Le Motif De Retour À La Nature Chez Rousseau : Le Logocentrisme Dans Le Discours Sur L’origine Et Les Fondements De L’inégalité Parmi Les Hommes

Abstract

In conjunction with being a controversial figure, Jean-Jacques Rousseau has often been a thinker that is difficult to evaluate consistently because, indeed, Rousseau's texts are often incoherent. This is accentuated by the fact that the author of these texts does not like systematization. In this paper, however, we argue that Rousseau's inconsistency is only superficial, and that a deeper investigation reveals that Rousseau is in fact a consistent writer. The source of his coherence, we argue, is that Rousseau's texts revolve around a certain theme: logocentrism. This term, borrowed from Derrida and specifically in its use in the context of Derrida's Grammatology, describes a typical Western way of thinking that is intellectually incapable of thinking without determining criteria such as origin or finally. For Derrida, this logocentrism is also present in all Rousseauian discourse. We agree with Derrida's claim. But in addition to this, in our study, since it would be wrong to approach Rousseau's texts uniformly, we argue that these texts undergo a paradigmatic shift within themselves, each text replacing a particular paradigm. The specific "paradigm" we have chosen is Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, published in 1755. This work is a kind of anthropological/ethnological examination of the pre-civilization conditions of man. According to Rousseau, civilization brought with it its evils, it put man in a much more unhappy state of mind, it detached him from his natural virtues and thus corrupted him. At this point, when we take Rousseau and his works as a paradigm and logocentrism as a theme, the parallels with a much larger subject begin to reveal themselves: the myths of paradise. In the myth of Prometheus and the myth of the Expulsion from Paradise, similar to Rousseau's descriptions, humanity maintains a happy and fulfilled condition of existence vii before the intervention of a certain "external" element. We argue that these myths are another parallel for Rousseau, and that the frame of mind that Derrida identifies with the concept of logocentrism is much more far-reaching and shows its influence on Rousseau in this way as well. We think that the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, which is the subject of our analysis, is a rich and articulate text that provides enough material for this research. Ultimately, our aim is to highlight these parallels and prove that Rousseau's supposed inconsistency can be dispelled by a deeper look.