the damnation of Mr. Bennet

In his great essay in defense of Robert Owen, Alexander Herzen remarks of 1850s England:

”The Continent, politically enslaved, is morally freer than England: the mass of ideas and doubts in circulation is much more extensive.They have become habitual and society does not shake with either fear of indignation before a free man – Wenn er die Kette bricht.

On the Continent, people are powerless before authority: thgey endure their chains, but they do not respect them. The Englishman’s liberty is more in his institutions than in himself or in his conscience.”

This is, I think, a nice way to begin a series of posts that alternate between M. de Staël and Jane Austen. In this way, I can get to the question of the condition of England.

Why England?As de Stael said in On Literature(1801), England is the country in the world where the women are most truly loved. Between De Stael’s statement and Herzen’s, something is happening. Perhaps they are both right.

De Stael thought Pride and Prejudice was vulgar, and Jane Austen, apparently, though De Stael was vulgar. But De Stael was, perhaps, the first to see what literature meant in modernity – and Jane Austen was a great plumber to the very depths of whether and how women are most truly loved.

…

So perhaps we should start with the beheadings. D.W. Harding, in the 40s, wrote a famous essay on Jane Austen that, I think it is safe to say, changed the way critics read her. It was called Regulated Hatred, and it takes up Virginia Woolf’s suggestion that there was a fiercer beast running through these novels than was reckoned by the culture of faux gentility and nostalgia. Harding begins by asking about a discrepancy between the image of Jane Austen – the preferred reading material for retired public servants, the much lauded writer of an idyll – and his own reading of Austin’s texts. In those texts, he believed he found a clue to her method of writing in such a way that her writing was, in crucial ways, overlooked – her decapitations were executed so that they disturbed no one who chose not to be disturbed.

What, he asked himself, was going on?

‘She has none of the underlying didactic intention ordinarily attributed to the satirist. Her object is not missionary; it is the more desperate one of merely finding some mode of existence for her critical attitudes…

As a novelist, therefore, part of her aim was to find the means for unobtrusive spiritual survival, without open conflict with the friendly people around her whose standards in simple things she could accept and whose affection she greatly needed.” [13]

We shall return to the satiric spirit without the missionary point – for this is a characteristic which has a wider application than he may realize. What is interesting, here, is how Harding’s 1940 idea of a double utterance, a code unobtrusively dropped into another code, is so like James Scott’s idea of the hidden transcript – or to use the vocabulary of my last post, it is a way of disguising lateral talk with vertical talk, of respecting a hierarchy while putting into words the anguish of one’s experience of it, in all its corrupting glory. Harding reproduces several passages where he will leave out a phrase, making them seem innocuous or funny, and then put the phrase back in, which makes us see the Jane Austen who could be Michelet’s Sorciere.

A good example of this is in Pride and Prejudice occurs in a passage in book II, after the terrific scene when Elizabeth rejects Darcy’s first proposal. Elizabeth is going through a conversion process in which she sees, as though for the first time, the world righted – the way things really are. And, as Darcy has told her, one of the things that really are is that her family is bizarre, eccentric, and not at all respectable. In particular, her two sisters, Kitty and Lydia, have made spectacles of themselves in the village, throwing themselves at the officers quartered there. Now Lydia, 16, has been invited to stay with friends at Bath, where the soldiers have been quartered next. Elizabeth pleads with her father to prevent this. Her father puts her off with a joke:

"Lydia will never be easy until she has exposed herself in some public place or other, and we can never expect her to do it with so little expense or inconvenience to her family as under the present circumstances."

As we know, Mr. Bennet’s words will come back to haunt him. Austen begins the next chapter with this explanation:

“Had Elizabeth's opinion been all drawn from her own family, she could not have formed a very pleasing opinion of conjugal felicity or domestic comfort. Her father, captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humour which youth and beauty generally give, had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her. Respect, esteem, and confidence had vanished for ever; and all his views of domestic happiness were overthrown. But Mr. Bennet was not of a disposition to seek comfort for the disappointment which his own imprudence had brought on, in any of those pleasures which too often console the unfortunate for their folly or their vice. He was fond of the country and of books; and from these tastes had arisen his principal enjoyments. To his wife he was very little otherwise indebted, than as her ignorance and folly had contributed to his amusement. This is not the sort of happiness which a man would in general wish to owe to his wife; but where other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.”
One could draw a line between that absolutely scathing glimpse of the marriage in the center of a family and Christina Stead’s The Man who Loved Children and Doris Lessing’s African novels, or The Golden Notebook. The male case was made out later by Hardy, but Jude, in spite of his marriage, earns our respect. Mr.Bennet doesn’t cheat on his wife – he cordially despises her. In this one paragraph, which quickly moves on and moves us into the business of getting Elizabeth and Darcy back together again, we see, as in a flash, the skull under the skin, Mr. Bennet and his wife and daughters stripped bare, like souls damned in a Memlinc painting – except who does the damning here? Hell has been filled in, and social relations, infinite social relations, have been built on top of it.

the of course

We are not utterly cut off.

There was, for instance, Mary Collier. An agricultural laborer, a washerwoman, and a poet. She was taught the crude elements of reading and writing and, in the midst of her toils, took some precious time out of the day to read. She read, for instance, Stephan Duck, another peasant poet, and noted his disparaging words about women “sitting in the fields” rather than swinging their scythes. She cried out against the lie here in her own poem, The Woman’s Labour an epistle to Stephan Duck, which was published in 1739. Collier gives us first hand an account of standing outside in the cold winter dark of early mourning, waiting for the maid to get up and let her and other washerwomen into the house, so they could begin the laundry.

But when from Wind and Weather we get in,
Briskly with Courage we our Work begin ;
Heaps of fine Linen we before us view,
Whereon to lay our Strength and Patience too ;
Cambricks and Muſlins, which our Ladies wear,
Laces and Edgings, coſtly, fine, and rare,
Which muſt be waſh'd with utmoſt Skill and Care ;
With Holland Shirts, Ruffles and Fringes too,
Faſhions which our Fore-fathers never knew.
For ſeveral Hours here we work and ſlave,
Before we can one Glimpſe of Day-light have ;
We labour hard before the Morning's paſt,
Becauſe we fear the Time runs on too faſt.

AT length bright Sol illuminates the Skies,
And ſummons drowſy Mortals to ariſe ;
Then comes our Miſtreſs to us without fail,
And in her Hand, perhaps, a Mug of Ale
To cheer our Hearts, and alſo to inform
Herſelf, what Work is done that very Morn ;
Lays her Commands upon us, that we mind
Her Linen well, nor leave the Dirt behind :


In Collier’s account, the labour is overwhelming. Duck had compared the endlessness of it to Sisyphus – and Collier replies:

“While you to Syſiphus yourſelves compare,
With Danaus' Daughters we may claim a Share ;
For while he labours hard againſt the Hill,
Bottomleſs Tubs of Water they muſt fill.”

What Collier complains of most, in the end, is

Our Toil and Labour's daily ſo extreme,
That we have hardly ever Time to dream.

It is being cut off from something vital that is felt to the very root of one’s wet being. And these nattering ghosts can’t be put down, then, by the utilitarian faith that the market will eventually make all parties happy. I’m making a wager that the vital portion is not the philosopher’s individuality, but Rousseau’s solitude – a flashing, unstructured portion of life upon which the community worth having – the community dreamt of by the aliens from happiness culture, the community in which there is time to dream – must be built.

And so she passes by – one of the obscure. Although not by Virginia Woolf’s standards.



“Ann married Mr. G., of course—of course. The words toll persistently through these obscure volumes. For in the vast world to which the memoir writers admit us there is a solemn sense of something unescapable, of a wave gathering beneath the frail flotilla and carrying it on.”

Virginia Woolf’s stunning essay on the literature of the Obscure is not about the literature of the working woman or man, not about the Mary Colliers, but that of the midlevel, that of families in the very cage of respectability, like Jane Austin’s Bennets, who sense how precariously they are perched. If we search for what has been left behind – what dirt, what voice, what soul – in order to reconstruct the wave gathering underneath these routines, we have to have an ear for lateral communication – those moments when the obscure speak to obscure in their own ever twisting language.

We are not utterly cut off.

“The atmosphere of London is so charged with particles of carbon and black smoke that if you hang up a white cloth in a current of fresh air, you will find it, at the end of two hours, entirely covered with little plack spots, and the white vest that you put on in the morning is dirty before the hour of dinner.” –A year in London, Auguste Jean B. Defauconpret, 1819 – my translation.

In Domination and the arts of resistance, Scott wisely sees that the very form of Hegel’s presentation of the master-slave relationship is politically coded. It is a dyadic form, master on one side and slave or servant on the other. This face to face form has been inherited by philosophy since, and even considered the nucleus of revolutionary thought, but… as Scott points out … the dyad is the master’s preference. ‘The politcal symbolism of most forms of personal dominance carries with it the implicit assumption that the subordinates gather only when authorized to do so from above.” And though we have been told that his personalized struggle for recognition is the very essence and myth of liberation, what is avoided here is the lateral, the association, the crowd. When the slave, in the great myth, faces the master, what is pre-emptively excluded is what Scott calls the hidden transcript, and what I would call lateral communication.

‘One has only to imagine a feudal lord noticing a large number of his serfs advancing unsummoned to his manor, a large number of beggarts (masterless men by definition) moving through the countryside, or even a large crowd of factory workers gathered near the plant manager’s office to recognize the possibilities.” (63)

These two modes of conversational direction – vertical and lateral – are, of course, our old friends from school, our first sense of disciplinary space. Lateral speech, at the wrong time, is punishable.

It may seem a long stretch from masterless men to the Bennet daughters, attending a ball in Pride and Prejudice, but I think that the novel, and especially the novel as the symptom of female insubordination or corruption, participates in this grid. Of course, lateral speech happens at the top as well as at the bottom – and the English novel, supremely, wants to make a place in the middle for it. However, even at the top it is felt to be somewhat lowering when it is exposed, as if the masters speaking among themselves go down the hierarchical scale and gossip. They reveal secrets, they lose the mask – and these secrets are precisely what they are accused of by the slave. It is not all recognition, you see.

The pathos of the obscure, the heavy “of course” that Virginia Woolf correctly sees as forming all the motion that sweeps the obscure across history, is lodged in the fact that the secrets aren’t interesting. That so and so slept with x, that uncle y was a drunkard – all of this, in the memoirs that Woolf picks up, has faded away. It has lost our interest. Such is the difference between synchronic interest, in which busy-ness itself engages us, and diachronic interest, in which only the heroic engages us. One definition of revolution is that it is the time when the arms, so to speak, of the synchronic and diachronic are squeezed together, imposed one on top of the other, so that the obscure becomes heroic, the complaints (doleances) of the blanchisseuses of Marseilles exert an oversocial force that is as riveting as the beheading of a king. Obviously, here, too, the forms of vertical and lateral communication correspond, in some way, link up with the synchronic and diachronic sense of interest.

Time, as Hamlet points out, is out of joint. Time, as Derrida points out, quoting Hamlet in Specters of Marx, is out of joint.

No, we are not utterly cut off. We are wired in.

It is this revolutionary energy to which Woolf unconsciously refers when she says that ‘Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to give Jane Austen the supreme delight of slicing their heads off.”

at the portals of the modern with a basket in my arms

So my faithful gadfly North wants to know, why washerwomen?
Wash women. Laudresses.

Why not seamstresses? Why not the workers in pin factories? Why not paysannes or prostitutes?

Well, partly it is for that most male of reasons: la donna è mobile. Blanchisseuses in 18th century Paris were not only numerous, but also moved in a number of social spaces. The obscure washed their own clothes, often jostling professional wash women on the banks of the Seine. As one climbs the ladder of notability, however, self-presentation, and thus clean linen, becomes ever more important.

And then, too, what would our artificial paradise be without chemicals? In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, while some remnant alchemists looked for universal solvents or the philosopher’s stone, others – whose very spirit is breathed out by the wonderful planches in the encyclopedia, those busy, small worlds – turned to more practical questions. And what was more practical than a better soap. Various substances – from dried pig’s shit to oak ash – were used to get cloth clean. Soap was the big expense for a wash woman – in 1789, when the cahiers de doleances, or notebooks of complaint (or, to be all Jeremiah about it, books of Lamentation) were collected throughout France, the blanchisseuses of Marseilles presented their complaint that the regulations concerning the composition and price of soap were not being respected.

And the relation between soap and clothes is as dramatic, in its way, as that between thesis and antithesis in Hegel’s dialectic. Clothes, after all, took on the complete impress of the ordinary – and especially the extraordinary. Every wine stain, every drop of grease, sperm, juice, all the perfumes and powders, all the sweat – and it is just these fantasmal half-beings, social doxa, that had to disappear. They had to be trampled, beaten, spindled, driven out – all these real ghosts, ghosts in material time. At the same time, the cloth itself had to be preserved. Soillure, dirt, - ground terms, terms that are rooted in the fundamentals of purity and impurity – and the wash woman stands at these archaic portals of purity. “There is not a city where one uses up more linen,” wrote Sebastian Mercier about Paris. And there was not a city where the archaic so joins the modern.

The modern came in the form of Claude Louis Berthollet’s invention of “l’eau de Javel”, in which chlorine was dissolved in a solution of potash lye. You may think that here we have got away from the gods, but actually, here we begin the divine and diabolic course that has touched every creature on earth – for it is among the elements of social life, raising crops, cleaning clothes, that chemistry turned practical, and then took over the human sphere to a point we cannot even comprehend.

Meanwhile, the body breaking method of beating clothes was also slowly being modified. In London, in 1782, Henry Sidgier was issued a patent for a drum rotating machine to wash clothes. Obscure Sidgier! And yet, as Lee Maxwell points out in his history of the washing machine, the principle of the drum rotating machine remains the same today.

What is funny is that out of this vast, centuries old enterprise, relatively little comes down to us. Compare the songs we all know celebrating the cowboy, to those we know celebrating the wash woman. In fact, do we know any celebrating the wash woman? The ‘we’ here is Anglophone. In fact, in France and Germany, and no doubt in Italy, those songs and the literature certainly remain.

It is to the literature I will go next.

solitude and the washerwoman

=Marie Petiet


It is said that St. Petersburg was built on the bones of the builders, the army of serfs that drained the swamps and laid the foundations.

And then, too, as Emerson once said, there was a deal of guano in every immigrant ship that came to America. Buffalo skinners and railroad track men, how many laid down their only homestead and died.

So while we are on the subject, give a thought to the hundreds of thousands of permanently bent spines, the hernias, the paralyzing shoots of rheumatism that rattle around in your clean clothes. Blanchisseuses, Wascherfrau, laundresses, washing woman – from the early modern period to the washing machine of the 50s, this overwhelmingly female job was ill paid, unhealthy, and exhausting. It is, of course, far from over yet. In Mexico City, with its terrible water system, you will not find the American style washer/drier set up as the convenience we all have, and on the rooftops of even rich mansions you might well find the maid soaking clothes in the tub.

Now there is some justice in asking if intellectual history would come unscathed through the judgment of the bones it ignores. And such might be one judgment on solitude as I’ve been construing it. Solitude is a bourgeois affectation – I can hear the voice of the commissar say exactly that, imagine some cloth capped Marxist enforcer from the 30s or 50s pronouncing the very word ‘solditude’ with the utmost contempt.

But contempt has its day, too, its warrant, its reasons. There were armies of washerwomen, and it is a fair question: what would solitude mean to them? To the 167,607 who worked in England and Wales in 1861 (Malcolmson, 7) To the half of free black women who worked as laundresses in Philadelphia in 1840. In France, in the 1870s, there were 90,000 in Paris alone.

Here is what M. Moisy, author of Les Lavoirs de Paris, wrote about the washerwoman:

She has a good heart. A strong yeller, I concur – like the daughter of Mme Angot – she is not less strong in her good sentiments. When an accident, or unemployment strikes one of her neighbors: let a drive be organized in the lavoir: she always gives, even if the charity is to an enemy of yesterday.

She also has the love or her profession, more than other workers of any other profession, and it is tough, this job: the laundry worker begins at six in the morning, only takes an hour off to eat, and works until eight or eight thirty in the evening, around thirteen to fourteen hours a day.

Returned home, wet down to her bones, she has to prepare the soup for her husband and kids, and doesn’t get to sleep until she has done her housework.

The next day should puts on her humid rags to begin the day’s rude existence all over again.” (Barbaret I: 271 – my translation)

Such numbers of women force an image upon the collective mind. It is a little unsettling that the image of the washing woman in the 18th and 19th century corresponds so well to national stereotypes. In Germany and Austria, there was the hetera washerwoman, the Alte Wascherfrau, who had her place in Volkslied and Grimm’s tales, and even casts a shadow in Kafka’s The Trial. In France, from Jean Vadé’s 1740 comic Parisian dialect novel, Lettres de la Grenouillère to Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse, the blanchisseuse was renowned for her freedom, for her constant presence on Parisian streets, and, of course, for her erotic charm – a charm that wished away the wet rags of Moisy’s description. Balzac’s men, his mature men, ass men, cannot resist her. And in England? England, that frightening, puzzling place. Unlike the cook and the chambermaid, who at least get some bawdy attention from 18th century writers and printmakers, and of course get orders in respectable 19th century households, there is something like a negative space, as though the laundress really was a pariah. Which is not true, of course, about Ireland – the old washerwomen in Yeats, and the voices of them in Finnegan’s Wake, are taken from life – that is where the authentic circus animals come from. In America, as we have mentioned, race has everything to do with cleaning clothes.

Well, solitude and the washerwoman will take us to another post.

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a walk of her own

I have not been entirely happy with the way I am developing the theme of solitude in the previous posts – perhaps I am simply bumping against the limit of developing an idea in the hit and run of a blog. I have been concerned from the outset not to make this another totalizing history – that melancholy child of universal history, but here and there, I do just that, or make just those gestures, impose unconsciously the manicheanism of the sides, of the bad and the good in deathgrapple. To shake this out of one’s head is an intellectual victory that is never enough, for it creeps back in the next day. So it goes.

I started out with Marie D’Agoult’s account of the revolutionary tradition in achieving women’s rights – which, appropriately enough, is found in her history of the revolution of 1848. The trend line, here – in as much as the trend line is under my control – is to try to show something about women and the culture of happiness. This is vitally important, as, from one perspective, one could say that the culture of happiness has been uncommonly favorable to women – bourgeois women, peasant women, proletariat women. The aliens from happiness culture, in fact, often seem to suffer from nasty cases of misogyny.

And yet and yet… In the turn towards the republican idea in the 18th century, as Maria D’Agoult notes, women were left out. There is an old tradition of blaming Rousseau for this or that aspect of the French revolution, and it always does something that I am careful not to do, erasing the mediation between intellectual and social history. But there is, as I’ve pointed out, a moment in Rousseau’s work in which both D’Agoult’s criticism and the countering idea, that Rousseau was actually an enlightened figure with regard to women, both have some justification. Examining that moment, in which the difference between men and women speaks in a new way, and the equality between men and women is foreclosed upon in an old way, brings to light a theme that is separated from Rousseau’s political and cultural politics – the theme of solitude. Todorov, for instance, speaks of Rousseau’s notion of solitude as an exception that applies to Jean-Jacques alone, or at least to the rare extra-societal figure. That notion of solitude, conveniently enough, conflates the solitary with the stranger. I have already, in several posts in 2997 and 2008, alluded to the importance of the adventurer in understanding the libertine fissure in the old order - the adventurer who loiters about the village economy, the society of the limited good, the dependence of the little on the great tradition. The adventurer who sails the ocean with his fevers, and destroys populations. The adventurer who becomes a politician in the late nineteenth century.

Like the adventurer, the solitary is not a type categorized by any division of labor. I’m concerned – and here I depart from Rousseau, having taken a hint – though, with solitude as an existential and original condition that founds equality. It is at this moment, in this dream of an exceptional solitude, that an almost unnoticeable division occurs between solitude and individuality. Intellectual historians have noticed that individualism – a word that was first coined in France at the end of the eighteenth century – connoted something disrespectable and a-social up to about the 1830s. Solitude was, of course, eclipsed by individualism. That eclipse inflects, in particular, the history of women. In founding equality on access to solitude, one is not promoting a lifestyle of solitude. Rather, one is promoting the kind of community that allows, in its very structure, access to solitude as one of the basic interstices of the moral life. It is not the community of the hermit or the shut in, but as a possibility available to every member of the community to walk unseen. To change the title of Virginia Woolf’s essay slightly – an essay about the lack of solitude for women, by the way - equality for women means, here, ‘a walk of her own.’ A solitary promenade of her own.

Rousseau was not, of course, the first to discover the conjunction of daydream, meditation, walking, and solitude. There is a famous letter from Descartes to Guez de Balzac, written in 1631, about the solitary walk. It has been translated a number of times into English – some of the translations are a little bizarre. I’m going to translate the famous bits here, and then – I’m going to move on. I want to go to Madame de Stael and Jane Austin next.

On to Descartes, then.

Guez de Balzac was a school friend from La Fleche. He has now fallen into obscurity even in France, and was never very famous in the English speaking world. His fame in the seventeenth century was as a refiner of the language, a rhetor. Or a corruptor of the language – as Stephen Gaukroger points out, Balzac’s style was the court style. In 1631, the court was on a collision course with the nobility – the proto-Fronde. And the Fronde was friendly to the Gassendi circle. Frondeurs were prominent patrons of Epicurian thought. Moliere’s Dom Juan is definitely a Frondeur.

Descartes’ letter to Balzac begins with a movement that startles us, so much does it evoke the Descartes of the Meditations:

“I lifted up my hand against my eyes to see if I was not dreaming when I read in your letter that you had a plan to come here, and still I dare not rejoice at the news otherwise than as if I had only dreamt it: however, I don’t find it strange that an intellect (esprit) as great and generous as your own cannot accommodate itself to these servile constraints to which one is obligated in the court; and since you sincerely assure me that God has inspired you to quit the world, I would consider myself to sin against the Holy Spirit if I tried to turn you from your holy resolution; but you must pardon my zeal if I press you to chose Amsterdam for your retreat, and to prefer it, I wouldn’t say not only to all the convents of the capuchins and chartists, where necessarily good men do retire, but also to the most beautiful spots in France and Italy, and even to that celebrated hermitage in which you stayed last year. However well stocked a country house, it always lacks an infinity of commodities which are only found in the cities; and the solitude that one hopes to find there is never quite perfectly encountered after all. I’d like to see you find a canal that would make the greatest talkers daydream, a valley so solitary that it can inspire them to transports and joy; but unfortunately, it can also be the case that you will have a quantity of little neighbors that will importune you on occasion, and whose visits are more discommoding than those you receive in Paris: instead in the great city where I live, there being no man except me who is not engaged in the market, each is so attentive to his profit that I can remain there all my life without being seen by anyone. I go walking every day among the confusion of a mass of people with as much liberty and repose that attends you in your country lanes; and I never consider the people that I encounter otherwise than I would the trees I would meet in a forest, or the animals I would pass there; even the noise of their tumults no longer interrupts my reveries any more than they would be interrupted by some stream: and if I makes some reflection on their actions, it is with the same pleasure that you have to see the peasants who cultivate your countrysides; for I see that all their work serves to embellish the place of my residence, and to make it the case that I lack nothing. If you find pleasure to see the fruits in your vineyards growing and to exist there in such abundance under your eyes, don’t you think that there is as much to see coming here ships which carry us abundantly all the products of the Indies, and everything that is rare in Europe? What other place could one chose in any other part of the world where all the commodities of life and all the curiosities that could be wished for are as easy to discover as here? In what other country can one enjoy such entire liberty, where one can sleep with less inquietude, where there are always armed men on foot expressly to guard you, where poisonings, betrayals and calumnies are least known, and where there still exists remants of the innocence of our ancestors?”

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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

This is going to be my August reminder to donate to LI and News from the Zona if you feel like it.
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.