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 of leaving this circle – for Rousseau is trapped in his own critique and has no means of escaping it. The circle is neither a logical nor a topological figure, but a causal or, rather, anti-causal figure: Althusser uses the word ‘circle’ to designate a theoretical configuration that does not contain the causes of its own development. Every occurrence of the ‘circle’ later in his course is geared to this crisis of causality and leads to the same question: How to escape it, given that Rousseau has locked the exits without providing the keys? Thus, after the circle of denaturation which impedes the discovery of the state of nature, this state of nature, once it is mentioned by Rousseau, is described as a circle in its turn; the same holds for the state of the youth of the world and, finally, for that of metallurgy and agriculture. These three circles produce nothing but their recommencement, that is to say, nothing; each time, Althusser leaves his auditors waiting for a solution, a wait without an object, since this object, the cause they are waiting for, is not in the circle. Upon this wait, this ‘suspense’ that is a wait for no one knows what, Althusser constructs a scene of the void, of absence, of deviation, of demarcation, of distance, and even of the abyss (a term of Rousseau’s that Althusser uses in a different sense).
Comparison of the courses of 1956 and 1966 with the present course (1972)
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