Lessons on Rousseau by Louis Althusser;

Author:Louis Althusser;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)

Second remark: these circles – when things turn around themselves by themselves, reproduction that cannot leave itself – which coincide with the intervention of external causes are all, with one exception, results of a process, a genesis. All these circles – the circle of the state of peace, if you will, the youth of the world, the circle of the state of war – are the results of a previous process. But the circle of the state of pure nature, for its part, is not. It is a circle that has no past, that has no genesis, that is the result of nothing, that is its own positing in reproduction, in repetition, that is outside all history. Yet it is that setting out from which a genesis, albeit impossible, will become possible. This genesis, however, will be a discontinuous genesis, and this genesis will be a genesis whose cause is not contained in the state of pure nature. More exactly, it will be a genesis of which the state of pure nature, that is, the state of origin, is not the beginning. In other words, things begin [ça commence] after the origin.

What is perhaps still more striking, however, is not just that the state of nature is dismembered, but also that which advenes between the state of war and the civil state, between (3) and (4) – that which advenes at the moment of the contract. You will recall what we said about the civil contract in Hobbes and Locke: the matter is obviously very complicated, but we can nevertheless affirm that, in both of them, the contract, albeit a form that intervenes in order to reorganize a preceding state, is a form that stands in a continuity of essence with the preceding state. The contract intervenes in order to redistribute, to limit, natural law; but it is natural law which limits itself and redistributes itself. It might seem that this is the case in Rousseau too. Not at all. Beneath the seeming identity, we in fact discover a profound difference.

In what does this difference consist? In the fact that the effect of the contract in Rousseau is neither to limit natural law nor to redistribute forces deriving from natural law; the effect that the contract has in Rousseau is the constitution, a constitution, of a radically new reality. In Rousseau, the contract is constituent [constituant]. This is what Rousseau expresses by saying that it is necessary to ‘denature man’, an astonishing expression. Let me remind you that we are at the end of the process of denaturation, the process of denaturation that begins with (2) and ends at the end of (3). Thus we are at the moment of the social contract, the end of the process of denaturation, of the loss of original nature. And the contract must consist in denaturing man. ‘Good social institutions’, Rousseau says in Emile, ‘are those best fitted to make a man unnatural [dénaturer l’homme], to deprive him of his absolute existence and

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