other permanent or transitory societies, whose influence is none the less real, and whose various relations, when they are observed, provide true knowledge of the moral habits. (PE, 133/245–246) Rousseau emphasizes the irreducibility of the social to a single set of moral or political principles. Wider society comprises a potentially infinite number of culturally diverse groups, whose varying interests and mores cannot be immediately discerned at the official level of the state. The never-ending multiplication of social difference means that the particular and the general have to be differentially or contextually defined. Society can no longer be perceived as an intelligible objective whole, but in a state of flux which refuses any ultimate determination. It is, to use a Derridean term, decentred: no one social group or identity provides a primary point of reference for explaining and unifying all the others, since they all depend on one another for their particular identity. Rousseau, along with Laclau, therefore affirms the relational character of social identities.30 The fact that identity is relational rather than inherent means that the distinction between the particular and the general will – a distinction intrinsic to all societies, including even subordinate or partial associations – is a mobile concept whose point of reference is constantly being


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redefined. What one group perceives as general can automatically be redescribed as particular from another perspective, showing the impossibility of definitively fi xing these terms: ‘The will of these particular societies always has two relations: for the members of the association, it is a general will; for the larger society it is a particular will, which is often found to be just in the first respect and corrupt in the second’ (PE, 133/246). The positions of particular and universal are therefore never factually or empirically given; they are not innate properties of any social agent. At first, this mobility seems to support a purely relativist notion of society. However, it illustrates how the particular always defines itself in relation to something wider. Rousseau thus repudiates the idea of pure relativism, by underlining the fact that any identity is always constitutively split between the particular and the universal. Insofar as each group establishes its identity through its difference from the others, it is implicated in an extensive network of relations. No group can affirm its particular social and cultural identity without referring to the identities of the other groups from whom it marks itself off to create its defining context. Thus, the idea of a pure particularism would be a self-cancelling one because its purity would eradicate the difference which confers identity in the first place. To enter the social pact requires us to sense the co-implication of self and other, universal and particular: Natural man lives for himself; he is the unit, the whole, dependent only on himself and on his like. The citizen is but the numerator of a fraction, whose value depends on its denominator; his value depends upon the whole community. Good social institutions are those best fitted to make a man unnatural, to exchange his independence, to merge the unit in the group, so that he no longer regards himself as one, but as a part of the whole, and only has sense of himself within common life. (E, 7–8/249) Our natural independence comes from a lack of relations. That lack deprives us of any identity: we lead a non-reflexive animal-like existence. The process of denaturation posits a divided rather than complete self; it leads us to understand how we work out our identities only in the context of our relations with others. It facilitates the transition from the futile precontractual rivalry whereby I experience others’ differences as threatening my unified self-image to the structure of the contract that reveals how difference is constitutive of social unity. ‘Partial associations’ become dangerous when they disavow their partiality and see themselves as an autonomous whole. The consequences of that

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denial appear in the final stage of political development in the Discourse: the ‘second state of nature’, discussed in the previous chapter (DOI, 113– 114/191). This despotic stage causes social disintegration, as subjects no longer freely determine their coexistence but submit to the despot’s arbitrary will. Consequently, any notion of the common good or principle of equity vanishes. Each sees itself as a pure particularism, striving to secure its interest at the expense of others. This violent phase confirms the need to conceive the particular and the general as interconnected. Refusing their interconnection means that one group’s identity is constantly under threat from another, as it can no longer safeguard its identity in relation to its difference from that group, but only (so it imagines) by destroying or subsuming it. A politics based on pure particularity therefore proves selfdefeating, for in the absence of any universality, differential identities disappear, resulting in the nothingness of the second state of nature whereby we become equal again through our lack of identity. The second state of nature shows how the problems of today’s multicultural societies would not be solved by a politics of difference which denies any commonality. The despotism of this phase, caused by the dominance of self-interest in the social field, produces an oppressive state of unanimity: ‘At the other extremity of the circle, unanimity occurs; this is the case when the citizens, having fallen into servitude, have lost both liberty and will’ (SC, 276/439). This questions any suggestion that the general will constitutes enforced consensus; it operates to safeguard difference, not to eliminate it. If the sole driving force behind political activity is my right to assert my difference, then we face an ethical impasse whereby we have to ‘accept the rights to self-determination of all kinds of reactionary groups involved in antisocial practices’.31 In such a situation, any group can legitimize its claims to power, even those that do not tolerate difference. As a solution, it proves counter-productive since it exposes us to totalitarian rule.

Protecting Plurality: The Civil Religion This threat founds Rousseau’s understanding of the Enlightenment question of despotism and of the civil religion.32 Before analysing the civil religion and its role in protecting plurality, it is useful to consider Laclau’s deconstruction of the concept of tolerance.33 Undecidability defines this concept. To conceive tolerance indiscriminately is ultimately self- cancelling, producing a situation whereby we tolerate even anti-social behaviour. Likewise, if we establish precise categories of what is acceptable and unacceptable to


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tolerate, we annul tolerance as a meaningful idea. Those categories would mean we tolerate only what we find morally acceptable, which means that we are not tolerating anything at all. Tolerance proves inseparable from its other: intolerance. As Laclau avers, it only becomes meaningful when the subject does not agree with what she has to tolerate. The act of tolerating therefore involves suspending moral judgement of a particular belief or practice. The question of tolerance arises only in an internally differentiated society. We can understand, in this theoretical light, Rousseau’s statement about the impossibility of establishing an exclusive national religion: ‘Now that there is and can no longer be an exclusive national religion, tolerance should be given to all religions that tolerate others, so long as their dogmas contain nothing contrary to the duties of the citizen’ (SC, 308/469). Rousseau refrains from providing precise criteria for what we should tolerate. For him, the act of tolerating, as for Laclau, consists of suspending ethical judgement of a particular religious dogma on a public level, irrespective of whether it coincides with our convictions on a private level. This reciprocal suspension of judgment allows diverse faiths to exist within one state without their entering into conflict with one another. The relationship between the citizens’ religious beliefs and the right of the sovereign to impinge upon them underlines the need to differentiate the civil religion from a particular faith: The right which the social compact gives the Sovereign over the subjects does not, [. . .] exceed the limits of public expediency. The subjects owe the Sovereign an account of their opinions only to such an extent as they matter to the community. Now, it matters very much to the community that each citizen should have a religion. That will make him love his duty; but the dogmas of that religion concern the State and its members only so far as they have reference to morality and to the duties which he who professes them is bound to do to others. Each man may have, over and above, what opinions he pleases, without its being the Sovereign’s business to take cognizance of them; for, as the Sovereign has no authority in the other world, whatever the lot of its subjects may be in the life to come, that is not its business, provided that they are good citizens in this life. (SC, 306–307/467–468) Any religion only pertains to the state in so far as it enjoins those who profess it to perform certain duties to others. Rousseau does not specify the nature of those duties, leaving it up to the general will to determine

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them. The articles of faith are not to be considered as religious dogmas, but as fostering ‘feelings of sociability’. A religious sensibility would aim to promote a sense of mutual dependence: a belief that our happiness is not independent of other people’s. It aims to mould the libidinal dimension of social unity, that is, to displace the investment of individuals in relations of domination and subjugation to the reciprocal bonds of the pact. The civil religion ideally creates a context in which plural faiths can coexist by encouraging recognition of their relative equality. Rousseau perceives the only negative dogma as intolerance (SC, 308/469). He therefore avoids defining tolerance positively by not including it among the affirmative elements of religion but by referring to it through its reverse: intolerance. Banishing intolerance from the state aims to preserve diversity. Specific faiths only jeopardize communal relations when they impose themselves as the state religion by suppressing other faiths. The civil religion aims, then, to keep religion and state separate, to prevent one particular faith from trying to fill the democratic space of power. As Baker affirms, it supplements a void: ‘the absence of sociable human nature’. ‘The social space [. . .] must be defined by the absence of violence. The “feelings of sociability”, founded on the passions of hope and fear, generate love and reverence for the contract and the law, because it is these which maintain the empty space’.34 The civil religion reveals the lack of universal morality, and consequently the relative status of all religions, thereby justifying and securing their plurality.35 Rousseau’s stance towards different religions is similar to his stance towards ‘partial associations’: they become inimical to democratic life when they claim completely to embody social truth and try to assert that claim through the exclusion or annihilation of difference.

Conclusion Through his critique of Diderot’s general society, Rousseau rethinks the universal as a political construct, refuting, like Laclau, an idea of it as ‘some pure human essence, such as reason, to which all particularity must necessarily submit and which could be incarnated in one privileged social actor’.36 He develops a notion of universality that reveals its contingency, that is, its inseparability from the particular. Universality, in Rousseau’s philosophy, undergoes, then, what Laclau describes in relation to his own theory as ‘a radical mutation that – while maintaining the double reference to the universal and the particular – completely transforms the logic of their articulation’.37 The incompleteness of the universal and the


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particular – their interdependence – leaves either term susceptible to being challenged and redefined by the other. Rousseau’s theory of social contract starts from this ambiguity, exploring the conditions of legitimacy for an inter-subjective agreement which protects individual and collective freedom through equality before the law. The general will, the moral being of society, supplements the absence of any natural union among men. As the general will lacks any pre-given identity, it depends on particular wills for its formation. Likewise, those wills require the institution of the general will for their democratization. This creates a paradox: particular wills already need to be generalized to be able to decide the common laws and yet it is those laws which generalize them. Chapter 7 examines this paradox in relation to the lawgiver. In the next chapter, we consider more explicitly how the general will gets constructed from antagonistic forces which come to form a unified democratic agent of social change. Difference and antagonism underlie Rousseau’s general will. Without diverse and opposing views in the state, Rousseau says there would be no need to form a general will in the first place. The general will therefore does not suppress plurality but safeguards it or more precisely depends on it to resist tyranny and thereby preserve liberty.

Chapter 6

Constructing the General Will

Disagreement and Agreement The social pact arises when we first recognize the interdependence of particular and general. An all out war where individuals blindly strive to secure their personal interests at the expense of others brings us to this recognition. The war is a consequence of natural freedom, where we pursue our aims without any external constraint. Complete autonomy does not ensure our freedom but actually enslaves us to the law of the strongest. Without any larger framework, we are left vulnerable to the will of others. This state reveals how ‘there is no natural and general society’ and how ‘we must extract from the evil the remedy itself’: the need ‘to make up for the lack of any general association by creating new associations’ (GM, 176/288): I suppose men to have reached the point at which the obstacles in the way of their preservation in the state of nature show their power of resistance to be greater than the resources at the disposal of each individual for his maintenance in that state. That primitive condition can then subsist no longer; and the human race would perish unless it changed its way of being. (SC, 190/360) We associate with one another after realizing that unconstrained, we obstruct one another. As the war is waged by all and against all, we cannot blame others solely for ‘the obstacles’ blocking our self-preservation. Extreme antagonism pushes us to see self and other no longer as clear opposites but as co-dependents and, as a result, the futility of securing our personal interests by suppressing or destroying others. Rather than experiencing others as an obstacle to my wholeness, I now experience them as representing a shared lack of wholeness and the need to cooperate with them to fill that lack. Through mutual obstruction, we sense our agency as both present and absent, questioning who we are and how we relate to one


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another. That experience activates our potential for change, our perfectibility. As we discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, that potential, coming from our indeterminacy, can never be fully actualized. This defines the social contract, we argue, ‘as one of continuous contracting’.1 Rousseau acknowledges again how antagonism is constitutive of any political order: ‘if the clashing of particular interests made the establishment of societies necessary, the agreement of these very interests made it possible. The common element in these different interests is what forms the social tie; and, were there no point of agreement between them all, no society could exist’ (SC, 200/368). The desire for association starts with an awareness of difference and that awareness leads us to apprehend what we share in common: a need for social order to protect our freedom. The objects of our agreement – order and freedom – appear through the disorder and constraint of war, through their very absence. That absence renders the different social actors equivalent to one another, showing how no one lives in total independence from others. Rousseau pre-empts Laclau’s observation that the ‘something identical’ in community relations ‘can only be the pure abstract, absent fullness of the community, which lacks [. . .] any direct form of representation and expresses itself through the equivalence of differential terms’.2 The desire for order to safeguard autonomy unifies antagonistic forces into a social pact. The pact’s formation highlights the undecidability of order and disorder underlying any social ordering. It is for this reason that Rousseau’s social contract, unlike the specious contract of the rich man in the Discourse, does not promise everlasting concord (DOI, 98/177). The contract’s identity as a source of order only makes sense because of the permanent threat of disorder subtending it. The Social Contract understands the disruptive effects of the political as inaugurating and, later, necessitating the renewal of our participation in the contract. The suppression of difference and disagreement would represent a suppression of our democratic right, as the sovereign people, to contest and redefi ne how we are governed. If we promise simply to obey, we dissolve ourselves as a people by that very act (SC, 200/369). The unity sought by the contract begins from radical disunity. The chaos caused by that disunity does not presuppose a Hobbesian pact of submission where the masses agree to surrender to the will of a sovereign figure to terminate the insecurity of their natural state. Rather, our basic freedom which, in the partially socialized state preceding the contract causes anarchy, denies the existence of any centre of power (no man has ‘natural authority over another’) and makes us all responsible for establishing an

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association based on mutual obligations and rights. Rousseau argues that Hobbes’s mistake is not therefore to believe that war arose among humans ‘who were independent and had become sociable’ but to see war as natural to them (GM, 176/288).3 If humans are innately bellicose and egoistical, they cannot be expected to form a democratic community based on the understanding that preserving individual freedom necessitates the equal right to freedom of all. The order resulting from the pact cannot therefore be total: to be just, it has to allow scope for autonomous action. On this point, Rousseau, argues Levine, differs from Hobbes who gives ‘precedence’ to ‘order’ ‘over freedom and everything else’. By contrast, Rousseau judges autonomy – our right to legislate for ourselves – the condition of a legitimate state.4 If order becomes the central principle of state organization, then any order will do whether it meets with public approval or not; democratic agency thereby becomes unimportant. Rousseau’s linking of legitimacy with the preservation of autonomy means that the question of the state’s legitimacy always hangs in the balance: the people can dispute it at any time. Natural liberty – our unlimited freedom to do what we want – must be supplemented by civil liberty – our freedom to exercise our rights as determined by the general will – to preserve collective freedom (SC, 196/365).

The General Will and Hegemony Rousseau’s theorization of the general will incorporates his recognition of the constitutive force of difference and disagreement for the formation of social unity. That theory considers how divergent individuals without any pre-given sense of belonging come to form a ‘common self’. What is general to us is precisely the lack of any natural and universal association and the need to fill that lack with ‘new associations’. The general emerges through the particular not as some underlying principle of explanation but as a missing fullness which requires the building of common projects and laws to compensate it. The general will is not a particular will but a generalized particular. The role played by particular wills in configuring the general will in Rousseau adumbrates Laclau’s and Mouffe’s understanding of hegemony.5 ‘Hegemonic politics is nothing other than a politics of the struggle over the occupation of the universal’.6 For Rousseau and Laclau, the universal, as we have observed, lacks any necessary content, symbolizing the absent fullness of society. That lack supplies the condition of hegemonic practices as ‘different identities compete among


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themselves to temporarily give to their particularisms a function of universal representation’.7 Laclau acknowledges a degree of similarity between Rousseau’s general will and his concept of hegemony, describing the ‘universalising effects’ of hegemonic agents as ‘not exactly Rousseau’s general will, but a contingent and pragmatic version of it’.8 However, Rousseau’s general will, we argue, is highly contingent and pragmatic. Both theories aim to conceptualise a non-oppressive mode of unity which accepts difference and reformulation. Contrary to the understanding of hegemony as domination, Laclau and Mouffe understand it as the linking together of different identities and political forces into a common project and as the building of new social orders from dispersed elements. They follow Gramsci’s conception of hegemony as a form of political leadership which transforms society morally and politically.9 For Gramsci, hegemony occurs only when the working class succeeds in converting its particular interests into those of ‘the people’ or ‘nation’ as a whole. Consequently, it forms a collective will that represents universal values and interests.10 Attaining power is not about coercion and force but about consent and consensus. Like Rousseau, Gramsci affirms the constructed and voluntary character of any political association and the re-education accompanying major change in civic life. Laclau and Mouffe detach Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony from its class basis, theorizing it as the articulation of diverse elements with no necessary class belonging into a unified political force.11 They rework the concept of hegemony in terms of their understanding of the social as a complex and infinite web of differential identities and positions. That reworking affirms a plurality of political spaces and struggles in which hegemonic forces could be articulated. Rousseau’s critique of Diderot’s general society of humankind argues that there is no common substance underlying communities. That argument provides the basis of his theory of the general will which offers a non-essentialist account of how to construct unity from difference and conflict. The general will cannot be imposed on individuals or groups: like hegemonic unity, the success of the moral and political change it engenders rests on agreement and identification. The sovereign, ‘being formed wholly of the particular beings that compose it, neither has nor can have any interest contrary to theirs’ (SC, 194/263). The name of the sovereign unites antagonistic forces with no essential connection, naming them as a unified political force. The ‘sovereign’, ‘one of the most important propositions in the field of political right’, functions like an empty signifier, representing the absent whole, that is, a common identification without (yet)

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a common identity: ‘it (. . .) has only an abstract and collective existence and the idea that gets attached to this word cannot be united to that of a single individual’ (GM, 314/ 295). Far from denoting a pre-existent object, the name of the sovereign actually brings that object into existence, showing ‘the central and constitutive role of the contingent moment of naming’ for constructing new political identities and agents.12 The Social Contract can be understood as a process of renaming or redescribing the propositions of political right. It redescribes ‘the sovereign’ as the authority of the people as opposed to that of a leader or political elite and, as we shall examine in Chapter 8, it ‘calls Government (. . .) the legitimate exercise of executive power’, the depositary of popular will (SC, 230/396). Without any pre-established content, the sovereign – the universal name for all state members – ensues from the articulation of divergent and conflicting wills into a general will. That articulating process does not simply aggregate particular identities and interests but generalizes them without completely eliminating their difference. Rousseau’s discussion of the distinction between the general will and the will of all evinces this idea. The will of all amounts to the total sum of private interests, whereas the general will derives from the sum of differences between them. If the general will simply aggregated particular interests without connecting them, the war would continue as no agreement would be reached to unify individuals across their divisions: ‘what makes the general will is less the number of voters than the common interest uniting them’ (SC, 206/374). That unity is contingent: the differences among particular interests allow common interests to appear: Every interest, says the Marquis d’Argenson, has different principles. The agreement of the two particular interests is formed by opposition to that of a third. He might have added that the agreement of all interests is formed by opposition to that of each. If there were not any different interests, the common interest would hardly exist and would never encounter any obstacle; all would go on of its own accord, and politics would cease to be an art. (SC, 203/372) The general will, unlike the will of all, is defined differentially. So Rousseau, Mason asserts, ‘never aspires to a uniformity of attitudes or behaviour – it is only the difference between particular interests which makes us aware of the common – any more than he wants to stifle individuality as such’.13 Politics becomes ‘an art’ or rather exists at all only because of opposing opinions and identities. Disagreement makes us think about,


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and search for, the common. Vibrant societies do not exclude disagreement and difference but negotiate them to gain a renewed sense of commonality. Just as unreflective consensus would deaden politics, the other extreme of ‘long debates, dissensions, and tumult’ would cause deadlock, allowing particular interests to obstruct the democratic activity of deciding the general will (SC, 276/439).14 Even if there were unanimity about the general will – a situation which would occur very rarely – Rousseau cautions that we cannot automatically read that unanimity as a definite sign of a healthy state. It could also signify a situation of ‘servitude’ without ‘freedom’ and ‘will’ (SC, 276/439). The meaning of unanimity therefore proves ambiguous, requiring an act of interpretation and judgment to determine it. Far from seeking complete consensus ‘without obstacles’, Rousseau’s general will enables citizens to disagree on what constitutes the common good as a way of re-affirming and revitalizing their unity, of negotiating their points of agreement. As particular interests relate to one another differentially, their commonality does not exist in any positive or pre-determined form, being constituted ‘by opposition’. We must become aware of the lack of natural association, so that we construct political associations in its place. The general will names the missing unity around which divergent beings converge, supplementing it with decisions about how to build society. As a supplement, it at once conceals what is missing by producing our common self and yet also reveals it through that very act of production. Like Laclau’s contingent universal, it has ‘no necessary body and no necessary content’.15 The emphasis on will in the general will confirms its contingency and provides, Affeldt states, its three main characteristics: it ‘(1) cannot be alienated, (2) cannot be represented, and (3) can exist only as a current will [. . .] this last point is [. . .] the basis of the other two’.16 The general will can never be alienated to or represented by a particular group, person or interest. This may seem to question our discussion of the interdependence of particular and universal. Rather it shows how the general will protects plurality. The impossibility of its being represented and alienated warns against a situation in which a particular will imposes itself as the general will, thereby suppressing the different opinions essential for identifying the collective interest. On a wider but related point, that impossibility concerns the nature of will itself: ‘Sovereignty, for the same reason as makes it inalienable, cannot be represented; it consists essentially of the general will, and will cannot be represented’ (SC, 266/429). ‘Will, for Rousseau, is essentially an act of willing’ and therefore cannot ‘be equated with or ensured by any concrete embodiment in established laws’.17 ‘Unforeseeable

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circumstances’ mean that ‘it is not enough for the assembled people to have once fi xed the constitution of the State by giving its sanction to a body of law; it is not enough for it to have set up a perpetual government, or provided once for all the election of magistrates’. The people must be available to assemble ‘without need of any formal summoning’ to defend its sovereignty by contesting oppressive laws or governments (SC, 262– 263/426). The general will is ultimately unrepresentable because it entails a continuous act of willing which leaves its identity forever incomplete and thus available to new demands and reformulations. If we believed that it could be totally embodied by representatives, or by laws and institutions, we would cease willing and the general will would disappear. Participating in the general will means accepting the impossibility of its full incarnation as the possibility of our ongoing freedom to decide how we coexist. The general will’s unrepresentability links it to Lefort’s theorization of the site of democratic power as an empty space. This dimension makes democracy possible as it allows groups and individuals to compete to generalize their interests in the bid to define the universal.18 As structurally empty – being inalienable and unrepresentable – the general will relies on the interaction among particular wills for its identity: There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will; the latter considers only the common interest, the former takes private interest into account, and is no more than the sum of particular wills: but take away from these same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel one another, and the general will remains as the sum of the differences. (SC, 203/372) The sum of differences is produced by subtracting certain interests to reach the point on which particular wills agree. Particular and general have an undecidable relation: they do not reduce to one another but are not incommensurable. As the general will is formed through its difference from particular wills, through what it is not, the division between what is internal or external to its identity becomes blurred. It remains forever haunted by the particular interests – its constitutive outside – from which it differentiates itself to acquire universal representation.19 This always incomplete separation of the general form the particular leaves the former susceptible to being challenged and modified by the latter. In other words, the different opinions which make it possible to determine the general will also make it impossible to constitute it completely. Its identity is contingent, representing its determinability rather than any underlying essence.


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It is therefore ‘impossible’ for the agreement between particular and general to be ‘lasting and constant’ and ‘even more impossible to have any guarantee of this agreement’ because the particular ‘tends to partiality’ and the general ‘to equality’ (SC, 200/368). This tension necessitates our being always ready to rethink and refresh our contractual ties, since we cannot be certain that the general will is truly general. Only a continuous act of willing conditions the state’s legitimacy: It is contrary to the nature of the will, which has no control over itself, to engage itself for the future [. . .] Now the law of today must not be the act of the general will of yesterday, but that of today. We have engaged ourselves to do not what all have wished, but what all now wish. For as the resolutions of the sovereign, as sovereign, regard only itself, it is always free to change them. (GM, 324/315–316) Any unity the general will establishes is temporary. As an act of willing, its identity is always ‘to come’, remaining infinitely open to being willed otherwise.20 We cannot take the prevailing order as the expression of our future or current will but must keep responsive to new demands or identities which question our understanding of the common. The element of ‘to come’ does not mean that the general’s full identity will eventually appear, since its dependence on difference excludes fullness. Nor does it signify indefinite deferral. Rather it calls on us to act in the present because full generality is impossible and thereby requires perpetual willing. It extends the promise of universal justice on the condition we commit ourselves to an ongoing critique of the laws.21 The combination of generality and will indicates the general will’s split identity. Bertram acknowledges that split, conceiving it at once ‘as decision’ and ‘as a transcendent standard or principle’.22 As no one has natural authority over another, authority lies with the people. Any regime’s legitimacy depends on its acceptability to those who live there. In this light, the general will provides a universally legitimate principle of social grounding. Paradoxically it does not precede what it founds but is actually constituted through the foundational act. Its identity, as social foundation, is always retroactively produced by a decision. Rousseau highlights this split, stating that the general will is always rightful for it seems absurd for a people voluntarily to harm itself but ‘it does not follow that the deliberations of the people always have the same rectitude’ (SC, 202/371) Our decision has no guarantee of being as enlightened as the will which guides it. If it did, different interests would not be so central for discerning the common

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interest, as that interest would be automatically dictated by reason, rendering deliberation futile. Rather the general will remains divided between its function as the universal condition of social legitimacy and the particular decision determining its identity. Consequently, we can never be sure that the general will is truly general or just a particular will masquerading as general: ‘the commands of rulers’ can ‘pass as general wills, so long as the Sovereign, being free to oppose them, offers no opposition. In such a case, the universal silence is taken to imply the consent of the people’ (SC, 201/369). That uncertainty advocates a contestatory mode of politics where we admit our vulnerability to deception as the condition of our civic responsibility to question and scrutinize our collective laws.

The Undecidability of the General Will Althusser identifies this uncertainty but sees it as a contradiction in Rousseau’s argument. He emphasizes the mobility of the general and the particular, observing that ‘each particular interest contains in it the general interest, each particular will the general will’, but, unlike our reading, denies its centrality to the ‘declared’ logic of the contract.23 For Althusser, that mobility appears when Rousseau argues that the general will’s rightfulness ‘originates in the preference each man gives to himself’ since man, in wishing ‘the happiness of each’, takes the word ‘each’ to pertain to himself and ‘in voting for all think[s] of himself’ (SC, 205/373). General and particular intersect: the general will takes effect only when individuals and groups identify it as their own will. Althusser, comparing this remark to a passage in the Geneva manuscript, concludes that the ‘preference’ is simply another name for a particular interest: As the will always tends to the advantage of the being who is doing the willing, as the individual will always has private interest for its objects, and the general will common interest, it follows that this latter is, or should be, the only motive force in the social body. (GM, 314/295) This comparison creates a paradox: the particular interest is at once ‘the foundation of the general will’ and ‘its opposite’, or ‘the essence of the general will’ and ‘its obstacle’.24 Althusser maintains that the solution lies in ‘the play of words’ whereby Rousseau calls, by ‘the same name’, each individual’s particular interest, and that of social groups.25 He sees this as contradictory because he believes that the general will’s ‘absolute


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condition’ is to exclude all groups from the state and that ‘the particular interest’ founding it is thus exclusively that of the individual. Althusser deduces from this alleged contradiction that Rousseau disavows the play in his terminology. I disagree with this conclusion. Rousseau’s insistence that there is no guarantee of the universality of the general will indicates his awareness of the play identified by Althusser. That awareness underlies the need for an eternally vigilant sovereign and that need suggests that the banishing of all groups is ultimately unachievable and cannot be made an ‘absolute’ stipulation. Instead, as noted in Chapter 5, Rousseau proposes their multiplication to prevent one group from dominating others (SC, 204/372). Rousseau therefore never tries to fix the meaning of the particular, conceiving it as contextually defined. It is Althusser, rather than Rousseau, then, who disavows how ‘play’ belongs to the contract’s dynamic. The mobility of general and particular actually facilitates a contract between citizens and their community, enabling each party to constitute and be constituted by the other. While Althusser correctly observes how particular interests operate at once as the foundation of, and obstacle to, the general will, he fails to notice how that undecidability demands the general will’s continual willing. As an obstacle those interests can make us aware of the limitations of the current definition of the general will, and thereby urge us to rethink it. Equally, they could make us realize our own personal limitations and the need to try to overcome them through identification with the wider whole. As a foundation, they ensure its renewal, allowing new interests to become generalized without ever reaching full universality.

The Citizen and the Contract The acceptance of disagreement and difference as formative of the general will and the continual willing which that acceptance presupposes necessitates an active and committed mode of citizenship. Rousseau’s theorization of a social contract between a citizen and his community supplements Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony, by offering a fuller account of the individual’s responsibility in the ongoing process of striving for democracy.26 While Rousseau’s general will and their theory of hegemony consider how particular identities and demands become generalized, Rousseau adds to that account by analysing what democratic subjectivity might entail. Antagonism is central for social formation for all three theorists. In the absence of any positive or substantive basis for communities, we realize

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what we have in common negatively through opposition. This theory of negative identification shows how communities in dispute come to build unity from disunity, it does not, however, adequately explain the citizens’ role in the process of democratization and in the perpetual regeneration of that process. For Rousseau, the incompleteness of the contract founds our ongoing obligation both to ourselves and our fellow citizens to reflect on and revive our contractual bonds of association as we look towards a democratic horizon. So Rousseau analyses in greater detail than Laclau and Mouffe what the individual’s commitments to his community would comprise in a democratic society which affirms the constitutivity of lack and contingency. The general will’s call to alert the state to change requires each citizen to assume his personal role in resisting blind conformity to the laws. The contract, being a ‘mutual undertaking’ between the citizen and the community, involves recognizing that ‘we cannot work for others without working for ourselves’ (SC, 205/273). In entering the contract, we become not only responsible for our own claim to preserving the pact’s freedom and equality but also for that of others. We have to draw on our perfectibility – our freedom for transformation which provides our moral dimension – to critique the prevailing order. That critique should represent the advantages or potential shortcomings of that order to other members so that they also heed the call of the general will to think critically about the laws governing them, so that they are forced to be free. Each citizen becomes equal not only through the need to make up for the shared lack of association but also through the need to remain responsible for shaping, and responsive to being shaped by, their community over time. We are not citizens if we merely obey the laws. ‘Law is purely the declaration of the general will’ (SC, 267/430) which, Affeldt affirms, does not simply mean ‘that genuine law must be established through popular sovereignty. [Rousseau’s] point is that genuine law cannot be established. That is, as nothing but the declaration of a general will, genuine law must be continuously newly born – always the declaration of a current will’.27 The state’s legitimacy does not merely come from citizens’ compliance with the laws but from their questioning and reforming of them. Subservience would result in an evasion of contractual duties and in the terror of the second state of nature whereby we become equal through collective oppression.28 Rousseau’s conception of citizenship proves complex: we acquire our moral identity from identification with the contract’s laws and yet we must also acknowledge our autonomy vis-à-vis those laws to critique and, if necessary, change them. Becoming a citizen entails both submission to


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the contract and also actively (re)producing it, what Rousseau terms ‘the reconciliation of obedience and liberty’ (SC, 263/427). Citizens, as both at once ‘sovereign’ and ‘subject’, emerge neither as a passive effect of the contract nor as a pure act of self-determination but as agents who are simultaneously determined and determining (SC, 230/396). This tension occupies the core of the contract: ‘The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the persons and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before’ (SC, 191/360). Rousseau’s analysis of this problem overcomes the deadlock of current debates in post-structuralist theory over the relation between structure and agency. Put schematically, those debates conceive the subject either as produced by subjection to power structures, whereby the subject loses all agency, or as totally autonomous whereby it becomes a pure act of self-creation.29 The interaction between the citizen and the contract shows how neither agent nor structure can be understood as fully determining. Rather, they are mutually constitutive. Lacking natural sociability, we become socialized only by identifying with social institutions and forms. The need to identify presupposes the absence of identity. The war of all against all, preceding the pact, exposes, we have argued, that lack as we suppress and destroy others in the futile bid to protect our property and person from them. To deny others also implies that we must have acknowledged them at some point and therefore theoretically can acknowledge them again. The contract emerges from this tension: mutual obstruction makes us realize the need for cooperation: ‘as men cannot engender new forces, but only unite and direct existing ones, they have no other means of preserving themselves than the formation, by aggregation, of a sum of forces great enough to overcome the resistance’ (SC, 191/360). We are forced to consent to the structure of the pact because it represents our sole means of self-preservation. However, we cannot submit passively to the contract since passivity would render it ‘an empty formula’. The contract is not an autonomous structure which unilaterally transforms individuals into citizens. For the contract to work, we have to change ‘our way of being’ voluntarily, to commit ourselves actively and passionately to the principles of freedom and equality. That change entails seeing through the illusion of ourselves as free while living ‘everywhere in chains’ and accepting the vigilance essential for preserving liberty. The dislocating effect of war distances us from our aggressive and possessive pre-political state, causing us to think afresh about our coexistence.

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The contract makes the citizens aware of the incompleteness of their particular identities and consequently their mutual dependence on the laws as a means of resisting oppression. Each member becomes an ‘indivisible part of a whole’ and can only be constrained if he violates the contract, by suppressing other citizens’ equal right to liberty. Rousseau theorizes this transformation in terms of the citizens’ total alienation of their rights to the community at large, so that the rights conferred by the contract are the same for all. Without this clause – if some individuals retained rights over others – ‘the state of nature would continue, and the association would necessarily become inoperative or tyrannical’ (SC, 192/361). Once we become sociable, our complete independence, as we have seen, causes extreme personal dependence, leading us vainly to protect our liberty by trying to deprive others of theirs. The only way to provide some degree of independence is for each citizen to depend equally on the whole. Each citizen becomes a member of a community, while the formation of that community depends on each and every citizen. Citizens consent to forego their unlimited freedom to do what they want, which ultimately leads to violence and oppression, and, in return, they acquire the freedom to legislate for their society. We integrate into a not yet existent community, creating the conditions of that integration. ‘Community’ functions as an empty signifier, naming the missing whole whose identity each citizen contributes to producing. An individual obeys only himself as he participates in defining the terms under which he is willing to participate in that production. Total alienation, the only clause of the contract, transforms us into citizens by substituting ‘ justice for instinct in our behaviour’ and giving our ‘actions a moral quality they previously lacked’ (SC, 195/364). It performs this transformation by making us conscious of the universal of which we, as particular beings, form a part and yet whose lack of necessary content or body confers on us the responsibility of its ongoing construction. We become a fraction of the whole and the whole is embodied in each and every one of us.30 It is because the whole has to be incarnated in something incommensurable with it – a particular – which means that it can never be taken for granted. We have constantly to reproduce it.

Total Alienation Total alienation does not strip citizens of their property and person but safeguards them under the law, relieving them of the need to defend themselves singlehandedly and aggressively against others’ wilful violation.


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The state now assumes the role of defence, leaving citizens free to cultivate their property and fashion their person according to need. We can thus redefine the notion of total alienation – the premise of political equality – as partial alienation. This clause defines freedom and equality as interdependent: If we ask in what precisely consists the greatest good of all, which should be the end of every system of legislation, we shall find it reduce itself to two main objects, liberty and equality – liberty, because all particular dependence means so much force taken from the body of the state, and equality, because liberty cannot exist without it. (SC, 225/332) The co-dependence of liberty and equality supports Rousseau’s assertion that equality does not presume ‘identical’ ‘degrees of power and riches’ but rather ‘a moderation in goods and position’ to prevent the violent use of power and one citizen’s total economic dependence on another. As equality represents ‘an unpractical ideal’, remaining always vulnerable to abuse, it needs to be correlated with freedom (SC, 225/332). We have to use our freedom to protect equality by sensitizing the laws to evolving social demands and identities. The interdependence of equality and freedom dovetails with that of the universal and the particular. No individual or group can assert their specific right to self-determination without simultaneously invoking a universal right to self-determination. Any claim of rights demands equal recognition with the rest of society and thus appeals to universality. If that claim were made solely in terms of particularity, it would be self-defeating, as it would reinstate the claimant’s marginal and subordinate position which it aims to overcome.31 Every notion of right implies at once the difference of the person who exercises it and their equality with their community. Without difference, the question of right becomes futile; without equality, it becomes unjust, insofar as a group or individual could always violate the rights of others in the name of their personal freedom. Total alienation supplies, for Rousseau, the answer to our pre- contractual alienated state in which we constantly attack one another to secure our own interests. Unlike our pre-contractual alienation, the total alienation of the pact is conscious and voluntary.32 Total alienation requires us to renounce the illusion of ourselves as completely self-contained and to recognize ourselves as part of the whole. It entails division: we have to objectify ourselves so as to give ourselves to the community at large, which means we give ourselves ‘to nobody’ (SC, 192/361), because the community, as an ‘abstract’

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being without any direct mode of representation, has to be imagined and constructed through our equal political participation (GM, 313/295). Entering the pact requires commitment to the ongoing process of (re)producing our community through our willingness to live by and revise the laws defending our freedom and equality. The contract divides our identity between universal and particular: ‘The act of association comprises a mutual undertaking between the public and the individual, and that individual, in making a contract, as we may say, with himself, is bound in a double relation; as a member of the Sovereign to individuals and as a member of the State to the sovereign’ (SC, 193/362). Through that mutual undertaking, citizens refer back to themselves as free individuals, consciously choosing to enter the pact to safeguard their person and property, and simultaneously also to something transcending them, the sovereign which together they form. Through this ‘double’ relationship, citizens can be understood as the point at which the particular and the general converge, as the site where ‘thought of the common’ emerges.33 This does not mean the sovereign completely subsumes the citizen, for their fusion would dissolve the need for a contract between them: the necessity of their mutual agreement implies division. The common, being produced through opposing differences, possesses no positive identity. To understand ourselves as a community, we have to symbolize our unity to ourselves through the writing of laws and the articulation of shared values and norms. That act of symbolization necessarily includes an imaginary dimension: there is always a gap between any society’s representation of itself as an indivisible whole and its actual divisions. Every society imagines itself as unified, but that unity, constructed from disunity, can never be complete. The ‘tacit agreement’ of the pact which stops it from being ‘an empty formula’ entails recognition of the impossibility of completion. That impossibility defines the contract as one of continual contracting, forcing us to use our freedom to construct the general will. Rousseau highlights the gap between the image of unity projected by the general will and the real social divisions underlying it, stating that ‘each individual [. . .] may have a particular will contrary or dissimilar to the general will which he has as a citizen. His particular interest may speak to him quite differently from the common interest’ (SC, 194/363). This division is constitutive: I have to realize the tensions my particular will may occasion to aim to mitigate them through identification with the general will and that realization also suggests the incompleteness of the whole – the fact that it does not magic away indeterminacy and conflict – and the necessity


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for me to engage critically with its terms and conventions. Citizenship, for Rousseau, does not replicate the effortless and perfectly ordered existence of natural man but involves struggle and sacrifice as we strive to sustain a free and equal association. Giving myself to the community does not mean that I have to renounce my particularity and submit unconditionally to the general laws of the pact. Rather it means that I have to come to terms with the impossibility of retrieving the mythic plenitude of nature and recognize the freedom which that impossibility gives me constantly to renegotiate the conditions of my social integration.

Forced to be Free: The Non-totalitarian Character of the Pact Our understanding of the common always comprises an imaginary element because it lacks any pre-given form or identity. That element causes one of the principal problems of the contract: that of the freeloader. ‘Regarding the corporate person which constitutes the state as a persona ficta, because not a man, he may wish to enjoy the rights of citizenship without being ready to fulfil the duties of a subject. The continuance of such an injustice could not but prove the undoing of the body politic’. Here, Rousseau addresses the reverse problem of citizens’ taking their regime as a full embodiment of the general will. In the case of the freeloader, the citizen treats the general will as a gratuitous fiction. Both cases meet in an evasion of the civic duty to scrutinize and revise the common ethos in response to its inevitable failure to capture the general will permanently. Freedom can only be maintained through constant vigilance: In order that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free; for this condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence. In this lies the key to the working of the political machine; this alone legitimises civil undertakings, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical and liable to the most frightful abuses. (SC, 195/364) This passage, often misread as demonstrating Rousseau’s supposed totalitarianism, explains how citizens are obliged to effect the duties to

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which they have freely consented.34 If there were no unspoken agreement that those who break their promise will be constrained, then the contract would not be binding, leaving us free to act without considering others. The pre-contractual chaos would recur, exposing each to the wilful violation of others and depriving all of any legal recourse. Constraint cannot logically take the form of a lynch mob because the sovereign – recognizing ‘only the body of the nation’ and drawing ‘no distinction between those of whom it is made up’ – cannot ‘pronounce’ on a particular object, that is, ‘a man or fact’ without disintegrating by that act (SC, 206–207/372–373). Moreover, the sovereign as an abstract being is not embodied by a group of individuals, acting legitimately only via the law. Far from totalitarian, the above quotation indicates the contract’s inherent incompleteness, the fact that it cannot fully determine citizens in line with the laws and agreements which it establishes and therefore requires an indefinite process of contracting. Obeying the general will does not simply entail obeying laws but actively participating in its perpetual constitution. The tacit agreement therefore involves a communal effort to turn away from our natural freedom in order to assume our civic freedom. That undertaking is mutual for ‘what citizens owe the common cause is not simply that they themselves will heed the call of the general will. They must also function as agents of constraint for others. Their own response to the call of the general will must be such that it will work to constrain others to heed that call as well’.35 As agents of constraint, citizens act on their responsibility to protect their community’s sovereignty by preventing their fellow citizens from succumbing to the imaginary tranquillity of servitude or from tolerating persecutory behaviour. Each citizen has not only to alienate herself from her natural independence so that she changes her own way of being to become responsible for, and responsive to, the whole, but also to create a context in which others feel compelled to do the same. We identify with others not simply through opposition to oppression but also because we come to understand how each individual’s claim about the community implicates, and possibly compromises us, as an equal participant in that community.36 We acquire a sense of unity not only through resistance to an oppressive outside – through what we are not – but also through what we are: free and equal citizens in charge not only of protecting our community but also of perfecting it through our critical engagement with the general will. This recalls our discussion of the moral education of Emile whereby the adolescent is instructed through compassionate identification to experience social marginalization and deprivation not simply as


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a failure of his society but of his own if he fails to take political action against it. The role of cit izens in urging one another to resist conformism suggests how the political circles discussed in the previous chapter could contribute to cultivating a democratic ethos. In those circles, citizens learn to appraise their society from multiple perspectives, to defend their viewpoints against the arguments of others, to understand how their claims about their community do not stand alone but can be taken up, contested and reworked through critical dialogue with their fellow citizens. By accepting the mutual implication of self and other, we can radicalize our democratic commitment by actively spreading the struggle for freedom and equality to ever-greater areas of social life. That commitment contains the unspoken agreement that no law or figure can fully incarnate the general will and it is awareness of this empty space which ensures our civic freedom, our sovereign authority. Rousseau’s theorization of the social contract systematically marks the gap between the pact’s promise of an egalitarian society and the divisions and conflicts which at once potentially threaten that promise and also demand its constant renewal. It highlights, to use Lefort’s terms, the gap between the discourse by which we represent to ourselves our society and the actual being of that society. In Chapter 3, we explored how totalitarianism, according to Lefort, disavows that gap, believing that a society can be totally identical to the idea it projects of itself. Conversely, democracy maintains that gap by keeping the site of power open. Rousseau’s conception of the general will as unrepresentable and inalienable fulfils this function: we decide on common laws and policies to represent our community but those laws and policies can never fully encompass it. The common good – the object of the general will’s deliberations – eludes any concrete institution or particular articulation. Such a general category, according to Rousseau’s linguistic theory, can never be totally grasped; we can only represent it in a particular form which never completely represents it.37 Therefore, citizens can never entirely identify with their society and its mode of governance, remaining always partly alienated from them. That alienation ensures the need for the general will as a principle of social organization: our inability to apprehend society as a totality should commit us to a constant process of willing. So the social contract makes no claim to determine society fully, as Rousseau states, ‘there is in the state no fundamental law that cannot be revoked, not excluding the social compact itself’ (SC, 273/346). We have to identify with the general structure of the contract because we lack any natural social identity and yet that identification, being produced and

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sustained by a lack, is always incomplete. The impossibility of totally reconciling individual and community produces the citizens’ agency.38 That impossibility forces us to be free: we have to decide which laws to sanction, which interests to generalize in our attempt to define the common good. Rousseau’s statement about freedom and constraint can be heard in the impact of Laclau’s words about the concurrence of the emergence of the subject with a moment of undecidability: The freedom thus won in relation to the structure is therefore a traumatic fact initially: I am condemned to be free, not because I have no structural identity as the existentialists assert, but I have failed a structural identity. This means that the subject is partially self-determined. However, as this self-determination is not the expression of what the subject already is but the result of its lack of being instead, self-determination can only proceed through a process of identification. As we can gather, the greater the structural indetermination, the freer a society will be.39 Laclau’s words help to reinforce the non-oppressive character of Rousseau’s statement of ‘forced to be free’. The differences and divisions which both necessitate and disrupt the legitimacy of the contract can never be overcome because they are constitutive of the contract itself. The structure of the contract is therefore always dislocated: the antagonism which makes it necessary also makes its full realization impossible. Dislocation calls on our perfectibility to resist structural breakdown by developing new laws and strategies. It defines us as partially self-determined, as the site of the decision in the social. Just as the failure of the contract to unite individual and community completely generates the political and moral autonomy that defines citizenship, so for Laclau, the fact that the structure has failed to provide a substantial identity for the subject paradoxically makes it impossible to do away with ‘the category of the subject’: So why call the chooser a subject? Because the impossibility of a free substantial subject, of a consciousness identical to itself which is causa sui, does not eliminate its need, but just relocates the chooser in the aporetical situation of having to act as if it were a subject, without being endowed with any of the means of a fully fledged subjectivity. The opacity of the decision to itself is one of the other names for this ontological condition. It is not possible to do away with the category of the subject: what it points to is part of a structure of experience.40


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We are called on to be citizen most urgently when faced with ‘obstacles’ which challenge our worldview, exposing the discrepancy between individual and community, particular and general. The fact that ‘our particular interest can speak to us quite differently from the common interest’ supplies the undecidability which places us in the positions of ‘choosers’ who have to decide the general will. That decision concerns an uncertain object whose identity can only ever be partial, depending on the particular for its articulation. The citizens’ task is complex: they have to make that decision as if they could form a general will while acknowledging the impossibility of its full constitution as the condition of their infinite responsibility to ensure its constitution. The Social Contract foregrounds how in a democratically founded society, power, unity, legitimacy and identity remain in question. We preserve the equality and freedom of the pact only if we are willing to endure this ambiguity, to subject ourselves and our community to interminable critique: ‘If we wish to establish a durable establishment, let us then not dream of making it eternal’ (SC, 260/424). The illusion of a perfect society based on irrefutable foundations disarms us against the violent abuses of power and inequalities to which humanity falls prey in the Discourse. The general will, being inalienable and unrepresentable, can never fill the void at the heart of the social – its lack of ultimate grounding – and thus requires constant rejuvenation: ‘The order of human affairs is subject to so many revolutions, and ways of thought and ways of being change with such facility that it would be rash to affirm that one would will the same things tomorrow as one does today’ (GM, 314/295). While the social remains always open to change, the institutions and values by which we officially understand ourselves as a society do not automatically integrate those changes. We therefore must exert considerable effort to prevent stagnation and apathy, for the moment we take the laws for granted, ‘the State is dead’ (SC, 261/425). The legitimacy of the society imagined by The Social Contract relies on democratically minded citizens who are able constantly to redefine and revitalize their communal ties in response to political and ethical challenges. In the next chapter, we shall consider the role of the legislator in guiding citizens from the pre-contractual chaos towards the horizon of a democratic community. We shall argue against those readings which cast him as an undemocratic figure, by showing his centrality for cultivating an ethos of contestation and democratic renewal.

Chapter 7

The Democratic Paradox: The Legislator

Rousseau describes the social contract as ‘the act by which a people is a people’ and considers this act the ‘true foundation of society’ (SC, 190/359). It is through the people’s free consent to the contract that it names itself as a people. Rousseau’s description of the contract raises the question of how a multitude can will themselves into the status of a people through their decision to participate in the contract, before they exist as a people with a general will to make that decision. His analysis of this paradox rejects the idea of the people as a pre-given totality or as an essence that the terms and agreements of the contract merely reflect. It emerges as an absent presence that haunts the contractual process, possessing no objective reality beyond its political construction. Its identity is therefore necessarily contingent and open to change. Rousseau’s discussion of this paradox reinforces our argument that his theory presupposes the absence of any fundamental foundations for society and, as a consequence, the contingency of all identities and structures. As we have observed, the central argument of The Social Contract is that a legitimate state is one in which the people, exercising its general will, is sovereign. As the sovereign authority, only the people can authorize the social contract. However, it is the contract itself which confers authority on the people, which establishes it as sovereign. For a people to act as the source of authority for the contract, it would have to be before the contract, what only the contract can make it: ‘the cause would have to become the effect’ (SC, 216/383). The name of the people legitimizing the contract names a lack. Rousseau supplements the lack of popular identity with a unique kind of political representative: the legislator or lawgiver. The lawgiving outsider aims, through his extraordinary political ingenuity, to enable the ‘blind multitude’ at the birth of the pact, to frame suitable laws and to form a people with a general will. The lawgiver’s inclusion in the social contract at once works to conceal the lack underlying the pact by standing in for or representing the absent fullness of the people, and also, through that act of representation, reveals it.

The Democratic Paradox

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Rousseau’s paradox and what some describe as the ‘outlandish’ solution of the legislator have recently spawned much scholarship. While critics largely commend Rousseau for identifying the central dilemma of democracy in his discussion of the people’s ambiguity as the source of legitimacy, some criticize him for trying to resolve completely that ambiguity and thereby eliminate the questioning and conflict characterizing the political.1 This criticism of Rousseau contradicts the main argument of The Social Contract that the popular sovereign has the almost unlimited right to (re)determine how it is governed. For Honig, The Social Contract never intends to overcome the paradox of ‘which comes first – good people or good laws’; it is a recurrent problem which ‘the lawgiver marks rather than solves’. The question of whether the lawgiver is a political genius or simply a charlatan, or whether the people forms a general will or the ‘blind multitude’ survives as such, remains open. The undecidability of both the legislator and the people suggests, Honig argues, a contestatory mode of politics whereby ‘the lawgiving/charlatan institutions’ must always ‘be responsive to the plural, conflicting agents who together are said to authorise or benefit from them’.2 My reading of the legislator welcomes Honig’s affirmation of the permanence of the political in Rousseau’s thinking. As we have seen, the absence of natural foundations defines any social institution as partial and therefore questionable and modifiable. The people’s will grounds the legitimacy of the state but that will is an uncertain object lacking any pre-constituted form or clear guidelines for discerning it. It represents a ground without a ground. ‘Because the act of association has no common grounds to support it but must itself produce those grounds – because each ‘gives himself to no one’ – the people’s collective identity is ‘grounded’ over an abyss’.3 In Chapter 1, we discussed how Rousseau thinking shares affinity with today’s post-foundationalism: the lack of foundations does not mean the impossibility of any social grounds but rather the lack of any final and totally stable grounds: ‘There neither is nor can be any kind of fundamental law binding on the body politic, not even the social contract itself’ (SC, 193–194/362). The problem of how to build society only arises because of the lack of natural foundations and that lack in turn excludes a definitive solution. The political moment of institution and the absent ground both at once depend on, and subvert, each other. The pact conceals the lack by partially instituting society, and simultaneously, through that instituting process, reveals it. The necessity of foundation never disappears, remaining present in its absence in any objective form, and haunting any attempt to construct society. My interpretation of Rousseau’s analysis of people formation draws strength from Laclau’s work on populism in On Populist Reason. Laclau’s

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theorization of populism has much in common with Rousseau’s analysis. They both refute the idea of the people as an empirical reality or as an essence that will eventually reveal itself through socio-political development. The people is a construct whose unity results from the temporary bringing-together or, in Laclau’s terms, ‘articulation’ of heterogeneous social demands into a common political project. Laclau’s thinking helps identify the affirmative character of the tensions that the moment of the legislator causes in The Social Contract. That moment deconstructs the binary oppositions of cause/effect, autonomy/heteronomy, homogeneity/ heterogeneity, represented/representative and fiction/reality, exposing, as does Laclau’s work today, the undecidability which defines the political. Acknowledging undecidability as integral to the logic of The Social Contract, rather than as an accident in a theory that supposedly targets closure, reinforces the democratic potential of Rousseau’s thinking.

Heteronomy as the Condition of Popular Autonomy Many consider the recourse to the lawgiver undemocratic because it apparently contradicts Rousseau’s insistence on the importance of popular autonomy for any just state. ‘The lawgiver leads the citizens to a legitimate set of arrangements, but he also positions the citizens in a relation of heteronomy that is deeply at odds with Rousseauian legitimacy’.4 But the relation of heteronomy only undermines the people’s freedom if ‘autonomy’ means total self-determination where ‘an entity is autonomous insofar as it does not have to go outside itself in order to be determined in its being’. 5 As we have already argued, Rousseau does not conceive subjects as totally selfdetermining. Given the lack it represents, the people, to acquire a common identity and will, has to identify with something external: the lawgiving outsider. The people requires a relation of heteronomy as the condition of its autonomy. This suggests that autonomy and heteronomy are not binary opposites but are caught in a constant tension ‘where the conditions of elimination of one or the other pole of the dichotomy never arise’. Democracy does not entail, Laclau avers, the eradication of ‘heteronomy in the name of a fully fledged self-determination’ but the permanent negotiation of heteronomy and autonomy.6 From this perspective, Rousseau’s inclusion of the legislator in The Social Contract, far from undemocratic, actually supplies the condition of democratization. Considering the traumatic situation which produces the pact, the need for the legislator becomes clearer. It explains why the people cannot write


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its laws without his guidance. Man emerges directly from the violence of war into the egalitarian contract. For the contract to become effective, he must behave as a responsible and informed citizen. Rousseau questions how that transition can be made, how the masses can form a general will so as to write their laws when all they have known is war. Good laws ‘must both come from all and apply to all’; only the people’s general will can regulate the conditions of its association. This creates a conundrum: the will of the people generalizes and thus legitimates the laws and yet the laws generalize and direct the people’s will and that will is produced through its common interest (SC, 206/374). But the multitude forming the body politic cannot know ‘by sudden inspiration’ what that interest is and give itself laws automatically: Has the body politic an organ to declare its will? Who can give the foresight to formulate and announce its acts in advance? Or how is it to announce them in the hour of need? How can a blind multitude, which often does not know what it wills, because it rarely knows what is good for it, carry out for itself so great and difficult an enterprise as a system of legislation? Of itself, the people wills always the good, but of itself by no means always sees it. The general will is always upright but the judgement which guides it is not always as enlightened. (SC, 212/380) The people is often too blind to see the generality essential for good law-making. Lacking any ‘organ’ to express its will, the body politic depends on something other than itself to discern the common interest which unites the particular interests. To allow the multitude to have ‘pure’ autonomy in making its own laws would risk perpetuating the bad socialization which caused the chaos preceding the pact. Constructing a people entails more than the simple aggregation of wills – what Rousseau calls the will of all – it requires a process of transformation by which the individual comes to see how ‘his personal interest demands that he submit himself to the general will’ (GM, 174/286). It involves a reciprocal act of agreement between the individual citizen and the sovereign community in which he participates. As we have observed, the general will does not imply the overcoming of particular interests but a more complex process by which the particular intersects with the general. The general and the particular are not mutually exclusive, occupying a tense co-dependence. Before the contract, there is a gap between the plurality of particular interests and the wholeness named by the general will. The gap needs to be bridged to transform the multitude into the democratic agent the

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contract presupposes. There being no natural link between the particular and the general, the bridge has to be constructed politically. The gap between particular and general constitutes the contract and politics at large: it can be reduced but never completely eliminated. The lawgiver endeavours to bridge that gap, mediating between the radical disunity from which the contract arises and the new sense of moral and affective unity which the contract promises. So the heteronomous lawgiver works to reconfigure the masses into a unified, autonomous people capable of making its own laws. As Laclau writes, ‘if [. . .] exteriority is truly constitutive, this means that the democratic/emancipatory agent cannot be entirely self-determined and that, consequently, its identity will necessarily include an element of heteronomy’.7 The legislator does not therefore undermine the people’s autonomy but actually enables it. The lawgiver ‘makes all from nothing’ (SC, 218/386) as there is no natural cohesion: unity and solidarity must be constructed. He attempts to fill the lack of the people with a system of legislation suitable for its social context. He cannot impose his particular will in writing the laws, since he has no ‘right of legislation’ and ‘the people cannot, even if it wishes, deprive itself of this incommunicable right’ (SC, 215/385). His role places him in a strange position where he is ‘both of the people and apart from them, both inside and outside’.8 He is ‘a superior intelligence beholding all the passions of men without experiencing any of them [. . .] This intelligence would have to be wholly unrelated to our nature, while knowing it thoroughly; its happiness would have to be independent of us, and yet ready to occupy itself with ours’ (SC, 213/380). This description of the legislator highlights the tension between the particular and the universal characterizing his function. His particularity is important because it differentiates him from the multitude, enabling him to formulate legislation which brings disparate individuals together to create a general will. Yet, to construct that will, he has partly to transcend his particularity and stand in for the absent whole that they name. The legislator functions rather like Laclau’s theorization of a hegemonic force.9 He is a particular agent which seeks to generalize private wills by articulating them into a common project of social change. As ‘the ability to generalize ideas is one of the most difficult and one of the last to be acquired achievements of the human understanding’, generalising the masses requires an outsider (GM, 174–175/286–287). The lawgiver represents the universal by embodying multiple interests and desires through his legislation. While the legislation must be designed for a people in specific geographical and social conditions, it must also project them beyond those conditions towards a


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democratic state based on the universal principles of freedom and equality. Like the process of hegemony, the lawgiver’s task has ‘a contextual and context-transcending dimension’, since he ‘should not go by what he sees but by what he foresees’ (SC, 222/389).10 As we have seen, the lack underlying the general will means that it relies on a particular will for its content – in this case, the lawgiver – which expands beyond its particularity to supply the common point of identification for diverse and seemingly opposed interests and demands. The lawgiver can only function hegemonically with the people’s consent: ‘there can be no assurance that a particular will is in conformity with the general will, until it has been put to the free vote of the people’ (SC, 215/383). However, his success is not simply reducible to the formal process of voting; it necessitates the people’s affective investment in his proposed changes. Let us recapitulate. The lawgiver endeavours to supply the cultural and emotional backdrop for constructing a community in a state of fragmentation. He seeks to foster a democratic sensibility in the collective, by facilitating the transition from aggressive competition to the egalitarian social pact, helping the people write the laws suitable for its specific context. The citizens need a political representative only in the figure of a lawgiving outsider, because of their constitutively incomplete identity: For an emerging people to be able to relish sound principles of political theory and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit, which should be created by these institutions, would have to preside over their very foundation; and men would have to be before the law what they should become by means of law. (SC, 216/383) This quotation foregrounds what critics call the causal reversal of the social contract.11 For the citizens to understand the contract, they need to be before the law, what they can only hope to become through living under it and learning thereby that the law in force is right for them.12 The idea of reverse causality does not adequately communicate the temporal complexity of the contractual process. Reverse causality implies a simple inversion of the cause and effect relation, thereby leaving that relation untouched rather than questioning its ability to depict political change.13 We could think about the contractual process more usefully in terms of temporal dislocation: that process does not invert the causal relation but demonstrates the impossibility of establishing antecedence. Norval acknowledges Rousseau’s demonstration of how the building of democracy combines

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both ‘retrospective and prospective dimensions’ which refuse chronological schematization: [These dimensions] are implicated in one another through a trace structure. This is clearly captured in Rousseau’s paradox of the institution of the democratic community: ‘men’ have to be prior to the law what they ought to become by means of the law. The formation of a democratic subject relies upon a set of practices being drawn together retroactively. But this drawing together of an already existing set of practices cannot occur without reference to the promise of democracy: its futural element is thus crucial but must remain precarious.14 The temporal dislocation of the contractual process – the impossibility of causality – highlights the precarious identity of the political community and the incalculable nature of its decision to join the pact. Democracy is not an automatic effect of the contract but a promise that it permanently holds out. As we have argued, keeping that promise requires the citizens’ ongoing commitment to their contractual rights and duties; it requires the people’s agency.

Representing the Unrepresentable ‘The people, being subject to the laws, ought to be their author’ but it lacks the necessary experience to judge what constitutes good laws. ‘Individuals see the good they reject; the public wills the good it does not see. All stand equally in need of guidance [. . .] This makes the legislator necessary’ (SC, 213/380). The ‘people’, possessing ‘only an abstract and collective existence’ is not present in any pure and original form; it has to be constructed (SC, 313/380). We grasp ourselves as a ‘people’ by having our potential unity represented through shared laws and customs. Recognizing that unity paradoxically requires division: we have to divide ourselves into self and other as we represent our unity to ourselves. In short, the multitude comes to understand itself as a ‘people’ in the form of an idea or representation not as a thing in itself. The lawgiver aims to supply that representation, supplementing the people in writing the legislation of the state. He has both to create the popular will through his laws and also represent it to the people so that it invests in those laws as its own. He therefore cannot simply make the citizens perceive ‘objects as they are’ but also sometimes as ‘they ought to appear’ (SC, 212–213/380). He guides them ‘to sense things that they


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cannot see’, to imagine themselves as a unified whole despite the diversity and divisions underlying their construction.15 His task entails finding a representational mode through which to communicate ‘a thousand kinds of ideas’ ‘impossible to translate into popular language’, ‘conceptions that are too general and objects that are too remote’ for ‘the common herd’ to comprehend (SC, 215/383). As we shall explore, the legislator, to get the ‘herd’ to accept his legislation, recurs to the fiction of the divine authorship of the laws. That fiction conceals the people’s lack of any direct presentation in reality, giving it an imaginary sense of inherent unity. The legislator’s role refutes the view that Rousseau is totally opposed to political representatives. We might reach this conclusion if we interpret the following quotation out of context: ‘The moment a people allows itself to be represented, it no longer exists’ (SC, 268/431). This quotation must be read in the light of Rousseau’s critique of ‘pure’ democracy where the people govern themselves directly. He judges it impossible and ultimately undemocratic as it leaves the state vulnerable to mob rule and limits the scope for reform. The only time when the people rules itself directly in The Social Contract is paradoxically when it decides to elect a government, that is, when it experiences the impossibility of complete democracy. Rousseau includes an elected government as a principle of political right. This shows that representation has a specific meaning in Rousseau’s work. ‘The idea of representation’, he advances, originates from ‘the iniquitous’ and ‘absurd’ system of feudal government ‘which degrades humanity and dishonours the name of man’ (SC, 266/430). It connotes a one-sided ruling where the representatives eventually replace the people as sovereign. So the people no longer exists when it see its representatives as an authority, that is, as such a direct expression of its will that it neglects its responsibility to decide the laws: ‘If the people simply promises to obey, by that very act, it dissolves itself and loses what makes it a people; the moment a master exists, there is no longer a Sovereign, and from that moment the body politic has ceased to exist’ (SC, 200/369). Rousseau’s insistence on the sovereign’s ultimate unrepresentability confirms that no leader or government can ever fully represent it (SC, 266/340). The impossibility of immediately transmitting the people’s will indicates the persistence, within the political field, of the unrepresentable. ‘The people’ names a fullness that can never be totally represented. The representative function of the lawgiver supplements the people’s unrepresentability. Paradoxically, his representational act partially engenders the object being represented: the people. Rousseau’s conception of the legislator offers a highly nuanced account of political representation.16

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The active part the lawgiver plays in guiding a ‘not yet’ democratic people to write the laws founding a democracy illustrates the mutual implication of represented and representative. Representation is normally considered democratic, when it faithfully reflects the popular will. Rousseau’s recourse to the legislator shows the inadequacy of this view. Laclau also considers inadequate this view but identifies Rousseau as its source: Democratic theory, starting with Rousseau, has always been highly suspicious of representation, and has accepted it only as a lesser evil, given the impossibility of direct democracy in large communities like modern nation-states. Given these premises, democracy has to be as transparent as possible: the representative has to transmit as faithfully as possible the will of those he represents.17 The representative does not merely ‘transmit the will of those he represents’ but also ‘gives credibility to that will in a milieu different from the one in which it was originally constituted’.18 He is therefore not ‘a passive agent’ but works to demonstrate how certain interests or values are compatible with the will of the community at large. Because the process of representation changes or modifies the identity of those represented, it does not operate in one direction alone: the represented depend on the representative for the constitution of their group identity and in turn the success of the representative depends on the acceptance of his programme. In fact, on the legislator’s formative role in democratization, Rousseau prefigures Laclau. Rousseau introduces the lawgiver to substitute the absence of a unified people. The pre-contractual state of war requires the lawgiver to provide a point of identification around which a heterogeneous mass can homogenize into a people with a democratic will. Like Laclau, Rousseau views social heterogeneity as a constitutive part of popular unity; heterogeneity gives presence to the absent plenitude of society which fuels the attempt to institute a people:19 He who dares to undertake the task of instituting a people ought to feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual, who is by himself a complete and solitary whole, into part of a greater whole from which he in a manner receives his life and being; of altering man’s constitution for the purpose of strengthening it; and of substituting a partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence nature has conferred on us all. He must, in a word, take away from man his own resources and give him instead new


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ones alien to him, and incapable of being made use of without the help of other men. (SC, 214/381) As we have observed, man, for Rousseau, is defined by the absence of any natural social identity. The establishment of the social contract only makes sense in relation to that absence. The lawgiver, as an outsider, alienates man from his asocial existence, exposes him to otherness. That exposure to otherness provides the condition of man’s ability to invest in a new mode of coexistence where self and other are not experienced as opposed to one another, but as mutually dependent. Man has to recognize, therefore, that it is his difference from others – his lack of common identity – which necessitates his participation in a contract based on shared obligations and respect. So the lawgiver directs man to renounce his feeling of individual wholeness – which the war uncovers as illusory – and confront his lack of identity as not only marking a lack within himself but also a lack within the wider sphere for which he has to compensate through identification with the contract. As we have noted in Chapter 4, a people that has recently been emancipated from an oppressive or anarchic situation has to confront the traumatic abyss of freedom as they invest in a new political order that has not yet been actualized. That traumatic experience can cause them to relapse into an authoritarian state. To avoid this relapse and to embrace that void as a condition of its self-determination, a people has to be able to break with habit and imagine alternative ways of coexisting. The legislator plays a constitutive role in this process. He not only helps to estrange the multitude from its formerly destructive state but also to glimpse the other modes of being allowed by its recently acquired identity as a democratic agent responsible for deciding its laws. He transports the people beyond the here and now so that it discerns the limitations of its previous situation and the need and possibility of a better future. Man’s absence of natural sociability is central to this process, enabling him to change through identification. Our attachment to the legislator eventually diminishes as his proposals become effective and we take responsibility for our ongoing self-construction. On this point, my reading of the lawgiver differs strikingly from that of Shklar who asserts an ‘indestructible’ inherent self in Rousseau’s philosophy which resists socialization: ‘The citizen, however much denatured, however conscious of his civic self, has still an individual self, an inner life of his own, and it is bound to assert itself as soon as the vigilant eye of the legislator is removed’.20 I refute the idea of an essential self which is recalcitrant to modification. As all reflection is comparative, self-awareness

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can be acquired only in the context of social relations, for this reason, Rousseau remarks that ‘we really only begin to be men after having been citizens’ (GM, 175/287). The self, being always relationally constructed, remains open to modification and transformation from without. In this light, Shklar establishes a falsely rigid dichotomy between men and citizens, failing to see how, in Rousseau’s thinking, they mutually imply one another. We have, however, argued, like Shklar, that man cannot be fully engulfed by any social order and always remains divided between particular and universal but not because of any innate selfhood but because of a constitutive lack of one which leaves open the question of his identity and that of his society. So, unlike Shklar, we read his division as the affirmative condition of his agency, his ability to engage with his community and imagine it otherwise. Our split between particular and universal supplies the difference essential for reflection. If man did not have a particular will, he would not need to try to surpass it and forge common interests with others in the bid to form a general will. He would remain apolitical like natural man. His particular will therefore provides the basis of his social integration and also of his autonomy to think critically about that integration. The educative function of the legislator is not to endow man with an integral self or to force him into an unnatural state of obedience but to allow him to glimpse the otherness constitutive of identity. He encourages individuals, or even provokes them, to go beyond their current selves and strive to attain a better self, to take advantage of their perfectibility. As we saw in Chapter 2, what is alien to us makes us see the given in a fresh light and recognize its scope for reorganization. The lawgiver’s foreignness distances us from our relation to ourselves and others, so that we can think about it from a new perspective. Whereas Shklar’s reading disavows the human potential for maturation in the Kantian sense of freedom from external authority, my reading emphasizes it, all the while stressing the struggle which actualizing that potential entails and its non-teleological aspect: there is no model of an ideal self which would enable us to achieve integrity, since division, being constitutive of identity, is insuperable and also autonomy always comprises a degree of heteronomy. The immense change effected by the lawgiver highlights how the founding of a democracy cannot come from his directly transmitting the people’s will, since that will has no essential or pre-existent form and if it did, it would exclude the necessity of both the lawgiver and the contract. The people therefore needs the lawgiver’s mediation for its constitution. The legislator cannot merely have a neutral connection to the people but must


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actively create the feeling of unity among individuals in their disunity. The lawgiving representative becomes the privileged point of reference in the representational act. Laclau sees reversal within the relation between represented and representative as the condition of ‘democratic participation’ in situations of social fragmentation: In many third world countries, for example, unemployment and social marginalisation lead to shattered social identities at the level of civil society and to situations in which the most difficult thing is how to constitute an interest, a will to be represented within the political system. In those situations, the task of the popular leaders consists, quite frequently, of providing the marginalised masses with a language out of which it becomes possible for them to reconstitute a political identity and a political will. The relation representative → represented has to be privileged as the very condition of a democratic participation and mobilisation.21 For Rousseau, and today Laclau, the idea of the people refers not to a ‘given group’ but to a ‘political category’ which requires ‘an act of institution that creates a new agency out of a plurality of heterogeneous elements’.22 The legislator endeavours to unify the individual members of the state by articulating their particular demands with the general laws of the contract. The lawgiver stands in for what does not yet exist; he has to represent the unrepresentable object of the people, producing that object through that process. He operates within the gap between the heterogeneous multitude at the instating of the contract and their potential for a more democratic identity. His role at once affirms and negates the absent plenitude of the social underlying the contract.

Fiction and Political Reality: The Lawgiver’s Invocation of the Gods The Social Contract, we have argued, highlights the absence of fundamental foundations and the freedom which that absence gives us to question and modify our social organization. Our reading of The Social Contract resonates with Lefort’s assertion that [Democracy] is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, the law and knowledge,

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and as to the basis of relations between self and other, at every level of social life.23 Rousseau deems necessary a consciously willed contract between the citizen and his community precisely because of the uncertainty engendering politics. If a general society of humankind existed where each individual knew a priori what he ‘can ask of his fellows and what his fellows have the right to ask of him’ (GM, 174/285), then a contract would become redundant. The contract aims to bring certainty to a situation of uncertainty. The people’s promise to live by it only proves meaningful if anyone could possibly break that promise. That possibility necessitates the people’s eternal vigilance against non-egalitarian practices or figures, their passionate devotion to the articles of faith of the civil religion which ‘anathematise persecutory violence’.24 In this section we examine how the lawgiver recurs to fiction – he pretends the laws were sent to him from the gods – to hide the unstable foundations of the contract so that the citizens invest in his legislation despite his having no legislative authority. The fiction of divine sanctioning supplements the political moment of the instituting of the pact. The pact is at once conditional upon the absence of any natural social grounding and also threatened by it, leaving it always vulnerable to ‘de-institution’. To resist this threat, the citizens have to move beyond the indeterminacy subtending the contract to commit themselves to its terms and agreements. The lawgiver’s fiction facilitates this process, functioning in a similar fashion to what Glynos and Howarth call the logic of fantasy. ‘If political logics (. . .) show how social practices come into being or are transformed, then fantasmatic logics provide the means to understand why specific practices “grip” subjects’. Fantasy does not give subjects ‘a false picture of the world’ but renders them ‘complicit in concealing or covering over the radical contingency of social relations’ so that political institutions, often born in struggle and contestation, come to appear stable and coherent enough to constitute reality.25 The mythical invocation of the gods takes its bearings from the contingency of the contract. The contract offers no guarantee of a safe and legitimate state, always appealing to a not-yet-realized community. The instituting of that community entails both an imaginary representation of its unity and the people’s concrete investment in its realization. So the people cannot assume sovereignty without denying its indeterminate foundations and experiencing it as an inalienable right. Citizens must not therefore treat the sovereign as a ‘persona ficta’, enjoying the benefits of citizenship without fulfilling their obligations (SC, 195/363). To preserve


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the freedom and equality of all, the citizens must abide by the laws and execute the duties which they voluntarily agreed to fulfil on entering the pact. They must therefore accept the terms that they authorize as binding; they must obey their own authority. So while openness defines the people’s freedom to decide the conditions of its coexistence, the preservation of that freedom requires a degree of closure whereby it invests in its sovereignty as a reality. The lawgiver’s fiction paradoxically makes the contract seem real. The lawgiver devises the ‘political’ or ‘fundamental’ laws; these laws regulate the relation of ‘the whole to the whole’ (SC, 227/394). But the very idea of regulating that relation already implies that the whole is never quite whole. The fiction of divine authorship conceals the people’s incomplete identity, allowing the antagonistic forces at war to form a common frontier and understand their authority as presupposed rather than produced by the contract. It fixes the people’s identity as sovereign but does not fi x the content of that identity: the people can only secure their sovereignty if they participate in the open-ended process of constructing the general will. The identity of that will remains always available to new social demands, not being bound by any future or past decision: ‘For as the resolutions of the sovereign, as sovereign, regard only itself, it is always free to change them’ (SC, 324/316). The unpredictable identity of the general will extends the promise of democracy not as a realizable state of perfect harmony but as interminably incomplete and thus susceptible to the event or the new. The general will, as the source of the state’s legitimacy, has the right always to call itself into question and reconstitute itself. It performs a double function: it grounds the legitimacy of any regime through its decision and yet can also contest the legitimacy of that decision if the regime no longer meets its demands. The sovereign ‘is always in a position to change its laws, however good, for if it chooses to do harm to itself who can have the right to stop it?’ (SC, 227/394). The people never provide the state with completely stable grounds being ‘still and also always a multitude’ which is prone to ‘anarchic waywardness’.26 Rousseau recognizes how democracy contains the risk of its own undoing. The openness which gives the people the authority to decide their own laws also gives it the authority to make bad decisions with undemocratic consequences. The lawgiver offers a case in point. It is up to the people to choose whether to accept his legislation or not. While he could guide them to a just set of arrangements, he could equally prove to be a charlatan who manipulates them into consenting to laws serving his own ends. ‘Legislator and charlatan thus remain radically undecidable’.27 Even if the legislator

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proposes sound legislation, there is no guarantee that the people will recognize its legitimacy and agree to it, or if it does, that it will persevere with it. Rousseau’s solution of the lawgiver, Honig remarks, never claims to possess the ‘certainty or force’ that other commentators attribute to it: ‘The lawgiver may offer to found a people, he may even attempt to shape them, but in the end it is up to the people themselves to accept or reject his advances. They may be dependent on his good offices, but he is no less dependent on their good opinion’.28 The illusory decree from the gods therefore constitutes ‘an authority that is no authority’ which is ‘capable of constraining without violence and persuading without convincing’, for if the people simply obeys that decree, it is no longer a sovereign people free to determine its mode of rule (SC, 216/383). Whether the legislator is a political genius or a charlatan can be known only through the effects of his legislation, that is, after the event. The undecidability at the heart of The Social Contract rejects once again Rousseau’s alleged totalitarianism. Rather, he recognizes the indeterminacy defining democracy: a fully legitimate people is an impossible aim because democracy demands that the people be always ready to challenge its regime and reconfigure itself in the pursuit of justice. The work of a good legislator must not therefore result in subservience to him and his legislation but must lead a people to assume, and act on, its sovereign authority, to become a site of questioning and transformation.29 Any claim to legitimacy must be both identical to the popular will and somehow beyond it to ensure its constant renewal. The people’s authority is necessarily contingent but not arbitrary. That authority must establish the general will and endeavour to follow its laws while acknowledging its susceptibility to contestation and revision. Each act of the general will appeals to a generality that exceeds it. The whole never becomes whole but must always strive to relate to itself as if it could reach wholeness to sustain the question of its own legitimacy. The quest to ground a safe and just society remains urgent because of the fragile basis of any social organization – its lack of natural foundations – which exposes it to the constant threat of corruption. The lawgiver’s fiction illustrates how ‘the dissolution of the myth of foundation does not dissolve the phantom of its own absence’.30 That absence has to find presence in some form to nourish our continual effort to build society. The impossibility of society as a perfect totality makes possible the open-ended attempts to construct it as a partial object. The myth of total foundation is therefore a productive impossibility rather than simply an impossibility. The lawgiver’s illusion hides the unstable origins of the contract. The people has to forget the chaos necessitating the contract and embrace its


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egalitarian principles. The way that illusion forms an integral part of reality in The Social Contract prefigures Laclau’s insistence on the necessity of myth to support political change. The emergence of myth coincides with moments of dislocation where we experience the contingency of social relations, their lack of objective grounding. Myth supplies a new space of representation which hides the dislocation, by offering a set of norms, values and ideas on which to re-build society. It thus projects us beyond the experience of fragmentation and reorients us towards a horizon of unity.31 In The Social Contract, the myth of divine sanctioning absorbs the temporal disarray of the contract, giving imaginary unity to its contracting parties by negating their lack of any pre-existent reality. Like all myths, it can never fully separate itself from the negativity from which it emerges and which it tries to dissimulate. The legislator’s invocation of the gods exposes not only a paradox whereby fiction constitutes reality but also another paradox, whereby the legislator encourages the citizens to identify with the non-authoritarian contract through the authoritarian means of an illusory decree from the gods. The fact that the contract is authorized before its source of authority – the people – has been established explains this apparent contradiction. The establishing of that authority can occur only through a contingent decision: man’s agreement to the contract which is not an inevitable outcome of the war. The legislator’s illusion seeks to distinguish between authority and power, by making the people’s sovereignty sacred and inviolable and to prevent a situation in which power becomes self-legitimating and therefore dispenses with the question of its legitimacy. By hiding the contingency of the people’s authority, the divine fiction aims to defend against the absent ground of society and forestall the threat of despotism whereby power is gained through force alone. The insertion of illusion into the social pact to ensure its legitimate functioning anticipates Žižek’s observation that the sources of authority can only act as the privileged point of reference for the authorization of power if history is written backwards, that is, if those sources pass themselves off as already presupposed.32 By ‘essentializing’ the people’s authority, the myth of divine authority fixes the ontological status of the general will as the organizing principle of the social without fixing the ontic content of the decision that temporarily determines it. So the people has to act as if it believed the myth to empower itself to make decisions without guarantees or pre-existent guidelines. The name ‘the people’ becomes a metaphor for the absent transcendental order traditionally signified by the name of God, which informed earlier descriptions of the general will. We can perhaps find a

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present-day theorization of the illusion of the divine origin of the laws in Laclau’s observation that at the moment of decision there is ‘something of the nature of a simulation. To take a decision is like impersonating God. It is like asserting that one does not have the means of being God, and one has, however, to proceed as if one were Him’.33 The divine fiction illustrates the irreducible tension inherent in any socio-political formation: our freedom to make decisions which affect us and our community comes from the insurmountable negativity of the social – its lack of foundations – and yet making these decisions requires us to act as if we could build a coherent society to negate that lack. The legislator creates a context in which the multitude begins to imagine itself as a democratic community motivated by the preservation of its freedom. He ultimately strives to enable the citizens to function without his guidance. He cannot, however, bring them to a state of complete autonomy: to behave as democratic agents, they must continually both make and submit to laws, they are therefore at once constituted and constituting, determined but never fully determined. The undecidability of autonomy and heteronomy persists: we exercise our sovereignty only if we internalize the external limits imposed by the contract, if we continue to identify with the legislator’s laws. Whereas his function is finite, his success hangs on the durability of his legislation. As Rousseau observes regarding Moses and Ishamel, ‘while the pride of philosophy or the blind spirit of faction sees in them no more than lucky impostures, the true political theorist admires, in the institutions they set up, the great and powerful genius which presides over things made to endure’ (SC, 217/ 384). Assessing durability is thus problematic: we can never totally distinguish between ‘significantly durable institutions from those whose durability is merely a function of mere good fortune or violent imposition’.34 Undecidability conditions the people’s freedom. The legitimacy of any state depends, for Rousseau, on its acceptability to its citizens; they therefore have to decide which laws and institutions should endure or which should be reformed or changed. Popular autonomy signifies that ‘it is consequently against the nature of the body politic for the Sovereign to impose on itself a law which it cannot infringe’ (SC, 193/362). Our almost unlimited freedom to (re)define the terms of our coexistence presupposes the absence of any guarantees or objective normative standards: such standards and guarantees would reduce law-making to a bureaucratic procedure of following fixed rules and pre-established guidelines. Undecidability at once allows us to make decisions which potentially destabilize and transform the established order and also prevents us from definitely knowing if we have made the right


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decision. A time could therefore come when a new lawgiver is required to reconstruct the popular will once the laws ‘insensibly lose their influence [. . .] and the state [. . .] is either destroyed or changed, and nature has resumed her invincible sway’ (SC, 227/393).

Conclusion The Social Contract, despite being written before the democratic Revolution, highlights the tensions constitutive of modern democracy. Baker, referring to Lefort’s idea of the permanence of the theological-political, affirms how the imaginary reactivation of the religious by the lawgiver anticipates the ambiguity of the post-Revolutionary era: Where the political and the religious dimensions are held apart so that the centre of democratic power is unappropriated, emptied of all sacred value [. . .]. This condition of democracy, this form of power, is purely symbolic; unrepresentable, unfigurable, because the political had never been non-religious, the religious never non-political. The immediate ‘return’ of the category of the religious in the imaginary mode is thus a kind of ghost, occurring whenever a political interpretation structures enquiry into the generative principles of a society. This imaginary reactivation is thought to attest the fact that democracy cannot easily make itself intelligible in its own eyes.35 The difficulty of imagining how the blind multitude can decide to will itself into existence as the sovereign people without possessing a general will to make that decision suggests the unintelligibility of democracy. Democratic politics, striving to reconcile the individual and the collective, freedom and the law, works to efface the division, conflict and indeterminacy providing its conditions of possibility. We have to pass from the undecidable and open level of the political to the decidable and totalizing level of politics which seeks to unify opposed elements to form a people. The recourse to the legislator exposes rather than overcomes the constitutive gap between these two levels. His legislation can never fully determine the people’s identity, that is, relate ‘the whole to the whole’, for the people needs legislation only because its identity is always indeterminate and uncertain. The ‘people’ denotes an absent whole. That absence conditions the people’s inalienable right to question and change the terms of its association as it seeks its missing wholeness. It provides the grounds

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of legitimacy of the state but that ground is never total, leaving it free to make new claims as it redefines its identity to respond to events. The illusion of divine authority does not force the citizens into a state of blind subservience but allows the contract’s contingency to recede into the background so that they have the courage to embark on the open-ended quest for democracy. In the next chapter, we shall explore the ambiguities and tensions which the democratic promise of the contract entails.

Chapter 8

Rousseau’s Radical Democracy

In the previous chapter, we explored how the people’s undecidability – whether it becomes the sovereign or the ‘multitude’ persists – provides the condition of (im)possibility of its agency. The people’s will never supplies a definite foundation for the state: the state’s legitimacy, unity and ethos remain permanently in question. This undecidability supports our understanding of the social contract as radically democratic. The Social Contract highlights the political ambiguity and indeterminacy activating the questioning, revision and transformation fuelling democracy. It systematically shows how the pact’s free and egalitarian society never gets fully instituted and how that incompleteness enjoins citizens to undertake the open-ended task of constructing it. Radical democratic politics refutes all ‘dogmatic postulation of any essence of the social’, affirming ‘the contingency and ambiguity of every “essence” and the ‘constitutive character of division and social antagonism’.1 It emphasizes the form of democracy rather than its content: social content cannot precede, or exist independently of, the democratic struggles over society’s determination. The fact that social unity and identity get constituted through difference and conflict questions any normative reflection on politics which prescribes the rules and conditions necessary for an ideal regime. Even society’s normative content – its idea of justice and the common good – arises from and gets formed through contestation. The emphasis on the contestable character of social values and organizations in The Social Contract, we argue, explains why Rousseau deems complete democracy an impossible ideal.

Democracy: The Impossible Ideal The term ‘democracy’, in The Social Contract, refers to the regime of direct or ‘real’ democracy in which the people making the laws also executes those

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laws in specific contexts. This limited sense of democracy does not exhaust Rousseau’s contribution to democratic theory. Rather his ‘greatest contribution’ lies in his conception of sovereignty as democracy2 and the ambiguity which that conception engenders for politics generally. Democracy becomes redefined as ‘the ground of inscription’ for any regime, as the form and experience of society’s constitutive contingency which engages citizens and their community in an ongoing process of mutual identity construction. His discussion of direct democracy reinforces our reading, foregrounding the impossibility of instituting democracy as a perfect regime. Rousseau identifies sovereignty with democracy because, without a divine or natural basis for society, any just political association can be authorized only by the people’s will. Sovereignty rests with the people but the people never forms, as we have seen, a harmonious unity capable of governing itself. Recognition of the gap between the ‘people’s’ universality and its particularity in time and space sustains democracy as different forces seek to define its identity. Democratic politics thus depends on an awareness of the incompleteness of the universal. That awareness underlies Rousseau’s critique of the regime of direct democracy where the people and the government become one; he states that this regime is only suitable for a ‘people of gods’ (SC, 240/406). Initially, direct or ‘real’ democracy might seem ideal as the people making the laws should be the best judge of their execution. However, Rousseau shows how real democracy proves ultimately undemocratic. The general will comes from all and applies to all. If citizens consider not only the abstract being of the community but particular cases as well, then their ability to see themselves as both a part and an embodiment of the whole, may become impaired, as they could find themselves judging cases which concern them personally. Their personal involvement would destroy the critical distance necessary for thinking through the implications of that judgment not simply for themselves but also for others. Direct democracy, far from ensuring the general will, actually jeopardizes it by potentially enabling private interests to interfere with public affairs. As we have said, we need to be aware of our internal antagonism – the fact that our particular will may speak to us quite differently from the common interest – in order to realize the need to participate in the general will. Real democracy endangers democratic activity, by concealing the division between the universal and the particular which defines the citizen and allows him to think beyond his limited personal context and scrutinize the laws on behalf of his community. This regime, by restricting critical reflection, risks dissolving fact (how things are) into right (how they ought to be), thereby rendering ‘all


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reformation’ ‘impossible’(SC, 239/404): ‘Were it possible for the sovereign, as such, to possess the executive power, right and fact would be so confounded that no one could tell what was the law and what was not; and the body politic, thus disfigured, would soon fall prey to the violence it was instituted to prevent’ (SC, 249/432). Pure democracy defeats its own objective of guaranteeing everyone’s equal participation in state matters, threatening society with the law of the strongest whereby individuals would impose their private interests on others as the common interest without seeking agreement or heeding any disagreement about the legitimacy of their claims. Consequently, it would blur the distinction between authority and power. If that distinction disappears, power becomes self-legitimating, allowing the powerful to organize the social field to its own ends without eliciting popular consent. Rousseau’s theory of social contract does not therefore strive to realize a state in which fact and right become perfectly fused: their fusion would cause political closure. By confusing fact and right, direct democracy jeopardizes our autonomy – our liberty to rethink the collective good beyond the status quo. Another weakness of this regime is that it does not account for the conflicts and tensions generating the political: ‘A people that would never misuse governmental power would never misuse independence; a people that always govern well would not need to be governed’ (SC, 239/404). For this reason, Rousseau describes direct democracy as a ‘government without government’, indicating its self-cancelling character. By denying the gap between the real divisions and differences of the individuals forming the people and their institutional representation as a unified whole, it actually engenders an anti-democratic type of politics. Democracy advances that the governed should decide their mode of governance. However, when the people and the government become one, the people cannot dismantle its government, without simultaneously dismantling itself. Put differently, if the government pretends to express the people’s will fully, to contest it is to exclude yourself from the people, and to forfeit your right to participate in public life. Drawing on Lefort, Žižek examines this paradox by analysing the people’s role in totalitarian regimes. In such regimes, the ruling party claims to embody the popular will completely. This proves highly authoritarian: the party’s universal claim can never be falsified for ‘the People always supports the Party because any member of the People who opposes Party rule automatically excludes himself from the People’.3 Rousseau’s critique of pure democracy illustrates how democracy is not necessarily measured by degrees of identification between governed and government, since this would mean that even totalitarian regimes were democratic but rather by a society’s willingness to acknowledge, and take

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responsibility for, the discrepancy between how things are and how they should be. We can infer from Rousseau’s critique that the impossibility of complete democracy provides the condition of democratic politics. The conflict, ambiguity, and questioning fuelling democracy also prevent its realization as an ideal. Rousseau’s maxim for democracy foregrounds this friction: ‘I prefer a perilous freedom to a tranquil servitude’ (SC, 240/405). The freedom justifying democracy is, for Rousseau, ‘unsettling, contingent, “perilous”, a capacity susceptible to error as well as alteration, a source of turbulence as well as contentment’.4 A free people enjoys the right ‘to elect and dismiss officials at will, not only to exchange pledges of continuing good faith in a common framework, but also to change entirely the form of government, to transform the institutions of society, to reject old laws and pass new ones’.5 We preserve democratic freedom only by recognizing democracy’s incompleteness. The sovereign people cannot govern itself directly, thereby defining the centre of democratic power as an empty place. Any figure or government occupying that place can do so only temporarily ‘as a kind of a surrogate, as a substitute for the real-impossible sovereign’ or, in the words of Rousseau, for a people of gods.6 Maintaining democracy requires us to confront the chaos and tyranny which threaten it and to resist that threat ‘through vigilance and courage’ (SC, 240/405). The freedom and openness afforded by democratic structures also entail, Žižek remarks, ‘the possibility of corruption, of the rule of dull mediocrity’. If we ignore this inherent threat and try to restore ‘real’ democracy, we risk, as Rousseau warns, abolishing democracy itself. For this reason, the term ‘radical democracy’ is to be taken ‘somehow paradoxically: it is not radical in the sense of pure, true democracy; its radical character implies, on the contrary, that we can save democracy only by taking into account its own radical impossibility’.7 That impossibility enjoins citizens to ‘arm themselves with the strength and constancy’ imperative for struggling for democracy and to prefer perilous freedom over the imaginary tranquillity of servitude (SC, 240/405). Total democracy, as an unrealizable ideal for Rousseau, supplies society’s horizon rather than its foundation.8

The Democratic Horizon This distinction between horizon and foundation is important for critiquing the view offered by Schwartz that Rousseau’s theory seeks to overcome


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the political. Schwartz partly bases this view on Rousseau’s brief depiction of a small idyllic community which rules itself directly (SC, 274/437). In this community, ‘peace, equality and unity’ reign, rendering ‘political subtleties’ irrelevant. Peasants decide on communal affairs under an oak tree, enjoying ‘the constant wisdom’ denied to those ‘encumbered with confused and conflicting interests’. Since all are ‘concerned with their common preservation’, their principles are ‘clear-cut’ (SC, 274/437). Schwartz judges this ‘utopia’ the endpoint of Rousseau’s contract, overlooking Rousseau’s description of this type of democracy as ‘only an ideal’ (SC, 280/443). For Rousseau, politics remains ‘an art’ because of differences and ambiguities not ideals. If an entirely self-regulating, apolitical idyll constituted Rousseau’s goal, we would be left to wonder why he so rigorously problematizes any principle he advances, and why he then considers so carefully the measures essential for resisting despotism. His political theory does not primarily concern ideals (SC, 181/351). Instead, it concerns the conditions of possibility for a free and equal coexistence. Schwartz’s reading diminishes that conditional aspect. The Social Contract theorizes our transition from natural independence to active participation in a democratic community where each member, as the basis of its moral freedom, shapes and is shaped by the whole. Real democracy excludes the need for moral freedom, for it creates a state where ‘equality’ ‘in morals and talents as well as in principles and fortunes’ pervades, thereby eradicating the differences and conflicts which require us to decide the general will (SC, 280/443). The questioning and contestation of the political must persist: ‘precisely because the force of circumstances tends continually to destroy equality that the force of legislation should always tend to its maintenance’ (SC, 225/391). Perfect equality represents an imaginary horizon rather than a realizable state. It exposes the injustice of social inequalities and allows us to take action against them as we picture a state beyond them. Just as Rousseau’s account of nature criticizes the historical closure of previous accounts, his image of a peaceful, homogeneous community emphasizes the limits of his contemporaries’ political theories. They ‘are led into error’ because they take the fact of their ‘wrongly constituted states’ for right, preventing them from imagining a society founded on the democratic principles of freedom and equality (SC, 274/437–438). Democracy, for Rousseau’s predecessors and contemporaries, signified disorder, depravity, and mob rule.9 Conversely, Rousseau makes it the basic condition of any legitimate regime. If we accept Rousseau’s statement that the dream of a pastoral democracy is unrealizable, we see that it does not foreclose the political but in fact

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opens it by reintroducing the gap between fact and right which propels democratic struggles.

Democracy and Pluralism As we have seen, ‘real’ democracy, for Rousseau, could prove authoritarian. Popular self-rule does not therefore suffice in itself to safeguard democratic politics. To prevent popular rule from becoming tyrannical, the logic of democracy, Mouffe asserts, has to be articulated with political pluralism. ‘Pluralism’ is based on ‘the principle that individuals should have the possibility to organise their lives as they wish, to choose their own ends, and to realise them as they see best’ and this is ‘the great contribution of liberalism to modern society’.10 However, like democracy, the principle of pluralism cannot reign unchecked. There has to be some minimal consensus concerning the fundamental principles and values unifying a society. Mouffe considers contingent the articulation of the democratic and liberal traditions: On the one side we have the liberal tradition constituted by the rule of the law, the defence of human rights and the respect of individual liberty; on the other the democratic tradition whose main ideas are those of equality, identity between governing and governed and popular sovereignty. There is no necessary relation between these two distinct traditions, only a contingent historical articulation.11 For Laclau and Mouffe, the contingent link between liberalism and democracy allows for their re-articulation; it enables the radicalization of liberal democracies. Reworking the idea of popular rule in terms of pluralism, they accept the relative autonomy of heterogeneous demands as the condition of their coming together in a common movement or what they term a chain of equivalence.12 The different identities and interests which eventually constitute a hegemonic force become equivalent through identification with a common demand made to and against institutions.13 The hegemonic process begins when diverse social actors experience relations of subordination as oppressive. They thereby sense the urgent need to form a common force to challenge those relations. Relations of subordination refer to a situation in which we find ourselves subject to another’s decisions: what Rousseau calls personal dependence. This situation becomes acknowledged as oppressive only in a democracy where we


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accept that ‘no one has natural authority over another’ and that sovereignty rests with all.14 So our autonomy, as democratic agents, partly depends on collective resistance to those anti-democratic groups that attack the egalitarian and free principles inaugurated by the democratic revolution. Our consent to the contract arises from awareness of the dangers of personal dependence and a desire to resist them through the formation of a general will. Rousseau’s general will aims to conserve plurality by allowing citizens independently to reflect on, and construct together, the common interest which defines them as a community. The differences and divisions which generate the need for that will also enable its constant renewal, as citizens choose to generalize different interests and demands, after realizing the contingency of their previous deliberations.

The Sovereign and the Government The friction between universal and particular fuelling democratic activity underlies Rousseau’s inclusion of a government into the pact. Laclau’s analysis of this friction, which we discussed in Chapter 5, helps clarify the tense coexistence of government and sovereign in Rousseau’s theory. In return, Rousseau’s detailed discussion of government supplements Laclau’s political theory which focuses more on the ontological dimension of the political (the form and institution of society) than the ontic dimension of politics (governmental and institutional practice). Rousseau’s discussion highlights the ambiguous role of government in both fostering and endangering civic participation, in both advancing and thwarting the ongoing process of democratization. For Rousseau, the government interprets and executes the general laws sanctioned by the legislative body of the sovereign. It acts as a depository of the people’s authority, occupying a relative and subordinate position. Rousseau defines the government as a particular self different from the common self of the general will in which everybody shares, including governmental members. The role of the government as ‘an intermediary body’ relating ‘the whole to the whole’ or ‘the Sovereign to the State’ highlights the gap between the people’s universality and the particularity of the groups and individuals constituting it (SC, 230/396). The need for the government arises from the impossibility of total popular rule, from the irreducible but not incommensurable character of particular and general. If particular and general could be fully reconciled, the question of government would disappear, thereby recalling the paradox of

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‘the government without government’ of real democracy. The need for the particular self of the government presupposes the existence of division within the state: it gets ‘from the sovereign the orders it gives to the people’ (SC, 230/396). It represents the people’s idea of itself back to the people, the whole back to the whole. On the one hand, it negates this fundamental division through its act of communication and, on the other, affirms it through that very act. The government, by simultaneously revealing and concealing the division between universal and particular, at once unites those dimensions to promote citizenship and also separates them to ensure the citizens’ ongoing freedom to decide the general will without interference from the dominant social force: a risk of direct democracy. Its institution highlights the mobile character of particular and universal. Rousseau rejects the idea that the government is instituted by a contract. A contract involves an agreement of mutual undertaking: ‘As the citizens, by the social contract, are all equal, all can prescribe what all should do, but no one has a right to demand that another shall do what he does not do himself’ (SC, 269/432). A contract cannot found a government because the government has no rights regarding the sovereign: it merely acts on its behalf. As a consequence, its establishment requires an act of legislation: ‘the sovereign decrees that there shall be a governing body established in this or that form; this act is clearly a law’. The people thereby nominates the members of government. This poses a theoretical problem because the process of nomination is a particular act, ‘not a second law, but merely a consequence of the first, and a function of government’. Just as Rousseau inquires how a multitude can authorize a contract before possessing the sovereign authority to do so, so he inquires how a governmental act can happen ‘before the government exists, and how the people, which is only sovereign or subject, can, under certain circumstances, become a prince or magistrate’ (SC, 270/433). Rousseau answers this conundrum by emphasizing the body politic’s malleable character: It is at this point that there is revealed one of the astonishing properties of the body politic, by means of which it reconciles apparently contradictory operations; for this is accomplished by a sudden conversion of Sovereignty into democracy, so that, without sensible change, and merely by virtue of a new relation of all to all, the citizens become magistrates and pass from general to particular acts, from legislation to the execution of the law. (SC, 270–271/433–434)


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The instituting of government represents an instant of direct democracy. Paradoxically, the people governs itself directly when deciding to instate a government, that is, when recognizing the impossibility of total selfgovernance. This instant of unity arises from an awareness of the fundamental disunity making a government necessary. ‘The new relation of all to all’ destabilizes the oppositions (sovereign/magistrate, legislative/executive, particular/general) which structure the state. The sovereign transforms itself into a democracy on the condition of this undecidability. That undecidability actually necessitates the government’s determinate force which functions to distinguish authority from power, the legislative from the executive, general from particular but also mediates between them. The uncertainty of the government’s institution also defines its identity: ‘The government is on a small scale what the body politic which includes it is on a great one. It is a corporate body endowed with certain faculties, active like the Sovereign and passive like the State, and capable of being resolved into similar relations’ (SC, 232–233/398–399). It is therefore both different from, and similar to, the sovereign/state. The universal sovereign depends on the particular self of the government to actualize its general laws, to objectify ‘its purely abstract and collective being’. Through that objectification, the government reflects the reality of the people’s sovereignty back to the people and thus should reinforce rather than undermine its authority: ‘the public force therefore needs an agent of its own to bind it together and set it to work under the direction of the general will, to serve as a means of communication between Sovereign and State, and do for the collective person what the union of body and soul does for man’ (SC, 229–230/396). The government reconciles the symbolic realm of the people’s laws (the soul) with the concrete realm of its individual actions (the body). Its conciliatory function indicates once more the division constitutive of unity. We argued that real democracy, by trying to eradicate that division, risks fragmenting the state, by opening the way for private interests to interfere in public affairs. A legitimate government reduces but does not try to eliminate it. While the government and the sovereign are interdependent, they must not be confused. The sovereign’s laws have concrete effects only via the government’s executive power. Likewise the government relies on the sovereign to authorize that power. The particular self of the government, as a depositary of public authority, partially embodies the general self of the people, showing again how the general acquires representation only through the particular. The juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible terms in its description as ‘a subordinate whole’ reveals this tension (SC,

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234/399). Its appeal to universality always exceeds its particular and relative status; this excess calls for constant public scrutiny. However, to translate the universal laws of the sovereign, to relate ‘the whole to the whole’, the government has to retain its own particularity: In order that the government may have a true existence and a real life distinguishing it from the body of the State, and in order that all its members may be able to act in concert and fulfil the end to which it was set up, it must have a particular personality, a sensibility common to its members, and a force and a will of its own making for its preservation. This particular existence implies assemblies, councils, power of deliberation and decision making, rights, titles, and privileges belonging exclusively to the prince and making office of magistrate more honourable in proportion as it is troublesome. (SC, 233/399) If government and sovereign became one, the distinction between fact and right would vanish. To attempt to actualize the sovereign’s universal demand for justice, the government needs the autonomy to interpret the general laws with regard to specific contexts. Otherwise, executing the laws would become a bureaucratic procedure without interpretation. So ‘although the artificial body of the government is the work of another artificial body, and has [. . .] only a borrowed and subordinate life’, it must act with ‘vigour and promptitude’ to respond to public demands, and translate them into action (SC, 234/399). In Rousseau’s Social Contract, particular and universal never subsume one another: their division generates political activity. That division, as we have argued, is not clear-cut; particular and universal inhabit one another while still remaining different from one another. This undecidability defines the government’s identity and also problematizes it: The difficulties lie in the manner of so ordering this subordinate whole within the whole, that it in no way alters the general constitution by affirmation of its own, and always distinguishes the particular force it possesses, which is destined to aid in its preservation, from the public force, which is destined to the preservation of the State; and, in a word, is always ready to sacrifice the government to the people, and never to sacrifice the people to the government. (SC, 234/399) The particular self of the government needs to be integrated into the common self of the State without effacing their distinction. The difficulty


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of keeping sovereign and government both separate and united points to the main threat the government poses. The government supplements the absence of a perfectly self-governing people; it becomes dangerous when it denies its supplementary status and believes itself the complete embodiment of the sovereign. It thereby seeks to suppress the division constitutive of the political: the division enabling the sovereign to question and reorganize the state, to contest its own understanding of itself. That suppression does not produce unity: ‘the moment the government usurps the sovereign, the social compact is broken, and all private citizens recover by right their natural liberty, and are forced, but not bound, to obey’ (SC, 259/423). Citizens, no longer determining their conditions of coexistence, lose all contractual obligations. Rule by force rather than by consent abolishes any claim of legitimacy: ‘Let us admit that force does not create right, and that we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers’ (SC, 185/355). The government’s uncertain character reinforces the need for a democratic people always ready to survey and contest their mode of governance, to critique their own decisions. The target of governmental abuse is also the source of resistance to it: ‘the depositaries of executive power are not the people’s masters but its officers; (. . .) it can set them up and pull them down when it likes, for them, there is no question of contract but of obedience’ (SC, 271/434).

Public Assemblies: The Empty Space of Power Identifying with the contestatory mode of citizenship advocated by The Social Contract requires us to turn away from our natural liberty, which eventually results in personal dependence, and identify with the empty space of power rendering us all equally responsible for our community. Assuming that responsibility means renouncing the illusion of tranquillity through servitude and adjusting to the tensions and ambiguities of democratic life. That illusion, writes Rousseau concerning hereditary rule, has led us to choose ‘rather to risk having children, monstrosities, or imbeciles as rulers than to have disputes over the choice of good kings’. By neglecting our civic duty, ‘we are setting almost all the chances against us’ and exposing ourselves to rule by force (SC, 247/411). We therefore have to engage critically with the claims made about the community which we authorize and build together. To encourage the critical spirit necessary to defend and rejuvenate our democratic ties and to resist the government’s usurping force, Rousseau

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proposes periodic public assemblies where governmental power ceases and the state is held in abeyance as citizens rethink and renew the conditions of their unity: The moment the people is legitimately assembled as a sovereign body, the jurisdiction of the government wholly lapses, the executive power is suspended, and the person of the meanest citizen is as sacred and inviolable as that of the first magistrate; for in the presence of the person of the represented, representatives no longer exist. (SC, 264/427–428) Public assemblies reintroduce the people’s absent presence which initiates the contract. The sovereign’s force emerges through the absence of representatives. Through that absence, the people realizes its authority as it identifies with the empty space of its power which grounds its liberty to decide how it represents itself to itself. The assemblies remind citizens that there is no privileged agent of power, no natural foundation and that the founding of society thus falls to society itself. They reveal the contingency of the current arrangements of the state, and consequently the scope for re-arrangement. Their suspension of governmental power – the point of communication between the people and the state – chimes with Lefort’s description of democratic societies as those ‘whose institutional structures include, as part of “its normal”, “regular” reproduction, the moment of dissolution of the socio-symbolic bond’.15 This connection shows how Rousseau’s analysis of popular assemblies undermines Laclau’s recurrent criticism that he rejects ‘representative democracy’, when it is ‘the only possible democracy. Its insufficiencies are actually its virtues, as it is only through those insufficiencies that the visibility of the gap between universality and particularity – without which democracy is unthinkable – can be recreated’.16 Popular assemblies disclose this gap as the ongoing condition of the state’s legitimacy, urging the people to see the government as ‘a particular self’ which never accords fully with the common self of the general will which authorizes it. Žižek analyses how, for Lefort, during elections, ‘the whole hierarchical network of social relations is in a way suspended [. . .]; society as an organic unity ceases to exist’.17 This analysis equally applies to Rousseau’s assemblies which reinforce the sovereign’s inalienable and unrepresentable character, opening the space of power to questioning and revision. For Rousseau, any ruler who tries to stop popular assemblies is ‘a lawbreaker’ and ‘enemy of the state’, denying the people its freedom to choose its mode of rule. The two central propositions of any assembly should


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concern whether the sovereign wishes first to preserve the present form of government and second to continue to entrust its administration to the members of that government (SC, 273/436). This unveiling of the purely symbolic quality of power – the fact that the government is not identical to the sovereign but only represents it – inspires, Rousseau maintains, fear in political leaders: These intervals of suspension, during which the prince recognises or ought to recognise an actual superior, have always been viewed by him with alarm; and these assemblies of the people, which are the aegis of the body politic and the curb on the government, have at all times been the horror of rulers: who therefore never spare pains, objections, difficulties, and promises to stop the citizens from having them. (SC, 264–265/428) Rousseau’s discussion of public assemblies answers, before the fact, Lefort’s question of why some of the most lucid modern thinkers (Adorno, Arendt, Horkheimer et al.) have sought to detect the seeds of totalitarianism in democratic structures, while failing to consider why twentiethcentury dictators abhor these structures.18 Rousseau’s anticipatory answer consists in demonstrating how those structures systematically foreground the absence of any substantial link between the ruler and the centre of power and consequently the impossibility for any agent to claim mastery of the political field. While democratic politics highlights the discrepancy between the prevailing regime conceived as society’s identity and its real status as one particular regime among many, totalitarianism disavows the symbolic dimension of politics, that is, the space between a society’s image of itself as a coherent whole and its permanent susceptibility to change.

Politics and the Political The empty space defining democratic power renders ‘unanswerable and indeterminate’ the question of what constitutes the best government (SC, 255/419). While that space rules out any normative prescription for an ideal regime, it does not indicate, as observed in Chapter 1, an ethical vacuum. If it did, despotic regimes would become as legitimate as democratic ones. Rather, it requires a politics which ensures ‘that nothing gets too decided or fully institutionalized’19 so that citizens use their freedom to (re)constitute the general will. It enjoins societies to scrutinize and

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redefine themselves because ‘moral qualities do not admit of exact measurement’ (SC, 256/420) and therefore ‘the best government in itself’ could ‘become the most pernicious’ as public needs change in line with events (SC, 234/400). Public assemblies draw attention to the inherent incompleteness of the state. Rousseau’s discussion of the irreducibility of the sovereign to the government adumbrates the current separation of the political and politics.20 That separation designates the permanent gap between the community’s own configuring of itself (the political/the general will) and its systematization through political practice (politics/the government). Employing Heideggerian terminology, Mouffe, distinguishes ‘the ontological level’ of the political which concerns how ‘society is instituted’ from the ontic level of politics which concerns diverse institutional practices and conventions’.21 This distinction is important because it shows how the political never reduces to political reality, leaving open the question of society’s institution. Lefort importantly gives the political ‘a reflexive turn’, understanding it as not only the shaping of ‘collective life (mise-en-forme)’ but also ‘the staging (mise-en-scène), the self-representation and interpretation, of those relations. Only the two together, collective relations and actors’ understanding of them give (objective) form and (subjective) meaning (mise-en-sens) to society’.22 Rousseau also recognizes this confluence of the objective dimension of form and the subjective dimension of understanding in his discussion of the general will. The general will takes effect once individual citizens understand its relevance for themselves. The general will’s subjective dimension prevents its full constitution: it always emerges from different and potentially conflicting viewpoints and can be revised when citizens no longer esteem its current definition generally applicable. The people grasps its unity by projecting it on to the laws it makes and, to become actual, those laws require the government’s executive power. The government relates the people to the state, subject to object, helping citizens to identify themselves as a society. The acts of institution of politics can never capture the instituting moment of the political, for the same reason that no identity fully represents the subject: both depend on identification and identification is constituted on difference. Politics, as the competition for public power and decisions, perseveres because the general will – the political – is never identical to any past or future decision, being defined by the open-ended potential of will itself. Rather than existing as two separate poles, politics and the political therefore form part of a continuum.


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The Undecidability of the Decision: The Question of Justice We saw in the previous chapter how the legislator uses the illusion of the divine authorship of the laws to conceal the contingency of the pact’s institution so that citizens commit themselves to its terms. Political reality paradoxically needs an imaginary dimension to become real. In public assembles, the emergence of the political – the unrepresentable sovereign – undoes the imaginary unity of the state, reactivating its uncertain foundations. In this way, the general will functions both to bind and unbind the state. Being constitutive of society, it shapes how we think and act, refusing to be ensnared in time and space. It binds divergent individuals together by providing the condition through which they determine themselves as a community and can also unbind them to the point that it can de-institute the social compact itself whose institution it once authorized: ‘if all citizens assembled of one accord to break the compact, it is impossible to doubt that it would be very legitimately broken’ (SC, 273/436). Our right to dissolve the contract indicates the self-grounding or contingent nature of our decision to join it in the first place: it is up to us to keep the pact alive and we can decide to suspend or rescind it any time, if it no longer defends our common interest. Our need to assemble as a people becomes urgent when we confront ‘unforeseen circumstances’ which reveal the distance of the prevailing regime from its claims to justice. We shift from the passivity of subjects to the activity of citizens most strikingly when we make decisions, when we institute new modes of identification and take action to withstand crisis. As the democratic paradox discussed in the previous chapter illustrates, we are never fully present in the decisions we make, we grasp that we have made a decision or performed a political act after the fact. We become aware of our ability as citizens to establish a new order almost always retrospectively and that founding act is performative, defining ‘its own conditions’, producing ‘retroactively the grounds which justify it’.23 Rousseau highlights the radical uncertainty underlying decisions when he states that a people would not voluntarily harm itself but its decision may have harmful effects. Nothing can stop a people from changing ‘its laws however good’ (SC, 227/394). The fact that we cannot know in advance the consequences of our decisions does not diminish, as we have argued, our moral responsibility but reinforces it. If we were certain always to make the right decision, we would not need to decide anything at all. Decision-making would be automatic. Without the risk of injustice, our civic freedom would become meaningless. Derrida helps to explain this paradox, emphasizing the undecidability

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of legal decision-making: ‘A decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be a programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process. It might be legal; it would not be just’.24 This undecidability is never completely surmounted but continues to haunt every decision ‘worthy of the name’. The unpredictability of the decision intersects with the open-endedness of the general will: ‘Sovereignty which is nothing but the exercise of the general will is free like the general will and not subjected to any kind of commitment. Every act of sovereignty as well as every instant of its duration is absolute, independent of the act or instant which precedes and never does the sovereign act because it has wanted to but because it does want to (PF, OC III, 485 (my translation)). The general will persists as a source of justice because it remains free from past and future obligations. If the effects of its decisions could be calculated in advance, it would lose all authority and become a purely bureaucratic and authoritarian operation. Its unbinding force momentarily interrupts the law and the action it prescribes, revealing how the question of justice motivating political intervention does not simply reduce to legal norms and precedents. It reactivates the permanent gap between fact and right, between its identity as ‘decision’ and ‘transcendent standard’ or the absence of any definite transcendent standard.25 The general will’s binding and unbinding force problematizes the view advanced by Scott and Shklar that the general will ‘works best in a closed, static, political whole’ and that the justice it represents is ‘an effort to prevent change’.26 While citizens must resist the government’s descent into corruption, and if they possess a good system, they ‘should hold fast to this’, a purely conservative attitude may lead them to regard even bad laws as ‘fundamental’, to forget their civic duty to think critically about the state (SC, 227/393–394). Rousseau does not restrict the general will to conserving the present order as an ideal: the differences and conflicts necessitating the contract exclude its full realization. The contract is not a state but a continual process of contracting: ‘The State subsists by means not of the laws, but of the legislative power. Yesterday’s law is not binding today; but silence is taken as tacit consent, and the Sovereign is held to confirm incessantly the laws it does not abrogate as it might. All that it has once declared itself to will it wills always, unless it revokes its declaration’ (SC, 261/424). To stop citizens from taking the laws for granted, popular assembles reactivate the absence of any founding totality so that they realize the need to reinvigorate and renegotiate their social bonds. Recognition of the state’s contingency reminds us of our potential for truly moral action.


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Derrida’s theorization of the legal decision is motivated by similar concerns to Rousseau’s insistence on the need to will the laws continually. For both Derrida and Rousseau, a legal decision made in a machine-like way would not enact justice despite its obedience to the law. To be just, laws must conform to precedents, conventions and norms, but not slavishly: to observe unjust laws, even with full legality, is not just. Laws must exceed conformity without rejecting it; they must be both regulated and deregulated, for ‘the inflexibility of the laws, which prevents them from adapting themselves to circumstances, may, in certain cases, render them disastrous, and make them bring about, at a time of crisis, the ruin of the state’ (SC, 293/455). Even the most sacred laws of the pact must be partially deregulated so that they can be suspended in an emergency where their sanctity would hinder the state’s survival. The legislator could not possibly legislate for all eventualities, since ‘a highly necessary part of foresight is to be conscious that everything cannot be foreseen’. Consequently, ‘it is wrong to make political institutions so strong as to render it impossible to suspend their operation. Even Sparta allowed its laws to lapse’ (SC, 293/455). When the state must react quickly to a crisis which endangers public security, the democratic procedures defending the legitimacy of the laws could actually obstruct that defence. In such rare and urgent cases, the laws need to be postponed and power to be entrusted to a ‘supreme ruler’ ‘who shall (. . .) silence the sovereign authority’ (SC, 294/456). The interruption of legislative authority does not destroy the general will. It actually maintains it because the general will’s primary concern is the state’s preservation. However, this rare protective operation contains its own threat: the supreme ruling has to be limited in time to avoid its descent into tyranny. The silencing of the sovereign to safeguard sovereignty corresponds to Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity, central to his account of democracy to come. Autoimmunity has diverse meanings but, in our context, it indicates how democracy may have to attack a part of itself in order to protect itself long-term.27 As we shall explore, Derrida’s democracy to come accounts for ‘the absolute and intrinsic historicity of the system that welcomes in itself, in its very concept, that expression of autoimmunity called the right to self-critique and perfectibility’.28 The self-critique inherent in democracy remains inseparable from democracy’s inherent risk: defending our democratic freedom entails resistance to persecutory or oppressive forces which seek to destroy democracy from within. The continual willing necessary for the state’s legitimacy and the rare suspension of democratic procedures to defend democracy suggest the

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incalculability of justice. That incalculability paradoxically allows legal decision-making to be just rather than simply legal. It enjoins the government to try to actualize the sovereign’s demand for universal justice while recognizing how that demand exceeds each particular application of the law and thus reinforces its subordination to popular authority. Rousseau considers the hiatus between the law and justice in his discussion of divine and human justice: ‘All justice comes from God, who is its sole source; but if we knew how to receive so high an aspiration, we should need neither government nor laws’ (SC, 210/378). Justice does not exist factually and does not provide the foundation of the law: ‘Law comes before justice and not justice before the law’ (GM, 329/329). While Rousseau believes in universal justice, that justice, ‘in default of natural sanction’ is ineffective. Attaching ‘purely metaphysical ideas to the law’, we do not reach any greater understanding of it; defining the law of nature does not define the law of the state (SC, 211/378). Laws, for Rousseau, become necessary because of the potential for human conflict, because of injustice; they are founded on what makes them uncertain. The ungrounded character of the law (‘there is no fundamental law binding on the body politic’) does not make it unjust but it does distinguish it from justice. Justice does not directly present itself, emerging through a feeling of injustice; it requires laws to represent it and direct it to objects. As Derrida argues, the institution of laws retroactively produces the idea of justice as a kind of excess inhabiting them. Laws supplement the absence of universal justice, aspiring to emulate its universality; their failure to do so enables the popular sovereign’s legislative power. The force of that power reinstalls the uncertainty of the law which simultaneously associates and dissociates it from the ideal of justice. By retaining the right to revoke any law, it aims to prevent the laws from becoming bureaucratic and impermeable to the event. Rousseau’s theorization of legislative power provides the condition for a free and responsible decision, which, according to Derrida, ‘must conserve the law and also destroy or suspend it enough to have to reinvent it in each case, rejustify it, reinvent it in the affirmation and the new and free confirmation of its principle. Each case is other, each decision is different and requires an absolutely unique interpretation, which no existing, coded rule can or ought to guarantee absolutely’.29 Derrida’s argument supports Rousseau’s conception of each act of sovereignty as ‘independent’ and ‘absolute’, insofar as it cannot be entirely bound by existing precedents or norms and therefore become simply procedural. If it did, it would no longer represent the ongoing possibility of justice. The disjunction between the sovereign’s


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call for universal justice and its partial embodiment in the laws executed by the government provides the condition of justice itself. If that disjunction could be overcome, if right and fact became one, the need for questioning, interpretation and freedom would disappear. The permanent tension between justice and the law challenges the immobility and closure sought by totalitarianism, keeping alive the promise of historical progress.

The Democratic Promise The contract is structured like a promise, being made in relation to ‘an imagined future which can intervene in and act upon the present’.30 Its promissory structure at once extends but also renders precarious the life of its institution: a promise is only worth making if it can possibly be broken. De Man analyses The Social Contract’s promise but concludes that it demonstrates the contract’s impossibility. We shall illustrate the affirmative effects of the contract’s promissory character, which de Man never examines: the impossibility of a fully regulated contract provides its radically democratic dimension. For de Man, the text of The Social Contract functions like a promise to the extent that it constantly reveals its susceptibility to betrayal, its uncertainty of realizing what it promises. In his view, The Social Contract ‘obviously proposes a model for political institutions and reflects on the authority of legal language’.31 He then shows the ‘unreadability’ of this reading: The Social Contract represents ‘a theoretical description of the state, as a contractual legal model, but also the disintegration of this model as soon it has been put in motion’. He highlights the discrepancy between the text’s ‘constative’ and ‘performative’ dimensions. Its performative dimension – its promise to enact political change through a contracted state – ‘never refers to a situation which exists in the present, but signals toward a hypothetical future’, because all laws are ‘future-oriented’, promissory in their structure.32 For de Man, the legal text of the contract refers back to itself as an eternal promise rather than a lived situation involving real people and institutions. It thus appears unrealizable in any concrete form. De Man does not read the contract’s alleged impossibility as something we have to deconstruct: The Social Contract openly deconstructs itself, perpetually reinscribing its own unreadability as a ‘master text’ of political institution. Chapter 7 explored the text’s self-deconstructive character: to institute the pact, the people must be before the law what it can become only by means of the law, ‘the effect would have to become the cause’. This

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‘metalepsis’, de Man opines, overtly demonstrates the unfeasibility of the contractual promise. The text compounds its own unfeasibility by ‘resolving the metalepsis’ with the ‘deceit’ of the divine authorship of the laws. ‘Only a subterfuge’, de Man writes, ‘can put this paralysis into motion. Since the system itself had to be based on deceit, the mainspring of its movement has to be deceitful as well’.33 The Social Contract constantly ‘advocates the necessity for political legislation’ and theorizes the principles on which that legislation should be founded only to ‘undermine’ the authority of those principles, by exposing their fictional basis. The Social Contract ‘is structured like an aporia’: it perpetually promises to provide the objective criteria for state institution and yet shows the impossibility of doing so.34 The Social Contract would fail to live up to such a promise only if we interpret it as a ‘model’ for an ideal state. That interpretation ignores the avowedly non-prescriptive character of The Social Contract’s statement of intent: it means to inquire into the conditions of possibility for a safe and legitimate rule of administration for men as they are and laws as they could be (SC, 181/350). It therefore never claims to set out the norms and practices for a perfect political system, showing how the uncertainty of political foundations makes certain the ongoing need to participate in their perpetual (re)production. So the text never betrays its own promise because it never poses as a ‘master text’ of state foundation, always emphasizing the permanent discrepancy between fact (men as they are) and right (laws as they might be). The contingency of its principles – the fact that any principle it advances contains the threat of its own corruption – does not paralyse political activity, as de Man suggests, but defines the permanently unfinished or perfectible quality of any state as the basis of our responsibility as citizens to sustain the democratic promise through our constant willing of the laws. Far from proffering an ideal which in reality remains eternally deferred, The Social Contract’s non-closure calls on us to act and engage in the now as we strive for a more democratic future. De Man’s reading therefore stresses the risk a promise incurs over the chance it creates, and overlooks how the absence of guarantees or fool-proof models for political legitimacy generates rather than immobilizes political commitment. We can use Derrida’s discussion of ‘democracy to come’ to show the affirmativeness of the contract’s promissory structure and thereby reappraise de Man’s pessimistic conclusion.35 ‘Democracy to come’ shares much affinity with Laclau and Mouffe’s radical democracy: in both cases, democracy is ‘interminable in its incompletion’.36 We, however, supplement the idea of radical democracy with that of ‘democracy to come’ because it helps us understand more


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fully what living in the contract’s democratic promise entails for citizens and their community. That promise indicates the contract’s susceptibility to corruption, its contingency and consequently the concerted effort demanded of its members to sustain and revive their democratic allegiances and obligations in the face of their possible betrayal. Laclau and Mouffe theorize ‘the contingency of identity’, Norval maintains, as ‘an openness that could be articulated in any political direction’. Hence, their theories of democracy ‘do not draw in any particular fashion upon this insight’. Derrida’s democratic theory, by contrast, links more closely the incompleteness of identity and democracy.37 Before analysing the notion of ‘democracy to come’ and what it offers for our current study, we need to consider Derrida’s discussion of Rousseau’s account of democracy. Derrida confines his discussion to Rousseau’s analysis of democratic government in ‘On Democracy’ (SC, 239–240/404–406). Rousseau, Derrida asserts, still believes in a strict sense of the term ‘democracy’: ‘Taking the term in the strict sense, a true democracy has never existed and never will’ (SC, 239/404).38 This would imply a clear idea of democracy which, for Derrida, would negate its inherent undecidability.39 Derrida then proceeds to foreground the ambiguity of Rousseau’s ‘On Democracy’, arguing that ‘what deprives democracy of any existence’, for Rousseau, is ‘the inhuman virtues’ it demands of humans because it ‘tends so forcefully and continuously to change its form’. ‘The absence of proper form’, ‘of proper essence or meaning’ for democracy renders it ‘unpresentable in existence’. However, just when Rousseau seems to have given up hope of the possibility of democracy, he then, Derrida implies, confirms its ‘unpresentability’ – its inconceivability as an empirical reality – as necessitating commitment to ‘the democratic “constitution”, the survival of democratic desire, the resurgence of a preference that prefers the risk, dangers, and perils of freedom to the slumbering quietism of servitude’.40 This tension partly defines how Derrida understands ‘democracy to come’. Our study of Rousseau and democracy is clearly not confined to his commentary on democratic government. Derrida himself laments ‘the fundamental limitation’ of Rousseau’s treating democracy in terms of ‘a very classical’ analysis of different governmental regimes.41 Rousseau’s taking of ‘democracy’ in ‘a strict sense’ equally suggests that he senses another notion of democracy, which is not so strict, which surpasses the idea of rule by the demos found in classical philosophy. Limiting Rousseau’s discussion of democracy to a type of government neglects this more indeterminate notion of it emerging generally in The Social Contract. Drawing on Laclau’s and Mouffe’s conception of radical democracy, we have examined how The

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Social Contract affirms an idea of democracy as a form, as a way of life which embraces the constitutive contingency of social values and institutions as the condition of freedom and transformation. When we read the contract democratically, we find that it contains similar commitments to those implied by Derrida’s notion of ‘democracy to come’. Before considering this link, the meaning of ‘to come’ in Derrida’s reflection on democracy requires clarification. Derrida explains that ‘democracy to come’ does not mean an ideal democracy which remains indefinitely postponed. If it did, he would be ‘reproducing, even plagiarizing, the classical discourses of political philosophy’.42 Neither does the ‘to come’ signify a future democracy that will be actualized in the present nor a Kantian regulative idea, which would turn it into ‘an ideal possible that is infinitely deferred’ but ‘not wholly freed from all teleological ends’.43 Rather, it signifies openness to otherness and to the event as incalculable and unpredictable, to the idea of coming itself. The ‘to come’ announces a future which never becomes a present existence but, like the imagined future structuring the promise, can affect the present.44 It means ‘not something that is certain to happen tomorrow, not the democracy (national and international, state or trans-state) of the future, but a democracy that must have the structure of a promise – and thus the memory of that which carries the future, the to-come here and now’.45 The futurity of democracy lies in its promise which ‘is kept in memory, handed down . . . inherited, claimed and taken up’. That promise refers concretely to ‘equality, freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of the press’.46 It implies a tradition, Norval suggests, whose inheritance and transmission requires a community which incessantly claims and resumes it, which (re)constitutes itself anew.47 But like deciding the general will, this constant renewal cannot consist of repetitively ‘following, applying, or carrying out a norm or rule’, as this would deny the undecidability of the decision, the need to respond to the unforeseen.48 Democracy to come is non-teleological: it does not target a perfect state but indicates the perfectibility of the present, calling for ‘a militant and interminable political critique’ of empirical democracies so as to open the future to new possibilities, to refresh and challenge our understanding of what constitutes democracy.49 As Thomson asserts, ‘it authorises an indefinite and prolonged criticism of the failure of democratic institutions to live up to an ideal without giving up on democracy in favour of something else’.50 Just as de Man highlights the undecidable identity of The Social Contract as both at once constative (a description of the principles of legitimate state institution) and performative (a promise of political change), Derrida


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identifies the same tension in ‘democracy to come’. On the one hand, it describes ‘what the concept implies, and has always implied (memory, promise, the event to come, historicity, perfectibility’ and on the other, it functions as ‘a call to action and engagement’. 51 De Man’s reading of The Social Contract as a promise becomes positive in the light of Derrida’s discussion of democracy. Its promissory structure highlights its inherent perfectibility or its susceptibility to the event which could prompt critical reflection on how we understand ourselves as a community, on how we keep the struggle for democracy alive. The contract’s futurity does not defer democracy but connects it to an imagined future which calls for action and commitment in the now with the hope of improving the present. The ‘to come’ of the contract is announced in the absent presence of the people who authorizes it and who is obliged relentlessly to reclaim that authority by constantly revitalizing its unity through the activity of the general will. The experience of the impossibility of perfect democracy inaugurating the pact can resurface at any time. That experience does not exempt us from acting on the current imperfections but should compel us to criticize and militate against them because our communities can always potentially be more democratic. We preserve ourselves as a vibrant political community only if we recognize how ‘the bounds of possibility, in moral matters, are less narrow than we imagine: it is our weakness, our vices, our prejudices that confine them. Base souls have no belief in great men, vile slaves smile in mockery at the name of liberty’ (SC, 263/425). Our citizenship therefore demands of us to reject blind conformity, to critique the given, to recognize the limits of the prevailing doxa and respond to, and take responsibility for the whole, as we perpetually define the common self and redefine ourselves through that process in a bid to stave off stagnation and apathy. We must acknowledge our perfectibility – our almost unlimited freedom to change – to improve ourselves, by reacting to the failure of our societies to achieve justice for all by reaching out to those whom the system has failed. Acknowledging our perfectibility means acknowledging its incalculable identity. That incalculability makes us infinitely accountable for our decisions and actions because we can never fully account for them. In the absence of any predefined guidelines or principles to ensure legitimacy, we are forced to be free, that is, to accept that our societies belong to us and therefore to ignore or not to resist illegitimate or non-egalitarian practices and institutions represents a dereliction of duty, an endorsement of injustice. Living in the democratic promise entails openness to the new and also the renewal of tradition. Imagination and perfectibility play a central role

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in both reviving and extending democratic hope. Any political project requires them for its conception and realization. Rousseau, discussing the Abbé de Saint Pierre’s project for perpetual peace, defends anyone who strives to surpass the confines of empirical reality and widen the horizon of humanity.52 Political change occurs when it captures citizens’ imagination, as they invest in a universe which has not yet been actualized, as they will into existence a state which breaks with what has gone before (PFC, 325/937; GP, 180–181/969–970) This imaginative opening up of the world does not simply imply a clear departure from what has preceded but may involve resuming and reinforcing the struggles of the past. While it seems, Rousseau writes from the perspective of his times, ‘unimaginable that the people should remain continually assembled to devote their time to public affairs’ (SC, 239/404), in ancient Rome, ‘few weeks went by when the Roman people was not assembled, and even several times’ (SC, 262/425) and in ancient Greece, the people was ‘constantly assembled in the public square’ (SC, 267/430). What now appears unimaginable has been imagined and enacted before in the pursuit of democracy and this should be periodically reactivated. Remembering and passing on this tradition without uncritically repeating it in the present pushes us to think about the limits of our current state, and endeavour to build something better in its place, as we resist the attempts of governments to destroy and restrain democratic activity in its quest for complete power. For Rousseau and our modern theorists, incompleteness marks both the project and subject of democracy; they both exist in relation to a promise which opens them to alterity, to the event, leaving them forever perfectible. Perfectibility, as the constitutive absence of determinacy, rejects the sterility of closure, defining us by our permanent liberty to change. That change, the Discourse shows, engenders simultaneously ‘progress and retrogression’ and therefore indicates the ongoing nature of our political obligations and responsibilities, the perseverance of the political as the question of how to form and institute a society.53 Perfectibility gives us the chance of improving ourselves through the development of new social practices and institutions while ‘not dreaming of making (them) eternal’ or ‘attempting the impossible, or flattering ourselves that we are endowing the work of man with a stability of which human conditions do not permit’ (SC, 260/424). What makes us human generates an excess inhabiting our endeavours, revealing both our restrictions and the spectral presence of what lies beyond them. That undecidability grounds our freedom to engage in genuinely moral action, to make decisions worthy of the name, to become citizens. Our perfectible humanity, being activated by what


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disrupts our sense of unity, involves an experience of the division underlying our attempts to build associations and stake our claim therein. The decision arising from this experience is not made by fully constituted subjects but implies a moment of alienation as we react ‘to the come’ of our identity and that of our community. The impossibility of fullness enjoins us to critique our existing state and to understand that critique as not simply exposing the inadequacy of what we take for reality but also as a renewal of the hopes and aspirations which first brought us together in the quest for a fair society. It represents an opportunity to reclaim and refresh them as we revise and deepen our understanding of what we accept as democratic in our refusal to be defeated by the challenges of endeavouring to coexist both freely and equally.

Conclusion

In the previous chapter, we argued that democracy involves both the embracing of the new and the constant revival of the democratic tradition and its commitment to the principles of freedom and equality. This book has combined the recent innovations in political thought with the innovations of Rousseau’s work written two centuries earlier. These two dimensions form less a simple chronology and more a dialogue of mutual critical elucidation and enrichment. Despite largely overlooking Rousseau and his contribution to democratic thought, modern radical democrats, we have shown, take up and renew many of the principles and ideas advanced by his philosophy, helping to show its continuing relevance for thinking through the current challenges faced by democratic theory and context. In turn, Rousseau’s writings supplement recent theories by reflecting more extensively on the collective and individual commitments and efforts needed to prevent political stagnation and to recognize our freedom to imagine the possibility of something better than existing reality. Rousseau’s philosophy still plays a fundamental role in stimulating and shaping our political imagination, enabling us to realize the limitations of the present and envision a more democratic future. His inquiry into social foundations – his image of nature – inaugurates the political as a process of interminable critique. The perfection of nature as an imagined state of peaceful independence and plenitude serves to illuminate the imperfections of society, to provoke disappointment in us with our current condition. Existing only as a socially generated dream, nature proves unfeasible as a lived situation. Through that unfeasibility, our disappointment assumes a critical force which is as pressing today as it was in Rousseau’s pre-revolutionary context. It expresses our alienation from what officially represents social reality as a source of freedom and transformation. We can always feel and think in ways which go beyond how we are told to understand ourselves and our world by the regimes we live in. Unbound by any regime and its description of social truth, we recognize how there is nothing natural or inevitable about the present and how it can therefore always be imagined and constructed otherwise. This process

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does not occur without struggle or sacrifice. It urges us to break with the comfort of familiarity, to resist unreflective conformity to the habits and preconceived ideas which allow us to remain blind to the contradictions and injustices of the social system, and to carry on as if our so-called democracies were actually democratic. It demands from us a response, a sense of duty to contend with the ways in which our societies do not meet our aspirations and hopes. To keep silent and inactive in the face of social failure is to endorse the injustice which that situation causes, to compromise ourselves as citizens who are responsible for our communities and their claims to legitimacy. As a sovereign people, it falls upon us to alert the state to the call of democracy, to sensitize it to our demands and changing identities. We have to perfect ourselves and our world through the ongoing critique of the institutions and practices which represent us as a people. The contractual character of Rousseau’s democratic thinking demonstrates how my political identity cannot be worked out alone: to affirm my membership in the sovereign community requires others to affirm that affirmation. We therefore have to struggle together to prevent political degeneration, constantly renegotiating and rejuvenating our communal ties. In attempting to fulfil this obligation, there are no easy rules to follow, no magical recipes to ensure its success, no set institutions through which it may occur. If there were, the contract would become a purely bureaucratic process rather than a source of emancipation which seeks to maximize our human potential for creative action and thought. We agree to make a contract with a community whose identity does not yet exist, whose identity, like our own, has to be imagined. The estranging effect of the Discourse – its revelation of the unnecessary character of all that we have judged necessary – paves the way for this reimagining of our being in common. It warns us not to be seduced by a promise of perfection without taking responsibility for the imperfections which generate that promise. We can still dream of an ideal democracy as long as we realize how that dream spells its empirical inexistence and thereby calls on us to act in the present and confront and deal with its deficiencies. We have stressed the contract’s inherent incompleteness – its permanent threat of betrayal – and how we must not simply resign ourselves to that incompleteness but to view it as the condition of our moral freedom, our need to participate in the constant willing of the general will. As citizens, we cannot turn away from any injustice done to others without neglecting our civic duty to defend and perfect the whole of which we are part and which is a part of us. Any claim made about our community is also a claim

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made about us and therefore necessitates our critical engagement with it, our reflection on the extent to which it speaks for us and our understanding of the common good. We must therefore remain responsive to others and their attempts to define and inflect the meanings which inform and delimit what we accept as reality as well as to those who find themselves marginalized by society, and who represent, through their lack of representation, the truth of society and its false appeal to universality. Taking up the challenge of democratic citizenship requires a change in perspective, a constant effort to perceive what goes unseen and unheard by the official governmental discourses, so that we can deepen and extend the egalitarian logic of the contract. Through questioning and contestation, we have to protect the name of our community whose fundamental indeterminacy leaves it vulnerable to being determined in oppressive and restrictive ways. That vulnerability should unite us as a political force; it should provide the source of our collective strength. It urges us not only to heed and respond to the call of freedom ourselves but to help foster a context in which others feel compelled to do the same so that the democratic promise lives on.

Notes

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C. Mouffe, ‘Preface: Democratic Politics Today’, in C. Mouffe (ed.), Dimensions of Radical Democracy (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 1–16 (p. 1). I focus primarily on the work of Laclau and Mouffe whose Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Verso: London, 1985) is a seminal text for a post-structuralist approach to democratic theory. I also explore their independent writings produced after this collaboration. For a comparison of how their respective theories have developed in often different directions, see S. Tormey and J. Townsend, Key Thinkers from Critical Theory to Post-Marxism (London: Sage, 2006), pp. 100–112. I also engage with other modern theorists whose work has been central for the development of Laclau’s and Mouffe’s thinking: Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Claude Lefort and Slavoj Žižek. For Laclau and Mouffe’s brief and, at times, oppositional references to Rousseau, see Laclau, La Guerre des identités. Grammaire de l’émancipation, (Paris: MAUSS, 2000), p. 8 (French translation of Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996)), the reference is not included in the English Version. Laclau, ‘Hegemony and Identity: the role of universality in the constitution of political logics’, in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek (eds) (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 45–89 (p. 55). Laclau, ‘Democracy and the Question of Power’, Constellations, vol. 8, no. 1 (2001), 3–14 (13). Laclau, ‘Democracy between autonomy and heteronomy’, in O. Enwezor et al. (eds), Democracy Unrealized: Documenta 11_Platform1 (Ostfielden-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), pp. 377–386 (p. 383). Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 85, 130, 132. Mouffe, C., On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 83 and Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), p. 158. I will examine these references in turn throughout my discussion. Norval’s discussion of radical democracy is not limited to Laclau’s and Mouffe’s account of it but also refers to its deliberative conception in the work of Habermas. Norval, ‘Radical Democracy’, in B. Clarke and J. Foweraker (eds), The Dictionary of Democratic Thought (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 587–594. Norval offers a more positive reading of Rousseau’s contribution in her Aversive Democracy. Inheritance and Originality in the Democratic Tradition (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), pp. 135, 183. Norval, ‘Radical Democracy’, p. 587. Lefort differentiates the political from conventional politics characterized by the practices of governments and political parties, defining it in the broad sense

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of society’s very form and mode of institution. Lefort, C., Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1988), pp. 11–12 and pp. 217–221. Laclau expresses this distinction in similar terms: the political is ‘the instituting moment of society’ and politics, ‘the acts of political institution’, Laclau, E., ‘Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony’, in Mouffe C. (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 47–67 (p. 47). We discuss this distinction further in Chapter 8. For how Laclau and Mouffe distinguish their work from ‘classical Marxism’ without rejecting key Marxist ideas, see their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Norval, ‘Radical Democracy’, p. 588. Ibid. See also Laclau ‘Democracy between Autonomy and Heteronomy’, p. 383. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 149–194. Ibid., p. 105. S. Critchley and O. Marchart, ‘Introduction’, in S. Critichley and O. Marchart (eds), Laclau: A Critical Reader (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 1–13 (p. 3). We could apply what Laclau says about the interpretation of Marx’s writings to those of Rousseau: ‘Marx’s texts are not read as one reads texts by Freud, Hegel, or Plato, that is, by questioning them from the perspective of our own problems and present situation’. Ernesto Laclau, ‘Politics and the limits of Modernity’ in T. Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader (Essex: Longman, 1993), pp. 329–343 (p. 339). Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, pp. 9–20. Ibid. Laclau, E., New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 159–160. Norval, A., ‘Democratic decisions and the Question of Universality’, in S. Critchley and O. Marchart (eds), Laclau: A Critical Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 140–166 (p. 151). In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe regarded antagonism as the differentia specifica of their theory of democracy. They both subsequently revised that view. Mouffe distinguishes between antagonism and agonism in her The Democratic Paradox. See my note 6 to Chapter 3. Laclau in New Reflections, no longer gives ontological primacy to antagonism; he now makes dislocation – the experience of social contingency – the ontological condition of the political, p. 39. For a discussion of the importance of the asymmetry between the universal and the particular for democratic politics, see Laclau, ‘Democracy and the Question of Power’, 3–14. James Miller brings out these two ideas of democracy in Rousseau’s thought in his Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), in particular pp. 105–122 (p. 118). Yves Vargas, ‘L’Immobile souveraineté du peuple’, in Y. Vargas (ed.), De la Puissance du people. La démocratie de Platon à Rawls (Pantin: Le Temps des Cerises, 2000), p. 191. I follow Barthes’s theory of textuality which conceives text as an infinite web of pre-existent codes, cultural discourses and other texts. His notion of textuality undermines the commonsensical notion of the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of a text,

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emphasizing how meaning cannot be confined or limited within the text itself and has to be produced. See particularly his ‘The Death of the Author’ and ‘from Work to Text’, in R. Barthes, The Rustle of Language, R. Howard (trans.) (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), pp. 49–55 and pp. 54–64. Bayard’s idea of plagiarism by anticipation is useful here. It aims to break with the rigid chronology which traditionally governs the reading of texts. Reading, he argues, is not structured on a strict and linear chronology but has an element of what we could call deferred effect. The meanings of earlier texts are often produced retroactively through dialogue with later texts whose meanings are also modified through that dialogue. The idea of plagiarism by anticipation designates a case where an earlier text through its ‘uncanny’ proximity to a later one appears to have plagiarized it. That text refers unknowingly and discretely to a future one; both texts intervene in, and act on, the meaning of the other in the present. Bayard, P., Le Plagiat par Anticipation (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 2009). Leo Strauss believes the absence of transcendental standards in Rousseau’s political philosophy contributes to the crisis of modernity (see Chapter 1), Strauss, L., Natural Right and History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1952); Paul de Man interprets society’s symbolic character as allowing for deceit and corruption (See Chapters 1 and 8), De Man, P., Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1979); Judith Shklar interprets the division between man and society as causing suffering (see Chapter 7), Shklar, J., Men and Citizens (Cambridge: CUP, 1969). Norval, Aversive Democracy, p. 11.

Chapter 1 1

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Derrida, J., ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ in his Writing and Difference, A. Bass (trans.) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 279–293 (p. 292). Katrin Froese studies the largely unacknowledged similarity between Rousseau and Nietzsche in her Rousseau and Nietzsche Toward an Aesthetic Morality (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2001). Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, p. 292. I follow de Man’s critique of Derrida’s reading of Rousseau. For de Man, Derrida’s interpretation was based on a deconstruction of a tradition of Rousseau criticism which represents him as a philosopher of presence and transparency rather than an actual reading of Rousseau’s texts. ‘There is no need to deconstruct Rousseau’, argues de Man, not because Rousseau criticism did not require deconstructing but because Rousseau’s texts already deconstruct themselves. De Man therefore agrees with Derrida’s reading but not his understanding of Rousseau’s intentions. De Man, P., Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 139. Starobinski maintains that Rousseau dreams of ‘total transparency and unmediated communication’ and that this dream underlies his political theory in his

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, Arthur Goldhammer (trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 153. Derrida’s interpretation of Rousseau as a metaphysician of presence deconstructs Starobinski’s reading. Derrida, J., Of Grammatology, G. Spivak (trans.) (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976). Following both Derrida and Starobinski, Sandel describes Rousseau’s political community as ‘an undifferentiated whole (. . .) unable to abide disharmony’. Sandel, M., Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1996), p. 319. Hill also identifies transparency as the social contract’s aim in his Rousseau’s Theory of Human Association: Transparent and Opaque Communities (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006). Many Rousseauists now refute this idea: Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the Politics of the Ordinary (London: Sage, 1994) pp. 145–149; Froese, Rousseau and Nietzsche; Marks, J., ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Politics of Transparency’, Polity, vol. 33, no. 4 (2001), 619–642; Lacoue-Labarthe, P., Poétique de l’histoire (Paris: Galilée, 2002). Many influential studies of Rousseau also emphasize the lack of natural social foundations in Rousseau’s thinking. My reading differs, by showing how this lack affirms a radically open and contestatory conception of the political. See Derathé, R., Jean-Jacques Rousseau et La science politique de son temps (Paris: PUF, 1950); Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History; Masters, R., The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton: PUP, 1968); Melzer, A., The Natural Goodness of Man (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990). Rousseau’s method of inquiring into the foundation of society constitutes a radical transformation of the seventeenth-century juridical philosophical tradition issuing from Hobbes and continuing in Pufendorf, Burlamaqui and Locke. I deal specifically with his critique of Hobbes in later chapters. Badiou remarks: ‘Politics starts with the same gesture by which Rousseau clears the ground of inequality: leaving aside all the facts. For an event to occur, it is important to leave aside the facts’ (my translation). Badiou, A., Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1985), p. 78. Derrida’s notion of undecidability refers to a term which does not fit neatly into either pole of a binary opposition but nonetheless still remains structured around an opposition: ‘undecidable propositions can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, but (. . .) however, inhabit philosophical opposition, resisting and disorganising it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics’. Derrida, J. Positions, A. Bass (trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 43. Laclau, ‘Discourse’, in Robert E. Goodin and Philip Petit (eds.), A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 431–437 (p. 431); see also his ‘Introduction’, in E. Laclau (ed.), The Making of Political Identities (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 1–8 (p. 2). M. Jorgensen and L. Phillips, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (London: Sage, 2002), p. 33. Lacoue-Labarthe reads Rousseau’s metaphor of nature as transcendental negativity: ‘The nature of man is to not to have any nature or if you want: man is not

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a being of nature, but a being who originarily lacks nature’. Lacoue-Labarthe, Poétique de l’histoire, p. 44 (my translation). ‘To speak of origin and zero degree in fact comments on Rousseau’s declared intention (. . .). But in spite of that declared intention, Rousseau’s discourse lets itself be constrained by a complexity which always has the form of the supplement of or from the origin. His declared intention is not annulled by this but rather inscribed within a system which it no longer dominates’. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 243. Ryan Hanley has recently described Rousseau as an anti-foundationalist in ‘Enlightened Nation Building: “The Science of the Legislator” in Adam Smith and Rousseau’, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 52, no. 2 (2008), 219–234, (231, n.21). This idea arises from influential studies of Rousseau: C. E Vaughan, ‘Introduction’, Rousseau: Political Writings, vol. 1 (New York: Wiley, 1962), pp. 1–123, and Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History and ‘Three Waves of Modernity’, Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, Hilail Gildin (ed.) (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), pp. 81–98. For the differences between foundationalism, anti-foundationalism, and postfoundationalism, see Marchart, O., Post-foundational Political Thought (Edinburgh: EUP, 2007), particularly pp. 1–34. Rousseau’s critique focuses on classical philosophers and the natural law theorists of the seventeenth century: Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, Hobbes. I deal more specifically with Rousseau’s critique of aspects of their thinking in later chapters. For further discussion of the differences between Rousseau’s representation of nature and that of his predecessors, see Goldschmidt V., Anthropologie et politique. Les principes du système de Rousseau (Paris: Vrin, 1974), pp. 177–217. Herzog, D., Without Foundations. Justification in Political Theory (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 20. Vaughan, ‘Introduction’, p. 16. Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 274. Strauss, ‘Three Waves of Modernity’, p. 96. Williams criticizes ‘positivistic’ readings of Rousseau and their claims that Rousseau’s idea of justice simply reduces to human conventions. He argues for a notion of justice in Rousseau which is both transcendent and indeterminate. While I welcome his interpretation of justice as indeterminate and not simply identical to the general will, I depart from his assumption that justice defi nitely precedes the law. I interpret, in Chapter 8, the relation of justice to the law as undecidable. Rousseau’s thinking undermines, as we have seen, strict causalities. D. L. Williams, Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2007), p. 95. This negative definition of justice is supported by Dent’s statement that ‘Rousseau nowhere gives (. . .) a general definition of justice’. A Rousseau Dictionary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), p. 138. We discuss the question of Justice further in Chapter 8. ‘Rousseau proposes to refashion our existence by imitating our original position as well-ordered beings within the divine or natural whole, a whole ordered

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by law’. Scott, John Scott, ‘Politics as the Imitation of the Divine in Rousseau’s Social Contract’, Polity, vol. 26, no. 3 (1994), 473–501 (479). These points are largely based on Starobinski’s footnote 2 to DOI, OC, III, p. 1299. Froese, Rousseau and Nietzsche, p. 18. Laclau and Mouffe assert: ‘we must consider the openness of the social as the constitutive ground or “negative” essence of the existing, and diverse “social orders” as precarious and ultimately failed attempts to domesticate the field of social differences’. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 95–96. Glynos and Howarth, referring to Heidegger, affirm that ‘an ontical inquiry focuses on particular types of objects and entities that are located within a particular domain or “region” of phenomena, whereas an ontological inquiry concerns the categorical preconditions for such objects and their investigation’. See their Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 108. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 111. Laclau and Mouffe describe their critique of the Marxist tradition through this Husserlian distinction: ‘Sedimented theoretical categories are those which conceal the acts of their original institution, while the reactivating moment makes those acts visible again. For us – as opposed to Husserl – that reactivation had to show the original contingency of synthesis that the Marxian categories attempted to establish’. Ibid., p. viii. Rousseau is a precursor of Saussure whose theory of language underlies many of the basic assumptions of post-structuralism. Saussure refutes the idea that words refer to objects in the world: this would imply a natural relation between the word and what it represents. When we speak the word ‘tree’, we imagine a tree in our mind but that tree does not refer to an actual tree, since we all imagine different trees. The word supplies a concept of the tree not the thing itself. He understands the relationship between the signifier (the written/acoustic mark) and the signified (the concept) which the sign or word comprises as being determined by social convention rather by any essence. The meaning of a sign does not reside within it but comes from its difference from other signs. De Saussure, F., Course in General Linguistics, R. Harris (trans.) (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1983). Laclau, E., On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), p. 101. Through his comparative study, Wokler refutes Marx’s narrow view of Rousseau as an Enlightenment philosopher committed to the abstract rights of man, whose realization in the French Revolution marked the bourgeoisie’s political victory. He also undermines the development of that reading in Galvano della Volpe’s Rousseau and Marx, J. Fraser (trans.) (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), and in Lucio Colletti’s From Rousseau to Lenin, J. Merrington (trans.), (London: New Left Books, 1972). Wokler, R., ‘Rousseau and Marx’ in D. Miller and L. Sidentop (eds.), The Nature of Political Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 219–248. See their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 105–114. Laclau stresses the political importance of de Man’s analysis of rhetoric in his ‘Paul de Man and the Politics of Rhetoric’, Pretexts 7, no. 2 (1998), 153–170.

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De Man, Allegories of Reading, pp. 135–159. Ibid., p. 151. We explore this question further in Chapter 3. The most influential who represent Rousseau as ‘totalitarian’ were Talmon, J., The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Sphere Books, 1952) and Berlin, I., Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). Jean Starobinski, Blessings in Disguise; Or, the Morality of Evil (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 37. Earlier critiques took Laclau and Mouffe’s idea of the discursive nature of the social as denying the material existence of reality. For their response, see their ‘Post-Marxism without Apologies’, in Laclau, New Reflections (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 97–131, particularly pp. 100–103. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 108. Ibid., p. 106. Froese, Rousseau and Nietzsche, p. 23. Ibid. Lefort, Writing: the Political Test (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 229. Laclau, E., Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 36–46. See Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to Marcel Mauss, F. Baker (trans.), (London: Routledge, 1987), pp. 62–63. Glynos and Howarth, Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory, p. 123. Ibid., p. 130 Victor Goldschmidt provides a less negative reading of the division of land, stating that this division not only works to stop others, but also the owner himself, from trying to occupy another person’s territory. Anthropologie et Politique: les principes du système de Rousseau, p. 419. Froese, Rousseau and Nietzsche, p. 37. Wokler, ‘Rousseau and Marx’, p. 234 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 87–129. Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 109. Skinner, Q., Visions of Politics, vol. 1 (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), p. 186. Skinner’s use of the Quintillian notion of paradiastole as a mode of rhetorical redescription shares, as Glynos and Howarth indicate, an affinity with Laclau’s conception of naming. See their Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory, p. 187. Coleman emphasizes the ambiguous role of opinion in Rousseau’s Letter to D’Alembert in his Rousseau’s Political Imagination: Rule and Representation in the Lettre à d’Alembert (Geneva: Droz, 1984), pp. 55–58. Abizadeh, following Derrida, maintains that Rousseau simultaneously affirms and negates the representational quality of language as he quests for full presence and transparency. See his ‘Banishing the Particular: Rousseau on Rhetoric, Patrie and the Passions’, Political Theory, vol. 29, no. 4 (2001), 556–582 (559–558). Chapters 5 and 6 also undermine Abizadeh’s assumption that Rousseau’s general will banishes the particular. We explore this idea further in Chapter 7.

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Laclau writes ‘If, on the one hand, a society from which the political had been completely eliminated is inconceivable – it would mean a closed universe merely reproducing itself through repetitive practices – on the other, an act of unmediated political institutions is also impossible: any political construction takes place against the background of a range of sedimented practices’. Laclau, New Reflections, p. 35. Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 59. Laclau, New Reflections, p. 173.

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Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, pp. 19, 23. The Genevan jusrist, Burlamaqui, published his Principles of Natural Right in 1747. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 116–117. Stavrakakis, Y., Lacan and the Political (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 14. Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the Politics of the Ordinary, p. 44. For the formation of the subject, see Lacan, J., ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I’, in Lacan, Ecrits: a selection, A. Sheridan (trans.) (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 1–8. Also important for Lacan’s theory of the subject and in the same collection of essays, see ‘Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis’, pp. 9–32; ‘The function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, pp. 33–125; ‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious’, pp. 161–197; ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’, pp. 323–360. Lacan, ‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious’, p. 171. Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary, p. 54. Starobinski, J., ‘Introduction’ in Œuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Pléiade, 1964), pp. XLII–LXXI (LX). Froese, Rousseau and Nietzsche, p. 20. Laclau, New Reflections, pp. 18–19. My analysis of the primitive festival is greatly assisted by Starobinski’s reading of it. See his note 4 to DOI, p. 1344. O’Hagan, T., ‘Amour-Propre’, in T. O’Hagan (ed.), Rousseau and the Sources of the self (Aldershot: Averbury, 1997), pp. 66–84 (p. 66). Derrida’s analysis of pity, in Of Grammatology, informs my reading, pp. 171–194. Froese, Rousseau and Nietzsche, p. 25. Laclau, New Reflections, p. 39 and pp. 52–56. Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 274. See Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 153–231, and Laclau, New Reflections, pp. 60–84. For a general discussion of the political significance of Lacan’s theory of the subject, see Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political, pp. 29–39. ‘The subject is the name of that unfathomable X called upon, suddenly made accountable, thrown into a position of responsibility, into the urgency of the decision in such a moment of undecidability’. Žižek, S., They Know Not What They

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Do. Environment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), p. 189. See also Laclau, New Reflections, particularly pp. 60–63. For Rousseau’s understanding of imagination, see Sosso, P., Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Imagination, Illusions, Chimères (Paris: Champion, 1999). In defining the human as potentiality, Rousseau anticipates Giorgio Agamben’s thinking on the human. I shall explore the links between Rousseau’s theorization of the human and that of Post-World War II thinkers in a future essay. See his The Coming Community, M. Hardt (trans.) (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), Chapter XI. Devenney emphasizes the need to maintain the distinction between ‘subjected subjectivity’ and ‘free subjectivity’ so as not to paralyze the ‘subjective freedom’ necessary for radical democracy. Devenney, M., Ethics and Politics in Contemporary Theory, between critical theory and post-Marxism (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 110–116. Žižek describes how ‘the most radical dimension’ of Lacanian theory is not simply that the subject is ‘divided’ or ‘identical to a lack’ but in realizing how ‘the symbolic order’ is ‘structured around a central lack’. That lack enables a radical politics which looks beyond the given and remains open to the new. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 122.

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Both J. Schwartz and Sandel interpret Rousseau as ‘anti-political’ in their The Permanence of the Political a Democratic Critique of the Radical Impulse to Transcend Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) and Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, respectively. Mouffe and Honig identify this tendency in liberal and communitarian thinkers. Mouffe, C., The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993) and B. Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1993). Following Rancière, Žižek calls this denial ‘post-politics’. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999); Žižek, S., The Ticklish Subject. The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 201–205. Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 115, 162. This tension between identity and difference critiques Nancy’s reading of Rousseau as the first to think community as the loss of a more primary and immediate community. I plan to develop my critique in a future article. Nancy, J.-L., The Inoperative Community, P. Connor (trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 9. Schmitt’s definition of the political concerns conflict and antagonism. He sees the friend/enemy distinction as the basic political relation: ‘The distinction friend/enemy denotes the degree of intensity of a union or a separation, of an association and dissociation.’ The enemy, being not predetermined in any way, defines the political as potentially ubiquitous because conflicts can happen

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anywhere, even in supposedly neutral spheres. Schmitt, C., The Concept of the Political (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 26–27. Mouffe’s leftist reworking of Schmitt’s political affirms how antagonism is positive only when recognized as internal to a society and not projected onto an outside. By accepting the constitutivity of antagonism, societies accept their susceptibility to questioning and reconfiguration and also their need to protect democratic practices and institutions from anti-democratic forces. Mouffe, ‘Introduction: Carl Schmitt’s Challenge’, in C. Mouffe (ed.) The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 1–6. Mouffe overlooks this point, tracing the denial of antagonism among liberal thinkers back to the French Enlightenment’s idealized notion of sociability found in Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot who, she believes, thought that hostility and violence could be completely eradicated through reason. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, pp. 130–132. See their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 122–127; Laclau, New Reflections, pp. 17–18, 27. Mouffe has recently problematized the earlier notion of antagonism, distinguishing between ‘antagonism proper’ – the generative force behind any social institution – and agonism – the moments of antagonism occurring in established regimes. This distinction redefines the idea of the enemy as an adversary: a person with whom we share the same social space but who wants to organize that space differently. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, p. 13. Baker, F., ‘Eternal Vigilance: Rousseau’s Death Penalty’ in R. Wokler (ed.), Rousseau and Liberty (Manchester: MUP, 1995), pp. 153–185. Mouffe, The Return of the Political, p. 140. Žižek, ‘Beyond Discourse Analysis’ in Laclau, New Reflections, pp. 249–260 (p. 254). Laclau, New Reflections, pp. 72–78. Froese, Rousseau and Nietzsche, p. 27. See his note 4 to DOI, OC III, p. 1344. Lacan’s dictum ‘le désir de l’homme, c’est le désir de l’Autre’ helps clarify how man’s desire functions in the Discourse. If we take the second ‘de’ as the subjective genitive, we can translate the dictum as follows: ‘Man’s desire is the Other’s desire’, ‘Man’s desire is the same as the same as the Other’s desire’ and ‘Man desires what the Other desires’, all of which express part of its meaning. However, it contains other possible meanings. It signifies how man desires in the same way as the Other or, more exactly, learns to desire as if we were some other person. It also implies how man’s desire is for the Other to desire him. Lacan, Ecrits, p. 345. See, for example, Baczko, B., Rousseau, solitude et communauté (Paris, Mouton, 1974), p. 20. Froese, Rousseau and Nietzsche, p. 43. See Jason Glynos, ‘Self-Transgression and Freedom’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 2 (2003), 1–20. Although Rousseau does not use these modern terms, he clearly describes them in his account of the changes effected by the invention of metallurgy and agriculture. See Starobinski ‘Introduction’, p. LXIII.

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My analysis of the surplus undermines Ansart’s conclusion that Rousseau’s thinking remains structured on binary sets which oppose ‘the useful to the useless, the necessary to the superfluous’. Ansart, G., ‘Rousseau, Bataille, et le principe de l’utilité classique’, French Studies, vol. 55, no. 1 (2001), 25–35 (35) (my translation). The denial of antagonism, states Mouffe, ‘was the very condition of the social contract from which violence and hostility would have been eliminated and where reciprocity could take the form of transparent communication among participants’. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, p. 131. I draw here on Stavrakakis’s Lacanian-inspired critique of utopianism in his Lacan and the Political, p. 107. Ibid. Mouffe, ‘Introduction: Carl Schmitt’s Challenge’, pp. 1–6. Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society. Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986), pp. 181–236. Ibid., p. 191. Ibid., p. 201. J. Thompson, ‘Editor’s Introduction’ in Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986), pp. 1–28 (p. 16). Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, p. 206. Ibid., p. 305. Ibid., p. 224. J. Ingram, ‘The Politics of Claude Lefort’s political: between liberalism and radical democracy’, Thesis Eleven, no. 87 (2006), 33–50 (37). Ibid., 37. Ibid., 36. E. Laclau and L. Zac, ‘Minding the Gap: The Subject of Politics’, in Laclau E., (ed.), The Making of Political Identities (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 11–39 (p. 35). Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the Politics of the Ordinary, p. 47.

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Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, p. 305. Mouffe examines the conditions of possibility for an ethics of democracy in The Democratic Paradox but does not flesh out her account with any analysis of the types of commitments and identifications it might involve, pp. 129–140. Laclau speaks generally about the ethical as an experience of the absent fullness of society rather than an ethics of democracy. See his ‘Hegemony and Identity’, pp. 80–88. Simon Critchley identifies a ‘normative deficit’ in Laclau’s theory of hegemony (for hegemony, see Chapter 6). Critchley states that it is not clear whether that theory is descriptive or normative, arguing that it needs to be supplemented with an ethics of infinite responsibility. See his Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 106–122 and his ‘Is there a normative deficit in the theory of hegemony?’, in S. Critchley and O. Marchart (eds.), Laclau: A Critical

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Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 113–122. For Laclau’s reply, see his ‘Glimpsing the future’, in Laclau: A Critical Reader, particularly pp. 286–291. Norval, while acknowledging the need for a fuller account of democracy, believes that Laclau’s and Mouffe’s ‘emphasis on form and the constitutive experience of social contingency’ contains an ‘injunction’ to acknowledge how ‘democracy is never fully instituted’ and ‘remains to be struggled for’. See her Aversive Democracy, p. 154. Jean Terrel emphasizes Rousseau’s difference on this point in Les théories du pacte social. Droit naturel, Souveraineté et contrat de Bodin à Rousseau (Paris: Seuil, 2001), pp. 325–367. Žižek’s idea of ‘enjoyment theft’ is useful here. We fantasize, maintains Žižek, that others have stolen the enjoyment we renounced to become subjects. Enjoyment signifies the imaginary feeling of fullness which remains after we separate from the mother to represent ourselves in language. We hold others responsible for that loss in order to repress the fact that we never actually possessed the fullness we perceive absent, the fact that that absent fullness provides the condition of our subjectivity. His idea of enjoyment theft reworks Hegel’s lord and bondsman dialectic. See his Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 200–237. Jouissance is difficult to translate in English: the closest term is ‘enjoyment’ which evokes both the idea of deriving pleasure from something and also the legal connotations of the enjoyment of rights, property etc. ‘Enjoyment’ does not render the sexual connotation of jouissance which also means orgasm in French slang. Lacan, in his Ethics of Psychoanalysis, conceives jouissance as not simply about pleasure but about also its opposite: the pain of physical and mental suffering. Lacan, The Seminar Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, D. Porter (trans.), J. A Miller (ed.), (New York: Norton and Company, 1992), pp. 166–240. For an overview of this concept, see Dylan Evans, ‘From Kantian Ethics to Mystical Experience: an exploration of Jouissance’ in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Dany Nobus (ed.), (New York: Other Press, 1998), pp. 1–28. I explore this concept in greater depth in my ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Post-Marxist” Critique of Alienation: a Re-reading through Lacan and Žižek’, Philosophy Today (Autumn 2006), 349–367. I draw on Glynos’s analysis of the paradox of voluntary servitude through the psychoanalytical category of jouissance. Glynos, ‘Self-Transgression and Freedom’, 7–18. A. Grosrichard’s The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East (London: Verso, 1998) also informs my argument. Following Žižek, Glynos and Howarth argue that ‘the subject of enjoyment [. . .] is structured around fantasies’. They conceive fantasies as ‘a narrative that covers-over or conceals the subject’s lack by providing an image of fullness, wholeness, or harmony, on the one hand, while conjuring up threats and obstacles to its realization on the other’. See their Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory, p. 130. Žižek, S. ‘I Hear You with my Eyes’ in S. Žižek and R. Salecl (eds), Gaze and voice as love Objects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 90–126. Mouffe, The Return of the Political, p. 2. Laclau, New Reflections, p. 216.

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Žižek’s idea of ‘traversing the fantasy’ refers to the outcome of Lacanian therapy whereby we sense the illusory nature of reality, ‘how there is nothing “behind” it, how fantasy masks precisely this “nothing” ’. That experience, argues Žižek, provides the condition for rethinking reality. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 126. Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, p. 169. Despite reading Rousseau as a dialectical thinker, Engels understands The Social Contract as supporting bourgeois ideals of individual property and rights. See his Anti-Dühring (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969), p. 167. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, p. 33. Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 19. Žižek explains the idea of ‘tarrying with the negative’ with an empirical example: after the violent overthrowing of Ceaus¸escu in Romania, the rebels waved the national flag with the communist symbol of the red star cut out. The hole in the flag simultaneously signified the demise of communism, and the openness of ‘the historical situation “in its becoming” ’ where the institutions and structures of the former regime had not yet been replaced by new ones. Tarrying with the Negative, pp. 1–2. Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, p. 305. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 220. Žižek, Enjoy your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out! (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 90. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, p. 139. Froese, Rousseau and Nietzsche, p. 73. The Democratic Paradox, p. 129. Ibid., pp. 130–132. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, p. 304. Mouffe, The Return of the Political, p. 11. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, p. 304 Mouffe, The Return of the Political, p. 15. Delaney also recognizes that Rousseau does not ‘reduce ethics to some overarching principle (. . .) for actions that grounds right and wrong’ but believes that a notion of ‘the good life’ is ‘at the core of’ what he terms Rousseau’s ethics of virtue. The emphasis on human alienation and suffering in Emile’s moral education as inducing human identification and association questions this claim. Delaney, J., Rousseau and the Ethics of Virtue (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 149, 153. De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 120. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, p. 136. Hobbes, T., Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1994). Rachman argues that Freud made this question a central ethical concern. J. Rachman, Truth and Eros (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 70. Froese, Rousseau and Nietzsche, p. 73. Lacoue-Labarthe, Poétique de l’histoire, p. 56. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 269. My discussion is informed by Laclau’s understanding of the ethical as ‘the experience of the fullness of being as that which is essentially lacking. It is

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the experience of the presence of an absence’. That experience of an absent plenitude reveals ‘the distance between what is and what ought to be, which is the root of any ethical experience and reflection’. Laclau, ‘Glimpsing the Future’, p. 286. He also discusses the ethical in ‘Hegemony and Identity’, pp. 80–88. Laclau, ‘Glimpsing the Future’, p. 286. The importance of identifying with the socially marginalized for Emile’s social awareness is similar to the importance given to the ‘underdog’ or Lumpenproletariat by Laclau and the ‘excluded element’, like the slum dwellers, by Žižek, for repoliticizing a seemingly settled political order. The socially excluded represent the incompleteness or ‘non-all’ of society. Laclau, On Populist Reason, pp. 144–148 and pp. 150–153; Žizek, S., In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), pp. 424–427. Laclau, ‘Glimpsing the Future’, p. 295. Laclau, Ibid., p. 287. Žižek, ‘Afterword: Lenin’s choice’ in Žižek, S., (ed.) Revolution at the Gates: Selected of Writings of Lenin 1917 (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 167–336 (p. 252).

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For a critique of Rousseau’s liberal detractors, see Wokler, R., ‘Rousseau’s Two Concepts of Liberty’, in G. Feaver and F. Rosen (eds), Lives, Liberties and the Public Good (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 61–97. For a discussion of how Rousseau’s thinking supports openness and diversity, see Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary; Froese, Rousseau and Nietzsche. Anthony Arblaster, Democracy (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994), p. 64. See Laclau, Emancipation(s), pp. 20–35 and pp. 47–65. For a discussion of Laclau’s conception of the universal, see Linda Zerilli, ‘This universalism which is not one’ in S. Critchley and O. Marchart (eds), Laclau: A Critical Reader, pp. 88–110. Roldolphe Gasché, ‘How empty can empty be? On the place of the universal’, in S. Critchley and O. Marchart (eds), Laclau: A Critical Reader, pp. 17–34 (p. 22). Laclau cites Plato as an ‘unambiguous example’ of how classical philosophy conceives the universal as the source of all meaning and as the ultimate truth of the particular. He argues that an epistemological break occurs with Hobbes who is the first philosopher to think the universal as totally empty. However, that empty space becomes filled by the absolute sovereign: an individual will that raises itself above all particular wills to embody ‘the unchallengeable law of the community’. Laclau overlooks Rousseau’s recognition of the emptiness of the universal and the constitutive force he gives to it. Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 62. ‘The universal is part of my identity as far as I am penetrated by a constitutive lack, that is, as far as my differential identity has failed in its process of constitution. The universal emerges out of the particular not as some principle underlying and explaining the particular but as an incomplete horizon suturing

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a dislocated and particular identity’. Ibid., p. 28. Likewise, the absence of nature names the missing fullness of both society and man which inaugurates political activity. Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., p. 35. Schwartz, The Permanence of the Political, p. 50. Laclau, La Guerre des identités, p. 8. Riley usefully shows how Rousseau bases politics on a general, as opposed to a strictly universal, will. He recognizes that Rousseau does not always distinguish between the terms ‘universal’ and ‘general’, often referring to the universality of the general will. He judges this ambiguity as part of Rousseau’s progression to a mature position. Riley, P., The General Will before Rousseau (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986). I, however, interpret this play in terminology as an integral part of the writing, as indicating the absence of pure universality. That absence is supplemented by the generalized particular which temporarily represents the general will. Rousseau comments regarding his particularized general will that ‘the words Universality and Generality’ mean ‘the same thing’ (GM, 329/326). I therefore employ both ‘universal’ and ‘general’. For Postigliola, Rousseau, having appropriated Malebranche’s notion of justice overlooks how his general will lacks the divine attribute of infinity. Rousseau, he argues, makes the error of using Malebranche’s epistemological categories, speaking about a general will which is ‘unalterble and pure’, when in Rousseau’s theory, generality can be no more than a ‘fi nite whole’, a ‘heterogeneous sum’. His reference to a ‘heterogeneous sum’ confuses the general will with the will of all. While the particular construction of the general will is fi nite, its pure and indestructible character indicates how it can never be fully represented, thereby requiring a constant process of willing (see Chapter 6). Postigliola, A., ‘De Malebranche à Rousseau: les apories de la volonté générale et la revanche du “raisonneur violent” ’, Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. 39 (1980), 123–138. Diderot ‘Droit naturel’, in J. H. Mason and R. Wokler (eds), Diderot’s Political Writings (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), pp. 17–21. For a discussion of Rousseau’s critique of Diderot, see Patrick Riley, The General Will before Rousseau, and Grace Roosevelt, Reading Rousseau in the Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). Riley, The General Will before Rousseau, p. 186. This does not imply that Rousseau literally replies to Mouffe’s statement. To recognize the importance of Rousseau’s thinking on the universal for current debates necessarily requires the perspective of those debates. All meaning, being relational, has a retroactive quality. Mouffe, The Return of the Political, p. 13. Equally, Zerrilli states that Laclau refutes the false universality of ‘abstract rationality’ in her ‘This universalism which is not one’, p. 93. Riley, The General Will before Rousseau, p. 209. Ibid., p. 205. C. Bertram, Rousseau and the Social Contract (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 98. Bertram, Rousseau and the Social Contract, p. 49.

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Laclau also emphasizes their co-implication in Emancipation(s), pp. 56–60. While Rousseau’s political theory focuses on small states, a nation or city, believing that, in such contexts, citizens are more likely to realize the results of their collective efforts and thus to acquire a sense of unity from that realization, this quotation implies that even small societies would recognize their status relative to a wider whole, their universal obligations. They should not therefore be conceived as self-contained. Riley, The General Will before Rousseau, p. 251. G. Mairet shares my reading of the partial association: ‘Totalitarianism comes from a particular will – a party – which sets itself up as universal: it is the part which takes itself for the whole. In other words, there is a danger of totalitarianism, when a section of the people takes itself for the people because it claims to represent them by merely speaking in their name’, see his note in Du contrat social (Paris: LdP, 1996), p. 200 (my translation). Abizadeh, ‘Rhetoric, Patrie, and Passions’, p. 564. Abizadeh erroneously assumes the general will comes from an infallible inward voice. Ibid., p. 565. Obviously writing before the advent of modern mass communication, Rousseau conceives a scene of public oratory where all citizens would need to be physically assembled to hear the speech, this would obviously restrict the size of the state. Modern technology would today enable a much wider diffusion of public discourse without requiring the actual physical presence of citizens. The empirical example of the political circle is depicted as exclusively male. This raises the question of the role of women in The Social Contract. Both Baker and Hegarty undermine the assumption that the silence about women in the text automatically implies their exclusion from the pact. Baker cogently argues that this exclusion would contradict the founding clause of the pact – our total alienation – which makes its terms equal for all members. If excluded, women would remain naturally free, unbound by laws. This would jeopardize the contract’s legitimacy. Baker, F., ‘La Sexualité et l’exclusion chez Rousseau’, Etudes Jean-Jacques Rousseau, no. 14–15 (2003–2004), 65–93. The Discourse supports her argument to the extent that it does not conceive humanity as naturally gendered – we are basically all free and equal. Gender differentiation is culturally produced, occurring after family settlements: ‘The sexes whose manner of life had been hitherto the same, began now to adopt different ways of living. The women became more sedentary and accustomed themselves to mind their hut and their children, while the men went abroad in search of their common subsistence (DOI, 88). Hegarty also stresses the openness of the social contract through its promissory structure in ‘Doubling Legitimacy: Reading Rousseau’s Contrat Social after Pateman’s Sexual Contract’, French Studies, vol. 53, no. 3 (1999), 292–306. Althusser, among others, believes that the suppression of interest groups forms ‘the absolute condition’ of the general will in his Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx: Politics and History (London: Verso, 1982), p. 151. I further critique his reading in the next chapter. Although more sympathetic to Rousseau, Balibar echoes this view in his ‘Ce qui fait qu’un peuple est un peuple. Rousseau et Kant’. Revue de synthèse, vol. 110, no. 3–4 (1989), 391–417 (393).

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For a relational conception of the social, see Laclau, On Populist Reason, pp. 66–67. Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 26. Betram refutes the idea that the civil religion is illiberal and totalitarian, arguing that it makes ‘important concessions to modernity and pluralism’ in his Rousseau and the Social Contract, pp. 177–178. Laclau, E., ‘Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony’, in Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism: Critchley, Derrida, Laclau, and Rorty (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 47–67 (pp. 50–51). Baker’s interpretation of the civil religion and the death penalty in her ‘Eternal vigilance: Rousseau’s death penalty’ greatly informs my reading, pp. 162–163. The impossibility of an indiscriminate notion of ‘tolerance’ conditions Rousseau’s inclusion of the death penalty in the civil religion. He reserves this violent punishment, which is not part of the penal code, for those political leaders or powerful figures who persecute others, for the extreme case of the despot. Baker writes: ‘Whether or not we agree with the principle of the death penalty as it is worked out in the Social Contract, we will at least acknowledge that it offers us a chance of imagining a society in which everyone knew they were obliged to resist the ascension of a modern Caligula’. Ibid., p. 183. From a modern perspective, Žižek underlines the need for a mode of exclusion for those who threaten democratic structures, stating that we cannot fight ‘ethnic hatred’ through its immediate counterpart ‘ethnic tolerance’, but through ‘even more hatred’, that is, ‘proper political hatred: hatred directed at the common enemy’ The Fragile Absolute (London: Verso, 2000), p. 11. Gasché, ‘How empty can empty be?’, p. 22. Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 51.

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Steven Affeldt, ‘The Force of Freedom’, Political Theory, vol. 27, no. 3 (1999), 299–333 (306). Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 57. Rousseau’s critique of Hobbes undermines Simpson’s suggestion that, for Rousseau, the ‘advanced state of nature, with its greed and vanity, is a perfectly natural condition compared to political society’. Simpson, M., Rousseau’s Theory of Freedom (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 115. A. Levine, The General Will: Rousseau, Marx, Communism (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), p. 54. For hegemony, see their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 134–145. Norval, Aversive Democracy, p. 47. Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 35. Laclau, ‘Identity and Hegemony’, p. 55. Gramsci, A., Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), especially pp. 180–185. Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 43.

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For Laclau’s and Mouffe’s critique of Gramsci, see Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 136–138. For a discussion of that critique, see Michèle Barrett, The Politics of Truth (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 51–80. Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 227. J. H. Mason, ‘Forced to be free’, in R. Wokler (ed.), Rousseau and Liberty, (Manchester: MUP, 1995), pp. 121–138 (p. 134). Rousseau restricts debating during the voting procedure because democratic decision-making and the multiple viewpoints which it requires may be threatened if one speaker dominates the proceedings. However, the fact that he qualifies debates with the adjective ‘long’ (SC, 276/439) suggests that he does not banish them outright but only if they obstruct independent deliberations on the general will. Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 35. Affeldt, ‘The Force of Freedom’, p. 304. Affeldt, Ibid., p. 306. Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 35. For a discussion of the idea of the constitutive outside, see Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, pp. 12, 22. We discuss the links between Rousseau’s democracy and Derrida’s democracy to come in Chapter 8. Our discussion refutes Žižek’s understanding of the general will as similar to Christian predestination. When deciding on the general will, citizens are asked, he argues, ‘not to performatively constitute their fate, but to discover (or guess) their pre-existing fate’. Consequently, the minority can never question the majority because the general will is seen as a pre-established truth rather than the result of a contingent decision. Žižek, S., ‘Introduction’, in S. Žižek (ed.) Robespierre, Virtue and Terror (London: Verso, 2007), pp. vii–xxxix (p. xxiii). Bertram, Rousseau and the Social Contract, p. 98. Althusser, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, p. 149. Ibid., p. 151. Ibid. Mouffe, in The Democratic Paradox, theorizes an agonistic notion of democratic citizenship whereby we come to regard our enemies as adversaries, as people who belong to our society but have different ideas about its organization from our own, p. 22. Norval makes two main criticisms of Mouffe’s position. First, Mouffe does not adequately explain the transition from one set of relations to another. Second, by defining adversarial relations as differences within an already constituted common space, she detracts from the transformative dimension of the earlier notion of radical democratic politics which involves repoliticizing existing relations so that the very constitution of their common space is questioned and reconfigured. Norval, Aversive Democracy, pp. 158–159. Affeldt, ‘The Force of Freedom’, p. 307. Ibid., p. 308. For further discussion of this debate, see Glynos and Howarth, Logics of critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory, pp. 127–132. They identify Laclau as central for offering a notion of subjectivity which is neither purely selfdetermining nor totally subjected.

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Froese also stresses how ‘The individual (. . .) becomes part of something larger than the self while at the same time creating the conditions by which he becomes such a part’. Froese, K., ‘Organic Virtue: Reading Mencius with Rousseau’, Asian Philosophy, vol. 18, no. 1 (2008), 83–104 (101). Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 132–133 Although Rousseau mainly uses the term ‘alienation’ to mean to give away or sell, we can understand its effects as similar to the modern sense of alienation as separation and estrangement. Althusser, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, pp. 121–122. Strong, Rousseau and the Politics of the Ordinary, p. 76. For a discussion of the misreadings of this quotation and an answer to them, see both Baker, F., ‘La route contraire’, in Harvey, Hobson, Kelley and Taylor (eds), Reappraisals of Rousseau (Manchester: MUP, 1980), pp. 132–162 and Wokler, R., ‘Rousseau’s Two Concepts of Liberty’, pp. 80–83. Affeldt, ‘The Force of Freedom’, p. 314. Norval regards the emphasis on negative identification in Laclau and Mouffe as potentially limiting for cultivating an ethos of ongoing democratic renewal. Aversive Democracy, pp. 154–160. Laclau, in Emancipation(s), judges this tension as central to the modern political landscape, affirming that ‘contemporary social and political struggles open (. . .) strategies for filling the empty place of the common good’, p. 60. Bertram also argues, in his Rousseau and the Social Contract, that full reconciliation ‘would mean engulfment of the individual in society and the loss of moral responsibility’, p. 145. The idea of identification is obviously essential to the establishment of the social contract and will be explored in relation to the legislator in the next chapter. Laclau, New Reflections, p. 44. Laclau, ‘Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony’, p. 56.

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Connolly and Keenan espouse this view. Connolly believes that Rousseau confines the paradox to the instituting moment to convince his readers of ‘another time when it could be resolved’. Connolly, W. The Ethos of Pluralisation (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1995), p. 137. Keenan discerns in Rousseau’s theory ‘resources for resisting attempts to naturalize, and thus, close off the identity of the people (including his own famous attempts at various points in the Social Contract and elsewhere)’ Keenan, A., Democracy in Question (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 40. While I welcome their analysis of Rousseau’s paradox as central for democratic thinking, their suggestion that Rousseau intends to theorize a closed and self-regulating state counters their readings of his writings as complex and open-ended. Honig, B, ‘Between Decision and Deliberation: Political Paradox in Democratic Theory’, American Political Science Review, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, 1–14 (1, 6, 14). Keenan, Democracy in Question, p. 43.

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Honig, B., Democracy and the Foreigner, (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 21. Laclau, E., ‘Democracy between Autonomy and Heteronomy’, p. 377. Ibid., p. 378. Ibid. Keenan, Democracy in Question, p. 48. For the constitutive split between the particular and the universal of the hegemonic agent, see Laclau, Emancipation(s), pp. 47–65. Norval, Aversive Democracy, pp. 49–50 De Man, among others, uses this term in his Allegories of Reading, p. 274. Bennington discusses the dimension of deferred effect in the Social Contract, viewing it as being opposed to Rousseau’s supposed intention of creating a society where the distinction between description and prescription has been dissolved. I reject this view: that dimension indicates the permanent non- closure of politics in Rousseau. Bennington, G., Sententiousness and the Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), pp. 156–171. For the difficulty of representing the temporality of political change, see Chambers, S., Untimely Politics (Edinburgh: EUP, 2003). Norval, Aversive Democracy, pp. 183–184. Kelly offers support for our understanding of the legislator as a representative, linking the legislator’s ‘art’ to Rousseau’s understanding of theatrical representation. Kelly, C., ‘ “To Persuade without Convincing”: The Language of Rousseau’s Legislator’, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 31, no. 2, 1987, 321–335 (324). I refer to Laclau’s work on political representation which is informed by a Derridean conception of representation as a more general theoretical category: ‘there is only representation, because there is never such a thing as a pure and original presentation’. Laclau, E., ‘Not a Ground but a Horizon: An Interview with Ernesto Laclau’, Brian Price and Megan Sutherland, World Picture 2 (2008), 1–4 (3). My use of representation would appear to counter Badiou’s assertion that ‘The essence of politics, according to Rousseau, affirms presentation over representation’. Badiou, A., Polemics, Steven Corcoran (trans.) (London: Verso, 2006), p. 95. For Badiou, politics is not about governmental representation but about the presentation of the people to itself. He rightly reads ‘the act by which a people is a people’ of the The Social Contract as a political event. The people wills itself into existence, it creates itself out of nothing. The people, he argues, cannot be represented because it does not exist prior to its construction: it establishes itself retroactively through fidelity to the contract itself. While my own reading does not differ greatly from this interpretation, I, however, use representation because of the foundational role of language in Rousseau’s political thought (‘purely abstract beings [. . .] are only conceivable by the help of language’ (DOI, 68)) and because of the legislator’s mediation in constructing the people, which questions the idea of direct presentation. For the links between Rousseau and Badiou, see Critchley, S. ‘Why Badiou is a Rousseauist and why we should be too’, Cardozo Law Review, vol. 29, no. 5 (2008), 1927–1934. Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 158. Ibid.

Notes 19 20

21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35

Ibid., p. 223 Shklar, J., Men and Citizens (Cambridge: CUP, 1969), p. 160. More recently, Simpson, in his Rousseau’s Theory of Freedom, reiterates Shklar’s idea that ‘humanity’s real nature’ is ‘inevitably’ ‘at war’ with civic duty. While rightly suggesting that the impossibility of total stability allows for freedom, Simpson makes the same mistake as Rousseau’s predecessor in taking socially produced passions like ‘greed and vanity’ as natural. pp. 116–117 (p. 116). My reading refutes the idea of a real human nature. Laclau, ‘Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony’, pp. 47–67 (p. 49). Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 224. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, p. 19. Baker, ‘Eternal Vigilance’, p. 153. Glynos and Howarth, Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory, pp. 134, 145. Honig, ‘Between Deliberation and Decision’, p. 6. Bennington, Sententiousness and the Novel, p. 22. Honig, ‘Between Deliberation and Decision’, p. 6. For Näsström, the impossibility of a fully legitimate people founds the people’s freedom always to make new claims of legitimacy. This viewpoint, she believes, takes us beyond Rousseau. She reproaches Rousseau for presuming, along with many of his successors, that ‘first we have a people and then we have legitimacy. The former is the basis of the latter’, for failing to see how ‘people-making is what legitimacy is all about’ Näsström, S., ‘The Legitimacy of the people’, Political Theory, vol. 35, no. 5 (2007), 624–658 (641). I agree with her overall argument but disagree with her interpretation of Rousseau. The contractual process rejects any simple causality: the making of the people already implies a claim of legitimacy. The constant renewal of the general will represents a continual quest for legitimacy. The people is both the source and the object of legitimacy. Laclau, E., ‘Politics and the Limits of Modernity’, p. 343. Laclau, New Reflections, pp. 61–65. Žižek, For they know not what they do, pp. 201–203 and pp. 214–219. Laclau, ‘Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony’, p. 55. Honig, ‘Between Deliberation and Decision’, p. 7. Baker, ‘Eternal Vigilance’, p. 153. For the theological-political, see Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, pp. 213–255.

Chapter 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

211

Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 193. Miller, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy, p. 118. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 147 Miller, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy, p. 201. Ibid., p. 200. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 147. Ibid., pp. 5–6.

212 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25 26

27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36

Notes

Laclau understands a horizon as a formation without a foundation, as an empty place in which society symbolizes its very groundlessness, its absent fullness. See his ‘Politics and the Limits of Modernity’, pp. 342–343. Miller, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy, pp. 103–122. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 58. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, pp. 2–3. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 167. Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 171. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 153–154. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, p. 17. Laclau, ‘Democracy and Power’, p. 13. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 147. Lefort, Writing: the Political Test, pp. 552–559. Keenan, Democracy in Question, p. 135. Carl Schmitt’s work is central for this separation. See his Concept of the Political. Mouffe, On the Political, pp. 8–9. Ingram, ‘The Politics of Claude Lefort’s Political’, 36. Subjects only become aware retrospectively of their founding acts. Zizek, For they know not what they do, p. 222. Derrida ‘Force of Law: “The Mystical Foundations of Authority” ’, Mary Quaintance (trans.) in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, D Cornell, M. Rosenfeld and D. G. Carlson (eds) (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 24. Betram, Rousseau and the Social Contract, p. 98. Scott, ‘Politics as the imitation of the Divine in Rousseau’s Social Contract’, 499; Shklar, Men and Citizens, p. 181. Autoimmunity is a biological term describing how the body’s immune system produces an immune response against its own cells, attacking itself from within. Derrida provides empirical examples of democracy’s autoimmunity: the suspension of the second round of elections in Algeria in 1992 and the measures used to protect democracy after 9/11. Derrida, J., Rogues, Two Essays on Reason, P.A. Brault and M. Naas (trans.) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 35–36. See also S. Hadad, ‘Derrida and Democracy at Risk’, Contretemps 4 (2004), 29–44. Derrida, J. Rogues, pp. 86–87. Derrida, ‘Force of Law’, p. 23. Norval, Aversive Democracy, p. 145. De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 246. Ibid., p. 273. Ibid., p. 274. Ibid., p. 275. Derrida examines the development of his notion of ‘democracy to come’ in Rogues, pp. 78–94. Ibid., p. 38. Thomson usefully compares Laclau’s and Mouffe’s radical democracy and Derrrida’s ‘democracy to come’. He argues that Laclau’s and Mouffe’s radical democracy is predicated on the radicalization of existent democracies whereas Derrida conceives democracy as the name for politics in general, and attempts to rethink the concept of the political itself. While I agree that radical

Notes

37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44

45

46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

213

democracy is, in part, a historically situated theory, it also transcends its context to emphasize the non-closure of politics. Thomson, A., Deconstruction and Democracy (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 41–54. Norval, Aversive Democracy, p. 184. Derrida, Rogues, p. 74 For Derrida, democracy is structured on an aporia insofar as ‘There is no democracy [pas de démocratie] without respect for irreducible singularity, but, there is no democracy [pas de démocratie] without ‘the community of friends’, without the calculation of majorities, without identifiable, stabilizable, subjects, all equal. These two laws are irreducible one to the other’. Politics of Friendship, G. Collins (trans.) (London: Verso, 1997), p. 22. Derrida, Rogues, p. 74 Ibid., p. 74 Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 84. ‘For democracy remains to come; this is its essence insofar as it remains: not only will it remain indefinitely perfectible, hence always insufficient and future, but belonging to the time of the promise, it will always remain, in each of its future times, to come: even when there is democracy, it never exists; it is never present, it remains the theme of the non-presentable concept’. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 306. Derrida, The Other Heading, P. Brault and M. Naas (trans.) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 78. ‘Politics and friendship: A discussion with Jacques Derrida’, Centre for Modern French Thought, University of Sussex, 1 December 1997. At (www.hydra.umn. edu/derrida/pol+fr.html), 1 July 2004. Norval, Aversive Democracy, p. 147. Derrida, Rogues, p. 84. Ibid., p. 86. Thomson, Deconstruction and Democracy, p. 38. Norval, Aversive Democracy, p. 146. See his Writings on the Abbé de Saint Pierre, OC III, pp. 563–613. De Man, Blind and Insight, p. 120.

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Index

Abizadeh, Arash 35, 115–16 Affeldt, Steven 124, 129, 134, 140 agency 29, 38, 41, 45, 54–5, 58–9, 63, 67, 78, 100–2, 110, 124–6, 135, 142, 150, 154–5, 163 agreement 113, 107–9, 123, 124–6, 128–32, 138, 147–8 the tacit agreement of the pact 138–43 see also disagreement alienation 42–4, 47, 58, 63–71, 75–9, 101, 141, 187, 188 total alienation 91–2, 136–9 alterity see otherness Althusser, Louis 27, 132, 133, 137, 206 n29 ambiguity 2, 5, 7, 8, 12, 27, 28, 29, 31, 36, 55, 58, 65, 82, 89, 107, 112, 123, 143, 145, 161, 163, 164, 166, 183 amour propre 39, 44, 64–5, 104 animals 10, 37, 43, 50, 51, 53, 93, 98 antagonism 6, 11, 58, 60–5, 67, 72–5, 81, 82, 86, 87, 89, 93, 123–5, 133, 142, 163, 164 Arblaster, Anthony 107 articulation 3, 5, 40, 110, 122, 127, 128, 138, 141, 143, 146, 168 association 3, 6, 12, 17, 25, 31–2, 43, 51, 60–3, 68, 72, 75, 82–3, 86, 92–4, 111–14, 124–9, 134–9, 161, 164, 187 partial association 115–19, 122 authenticity 66–7 autoimmunity 179 autonomy 2, 3, 17, 51, 55, 67, 91, 110, 112, 116, 124, 125, 126, 134, 142–8, 154, 160, 165, 168–9, 172

Badiou, Alain 19, 194 n7, 206 n16 Baker, Felicity 62, 122, 161, 206 n27 Barthes, Roland 192 n22 Bennington, Geoffrey 157 Bertram, Christopher 114, 131, 207 n32, 209 n38 causality 9, 17, 92 reverse causality 149–50 change enacting 136–9, 148–50, 151–5, 156–7, 158–60, 186 freedom to see perfectibility revolutionary 87 social 5–7, 8, 18, 19, 23–4, 29, 31–5, 36, 37–8, 57–8, 81, 86–7, 88, 110–11, 127, 131, 143, 161, 175, 176, 178, 183–6, 190 subjective 41–4, 97–8, 99–103, 124–6, 134–6 citizenship 30, 33, 35, 119, 120–2, 133–43, 147, 153, 156, 164, 174 civil religion 120–2, 156 community 31–3, 44, 46–7, 56, 59–61, 65–8, 69–71, 75, 91–2, 94, 97, 101–3, 104, 119, 125–6 citizen and community 116–17, 133–9, 140–3, 147, 164, 167, 169, 173, 177 construction of 149–50, 152–4, 156, 160 democratic 183–7, 189–90 transparent 72, 111 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot 48–9 conformity 54 non- 116–18, 134, 140–3, 185, 188–9 Connolly, William 209 n1 consensus 58, 62, 120, 127, 129, 168

222

Index

constitutive outside 61, 130 constraint 139–41 contingency 17, 19, 21, 26, 28, 29, 34, 36 Critchley, Simon 201 n3 Critchley, Simon and Marchart, Oliver 3 death penalty 207 n35 debate 116–17, 129 decision 11, 29, 30, 50, 52–5, 90, 110, 112, 115, 131–2, 142–3, 144, 157–61, 176, 177–80, 184, 187 deconstruction 108, 120, 146, 181 Delaney, James 203 n29 De Man, Paul 27–9, 35, 181–4, 193 n3 democracy 1–8, 16, 46, 74, 77, 82, 88–9, 107, 108–9, 110, 112, 130, 133, 141, 145–6, 150, 157–8, 161–2, 163, 164, 166, 170, 171 ancient 35, 116, 186 direct/real 7, 151, 152, 163–8, 170–1, 183 liberal 1, 2, 107 radical 1, 2, 5, 11–12, 16, 82, 102–3, 110, 166, 182–3 representative 151–5, 174 to come 12, 179, 182–7 democratic ethos 82, 98–104, 143, 184–7 democratic subject see subject democratization 88, 123, 134, 146, 152, 169 Derrida, Jacques 12, 15, 19, 45, 79, 90, 177–80, 182–7 De Saussure, Ferdinand 196 n30 desire 45–7, 49, 51, 63–8 despotism 3, 33, 55, 87, 108, 117, 120, 159, 167, 175 Diderot, Denis 31, 110–13 difference 3, 6, 7, 11, 17, 23, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 38, 39, 45, 46, 47, 49, 60, 62, 64, 67, 68, 77, 78, 80, 81, 85, 100, 101, 115, 117, 137, 163 and the general will 125–33, 138 and identity 42–4, 58–9, 81–3, 88–9, 118–20, 153–4, 176

and pity 45–50, 92–5 politics of 107–9 disagreement 75, 89, 116, 124–32, 133, 165 discourse 30–1, 73–7, 79 dislocation 47, 50, 56, 63, 95, 142, 149, 150, 159 division 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 33, 39, 43, 45, 59, 81, 83, 88, 89, 96, 104, 150, 161, 187 as constitutive of social unity 73–9, 81, 88–9, 137–9 and democracy 163–6, 169–73 of labour 33, 68–71 of self 63–8, 89, 153–4 domination 61, 66, 73, 82–7, 118, 122, 127 duty 54, 98, 102, 121, 139, 173, 178, 185, 189 economy 64, 69 Emile 11, 44, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54, 56, 82, 90, 92, 93, 94, 98–104, 119, 140 Engels, Friedrich 87 enjoyment see jouissance equality 1, 4, 8, 11, 16, 20, 25, 28, 29, 31, 34, 40, 46, 68, 69, 73, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 92–4, 98–104 107, 109, 118, 122, 123, 131, 134, 135, 136–9, 141, 143, 149, 157, 167–8, 184, 188 Essay on the Origin of Languages 16, 28, 34–5, 45, 46, 47, 51, 60 essence 7, 11, 24, 36, 38, 41, 46, 51, 57, 108, 110, 112, 114, 122, 130, 132, 144, 146, 163, 183 ethics 11, 21, 28, 46, 52–4, 82, 88–104 excess 25, 51, 70, 71, 93, 172, 180, 186 fantasy 22, 83–9, 92, 156 finitude 52, 99 foundation 10, 15–26, 31, 36, 79, 82, 99, 108, 131, 132, 133, 144, 145, 149, 158, 163, 166, 174, 180, 182 foundationalism 19

Index freedom 1–2, 8, 17, 34, 36, 37, 50–6, 57, 73, 76–7, 78, 81–2, 83, 84, 86, 87–92, 98, 99, 103, 107, 109, 129, 130, 133–43, 146–9, 160–1, 174, 175, 186, 190 civic 91, 126, 140–1, 177 democratic 166, 183–4 moral 90, 167, 189 natural 124, 126, 140 Froese, Katrin 23, 30, 32–3, 43, 45, 64, 66–7, 89, 92, 209 n30 Gasché, Rodolphe 108, 122 gaze 44, 63–6, 70–1 general will 1, 2, 3, 11, 12, 24, 31, 47, 62, 72, 77, 81, 107, 108, 109–20, 121, 123, 126–33, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 154, 157, 158, 159, 161, 164, 167, 169, 170, 171, 174, 175–6, 177, 178, 179, 184, 185, 189 Geneva Manuscript 22, 23, 25, 29, 32, 35, 40, 59, 60, 110–14, 124, 126, 128, 131, 132, 138, 143, 147, 148, 154, 156, 180 Genevan circles 116–17, 141 Glynos, Jason 200 n19 Glynos, Jason and Howarth, David 32, 135, 156, 202 n8 golden age (the) 58–61, 79 government 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 24, 25, 35, 61, 78, 85, 87, 128, 130, 151, 164, 165, 166, 169–77, 180, 181, 183 Gramsci, Antonio 127 Grotius, Hugo 55 ground the absent 6, 7, 15–16, 16–19, 20–1, 22–6, 31, 36, 58, 145–6, 156–61, 162 see also foundations hegemonic agent 127, 148–9 hegemony 3, 12, 109, 126–32, 133, 168–9 Herzog, Dagmar 19 heterogeneity 152, 155, 168

223

heteronomy see autonomy history 10, 20, 23, 27–8, 40, 50–2, 56, 58, 68, 74–6, 78–9, 82, 86, 93 Hobbes, Thomas 89–93, 125–6 Honig, Bonnie 58, 145, 146, 157, 158 hope 5, 35, 37, 51, 122, 149, 183, 185, 186 horizon 7, 11, 22, 42, 97, 104, 134, 143, 159, 166–8, 186 humanity 1, 6, 22, 35, 37, 39–47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 78, 92–8, 99, 100, 101, 110, 111, 113, 143, 151, 186 identity/identification 5–7, 18, 25–7, 37–8, 39, 40, 41–50, 52, 55, 56, 57–8, 60–8, 71, 75, 77, 79, 104, 109, 118–20, 134–6, 138, 139, 141, 142–4, 152–5, 157, 161–2, 183, 187, 189 ideology 58, 73–9 imagination 37, 41, 45, 51–2, 70–1, 74–7, 93–4, 97–8, 103, 177, 185–6, 188 incompleteness of democracy 5, 98, 166, 183, 186 of identity 66, 183 of the social contract 134, 140–3, 189 of society 18, 63, 75, 81, 82, 102, 104, 138, 163, 176 of the subject 6, 41, 63, 64, 83, 104, 136 of the universal 122, 164 independence 17, 34, 44, 47, 59, 68, 83–4, 90–1, 94, 119, 125, 136, 140, 165, 167, 188 indeterminacy, fundamental 37–8, 50–6, 57, 110, 125, 156, 186–7, 190 individual 41–4, 62–3, 133–43, 152–3, 155, 168, 188 inequality 68–71, 98–104 see also equality Ingram, James 77, 176 institution 9, 12, 21–6, 71–9, 86, 88, 89, 92, 123, 141, 145, 150, 155, 169, 170, 171, 176, 177, 180, 181, 182, 184

224

Index

Jorgensen, Marianne and Phillips, Louise 18 jouissance 84, 73, 84–5, 100 justice 4, 11, 20–1, 23, 53, 82, 92, 93–8, 102, 104, 131, 136, 158, 163, 172, 177–81, 185 Keenan, Alan 145, 148, 175, 209 n1 Lacan, Jacques 41–2, 49–50, 65, 202 n6 Laclau, Ernesto 6, 7, 11, 19, 31–2, 34, 36, 38, 40, 43, 47, 50, 63, 79, 86, 87, 95, 107–9, 118, 120–1, 122–3, 126–7, 142–3, 146–9, 152, 155, 159 see also Laclau and Mouffe Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal 1, 2, 3–7, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 18, 25–6, 30–1, 36, 40 61–3, 82, 126–7, 133–4, 168–9, 182–3 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 93, 195 n23 language 10, 17, 23, 25–35, 41, 47–50, 60, 67, 108, 111–16, 141, 151, 155, 181 law 4, 55, 85, 88, 89, 91–3, 122, 123, 124, 130–2, 134–6, 140, 141, 145–50, 155–7, 160–1, 165, 168–73, 177–80, 181–2 natural 19–24, 36 Lefort, Claude 4–5, 9, 19, 31, 73–7, 82, 88, 89, 141, 155, 161, 165, 174–6 legislator 12, 35, 143, 144–6, 148, 150–5, 157–62, 177, 179 legitimacy 28–9, 87, 89, 109, 111, 131, 132, 143, 165, 173 of the contract 72, 123, 142 of the people 145, 157–62, 163 of the state 36, 126, 131, 134, 157, 174, 179 Letter to d’Alembert 34, 90, 95–8, 104, 116–17 Levine, Andrew 126 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 32 love 44, 64–5, 92, 104 Machiavelli, Niccolò 117–18 Malebranche, Nicolas 110, 112 man moral 49–56, 89–92

in nascent society 58–62, 64–72, 147 the naming of 27–9, 32, 34, 49 natural 17–18, 22–3, 37–8, 42–6, 50, 98, 119 perfectible 50–6, 63 the study of 38–42, 75 Marx, Karl 1, 2, 27, 75 Mason, John 128 mastery, self- 52, 54–5, 82–9, 91–2, 100 metaphor 32, 35, 39, 92, 103, 108, 116, 117, 159 the blindness of 28–9 metaphysics, Western 15–16, 79 Miller, James 7, 166, 167 morality 17, 23, 49–50, 52–6, 59, 67–8, 89–92, 93, 110, 114, 121–2 Mouffe, Chantal 1, 58, 62, 73, 86, 88–9, 90, 168, 176 see also Laclau and Mouffe myth 42, 49, 158, 159 naming 27–9, 31–6, 49, 127–8 Näsström, Sofia 211 n29 natural goodness 17, 90–2 natural law see law natural sociability, the lack of 10, 17, 37, 40, 49, 57, 81, 122, 135, 153 nature the negativity of 26, 36, 98, 108 the second state of nature 58, 85–6, 103, 108, 120, 134 the state of 16–26, 33, 36, 38–9 41–2, 43, 49, 50–2, 53, 56, 58, 59, 66–7, 71, 74, 86, 90–2, 93, 96, 98, 160, 188 Norval, Aletta 1, 5, 9, 126, 149–50, 183, 184 O’ Hagan, Timothy 44 On Political Economy 118–19 oppression 55, 58, 76–7, 82–9, 100–3, 134, 136, 140, 168–9 On the Government of Poland 55, 87–8, 95, 111, 186 order moral 54, 90–1, 97 natural 21, 94 political 153, 177, 178

Index social 32, 75, 154 totalitarian 20, 55, 73, 76, 85 origin 5, 10, 15–19, 25, 27 the origin of language 47–50 otherness 37, 38, 43, 44, 46, 47, 57, 58, 63, 66, 68, 74, 75, 88, 89, 153, 154, 184, 186 particular, the 11, 107–14, 117–18, 120, 122–3, 137, 139, 147–9, 164, 169, 172, 174 particular will 31, 81, 109–14, 118–20, 128–33, 138–9, 148–9, 154, 164 people 4, 7, 8, 12, 17, 20, 21, 31–2, 34–5, 76, 87–8, 108, 181, 186, 189 the absent presence of 144–6, 151, 154, 161–2, 181, 185 the formation of 146–53, 155 the legitimacy of see legitimacy sovereign people 125–32, 157–61, 163–6, 169–79 perfectibility 10, 12, 37–8, 39, 40, 50–6, 57, 58–9, 63, 78–9, 90, 98, 102, 125, 134, 142, 154, 179, 184, 185–6 pessimism 27, 57 pity 11, 22–3, 45–7, 82, 88–9, 90–104 pluralism 168–9 plurality see society political, the 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 25–6, 58, 59, 60, 62–3, 73, 75–7, 78–9, 86, 90, 102, 125, 141–3, 145–6, 155–6, 161, 163, 167–8, 169, 173, 176, 177, 186, 188 politics 15–16, 19, 27, 29, 31, 36, 47, 57–8, 61–3, 73, 77, 79, 115, 128–9, 156, 164, 167 contestatory 107, 132, 145, 173 democratic 4, 6, 82, 89, 161–2, 164, 166, 175 of difference 107–8, 120 hegemonic 126 totalitarian 165, 175 politics and the political the distinction of 175–6 post-foundationalism 19–21, 145 Postigliola, Alberto 205 n12 post-structuralism 15, 135

225

post-structuralist political theory 1, 8–10, 15 potentiality, human 52, 56, 65–8, 70, 90, 124–5, 185–7, 189 see also perfectibility power 4–8, 72, 76–7, 84–9, 91, 108, 125–6, 127, 135, 137, 141, 143, 159 161, 165–6, 170–6, 179–80, 186 empty space of 4, 11, 122, 130, 141, 173, 174–5 hereditary 78–9 public assemblies 130, 173–5, 177–8 public opinion 34–5 presence 15, 20, 36, 37, 38–9, 44, 46, 48, 51, 59, 61, 67, 93, 102, 108, 144, 152, 158, 174, 185, 186 profit 69 progress 51, 56, 90, 181 promise 88, 92, 125, 131, 140, 141, 150, 156–7, 162, 181–7, 189, 190 property 32–4, 55, 68–71, 72, 73, 136–7 Pufendorf, Samuel 55 reactivation 26, 58, 161 redescription 34 representation 30–1, 40, 41, 50, 57, 74–8, 108 political 94, 102, 114, 125, 129–30, 144, 150–2, 154–5, 159, 165, 171, 176, 190 responsibility 28, 29, 33, 36, 44, 52–5, 73, 78–9, 87, 89–92, 96–8, 102–3, 110, 132, 133, 136, 140–3, 151, 153, 166, 173, 177, 182, 185, 189 responsiveness 97–8 rhetoric 10, 74, 77, 80, 81, 101 rights 1, 7, 29, 31, 55, 70–1, 72, 73, 76, 91, 100, 107–8, 120, 126, 136–9, 150, 168, 170, 172 Riley, Patrick 110, 112, 114, 205 n11 rivalry 44, 64, 75, 88, 119 Schmitt, Carl 199 n6, 212 n20 Schwartz, Joel 109, 166–8 Scott, John 178, 195 n23

226

Index

sedimentation 25–6 self-love 22–3, 44, 93–4, 98, 99 self, the 20, 39, 43–7, 50, 56, 65–8, 75, 93, 104, 112, 154 Shklar, Judith 153, 154, 178 signifier, empty 32, 35, 127, 136 Simpson, Matthew 207 n3, 211 n20 Skinner, Quentin 55 socialization 23, 26, 44 society absent fullness of 16–19, 20–1, 22–4, 31, 36, 49, 78–9, 88–9, 100–3, 104, 136, 141–3, 152, 156, 159, 160, 178, 186 anti-totalitarian 107–9 democratic 163, 164–6, 167–8, 174–5, 185–7, 188, 190 a discursive construct 27, 28–31, 35, 71 formation of 74–7, 124–6, 129, 176 the general society of humankind 110–15, 127, 156 openness of 18, 37–8, 56, 58, 81–2, 91–2 the plurality of 107–8, 115–18, 119–20, 121–2, 123, 127 solidarity 2, 88, 94, 148 sovereignty 2, 4, 7–8, 68, 121–2, 127–32, 134, 137–40, 156–62 164, 168, 169–75, 178–81 specious contract 62, 71–4, 76, 78, 86, 125 Starobinski, Jean 29, 38, 43, 44, 65, 87 Strauss, Leo 20, 23 Stravakakis, Yannis 41, 73 Strong, Tracy 41, 42, 80, 138 structure 4, 5, 15, 32, 108, 135–6, 141–2, 181–2 subject, the 5–6, 38, 39, 40–4, 50, 55, 62–5, 70, 94, 121, 139, 150, 168, 170, 176 democratic 133–43, 186 surplus 69–71 teleology the absence of 37, 53, 84, 154

text 8–9 theatre 34, 95–7 tolerance 107, 120–2 totalitarianism 20, 29, 36, 73–7, 109, 139, 141, 158, 175, 181 transgression, self 68, 83, 91 transparency 3, 7, 15, 38 tyranny 8, 20, 87, 123, 166, 179 unanimity 120, 129 undecidability 18, 29, 54, 65–6, 90, 120, 132–3, 142–3, 145–6, 158–61, 163, 171–2, 177–80, 183, 184, 186 unity imaginary unity of self 40, 44–5, 47, 62–3, 70–1, 82–4, 96–7 natural unity 52 social unity 3, 4–5, 6, 17, 27, 59–61, 73–7, 79, 87–9, 99, 107, 115–22, 124–32 133–4, 138–9, 140–3, 146–9, 150–3, 155, 159, 163, 171–4, 176–7, 185, 187 universal, the 6, 7, 11, 19–21, 31, 36, 89–90, 93, 100, 104, 107–15, 118, 119, 122–3 126, 127–32, 136–8, 148–9, 164, 165, 169–72, 180, 181 utopia 71–3, 167 Vargas, Yves 7 Vaughan, Charles 20 voice 111–16 wholeness the impossibility of 6, 41–2, 62–3, 65, 66, 70–1, 75, 77–9, 83–5, 88–9, 92, 96–8, 101, 124, 147, 153, 158, 161 Williams, David 20 Wokler, Robert 27, 34 women and the contract 206 n28 Žižek, Slavoj 34, 38, 40, 50, 62–3, 67, 86, 88–9, 104, 165–6, 174, 177

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