of the denaturation.
The third lecture is more concrete: Althusser serves us notice that he intends to carry out a reading of the text itself, in order to analyse in detail that which makes it possible to think the state of pure nature. This state concerns, first of all, man’s relation to nature, and, second, men’s relations to each other. The former (man–nature) is an ‘immediate’ relation; ‘man is at home’ in nature because nature meets all his needs at all times and in all places. The latter (man–man) is ‘nugatory’, ‘nil’ [néant]; men live in dispersion, without contact, never seeing each other twice and forgetting each other as soon as they see each other. These relations make the state of pure nature possible, but are they themselves possible? That has to be demonstrated.
This demonstration implies a particular theoretical operation, for, says Althusser, to understand this Rousseauesque dispositive, we have to bring out certain concepts which are not ‘thought’ by Rousseau, although they are ‘practised’ by him; which are present in Rousseau, but in a state of ‘theoretical divagation’. We must therefore go to work to pin them down and make them plainly visible, for Rousseau ‘does not see them’, he ‘directs his gaze elsewhere’, they ‘escape his attention’. This holds for the concept of the ‘accident’, which is stated but not analysed as such; it holds, above all, for the ‘concept of the forest’, which is central: without it, the origin is unthinkable. Althusser replaces Rousseau’s gaze, ‘directed elsewhere’, with another that makes it possible to see that the forest invented by Rousseau basically fulfils all the conditions required for the immediate fusion of man with nature (trees with low branches laden with fruit; shade; refuge), and also to see how the same forest separates men from each other (assistance is pointless, for the forest provides everything; war is impossible, for the forest offers protection and abundant nourishment). Setting out from this conceptual mise en scène, Althusser puts the elements of the theory back in place, bringing out its points of opposition to other theories (Hobbes, Pufendorf, Diderot, but also Aristotle). In this sense, his third lecture will seem more familiar to readers who know Rousseau; they will find a Rousseau they know in it, albeit displaced, highlighted, and redistributed.
Concepts at work
We must now go back over this description of Althusser’s course in order to emphasize a certain aspects of it. First of all, the reader who reads through the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality before reading Althusser cannot help but notice one thing: certain terms that Althusser uses are unmistakably Rousseau’s, and here Althusser works on the standard text (for example, state of pure nature, pity, youth of the world, forest, needs, and so on); whereas other terms – terms that recur insistently throughout his exposition – are completely absent from the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and even from other texts by Rousseau (for example, circle, nothingness, distance, void, negation of the negation, and so on). This remark about an obvious feature of Althusser’s text leads us to oppose two levels of reflection: explained (Rousseau’s text with its terms, the meaning of which has to be elucidated) and explaining (Althusser’s discourse, with its invented terms that serve as tools with which to work on the first level). This might make it seem that we have to do here with the rather common situation of an ‘explication of the text’ that makes use of general categories to underscore the logic of an argument, along with its effects or its intentions. This way of looking at things is, however, incomplete, for in reality there are not two levels (Rousseau’s terms/Althusser’s terms), but three. Why three? Because the first level, that of ‘Rousseau’s terms’, is itself situated on two levels, leading us to distinguish three levels.
1. There are, first, the terms (in reality, concepts) that operate in a way that the text takes responsibility for; they are at the centre of Rousseau’s reflection and play an explicit theoretical role: nature, force, need, pity, perfectibility, and the like. All these concepts provide the core of the specialized studies of Rousseau.
2. There are, however, other terms (which are perhaps concepts, according to Althusser) that remain in the background to form a sort of accompaniment, prop, or punctual explanation: pure nature, the forest, accidents, and so on. Althusser says that Rousseau ‘practises’ these terms without ‘seeing’ them, because he ‘directs his gaze elsewhere’. When we read his course, we notice that the leading role has been conferred on these backgrounded terms; they are the ones that traverse Rousseau’s text in order to indicate its coherence and unity. The example of the forest is noteworthy. In Rousseau’s text, it seems to be nothing more than a stage-setting needed for the actors’ performance; it is there simply to provide decor for the life of savage man. In Althusser’s course, in contrast, the forest becomes the leading actor; it unfolds through the text’s every detail, sustaining and producing it to the point that natural man, pure nature, and so on become nothing more than the shadows of the theoretical trees and fruit of the forest that grounds the entire edifice.19
3. It seems to us that this promotion of stage-setting-concepts or character-concepts results from the intervention of the last level (circle, void, nothingness, and so on) in Rousseau’s text. It is as if this third level, rather than working on the text, slides beneath it in order to make its critical joints crack or to produce conceptual hernias: Althusser forges and uses these sub-concepts in order to display the fault-lines in the textual crust, to destroy its seeming continuity in order to set it on other foundations, on the ground of new concepts, on a new text of Rousseau’s. In fact, it is the same text, but the roles have been inverted: the stage-setting has come to occupy the foreground.
The second level of reading is what we have called the conceptual ‘promotion’ of certain figures, the ones Rousseau ‘practised’ without seeing them because his gaze was ‘directed elsewhere’. It seems to us that, at this level, Althusser has inaugurated a vast working programme for Rousseau studies, for he has shown the conceptual power of common objects (trees) or mises en scène (the non-fight under the fruit tree). Well before Gilles Deleuze put forward the notion of a ‘conceptual persona’,20 Althusser had already worked it out, allowing us to ‘see’ that the epistolary exchanges in The New Heloise are a mise en scène of the concept of virtue, that the various mises en scène in Emile are so many references to certain laws of development of human history, that feminine sexuality is bound up with the theory of history, that Jean-Jacques Rousseau himself establishes his ‘biographies’ as the last experimental mise en scène of human nature and its denaturation. Althusser has assimilated the fictional and the picturesque in Rousseau to the stark order of systematic conceptuality. Many modern readers of Rousseau owe him a great deal.21
Let us begin with the third level, which corresponds to the body of Althusser’s first lecture, the part following the introductory comparison of Machiavelli and Rousseau. What we are calling the ‘third level’ involves those concepts that are nowhere to be found in Rousseau’s text and that Althusser constantly insinuates beneath it in order to reveal its fractures and moments of crisis. The first of these concepts is the circle, which is applied in various ways: Rousseau criticizes philosophers for conflating the state of nature and the state of society by inscribing social characteristics at the heart of nature, but adds that this mistake is grounded in reason, which is itself incapable of thinking anything other than society, since reason is not natural, but social. Althusser calls this argument ‘the circle of denaturation’ or ‘alienation’. This figure of the circle goes well beyond the logical figure of the ‘vicious circle’, that is, of tautology or repetition of the same thing (A = A, social reason = society as represented by reason [la société raisonnée]).
Here, ‘circle’ indicates the absence of an outside or, to put it differently, the absence of a cause that would make it possible to leave the circle; it is an anti-Hegelian circle with no inner motor, a circle that can only go round and round for lack of an internal cause. If Althusser talks about a circle of denaturation containing a reason that is powerless to leave it, it is not in order to give a new name to the methodological tautology that Rousseau denounces, but to show the impossibility
