of it in order to confer epistemological status on it: it is, within denatured nature itself, the voice of nature that will be able to guide reason. The heart is not one element among others in Rousseau’s thought; it is the operative key to an impossible operation, the production of knowledge about true nature. There is more: by making reason dependent on the heart, by thus endowing it with secondary status, Rousseau ‘marks himself off from’, or ‘takes his distance’ from, the Enlightenment philosophy which posits reason as the fundamental, supreme principle. The ‘heart’ is thus not a thing – not even a deeply personal thing – but a theoretical operation, the consequence of which is a grasp of the true origin, the state of pure nature. ‘Pure’, in the expression ‘state of pure nature’, indicates – Althusser dwells on this – the difference from ‘the state of nature’ of which all the natural law philosophers speak. The ‘heart’ is a concept that operates on the object peculiar to it, and this object is ‘pure’ nature.15 Althusser’s first lecture thus situates Rousseau in his historical period and establishes the epistemological status of his concepts.
His second lecture is about the genesis of humanity, the genesis that leads to society as we know it. Here, too, Althusser sets about exacerbating problems. Once we have isolated the state of pure nature by leaving the ‘circle of denaturation’ (in which his prececessors were caught), it remains to see how, and by what means, it will be possible to turn back towards this denaturation (which has taken place; this is a fact, inasmuch as the state of pure nature no longer exists). Althusser, rather than quickly taking up the solution proffered by Rousseau (which we mentioned above: natural catastrophes, the discovery of metallurgy), subjects the state of pure nature to veritable philosophical torture in order to make it confess, by all available means, that it is incapable, radically incapable, of producing society. It is as if Rousseau, after leaving the circle of denaturation by way of the heart, found himself caught in a second ‘circle’, that of the true origin, with no way of getting out of it. After seeking to formulate a true origin that expels every disguised trace of society, Rousseau walls himself up in a ‘theoretical isolation’ from which there is no exit: between this true origin and society he puts a ‘distance’, an ‘abyss’, a ‘void created by this separation’.
That is the price to pay for this origin that is a ‘radical absence [néant] of society’. A radical absence, not just an absence, for nothing indicates its absence, in the sense in which someone who is absent is waited for, has his name on a list: there is a place for him to take, which is empty while we wait for him, yet a place we can designate nonetheless. Althusser presents the state of pure nature as a present without a future, in a radical sense: the future is not a necessity inscribed in the present (what Althusser calls a ‘deduction’ – or ‘analysis’ – ‘of essence’). We must, however, also understand that the future is just as plainly not a possibility of the present (a virtuality dependent on various elements contained in the present, which might, under certain circumstances, combine and fuse). Neither a necessity nor a possibility, the future is the impossible of the present. Historical time is thus divided, torn [écarté, écartelé] between a suspended present and ‘its’ future, from which it is absolutely separated (by an ‘abyss’).
On the basis of this hopelessly blocked situation, Althusser opposes the solutions of natural law philosophy (Hobbes, Locke) to Rousseau’s. In Hobbes and Locke, society is deduced from the state of nature, since it is already present in it and its genesis is ‘linear and continuous’; this is a ‘deduction of essence’. For Rousseau, this genesis is the very opposite of a deduction; it can only come about thanks to chance occurrences and accidents that impinge on it from outside (catastrophes). It is a genesis made up of ‘gaps’, ‘breaks’, and ‘hiatuses’. Ultimately, the state of nature finds itself ‘dismembered’ in three ‘discontinuous moments’. The closed circle of the true origin (circle 1) is succeeded by other circles that are just as hermetically sealed: the youth of the world (circle 2) and nascent agriculture (circle 3).
This presentation of Rousseau’s theory as riven by discontinuities [en déchirure] leads Althusser to define two points. The first is that Rousseau’s philosophy proceeds by way not of right, but of ‘history’, the ‘event’: there is no appeal to right emanating from a fearful humanity (as there is in Hobbes, where men prefer to be subject to laws rather than risk death). Accidental, unpredictable fact changes everything and establishes a new order. The second point bears on the theory of this history: this Rousseauesque history is a combination of the accidental and the necessary. The accidents are contingent, but arrive ‘at the right moment’: there is ‘coincidence between chance and the moment of chance’,16 and this establishes a rational, non-teleological history, because the necessity of the future has to wait for contingency. Althusser then comes back to these three ‘circles’ of the state of nature: pure nature (circle 1), youth of the world (circle 2), and metallurgy + agriculture (circle 3). If circles 2 and 3 are the result of a process, circle 1, in contrast, ‘results from nothing’ and ‘is not the beginning’, for ‘the beginning begins [ça commence] after the origin’. Thus it comes from nothing and goes nowhere, as if suspended in the ‘void’.
The rest of the second lecture examines this first state, paving the way for the following lecture, which will go into its contents in detail. Althusser puts this state under the general sign of negation: it is a ‘radical absence of society’, a ‘radical absence of natural law’, and it requires Rousseau to find a ‘representation of negation’. Althusser explains that the ‘realization’ of this ‘void’ is provided by ‘the forest’, which is ‘a void’ ‘without time’, while human qualities in this state are themselves ‘purely negative’ (such as pity), or ‘virtual’, ‘latent’ (such as reason and perfectibility). This true origin is an ‘origin of nothing’ [origine de rien]; it is not the true double of the false origin, as in Plato, for whom error (the shadows at the back of the cave) is a deformed replica of reality (the light and the ideas outside).
The future is, at every moment in this history, not just absent from the present, but annihilated by a sort of antibody. The present abounds in anti-future; it is full of an antibody that voids the future, should it, perchance, present itself. The forest is this antibody, for it stuffs savage man full of everything he could feel a need for before he feels a need for it; it is a black hole that devours all causality in advance, with the result that there is no future in preparation or even in gestation. Thus ‘perfectibility’ does not strike root in the state of nature in order to bear fruit later, in society; ‘perfectibility’ is present, but for nothing, awash in an excessive fullness that drains it of all reality. We can learn only after the fact that it was present.17 One measures the difference in tone between Rousseau’s narrative, which is focused on savage man, his life, his acts, and his encounters, and Althusser’s reading, which invests it with concepts and lines of force, a reading that is quite remote from the apparent ‘novel’.
The remainder of the genesis, phases 2 and 3, is thus external to this ‘origin of nothing’, and the ‘law of development’ is specific to each phase, operating within each ‘particular’ circle. Each circle invents its own logic, fabricating its internal laws and problems for itself; they are not the same as those of the preceding or following circles (for example, the origin of language is a problem that arises in the state of pure nature, but not in the youth of the world, while there is no place in the latter for the economic questions of labour, wealth, and so on, which will be at the centre of the next circle). Thus, according to Althusser, no general laws of history exist for Rousseau, but only regional laws that belong to each particular moment of history and yield to other laws in subsequent periods. We are at a very far remove from a Rousseau supposed to have anticipated Marxism with its universal economic laws (productive forces, relations of production, and so on).18
At the end of these three states of nature, the social contract makes its appearance. It is a ‘leap in the void’, suspended over an ‘abyss’, and a ‘new beginning of the origin’, a ‘negation of the negation’ (‘denaturation of the denaturation’). For the social
