Languages are made to be spoken, writing is nothing but
a supplement of speech. ... The
analysis of thought is made through speech, and the analysis of speech through writing;
speech represents thought through conventional signs, and writing represents speech in the
same way; thus the art of writing is nothing but a mediated representation of thought, at least
in the case of vocalic languages, the only ones that we use.
The movement of supplementary representation approaches the origin as it distances itself
from it. Total alienation is the total reappropriation of self-presence. Alphabetic writing,
representing a representer, supplement of a supplement, increases the power of representation.
In losing a little more presence, it restores it a little bit better. More purely phonographic than
the writing of the second condition, it is more apt to fade before the voice, more apt to let the
voice be. Within the political order—total alienation, that which develops, as The Social
Contract says, “without reserve”—“we gain the exact equivalent of what we lose, as well as
an added power to conserve what we already have” (Bk. I, p. 361) [p. 181]. On condition, of
course, that the emergence out of the anterior state—at the limit, from the
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state of pure nature—does not make it fall back, as is always possible, short of the origin, and
consequently if “the misuse of the new conditions still, at times, degrades him [the human
being] to a point below that from which he has emerged” (p. 364) [p. 185].
Unreserved alienation is thus unreserved representation. It wrenches presence absolutely from
itself and absolutely re-presents it to itself. Since evil always has the form of representative
alienation, of representation in its dispossessing aspect, all Rousseau’s thought is in one sense
a critique of representation, as much in the linguistic as in the political sense. But at the same
time—and here the entire history of metaphysics is reflected—this critique depends upon the
naivete of representation. It supposes at once that representation follows a first presence and
restores a final presence. One does not ask how much of presence and how much of
representation are found within presence. In criticizing representation as the loss of presence,
in expecting a reappropriation of presence from it, in making it an accident or a means, one
situates oneself within the self-evidence of the distinction between presentation and
representation, within the effect of this fission. One criticizes the sign by placing oneself
within the self-evidence and the effect of the difference between signified and signifier. That
is to say, without thinking (quite like those later critics who, from within the same effect,
reverse the pattern, and oppose a logic of the representer to the logic of the represented) of the
productive movement of the effect of difference: the strange graphic of differance.
It is therefore not at all surprising that the third condition (civil society and alphabet) should
be described according to the patterns that are as much those of The Social Contract as those
of the Letter to d’Alembert.
Praise of the “assembled people” at the festival or at the political forum is always a critique of
representation. The legitimizing instance, in the city as in language—speech or writing—and
in the arts, is the representer present in person: source of legitimacy and sacred origin.
Perversity consists precisely in sacralizing the representer or the signifier. Sovereignty is
presence, and the delight in
[jouissance] presence. “The moment the people is legitimately
assembled as a sovereign body, the jurisdiction of the government wholly lapses, the
executive power is suspended, and the person of the meanest citizen is as sacred and
inviolable as that of the first magistrate; for in the presence of the person represented,
representatives no longer exist” (Social Contract, pp. 427–29 [p. 76].
In all the orders, the possibility of the representer befalls represented presence as evil befalls
good, or history befalls origin. The signifier-representer is the catastrophe. Therefore it is
always “new” in itself, in whatever epoch it might appear. It is the essence of modernity. “The
idea of representation is modern,” is a proposition which must be extended beyond the limits
that Rousseau assigns it (p. 430) [p. 78]. Political liberty is full only
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at the moment when the power of the representer is suspended and given back to the
represented: “In any case, the moment a people allows itself to be represented, it is no longer
free: it no longer exists” (p. 431) [p. 80].
It is necessary, then, to reach the point where the source is held within itself, where it returns
or reascends toward itself in the inalienable immediacy of self-possession [jouissance de soi],
in the moment of the impossible representation, in its sovereignty. In the political order, that
source is determined as will: “Sovereignty, for the same reason as makes it in-alienable,
cannot be represented; it lies essentially in the general will, and will does not admit of
representation: it is either the same, or other; there is no intermediate possibility” (p. 429) [p.
781. “. . . The Sovereign, who is no less than a collective being, cannot be represented except
by himself: the power indeed maybe transmitted, but not the will” (p. 368) [p. 20].
As corruptive principle, the representative is not the represented but only the representer of
the represented; it is not the same as itself. As representer, it is not simply the other of the
represented. The evil of the representer or of the supplement of presence is neither the same
nor the other. It intervenes at the moment of differance, when the sovereign will delegates
itself, and when, in consequence, law is written. Now the general will risks becoming a
transmitted power, a particular will, preference, in-equality. The decree, that is to say writing,
can be substituted for the law; in the decrees representing particular wills, “the general will
becomes mute” (Social Contract, p. 438) [p. 86]. The system of the social contract, which
founds itself on the existence of a moment anterior to writing and representation, can,
however, not avoid allowing itself to be threatened by the letter. That is why, obliged to have
recourse to representation, “the body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon
as it is born, and carries in itself the causes of its destruction” (p. 424 [p. 73] Chapter 11 of
Bk. III, “Of the Death of the Body Politic,” opens all the developments of representation).
Writing is the origin of inequality. 20 It is the moment when the general will which cannot err
by itself, gives way to judgment, which can draw it into “the seductive influences of
individual wills” (p. 380) [p. 31]. One must therefore separate legislative sovereignty from the
power of drawing up laws. “When Lycurgus gave laws to his country, he began by resigning
the throne.” “He, therefore, who draws up the laws has, or should have, no right of legislation,
and the people cannot, even if it wishes, deprive itself of this incommunicable right” (pp. 382