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Eva D. Bahovec
Rousseau and Nietzsche: “The Politics
of the Proper Name”
Abstract: The paper presents Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the problem of the unity of his work. The
Rousseau as the author of the social contract and the modern theory of education is related to the
Rousseau of confessions; in this context, the importance of autobiography as a political category is
discussed. The second part of the paper focuses on comparing the life, work, and autobiography of
Rousseau and Nietzsche with special attention to their place in the eighteenth and the nineteenth
centuries, respectively; the main target of the study is their common problem of how to face the
corrupt nature of human civilization, and how to use education as a remedy, along with the way each
one inscribed himself and his proper name in philosophy. The paper then focuses upon Rousseau’s
Enlightenment claim for transparency and self-transparency, and relates his claim to Nietzsche, to his
claim for self-overcoming, and to what Derrida defines as his politics of the proper name. The paper
concludes with a broader comparison of Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Derrida in relation to the question
of how “the personal” should become “the political” precisely through education.
Keywords: Rousseau and philosophy, images of authority in Rousseau, negative education, confessions,
self-transparency, Rousseau and the French Revolution, Nietzsche, philosopher-physician, autobiography,
dressage, self-overcoming, Derrida, circumfession, politics of the proper name, Rousseau and Nietzsche
UDC: 37.01
Original scientific paper
Eva D. Bahovec, Ph.D., professor, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Aškerčeva 2,
SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia; e-mail: [email protected]
JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 4/2012, 56–74
Rousseau and Nietzsche: “The Politics of the Proper Name”
57
“As a critic of the existing world, Nietzsche was to the nineteenth century what
Rousseau had been to the eighteenth.” (Löwith 1967, p. 257)
Let us start from the middle: having cured myself, I am now, in the state
of “gratitude of a convalescence,” writing the book “The Gay Science” (Nietzsche
1974, p. 32). This is the book that marks the beginning of “true” Nietzsche. This
is the book that brings about his science of purification – not the “experience and
purification” of consciousness as in Hegel and his “Phenomenology of Spirit” but in
a kind of paraphrase: the science of experience and purification of the body. What
completely and forever separates Nietzsche from Hegel is his autobiography written
through the body; as opposed to Nietzsche, Hegel never spoke in his proper name;
to the contrary, he “erased it in the logic of the absolute knowledge” (Malabou
2009, p. 175). What completely and forever separates Nietzsche and Rousseau,
one could add, is exactly the opposite: including autobiography into the “life and
work” of the philosopher and into philosophy as such.
In the logic of the proper name, among the Germans (as Nietzsche would say),
it was only “our” Nietzsche who spoke in such a manner. Friedrich Nietzsche, not
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel! The proper name that for philosophy is something
not allowed becomes with Nietzsche “a politics.” The subtitle of Derrida’s well-known
book on Nietzsche runs: “The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper
Name” (Derrida 1984). This is the way in which the long history of philosophy
finally envisions “the personal” and anticipates the famous slogan that was going to
mark the notorious sixties, and co-produce its politics: The Personal Is the Political!
Nietzsche’s “I” that in his gaya scienza mocks philosophers in all their long
history coexists with his neither sick nor healthy but convalescent body. His “I”
is not a post-modern, dispersed, multiplied ego. His “I” is a bodily ego: “I am body
entirely, and nothing beside,” says Nietzsche (2003, p. 62). More precisely, I am a
cured body. This is a new starting point that is diametrically opposed to the Cartesian cogito. The foundation of cogito demands that one expels into exteriority all
that is insane and all that belongs to the body. Nietzsche, however, turns all this
and along with it all modern history upside down. Nietzsche says one has to begin
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completely elsewhere as Descartes does; it is wrong to begin with consciousness
instead of starting from “the wisdom of the body” (Granier 1995, p. 87). One must
begin on the other side: on the side of the un-conscious, non-spiritual, non-soul,
un-reason. What relates all these “un-s” and “non-s” could be (as a positivation
of such negative determinations) described as the becoming of the body in the
process of eliminating the malady.
Gratitude of convalescence: Nietzsche (1974, p. 32) knows very well that philo­
sophy is closely related to therapy and healing. Philosopher-physician, having
cured himself, is thus a physician of civilization. The philosopher and the artist
are the physicians of civilization. Philosophical spiritual exercises stem from Anti­
quity, and in philosophy they have a place similar to that of therapy in medicine,
inscribed in the body, on the side of the bodily convalescence. After the long break
within this kind of ancient “practice” of philosophy that extends from the medieval limitation of philosophy to the mere relation to the text, all the way down to
Rousseau, a privileged proper name now finally pops up in all its philosophical
bodily presence: Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche: Philosophenbuch and autobiography
Nietzsche’s writing is virtually arrogantly personal. He writes about himself,
because of himself, to himself. How much I have discovered, how much I have
broken with, how much of everything have I “cut in two.” Why am I so wise? Why
am I so clever? Why do I write such good books? (Nietzsche 1967–1977, 6, pp. 264,
278 and 298) In addition, his writing also contains a considerable measure of distance toward himself; everywhere there is a lot of humor that constantly disperses
the appearance of superiority. What is actually more arrogant – to write as a
“true” philosopher with all the necessary serenity, and from one’s specific place of
utteranc­e, precisely in the name of all and for everybody? Or to hide oneself behind
the initial place of the philosopher’s “we” instead of saying “I” (Cavell 1996, p. 8)?
This then is our Nietzsche: not in the arrogance of philosophy and not in its
basic tendency toward the universal, as in Kant; also not “us” as the linguistic
counterpart. Even less so is it a neutral, objective, and detached “never finished”
Philosophenbuch that Nietzsche was supposed to write during his entire life (De
Man 1979, p. 110). In opposition to all of this is writing about oneself.
We are in Torino in 1888 when Friedrich Nietzsche decided to write his
autobiography. He already knows that his works are immortal and that he has
given to humanity the most of what can be given. For his birthday, he writes his
autobiography, which is going to be published after his death, bearing the title
“Ecce homo”, and he writes this book – to himself. Nietzsche narrates his life for his
forty-fourth birthday somehow “out from the middle,” and is somehow intertwined
in the text itself. Nietzsche stands as the addressee, as the one to whom – outside
the text – his speech is addressed, as well as the one who is implemented in the
very interiority of the text. But his name cannot be limited either to the text or
to life “beyond” it. His name is situated on the verge between the two, where his
Rousseau and Nietzsche: “The Politics of the Proper Name”
59
name insists in its singularity, with no place to be assigned to it, as a trace that
cannot be erased. However, it is constituted as a trace only as being narrated
about, in repetition, always afterwards. The “I” who speaks was other than the
“I” who narrates his life. The speech must pass through the body, it passes from
mouths to ears, it returns through “the ear of the other.”
That is why a new name is needed; Derrida starts to talk about otobiography
instead of autobiography. Biography means writing one’s life, whereas the prefix
“oto” stresses the role of “the ear,” and the importance of the other that is constitutive for writing about oneself. Writing about oneself, in one’s own voice, then
passes through “the ear of the other,” and this is why the labyrinth becomes one
of Nietzsche’s favored topics (Derrida 1984, p. 76). “Have I been understood?” is
Nietzsche’s question (in Cavell 1996, p. 5). “Listen to me!” Nietzsche tells us (in
Derrida 2005, p. 50). Science has no audience, but this is not true for philosophy.
Philosophical discourse includes an address. In the twentieth century, the analysis
of the address is related to Austin’s “revolution in philosophy” (Cavell 1996, p. 10),
in the nineteenth century to Nietzsche’s “otobiography” (Derrida 2005), and,
as we shall see in what follows, in the eighteenth century to Rousseau and his
“thought which accuses” (Starobinski 1989, p. 44), addresses us, promises, and
makes excuse­s (De Man 1979, pp. 246 and 278).
The proper name: Derrida first wrote about how Nietzsche wrote about
himself. Half of my life is over, and this is the book I have done something with.
This is a debt toward me and my own life (Derrida 1984, p. 59). One thing is me;
another thing is my essays (Nietzsche 1967–1977, 6, p. 298). Is this Nietzsche in
the vivid presence of his voice that echoes in the very first sentence? Nietzsche
who draws a line under his life? The name, as soon as it has been written down,
bears the meaning of the author’s absence and the negation of his existence. The
name is on the verge of writing down death. The name will forever supersede its
referent. It will not only survive him but is also already “surviving” him at the very
moment of writing it down. This is the special trait of the category of the name:
like any other marginal categories, the title, the motto, the address, the exodus, or
the postscript, it forms a part of the text, and thus, it is something alien, hetero­
geneous, and external to the text. Along with it, the name is something else as
well: the herald of absence and therefore a way of denying life. The signature, the
proper name, the autograph that inhabits the borderline between life and work,
also inhabits the borderline between life and death. The principal question is,
what does it all mean for “the politics of the proper name” (Derrida 2005, p. 39)?
Derrida invents a new word: thanatology (ibid., p. 73). The word derives from
the name “Thanatos,” which means death, or the divine representation of death,
and is in direct opposition to “Eros” – love, life, and creative force. In between these
two opposite sites, the whole drama of Derrida’s deconstruction evolves: on the
one side the proper name and death, on the other his own life, which he is adding
at the bottom of the pages, just like a note under the border-line of a page. This
is the book in which the main corpus of the text is only about his work, written
by the hand of Geoffrey Bennington, his best connoisseur, and under the line of
Derrida’s “own” supplement – his autobiography (Bennington and Derrida, 1991).
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Rousseau: social contract and confessions
Three hundred years have passed since Rousseau’s birth. However, the prevailing philosophical reception still envisions Rousseau mainly as the theorist of
“The Social Contract”, in the succession line of Hobbes, Grotius, Pufendorf, etc.
“The personal” Rousseau and the way in which he approached the dimension of
the autobiographical is relegated to literature: Rousseau philosopher vs. Rousseau
as the author of literary (and autobiographical) works. As if in the very heart of
his social contract there was no open space for the irreducible dimension of the
singular! This is, of course, Rousseau’s legislator. While describing him, Rousseau
exposes a very “personal,” individual, particular note, defining him with a proper
name: Lycurgus, Numa, etc. (Rousseau 1964, pp. 372 and 382; Rousseau 1992,
p. 204). “Lycurgus established such morality that practically made the laws needless – for laws as a rule […] restrain men without altering them […]” (Rousseau
1962, pp. 187–8; Rousseau 1992, p. 109).
What Rousseau is interested in is the “personal” influence of great legislators
on people; as he writes in “The Social Contract”, he is interested in their magnetic
personalities (Shklar 1969, p. 157), which cannot be resisted. The figure of the
legislator is an example that attracts and thus forms a necessary supplement to
the law and the contract. The main figure of Rousseau’s politics is not law, but the
legislator and his “legislative authority” (ibid., p. 154). However, one has to keep
in mind the ambiguity of the word “authority”: “the legislator occupies in every
respect an extraordinary position […]”; in his work, he brings together “two things
which seem to be incompatible: the enterprise too difficult for human powers, and,
for its execution, an authority that is not authority” (Rousseau 1964, pp. 382–3;
Rousseau 1992, pp. 214–5).
The problem of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is neither the emergence of culture
nor the foundation of the binary opposition between nature and culture, but
something else, which could provisionally be called the problem of negativity.
From the very beginning, the idea of the discontent of our culture is present
in his “Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality among Men”
(Rousseau 1964). It seems to present a non-curable symptom of our civilization.
Rousseau exposes the constitution of the fundamental etiology of evil (Philonenko
1984, p. 160), and endeavors to find a remedy to cure it. But this pre-existent
negativity is confronted in a somewhat similar manner as Derrida confronted
Plato’s “pharmakon”: he gets hold of a remedy that brings poison along with the
cure (Derrida 1972, p. 108). In other words, this problem has been confronted in
classical studies as the problem of Rousseau’s contradictions (Gay in Cassirer
1989, p. 5). Because of his “contradictions,” Rousseau occupies in the eighteenth
century a similar place as Nietzsche in the nineteenth. Nietzsche’s philosopher is
the philosopher-physician who cures himself and the whole of social order, while
Rousseau’s philosopher confronts this order using his three “images of authority”
(Shklar 1969, p. 127; Shklar in Cranston 1972, p. 333).
The three images of authority in Rousseau’s work are related to his three –
closely connected – basic works. They are of course first “the legislative authority”
Rousseau and Nietzsche: “The Politics of the Proper Name”
61
from “The Social Contract”, then “the therapeutic authority,” embodied by Wolmar
in “Julie, or the New Héloïse”, and last but not least, “the helping and preventive
authority” of the governor from “Émile, or On Education” (Shklar 1969, p. 129).
In the legislator, first, as opposed to the actual authority of the sovereign, one can
trace an ideal authority that embodies the “pure and depersonalized mechanic
device,” which for Rousseau is again something ambivalent: on the one hand, there
is the objective and mechanical personification of the law, and on the other hand,
the irreducible other side, without which the law can neither be implemented
nor can it endure. The law is not self-sufficient; it necessarily needs “the other”:
the legislator as “creative authority” that can and must reform every member
of society. The legislator is not responsible for the laws, but for the spirit of the
laws, and that demands permanent and continuous education – of everybody. The
legislator has to act with the power and strength of his personality, which he uses
to bind citizens to his model that cannot be resisted in any way. That is what the
great legislators in history have been: what cannot be achieved either by force or
by reason can be done by the pure hypnotic power of the great legislator (Shklar
1989, p. 161), and by magnetism of his virtue (Blum 1986, p. 37).
But how can this be possible? To explain this, we have to relate the imago
of authority from the social contract to Rousseau’s two other main creations:
therapy and education. The legislator, the therapist, and the educator: this is the
basic triangular structure found in Rousseau during the Enlightenment, echoed
in our Freudian epoch by Freud himself. The three impossible professions, Freud
writes, are government, education, and analysis (Freud 1975, p. 388). They are
not grounded in the essence or content of a phenomenon; they repose on love.
What makes out of a physician a psychoanalytic therapist is the transference
love that emerges in the psychoanalytic situation. The meaning of the analyst’s
“therapeutic authority” derives from the place in the structure; this place itself
produces ‘love-related’ healing effects on the patients. This is how the analyst
cures: with the presupposed subject of a merely presupposed knowledge, which
Lacan will formulate as the subject supposed to know by (Lacan 1998).
The imago of Rousseau’s therapeutic authority is Wolmar, the hero of “Julie,
or the new Héloïse” that supplements Rousseau’s “Philosophenbuch” in the social
contract. Following her father’s wishes, Julie renounces her true love for Saint-Preux
and marries Wolmar – an instance of love justice and love for a well-ordered world.
His main characteristic is that he is completely self-contained. Wolmar is shaped
according to god’s image, and thus has “mitigating effects” on people. His is an
invisible presence; his “being there” is completely sufficient. One never discovers
what Wolmar is like; the only thing that can be discovered is that he represents
the most perfect imago of paternal authority, and that his gaze, subtle and cold,
reaches directly into our hearts. As if he sticks to the Freudian “rule of abstinence,”
Wolmar never preaches, moralizes, reproaches, or punishes; his sole presence guarantees the foundation of the cosmic order, as it were. This order is then realized
in Rousseau’s microcosm: in the estate of Clarens, where the novel takes place.
The rule of abstinence is the other side of influencing people with mere
presence and mere place, occupied by the sovereign, governor, or therapist. This
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rule was introduced by the figure of Émile’s governor in “Émile, or On Education”
(Rousseau 1969). The governor has to carry out many rules that aim precisely
at abstinence: nothing to say, nothing to prescribe, nothing to forbid. He brings
about only a negative education, while he himself is but a companion; if he were
a child, “he could become his comrade and pupil” (Rousseau in Château 1974,
p. 123). Other­wise, everything is bound to become corrupt – for everything is in
fact perverted from the very beginning on. Rousseau’s notorious “nature,” which
is supposed to be captured at its very source in all its presumable purity and
spotlessness, is also always already its exact opposite: “perversion.” Everything
perishes in the hands of man; degeneration is inevitable. “Man is born free, and
everywhere he is in chains” (Rousseau 1964, p. 353; Rousseau 1992, p. 181).
“Therefore the education of the earliest years should be merely negative. It consists not in teaching virtue or truth, but in preserving the heart from vice and
the spirit from of error” (Rousseau 1969, p. 323; Rousseau 1992, p. 57). However,
since the danger of perversion is “original,” education has to be, paradoxically,
complete surveillance. Do not let the steering wheel out of your hands even for a
moment; otherwise, everything will be lost, although “the first impulses of nature
are always right” (Rousseau 1969, p. 322; Rousseau 1992, p. 56).
Danger is all-pervasive, but the highest danger dwells in Émile himself. It
is called self-affection and autoerotism, which must by all means be prevented:
he is never to be left alone, day or night. He is not supposed to go to bed before he
falls asleep, and he should get up as soon as he wakes up, the sole governor’s care
being “the dangerous supplement” that “breaks with nature” (Derrida 1998, p. 187),
and which he has to be very carefully protected from: “when he gets acquainted
with this dangerous supplement, everything is lost” (Rousseau in Derrida 1998,
p. 186). You’d better sleep in his bed!
Rousseau’s three images of authority, governed by the principle of Freud’s
three impossible professions of governing, education, and analysis, bring together
the main corpus of his work. However, on the side of his life we find his confessions
and his autobiographical writing. Thus, Rousseau was the one who invented a
new dispositive of how to relate the anecdote of life to the “thought that accuses”
(Starobinski 1989, p. 44), and addresses the other through his excuses. Among the
anecdotes that represent a “philosopher’s life” in the main corpus of the history of
philosophy, Rousseau’s notorious ribbon seems to be among the most indispensable.
Young Jean-Jacques has stolen a ribbon to give to servant Marion, and that is
what he now regrets so much, and confesses it to us. When this was revealed, he
defended himself, saying Marion gave the ribbon to him! As a consequence, both
were fired, which then became the framework for accusing and changing himself
(Derrida in Caputo and Scanlon 2005, p. 23). Rousseau’s “thought that accuses”
aims at the perverted world and at the inner voice of his conscience.
In Rousseau’s “life and work,” a very special place belongs to his “Confessions”. With his “Confessions”, he invented autobiography as a philosophical
“genre,” which is neither truly philosophical nor entirely a genre. It is writing in
the first person singular. Rousseau did not want his life to be written about by
the others; he consciously avoided the universal “we” of philosophers. This is how
Rousseau and Nietzsche: “The Politics of the Proper Name”
63
he presented his singularity in “Confessions”: “I have resolved on an enterprise
which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man
I shall portray will be me, simply myself. I know my own heart and understand
my fellow men. But I am made unlike any one I have ever met; I will even venture
to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I
am different” (Rousseau 1959, p. 5; Rousseau 1953, p. 17).
As indicated already in the classical study “Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstacle” by Jean Starobinski (1971, p. 22), Rousseau relied heavily
on the all-pervasive myth of transparency. The confessions aim to make Rousseau
completely transparent – just as transparent as he was to himself.1 He was the one
who had to be displayed most transparently: “I will say in a loud voice: ‘Look, this
is what I have done, what I thought, what I was. […] I exposed myself just like I
was: contemptible and evil, when I was like that; or good, generous and sublime
[…]. Let them complain about my little evils, let them blush at my weaknesses.’”
(Rousseau 1959, pp. 9–10; Rousseau 1953, p. 5). Nothing is to remain hidden – all
has to be as transparent as a crystal, says Rousseau; I have to expose myself from
all the possible perspectives. If the reader cannot see everything, then he himself
is to blame: “the error is in the gaze of the others” (Starobinski 1971, p. 218).
Transparency is the remedy that could abolish negativity. However, even
this transparency is, from the very beginning, bound to an “obstacle”: it is by
no “anecdotic” coincidence that Starobinski in probably the most famous of all
famous books on Rousseau has put it in the very title: transparency and obstacle
(Starobinski 1971). This title ultimately means that it is not possible to obtain
total transparency. This non-possibility is original; it is there from the very first
sentence on. Indeed, the non-possibility has to be inscribed in the very title.
The personal is the political? There seems to be a necessary obstacle that
actually turns out to be an inner impossibility “from the beginning.” How to proceed? In any case, one should take into account all the hints that in Rousseau
one deals with a fundamental ambivalence. This ambivalence, now, needs more
thorough consideration.
Derrida: grammatology and circonfession
In Antiquity, the idea of philosophy was related to life. The philosophical schools
each cherished a way of life, a form of life and a lifestyle that would enable progress
toward the ideal of wisdom. This style was defined, first, in opposition to everyday
life. Philosophers do not live like ordinary people; they live detached. Second, the
style is defined as an exercise (Hadot 1994, p. 27; Hadot in Davidson 1997, p. 211).
1
Rousseau feels he is being his true self when he engages in solitary walks, and confronts a fictive construction of the other that presents a projection of all that was threatening him. This is very
different from Augustine’s “confessions”, which were written based on his conversion to Christianity.
That is why Augustine’s work should not be understood as the beginning of philosophical confessions
(Hadot 1994, p. 13).
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Philosophers train the spirit. This is how philosophy is practiced. Athletes train
the body; philosophers train the mind. Contemplation of the genesis of the world
in the infinite void in the Epicureans, or of rational and necessary unfolding of
cosmic events in the Stoics, can be used as an exercise of imagination concerning
the immensity of time and space, compared to which everyday life appears of
little importance (Hadot 1994, p. 35; Davidson, p. 214). In the medieval period,
this changed. The link between life and the exercises is interrupted, philosophy is
gradually reduced to “discourse,” and progress of spirit is based on reading written
texts (Hadot 1994, p. 48). From then on, philosophy is what is read, translated,
commented, and interpreted. The relation of philosophy to life has become distant;
we have only the philosopher and the text, while the dimension of life is preserved
only as a kind of not-really-needed addition of “life” to work.
How wrong this is, and how big a problem for philosophy it presents, has
been shown at the other end of the chronologic line: in the twentieth century by
Jacques Derrida. Derrida invents new practices of philosophy that are still textual
practices but call into question the textual as such. The extreme investment in
the text has been deconstructed by Derrida – to use his own word. This means to
destruct and to establish something new – it destructs, abolishes, and constructs,
builds up anew. Derrida’s deconstruction in philosophy is also directly related to
construction and architecture (Bahovec Dolar 2011, p. 19).
What did Derrida actually accomplish? He questioned the very status of
the text. He turned everything that is “around” the text, like the frame around
the picture, into a problem. Even when starting from the ‘text is everything,’ we
also have the title, subtitle, signature and – my own signature. Derrida adds the
facsimile of his own signature under one of his texts (Derrida 1972, p. 393). All
this means that we have to somehow include in the text what lies at its borders.
Derrida deals with the text as with philosophy itself. While he reads and writes,
he is interested in the margins of the text, just as in “writing” philosophy he is
interested in “Margins of Philosophy” (Derrida 1972). He pursues the nagging
question; what is and what is not philosophy, what is part of philosophy and what
has fallen out of it, what is in the middle of a philosophical text and what is on its
borders, what is a cornerstone and what is a “defective cornerstone” that is most
effective precisely as defective, and precisely thus forms a necessary constitutive
part of the text (Malabou 2009, p. 96). This is the way Derrida reads Hegel (their
common ground is their view on reading), and the way Derrida’s Hegelian student
Catherine Malabou reads Derrida himself (ibid., p. 90).
Margins: They are the title, signature, footnotes under the bottom line, the
text within the text. Derrida writes his book on Hegel in parallel columns, and
adds inserts into the core of the text as in the newspapers (Derrida 1974). In the
book on Socrates and Freud (Derrida 1980), Derrida adds a picture that has to be
spread out to be seen. Namely, he has found a medieval illustration that turns the
whole history of philosophy upside down: the picture presents Socrates writing
and Plato speaking. All these Derrida’s wits are wits, but at first sight, while they
literally, not only metaphorically, announce a new orientation of thought and a
Rousseau and Nietzsche: “The Politics of the Proper Name”
65
new sense of reading – and of philosophy! Derrida sums it up in his new slogan:
the end of the book and the beginning of writing (Derrida 1967, p. 15). The motto
for this new beginning comes from nobody else but Friedrich Nietzsche: “Socrates,
the one who does not write” (ibid.).
However, to understand the meaning of “Derrida in person,” of his signature
and his autobiography, we must first define what exactly Derrida deconstructs here.
He deconstructs the reduction of philosophy to discourse. To repeat, in Antiquity
the idea of philosophy was connected to life, which meant carrying out spiritual
exercises and conducting a philosopher’s life. In the Middle Ages, this link between
life and philosophy was cut. Philosophy is not “practiced” any more – we read it,
and in the best case, we write it. Philosophy is limited to “discourse”; it becomes
something that belongs to work, to opus. A philosopher who “does” philosophy is
confined to the “life and work” we know from the beginning of the chapter on each
one: first life, as a prelude, and then work.
Why life? What does this word mean in this context? It contains two things.
First, life contains “personal data,” as inscribed on our documents: name, family
name, date and place of birth. But what Derrida is interested in is the trace of
the singular, the trace of the author, the trace of himself that has nonetheless
somehow left traces in his philosophical, that is, in principle non-personal and
objective, neutral and universal writing. Bennington’s “summary” of Derrida’s
philosophy holds the place of Nietzsche’s “Philosophenbuch”, while Derrida’s own
writing, which fills in the space for notes under the horizontal line through the
whole book, holds the place of autobiography (Bennington and Derrida 1991). Above
we have Derrida’s Philosophenbuch: purely objective and neutral knowledge that
can be signed by somebody else instead of the author Derrida (it can also be left
unsigned); below, under the line, Jacques Derrida personally? This means that the
text, the name of the author, and apart from that an “x,” an excess, a Derridean
supplement that now has to be defined in more detail.
“Life and work”: this actually means that only work counts. However, we have
to include this necessary, and yet so dangerous, supplement, life. It is supposed
to mean something; we have to add it, but we don’t know what it means. This is
also the meaning of the famous Heidegger’s lecture on Aristotle, which begins
like this: Aristotle was born, he lived, and he died. Now let’s move to our subject
matter! There’s the problem: to the subject matter, but first this note itself has to
be added, as a “note” that forms a part of the text and its constitutive exteriority.
The name, in other words, in not just a Derridean herald of absence and
death; the name is also closely related to “life and work.” This “life” that is so
absent-mindedly added to “work” therefore hides a lot – it hides itself, as a kind
of a secret, while at the same time persisting as something that one cannot lose
sight of. In the history of philosophy, this “dangerous supplement” first takes the
form of an “anecdote.” A philosopher’s teaching is supplemented with an anecdote
from his life, e.g., “to live in a barrel,” “to jump into Etna,” and so on. All this tells
us something about the philosopher, but we don’t know what exactly. Usually the
procedure is to link it to the category of “ethics.”
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However, there is the proper name as well: Diogenes and his barrel, Empedocles and his sandal (Deleuze 1969, p. 153)2; Heraclitus would not have been
able to live in a barrel. Last but not least, Nietzsche would not have been able
to live the life of Immanuel Kant; however, the well-ordered Kant had a portrait
of Rousseau, “the father of the French Revolution,” on the wall of his work room
(Cassirer 1981, p. 362). Just as there is no “philosophical” Rousseau without
Kant (Weil 2012, p. 10), so Kant’s admiration for the French Revolution and the
“enthusiasm” by which the spectators all around accompany it, would not take
place without his enthusiasm for Rousseau. “The French” were doing the revolution, while “the Germans” were enthusiastic about it, and they – after nightfall
when the Hegelian owl of Minerva spreads out its wings – afterwards and post
festum “capture the revolution in thought.” This is not unrelated to what Cassirer
in “Kant’s Life and Thought” described as “personal Lebensform” (Cassirer 1981,
p. 7). The “life and thought” of each one, of Rousseau and Kant, are by no means
unimportant for our Nietzsche (Ansell-Pearson 1996, p. xi).
All of this – the personal data, anecdotes, the author and his signature, a picture on the wall or a stolen ribbon, this whole compendium ad hominem – orients
us toward something. There seems to be a whole realm of the un-thought that has
to be studied carefully. What does it tell us? Stanley Cavell, after writing his main
reference book on Wittgenstein and after he later had a friendly discussion with
Derrida (and with Derrida’s polemic with Austin and Searle), wrote a book about
this: a book of autobiographical exercises (Cavell 1996). Autobiography, thus, is
“practicing” philosophy and something that has to be understood in relation to the
exercises we practice philosophy with. One could say that from Hadot and spiritual
exercises in Antiquity to Cavell’s autobiographical exercises and his reading of
Derrida, the very word “autobiography” is not appropriate for a philosopher, for
it is a literary genre; but if we manage to transform it into exercises, then we are
already on a different terrain.
What do Cavell’s autobiographical exercises start with? First, he introduces
a new word and a new concept: the arrogance of philosophy. The arrogance of
philosophy, the first sentence tells us, “is not one of its best kept secrets” (Cavell
1996, p. 3). Now we are in the line of searching for that secret and that “x” that
has been added to “life and work” – to personal data and photographs in personal
documents. Arrogance means to take voice from somebody, to speak instead of
someone, to speak in the name of the other or a signature under the texts of all
the others. Arrogance means that, being trained as philosophers, we first begin
to write a philosophical tractatus or Philosophenbuch in the non-personal plural:
We, philosophers. In this “we,” a lot is hidden, and a lot has been erased.
The arrogance of philosophy, Cavell continues, can be seen precisely in its
ambivalence in relation to the autobiographical (Cavell 1996, p. 3). Our “x,” the
dangerous supplement to work, the proper name and signature under the text,
can now be better defined. While being erased, “life” has been preserved. It is
2
Anecdotes are always anecdotes of the “live proper name,” as concepts, created by a philosopher,
are inherently related to his name: Plato’s ideas, Descartes’s cogito, Spinoza’s substance, Kant’s
transcendental condition, etc. (Deleuze and Guattari 1991, p. 13).
Rousseau and Nietzsche: “The Politics of the Proper Name”
67
preserved in several anecdotal additions: Augustine’s stolen pears, Descartes’s
nightgown (in which he sits before his fireplace and meditates), Rousseau and his,
again stolen, ribbon. One could add Hegel’s nightgown and nightcap, the notorious
Heidegger’s knickerbockers, which he used for his walks in the woods. Philosophy
forever toys with worlds, like Kant, like Nietzsche: Kant when he discovers the
limits of human knowledge, Nietzsche interpreting human resentments in his
“Genealogy of Morals” (2000); and while doing this, “it finds itself exorbitantly
superb” (ibid.). The two philosophers seem to be pleased with this, but a crucial
difference exists. As opposed to Kant, Nietzsche, instead of writing the superb and
universalist Philosophenbuch, has introduced “himself” into his philosophy, and
wrote an autobiography. Now he himself wrote about his “life and work.”
Derrida made a double move: as pointed out, he questioned the status of the
text and of “work,” while he problematized “life” as well. He carried this out by
adding his autobiographical writing to a philosophical text that attempted to sum
up his philosophy. The book he wrote together with Geoffrey Bennington, which in
its very title bears his proper name, “Jacques Derrida” (Bennnington and Derrida
1991), is composed of two parts. Bennington’s part is entitled “Derridabase,” and
Derrida’s part “Circonfession.” This word is again a neologism, composed of two
elements: circumcision, circumcission in French, meaning a surgical operation
performed on the body in the Jewish tradition, which was also Derrida’s tradition. “If I so much insist on circumcision in this text, it is because circumcision
is precisely something which happens to a powerless child before he can speak,
before he can sign, before he has a name […] This happened to him and leaves
a mark, a scar, a signature on his body” (Derrida in Caputo and Scanlon 2005,
p. 21). The second element of this newly composed word is of course “confession.”
A confession that cuts into the “objective” part of the text just like the knife cuts
into the body? Making everything transparent by writing through the body?
Rousseau, Nietzsche, and “the politics of the proper name”
Let us return to the middle, where we started. In between Derrida and
Rousseau, there is Nietzsche. Rousseau was a passionate critic of his time and
its “philosophers,” without ever losing sight of himself. I have to make everything
transparent, Rousseau, says, but in the first place this is true for me. Nietzsche
was a philosopher-physician who was in an incessant struggle with his time,
alway­s “untimely,” oriented in the philosophy for “the day after tomorrow” (Cavell
2005, p. 111). I have cured myself, Nietzsche claims, and now I write philosophy
“through the body,” in the first person singular, for the time to come.
What brings Rousseau and Nietzsche together is their opposition to the perversion of human civilization, and what is directly connected to it, the conviction
that we have to “promote the production of true human beings” (Ansell-Pearson
1996, p. 27). Nietzsche’s notorious nihilism is difficult to understand if we do not
recognize the importance of Rousseau to Nietzsche’s “life and work” (ibid., p. 20).
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Although Rousseau was not preoccupied with the problem of social revolutions,
and had an ambivalent or even opposing attitude toward them (Garrard 2003,
p. 36), his name was brought into close connection with the French Revolution
very early on – from 1791 on. Rousseau’s description of the ideal political state
was related to revolutionary aims only later, when “the effect became the cause”
(Blum 1986, p. 108). The revolutionaries themselves counted on him until the
very end. Just before the final breakdown, Rousseau’s eager admirer Maximilien
Robespierre was still convinced that the only thing that could save the revolution was a Rousseauian glamorous public festival. But his faith in the power of
celebration was still captured within the myth of transparency, as people’s gazes
met in celebrating their common freedom, and their “communication would not
be obstructed by any obstacles” (Starobinski 2011, p. 83). Transparency can be
reached only through “a global event of celebration” that predicts the emergence
of a new social order – or else?
Celebration reflects the desire for public unity and general will: “When its
flame is the highest, the general joy absorbs every individual appetite” (ibid.).
This is the appetite of the individual that actually has to be mitigated all the
time. The solution for the individual is possible, but only if he was breast-fed by
his natural mother, and that from the very beginning – if she protected him from
the ambiguity of her own maternal voice by breast-feeding (Zerilli 1994, p. 41).
Rousseau proclaims in “Émile”: “Begin with the mothers. You will be surprised
by the changes you will produce. Everything follows successively from this first
depravity [mothers who despise their first duty and no longer want to feed their
children]. The whole moral order degenerates” (Rousseau in Copjec 1999, p. 117).
If mothers “deign to nurse their children,” morals will reform themselves, and
“the state will be repeopled” (ibid.). The same principle is the basis of reforming
all of society: while waiting for the new human race to come of age, to be reborn
through maternal milk, we can stage a general public festival with a giant sculpture of the breast-feeding mother that “disseminates” her non-degenerated milk
on all sides (Jacobus 1995, p. 219).
“We are all children” is the final solution. But even mother’s milk in corruptible!
The purification of the political body has finally failed. The revolution broke apart.
The very opposite of transparency is spreading: the gothic novel with mysterious
heroes, living in dark castles, hidden cellars, and detached attics, in the midst
of an aura of anxiety that surrounds them and signals the danger. All this scary
“vampire fiction” governed by supernatural forces now appears as “the precise
equivalent” of the political plea for breast-feeding (Copjec 1999, p. 118). Rousseau’s
ambivalent “politics of the proper name” is supplemented by a no less ambivalent
“politics of breast-feeding” that is going to assume one of the main roles in his
notion of education and transformation of the individual. A proper name nurtured
with the proper milk of the proper mother, written through the proper body?
Just as Rousseau’s attitude toward revolution is a refusal, so is Nietzsche’s;
it is even overtly renounced. For Nietzsche, the French Revolution was one of
the “reasons” for modern nihilism and its moral and political manifestations
(Ansell-Pearson 1996, p. 34). Nietzsche did not think of the revolution as a novelty
Rousseau and Nietzsche: “The Politics of the Proper Name”
69
or an invention, but understood it as just another episode in the history of the same:
of Christian morality and its continuous “progress” in the long development of our
civilization. Now we can understand why Nietzsche’s attitude toward Rousseau is
so ambivalent. Nietzsche is very far from Hegel, who saw in Rousseau the father of
modern political theory (ibid.) and was enthusiastic about the French Revolution
as a superb illustration of social contract (Kouvelakis 2003, p. 30). Nevertheless,
one would not expect the problem “Rousseau and the French Revolution” to be
limited only to a couple of marginal quotes, especially in books on “Philosophy
and Revolution” (ibid., pp. 81–82, 260, 295 and 302). Even the new presentations
of “Rousseau’s incarnation,” Maximilien Robespierre (ibid., p. 77), are somehow
stuck within such a limited framework (e.g., Žižek 2007, p. xxii).
If Rousseau in one way or another is nevertheless related to the French Revolution (Blum 1986, p. 28), and if his name was used not only by Robespierre and
Saint-Just but also by members of the revolutionary Committee of Public Safety
(ibid., p. 150), what then is related to Rousseau’s counterpart in the nineteenth
century? Nietzsche does not prepare a revolution and does not reflect upon revolution. Nietzsche does not grasp the time of revolution in his thought. Nietzsche
does not trust Rousseau’s confessions (Wuthenow 1989, p. 71). But this does not
mean Nietzsche is not trying to change the world, or that he does not write about
himself. Actually, Rousseau’s ideas played a crucial role in Nietzsche’s “genealogy
of the modern decadence” (Ansell-Pearson 1996, p. 20). This is what Rousseau
and Nietzsche agree about: the world order demands a radical change. But their
solutions are shaped according to their different centuries.
Rousseau’s social contract is based on the education of future citizens, whereas
Nietzsche prefers to talk about dressage and elevation instead of education.
“Dressage” means that one has to educate the body, not only the spirit. This will
enable the formation of the great man (Wotling 1995, p. 334) who is then going
to open up the dimension of the super-human, das Übermenschliche. The prefix
“über” primarily means overcoming, Überwindung, and is related to the future.
The notorious word “super-man” is above all this: what is going to come, the future
as a want and a promise (ibid., p. 337); the super-human does not exist yet (ibid.,
p. 347). Although Nietzsche cannot avoid quoting a few great proper names and
incorporating them (Cesare Borgia, Napoleon, Goethe, and Shakespeare), at the
end of the day he tells us that it is actually a “type which has not existed” (ibid.,
p. 352).3
Instead of using the word “teacher,” Lehrer, Nietzsche uses two other words:
Züchter and Erzieher. Züchter is the one who “trains,” and aims to select the
super-human (Wotling 1995, p. 339), and Erzieher is, as in the Socratic midwifery
profession, the one who promotes changes and transformations (Schacht 1995,
p. 231), and provides support for Überwindung, overcoming. The most important
overcoming for man is Selbst-überwindung, the overcoming of oneself. This is
self-overcoming, which is developed similarly in saints, genial individuals, or
3
Nietzsche’s “über” is in the first place related to this new orientation into the future; it can
be explained also from such connections as überhistorisch, Übertier, Überkultur, etc. (Wotling 1995,
pp. 335–336).
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Epicurean gods: in the pathos of distance and detachment (Wotling 1995, pp. 334
and 343). The great governor is the one who promotes his own curing and overcoming – and that of his students. Apart from Wagner, and above all apart from
Schopenhauer who was praised by young Nietzsche as his governor, without
telling us anything about him (Schacht 1996, p. 226), the only true governor is
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. The book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” could be perhaps
taken for a kind of a Bildungsroman (ibid., p. 231). We cannot be satisfied with
the present-day man, Nietzsche claims in his autobiography; “in what I call the
great convalescence,” Zarathustra is “an ideal of the human-superhuman wellbeing
and benevolence which all too often looks as non-human.” While turning against
the “despisers of the body” (Nietzsche 2003, p. 62), he speaks about “the nearest,
the most common […] about the unprecedented things […]. Lightenings spread
like a streak into unresolved futures […] It is in this comprehension of the spaces,
in this access to oppositions that Zarathustra feels like the highest art of all the
existent” (Nietzsche 1967–1977, 6, pp. 343–4).
Zarathustra: the one who overcomes himself, among all of Nietzsche’s “ima­ges
of authority” the greatest. Zarathustra: in the place of Rousseau’s Lycurgus and
Numa, or even that of Moses. Zarathustra: the personification of the one who
educates and the one who is educated, the uncured and the cured, the man and
the one who is yet to come. Zarathustra: an answer to the question, what does it
mean to orient oneself in thinking? Zarathustra: only through him can man attain
true greatness (Schacht 1995, p. 233). Zarathustra: the philosopher-physician and
self-educator for the time to come?
The event that is to come is for philosophy – Nietzsche himself. To cut history into two is his main “revolutionary” maxim. In contrast to the prevailing
understanding that sees the gist of Nietzsche in his aphorisms, in their interpretations and in the notorious Nietzsche’s style (Derrida 1987), we can now,
after Nietzsche and with “Nietzsche and Rousseau,” install the authority of the
other Nietzsche: instead of interpreting the world – changing it. The “Nietzsche
case” is for the history of philosophy without a precedent: Nietzsche himself. As
he finally asks himself in his autobiography ‘why am I destiny?’ he puts into the
forefront precisely this: “I know my destiny. Some day my name will be melted
with a memory of something exorbitant – of a crisis […] evoked against everything
that people believed in. I am not human, I am dynamite” (Nietzsche 1967–1977,
6, p. 365). Dynamite: the event Nietzsche, his self-overcoming, and his politics of
the proper name.
The facsimile of Nietzsche’s name has to capture this very dynamite that is
Nietzsche himself, his Selbst-überwindung. Just like Rousseau in the eighteenth
century, Nietzsche is also without a precedent, but just Rousseau has enough
strength to cut into history. Nietzsche does not introduce new values into philo­
sophy; neither does he introduce the very notion of value as such. Nietzsche’s
problem is not the notorious “revaluation of all values.” Nietzsche’s most general
project, as opposed to Kant’s, is to carry out a true critique (Deleuze 2010, p. 1),
and to install the value of what cannot be estimated: life as such. But this is not
any more life that would be a somewhat uncertain (and dangerous) supplement
Rousseau and Nietzsche: “The Politics of the Proper Name”
71
to work, and it is also not bare life, which would be written on the bottom of the
page in autobiographical exercises. It is Nietzsche’s life, which steps over onto the
side of thought, an anecdote that steps over onto the side of an aphorism (Deleuze
1965, p. 18; Deleuze 1969, p. 153).
There is no contradiction between the Nietzsche-physician and the “persona­
lized” Nietzsche who writes in the first person singular for his forty-fourth birthday
to himself. Just as there is no contradiction between Rousseau who writes his most
“personal” confessions and Rousseau of the social contract embodying the common
will of all. Rousseau who detaches himself into pure solitude is only at first sight
incongruent with Rousseau who tends to install the universal. If we put him side
by side with Nietzsche, we can understand that there is no contradiction involved.
In their own centuries, Rousseau and Nietzsche were “too early,” both lived in the
dimension of “not yet,” and both in the time that is “yet to come” (Schacht 1996,
p. 37). Rousseau and Nietzsche are bound together by self-transparency and the
transparency of education for social contract, self-overcoming, and overcoming
of the “human, all too human” – the personal that is yet to become the political.
Neither Rousseau nor Nietzsche carried out a political revolution, nor did
they write about it. And yet their lives opened up as broadly as possible a way
of educating a citizen that is not going to be “everywhere in chains,” and the
“dressage” of the free spirit, which is always “untimely” and, in the incessant
struggle with its time, always “actual.” Pierre Hadot, who reflected a lot about
the Lebensform of philosophers and about philosophers “in person,” concluded
his inaugural speech at the Collège de France with the voice of the other that is
now to speak in his name. It sounds like this: “Many are those who are entirely
absorbed in militant politics, in the preparation for the social revolution. Rare,
very rare, are those who, in order to prepare for the revolution, wish to become
worthy of it” (Friedmann in Hadot 1997, p. 224).
At the end, a note: Nietzsche’s debt to the American Emerson that seems to
preoccupy Stanley Cavell more and more (2011, p. 93) belongs to the history of
ideas. Nietzsche’s place in the nineteenth century, in Karl Löwith’s lucid analysis
of the “German spirit from Hegel to Nietzsche,” put together with Rousseau’s
place in the age of the Enlightenment, however, present one of those inspirations
in the history of philosophy that are very scarce. I think it can be compared to
the famous inspiration of Rousseau himself – the one by which Rousseau actually
became Rousseau.
We are in the anecdotal year of 1749, when Rousseau is on his way to Diderot
imprisoned in Vincennes. In the unrest effected by the question of the importance
of human institutions for the progress of civilization (to which he will then provide an answer in his discourse on the sciences and the arts), “he noticed at once
how his mind was blinded by thousands of lights” (Rousseau in Philonenko 1984,
p. 13). He found a refuge under a tree near the road searching for an answer to
the posed question. However, his “solution” is going to be no less ambivalent,
contradictory, and “only negative” as all of his work, life – and autobiography.
And this Enlightenment philosophical anecdote took place in the same Vincennes
where later on, as a consequence of the student revolt in the restless year 1968,
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the entirely new alma mater will be built: the Paris VIII – Vincennes University,
the herald of the future for our century.
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