Out of Desire’s Excess, a Lover: Rousseau between Narcissus and Pygmalion

One of the paradoxes of Robespierre’s Republic of Virtue is that the author from whom he so largely borrowed did not really consider himself virtuous. Virtue may mean purity of heart and motive in one’s daily actions, but as Jean-Jacques Rousseau very well knew, it also implied a constant rational struggle against intrinsic passions and appetites. It is for this reason that in several parts of the Dialogues, Rousseau portrays himself paradoxically as a virtuous man who lacks virtue: “But is there some virtue in that sweetness? None. There is only the inclination of a loving and tender nature […] This very reasonable choice isn’t made by either reason or will. It is the work of the pure instinct. It lacks the merit of virtue, doubtless, but neither does it have its instability. One who has surrendered only to the impulses of nature for sixty years is certainly never going to resist them” (RJJ 150).¹ It is not difficult to see why Rousseau would characterize himself as such. If, as Saint-Preux warns Julie, “virtue is a state of war” (J 560), belief in this struggle would mean recognizing our inherent disposition to sin and refuting, as a result, one of Jean-Jacques’s principal tenets: man’s natural inclination for the good. As Rousseau notes in the first pages of the Dialogues, “virtue among us often requires fighting and conquering nature” (RJJ 10–11).

Through his oeuvre, however, Rousseau does not do away with virtue’s struggle as much as he reframes it and confines it within a realm that is strictly intra-sentimental. Rousseau, in other words, does not need to fight his desire, but rather, without will or volition, it is his desire that does the fighting for him. To understand this point, it is worth considering the depiction Rousseau gives in the Confessions of his peculiar sexual tastes. When describing the punishments he received at the hands of Mlle Lambercier and the kind of sensuality they had aroused, Rousseau makes clear to the reader that his desire was a sort of blessing in disguise, an evil that contained its own remedy. Although he says that with a little more effrontery, his senses would have plunged him “into the most brutal sensuality” (C 15), Rousseau describes his sexual desire at once as both appetite and law, as being self-contained in its own zeal:

For the present, it is enough for me to have pointed out the origin and first cause of a penchant that has modified all my passions, and which, repressing them by themselves, has always rendered me lazy in acting because of too much ardor in desiring.

(C 35; emphasis mine)

Desire may be a potential source of perdition, but in Jean-Jacques’s case, it also happens to hold the seeds for his salvation. As he puts it, “what ought to have ruined me still preserved me” (C 15).

When describing his particular sexual desires in the Dialogues, Rousseau reiterates the same point. Speaking about himself in the third person this time, he notes that “[t]he most unbelievable timidness, the most excessive indolence would perhaps have yielded on occasion to the strength of desire, had he not found in this very strength the art of eluding the efforts it seemed to require; and here again, of all the keys to his character, this is the one that best reveals its mechanical parts” (RJJ 152–53; emphasis mine). To truly understand Rousseau, in other words, it is essential to take into consideration the self-sufficient and self-annulling nature of his desire. But what does all of this mean exactly? What follows in this telling passage offers us some important clues in deciphering Rousseau’s enigma. By dint of attending to the object he desires, he continues:

His beneficent imagination reaches its goal by leaping over the obstacles that stop or frighten him. It does more. Removing from the object everything that is foreign to his covetousness, it presents it to him only as suited to his desire in all respects...