give any assistance to the fainting mother and the dying infant! Such is the pure emotion of
nature, prior to all kinds of reflection!”
((342))
14.I ask if one may, like Derathé, oppose the doctrine of Emile to that of the Second
Discourse on this point (“In
Emile pity becomes a sentiment derived from the love of self
whereas the second Discourse would set these two principles against each other” Le
rationalisme de J.-J. Rousseau, pp. 99-100) .
15.It is known that Rousseau had projected writing an entire work on the role of women in
history. It seems that for him the question was as much of restoring an historical truth (the
importance of woman’s role, which the history of man has deliberately dissimulated) as of
recalling the occasionally pernicious character of that role, through making “some
observations on great men who have allowed themselves to be governed by women.
Themistocles, Antony, etc. Fulvia, Antony’s wife, provoked war because she was not loved by
Caesar.” (Cf. Sur les femmes and Essai sur les évènements importants dont les femmes ont été
la cause secrète. Pléiade, vol. 2, pp. 1254-57.)
16.[Derrida’s references to this text are to the Garnier edition. I have quoted the
corresponding passages from Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre, tr.
Allan Bloom (Glencoe, Illinois, 196o), and have placed page references within brackets.]
Garnier edition, p. 204 [pp. ioo–oi]. One should also read note i in its entirety; there the author
is surprised that “such pleasantry, of which one sees sufficient application, has been taken at
face value by Frenchmen of spirit.”
17.Second Discourse, p. 159. On the subject of the relationship of these themes to the
opposed or related themes of Voltaire, Buffon, or Pufendorf, see the notes in the Pléiade
edition, pp. 158–59.
18.Letter to M. d’Alembert, pp. 206–07 [pp. 103–04]. See also the note on p. 206 [p. 103]. It
begins thus: “Women, in general, do not like any art, know nothing about any, and have no
genius.” “In the union of the sexes . . . the man should be strong and active; the woman should
be weak and passive” (Emile, p. 446) [p. 322].
Is it not remarkable that Nietzsche, sharing completely this conception of femininity, of the
degradation of culture, and of the genealogy of morals as servitude to the slave, should have
hated Rousseau? Is it not remarkable that he thought Rousseau an eminent representative of
the slave morality? Is it not remarkable that he should have seen precisely in pity the true
subversion of culture and the form of servitude of the masters?
There is much to say along this line. It will lead us in particular to a comparison of the
Rousseauist and Nietzschean models of femininity; domination or seduction is equally feared,
whether it takes, alternatively or simultaneously, the form of cloying sweetness, or of
destructive or devouring fury. It would be a mistake to interpret these models as simple
affirmations of virility. Perhaps Novalis saw more profoundly and beyond what Rousseau
himself calls at the beginning of The Confessions (p. 12) [p. io] his “character so effeminate.”
“Rousseau’s philosophèmes are, absolutely speaking, a feminine philosophy or a theory of
femininity” (Encyclopédie, tr. M. de Gandillac, Edition de Minuit, p. 361) .
19.Cf. Derathé,
Le rationalisme de Rousseau, most especially pp. 30 f.
20.Derathé recalls that “Durkheim is . . . the first to have indicated the importance of this
notion of potential faculty in Rousseau.” Le rationalisme de Rousseau, p. 13. Cf. [Emile]
Durkehim, « Le Contrat social, histoire du livre, » Revue de métaphysique et du morale, xxv, i
& ii, (Jan.–Feb. 1918), pp. 1-23, 129–61. Most of Rousseau’s systematic contradictions would
be resolved by bringing into play this concept of a potential faculty which operates as a solder
at every point of rupture, and primarily at the points where society breaks—and articulates
itself—with Nature. Cf. Derathé, Rousseau et la science politique de son temps, p. 148. It is
remarkable that this theme of potentiality should be so often misunderstood, wherever it crops
up. This misunderstanding is at the center of the problematics of innate ideas, and of Locke’s
relationship with Leibniz, or Leibniz’s with Descartes.
21.Naturally, this argument is marked by a reflection that would associate Kant and Rousseau
differently from the chapter on morality. The entire chain that makes possible the
communication of the movement of temporalization and the schematism of imagination, pure
sensibility and the auto-affection of the present by itself, all that
((343))
Heidegger’s reading has strongly repeated in
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics could, by
way of a carefully staked out path, lead us back on to Rousseauist ground.
22. The
Essay allows us to believe as little in original war as in the Golden Age. From these
two points of view, the Essay matches the great Rousseauist theses. In the Geneva manuscript
(the first version of The Social Contract, dating from 1756), Rous-seau writes that “the golden
age was always a condition alien to the human race.”
23.Pages 153—54 [pp. 181—82; Cole’s note: Justin, Hist. ii, 2. So much more does the
ignorance of vice profit the one sort than the knowledge of virtue the other.] Cf. also p. 152
and the fragment on L’état de nature: “As long as men retained their first innocence, they
needed no guide other than the voice of Nature; as long as they did not become evil, they were
dispensed from being good” ([Pléiade, vol. 3,] p. 476).
24.The textual unity of this doctrine of pity is confirmed once again if these four passages are
placed side by side: “Although pity is native to the human heart, it would remain eternally
quiescent unless it were activated by imagination. How are we moved to pity? By getting
outside ourselves and identifying with a being who suffers. We suffer only as much as we
believe him to suffer. It is not in ourselves, but in him that we suffer” (Essay) [p. 32].
“So pity is born, the first relative sentiment which touches the human heart according to the
order of nature. To become sensitive and pitiful the child must know that he has fellow-
creatures who suffer as he has suffered, who feel the pains he has felt, and others which he
can form some idea of, being capable of feeling them himself. Indeed, how can we let
ourselves be stirred by pity unless we go beyond ourselves, and identify ourselves with the
suffering animal, by leaving, so to speak, our own nature and taking his. We only suffer so far