Abstract

My dissertation reveals that Rousseau's writings, especially the Contrat social, La Nouvelle Heloise, and Emile, offer recurrent patterns of representation that one can analyze under the aspects of repetition, substitution, and transformation developed by Louis Marin in Le Portrait du roi. I suggest that representation, which in the Discours sur l'inegalite appears in its presocial manifestation as pity, serves in Rousseau's work as a way of both intensifying and minimizing prevalent structures of authority. This paradoxical intensification and minimalization allows Rousseau to create a world in which man's identity merges or diffuses so well within the community or nature that its presence seems to vanish while remaining essential. Rousseau perceives non-identity, the expansion of man's identity to a point where individuality no longer exists or exists only in relation to others, as the truest level of authenticity. He centers his work on a search for order and unity and, by means of the image, intends to resuscitate an original transparency thanks to which a rapport with the self reproduces the history of the species, revealing the lost past as nature's eternal presence. ;Marin's model allows us to see how representation, as a complete process, abolishes directivity and duality in the works of Rousseau. Using this model and models developed by Rene Girard and Michel Foucault, I deal with the problem of political authority by suggesting that Rousseau's ideal societies offer representative models of nature. Foucault's model shows how repetitions linked to natural resemblance transpose into models of society. Girard's model, centered on substitution, describes sacrifice as a means of transition from primitive to civilized society through transformation of the law. Marin's model, the most synthetic of the three, reveals representation completed in the stage of transformation, giving integrity to the entire process. ;I thus demystify the myth of duality in Rousseau, demonstrating that representation is not negative as long as it respects natural order. Representation does not create a supplement or difference, but rather is a primitive, transformative process which establishes unity. This unification allows Rousseau to envision a non-hierarchical state, since in the ideal society power becomes a natural force expressed by a code of representation recalling the primitive, unifying qualities of pity in nature