Finite Community: Reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau with Jean-Luc Nancy

Abstract

Jean-Luc Nancy identifies Rousseau as the first to conceive community as a lost state of immediacy and transparency. Rousseau’s conception has allegedly shaped the western ideal of an immanent community. Nancy deconstructs that ideal, arguing that immanence would suppress community; its oneness would block the being-with which enables our ontological being-in-common. This article argues that Rousseau never posits a lost community but actually explores, like Nancy, the political closure of immanence. Man’s distinguishing trait of perfectibility, which renders him finite, always open to change for better or worse, rejects the self-enclosure of immanence as does the constant willing of the general will which defines a community’s political life. If citizens could form an immanent whole, they would have nothing left to will, reaching an inhuman situation without liberty, reflection and responsibility. A community’s vitality, as Rousseau’s discussion of Poland suggests, does not come from closure to the outside but from openness to what potentially disrupts it. That openness, by raising the question of communal legitimacy, underlies the shared responsibility of citizens to ensure their free and equal coexistence. Rousseau’s theory, I conclude, thus supplements Nancy’s ontological reflection by considering the antagonism and struggles endured by ontic communities as they confront the chances and risks arising from their finitude.

Acknowledgement

I wish to thank the reviewers of The European Legacy for their helpful comments on my article.

Notes

1. Jean Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (IC), trans. Peter Conor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhey (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 9; hereafter page references are cited in the text. For an overview of Nancy’s philosophy, see Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), and Marie-Eve Morin, Jean-Luc Nancy (Cambridge: Polity, 2012). Ignaas Devisch situates Nancy’s reflection in current debates on community in Jean-Luc Nancy and the Question of Community (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

2. Andrew Norris, “Jean-Luc Nancy and the Myth of the Common,” Constellations 7 (2000): 280.

3. For Robert Bernasconi Nancy’s reading of Rousseau as yearning for immanence is “fairly widespread” but “is not readily supported by Rousseau’s texts.” Rousseau employs the word ‘community’ sparingly and “the kind of society that Rousseau was nostalgic for was a rural society where the people had very little contact with each other” Robert Bernasconi, “On Deconstructing Nostalgia in the West: The Debate between Nancy and Blanchot,” Research in Phenomenology 23.1 (1993): 17. The sparing use of the term does not mean, however, that ‘community’ represents a minor preoccupation for Rousseau. ‘Community’ and ‘society’ were “virtually interchangeable” in the period Rousseau was writing; they both expressed the shared life world of the people as opposed to the remote, absolutist state. Gerard Delanty, Community (London: Routledge, 2003), 8.

4. My approach follows Pierre Bayard’s idea of plagiarism by anticipation which rejects a simple chronology, examining how the meanings of earlier texts are often defined retroactively through dialogue with later texts whose meanings are also modified in the process. Pierre Bayard, Le Plagiat par anticipation (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 2009).

5. I adopt Paul de Man’s argument that Derrida’s deconstruction of Rousseau deconstructs a tradition in Rousseau criticism which portrays him as a metaphysician of presence. “There is no need to deconstruct Rousseau,” argues de Man, not because the criticism of his work is correct but because Rousseau’s texts already deconstruct themselves. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 139.

6. References to Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (DOI), Social Contract (SC), and Geneva Manuscript (GM) are taken from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. J. D. Cole (London: Everyman, 2004). For Rousseau’s Emile (E), see Emile, trans. Barabara Foxley (London: Everyman, 2003); hereafter pages references are cited in the text. The translations have been modified in places.

7. Tracy Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (London: Sage, 1994), 140. Strong translated Nancy’s “La comparution/compearance,” Political Theory 20 (1999): 371–98; his own reading of Rousseau may have been informed by Nancy’s conception of community. Strong avoids the term ‘community,’ using the ‘in-common’ instead.

8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland (C), trans. Willmoore Kendall (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1985); hereafter page references are cited in the text.

9. Norris, “Jean-Luc Nancy and the Myth of the Common,” 273.

10. Jane Gordan makes a similar point about Rousseau’s plans for Corsica in Creolising Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

11. I employ Derrida’s idea of autoimmunity to analyse this aporia. This biological image indicates how total self-protection could occur only by excluding all threat, by closing off the future without which nothing can occur or live on. It would imply a state of death. For this reason, the self-protective drive has to be compromised, by opening itself up to the otherness, to the uncertainty which it aims to block, so that it does not destroy what it seeks to protect. See his “Knowledge and Faith,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gil Andijar (London: Routledge, 2002), 87. For a discussion of autoimmunity, see Martin Hӓgglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

12. My use of the concept of autoimmunity identifies Rousseau’s political thinking with an anti-religious position: autoimmunity rejects the “horizon of redemption, of the restoration of the unscathed, of indemnification” which, for Derrida, characterises religion (‘Knowledge and Faith’, 84 n. 30). I would therefore agree with Jeremiah Alberg that the rejection of salvation is central to Rousseau’s philosophy but I conclude differently. For Alberg, that rejection means that Rousseau’s “incredible critiques of society... lead nowhere. ... In a sense, he propagates the vices against which he protests.” Jeremiah Alberg, A Reinterpretation of Rousseau: A Religious System (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 183. In my reading, it gives urgency to his critiques, affirming our responsibility to reflect on, and act in, the present because there is no salvation awaiting us.

13. Nancy takes this opposition from Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society, trans. José Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

14. Christopher Fynsk, “Foreword,” in The Inoperative Community, x.

15. Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand, 199.

16. Ignaas Devisch, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Question of Community (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 33. Their reading of Rousseau is largely informed by Jean Starobinski’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau. La transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).

17. Compearance signifies how “there is no appearance, no coming to the world and to being in the world that does not take place as withness.” Devisch, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Question of Community, 99.

18. Katrin Froese stresses how compassion requires separation in Rousseau and Nietzsche (New York: Lexington Books, 2001), 24–28.

19. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, trans. J. H. Moran and A. Gode (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), 32.

20. “Life does not go without death, and death is not beyond, outside of life, unless one inscribes the beyond in the inside, in the essence of the living.” Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, trans. P. Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 141.

21. Strong describes nature as “the absence of the in-common,” in The Politics of the Ordinary, 52.

22. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 155–56.

23. Nancy advocates joining Rousseau’s theory of the common body from which man is produced with Pascal’s conception of “Man as infinitely transcending man” to think democracy beyond its current ‘managerial’ form, so that it expresses “the true possibility of being all together, all and each one among all. ” The addition of Pascal to Rousseau allows us to think the human which is produced not simply as a given but as an infinite process of exposition and transcendence. Rousseau’s insistence on man’s perfectibility already implies a process of infinite transcendence. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Truth of Democracy, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press), 14–15, 19.

24. On how the impossibility of real democracy enables democratic activity, see Kevin Inston, Rousseau and Radical Democracy (London: Continuum, 2010).

25. Norris, “Jean-Luc Nancy and The Myth of Community,” 280.

26. Norris, “Jean-Luc Nancy and The Myth of Community,” 281.

27. Arthur Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 199.

28. Peter Gratton, The State of Sovereignty (New York: SUNY, 2013), 42.

29. William Corlett, Community without Unity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 18–19.

30. Roberto Esposito sees immunity as the opposite of community: immunisation closes contact with the outside and therefore aims to protect individuals from the demands of community. While Hobbes allegedly advances this logic, Rousseau recognises both the necessity and impossibility of community but eventually succumbs to the myth of an unmediated community modelled on the image of self-sufficient natural man. Self-sufficiency is possible only by excluding community. For Esposito, Rousseau’s reflection reaches this impasse. See his Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 41–61. My reading critiques his position.

31. Strong, The Politics of the Ordinary, 34.

32. Christopher Betram, Rousseau and ‘The Social Contract’ (Routledge: London, 2004), 145.

33. For Melzer, this “chaos and conflict” is superseded by the production of a “single ‘public person’ which, whatever commands it gives itself, is perfectly absolute, infallible, and united” (The Natural Goodness of Man, 199). If citizens, no matter what they decide, are infallible, they would have no reason to decide anything at all; the question of legitimacy would disappear.

34. Gordan also stresses the importance of difference for the general will in Creolising Political Theory, 104.

35. Steven Affeldt, “The Force of Freedom,” Political Theory 27 (1999): 299–333.

36. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 295–98.

37. Rousseau critiques the idea of an inner voice of universal reason in his discussion of Diderot’s idea of a general society of mankind, GM, 169–77.

38. Oliver Marchart, Post-foundational Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 78–83.

39. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 83.

40. Jeffrey Smith, “Nationalism, Virtue, and the Spirit of Liberty in Rousseau’s Government of Poland,” The Review of Politics 65 (2003): 428.

41. Smith, “Nationalism, Virtue, and the Spirit of Liberty,” 424.

42. Rousseau opposes the suggested abolition of armed confederations, arguing for a clearer definition of the “situations in they may legitimately take place” and for “rules regarding their form and function, so as to give them legal sanction, to the extent that this is possible without putting obstacles in the way of their form or function” (Considerations, 61).

43. To prevent dependence, Rousseau seeks to make Poland economically “sufficient unto itself” (Considerations, 68).

44. For a discussion of the conflicting views about the connection between Rousseau’s political philosophy and nationalism, see Steven Engel, “Rousseau and Imagined Communities,” The Review of Politics 67 (2005): 515–18.

45. Jean-Luc Nancy, Identité: Fragments, franchises (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 68.

46. While the strategy of developing strong national identification will have, Rousseau acknowledges, its “bad points,” its “advantage” will be to endear Poland to its citizens, even by developing “a distaste” among them “for mingling with the peoples of other countries” (14). The strategy appears specific to Poland as a nation threatened by foreign occupation. Emile is to be educated, as Georg Cavallar demonstrates, as a cosmopolitan, with “an openness to others” and an “appreciation of diversity.” Georg Cavallar “Educating Émile: Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Cosmopolitanism,” The European Legacy 17.4 (2012): 493.

47. This discussion questions Gratton’s assertion that Rousseau’s theory proposes a repressive state of homogeneity where “the rights” of “foreigners are foreclosed from the beginning”, The State of Sovereignty, 41. Patrice Canivez would also reject this view, arguing that Rousseau overcomes the dichotomy between cosmopolitanism and patriotism: all Poles should receive the right to vote not because of their nationality but because they are free and equal human beings, in Rousseau’s Concept of the People, Philosophy and Social Criticism 30 (2004): 404. Cavallar shares this view, analysing how the cultivation of compassion could reduce patriotic prejudice, “Educating Émile,” 489.

48. On how the civil religion resists persecutory violence, see Felicity Baker “Eternal Vigilance: Rousseau’s Death Penalty,” in Rousseau and Liberty, ed. R. Wokler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 153–85.

49. Smith, “Nationalism, Virtue, and the Spirit of Liberty,” 428, 426.

50. On how heroic literature can be “an educational measure” but also a source of blind passion and irrationality, see Cavallar, “Educating Émile,” 495–96.

51. For a fuller account of these reform, see Smith, “Nationalism, Virtue, and the Spirit of Liberty,” 418–36.