Abstract
This article positions Rousseau within contemporary political theory's current engagements with nonlinear, non-teleological accounts of time. Although these seek to widen the pluralistic possibilities of politics through an affirmation of an irreducible future, I contend that, insofar as it speaks to our existential desire for coherency and continuity, the present is equally crucial to politics. Beyond his elaborations on history, Rousseau, I show, offers an account of time as dynamic and contingent. Amid such conditions, a unified existence is fundamental to survival. Yet, given that life is marked by a passing time, such a unity can never be fully secured. Rousseau's writings thus highlight the tension between the desire for temporal unity on the one hand, and the differentiated nature of our temporal lives on the other. I take this tension to be a useful qualification to the current discussions of time and argue that an attention to the present is as vital, if not more, to the pursuits of pluralism.
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Notes
For a discussion of the differences between Derrida and Deleuze with regard to the political stakes implied in their respective conceptions of time (see Hutchings, 2008; Patton, 2003, 2010).
See Pluralism wherein he proposes a ‘double-entry orientation to the experience of political time’ that calls for an attentive negotiation between the present as a stable site of being and time's dissonances as the realm of becoming (Connolly, 2005, p. 129). Although I appreciate the value Connolly now gives to the present, my efforts to explore how the present might be lived in more open and responsive ways involve a move away from viewing the present as a stable, static ground, hence my definition of ‘presentness’. To this end, Hutchings offers an interesting image of the present as constituted by a heterotemporality (Hutchings, 2008, pp. 172–174). Although this image goes some way in thinking about the present as a differential assemblage, her account of it in terms of ‘many presents’ does not quite capture the differentiating movement of time I think is inscribed in the present itself.
Widder attempts to set his explorations of time apart from Grosz's by attributing time's creativity not to its movement but to its structural ungrounding that, according to him, invokes movement as much as it disrupts it. Nonetheless, the political stakes in both works are, in my view, not unlike each other insofar as both insist on challenging the consistency of the present for the sake of radically novel futures.
Arthur Melzer notes that one of the crucial elements in Rousseau's characterization of social man is his disunity over time. Although Melzer understands this in terms of history, he rises the interesting and, I think, accurate point that temporal unity is for Rousseau the primary condition of happiness. ‘To live in the extensionless present’, Melzer argues, is for Rousseau to ‘perish every instant. In order to truly exist, to have a self and a life, one must have duration: unity or self-sameness over time’ (Melzer, 1990, p. 65). What I take to be suggestive in Melzer's reading is the implication that if man's historical and social existence is defined by a state of temporal disunity, then life in the state of nature must, conversely, be characterized by temporal unity. What interests me and what I attempt to develop in this article is the nature of this unity, of the ways in which a pre-rational, pre-conscious man produces and sustains it.
For another reading that also sees Rousseau's nature as a dynamic process of change (see Marks, 2005, pp. 22–33). However, where Marks sees this dynamism in terms of physical history, I view it as driven by the impact of time.
Rousseau reiterates this point a few pages later: ‘Savage man, by nature, committed to instinct alone, or rather compensated for the instinct he perhaps lacks by faculties capable of substituting for it at first, and then raising him far above nature, will therefore begin with purely animal functions [emphasis mine]’ (Rousseau, 1964, p. 115).
Rousseau notes that because self-preservation is savage man's primary activity, sight, hearing and smell are his ‘best-trained faculties’ whereas taste and touch are ‘organs that are perfected only by softness and sensuality’ and thus ‘must remain in state of crudeness’ (Rousseau, 1964, p. 113).
That Rousseau's savage man is not simply passive to his sensations but is instead defined by the correspondence between his sensations and his freedom is a point superbly discussed by Poulet, 1956, pp. 158–184). However, where I see this correspondence as a relation that requires the organization of temporal flows, Poulet views this correspondence in terms of a coincidence that requires no effort, since they are, on his account, ‘confounded’ (Poulet, 1956, p. 161).
No doubt the reason for why the general and private cannot permanently coincide lies in the nature of their respective objects; where the general will can only every have a general object, the private will has particular objects (Rousseau, 1978, pp. 62–64). The general will might, for example, want us all to be healthy but the particular individual only wants care for his or her health. The two can certainly overlap but they cannot be totally conflated. In approaching this logic from a temporal perspective, my concern is less with the nature of the objects involved than with the durability of their coincidence. That is to say, I am not so much interested in the reasons for why the general and private will do not permanently coincide as I am in the fact that their merger cannot be absolutely secured in time.
I do not think that Rousseau's patriotic prescriptions can be read as a particular strategy meant only for mid-eighteenth century Poland. An emphasis on patriotism as a general means through which a people cohere and sustain themselves through time can be found throughout his works from the Discourse on Political Economy, the Social Contract and the Project of a Constitution for Corsica. For a discussion of the place of patriotism (and, in its strongest version, nationalism) in Rousseau's thought (see Cohler, 1970; Barnard, 1988; Plattner, 1997).
For a strong version of this claim, see Johnston (1999).
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