Political Force and the Grounds of Identity from Rousseau to Flaubert - Johns Hopkins University

Political Force and the Grounds of Identity from Rousseau to
   Flaubert

   Jonathan Strauss

   MLN, Volume 117, Number 4, September 2002 (French Issue), pp. 808-835
   (Article)

   Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2002.0066

       For additional information about this article
       https://muse.jhu.edu/article/22829

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]

808                          JONATHAN STRAUSS

             Political Force and the
            Grounds of Identity from
             Rousseau to Flaubert
                                          ❦

                             Jonathan Strauss

In 1988, D.A. Miller used the example of nineteenth-century novels
to argue that the subversive power of literary texts was greatly
exaggerated, and that the novel tended instead merely to reproduce
the ruses of existing social power structures.1 More recently, however,
a group of jurists and literary scholars met at Yale University to discuss
the relations between legal and literary discourses. Focusing more on
the rhetorical nature of legal discourse than on its representation in
literary works, those assembled came to very different conclusions
than Miller. Reva B. Siegel, a professor of law, argued, for instance,
that “while it is conventionally assumed that the category of legal
fictions is sparsely populated by a few quaint counterfactuals, it seems
instead that the category of legal fictions is quite large—the figural
terrain on which we fight some of the major social conflicts of our
day” (228). Some of those “major conflicts” can best be understood
by tracing them back to the period between the mid-eighteenth and
the mid-nineteenth centuries, when the legal grounds of modern
Europe and the U.S. were being laid. In particular, it is by returning
to this period that one can begin deciphering the relation between
that “figural terrain” and a conflict so pervasive and so fundamental

  1
    I am deeply indebted to Wilda Anderson for her remarkable critiques of this article
in its earlier stages. I would also like to thank those who have commented on lecture
versions of this work, especially Daniel Brewer and my colleagues at Miami University.

      MLN 117 (2002): 808–835 © 2002 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

MLN                                809

to our social functioning that it does not even seem to be perceivable
as a conflict: the determination of what constitutes an individual
person. Even in a volume as sophisticated and as cagey as Law’s
Stories —the proceedings from the conference at which Siegel spoke—
the individual is largely taken as a natural entity who pre-exists the
law. A return to some of the seminal social texts of the mid-eighteenth
to mid-nineteenth centuries indicates, however, that the individual is
instead a figural construction of the law, indeed of the police. And
yet, paradoxically, this politico-rhetorical facticity confers on that
same individual unique possibilities of agency within and upon the
figural terrain of legal discourse. Those possibilities were worked out
in literary language, especially during the mid-nineteenth century,
when rhetorical style became a model for effective resistance to what
is perhaps the most pervasive form of social control: individuality.
   One can pick up the thread of this story around 1748, when
Montesquieu published De l’esprit des lois. In a theoretical move that
would have long echoes throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the tract conceived of human character as largely a
function of its physical environment. A wealthy landowner who had
often confessed that he liked to feel his money under his feet,
Montesquieu argued for the inalienability of a people from its
geographical location, contending that terrain and climate both
express themselves in the characteristics of the human cultures that
develop in them. Even after abstracting away such topographical
particularities, the sheer fact of being situated, of remaining in a
place, had, according to him, a profound, foundational effect on
human societies. In Book 18, for instance, he traced the historical
origins of marriage to the decision to settle down and tend crops.
With the adoption of a sedentary agrarian existence, according to
Montesquieu, socially recognizable individuality shifted its basis from
the internal powers of memory to an external field and the crops
growing in it. The need to linger by a piece of land and care for it
gave an identifiable duration or permanence to a person, and this
permanence was in turn reflected in the institution of marriage,
which at once helped guarantee the guardianship of a field and also
translated the time and immobility of crops into a social institution.
From the “assiette” of the field, to which the farmer was attached
through the roots of plants, a person took shape and found him- or
herself mirrored in the eyes of that single other person who was his or
her spouse (538–39).
   Within this agrarian model, then, the notion of a person as unique

810                       JONATHAN STRAUSS

and self-same over time stemmed from particularities of the plant
kingdom, such as immobility and growth cycles, and to be a socially
recognized individual capable of identifying oneself and others as
persons meant being rooted, like or through a plant, in the dirt. This
form of individual recognition, which was based on the division and
attribution of lands to single people, only arose, however, at the
expense of another kind of individuality, for as Montesquieu wrote:

  C’est le partage des terres qui grossit principalement le code civil. Chez les
  nations où l’on n’aura pas fait ce partage, il y aura très peu de lois civiles.
     On peut appeler les institutions de ces peuples des mœurs plutôt que des
  lois.
     Chez de pareilles nations, les vieillards, qui se souviennent des choses
  passées, ont une grande authorité; on n’y peut être distingué par les biens,
  mais par la main et par les conseils. (538)

Among agricultural peoples the social recognition of individuality as
a continuous identity over time (as the same landowner or the same
wife, for example) supplants another form of subjective persistence,
that of memory. Among nomadic cultures, in other words, a person
had been recognized through his or her self-perceived continuity,
and through the person of the old man, in fact, the self-conscious
continuity of the group as a whole had been founded on and assured
by the individual’s powers of memory. Among farmers, on the other
hand, that same individual continuity is assured by a possession, the
land, whose attachment to the person is derived from and symbolized
by the immobility of the plant. The rootedness of the crops, in other
words, leads to the “demeure” and the recognition of continuous
identity in wife and landowner, and in so doing it effaces another
form of individuality, based on the self-experience of continuity that
is memory. In the historical passage from nomadic to agrarian
societies, therefore, the grounds of self-identity are displaced from
within the individual they support to somewhere outside of him or
her. It is not the earth itself that now plays this foundational role, but
rather the plant that takes root in it and obliges people to tarry, for
the enduring of the soil does not become an issue to societies, does
not produce persons, until it has been sown and those persons have
staked themselves to their harvest.
   Because, in the movement from memory to field, the bases of
externally recognizable self-identity have been alienated from the
individual they ground, one must maintain a link to his or her
selfhood simply to exist as a person in society. This supplementary

MLN                                      811

connection, however, quickly acquires a troublesome autonomy from
both of the entities it is supposed to join, for it develops into an
independent abstraction of particularity in relation both to the land
and to the people who work it. This new, autonomous element soon
takes the forms of both money and police, which means that the
objectified bond between a person and his or her alienated self-
identity—the field—becomes, on the one hand, abstract and fun-
gible, and on the other, gains a coercive element capable of enforcing
personal identity. In Montesquieu’s words:
  Soyez seul, et arrivez par quelque accident chez un peuple inconnu: si vous
  voyez une pièce de monnoie, comptez que vous êtes arrivé chez une nation
  policée.
     La culture des terres demande l’usage de la monnoie. Cette culture
  suppose beaucoup d’arts et de connoissances; et l’on voit toujours marcher
  d’un pas égal les arts, les connoissances et les besoins. Tout cela conduit à
  l’établissement d’un signe de valeurs [. . .].
     [C]hez un peuple où la monnoie est établie, on est sujet aux injustices
  qui viennent de la ruse; et ces injustices peuvent être exercées de mille
  façons. On y est donc forcé d’avoir de bonnes lois civiles; elles naissent
  avec les nouveaux moyens d’être méchant.
     Dans les pays où il n’y a point de monnoie, le ravisseur n’enlève que des
  choses, et les choses ne se ressemblent jamais. Dans les pays où il y a de la
  monnoie, le ravisseur enlève des signes, et les signes se ressemblent
  toujours. Dans les premiers pays rien ne peut être caché, parce que le
  ravisseur porte toujours avec lui des preuves de sa conviction: cela n’est pas
  de même dans les autres. (539–40)

As memory gave way to the field, so the field demands and then gives
way to money. Consequently, in its role as a “sign for value,” money
represents not only goods or possessions, but also the possessor, and
in a society like the one Montesquieu now describes, where individu-
ality is recognized as ownership, loss of ownership amounts to a loss
of identity. By “recognition” we should not, however, understand
“respect,” but something closer to “visibility” or even “existence,” for
respect presupposes an object and that object—the person, the
owner—is precisely what is established through possession. That
person is also what is at risk of vanishing in theft, when the link
between possessor and possession is broken, when an individual and
the abstracted sign of his or her field are separated. In an agricul-
tural, and therefore monetary society, one is “subject to injustices” as
long as one has money, but one has only a tenuous hold on that
identity once one’s money is gone and only its memory remains. The

812                            JONATHAN STRAUSS

semiotic field instantiated in money thus perpetuates and compli-
cates the possibility of separating people not only from their goods,
but also from their identity. The police exist not simply to stave off
starvation, but also to enforce a selfhood that the subject itself might
otherwise lose, forget, or neglect. Within the context of Montesquieu’s
immediate argument, then, the police are the guarantors of an
effaced metaphor between roots and people.
   Like Montesquieu before him, Rousseau was interested in the
implications for social history of pre-agrarian nomadic societies.
Among them, he fantasized, “chacun se logeoit au hazard, et souvent
pour une seule nuit [et] les mâles et les femelles s’unissoient
fortuitement selon la rencontre, l’occasion, et le désir” (I, 147).2 In
this state of pre-historical promiscuity, Rousseau argued in his second
Discours, it would not have been possible to recognize other individu-
als as such. “Comme il n’y avoit presque point d’autre moyen de se
retrouver que de ne pas se perdre de vûe,” he wrote, “ils en étoient
bientôt au point de ne pas même se reconnoître les uns les autres” (I,
147). Recognizable individual identity would, therefore, be premised
on “demeure.” Like Montesquieu too, Rousseau noted the risks
involved in this new social order, raising the issue of theft and asking:
“quel seroit [. . .] l’homme assés insensé pour se tourmenter à la
culture d’un Champ qui sera dépouillé par le premier venu, homme
ou bête indifférement, à qui cette moisson conviendra?” (I, 145). And
like Montesquieu, who founded the conventions and subsequent
rights of personal property in “demeure,” “soin,” and “subsistance,”
Rousseau framed the same issue in terms of “le séjour et les alimens,”
citing three conditions for the legitimate possession of land: “que ce
terrain ne soit encore habité [. . .] qu’on n’en occupe que la quantité
dont on a besoin pour subsister [. . .] [et] qu’on en prenne pos-
session [. . .] par le travail et la culture” (C, 366). The extensiveness of
personal property would thus be proportionate to the material
properties of a person’s body, since the rightfully owned field would
directly correspond to the dimensions of his or her nutritive needs
and capacity for labor. This would also seem to suggest that for

  2
    Abbreviations for parenthetical references to Rousseau’s texts are as follows:
Discours sur l’origine et les fondemens de l’inégalité (I) and Du Contrat social (C) from the
third volume of the Pléiade edition; the Emile (E) and the Dictionnaire des termes d’usage
en botanique (B) from the fourth. Abbreviations for works by other authors are given at
the end of the relevant entries in the list of works cited. Page numbers for entries from
the Encyclopédie are preceded by their volume number.

MLN                                    813

Rousseau the limits of a person would stem from those that deter-
mine the size of personal property, and that a single body would be an
individual.
   While to a certain extent this was true, the limits of a socially
recognizable individual frequently exceeded the bounds of a single
body in Rousseau’s writings. At the beginnings of the agricultural
revolution, when the link between self-identity and the earth was
being forged, personhood was still an indistinct category. Primitive
Man had previously known a world without singular people, “sans
parole, sans domicile [. . .] sans nul besoin de ses semblables [. . .]
peut-être même sans jamais en reconnoître aucun individuellement”
(I, 160), but now, a distinctive unit emerged with the advent of
property: “Ce fut-là l’époque d’une premiére révolution qui forma
l’établissement et la distinction des familles, et qui introduisit une
sorte de propriété” (I, 167). This familial entity formed a prototypical
society in which the roles of the constituent members were not
necessarily clearly defined: “Chaque famille devint une petite Société
d’autant mieux unie que l’attachement réciproque et la liberté en
étoient les seuls liens” (I, 168). This primitive collective individual, in
a certain sense, predated the singular individual and would persist
from the beginnings of farming throughout subsequent social his-
tory. In the Contrat social, for example, Rousseau spoke of the “moi
commun” and the “personne publique” (C, 361), while arguing that
a nation is to be considered an “individu” in relation to other states
(C, 362–63). Still, he very clearly includes a non-collective individual
within the state; these are what he variously refers to as citizens, when
considered as “participans à l’autorité souveraine,” and as subjects,
when considered “comme soumis aux loix de l’Etat” (C, 362). Among
these subjects, the limits of the body do play an important, if not
sufficient, role in determining the limits of personhood.
   On the basis of the second Discours or the Contrat social alone it is
not clear how the limits of these “particulars” are to be determined,
and to do so one must consequently look elsewhere among Rousseau’s
writings. A footnote from the “Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard”
in the Emile is particularly eloquent in this regard, and there
Rousseau argues that particular individuality stems from sensation. It
is through feeling alone that the unity of the atomic person can be
established, he contends, and for that reason the limits of an
individual, while deriving from a relation to the sensual world, are not
based on those of his or her body: “Les parties sensibles sont étendües
mais l’être sensitif est indivisible et un; il ne se partage pas, il est tout

814                            JONATHAN STRAUSS

entier ou nul: l’être sensitif n’est donc pas un corps” (E, 584n.). This
“être sensitif” is the entity, it would seem, that constitutes the
indivisible unit of personhood.3 The particular individual so deter-
mined is, however, caught between two worlds, for while it is
incorporeal, this “être sensitif” derives its sensations through physi-
cal—and therefore bodily—sensation. Put another way, sensation
marks the separation of one person from another, for while I may
sympathize with your pain or pleasure, I do not actually feel them,
and this difference of sensitivity in turn determines the limits of an
individual body, rather than the other way around. According to this
logic—and bracketing ambiguous but not insoluble issues such as
numbness, phantom pains, or inner organs—a body is mine because
I, as an indivisible and non-corporeal entity, can feel what happens
throughout its material extension, and where I can no longer feel, I
no longer have body.4 This indivisible and non-communicable unity

   3
     This idea that the individual is constituted through its sensitivity reappears in
Rousseau’s descriptions of primitive Man from the second Discours: “Telle fut la
condition de l’homme naissant,” he wrote, “telle fut la vie d’un animal borné d’abord
aux pures sensations” (I, 164). As Jean Starobinski commented in his preface to the
Discours, “Une fois écartés les préjugés et les passions, une fois soustraits tout l’acquis et
tout l’adventice, on voit s’éclairer la profondeur du temps, et l’on aperçoit un être
presque purement sensitif, qui ne se distingue de l’automate et de l’animal que par des
facultés virtuelles et une liberté encore sans usage” (lv). This original, sensitive unity of
the individual in the state of nature would subsequently become a model for the unity
of the state, as in this passage from the Contrat social : “pour que le corps du
Gouvernement ait une existence, une vie réelle qui le distingue du corps de l’Etat,
pour que tous ses membres puissent agir de concert et répondre à la fin pour laquelle
il est institué, il lui faut un moi particulier, une sensibilité commune à ses membres, une
force, une volonté propre qui tende à sa conservation. Cette existence particuliere
suppose des assemblées, des conseils…” (C, 399). As in Plato’s Republique, the state is
viewed here as a magnified person, and it is the common sensitivity among its parts,
coupled with a will to self-preservation, that makes of it a moi. In this respect, the
conventional unity of the republic mimics the natural, and immaterial, unity of the
single person.
   4
     Condillac takes the same approach in his Traité des sensations, arguing that the limits
and integrity of a person’s body are manifested to him or her through tactile sensitivity:
“Quoique la statue doive avoir des sensations qu’elle aperçoit naturellement comme
des modifications de ses organes; cependant elle ne connoîtra pas son corps, aussitôt
qu’elle éprouvera de pareilles sensations. Pour le découvrir, elle a besoin d’analyser,
c’est-à-dire, qu’il faut qu’elle observe successivement son moi, dans toutes les parties où
il paroît se trouver” (254; 2.4). So it is that “[e]n les [its hands] portant sur elle-même,
elle ne découvrira qu’elle a un corps, que lorsqu’elle en distinguera les différentes
parties, et qu’elle se reconnoîtra dans chacune pour le même être sentant; et elle ne
découvrira qu’il y a d’autres corps, que parce qu’elle ne se retrouvera pas dans ceux
qu’elle touchera” (255; 2.5, §2). Even if he does not really answer it, Condillac goes
farther than Rousseau in at least raising the question of how an immaterial soul can
appear to be distributed throughout a physical, and therefore extensive, body: “là le

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that traces the limits of my corporeal being in turn expresses itself,
through the body’s mediation, in the dimensions of the field I might
legitimately own. My right to its possession is thus natural to the
extent that as directly as possible the field derives from and expresses
my organic constitution as a person—if nature did not make individu-
als, there would be no natural justification for individual ownership,
but since it does, there is. Or as Rousseau himself puts it, “tant que
nous ne connoîtrons point l’homme naturel, c’est en vain que nous
voudrons déterminer la Loi qu’il a reçue ou celle qui convient le
mieux à sa constitution” (I, 125). Individuals are natural, rather than
social phenomena, and the right for each of them to possess a
certain, circumscribed amount of arable land thus expresses, in a
positive way, the very structures of nature itself.
   While Montesquieu grounded the identifiability of an individual
person in the stability of the field he or she tills, Rousseau moves in
the opposite direction, basing the dimensions of the cultivated land
in the individuality of an immaterial person, or “être sensitif.”
Similarly, Montesquieu had derived the farmer’s individual continuity
over time from the cycles of crops, while Rousseau’s person, like
Montesquieu’s pre-agricultural individual, maintained its indivisible
temporal unity through the action of memory: “Ce que je sais bien,”
Rousseau wrote, “c’est que l’identité du moi ne se prolonge que par la
mémoire, et que pour être le même en effet, il faut que je me
souvienne d’avoir été” (E, 590). For Montesquieu it was the rootedness
of plants that generated demeure and agricultural personhood, while
for Rousseau the individual results from deeper laws of nature that
underlie both plants and people.5 In fact, for him, the immobility of

moi, au lieu d’être concentré dans l’ame, devoit s’étendre, se répandre et se répéter en
quelque sorte dans toutes les parties du corps. [. . .] Cet artifice, par lequel nous
croyons nous trouver dans des organes qui ne sont pas nous proprement, a sans doute
son fondement dans le mécanisme du corps humain, et sans doute aussi ce mécanisme
aura été choisi et ordonné par rapport à la nature de l’ame. C’est tout ce que nous
pouvons savoir à ce sujet” (254; 2.4). The apparent co-extensivity of body and soul is
thus based on a pre-ordained concordance between the two, a sort of natural artifice.
In Rousseau, this concordance would then be further expressed in the dimensions of
the field.
  5
    The meaning of the expression “laws of nature” provoked disagreement during this
period. Newton and his numerous followers understood them to be basic properties of
the physical world. As defined under their entry in the Encyclopédie, the lois de la nature
“sont des axiomes ou regles générales de mouvement & de repos qu’observent les
corps naturels dans l’action qu’ils exercent les uns sur les autres, & dans tous les
changemens qui arrivent à leur état naturel. [. . .] Quoique les lois de la nature soient

816                           JONATHAN STRAUSS

the root itself stems from a condition that marks not a continuity but
rather a clear distinction between the essence of human individuality
and the nature of the vegetal. An entry from his Dictionnaire des termes
d’usage en botanique, finished in 1774, demonstrates the decisiveness of
this difference:
   RACINE.—Partie de la plante par laquelle elle tient à la terre ou au corps
   qui la nourrit. Les plantes ainsi attachées par la racine à leur matrice ne
   peuvent avoir de mouvement local; le sentiment leur seroit inutile,
   puisqu’elles ne peuvent chercher ce qui leur convient, ni fuir ce qui leur
   nuit: or la nature ne fait rien en vain. (B, 1241)
Plants are attached to the earth, like the individuality of Montesquieu’s
farmers, and this attachment in turn determines some of their other
characteristics, such as the fact that they have no capacity for
sensation, which their immobility would make useless to them.
Because of its rootedness, the vegetal thus lacks that very characteris-

proprement les mêmes que celles du mouvement, on y a cependant mis quelque
différences. En effet, on trouve des auteurs qui donnent le nom de lois du mouvement
aux lois particulieres du mouvement, & qui appellent lois de la nature les lois plus
générales & plus étendues, qui sont comme les axiomes d’où les autres sont déduites.
[. . .] De ces dernieres lois M. Newton en établit trois” (11: 41; cf. Newton’s own “Rules
of Reasoning in Philosophy” in the Principia, 398–400). On the other hand, “natural
laws” were given a significantly different meaning in the Encyclopédie, where they were
attributed only to human beings: “on définit la loi naturelle, une loi que Dieu impose à
tous les hommes, & qu’ils peuvent découvrir par les lumieres de la raison, en
considérant attentivement leur nature & leur état. [. . .] Le droit naturel est le système
de ces mêmes lois, & la jurisprudence naturelle est l’art de développer les lois de la
nature, & de les appliquer aux actions humaines. [. . .] Le savant évêque de Péter-
borough définit les lois naturelles, certaines propositions d’une vérité immuable, qui
servent à diriger les actes volontaires de notre ame dans la recherche des biens ou dans
la fuite des maux, & qui nous imposent l’obligation de régler nos actions d’une
certaine maniere, indépendamment de toute loi civile, & mises à part les conventions
par lesquelles le gouvernement est établi. Cette définition du docteur Cumberland
revient au même que la nôtre. [. . .] Les lois naturelles sont ainsi nommées parce qu’elles
dérivent uniquement de la constitution de notre être avant l’établissement des
sociétés” (11: 46). Rousseau’s own definition of the term “loi naturelle” conceived of it
as a direct human expression of immutable natural conditions that are not limited to
the properties of movement and rest that Newton understood by the term “laws of
nature.” In the preface to the second Discours, for instance, he writes: “Connoissant si
peu la Nature et s’accordant si mal sur le sens du mot Loi [as the authors who have
already written on this subject], il seroit bien difficile de convenir d’une bonne
définition de la Loi naturelle. [. . .] Tout ce que nous pouvons voir très clairement au
sujet de cette Loi, c’est que non seulement pour qu’elle soit loi il faut que la volonté de
celui qu’elle oblige puisse s’y soumettre avec connoissance; Mais il faut encore pour
qu’elle soit naturelle qu’elle parle immediatement par la voix de la Nature” (I, 125). It
is in the latter sense that the term “laws of nature” will be used in this article.

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tic—sentience—which creates human individuality, but that lack also
makes the plant an example of the natural order as a whole, insofar as
it is a system in which nothing, as Rousseau puts it, happens in vain.
It is this exemplarity that is significant, for through its rootedness—
and subsequently through its inability to stray, to feel lack, or, most
importantly, to manifest in excess—the plant becomes a synecdoche
for a mode of expression based on positivity, plenitude, and the
adequation between what represents and what is represented. Like
Rousseau’s “loi naturelle” and as an expression of it, the root “parle
immediatement par la voix de la Nature” (I, 125). Incapable of
excess, of that difference between “être” and “paraître” that opens
the way for detour, dissimulation, ruse, or semiotics (in a modern
sense), the racine is even more deeply and directly embedded in
natural law than it is in the soil from which it grows.6 Since it can
never be dislodged from that law, the botanical specimen symbolizes
a mode of representation opposite to that configured by the pair of
money and police in Montesquieu, where the abstracted root of
human individuality threatens to vanish into the anonymity of inter-
changeable signs.
   Rousseau characterized his attempt to reconstruct human beings in
the state of nature as a return to their roots, explaining, in the second
Discours, that “[s]i je me suis étendu si longtems sur la supposition de
cette condition primitive, c’est qu’ayant d’anciennes erreurs et des
préjugés invétérés à détruire, j’ai cru devoir creuser jusqu’à la racine”
(160). The “être sensitif,” human existence before the advent of
society, is the root of our identity, the place where it speaks directly
the laws of nature. In this sense, Rousseau’s racine symbolizes the
human individual insofar as it is a direct expression of an underlying
natural condition, which is its determination by self-sensation. To say,
as Montesquieu does, that an individual could be alienated from his
or her individuality is as nonsensical in Rousseau’s terms as to say that
a plant has behaved unnaturally. Moreover, to the extent that it

   6
     In the second Discours Rousseau uses this same distinction between being and
seeming to describe the first time primitive humans felt the need to respected by others
of their species. It is in the space created by this difference that deception and all its
attendant vices are born: “Il falut pour son avantage se montrer autre que ce qu’on
étoit en effet. Etre et paroître devinrent deux choses tout à fait différentes, et de cette
distinction sortirent le faste imposant, la ruse trompeuse, et tous les vices en sont le
cortège” (I, 174). All ruse, one could say, is faste, in that it is an expression of excess. It
is this excess that is unnatural, and the root is incapable of it.

818                       JONATHAN STRAUSS

conforms to the laws of nature, Rousseau’s social world should have
no need for a police, since the natural and invariable conditions
which the plant expresses through its roots also protect the individual
person from the potentially overpowering strength of the collectivity
in which he or she might participate, as becomes clear in his political
writings, such as the Contrat social.
   The early chapters of this work are devoted to a lengthy refutation
of Grotius’s arguments for the inevitability of the “droit du plus fort.”
This refutation will prove to be an essential preliminary step when
Rousseau subsequently attempts to establish the necessity and viabil-
ity of the social pact itself, since the latter can only be contracted
through the free self-interest of independent persons and since those
contracting individuals will be understandably chary about creating,
through their participation, a social entity vastly stronger than
themselves. The Contrat social is especially reassuring on this point, as
demonstrated by the following description of the state formed by free
engagement among individuals:

  Tous les services qu’un citoyen peut rendre à l’Etat, il les lui doit sitôt que
  le Souverain les demande; mais le Souverain de son côté ne peut charger
  les sujets d’aucune chaine inutile à la communauté; il ne peut pas même le
  vouloir: car sous la loi de raison rien ne se fait sans cause, non plus que
  sous la loi de nature.
     Les engagemens qui nous lient au corps social ne sont obligatoires que
  parce qu’il sont mutuels, et leur nature est telle qu’en les remplissant on
  ne peut travailler pour autrui sans travailler aussi pour soi. (C, 373)

Reason, like nature, does nothing in vain or without a cause, and the
Sovereign itself is therefore governed by a principle analogous to the
one that governs and expresses itself through the root. The latter, in
its insensibility, is a concrete example of natural positivity, of nature’s
legible and inviolable utility. It is an example too, therefore, of the
natural law by which the individual is protected from the collectiv-
ity—and consequently also from the potential abuses of a police. One
must, one will enter the social contract and constitute the modern
state because the state so formed will protect one from other
individuals and because the laws of reason and nature will, in turn,
protect one from the state itself. The guarantee of this higher law
comes not in such forms as divine tablets or miracles, or the obvious
sanctity of the French king’s healing touch, but in the shape of the
root, which manifests the rationality and utility of the natural.

MLN                                     819

   For there is need of a persuasive guarantee. In speaking here of
“engagemens [. . .] obligatoires,” Rousseau drops a reminder that his
argument is not simply descriptive. True, his principles “dérivent de
la nature des choses, et sont fondés sur la raison” (C, 358); still,
setting them into practice will involve a little force, such that anyone
who refuses the social pact, “on le forcera d’être libre” (C, 364)—that
is, to join the state. The argument is therefore performative insofar as
it is an attempt to convince—and failing that compel—free individu-
als to gather, contract, and thereby form the state which it describes.
It does so, of course, on the authority of reason and nature. But still—
it argues. Reason, in short, will need to use a little persuasion—and
perhaps a little force—to help individuals identify their best interests.
   Through a similar turn of events, it becomes clear that although
nature demonstrates our indivisible individual unity to us through
sensation, sensation might also need a bit of outside authority to help
individuals simply identify themselves. Since some of the fantasmatic
forces that Rousseau dissimulates in his political reasoning are more
clearly expressed when he takes up similar themes in his botanical
writings, one must turn again to his Dictionnaire de botanique for an
indication of the problems that identifying a naturally determined
individual might entail. The dictionary’s introduction begins with a
critique of previous taxonomical systems, contending that long-
prevalent methods of classification had proven inadequate because
they had attempted to identify plant species on the basis of their
substance rather than their structure. These earlier approaches to
botanical nomenclature had tended to treat the study of plants as a
subcategory of medicine, with lamentable results:

  Cette fausse maniere d’envisager la Botanique en a long-tems rétréci
  l’étude au point de la borner presque aux plantes usuelles, et de réduire la
  chaîne végétale à un petit nombre de chaînons interrompus. Encore ces
  chaînons mêmes ont-ils été très-mal étudiés, parce qu’on y regardoit
  seulement la matiere et non pas l’organisation. Comment se seroit-on
  beaucoup occupé de la structure organique d’une substance, ou plutôt
  d’une masse ramifiée qu’on ne songeoit qu’à piler dans un mortier? (B,
  1201, emphasis added.)

The guiding principle of Rousseau’s own approach is, in contrast, to
view the material specimen as the expression of an immaterial
structure. The individual plant, in other words, concretely manifests
certain rules of conformation particular to its species. As the body,

820                       JONATHAN STRAUSS

and by mediation the field, express the immaterial personhood of the
sentient individual, so do individual botanical specimens express an
immaterial organization that is their essence. This essence is not,
however, a “simple” that might be ground down from vegetable
matter. It is, in fact, as complicated as it is abstract, and the
importance of the dictionary itself derives from the homology be-
tween this underlying abstract structure of the plant and the abstract
system of nomenclature. The former cannot, in fact, be successfully
identified without the aid of the latter, for Rousseau contends that
although “il est vrai que les noms sont arbitraires,” it is equally true
that “admettre l’étude de la Botanique et rejetter celle de la nomen-
clature, c’est [. . .] tomber dans la plus absurde contradiction” (B,
1209).
   Although it is not clear from the Dictionnaire itself why botany and
nomenclature should be inseparable, Rousseau is echoing a more
general attitude about the relation between language and things that
was characteristic of his period. The entry on “Langue” in the
Encyclopédie, for instance, argued that ideas were impossible without
the words to express them. “Les mots,” it asserted, “sont les signes des
idées, & naissent avec elles, de maniere qu’une nation formée &
distinguée par son idiome, ne sauroit faire l’acquisition d’une nouvelle
idée, sans faire en même tems celle d’un mot nouveau qui la
représente” (9: 264). In a more fundamental sense, the structure of
languages was always, at bottom, that of thought itself, or, more
precisely, of analytic thought:
  il n’y a que l’ordre analytique qui puisse régler l’ordre & la proportion de
  cette image successive & fugitive [i.e. the word as sensous image of
  thought]. Cette regle est sûre, parce qu’elle est immuable, comme la
  nature même de l’esprit humain, qui en est la source & le principe. [. . .]
  L’ordre analytique est donc le lien universel de la communicabilité de
  toutes les langues & du commerce de pensées, qui est l’ame de la société.
  [. . .] Voilà donc ce qui se trouve universellement dans l’esprit de toutes les
  langues ; la succession analytique des idées partielles qui constituent une
  même pensée, & les mêmes especes de mots pour représenter les idées
  partielles envisagées sous les mêmes aspects. (9: 257–58)

Syntax and grammar thus conform more or less faithfully to a
universal and immutable system that itself derives from the very
nature of human intelligence. This means that the mind is itself
already an analytical space. Michel Foucault described this pre-
organization of thought as a “disposition” towards representation that

MLN                                         821

ordered the world of things in a way that could itself be reflected in
language.7 And it is from this open but structured space, he argued,
that natural history, with its attendant taxonomies, emerged:
  l’histoire naturelle—et c’est pourquoi elle est apparue précisément à ce
  moment-là—c’est l’espace ouvert dans la représentation par une analyse
  qui anticipe sur la possibilité de nommer; c’est la possibilité de voir ce
  qu’on pourra dire, mais qu’on ne pourrait pas dire par la suite ni voir à
  distance si les choses et les mots, distincts les uns des autres, ne
  communiquaient d’entrée de jeu en une représentation. L’ordre descriptif
  que Linné, bien après Jonston, proposera à l’histoire naturelle, est très
  caractéristique. (M, 142)8
   Rousseau addressed the issue of this relation between seeing and
speaking in an extended passage from the second Discours in which
he tried to imagine the way language must have been born. At first,
he contended, there would have been nothing but proper nouns,
with each entity given its own appellation. The problem at that point
would then have been how the general structures of language
developed, so that the relations among different objects, that is to say,
the order of representation, could be expressed. The first step would
have been to create generic nouns, and to do so it was necessary,
according to Rousseau, to recognize identity among—or rather,
through—difference:

   7
     “La théorie de l’histoire naturelle n’est pas dissociable de celle du langage. Et
pourtant, il ne s’agit pas, de l’une à l’autre, d’un transfert de méthodes. Ni d’une
communication de concepts, ou des prestiges d’un modèle qui, pour avoir ‘réussi’
d’un côté serait essayé dans le domaine voisin. Il ne s’agit pas non plus d’une
rationalité plus générale qui imposerait des formes identiques à la réflexion sur la
grammaire et la taxonimia. Mais d’une disposition fondamentale du savoir qui ordonne
la connaissance des êtres à la possibilité de les représenter dans un système de noms”
(M, 170).
   8
     Sylvain Auroux has made a similar argument, stating that while, during the
Enlightenment, “le signe linguistique est arbitraire, c’est-à-dire non naturel” (14), the
relation between language and nature was more complex than it might initially appear.
“Il faut donc dire,” he writes, “qu’un concept de langue se constitue au XVIIIe siècle;
il ne s’agit pas d’un concept abstrait mais de ce que l’on peut nommer un concept
naturel.... Le concept naturel…se définit par la désignation d’un champ d’objets; les
propriétés qu’on lui assigne dépendent de la dispersion des propriétés répartissant les
objets du champ en classes; autrement dit le concept naturel n’est qu’à demi construit;
il donne certes des critères d’exclusion, mais ne peut servir à une délimitation stricte,
ce n’est pas lui qui est le thème de la théorie, c’est le champ des objets empiriques et
leurs propriétés” (46).

822                       JONATHAN STRAUSS

  Chaque objet reçut d’abord un nom particulier, sans égard aux genres, et
  aux Espéces, que ces premiers Instituteurs n’étoient pas en état de
  distinguer; et tous les individus se présentérent isolés à leur esprit, comme
  ils le sont dans le tableau de la Nature. Si un Chêne s’appelloit A, un autre
  Chêne s’appelloit B: de sorte que plus les connoissances étoient bornées,
  et plus le Dictionnaire devint étendu. L’embarras de toute cette Nomen-
  clature ne put être levé facilement: car pour ranger les êtres sous des
  dénominations communes, et génériques, il en falloit connoître les
  propriétés et les différences; il falloit des observations, et des définitions.
  (I, 149)

The necessity of nomenclature in botany seems to derive from the
principle that the generic name is the abstract sameness of the thing
among diversity and that to establish this name is to establish the
species among the specimens, identity among and through differ-
ence. The laws of the species, which the particular plant expresses,
are therefore onomastic laws and their structures linguistic.
   Single plants manifest the self-identity of their species. That species
is, in turn, a structure of laws that can only be fixed—or identified—
in and as language. The relation between species and name is really,
in short, a form of metaphor: one name for another. In its absolute
differentiality, in its perfect exclusion of positivity or essentiality, the
system of nomenclature is, however, of a labyrinthine complexity, for
how, after all, was one to identify any individual species when the
principles of identification themselves comprised a theoretically
infinite series of onomastic relays, when, in other words, “la
connoissance d’une seule plante exigeoit celle de plusieurs autres,
auxquelles sa phrase [i.e. its “nom”] renvoyoit, et dont les noms
n’étoient pas plus déterminés que le sien?” (B, 1204). The problem of
botany is, therefore, the problem of the dictionary itself: how is one to
learn what words mean if all one has is a series of interdependent
definitions in yet more words? The entry on “Dictionnaire” in the
Encyclopédie proposed a solution (subsequently repeated in the entry
on “Encyclopédie): “comme des définitions consistent à expliquer un
mot par un ou plusieurs autres, il résulte nécessairement de-là qu’il
est des mots qu’on ne doit jamais définir, puisqu’autrement toutes les
définitions ne formeroient plus qu’une espece de cercle vicieux, dans
lequel un mot seroit expliqué par un autre mot qu’il auroit servi à
expliquer lui-même” (B, 259). Now, these words that must not be
defined, that must be passed over in silence, the author names the

MLN                                           823

“racines philosophiques de la langue” (B, 259).9 For the order to
function, certain terms must be excluded from it, and these terms are
roots. In botany, however, the root itself could neither limit nor
ground the onomastic system since any plant is identifiable only as a
product of that system, and the “outside” standard by which the
proliferation of definitions would be closed is itself only an effect of
those definitions. If botanical identification depends on dictionary
definitions, and these in turn only lead one farther and farther from
the plant to be isolated, how can one ever possibly bridge the divide
between an organic entity and abstract language? In other words,
having dug up a root, how can one use the dictionary to identify it?
   To the extent that identification, especially of a single individual,
can in fact be determined, it will only be through a mastery of this
potentially endless proliferation of interlocking references, through a
systematization of the arbitrarily chosen names of all plants. The
organization, or structure, of the field of nomenclature will therefore
be more important than the structure of the specimen to be identi-
fied, for identification is assured not through the plants themselves,
as positive as they may be in other respects, but through a control of
the semiotic system that designates them:
   Perdus dans ce labyrinthe immense, les Botanistes forcés de chercher un
   fil pour s’en tirer, s’attacherent enfin sérieusement à la méthode; Herman,
   Rivin, Ray, proposerent chacun la sienne; mais l’immortel Tournefort
   l’emporta sur eux tous; il rangea le premier systématiquement tout le
   regne végétal; et réformant en partie la nomenclature, la combina par ses
   nouveaux genres avec celle de Gaspard Bauhin. (B, 1205)
Again structure and nomenclature go together but, freed from a
grounding in positivities, they have become a labyrinth in which the
stability of identificatory principles is lost; they are only mastered, the
field is only finally limited and organized, through the application to
it of system and method—that is, through the articulation of the

  9
    A similar term reappears in the entry “Encyclopédie”: “Il faut définir tous les
termes, excepté les radicaux” (5: 635A). In returning to the issue of “racines
grammaticales,” the author offers the following method for delimiting, if not defining
them: “Passons maintenant à la maniere de fixer la notion de ces radicaux: il n’y a, ce
me semble, qu’un seul moyen, encore n’est-il pas aussi parfait qu’on le desireroit; non
qu’il laisse de l’équivoque dans les cas où il est applicable, mais en ce qu’il peut y avoir
des cas auxquels il n’est pas possible de l’appliquer, avec quelqu’adresse qu’on le
manie. Ce moyen est de rapporter la langue vivante à une langue morte” (5: 638).

824                            JONATHAN STRAUSS

space of representation rather than through the essential properties
of referents. In order for system and method effectively to supplant
the misleading promises of essentialist or substantial identification,
they must, however, be universalized. For example, in order to
impose a new system of taxonomy after the generally accepted
Linnean one, “il faudrait [. . .],” according to Rousseau, “un auteur
dont le crédit effaçât celui de M. Linnaeus, et à l’autorité duquel
l’Europe entiere voulût se soumettre une seconde fois, ce qui me
paroît difficile à espérer. Car si son systême, quelque excellent qu’il
puisse être, n’est adopté que par une seule nation, il jettera la
Botanique dans un nouveau labyrinthe, et nuira plus qu’il ne servira”
(B, 1208). The system would thus revert to a labyrinth for the logical
reason that a non-universally adopted method would not supplant
but merely supplement the original Linnean one, and its terms would
consequently not better master the field of differential identification
but would simply become further relays or renvois to all the pre-
existing ones, thereby reopening the whole problem of mastery.
   The identities of flowers and plants are thus established, for
Rousseau, not on the basis of their essence or their regionality—in
fact, one of the purposes of the Dictionnaire de botanique, as stated in its
introduction, was to standardize the various regional names for plant
species and thereby reveal in them an identity more fundamental
than would appear to local observers and taxonomists. Instead, those
identities are to be determined on the basis of their difference. Plants
may, in themselves, be positivities, but the ability to recognize them,
that is, to relate a single material specimen to the abstract generality
of a species, depends not on the positive qualities of the plant in
question, but rather on a comprehensive knowledge of what it is
not.10 Their self-identity as systems of iterable structures—as species,
in other words—requires an entire, differential system of nomencla-
ture, and this differential system, in turn, depends on a single
authority in order to function comprehensibly, in order, that is to say,
to produce individual species. The overall system may be the direct

   10
      Botany (and natural history in general, to the extent that it follows the same
principles) thus foreshadows the structuralist linguistic system described by Saussure,
esp. on pp. 166–67. Cf. Foucault, who argues that in the Classical period “[u]n animal
ou une plante n’est pas ce qu’indique—ou trahit—le stigmate qu’on découvre
imprimé en lui; il est ce que ne sont pas les autres; il n’existe en lui-même qu’à la limite
de ce qui s’en distingue. Méthode et système ne sont que les deux manières de définir
les identités par le réseau général des différences” (M, 157).

MLN                                  825

expression of natural laws of representation, but for them to operate
meaningfully, all of Europe must submit itself to one master. Two
principles can be induced from this: first that natural identity is a
form of language and, second, that linguistic identity depends on
convention.
   But conventions, as Rousseau acknowledged in the Contrat social,
require enforcement, even when they conform most closely to
natural law. Not only must those who refuse their freedom be forced
to accept it (C, 364), the state itself demands a permanent coercive
force: “il lui [i.e. the State or the City] faut une force universelle et
compulsive pour mouvoir et disposer chaque partie de la maniere la
plus convenable au tout” (C, 372). The less citizens are willing to act
in their own natural best interests, the more that force must be
exercised: “Or moins les volonté particulieres se rapportent à la
volonté générale, c’est-à-dire les mœurs aux loix, plus la force
réprimante doit augmenter” (C, 397). The police has returned, in
short, within the very laws of nature that were supposed to protect
individuals from it. It has returned in language.
   To retrace the steps of their reappearance: through its positive
expression of natural laws, the plant is a talismanic guarantee that the
state and its police are themselves governed by a higher, disinterested,
and utterly reliable authority. The plant expresses the reliability of
natural law in general insofar as it is a positive materialization of its
immaterial structure—insofar, that is, as it cannot lie, deceive, or
deviate about its own nature in particular. It turns out, however, that
in order to be intelligible, the relation between structure and
manifestation must itself be policed, if the police is understood either
in Montesquieu’s terms as a force exercised to protect individual
identity from alienation within a semiotic system or as a compulsive
agency within the state. According to the reasoning of the botanical
dictionary as applied to political theory, then, natural identity does
not precede coercion but is instead produced by it. The guarantee
against the police is itself, in short, a product of the police and not of
a higher authority—it is, in fact, a ruse of the police to the extent that
the guarantee is presented as coming from elsewhere than its own
exercise of power.
   According to the “Profession de foi,” the unity of sentience gives
limits and individuality to the atomistic individual. The individuality
of a person as self-sensation is incommunicable, and indeed, its limits,
which are the limits of the individual—which are, in fact, the
individuality of the individual—derive from the very incommunicability

826                          JONATHAN STRAUSS

of sensation. We touch: my body ends and yours begins by the
insurmountable difference, the abyss of that contact, with my hand
feeling me and your hand feeling you, and then derivatively each
other.11 But this individual is replaced by someone communicable the
moment he or she enters the social pact, by the sheer fact of being
identifiable to others. Or rather, it is the other way around: the
moment an individual is recognizable to others, he or she has
engaged a linguistic, i.e. social, convention of some sort. And the
lesson of the root is that identification involves the police; that the
moment one is identifiable one has entered into a structure of
signification and has submitted to an authority whose legality comes
only from its power to enforce itself.
   The figure of Rousseau the botanist appeared in an 1850 text by
Gérard de Nerval entitled Les Faux Saulniers and undoubtedly the
most eccentric of the author’s works published during his lifetime. It
is a feuilleton that recounts Nerval’s wanderings in the Valois region
to the north of Paris, an area where memories from his own
childhood mingle with reminders of historical personages. The
character of Rousseau moves in and out of the text, appearing in
passing remarks, in a visit to the cenotaph that commemorates the
place of his original burial, and in an extended sketch for a
dramatization of the philosopher’s last days. Rousseau, the poet
contended, had been drawn to the Valois because of his interest in
botany, and “s’il y a accepté un asile,—c’est que depuis longtemps,
dans les promenades qu’il faisait en partant de l’Ermitage de Mont-
morency, il avait reconnu que cette contrée présentait à un herboriseur
des variétés de plantes dues à la variété des terrains” (101). It is,
however, an uncharacteristically medical Rousseau that one sees
portrayed here. In the dramatic sketch he is shown crushing a plant
and extracting its simple for its apothecary properties—he collects
hemlock, carefully expresses its sap, and poisons himself with it
(111)—which is precisely the approach to botany Rousseau had
rejected in the preface to his dictionary. The play’s final scene is not
merely a return to a more conservative and utilitarian approach to
botany, however, it is also a reminder of the material force of plants,
of their effect not just on systems of knowledge but also on the body.
In the play, a range of concerns which Rousseau had swept away as

   11
      See Condillac’s Traité des sensations: “…si elle [i.e. la statue] touche un corps
étranger, le moi, qui se sent modifié dans la main, ne se sent pas modifié dans ce corps.
Si la main dit moi, elle ne reçoit pas la même réponse” (257; II, v, §5).