aesthetics, of a restoration of the “logos of the aesthetic world”
(Formal and Transcendental
Logic) * remains subjected to the in-stance of the
living present, as to the universal and
absolute form of experience. It is by what complicates this privilege and escapes it that we are
opened to the space of inscription.
Breaking with linear genesis and describing the correlations among systems of script, social
structures, and the figures of passion, Rousseau opens his questions in the direction that I have
indicated.
Three states of man in society: three systems of writing, three forms of social organization,
three types of passion. “These three ways of writing cor-respond almost exactly to three
different stages according to which one can consider men gathered into a nation” [Essay, p.
16]. Among these three manners, there are no doubt differences of “crudity” and “antiquity.”
But in as much as they can assure a chronological and linear localization, they interest
Rousseau but little. Many systems may coexist, a cruder system may appear after a more
refined system.
Here too all begins with painting. That is to say with savagery: “The primitive way of writing
was not to represent sounds, but objects them-selves.” Is this painting satisfied with
reproducing the thing? Does it cor-respond to that universal proto-writing that redoubles
nature without any displacement? Here the first complication is introduced. In effect Rous-
seau distinguishes between two pictographies. One proceeds directly and the other
allegorically, “whether directly as with the Mexicans, or by allegorical imagery, as previously
the Egyptians did” [p. 17]. And when he links them thus: “This stage corresponds to
passionate language, and already supposes some society and some needs to which the
passions have given birth,” he doe not designate the sole “Egyptian” or “allegorical” state
with any verisimilitude. Without which it would be necessary to conclude that a writing—
direct pictography—could have existed in a society without passion, which is contrary to the
premises of the Essay. On the other hand, how should one imagine a direct, proper,
unallegorical painting in a state of passion? That too is contrary to the premises.
One cannot overcome this alternative without reinstating something unsaid: pure
representation without metaphoric displacement, the purely reflecting kind of painting, is the
first figure. In it the thing most faith-
xxx fotnote start xxx
•
Op. cit., “Schlusswort,” p. 297, Eng. tr. “Conclusion,” pp. 291-92.
xxx
fotnote slutt xxx
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fully represented is already no longer properly present. The project of repeating the thing
already corresponds to a social passion and therefore requires a metaphoricity, an elementary
transference. One transports the thing within its double (that is to say already within an
ideality) for an other, and the perfect representation is always already other than what it
doubles and re-presents. Allegory begins there. “Direct” painting is already allegoric and
impassioned. That is why there is no true writing. The duplication of the thing in the painting,
and already in the brilliance of the phenomenon where it is present, guarded and regarded,
maintained, how-ever slightly, facing the regard and under the regard, opens appearance as
the absence of the thing in its self-sameness [propre] and its truth. There is never a painting of
the thing itself and first of all because there is no thing itself. If we suppose that writing had a
primitive and pictorial stage, it would emphasize this absence, this evil, or this resource which
forever shapes and undermines the truth of the phenomenon; produces it and of course
substitutes it. The original possibility of the image is the supplement; which adds itself
without adding anything to fill an emptiness which, within fullness, begs to be replaced.
Writing as painting is thus at once the evil and the remedy within the phainesthai or the eidos.
Plato already said that the art or technique (techn) of writing was a pharmakon (drug or
tincture, salutary or maleficent). And the disquieting part of writing had already been
experienced in its resemblance to painting. Writing is like painting, like the zoographeme,
which is itself determined (cf. Cratylus, 430-32) within a problematic of mimesis;
resemblance is troubling: “I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like
painting” (zoographia) (275d). Here painting—zoography—betrays being and speech, words
and things themselves because it freezes them. Its offshoots seem to be living things but when
one questions them, they no longer respond. Zoography has brought death. The same goes for
writing. No one, and certainly not the father, is there when one questions. Rousseau would
approve without reservations. Writing carries death. One could play on this: writing as
zoography as that painting of the living which stabilizes animality, is, according to Rousseau,
the writing of savages. Who are also, as we know, only hunters: men of the zoogreia, of the
capture of the living. Writing would indeed be the pictorial representation of the hunted beast:
magical capture and murder.
Another difficulty in this concept of proto-writing: no recourse to convention is made there.
The latter appears only in the “second way”: moment of barbarism and of the ideogram. The
hunter paints beings, the shepherd already inscribes languages: “The second way is to
represent words and propositions by conventional characters. That can be done only when the
language is completely formed and an entire people is united by common laws; for this
already presupposes a twofold convention. Such is the
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writing of the Chinese; it truly represents sounds and speaks to the eyes” [Essay, p. 17].
One may conclude from this that, in the first state, metaphor did not give rise to any
convention. Allegory was still a savage production. There was no need of institutions to
represent beings themselves and metaphor here was the transition between nature and
institution. Then the protowriting which did not paint language but painted things could make
shift with a language, therefore with a society which was not at all “completely formed.” This
first stage is always that unstable limit of birth: one has left “pure nature” but one has not
completely reached the state of society. The Mexicans and the Egyptians would have the right,
according to Rous-seau, to only “some society.”