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LESSONS ON ROUSSEAU
Louis Althusser
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2. There are, however, other terms (which are perhaps concepts, according to Althusser) that remain in the background to form a sort of accompaniment, prop, or punctual explanation: pure nature, the forest, accidents, and so on. Althusser says that Rousseau ‘practises’ these terms without ‘seeing’ them, because he ‘directs his gaze elsewhere’. When we read his course, we notice that the leading role has been conferred on these backgrounded terms; they are the ones that traverse Rousseau’s text in order to indicate its coherence and unity. The example of the forest is noteworthy. In Rousseau’s text, it seems to be nothing more than a stage-setting needed for the actors’ performance; it is there simply to provide decor for the life of savage man. In Althusser’s course, in contrast, the forest becomes the leading actor; it unfolds through the text’s every detail, sustaining and producing it to the point that natural man, pure nature, and so on become nothing more than the shadows of the theoretical trees and fruit of the forest that grounds the entire edifice.19
3. It seems to us that this promotion of stage-setting-concepts or character-concepts results from the intervention of the last level (circle, void, nothingness, and so on) in Rousseau’s text. It is as if this third level, rather than working on the text, slides beneath it in order to make its critical joints crack or to produce conceptual hernias: Althusser forges and uses these sub-concepts in order to display the fault-lines in the textual crust, to destroy its seeming continuity in order to set it on other foundations, on the ground of new concepts, on a new text of Rousseau’s. In fact, it is the same text, but the roles have been inverted: the stage-setting has come to occupy the foreground.
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