With the publication of the First Discourse, Rousseau initiated a famous debate over the social value of the arts and sciences. As this debate developed, however, it transformed into a question of the value of the intellectuals as a social class and touched upon questions of identity formation. While the philosophes were lobbying to become a new cultural aristocracy, Rousseau believed the ideological glorification of intellectual talent demeaned the peasants and working classes. This essay argues that amour propre, as put (...) forth in the Second Discourse, was in part designed to address this concern and is an attempt to highlight the dangers of making talent the measure of a human. (shrink)

According to Rousseau, conscience and conscience alone can elevate human beings to a level above that of animals. It is conscience, understood as infallible judge of good and bad, which makes man like God. Conscience itself is, in this context, understood as divine, as an ‘immortal and celestial voice’. Therefore, if the voice of conscience is the same as the voice of God, then conscience is nothing human. However, although this interpretation is correct, there are some problems with it. If (...) we take into consideration the fact that conscience is in the same context defined first as a unifying principle which makes us like God, second as a thing which is in the middle between God and man and thirdly as a middle thing or mediation that integrates extremes organically, then conscience cannot be either simply human or divine. The second problem is the following: How can one who hears the voice of God know that he really hears his voice? And, if he is the only one who hears it, how can we know that he hears it? (shrink)

The article critically engages with Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Rousseau in order to explore the affinities between the two authors’ subtractive approach to political subjectivation. In The Kingdom and the Glory. Agamben argues that Rousseau’s Social Contract reproduces, in a secularized manner, the providential paradigm of government, whose origins Agamben finds in early Christianity. This paradigm establishes a fictitious articulation between transcendent sovereignty and immanent government, presenting particular acts of government as emanating from general divine laws. We shall demonstrate that (...) Rousseau was neither unaware of the problematic character of this paradigm nor did he venture to conceal its problems, but, on the contrary, he highlighted them throughout the Social Contract, whose key motif was the danger of the contamination of general will by particular acts, identities or interests. The same wariness of particularism characterizes Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker, often read as entirely heterogeneous to the political project of the Social Contract. By reading these two works together as the affirmation of generic existence against all forms of particularism, we bring Rousseau’s analysis closer to Agamben’s own attempts to rethink politics as subtracted from all identity predicates and contained in the affirmation of ‘whatever being’. The elucidation of affinities between Rousseau and Agamben will permit us to identify the limits of this subtractive approach to politics and outline an alternative to it. (shrink)

El presente artículo analiza el papel de Rousseau en los cambios de la cultura del diseño durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII. Basándose en Montesquieu, Robinson Crusoe y la superioridad de los antiguos sobre los modernos, opuso a la cultura rococó un modelo ético y estético de naturaleza rústica, producido por la síntesis de los ideales de la Antigüedad y lo primitivo con el mundo campesino, abriendo una vía influyente en el mundo moderno.