Lessons on Rousseau. Louis Althusser
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Rousseau. In 1956, his course on Rousseau affirms, on the contrary, that he ‘conceives of history as a process, as the effect or manifestation of an immanent necessity … It is not, however … a continuous, linear development, but a nodal, dialectical process.’22 And again: ‘Rousseau is perhaps the first philosopher to have systematically conceived of the development of history … as a development that is dialectically bound up with material conditions … (consider the forest, the end of the forest, the rich and the poor …).’23
We certainly do find a circle in the 1956 course, but it is the circle of tautology.24 It appears clearly that Althusser, like most of Rousseau’s Marxist readers, is looking for an internal (‘immanent’) historical causality in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, a history that progresses by sudden leaps and bounds (‘dialectical nodal process’) and is grounded on a material base (‘the forest’, and so on). The portrayal of a historical time on the verge of the abyss, empty of determinations, is not yet on the agenda.
Ten years later, in the 1966 course, the circle, the void, and nothingness all make their appearance. They do not, however, have the same systematic character; they are still associated with tautological forms and dialectical genesis. Certain formulas that the 1972 course puts at the centre of its reflection are to be found in the 1966 course, as are ‘circles’ separated by ‘accidents’.25 One difference should be noted: in 1966, the internal relation between closure (circle) and the annihilation of history (the void) is not explicitly thought through; that is why, in 1966, the forest does not play the decisive role (causal antibody) that it will play six years later, in the course we are here concerned with.
Let us turn back to the 1972 course. It can be seen that the sub-concept of the circle and the sub-concepts of the void, nothingness [néant], and so on form a system: there is a causal void because the circle is a radical absence [néant] of internal causality (‘radical absence of society’). The ‘circle’ makes it possible to eliminate recourse to the ‘dialectic’. The term ‘dialectic’ is, moreover, absent from this course, except in a quotation from Engels, who finds ‘in Rousseau … a whole series of the same dialectical turns of speech as Marx used’.26
Althusser, then, isolates the ‘circles’ that turn round and round for lack of an internal cause, and it is clear that this figure is constantly associated with the ideas of negation, the void, nothing, and so on. There is nothing in the circle that could get us out of it. Althusser’s thought is fixed on a particular type of causality, the one we can neither predict nor expect nor guess, for it is an ‘accident’ – a term of Rousseau’s that he elevates to the rank of a master concept. It is likewise in order to produce the void – to show clearly that, in the circle, there exists no cause, however slight, that might make it possible to leave it – that Althusser is led to establish the forest as a concept: for the forest is perceived as the a priori suppression of anything that might open up the circle, so that there is not only nothing in the circle, but also a painstaking construction of this nothing. The forest is a ‘concept’ because it is the incessant, painstaking fabrication of this nothing; it puts, everywhere, a void between every thing and what follows that thing; it blocks every embryonic form of causality in advance.
By creating the void around the circles and in them, Althusser makes room for a theory of history at antipodes from the ‘dialectical’ tradition that depicts historical time as an unfolding of the contents, the ‘internal contradictions’, that produce their sublation. There is no contradiction in the Althusserian circles; history becomes inseparable from the idea of the event, that is, an unpredictable accident that occurs at the right moment. It would be a mistake to suppose that the passage about the ‘negation of the negation’ (‘denaturation of the denaturation’) suggests a kind of dialectic, à la Engels. For, in this passage, Althusser defines the social contract as a negation of the negation on the grounds that man’s entry into political society necessarily denatures him (Rousseau repeats this in several texts). As we noted, however, this denaturation pertains to a previous state (youth of the world, agriculture) that is itself a denaturation with respect to true (pure) nature. It is, for this reason, a denaturation of denaturation. In this formula, however, the negation of the negation, far from being the motor that goes from the present to the future (from pure nature to society), is, rather, a return of the present towards the past for the purpose of recovering that past après coup. Althusser calls this a ‘reprise’ [reprise]. Society takes back [reprend] from nature what nature never gave it. Thus there is a return of (towards) pure nature, but not at all in accordance with a dialectical spiral advancing all by itself. Quite the contrary: Althusser takes note of a return or reprise of something that was without effect, without dynamics, without progress – it is simply noted. One sees what Rousseau owes to Althusser: a reading that transforms his figures (images, characters, stage-settings, situations, and the like) into veritable concepts and a theory of history that is materialist but not dialectical.
What Althusser owes to Rousseau
In considering Althusser’s three courses on Rousseau (1956, 1966, 1972), we have seen that he gradually takes his distance from what might be called the traditional Marxist reading of Rousseau. Obviously there exist Marxist readings that are highly divergent in their interpretations, but they generally revolve around the same preoccupations. Rousseau is a ‘petty bourgeois’ thinker (a reading directly inspired by Marx), a dialectician (Engels), a socialist who anticipated Marx, and so on. Generally speaking, Marxists look for a dialectical ‘method’ in Rousseau, an economic determinism, a body of political thought centred on the state or on equality, an anthropology that opposes man and the citizen: they look for Marx in Rousseau either to find him there or to remark his absence.27 While Althusser’s 1956 text fits into this theoretical landscape rather well, his 1966 text detaches itself from it, and his 1972 text has nothing more to do with it.
In 1972, there is no longer any question of the dialectic and, as we have emphasized, the ‘negation of the negation’ is the very opposite of what Engels designates by that term, since, rather than being a future-orientated process, it is merely the retrospectively observed ‘reprise’ of an inactive past. The economic problems have disappeared, and the whole course concentrates on hermetic circles emptied of causality, the happen-stance of unpredictable accidents, and the retrospective theory of history, which breaks with the monism of laws that constituted the foundation of the historical and dialectical materialism in general circulation; it is not a question of either class struggle or productive forces (elements that are, however, easy to exhibit in Rousseau’s text when one sets out from simple identifications: the rich/the poor, forced labour, and so on). Thus Rousseau appears to be at a rather far remove from Marxism, and Professor Althusser seems oddly distant from the communist philosopher who gained his international reputation on the strength of an analysis of the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao.
A reading of Althusser’s posthumous texts and his correspondence shows that this is not the reality of the matter, and that, in 1972, Althusser was thinking about the question of materialist philosophy in accordance with a twofold idea.
On the one hand, he was fabricating ‘his own Marx’28 by repeating the classical terms of Marxism in order to confer new content on them. He poured new wine into old bottles, keeping the words but investing them with a meaning that allowed him to develop a new theory of historical causality.29 He rejected materialism’s ontological preoccupations (matter precedes thought, and so on) in order to found materialism on a theory of knowledge and, later, on a theory of the primacy of practice. All this is rather well known.
On the other hand, he already had this ‘Rousseauesque’ depiction of nothingness, the unpredictable encounter, circumstance, retroactive [après-coup] causality, and the like in mind, as is attested by his correspondence when, in 1971, a year before delivering this course, he wrote to his friend Franca: ‘Encounter: this word is very important for me, and has a profound resonance: I’m holding it in reserve for philosophical interventions about the dialectic that I will make some day.’30 We can also discern a few formulations of this line of thought in his lecture on Lenin: ‘The intervention of each philosophy, which displaces or modifies existing philosophical categories