—83) [pp.32—33]. It is therefore absolutely necessary that the general will express itself
through voices without proxy. It “makes law” when it declares itself in the voice of the “body
of the people” where it is indivisible; otherwise it is divided into particular wills, acts of
magistracy, decrees (p. 369) [p. 21].
But the catastrophe that interrupted the state of nature opens the move-ment of distancing
which brings closer; perfect representation should re-
((298))
present perfectly. It restores presence and effaces itself as absolute representation. This
movement is necessary 21 The telos of the image is it own imperceptibility. When the perfect
image ceases to be other than the thing, it respects the thing and restores originary presence.
Indefinite cycle: represented source of representation, the origin of the image can in turn
represent its representers, replace its substitutes, supply its supplements. Folded, returning to
itself, representing itself, sovereign, presence is then—and barely—only the supplement of a
supplement. It is thus that the Discourse on Political Economy defines “the general will, the
source and supplement of all laws, [which] should be consulted whenever they fail” (p. 250;
italics added) [p. 242].* Is not the order of pure law, which gives back to the people their
liberty and to presence its sovereignty, always the supplement of a natural order somewhere
deficient? When the supplement accomplishes its office and fills the lack, there is no harm
done. The abyss is the chasm which can remain open between the lapse of Nature and the
delay of the supplement: “The time of man’s most shameful lawlessness and greatest misery
was when, new passions having smothered natural sentiments, human understanding had not
yet made sufficient progress to substitute maxims of sagacity for natural impulses.” 22 The
play of the supplement is indefinite. References refer to references. The general will, that
“celestial voice” (Discourse on Political Economy, p. 248) [p. 240] is therefore the
supplement of nature. But when, by a return of catastrophe, society is degraded, nature can
substitute itself for its supplement. It is then a bad nature, “it is under these circumstances that
the voice of duty no longer speaks in men’s hearts, and their rulers are obliged to substitute
the cry of terror, or the lure of an apparent interest” (p. 253; italics added) [P. 245]
This play of the supplement, the always open possibility of a catastrophic regression and the
annulment of progress, recalls not only Vico’s ricorsi. Conjugated with what we have called
geometric regression, it makes his-tory escape an infinite teleology of the Hegelian type. In a
certain way, considering that history can always interrupt its own progress, (and must even
progress in regression), (re) turn behind itself, Rousseau does not make “the work of death,”
the play of difference and the operation of negativity, serve in the dialectical accomplishment
of truth within the horizon of parousia. But all these propositions may be inverted. This
finitism of Rous-seau emerges also on the basis of a providentialist theology. Interpreting
itself, it effaces itself on another level as it reduces the historic and negative to the accidental.
It too is thought within the horizon of an infinite restitution of presence, and so on. In the
closed field of metaphysics, what
xxx fotnote start xxx
•
I have used the corresponding passages from Cole (op. cit.), and placed references
with brackets.
xxx fotnote slutt xxx
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I outline here as an indefinite exchange of “Rousseauist” and “Hegelian” positions (one might
take many other examples) obeys the laws inscribed within all the concepts that I have just
recalled. It is possible to formalize these laws and indeed they are formalized.
What I have just noted within the political order is applicable also to the graphic order.
Access to phonetic writing constitutes at once a supplementary degree of representativity and
a total revolution in the structure of representation. Direct or hieroglyphic pictography
represents the thing or the signified. The ideo-phonogram already represents a mixture of
signifier and signified. It already paints language. It is the moment located by all historians of
writing as the birth of phoneticization, through, for example, the picture puzzle [rebus à
transfert]; 23
a sign representing a thing named in its concept ceases to refer to the concept
and keeps only the value of a phonic signifier. Its signified is no longer anything but a
phoneme deprived by itself of all meaning. But before this decomposition and in spite of the
“twofold convention,” representation is reproduction; it repeats the signifying and signified
masses en bloc and without analysis. This synthetic character of representation is the
pictographic residue of the ideo-phonogram that “paints voices.” Phonetic writing works to
reduce it. Instead of using signifiers immediately related to a conceptual signified, it uses,
through the analysis of sounds, signifiers that are in some way nonsignifying. Letters, which
have no meaning by themselves, signify only the elementary phonic signifiers that make sense
only when they are put together according to certain rules.
Analysis substituting painting and pushed to insignificance, such is the rationality proper to
the alphabet and to civil society. Absolute anonymity of the representer and absolute loss of
the selfsame [le propre]. The culture of the alphabet and the appearance of civilized man
[l’homme policé] cor-respond to the age of the ploughman. And let us not forget that
agriculture presupposes industry. But then, how can we explain the allusion to the trader who
is in fact never named in the classification of the three conditions and thus seems to have no
appropriate era?
The third [way of writing] is to break down the speaking voice into a given number of
elementary parts, either vocal or articulate [vowels or consonants], with which one can form
all the words and syllables imaginable. This way of writing, which is ours, must have been
invented by commercial peoples who, in traveling to various countries, had to speak various
languages, which would have impelled them to invent characters that could be common to all
of them. This is not exactly to depict speech, but to analyze it [p. 171.
The trader invents a system of graphic signs which in its principle is no longer attached to a
particular language. This writing may in principle in-