SIGNATURE PIECES by PEGGY KAMUF

Author:PEGGY KAMUF
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Promise of “le Français”

The Dialogues would seem to remain suspended before this limit, before the featureless and unrecognizable dépositaire. Within the text, he—or it—is called “le Français,” at once Everyman and No Man, a mere surface that has taken the imprint of general opinion regarding J. J. “Le Français” is the pivoting term of the reconfiguration of J. J.’s image, the eventual dépositaire who will give face and voice to an absence no longer able to speak or appear. He—or it—is the place of the promise to keep safe J. J.’s deposit, to share with the interlocutor “Rousseau” the risks of guarding J. J.’s unpublished writings. The partage of their dialogue thus concludes with the agreement to partager, to share the deposit, but it is “le Français” who explicitly engages himself to keep the depositor’s promise, who performs the speech act called a promise: “I offer to share with you the risks of this deposit and I promise to spare no trouble to bring it one day before the eyes of the public just as I received it” (“je m’offre à partager avec vous les risques de ce dépôt, et je m’engage à n’épargner aucun soin pour qu’il paraisse un jour aux yeux du public tel que je l’aurai reçu”) (1:975). Such a promise has every appearance of being a wishful fiction, offered as it is by no one really. But this is not necessarily to say that nothing happens when Rousseau makes his deposit with “le Français.” Perhaps, on the contrary, the delusion is to imagine that a “real” dépositaire could rescue the charge of truth from the corrosive disfigurement of fiction. While that may well have been a delusion Rousseau shared, the text of the Dialogues nevertheless consigns itself to le français—not a man but a language. This is the fourth, irreducible position of articulation whose necessity, as we remarked at the outset, exceeds the circle of Rousseau’s self-judgment, or of any judgment. In several senses of the phrase, le Français is a figure of speech; specifically, he—or it—is a prosopopeia, an animation of the language to which and in which the Dialogues have been deposited. It is this figure of animated language that promises, in turn, to give “voice” to the author beyond his grave. He promises, that is, to continue signing “J. J. Rousseau.”

Le français is Rousseau’s only—and only possible—dépositaire. Although it gives no one and nothing to see, it goes on promising “to show a man in the full truth of nature,” it continues to repeat “le voilà.” And we, of course, are still trying to see through that false promise of a signature.

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