Obscure Openings: Intellectual Freedoms of Rousseau, Agamben and Malabou

Abstract

“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains”.1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous words, first published in “Social Contract”, sparked intense revolutionary fervour. Seeming to pose an impossibly out-of-reach idea of freedom, these words also catalysed debate often concerned with whether Rousseau idealises a nature that is free because it belongs to a primitive past (the first man) and/or a nascent state of life (birth/early childhood).2 Throughout his work, Rousseau writes of how immediate sensory experiences of nature are hampered by a situation in which living beings are captured within regulating systems. He writes of the dangers that administrative machines pose to freedom, applying this to political leaders and law-makers but also, and at significant risk to himself and his writerly/artistic career, frequently aiming his critique at the learned arts and science societies of his own time. Rousseau argued that the impulse to inhibit freedom is structural to the activity of intellectual coteries that are arranged according to the views of like-minded men. While man enters the world with the capacity for full sensory engagement and activity with the world, the conventional development of a child from birth into adulthood entails measuring the self in accordance with the opinions of others. Living beings are born free but are inevitably caught in homogenising administrations that, geared only toward their own reproduction, stultify or foreclose the opening of horizons that might enable free thought.