the end of the nineteenth century: November 8, 1998

The nineteenth century ended on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Following this supposed death blow to the state’s central management of the economy, the intellectual fashion of the nineties was to pretend that the long nineteenth century – 200 years long! – was a huge mistake. The French Revolution was immediately followed by the Gulag, Freud was a crackpot, and Rational Choice would reign as queen of the human sciences forever and forever. Thus, there was a move back to the 18th century, before the French Revolution, when, under the newly mythified ancien regime, something called the public sphere happened. Instead of dwelling on enclosures and factories, prisons and madhouses, the new fashion was to dwell on coffeehouses and newspapers. Sociability was the new phrase. The birth of sociability. Not, never, solidarity, because solidarity implies action of the masses, which leads to the French Revolution and the Gulag, of course.

LI gests. We joke. We have a little joke. Did you enjoy our little joke? But in fact this sketch is not all joking, all fun and games.

And so we come to Todorov’s Living Alone Together. This essay, published in translation in New Literary History, 1996, is not a bad intellectual history – a history, that is, of a theme transposed, consciously or unconsciously, among great thinkers. In this case, the great thinkers are Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Hegel. One can think of this essay as spadework around Hegel’s idea of recognition – what the slave demands from the master, what the master refuses the slave. Rousseau, in Todorov’s version, begins the thread with a new sense of man as a creature born with a lack that distinguishes him from all the beasts. In this story that is played over and over, all the beasts form an extensive but blurred crowd, from parrots to monkeys. Their particular habits are not pulled out – we don’t hear that the spider is distinguished from all the beasts by her thread. The only animal that is pulled out and made the equal of the beasts is, of course, man. And this moment is not questioned, of course – the equal weight accorded to man and the beast – even if the place of the weighing, nature, doesn’t support our one-to-one. If there is a founding myth of the human sciences, it is here – man vs. the beasts. Not some beasts, not man as a beast vs. some other beasts, but the equivalence so silently and sufficiently summoned up: man on one side, the beasts on the other. Man as culture on one side, nature on the other.

It has been a long, long time since Aristotle said that the contemplation of man was the contemplation of an essentially minor and ignoble figure against the more noble contemplation of the Gods the fabric of the world.

Todorov, working within the assumptions that make that versus plausible, writes that Rousseau understood, as the Greeks didn’t, and as the early pre-moderns didn’t, that man was born with a lack. Sociability, a postive extension of man in the early enlightenment, appeared, to Rousseau, rather as the response filling this lack. As Todorov says – telling the beads of French lit – Rousseau departs from the moralist tradition in distinguishing amour de soi from amour propre, whereas for a moraliste like La Rouchefocauld they are the same thing. Rather, the former is care for our survival; the latter is concern for what others think of us, or vanity. Out of this dualism, Rousseau, according to Todorov, finds a middle ground – a synthesis:

“Rousseau's merit consists precisely in having envisaged this other type of social relationship and having sighted its effects on human identity, even if the term which he uses to designate it is not comparable in generality to either amour de soi or amour-propre. This third sentiment, halfway between the two others is the "idea of consideration" ( OC, III, 169). From the moment men live in society (for Rousseau this means, in relation to historical time, always), they feel the need to attract the gaze of others. The eye is the specifically human organ: "Each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself" (OC, III, 169). The other no longer occupies a place comparable to mine, but a contiguous and complementary place; he is needed for my complete ness. The effects of this need resemble those of vanity: one wants to be looked at, one seeks public esteem, one tries to interest others in his fate. The difference is that we are dealing here with a constitutive need of the species, such as we know it, and not with a vice. Rousseau's innovation is not that he sees that men can be moved by the desire for fame or prestige - all the moralists know that - but to make of this desire the sole threshold setting humanity apart. The need to be looked at, the need for consideration, these human faculties Rousseau discovered have an extension perceptibly greater than our aspiration for honor.
Sociability is neither an accident nor a contingency: it is the definition of the human condition.”

What about solitude? Well, Todorov grants that solitude plays a role in Rousseau’s personal writings. But this role is exceptional – it is under that exception that Rousseau, as it were, exists outside of the society of his time.

From this interpretation of Rousseau, Todorov moves forward to Adam Smith, and the Theory of the Moral Sentiments. Todorov supposes that the need for consideration is assimilated, in Smith, to his notion of the basic motives that move mankind:

“The need to be gazed upon is not one human motivation among others; it is the truth of the other needs. The same with material riches: they are not a goal in themselves, but a means of assuring us of the other's consideration. "Nay, it is chiefly from this regard to the senti ments of mankind, that we pursue riches and avoid poverty" (TMS 50). The rich man is happy because he has succeeded in attracting society's attention. The same with pleasure as well: the most intense are those that we receive from a certain gaze we get from others. "Nature, when she formed man for society . . . taught him to feel pleasure in their favorable, and pain in their unfavorable regard" (TMS 116). The other pleasures are negligible, next to those: "It is not ease or pleasure, but always honour, of one kind or another, though frequently an honour ill understood, that the ambitious man really pursues" (TMS 116). It follows, as Jean-Pierre Dupuy notes in his commentary on Smith, that "the Smith subject is radically incomplete," because he cannot do without the gaze of others "he desperately needs his fellow men in order to create his identity" (Le sacrifice et l envie, 86). Smith is indeed, in this sense, a disciple of Rousseau.” A need evolves a function – and so it proves with Smith. It turns out that humans are sometimes outside of the gaze of others. But happily, that gaze has been internalized. It is the conscience. It is the impartial spectator.

The place of the third figure, Hegel, is, in a sense, lightly etched in this history already. What is needed, here, is to show that the gaze and its effects are not matters of coincidence, but matters of struggle. And this leads us to recognition – that good held – mysteriously – by the master and demanded by the slave.

I will return to this in another post.

Fund drive post

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And tonight is a Happy Mondays song:

You used to speak the truth but now you’re clever

Rousseau and Mrs. Bennet

“But I can assure you,: she added, ‘that Lizzy does not lose much by not suiting his fancy; for he is a most disagreeable, horrid man, and not at all worth pleasing.”
- Mrs. Bennet, commenting on Darcy’s behavior at the ball at which he and Elizabeth Bennett met in Pride and Prejudice.

According to a German sociologist, Harald Uhlendorff, Einsamkeit – which we can translate as solitude, or loneliness (although Alleinsein might work better for the latter) had a mostly positive use in the fifties. In the sixties, however, it began to accrue negative meanings, and is now, Uhlendorff claimed, seldom used except to denote something sad, some condition from which one would want to get away. (Wege zum Selbst, 226-227) My notes on solitude seem to entirely ignore this, besides going against the notion that the self is a social construct.

Unless I have to, I don’t like lifting a word from the mainstream of ordinary life and endowing it with special meanings. In the case of solitude, however, I think my notion of the state is well rooted in a tradition. I have not, unfortunately, read Barthes lectures on “how to live together” – I’ve only read Diana Knight’s essay on it – but from Knight, I think that Barthes, too, was after some sense of solitude that reconnected it to a tradition – for instance, that of renunciation. Myself, I’d mark a break between the Christian notion of the hermit, the person who suspends the human appetites, and Rousseau’s vision of solitude. Of course, in the first of his reveries as a solitary walker, he tells us that the solitude he seeks is reactive – it is in reaction to his disappointment with all of human society. Yet he soon develops another track, a more fruitful one, I think, of solitude as being not so much in reaction to human society as in reaction to the imperative to be of use. Solitude is the mode in which he daydreams; these daydreams are of no use to anybody. It is here, I think, that we start to meet with a form of existence that has more than a reactive force. Against Rousseau’s own cautions, I do not take the Reveries as the expression of an exception – rather, I take them as founding the possibility of a useless existence. A moment, that is, of pure uselessness – much like the oak tree in the Daoist tale I’ve referred to more than once, here.

Solitude not as communion with God, or the giving up of the appetites, and thus a form of socially instituted continuity, but as daydream, wandering and uselessness, existing below any social institution, never determined by any regime of the division of labor – this, I want to say, somewhat paradoxically, is an essential element of republican equality. This solitude, I’m going to maintain, is what is taken from women – the first and greatest theft of the patriarchy. Solitude is exactly what Rousseau does not want to restore to women.

Now, I want to be clear that sexism here isn’t something Rousseau invents. It does take a new form, a new arbitrariness, after Rousseau. Marie D’agoult is quite right to reproach Rousseau for wanting to raise women to be vain; however, Rousseau is merely assimilating a dominant theme in the prevailing old order – that of the woman as companion. This was taken from ordinary speech. My quote from Pride and Prejudice is not to show how Rousseau influenced Mrs. Bennett, but to show how the Mrs. And Mr. Bennett’s of the world influenced Rousseau. Indeed, I could walk up the street to the grocery store and find Mrs. Bennett’s assumptions staring me in the face from twenty magazines.

I’m going to write about Todorov’s essay, Living Together Alone, in the next post.

Fund drive

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And for today’s music, Spiritual Front!


But I need (a need) a slave
Who will stab me and a faithful dog
That will devour my body

Notes on solitude

Solitude is feared by all wardens – whether they watch over a prison, a church, a factory, an office, or a school. Solitary, that American torture, is the jailkeeper’s mockery of solitude, stripping the self of its senses and making the self bear, weightily, upon the self – a weight that soon enough becomes a torture. Solitary is not, of course, merely a thing of prison basements, but is out there in the fields of everyday life, a scarecrow to enforce subservience in the general population. Schools socialize children, but you will never be taught solitude there.

It may seem tendentious to contrast solitude to individuality, but these are very distinct social modes, and it is the underplaying of solitude that has allowed individuality to dominate the discursive field of the self. Solitude is existential and original, individuality is derivative and legal. Solitude is the release from self interest, individuality is its tightened grip. Solitude tends towards sovereignty or abjection, individuality tends towards the normal.

In Rousseau’s thought (and Rousseau was the poet of solitude), equality, which is tacitly posited against the old order, collapses without solitude. This is not to say that a republican society must purge individuality; but it must never confuse it with solitude. This is the real work of culture. From this, Rousseau thought, sprang real happiness.

This is why Rousseau’s denial of the capacity for solitude to women, a conclusion based on a shady rhetorical move, is at the heart of Rousseau’s sexism. Without solitude, women must always, in the end, be essentially companions – and companions to men. The denial of solitude is the denial of the basis of community.

Notes, these, as aids to reflection.

It's a man's man's man's world - but it wouldn't be nothing...

This is a man's world...

Susan Okin’s 1979 essay on Rousseau, Rousseau’s Natural Woman, remains a feminist landmark in the literature on Rousseau. Okin carefully goes through the Second Discourse to disentangle what Rousseau meant by natural and how human nature within nature – a human nature unencumbered by society – is to be imagined. She notes that Rousseau does not imagine that the nuclear family existed at the beginning. Rather, men and women existed, so to speak, side by side, and if their sexual congress resulted in a pregnancy, this did not particularly concern the man, nor did it particularly concern the woman to make any claim on the father. In this section, in a long footnote on Locke, Rousseau attacks the British version of the state of nature:

“At this point in the Discourse, there is a long footnote in which Rousseau attacks Locke for his argument that the nuclear family existed even in the state of nature.5 Whereas Locke had claimed that the helplessness of human offspring meant that the race could not survive without the institution of monogamy, Rousseau argues that this is a prime example of the failure of phi- losophers to get beyond social and moral developments and back to the true state of nature. The human female, he asserts, is quite capable of rearing her child unaided, and since no man knew which child was his, what possible reason could there be at this stage for any man to participate in the rearing of any woman's child? Though Locke may want to justify the family as an institution, he cannot show it to be necessary, or even comprehensible, in the natural order of things. As Rousseau says (and it is important to note the form of this argument because of what he himself does subsequently):

Although it may be advantageous to the human species for the union between man and woman to be permanent, it does not follow that it was thus established by nature; otherwise it would be necessary to say that nature also in- stituted civil society, the arts, commerce, and all that is claimed to be useful to men. [Okin, 1979: 397]

As Okin notices, Rousseau’s conception of human nature accords to women, in this Ur-scene at the beginning of the world, a full independence in relation to men. Which is why the next move he makes is so logically puzzling:

“The transition, in the Second Discourse, from the original state of nature, in which the sexes were equal and independent, to the patriarchal family, is very sudden, and of critical importance for the subject of this paper. In a single paragraph, and virtually without explanation, Rousseau postulates a "first revolution," in which, to- gether with simple tools and the first huts, which together constitute "a sort of property," appears the very first cohabitation in the form of the monogamous nuclear family. Suddenly, and without justification, since up to this time women have been supposed capable of fending for themselves and their offspring alone, Rousseau intro- duces a complete division of labor between the sexes. Previously the way of life of the two sexes has been identical. Now, he says, "Women became more sedentary and grew accustomed to tend the hut and the children, while the man went to seek their common subsistence."10 With no explanation, then, we have the division of labor between men as breadwinners and women as housewives. This division of labor, moreover, means that the entire female half of the human race is no longer self-sufficient. Since it was this very self-suffici- ency which had been the guarantee of the freedom and equality that characterized the original state of nature, one might expect some commentary on this suddenly introduced inequality, but one will not find it. Rousseau describes these original families as united only by the bonds of "reciprocal affection and freedom," but it is also made very clear that, since the male is assigned the only work which Rousseau considers to be productive of property, the family's goods belong to him alone.”

Okin presses here upon a “rhetorical syllogism”, as Aristotle would call it, that reappears in Emile. The two works were composed in the 1755-1760 period, which also included the writing of Julie. The pattern is the same: we have, on the one hand, a primary equality, and on the other hand, a defense of dependence. Let me get ahead of my texts, here, and say that what is at issue here is solitude. Can a woman be solitary? In the creation story as Rousseau has inherited it, women are simply dependent by way of a divine fiat. The enlightenment gesture one would expect would be clearing away the theological impression – which Rousseau, following Locke, does. But Rousseau does not want to import England into the primal scene: rather, the New World. In so doing, Rousseau creates an insurmountable logical problem for himself – from the New World, we only get to the patriarchal world by an illegitimate violence – illegitimate in that it does not reflect or extend our nature. This is a truth too far for Rousseau, which is why he revisits the creation scene, this time using the language not of Locke, but of the Bible. And yet still, the dice give him snake eyes – one and one.

I’ll end here with this passage from Emile:

In everything that concerns sex [sexe – sexual parts, sexuality], women and men have throughout relations and differences: the difficulty of comparing them comes from that of determing in the constitution of one and the other what is a matter of sex and what isn’t. By comparative anatomy, and even by one’s particular inspection, one finds between them general differences that don’t seem to concern sex. But they do, although by ties that are outside of our capacity to perceive: we only know where the ties are extended [LI NOTE: I’d bet Charles Darwin knew this passage, since it so exactly reflects what he says about sexual selection in the Descent of Man] the only thing that we know with certainty is that all they have in common is the species, and all that they have that is different concerns the sex. Under this double point of view, we find between them so many relations and so many oppositions that it is perhaps one of the miracles of nature to have made two beings that are so alike in constituting them so differently.

These relations and these differences ought to have some empire on morals: this consequence is sensible, conformable to experience, and shows the vanity of disputes on the preference or equality of the sexes: as if each of the two, going towards their natural ends according to their particular destination [LI NOTE: I have italicized this phrase, which we shouldn’t let slip past – this is, of course, the logic of the proper place, which we have seen in Aristotle – the power of place is just in being the proper destination of the thing of which it is the place], were only the more perfect in this, that they resembled each other the more! In what they have in common they are equal; in what they have that is different, they are not comparable. A perfect woman and a perfect man ought to resemble each other in intellect no more than they do in face, and perfection is not susceptible of more and less.

In the union of the sexes, each concurs equally in the common object, but not in the same manner. From this diversity is born the first difference assignable between the morals of one and the other. One must be active and strong, the other passive and weak: it is necessary that one will want and can do, and it is sufficient that the other resists little.

This principle established, it follows that woman is especially made to please man. If man must please in his turn, it is by a necessity less direct: his merit is in his power: he pleases by this alone, that he is strong. This, I agree, is not the law of love: but it is that of nature, anterior to love itself. “ [My translation]

LI will treat this in another post.

Time for the bi-annual fund drive

Well, let's see, my last fund drive was, I think, back in January. I aim, this summer month, to raise the dough for Limited Inc and News from the Zona. We'll see. So I'm going to put up these donate to LI reminders.

Armes Deutschland,
kannst du deine Kinder sehen,
Wie sie vor dem Abgrund Schlange stehen.
Cheers
R.

names and places

Historians say that the period of the 1760s, in France, marked a resurgence of censorship. The strict controls instituted by Louis XIV had collapsed under the regency – the time period in which Montesquieu and Voltaire both started publishing. But as Louis XV’s regime ended amidst the squalor of a court in which major decisions on personnel and policy depended on who could get the Well Beloved’s dick to rise, popular discontent rose too. The solution, as always, was to find scapegoats. Rousseau, when he was still living in France, was more than a little alarmed by the Calas affair, in which the old system of targeting the Protestants was brought into play to burn another of them on trumped up charges.

However, even given the reactionary forces at work in the 1760s, Emile was targeted by extraordinary persecution. It caught Rousseau off guard, as he had been assured by the enthusiasm of his protector, le Marechal and Marechale Luxembourg, and the royal censore, Malesherbes, that Emile’s publication would pose no problem. When it did, the Luxembourg’s spared no time in telling Rousseau to fly – they were not going to expend any social credit in defending the son of a poor Genevan watchmaker. In the last thirty reactionary years, since the eighties, under the watchful eye of Furet, historians have tended to emphasize the awfulness of the terror and the ‘civilization’ of the ancien regime. One has to remember that in the historian’s book, the beheading of a queen counts for much, the decimation of a regiment counts for nothing. And thus, that patchwork of dynastic wars and famines that constituted Louis XV’s policy melts into the hazy background, while in the foreground we concentrate on the plump rumps of Boucher’s pinups. But this picture is, of course, utter bullshit.

In actuality, the ancien regimes never stop coming on line, and their awful decline is structurally constant, whether it is Marcos’ Philippines or Louis XV’s France. They all generate a structure of covert culture. On the one hand, there is the official culture and its fierce protection by the police, and on the other hand, what is allowed in the private space created by the elite. The parlement’s judges could well have the hangman burn the same books that were treasured in the judges’ library. It is this double system that Rousseau set out, in his literary practice, to slay. And it is for this reason that the same system that could give a pass to the materialist atheism of Helvetius (as long as the volumes were anonymous and printed in Holland), could find so much to burn in Emile, for all its piety.

Since Paul de Man made the second preface to Julie the subject of one of his essays in the Allegories of Reading, it has become a much commented upon text. But there seems to be a gap between de Man’s reading of it within the system of Julie itself, as a text, and the system of texts in which Rousseau’s signature was consciously set in defiance against the erasures of the censure. Derrida, in On Grammatology, extensively analyses an episosde in Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques in which Levi-Strauss recounts how he was able to obtain the ‘real’ proper names of the Nambiwara. The people kept their real names a family secret, for their real names had power. Levi-Strauss tells of how he was able to obtain those names, nevertheless, from some ‘little girls’ in the tribe, who he manipulated, very simply, into making a game of name telling. In a passage that is still thrilling, to me, Derrida uses this story as a scene in which the alliance between logocentrism and power exposes itself:
Before we approach this, lets remark that this prohibition is necessarily derived from the gaze of the erasure constitutive of the proper name in what we have called archi-writing, that is to say in the play of difference. It is because the proper names are already no longer proper names, because their production is their obliteration, because the erasure and the imposition of the letter are originary, because they do not supervene on a proper inscription; it is because the proper name has never been, as a unique appellation reserved for the presence of a unique being, anything else than myth of origin of a transparent and present legibility under the obliteration; it is because the proper name has never been possible as anything other than by its functioning in a classification and thus in a system of differences, in a writing retaining the traces of differences, that the interdiction has been possible, could play, and eventually be transgressed, as we are going to see. Transgressed, that is to say restored to the obliteration and the non-proper of the origin.”[159 – my translation]

There is a queerly compelling parallel here with Rousseau’s system of signing his name, and thereby bringing to the surface not just the anonymity by which the ancien regime could sustain in the play of its own classifications both the condemned book and the celebrated name (as Christopher Kelly points out, Montesquieu used the Persian Letters as his way to gain entry into the Academie Francaise even as he officially denied his authorship of the letters, which would have interdicted his entrance into the Academie Francaise). In a sense, Rousseau combined the function of the ‘fillette” and the anthropologist. The second preface is a powerful illustration of Derrida’s point, here, for the name of the author of Julie is caught up, in the dialogue between R. and N., in a double bind: on the one hand, Rousseau felt the need to throw one’s name against the regime by signing his text; on the other hand, Rousseau called himself the ‘editor’ of this collection (recuil), and throughout retreats from saying that he wrote the letters. In fact, N., his interlocutor (who is written by R., but figures, commentators say, as D – for Diderot) says at one point that if the letters were truly from Julie, he would treasure the book and read it a million times over, but if they were from R., then the book is flat and inartistic. Julie, N. claims, maliciously, acts like a sorceress in the book – everybody ends up sounding like Julie.

The dialogue in which R. and N. discuss the name is as follows:

R: Does An honest man hide himself when he speaks to the Public? Does he dare to print what he doesn’t dare to recognize? I was the editor of this book, and I will have myself named as editor.
N: You will name yourself here? You?
R: Myself.
N: what? You are going to put your name to it?
R: Yes, Monsieur.
N: Your real name? Jean Jacques Rousseau, all the letters?
R: Jean Jacques Russeau in all the letters.
N: You aren’t thinking about it! What will people say?
R: What they want to. I am naming myself at the head of this collection not to appropriate it, but to respond for it. If there is bad in it, let it be imputed to me. If there is good, I don’t intend to make that honor me. If they find the book evil in itself, it is a reason more for me to set my name to it. I don’t want to pass for better than I am.
N: You are satisfied with this response.
R: Yes, in a time when it is not possible for anyone to be good.
N: And the beautiful souls, have you forgotten them.
R: Nature made them, your institutions spoil them.
N: At the head of a love story one will read the words: by J.J. Rousseau, citizen of Geneva.
R: Citizen of Geneva? No not that. I am not going to profane the name of my country. I only put it on writings that I believe will do it honor.” (oc 1769: v:xxx – my translation)

Since I promised Northanger in the comments that I would write a ps, here it is:

Anonymity, in the ancien regime, is systematic and signed. When Rousseau, in effect, tells on the system by signing his name, he is not only contrasting his work to the philosophes, he is also pointing to the essential subservience that possesses the writer who has signed into, signed onto, his anonymity. While the philosopher can criticize the entire system from under the shadow of that anonymity, the entire system has signed that criticism with every one of the critical writer’s pseudonyms. The writer has made the regime responsible for his or her name.

The regime, even in a period in which a considerable minority can’t sign their names, has already developed a system of who signs for what. Thus, to deliver a blow against the system and the enlightenment crewe that depends on very the system whose foundations in truth and reason they destroy - Rousseau signs his name. Everything, at this moment, is clear. Through the signature, you can see the man. Or so goes the first movement. In the moment of signing his name, Rousseau takes responsibility – and who does he take it from? The system that cares for responsibility, that guards it, that keeps it – the whole of the social order.

But the first movement will turn out to be not enough. For it will turn out that one has to sign somewhere. And as one searches for the place to sign, what role the signature plays, what text it is part of, becomes an issue for the man whose honesty, whose responsibility, is embodied in the signature. Now, on the conventional level, these problems are brushed aside. Rousseau is the author of Julie and the preface to Julie. Rousseau signs for R. and N., for the citizen and the philosophe, for Emile, for every letter he sends to the authorities, for his “philosophical” works and his Confession. Sign here, sign here. And yet, as soon as the conventional view has had its say, has dispensed with the cobwebs woven around the signature, it begins the work of identification – N., it will turn out, is Diderot, and the tutor in Emile, it will turn out, is Rousseau. And so the figure who advises R. not to sign is both assimilated to Rousseau and assigned to Diderot, and the figure who tutors a fiction, an imaginary figure, turns out to be a real figure, who signs his name Jean Jacques Rousseau.

This, however, returns us to our dilemma, except on a second level. On this level, N. is so taken with, shaken with Julie that if the letters were “real”, it would be the best book in the world. And yet, if the letters are Rousseau’s invention, the value of the book will be inversed. It will be flat, stale, provincial, badly written.

At this point one has to ask about the power of the signature. For it is on this level that the problem of the place of the signature, whether in the text (and thus, signing itself signing itself, in the vertigo of a hall of mirrors that has no limit), or outside the text, and thus forming – what? Another text?

You can frame Rousseau’s gesture in breaking with the system of anonymity as one of those moments when the hidden transcript, to use James Scott’s term, composed of all the gestures, jokes and beliefs of the subordinate, the enslaved, ‘storm the stage’ – suddenly the hidden dissolves and the content of that thought, of what was said in the kitchen and in the yard and among the apprentices and among the women in the needle factor suddenly gets said and named and names. But at the same time, there is curb, here, and it is the curb of the truth – for the opening of the hidden is not, after all, the truth. And the signature is never protected from the elaboration of the text, or the dream – it is never totally safe from the power of ficticity, a power that may seem to zap the charisma of responsibility, that emancipatory gesture, before it even get going.

And yet, much as I hate to say this: there is no revolution in language. While Rousseau fights against the anonymous system, he works within the hybrid genre that the enlightenment writers perfected, none more so than Diderot. In this genre, real figures show up next to fictitious ones and thus are both real and fictitious: real arguments are absorbed into the fiction of conversation. And who can tell who is signing?

Another remark needs to be made about the ancien regime’s enforcement of the regime of anonymity. Rousseau very shrewdly saw that this system of rule was nurturing intellectual irresponsibility. Or perhaps I should say thwarted responsibility. It was not just the oppression that stroked the rage of the subordinated population, but its feckless inconsistency. Rousseau experienced to the full the senility of the system in trying to publish Emile, for he was guaranteed by the Luxembourg’s and Malesherbes, and yet neither was able to prevent Emile from being burnt by the public hangman. And thus was the system of patronage debased – not, of course, in the eyes of the patrons, who forget everything except their own generosity, but in the eyes of the patronized. This is no little thing. Any system that forces you to swallow your name is manufacturing poisons, for a name will rankle. The system that allowed and then censored Emile tore a breach in its structure, the homogeneity of the face it turned towards the governed and obscure. Like a crack in the foundation of a house, that breach was bound to tell a story one day or another.

But – to sum up and return to the problem of the signature – what Rousseau could not escape by opposing the system of signed anonymity with his own signature as a citoyen of Geneva is the fact that this opposition on behalf of transparency and authenticity inevitably threw him into a self-undermining process in which no closeness of the text to the signature or of the self to the responsibility it took on could ever be total. Although it could be mortal – we should always remember that the anchors of history are made out of human flesh, throw them out for mooring or bait, one. The signature’s very place, or placelessness – sign here and here – makes the task of absolute authentification hopeless.

It is not good for man to be alone

The fifth book of Emile begins the “last act of Emile’s youth.” Which is described as follows: “Il n’est pas bon que l’homme soit seul, Émile est homme ; nous lui avons promis une compagne, il faut la lui donner.” This borrowing from Genesis, with Rousseau as the “we” and Emile as Adam presents us with a problem that is traditionally solved by simply extracting the concepts, here, connecting them to this “we”, and making out as if Rousseau were writing a treatise. The literary is a sort of small bend in the fall of the conceptual atoms, but nothing to worry about, if we go at this narrative as a thing that can be reduced to an exempla derived from the principles of practical reason.

However, enough - I've beaten this subject enough in the last post. Rather, here's the point: meditating on this not exceptional allusion to the creation story, we find we are faced with the true oddity of the project outlined in this book: this is a re-creation story in which Emile is and can’t be Adam. That he can’t be is clear enough – Rousseau has been clear throughout the book that there is an existing, intrusive society with which Emile will have to deal. Any education he receives will have to, in some way, work to insert him in that society. And yet that society is laced through with corruption in such a way that it isn’t clear that Emile will succeed in that society. And yet here, again, we have the Adam motif, for was Adam created to succeed in Eden? The story has always been unclear, always been related to many other stories in many other cultures about the peculiar fear that man evokes in the Gods. Created to worship God, and yet hiding, the Gods suspect, the aspiration to overthrow the Gods, to become as God.

It is not good that man is alone. In the blank towards which that statement gazes, there appears a woman – made not from Emile’s rib, but from our idea of the woman Emile needs, Sophie.

And as Emile is educated to take his place as a man, so Sophie should be educated to take her place as a woman. And that place is firstly a negation – of the solitude that is not good for the man. Right away, then, that place is company – peculiarly defined by a lack in the man. And yet, the logical step beyond company would seem to be the space of company, the public space. This is, of course, not going to be the case for Sophie – because that space is inhabited, it turns out, with many men, for all of whom it is not good to be alone, and who thus seek out the negation of that solitude in woman.

What is not good about that solitude? I’ll leave that question open for the moment.

Rousseau does go on to remark on the difference between his Genesis and the lesson of Locke, who Rousseau is tracking – Locke, who writes that not it is time for his gentleman to marry. Since I do not have the honor of raising a gentleman, Rousseau says, I will refrain from imitating Locke in this.

As for women: we can see that her first appearance, here, is as a negation, a necessary supplement, as pure company, as though, from the beginning, she is not alone. We can already see that this creation story is turning in the hands of its creator, and not exactly where those hands want it to go. This notion of women as company, as, on the primary level, a companion, will certainly determine woman’s education. But the denial of solitude in that first diktat will always fuck it up. Woman’s solitude will slide and hide under the hands of that creator and find their place in spite of his hands, ultimately corrupting woman’s companion-ship and throwing into question the education/creation of both Emile and Sophie.

“Sophie ought to be a woman as Emile is a man, that is to say, have all that is conformable to the constitution of her species and her sex in order to fill her place in the physical and moral order. Thus, let’s being to examine and conformities and differences of her sex and of ours.”

narrative and nihilism

We could run this as though on a television screen, in the background.

Andre Amar from the Committee of Public Safety stands up to address the Convention. He is known as the “most elegantly dressed man in the Convention.” (Bire, 312) It is October 31, 1793 – the month of Brumaire – and he has been appointed the speaker for a committee that investigated the ‘woman question’. This is after Charlotte Corday answered that question by putting a knife very neatly in Marat’s heart. This is after Marie Antoinette cried out to the mothers at her trial to rise up, as she had been accused of incest. This was after Charlotte Corday had said, to her judges, that she was a “republican before the revolution” and remained one. This was after one of the judges had asked Do you suppose you have killed all the Marats – to which she answered, that one dead, maybe the rest will tremble. This was after David had drawn Marie Antoinette in the cart that drew her to the guillotine, no wig on her head, in a bare shift. This was after the executioner had taken Corday’s head from where it lay on the ground and had slapped it – for which offense he was put in prison. This was after the men of Paris were becoming rarer, as they were sent off to fight on all fronts. This was after the street scuffles had broken out concerning the law that women had to wear the cocard. This was before the trial of Olympe de Gouge, condemned on November 1, 1793.

Amar began his speech by saying, “I am denouncing to you a group of more than six thousand women, so called Jacobins and with pretention to a revolutionary society. Many of them, no doubt, have only strayed through an excess of patriotism; but others are only the instruments of the enemies of the public thing (chose publique), and have only put on the mask of an exaggerated patriotism in order to excite sectional movements and a kind of counter-revolution.”

Amar’s speech was the signal of another purge of the ultras, this time aimed at women. In it, Amar (imagine him speaking in a thunderous basso. Imagine his white linen shirt, and the washerwoman who ironed it. Imagine him at dinner) laid down the code: do women have the right to immerse themselves in government affairs? No. Do women have the “moral force and physique” demanded by the exercise of politics? “Universal opinion” responds to that. And what is the relation of women to the public thing? “Without doubt, it is necessary that they instruct themselves in the principles of liberty, in order to have their children cherish it; they can sit in as spectators at deliberations of the sections and discussions of popular assemblies; but, made to sweeten the moeurs of man, must they take an active part in discussions of which the heatedness is incompatible with the gentleness and moderation that make up the charm of the sex?” (Lairtullier, 185)

…

As this runs on the screen, so to speak, behind us, let’s return to the curious eclipse of place that I have outlined as it is detailed in E. Casey’s work. In essence, by the eighteenth century, place had been triumphantly expulsed from natural philosophy. Gilbert’s phrase is prophetic: there is no place for place in nature. But, in spite of this fact, in spite of the disrepute into which Aristotle’s proper place and power of place falls in physics, it does remain in the order of nature for the human sciences. One could even say that without place, it would have been impossible to grasp the world of the great transformation, must less try to subdue the subject to universal history. Place and its associated concepts, property, order, hierarchy, all remained social forces, as though in the same society and at the same time, place was not being hollowed out. There is a certain blank, a certain white space as though on a page, separating one column from another, here – the world reconstructed by mathesis and experiment in one column, and the human world, the world for humans, in the other. In the nineteenth century, that blank will find a name – nihilism. But the foreshocks were already being felt by the philosophes in the eighteenth century. Perhaps one could say that it was under the mysterious empire of that blankness that Rousseau’s conceptual structures seem always to suffer when the hand of his narratives are laid upon them. Nicole Fermon has mocked the tendency of Rousseau’s commentators to leave unexplained this gap between concept and mythos, as if it were a mystery, as if Rousseau were simply confused. She makes the case that instead, we are looking at a dialectical pattern.

I’m going to follow Fermon’s suggestion.

A stele is found in the desert: what kingdom was this?

You say we're almost all alone together...

“…il doit se dire d’avance que ceux qui les écrivent ne sont pas des Français, des beaux-esprits, des académiciens, des philosophes ; mais des provinciaux, des étrangers, des solitaires, de jeunes gens, presque des enfants, qui, dans leurs imaginations romanesques, prennent pour de la philosophie les honnêtes délires de leur cerveau.”- from the introduction to La Nouvelle Heloïse

When I talk about my happiness thesis to people who aren’t necessarily readers of LI, a spark of recognition will appear in their eyes, even if they disagree with me. But that spark dies when I try to explain the human limit.

My thesis is built upon these two themes. One of those themes is the emergence of a happiness culture, defined as a culture that adopts happiness as a norm by which to judge one’s life and expectations (on the individual level) and the success and intents of one’s collectivity (on the social level). That the happiness culture is a background constant for both capitalist reality and the socialist dream points to the way it emerges from the ruin of the previous order, the order of dependence and the limited good. But my second theme is that the happiness culture emerged in tandem with a particular kind of alienation at its margins. This alienation from the total social fact of happiness saw a dangerous cultural and social vacuum, which threatened the human imagination, as a product of the norms of the happiness culture. Of course, they didn’t see it as programmatically as I am expressing it here – they saw it in bits and pieces, and the alienated marginals often borrowed their vernacular and concepts from the happiness culture, often used unhappiness as a protest not against the norm of happiness itself, but against a system that produced unhappiness.

I am intent on tracing the interplay between, on the one hand, the creation of the happiness norm, and, on the other hand, the dissolution of the human limit – but as the latter process is dialectically complex, it is not an easy thing to trace. The idea that human power – through science, or through conquest – takes dominion over the world is an old, positivist theme. But in that process, the old human thing, defined by a world of limits and dependences, of sanctions and gods, necessarily collapses; its reconstruction as a human subject is, in a sense, the interiorization of a system of management that was not predominant in the old human thing.

Obviously, the philosophical history of the decline of the standing of ‘place’ has a connection with one part of my story – that is, the story of the dominion of man over the world. But, insofar as place is a notion that is neither formal nor material – as Aristotle noticed – we should notice place spreads over the physical and the moral order. It would be easy to draw the Heideggerian parallel between the displacement of place by space and the displacement of Dasein by the cogito. This may be one way of describing what is happening in the background. My notion is that the great transformation to capitalism pivoted upon a new sense of the substitutability of the human thing: Marx’s abstract labor. And there were several aspect of this new regime of substitutability – among them, the notion of equality. If the old order presumed on its ‘places’, with everything in its proper place, the emerging order presumes on its spaces – an equality can be set up so that theoretically, all subjects have a place in the public domain. And that means, as Condorcet was quick to see, that men and women have equal footing there.

Rousseau is an exemplary figure in as much as he experience to the full the agony of these shifts. And so it is that I am approaching him from the viewpoint of the place of women, because there is a maximum tension in Rousseau’s thought at this point. One shouldn’t, however, fall into the habit of thinking of this as a history that occurs in “thought’ – rather, it is a real history fought out in homes, shops, streets, frontiers, courts, markets, etc. It is under the sign of place and displacement that the notion of liberty and the notion of the stranger – a figure that incorporates the modality of adventure to which I keep returning – comes in. Instead of presuming that I know about public and private spaces from a sort of Habermasian assumption about coffee houses and domestic spaces, I have a notion that it is the possibility of the stranger that is on the horizon of the public/private divide.

This note I shore against some future use.

no place

Ladies and Gentlemen we are floating in space

In the twentieth century, century of Freud and Heidegger, World Wars and nuclear races, the fashion in philosophical history was not to paint a progress, an arrow arranging itself in forward flight amongst the confusion of events, a piece of the universal history, that to which both the reader and the writer served as goals; but rather, to trace some disaster, some lost moment, some irreversible waste, under the sign of forgetting, with both the reader and writer undergoing a cure. Whether forgetting a childhood trauma or childhood sexuality or the barbarism it took to build the monuments of civilization or being itself – these histories were accounts of what, at best, could be construed as the negative externality of progress, and at worst, as the exposure of its grift.

In several books and numerous articles, Edward Casey has tried to revive a history of place – a history that is “virtually unknown.” He is wary of the Heideggerian model, but at the same time, he traces a thematic that falls within its orbit.

“Yet this rich tradition of place-talk has been bypassed or forgotten for the most part, mainly because place has been subordinated to other terms taken as putative absolutes: most notably Space and Time. Beginning with Philoponus in the sixth century A.D. and reaching an apogee in fourteenth century theology and above all in seventeenth century physics, place has been assimilated to space. The latter, regarded as infinite extension, has become a cosmic and extracosmich Moloch that consumes every corpuscle of place to be found within its greedy reach. As a result, place came to be considered a mere “modification” of space (in Locke’s revealing term) – a modification that aptly can be called a site, that is, leveled down, monotonous space for building and other human enterprises. (The Fate of Place, x)

In Plato’s Timaeus, place and space are distinguished as topos and chora – although this distinction, it has been said, doesn’t correspond to our place and space schemata. Chora sometimes seems to be place, too; certainly that is what it seems to mean in other Greek texts, and, sometimes, in the Timaeus. Chora, the receptacle, the container, has been associated by some scholars with choris, which means ‘independently’, or, as a noun, means “widow or one bereaved’. (Malpas, 25). It would be convenient if Plato simply made the topos/chora distinction on lines that correspond to our own modern understanding of space and place, and that it was overturned by Aristotle and the tradition afterwards. However, that is not what happened. The binaries don’t come to us on the wings of textbooks, 0/1 for our amusement and edification, but are difficult fliers, birds that sometimes do and sometimes don’t flock together. Among which there are not a few mockingbirds.

Aristotle wrote appreciatively in the Physics IV that Plato was the first to try to tell what place is, and he follows Plato to a certain extent. Place doesn’t seem to be a form, in the Platonic sense, nor is it a body. “We can readily see that place cannot be either form or material.” Aristotle gives five reasons for this, which show the distance between Aristotle’s place and our place – although our place is a divided house, and perhaps it is not just the great tradition, science in the house, but a host of little traditions to, a popular psychology of place.

If, then, we look at the question in this way the place of a thing is its form. But, if we regard the place as the extension of the magnitude, it is the matter. For this is different from the magnitude: it is what is contained and defined by the form, as by a bounding plane. Matter or the indeterminate is of this nature; when the boundary and attributes of a sphere are taken away, nothing but the matter is left.

This is why Plato in the Timaeus says that matter and space are the same; for the 'participant' and space are identical. (It is true, indeed, that the account he gives there of the 'participant' is different from what he says in his so-called 'unwritten teaching'. Nevertheless, he did identify place and space.) I mention Plato because, while all hold place to be something, he alone tried to say what it is.

In view of these facts we should naturally expect to find difficulty in determining what place is, if indeed it is one of these two things, matter or form. They demand a very close scrutiny, especially as it is not easy to recognize them apart.

But it is at any rate not difficult to see that place cannot be either of them. (1) Form and Material cannot be dissociated from that to which they belong, whereas the place can be separated. As we pointed out, where air was, water in turn comes to be, the one replacing the other; and similarly with other bodies. Hence the place of a thing is neither a part nor a state of it, but is separable from it. (2)For place is supposed to be something like a vessel-the vessel being a transportable place. But the vessel is no part of the thing.

In so far then as it is separable from the thing, it is not the form: qua containing, it is different from the matter.

Also it is held that what is anywhere is both itself something and that there is a different thing outside it. (Plato of course, if we may digress, ought to tell us why the form and the numbers are not in place, if 'what participates' is place-whether what participates is the Great and the Small or the matter, as he called it in writing in the Timaeus.)

(3) Further, how could a body be carried to its own place, if place was the matter or the form? It is impossible that what has no reference to motion or the distinction of up and down can be place. So place must be looked for among things which have these characteristics.

(4) If the place is in the thing (it must be if it is either shape or matter) place will have a place: for both the form and the indeterminate undergo change and motion along with the thing, and are not always in the same place, but are where the thing is. Hence the place will have a place.

(5) Further, when water is produced from air, the place has been destroyed, for the resulting body is not in the same place. What sort of destruction then is that?" - translation by R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye

Aristotle’s notion that there is an “own” place formed a flaw in the fabric of this argument that unraveled it for Philopunus. Edward Grant has summarized Philoponus’ anti-Aristotelian argument like this: “In Philoponus’ cosmos, bodies move in an absolutely immobile, three-dimensional void space. When a body movies, it leaves behind successive parts of that void equal to itself and occupies other parts equal to itself. Although bodies occupy and then depart from successive parts of an absolute void space, the latter remains immobile. By virtue of its absolute immobility, then, no part opf the void space can be transported anywhere to occupy another part of void space…”

“Not only did he [Philoponus] distinguish between material and immaterial dimensions, and thus destroy the basis of one of Aristotle’s most powerful arguments against the exitence of vacuum, but his conception of vacuum as three dimensional extension always filled with body and never existent per se was accepted in some form the Italian natural philosophers of the sixteenth century, some of whom filled their separate, empty space with light (Patrizi) or ether (Bruno).” (21) The counterpart to the Italian humanists in Britain were the natural philosophers, working in the Baconian vein. Among them, Casey has spotted William Gilbert (who wrote the famous treatise on the magnet) for a remark in one of his works that could serve as a slogan for expulsion of place from the order of the sciences: “locus nihil est, non existit, vim non habet…” place is nothing, doesn’t exist, has no strength (vim) (Casey 1998:135)

Rousseau and the women III

In the post before the Simmel post, I quoted a bit from one of Saint Preux’s letters describing Clarens in the Nouvelle Heloise. In that letter, a new question of place arises – but so discretely that it is hardly even heard, hardly exists:

They [the servants] well know that their surest fortune is attached to that of the master, and that they will never lack anything so long as the house is seen to prosper. In serving it, therefore, they serve their patrimony, and augment it in rendering their services agreeable. This is their greatest interest. But this word is hardly in its place on this occasion; for I have never seen a place where the rules [police] or the interests are so wisely managed, and where, however, they have less influence than here. Everything is done by attachment …

A word that is “hardly in its place” – a word that could be replaced by another word – I want to take this exchange over a place and make it thematic, even though it is not thematic, here. In fact, place (‘place’ and ‘lieu’) exists in Rousseau more as the stitching, one might say, then the clothing – more as what goes on semi-automatically, rather than what goes on thematically. Plus, of course, how does one make place a theme? Isn’t there a problem here in the fact that the conditioned is in the set of the condition? Especially as the place, here, is the place of words – and that relationship of places is vaguely but distinctly traced as the condition for the thematized condition of place.

Because I’ve been threading about Freud and projection, perhaps, this exchange of places between attachment and interest evokes the familiar Freudian spectacle of denial, which is the result of the logic of the Freudian bureaucracy: the lack of a ‘no’ function in the unconscious, and the management of the no by the superego.

However, I don’t want to take up the Freudian thread here, but rather speculate that the conflict between interest and attachment is, perhaps, definitive of the place of women in Rousseau, or the place of women in the society that Rousseau wanted, or in the revolutionary society that was associated with Rousseau. Three societies, linked by a disjunction that slightly differs them, but invites an exchange of places. It is as though here, below what is thematic, an intersigne is exchanged.

That slight incommensurability of attachment and interest in Rousseau has been felt, if not analyzed, all through the long career in assessments of Rousseau, like the pea under the mattress of the princess. The position of English liberalism is represented by Bertrand Russell, who writes, in his History of Philosophy, that Rousseau payed “lip service to democracy” but that in the Social Contract, where he dispenses with “sentimentality”, he “tend[ed] to justify the totalitarian state.” This is an image of Rousseau, and in general an image of what went wrong with the French Revolution, that was transposed into the Cold War culture. Hannah Arendt, who far outstripped Russell in her understanding of the sentiments, was a shrewder reader of Rousseau, but her reading elaborates on the charge of totalitarianism by continually confounding Rousseau with Robespierre. Never mind that all sides in the Revolution called upon Rousseau – no, in 1962, when Arendt’s On Revolution was published, one was aware that the general will, that madness to sweep away all property arrangements, was alive on the edges of the Imperium, advancing from the peripheries: the sans-culottes (or the guerillas in the rice paddies in Vietnam, or in Algiers, or the civil rights marchers in Mississippi) could think that they embodied the popular will, the secret popular will underneath the orderly exterior. Possibly the general will had been frozen, paralyzed by the vocabulary of the colonial order, paralyzed by every mechanism put in place to manipulate the collective dream – the American dream, the dream of freedom, the pop dream. This is what made Rousseau a figure as frightening in his way to the Imperium as Marx.

I want to quote two other passages that are about and not about place in Rousseau – in my next post. Meanwhile, I’d suggest those who have not read the Nouvelle Heloise to look at Amie’s summary of one of the narrative ends of that book in the comment to this post.

apologies all around

I'm sorry I have not added to this thread, but my work load at the moment is too killing. But I will be returning to this soon.

the place of women II: A digression

In the Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel speaks of money as the “absolute tool”. Simmel begins with one of those foundation stories with which philosophy is littered - the baby who sees his mother point, the man on the deserted island, the two men handing each other tools and instructions. In this story, the stress falls upon the disparity between what an individual wants of another individual and what he has to trade for it. What this situation is supposed to show us is that, in the encounter of the two individuals, everything is too personal. They are too much themselves, they are persons whose qualities require some intermediary to make them collaborate, to make them less personal one with the other. In this encounter, the peculiarities and situations of both individuals are highly pertinent – they are, so to speak, rooted in their situations. They are, one could say, the prisoners of their own authenticity. Simmel postulates that what is required, here, is some third, some intermediary, some absolute means that will enable these situations to interrelate. And in so doing, that means will uproot them. This might not seem to be the obvious result of money, the absolute means. It turns out, however, that money does change the situation of the men not only in regards to their relation to each other, but in regards to their identity with their situations. Their places. Which have been constructed so far on the premise of opposition, and which now encounter the social symbol of absolute indifferent. It is this indifference to what it is a means to, this openendedness to ends, that makes money such an absolute and finally subversive means.

As we fall into the habit, then, of thinking not of the ends, but in terms of this means, money begins to penetrate other social niches. It is the “nature of the instrument to persist through its individual applications or to be called into service in a generally not foreseeable number of occasions.” And this, Simmel thinks, is the secret of the dominance of money: “Out of this particular value of money, its complete lack of connection to all things and moments of time, its complete renunciation of any proper end on its own behalf, the abstraction that derives from it mediate character, flows the superior weight of that which money offers over that which the commodity offers.”

Now, it is under the sign of its penetration into all spheres, as a pure instrument, and its domination of commodities, as being disconnected ideally from all situations – from production itself – that Simmel introduces the effect of money on the style of modern life. Of the style of life, Simmel gives an account that emphasizes the ‘circle’ as the essential community form:

"One of the most common images under which the organization of the substance of life is made clear is its assimilation into a circle, in the center of which stands the actual ‘I’. There is a mode of relationship between this I and the things, people, ideas and interests that we can only designate as the distance between both. An as far as we deal with an object it can, remaining substantially unchanged, come near to the center or be pushed back to the periphery of our range of vision and circle of interest; but this doesn’t effect, for instance, the fact that our inner relationship to this object is changed, but just the inverse, we can designate certain relations of the I to its contents only through the intuitive symbol of a specific or changing distance between both.” These distances are not separated for the I from the object, in other words, but “according to its distance from our organs - differences not only of clearness, but of quality and of the whole character of the felt image – it is easy to extend this symbolization therein that the differences even of inner relations to the things are interpreted as differences of distance to it. (My translation)

”

To get near a thing, in other words, symbolizes a stage in the understanding of a thing. To be “near” a person is to be in a particular relationship with a person. In the world picture given to us by science, Simmel says, this relation of near and far is displaced from its instinctive, or at least traditional, coordinates: our instruments for getting near – like the microscope or the telescope – at the same time tell us how far we are from the objects we are pointing at. How far I am from the piece of skin that, under the microscope, I see is a much different looking thing than the skin that I thought I was as near to as… my own skin. Accordingly, “the anthropomorphizing of nature leaves us, in the subjective perspective, after the side of the feelings and of the, as always, misleading beliefs, a littler distance between men and things that we have at present.” And in this double process, Simmel says, money plays a role.

I’ll return to what that role is after I interpose some excerpts from Rousseau that continue the theme we began to see take shape under Morgenstern’s suggestion about the place of women, or rather, a woman, Julie, in the autarky of Clarens. Though Morgenstern doesn’t mention Simmel, I think the Philosophy of Money gives us an appropriate framework within which to see more clearly why Rousseau’s heroines end unhappily – and more generally, why women, in the moment that they are set in their place, collapse a whole ideology of places.

A woman's place

Let’s take up where we left off: with Madame de Stael’s remark that, in our current social arrangements, women are “neither in the order of nature nor in the order of society.”

D’Agoult cites de Stael not to refer to Rousseau’s time, but to the new, post revolutionary society. However, since the very staging of that opposition is, in a sense, signed by Rousseau, it is natural to think that Rousseau would have something to say to women and about women. In fact, when d’Agoult writes that Rousseau “spoke” to women, she could well be referring to the introduction of Emile, in which Rousseau literally says that he is speaking to mothers. Less literally, the Nouvelle Heloise was an event in the third life of women all over Europe, and surely the letters of Julie speak to women, in d’Agoult’s sense.

Certainly, d’Agoult is onto something when she contrasts Condorcet, with his eagerness to end the system of submission that shackles women in the civil sphere, and Rousseau, for whom it would seem that a woman’s place is in the private sphere. By the social logic that opposes independence and dependence, women, then, should be dependent. And yet, this can’t be all the story. Rousseau could see, and even advocate for, the transformation of the order of dependence, the traditional order; by committing himself to this change, he deprives himself of the traditional reasons that women should be dependent. He deprives himself of the social sanction of that hierarchy. Moreover, how can women have a place at all if all places are to be rearranged? If the old order’s corruption calls for revolutionary action? In fact, as Helena Rosenblatt has pointed out in an article defending Rousseau from the charge of misogyny, even in the Letter to D’Alembert, which has often been seen as the most misogynistic of Rousseau’s writings about women, a closer reading will find that Rousseau is not writing against all women, but pleading the case for women of civic virtue. For Rosenblatt, one should never forget that Rousseau wrote: “Every revolution began with the women. Through a woman Rome gained her liberty, through a woman the plebians obtained the consulate, through a woman the tyranny of the decemvirs was ended; it was the women who saved Rome [when besiged by Coriolanus].”

In all of these examples, Rosenblatt claims, we see women in a different light than in the usual Enlightenment discourse about the ‘softening’ power of women. Rather, Rousseau aimed at the opposite.

And yet, those examples of women outside the house are also examples of states of emergency. If the revolution begins with women, doesn’t it end by putting women back in their place?

The theme I’d like to follow, the effect I’d like to investigate in Rousseau, is, in a sense, a detour around the question of whether D’Agoult is right, or whether Rosenblatt is right. It is the question of the place of these beings who are not in nature or society. I am inspired here by the starting point of Mira Morgenstern’s book on Rousseau. Why, Morgenstern asks, is it that the model of a woman’s place in Emile and the Nouvelle Heloise is in such discord with the arc of the narrative in both books? For surely if the author of Emile is right about women, then the education of Sophie should be crowned with success, rather than tragedy. And Julie’s ultimate failure to be happy in her marriage to Wolmar in the Nouvelle Heloise – Wolmar, the man who her father chose, and who does his best to get her to love him – condemns absolutely that marriage and all the arrangement of the idyll of Clarens, their utopian estate?

Why is it that Rousseau does not gild his theme of women’s place with happy endings, in other words? Why does the narrative force seem to perversely turn upon the conceptual advice? Where is a woman’s ‘place’ in all of this?

I am not taking that as a starting place for an examination of the narratives so much as an allowance for seeking the source of the tension created in Rousseau’s work by women. Ultimately, I want to focus on a suggestion of Morgenstern’s in her brilliant chapter on the household set up by Wolmar and Julie in la Nouvelle Heloise. In a subsection about women and power entitled The Benevolent Patriarchy, she shows that the utopian arrangement of the household set up by Wolmar at Clarens, she writes:

“On the face of it, then, Clarens would appear to be the perfect example of benevolent paternalism. However, here the paradox reappears: using the familial metaphor based on love to operate an estate that must be run on the principles of order, although perhaps in a different guise than expected. Wolmar does use love to run the entire estate, servants and family alike. But this love is not a true emotion. Rather, it is a disguise for absolute control. This use of love as a cover for authoritarian domination emphasizes Wolmar’s cynical realization that while different principles ostensibly underlie the organization of family, citizens, and servants, any relationship involving people can be translated into a matter of politics and power, albeit in different strengths and forms.” (208)

The problem of dependence for Rousseau is the problem of attachment. As St. Preux himself remarks about the Wolmar’s schema, the whole thing is based on attachment.

‘They [the servants] well know that their surest fortune is attached to that of the master, and that they will never lack anything so long as the house is seen to prosper. In serving it, therefore, they serve their patrimony, and augment it in rendering their services agreeable. This is their greatest interest. But this word is hardly in its place on this occasion; for I have never seen a place where the rules [police] or the interests are so wisely managed, and where, however, they have less influence than here. Everything is done by attachment: one might say that venal souls are purified in entering into this abode of wisdom and union.” [1873:430]

Rousseau’s utopian solution to the problem of interest has not drawn enough attention, Morgenstern thinks. Underneath Wolmar’s benevolence is a very manipulative economic structure:

The second obstacle to the servants’ developing any independent notions of their own good as distinct from the well-being of their masters lies in the economic structure of Clarens. Wolmar’s aim is to make the small estate of Clarens as self-sufficient as possible. To this end, outside trade is discouraged unless it is strictly necessary. Further enforcing the autarky of Clarens is the internal exchange system fostered among the inhabitants and workers of Clarens. Thus, for example, the grocer is paid with grain for his supplies, while the rents are used to furnish the houses owned by Wolmar. This economic system, dispensing as much as possible with the circulation of money, finds its philosophical justification in the avoidance of any intermediaries that can render human exchange potentially inauthentic. A most important side effect of this self sufficiency, however, is that this exchange system effectively prevents the servants and workers of Clarens from ever leaving.” [212]

Here, indeed, is place – place closed upon itself. It is here that the problem of the place of women finds a solution – a solutin which, on another scale, is the solution for society as a whole. But the problem with this solution is two-fold: it fosters desperate attachments, rather than love; and it prevents and minimizes the chance of a stranger appearing. The latter is, I think, crucial to Rousseau’s unresolvable problem of reconciling love and place.

Jean-Jacques and the women

They only want you when you’re seventeen
When you’re twenty one, you’re no fun…

Marie d’Agoult, in her summation of the struggle for equal rights for women in France, felt she had to dispell a myth about where Rousseau stood in this history:

“It is to Condorcet and not to Jean-Jacques, as is generally believed, who deserves credit for the initiative of reforms proposed in the education and condition of women. The first man posed the principle of the entire equality of the sexes. Jean-Jacques, who had spoken to women with an incomparable eloquence and tenderness, showed himself, however, less liberal and less serious to them than Fenelon. In his plan of education, which was applicable neither to the women of the people, who did not occupy him, a man sprung from the people, nor even to the women of the middle class, but only to wealthy girls, he established as a principle that women ought to be exercised in constraint; that dependence is their natural state. He wanted to see developed in them not reason, which would render still more painful this blind submission to the will of others, but the talents of agreeableness, on the condition, however, that this be in the frivolous and subaltern manner. M. de Stael, more rational and firmer in her judgments, removed the prejudices of Jean Jacques. Her strong but proud soul was open to all the grand presentiments of modern times. She declared that, in the actually existing state of affairs, women are neither in the order of nature nor in the order of society.”

I’m going to be doing a series of posts on Rousseau, women, money, strangers and the lateral. I thought d’Agoult’s text is a good place to start, both as a statement of the prosecutor’s case against Rousseau and because of the strange intimacy of the denunciation – one made about a man she calls “Jean-Jacques” throughout. A man who spoke to women, and thereby gained a deceptive reputation among them – for though he strirred them up, he meant, all the time, to bring them down. This is, of course, a voice that is very familiar – it is the serpent’s voice; it is the voice of the seducer.

There is something brilliant and momentous about the conjunction, at the end of this passage, between a Rousseau who addresses the daughters of the rich and the more historically informed de Stael. Indeed, it is impossible to talk of Jean Jacques and women without running into the ambivalence of the place of women, played out against a background in which the old order of dependence was dissolving.

Amie's Excellent News - and the ten song countdown!

Amie, long the friend of LI, told me some excellent news yesterday, and I persuaded her to let me celebrate it with a list of ten songs. What the news is can probably be gathered from my not so subtle subtitles.


The brain - Soave il vento


The beating heart Santigold – Creator.


Eyelids – Talking Heads Naïve Melody

Oh expressive Mouth - Yet nature is made better by no mean/But nature makes that mean
Sezen Aksu – Rakkas

Hair - Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy
Dhoom machale

Skin that blocks the light of the sun - the birth of our shadows
Dandy Warhols –Good Morning

Hearing voice makes space from which we dare not turn
Metric Help I’m Alive

And the red blood cells then came then
Dionysos et Kaolin C’est la vie

And the world was the best thing sense had ever sensed
Stravinksy Sacre de Printempts, part 1

Kick out the jams Sexy Sushi – Hibernatus
J'ai tout visité en 2 secondes,
Pékin, Tokyo, la Joconde.

J'ai fait tous les jobs possibles,
Plombier, pute et belle fille.

J'ai sodomisé un louveteau
Avec le manche d'un marteau.

the politics of being born

- Martine Francke
As I perhaps clumsily indicated in my last post, one risks falling under the spell of a parergonal logic in trying to “frame” a text, to give it a frame, to approach it from a frame. For from the start, the frame has a fatal tendency to bilocate within the frame. In this particular case, the frame is a woman – who provides the frame for the actual content of the phrase from Rousseau, “all men are born to be free…”, about which the Consolatio dialogue turns. The woman is both the support, the constitution and condition of that birth, and what is marginalized by that particular freedom. Marie d’Agoult in her Histoire provides a very good (and neglected) overview of feminist history from the French revolution to 1848 –giving due credit to figures who were supposedly re-discovered by the feminists of the 1970s, like Olympe des Gouges.

“The Revolution, after having provoked them [women] to appear on the political scene, threw them back into the shadows, on 9 thermidor, without having provided essential changes in their social condition. However the constitutional assembly, not content to render them a striking homage in entrusting the “reserve of the Constitution to the vigilance of wives and mothers” had sensibly ameliorated their fate in the family in establishing the equal sharing of goods and abolishing the perpetuity of monastic vows. The legislative assembly thought they were doing even more by legalizing divorce. But in this as well the legislators were occupied solely with women of the wealthy class. The questions of equal division of goods, of perpetual vows and of indissoluble ties did not touch the daughter of the people, for she did not expect inheritances, her family had no interest in pushing her into a convent, and the uniformity of the habits of her industrious life retained her naturally, without causing her to suffer, in the one matrimonial tie. The ideas which interested the generality of women and their rights in all social situations were not treated again after the long silence of the Empire and the Restoration than by the schools of Saint Simon and of Fourier.” (II, 33)

This is a beautiful passage, both for what it recognizes and its rather destabilizing ultra gesture. The latter became more common in leftist discourse in the 20th century, when, due to the reactionary family policy of Stalinism, the cry went forward that, as d’Agoult puts it here, the women of the people were wholly uninterested in the bourgeois topics of feminism. The game, by that time, was all about suspending indefinitely the cultural revolution (which was frivolous) while pursuing the economic and political revolution (which was serious). Seriousness is a politically charged social thematic – and alas, an all too little investigated one. However, at the time d’Agoult was writing, the sinister career of this theme was well in the future. Instead, one has to credit d’Agoult with the perception that the unity of “women” could easily disguise the social disunity of “women”. That the “long silence” is broken by the ‘utopians” – oh, this is such a rich topic, and one with such bearing on the liberal-radical alienation from the happiness culture, that I can hardly do it justice here. I’ll just point to it.

And so let us leap, following the method of the grasshopper rather than that of the scholarly ant, back to our Herzen text and end this post with a quote from the doctor:

“Did you ever think what the words, ‘man is born to be free’ mean? I shall interpret them for you. They mean, ‘man is born to be a beast’ – no more. Take a drove of wild horses – complete freedom and equal rights, the most complete communism; but development is impossible. Salvery is the first step to civilization. For development it is incumbent that some shall be far better off and others far worse. It is then that the former can advance at the expense of the latter. Nature spares nothing for development. To her man is an animal with an extraordinarily well developed brain: herein lies his power. Man did not feel in himself the agility of the tiger or the strength of the lion. He was remarkable neither for his muscles nor for especially keen senses; but he evinced a world of cunning, a host of humble qualities which, coupled with his natural tendency to live in communities, brought him to the initial step of social life. Bear in mind that man is fond of obeying; he always seeks something to lean upon, or to hid behind. He lacks the proud self-sufficiency of the beast of prey. He grows up subjugated by the family and the tribe. The more involved and tight the knot of social life became, the deeper people sank into slavery. They were oppressed by religion, which played on their fears, and by the tribal chiefs who played on tradition. There is not an animal, but one from the ‘kind corrupted by man,’ as Byron called domestic animals, that would be able to stand the strain of human relations. The wolf devours the lamb because it is hungry and became the lamb is weaker; but the wolf does not demand slavery from the lamb, nor does the lamb submit to him. It protests by bleating and running away. Into the wildly independent and self-sufficient world of the animals man has introduced an element of personal loyalty, the element of Caliban, and it is owing to this that a Prospero could appear.” (426)

more thoughts on women and doctors

Another story, another tale of substitutions.

Amie’s citing of Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus in the comments of my last post made me think about the difficulty of trying to “frame” my description of Herzen’s Consolatio when the frame is bigger than the picture. But this is not an unusual situation – indeed, though we speak of frames with the image in our mind of those ornamental strips of wood which form a square in which a picture is placed, the analogy rarely works like that when dealing with concepts and themes. For the frame is the world itself, and we must take ‘frame’ in a different, older sense: as the OED puts it, rather diffusely, “The manner or method of framing; construction, structure; constitution, nature…” Etymologically, the word is related to “from” – a root meaning advancement. The unstoppable growth of frames is, indeed, a kind of demented advancement – what begins as a boundary becomes an endless frontier.

If, as I am going to imagine it, there is a vibe in Herzen that comes from therapeutic nihilism, and a likeness of his doctor to one of France’s most prominent radicals, Raspail, there is also a vibe in that struggling dyad, the woman and the doctor. A very nineteenth century vibe, indeed. Modern historians – Angus McLaren and Thomas Laquer, for instance – in telling the story of the medicalization of the female body in the nineteenth century re-use a substitution trope that comes from the nineteenth century: the doctor replaces the priest. McLaren writes:

“when nineteenth-century observers declared “the doctor is replacing the priest” they were almost always referring to the new role assumed by medicine on the terrain previously dominated by the dictates of religion – the area of sex and the family.” (McLaren 1975:39) Now how exactly a replacement like that works – what the area is that is replaced, this hole inside the frame – is relevant not just to the politics of projection which we have been following, but to the interior of the human limit – the defining traits of the Other – that has served as one of our parameter for defining the rise of the material culture. The other within, the patient within, the invalid within the house, the bed, the nation, was becoming, archetypally, the Woman. Michelet, with whom Herzen was friendly, proclaimed, famously, in L’amour that “la femme est une malade.” “She seems destined to pain; thus suffering to be formed, suffering every month, suffering to be a woman…” Thomas Laqueur noted that it was in the 1840s that obstetricians developed a better sense of the menstrual cycle (there had been a medical theory that menses was caused by lasciviousness), building on von Baer’s demonstration of an egg in the fallopian tube of a dog:

“In the novelistic style that characterizes so much early nineteenth-century scientific reporting, Theodor L.W. Bischoff tells his reader that on 18 and 19 December 1843 he noted tat a large bitch in his possession had begun to go into heat. On the 19th he allowed her contact with a male dog, but she refused its attentions. He kept her securely imprisoned for two more days and then brought on the male dog again; this time she was interested but the animals were separated before coition could take place. At ten o’clock two days later, i.e., on the morning of the 23rd, he cut out her left ovary and fallopian tubes and carefully closed the wood. The Graafian follicles in the excised ovary were swollen but not yet burst. Five days later he killed the dog and found in the remaining ovary four developing corpus lutei.

Laquer points out that F.A. Pouchet, a famous doctor (and friend of Michelet) considered the discover that ovulation occurs independently of coition so important that “he formulated it as his “fifth and critical law of reproductive biology.” (Laqueur 1987: 26) As Laqueur points out, this shifted the medical identity of women from the vagina to the ovaries. And Emily Martin has pointed to the persistence of feminine and masculine cultural archetypes in the representation of the egg and the sperm up to the present day.

The thematic of alienation in the liberal and radical marginals begins with a turn in the interpretation of the structure of the relationship between the governors and the governed. The enlightenment notion that the bond between the people and the state consists in some relationship to collective happiness was not a direct hit on the old order – rather, a conservative view of this notion is that happiness is the equivalent of the stability given by a fixed order of dependence. Georg Foster had compared this to an order that kept the people in the stage of larvae – arrested in their development. This metaphoric of development is, of course, a biologic metaphoric. It is taken, ultimately, from embryology. Just as the embryo develops into a human in the womb, the people would develop into perfected humans in the womb of the revolutionary state – or, in the liberal version, in a state that allowed for a culture of the liberated imagination. The oddity of this metaphoric is that, although it is taken from the woman’s body, the woman in the story seems to be backed further and further away from the center. In this, she becomes a frame, a bracket, a support.

I'll return to this in another post

doctors and women

- Ann Svenson, untitled

It was around 1848 that Joseph Dietl, a doctor in Vienna, first used the phrase “therapeutic nihilism.” It was an attitude that had been developing in the medical school of the University of Vienna, a part of the extreme positivist reaction to the feverish cosmic analogies of the romantics. According to the circle in which Dietl taught, medical science was caught between an increasingly sophisticated ability to diagnose and the growing realization that all traditional therapies, everything in the doctor’s toolkit, had no scientific grounding. In a sense, medicine still oscillates today between the idea that cures come as a result of understanding causes and the idea that one should just empirically test to see if something cures. Penicillin, to use one famous example, was developed in the absence of a theory about why it should work. But therapeutic nihilism stood at the positivistic extreme: nature, in this view, was the only cure. The result was, curiously, that Vienna’s medical school became more and more famous, and Vienna’s hospitals became more and more disgraceful.

Herzen took classes at Moscow University in Physics, but he was certainly interested in medicine, and knew members of the medical faculty. Was he aware of what was happening in Vienna? In France, medical journals after 1860 use the term nihilisme therapeutique to refer to practices like that of Laennec’s, in the 1820s, with regard to tuberculosis. The Journal de médecine, de chirurgie et de pharmacology refers to the “doctrines sustained successively by Broussais, Schoenlien, Heusinger, Rokitansky and Lebert remained sterile in therapy, but continued to tranquilly play their role in the program of studies of our faculties of medicine under the determination, ‘pure medical science’, with which therapy conserved only a distant tie.” Lebert founded a group dedicated to the synthesis of biology and medicine in 1848 – Rokitansky was the head of Vienna’s Medical school – and Broussais was one of the most famous doctors in the 1840s.

The idea of pure medical science is, in a sense, like the idea of creating a pure science to observe the political physiognomy of a society – or the cultural physiognomy. The great master of the diagnostic metaphor in nineteenth century philosophy is Nietzsche, who, as well, considered a form of nihilism to be the great European disease. A disease of heredity:

“This innocence between opposites, this good conscience in the lie is… modern par excellence, it is almost definitive of modernity. The modern person presents, biologically, a contradiction of values, he sits between two stools, in one breath he says yes and no… we have counter knowing, counter wills, counter values, counter formulas, counter morals of opposed heredity in the body… A diagnostic of the modern soul – where should it begin? With a resolute incision in this contradictoriness of instincts, with the leaching out of its opposite values.” - Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner

All of which brings us back to the fact that a doctor is, if we can trust Aileen Kelly, voicing Herzen’s views in From the Other Shore, and, in particular, in the dialogue we are interested in, Consolatio. And on the other side of the doctor? A woman. Who we need to trace, too, who we need to look at in terms of this dyad, the woman/doctor, which turns up again and again in the nineteenth century – until we get to Freud’s wonderful case histories.

In fact, the strongest evidence that the doctor in question is influenced by therapeutic nihilism is a story he tells which, again, concerns a woman.

the revolution of the intellectuals?

Although the French revolution of 1848 was incessantly put in terms of the French revolution of 1789 by its participants, it was, in that very act, necessarily different than 1789. It is to that self-consciousness Marx alludes with the famous bon mot about farce; it was also the reason a Whig historian of the 20th century, Lewis Namier, could say that 1848 was the revolution of the intellectuals. Of course, this view is considered much too idealistic by more sociologically inclined historians. What seems true, however, is that in 1848, for reasons that remain unclear, that floating sector of intellectuals and the more easily identified sector of the working class interpenetrated for one startling moment. A wall fell, a sort of pentacost of tongues broke out in the streets. Most observers claim that, in France at least, the revolution came as a stunning surprise. Mark Traugott, who has studied the worker’s movement of 1848, wrote that “although in retrospect it was easy to appreciate how the ground had been prepared by the calamitous economic crisis that began in 1845-1846 and by the political reform movement launched in 1847, the February Revolution appeared to stun even those best apprised of the French situation” – and here he references Tocqueville. Traugott writes, further: ‘It is, in part, this contrast between the apparent unanimity of the population’s response and the failure of contemporary observers to anticipate the insurrection’s outbreak that accounts for the fascination of the February Days to students of revolutionary movements.” (1988)

Herzen’s analysis of the revolution and its failure is not couched on the level of class interest, as Marx’s analysis is. Rather, Herzen surveys the revolutionary “spirit” – the community mood – of those activists who propagandized and organized for the revolution. Herzen, who watches the revolution in both France and Italy from the standpoint of a Russian exile, correctly divines that one cannot dismiss the link between the intellectual and the people and successfully understand the events that unfolded in 1848 and 1849. The revolution of 1848 was one of those rare moment in which history as the philosopher views it and history as it is made by the people overlapped.

For this reason, I think his choice of his “spokesman” in From the Other shore is important. As I’ve mentioned, there is some controversy over what Herzen is doing in the dialogues that alternate with reports and reflections in the book. Aileen Kelly, who surely knows Herzen better than anyone writing in English, claims that we can easily see through the character of the doctor in Consolatio to the author – here Herzen is saying what he thinks. And if we identify the doctor with the radical sceptic in all the dialogues, we have this fictional character playing the traditional role, in a philosophical dialogue, of the one who expresses the author’s opinion. Morson, who is one of the American champions of Bakhtin, disagrees, and thinks that the dialogue form is evidence for the dialogic thought.

Herzen had a curious way of expressing his thoughts not in treatises or lectures – although he gave some of them – but, more commonly, in memoirs and reports on the news, in letters, in stories, and in the phantasmagoria of From the Other Shore. I think there is a reason that he chose to write in such a way as to mark the occasion of the writing – which is what a letter, a report, a conversation does. He wanted to keep a close hold on the ephemeral, to use it as a guard against the power of conceptual rapture.

If this is his point, then it is appropriate that the man who, in From the Other Shore, ‘represents’ Herzen is a doctor. There’s something teasing about that doctor, after all. Many of his traits – his radical skepticism, his disengagement from the forms of revolutionary politics and sympathies with it - fit like a glove one of the great radicals of 1848 – Francois-Vincent Raspail. Raspail was a figure after Herzen’s own liberty seeking heart. For instance, he refused to get a medical degree, even though he was generally known as a great doctor; hauled into court for practicing without a license, he still refused to get one because he refused to grant authority to the medical institutions of Louis-Philippe’s France. Norma Weiner, his biographer, points out that he became extremely wealthy by writing and printing one the Manuel annuaire de la sante. It was translated into Spanish, English, German and Italian and sold at an astonishing clip, becoming one of the century’s best sellers. (Weiner, 1959: 156) Becoming independently wealthy, he could indulge in his penchant for radical politics. Madame Agoult, who must have known him, pens a good portrait of him in her history of the 1848 revolution:

“Although his doctrines, strongly bound up in a system of pantheistic philosophy, tended to a radical communism and he considered the right of property as an illusion of amour-propre, he lifted his voice on all occasions against the thought of an immediate and violent reform: he fought against the agrarian law, that he called a chimera of restitution, an absurd idea. “Those who dream of social reform by suddenly upsetting property,” he said, “would not only be guilty; they would be insane; they would be savages who take revenge on their enemies by burning their own harvests, and who crown with their own death the success of a stupid vengeance. The equality of rights is an immoveable law, the equality of goods will not last for more than two hours.”

What he had of absolute in the expression of even his more wise ideas, his shadowy character, his austerity isolated Raspail from parties and factions. He excercized a personal ascendancy over the population of the quarters. His medical knowledge put him in the position of effectively helping, at every time of day, the injuries and sufferings that the rhetoricians of the clubs contented themselves with painting and that the ambitious were trying to exploit; but it was a moral isolated action, secretly envied and wrong footed by the chiefs of the party, and which never took the initiative in the revolutionary movement. One… never saw M. Raspail accompanied but by obscure soldiers of democracy.” The radicals of the government, MM. Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc, judged him dangerous. M. Caussidiere, to whom he went on the day he was installed to see the registers of the police and find out the names of those who had betrayed him in the secret societies, refused him. A few days afterwards, M. Raspail’s paper, L’ami du people, was taken out of the hands of its paper boys and torn up by a troupe of students to whom they had made Raspail’s name suspect. The rumor floated, nobody knew how, that Raspail preached the extermination of the rich, like Marat.” (V.2, 9-10 – my translation)

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