Rousseau and the Reserve of Nature: A Rejoinder to Derrida

This article re-examines Derrida's presentation of Rousseau's philosophy of nature and culture in De la grammatologie to interrogate that work's conclusions about the inescapability of the logic of the supplément. Drawing on a close reading of the first book of Émile, it argues that Rousseau's ontological commitments neither originate from nor entail a metaphysics of pure presence. The challenge to Derrida derives from the category of habit understood as an ontological principle that structures the conceptualization of nature in Émile. Rousseau's formulation of nature as a réserve, a theory of innateness as sleeping potentiality, indicates not a 'presence' but a store of potencies bearing an indeterminate ontology. As well as a capacity and an agency, nature is also a state of being. Habit, meanwhile, reveals the two senses of nature — as teleology and being — and mediates between them. Nature, for its part, arises as the outcome, as well as the origin and determination, of habit. This signifies that nature and culture are not the terms of a dichotomy but arise simultaneously when habit draws from nature's reserve. The article concludes that Derrida simplifies and exploits Rousseau by reading him through the distorting lens of Lévi-Strauss's structuralist anthropology.