of public gatherings.” “Innocent joy is likely to evaporate in the full light of day; but vice is a
friend of shadows” (Letter to M. d’Alembert, p. 227) [p. 129]. Furthermore, the nudity that
presents the body itself is less dangerous than the recourse to sartorial signifiers, to the
northern sup-
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plement, to “artful dress”: the latter is not “less dangerous than an absolute nudity the habit of
which would soon turn the first effects into indifference and perhaps distaste.” “Is it not
known that statues and paintings only offend the eyes when a mixture of clothing renders the
nudity obscene? The immediate power of the senses is weak and limited; it is through the
intermediary of the imagination that they make their greatest ravages; it is the business of the
imagination to irritate the desires” (p. 232) [p. 134]. It will have been noticed that
representation—the picture—rather than perception, is chosen to illustrate the danger of the
supplement whose efficiency is the imagination. And it will then be noticed that, in a note
inserted into the heart of this praise of marriage, anticipating the errors of posterity, Rousseau
makes only one exception to his denials:
It is something amusing for me to imagine the judgments that many will make of my tastes on
the basic of my writings. On the basis of this one they will not fail to say: “that man is crazy
about dancing”; it bores me to watch dancing; “he cannot bear the drama”; I love the drama
passionately; “he has an aversion to women”; on that score I shall be only too easily
vindicated (p. 229) [p. 131n].
Thus the North, winter, death, imagination, representation, the irritation of desires—this entire
series of supplementary significations—does not designate a natural place or fixed terms:
rather a periodicity. Seasons. In the order of time, or rather like time itself, they speak the
movement by which the presence of the present separates from itself, supplants itself, replaces
itself by absenting itself, produces itself in self-substitution. It is this that the metaphysics of
presence as self-proximity wishes to efface by giving a privileged position to a sort of
absolute now, the life of the present, the living present. The coldness of representation not
only breaks self-presence but also the originarity of the present as the absolute form of
temporality.
This metaphysics of presence constantly reappears and is resumed in Rousseau’s text
whenever the fatality of the supplement seems to limit it. It is always necessary to add a
supplement of presence to the presence that is concealed. “The great remedy to the miseries of
this world” is “absorption into the present moment,” says Rousseau in The Solitaries. The
present is originary, that is to say the determination of origin always has the form of presence.
Birth is the birth (of) presence. Before it there is no presence; and from the moment that
presence, holding or announcing itself to itself, breaches its plenitude and starts the chain of
its history, death’s work has begun. Birth in general is written as Rousseau describes his own:
“I cost my mother her life; and my birth was the first of my misfortunes” (Con-fessions, p. 7)
[p. 5]. Every time that Rousseau tries to recapture an essence (in the form of an origin, a right,
an ideal limit), he always leads us back to a point of full presence. He is less interested in the
present, in the being-
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present, than in the presence of the present, in its essence as it appears to itself and is retained
in itself. Essence is presence. As life, that is as self-presence, it is birth. And just as the present
goes out of itself only to return to itself, a rebirth is possible which, furthermore, is the only
thing that permits all the repetitions of origin. Rousseau’s discourse and questions are possible
only in the anticipation of a rebirth or a reactivation of the origin. Rebirth, resurrection, or
reawakening always appropriate to them-selves, in their fugitive immediacy, the plenitude of
presence returning to itself.
That return to the presence of the origin is produced after each catastrophe, at least in so far as
it re-verses the order of life without destroying it. After a divine finger had turned the order of
the world over [renversé] by inclining the axis of the globe on the axis of the universe and
had thus willed that “men [be] sociable,” the festival around the water hole was possible and
pleasure was immediately present to desire. After a “great Danish dog” had knocked Jean-
Jacques over [renversé] in the second Promenade; when after “the fall” which had
precipitated him (“my head was thrown down lower than my feet”) it was first necesasry to
recount to him the “accident” that he had not been able to experience; when he explains to us
what happened at the moment when, he says twice, “I came to myself,” “I came back to
consciousness,”—it is indeed awakening as re-awakening to pure presence that he describes,
always according to the same model: not anticipation, not memory, not comparison, not
distinction, not articulation, not situation. Imagination, memory, and signs are effaced. All
landmarks on the physical or psychical landscape are natural.
The state in which I found myself in that instant was too singular not to make a description of
it here.
The night was coming on. I perceived the sky, some stars, and a little grass. This first
sensation was a delicious moment. I did not feel anything except through them. I was born in
that instant to life, and it seemed to me that I filled with my light existence all the objects
which I perceived. Entirely given up to the present moment, I did not remember anything; I
had no distinct notion of my individuality, not the least idea of what had happened to me; I did
not know who I was nor where I was; I felt neither evil nor fear, nor trouble.
And, as around the water hole, and on the Isle of St. Pierre, the enjoy-ment [jouissance] of
pure presence is that of a certain flow. Presence being bom. Origin of life, blood’s
resemblance to water. Rousseau continues:
I saw my blood flowing as I might have looked at a brooklet, without dreaming even that this
blood in any way belonged to me. I felt in the whole of my being a ravishing calm, to which,
each time that I think of it, I find nothing comparable in the whole action of known pleasures
(p. 1oo5) [p. 49].