Re: Genesis and Structure of the Essay on the O …

看板EngTalk (全英文聊天)作者fizeau (Gratias ad Opus)時間18年前 (2008/01/08 18:15)推噓0(0推 0噓 0→)

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The historical perversion is introduced through a double substitution: substitution of a political command for domestic government, and of moral for physical love. It is natural that the woman govern the home and Rousseau recognizes her "natural talent" for it; but she must do it under the husband's authority, "as a minister reigns in the State, by contriving to be ordered to do what she wants": I expect that many of my readers will remember that I think women have a natural gift for managing men, and will accuse me of contradicting myself; yet they are mistaken. There is a vast difference between claiming the right to command, and managing him who commands. Women's reign is a reign of gentleness, tact, and kindness; her commands are caresses, her threats are tears. She should reign in the house as a minister reigns in the state, by contriving to be ordered to do what she wants. In this sense, I grant you, that the best managed homes are those where the wife has most power. But when she despises the voice of her head, when she desires to usurp his rights and take the command upon herself, this inversion of the proper order of things leads only to misery, scandal, and dishonor (ibid.; italics added). In modern society, then, order has been reversed by woman and that is the very form of usurpation. That substitution is not one abuse among others. It is the paradigm of violence and political anomaly. Like the linguistic evil of which we spoke above--and we shall soon see the two directly linked --that substitution is a political evil. The Letter to M. d'Alembert says it well: ...and, no longer wishing to tolerate separation, unable to make themselves into men, the women us into women. This disadvantageous result which degrades man is very important everywhere; but it is especially so in states like ours , whose interest it is to prevent it. Whether a monarch governs men or women ought to be rather indifferent to him, provided that he be obeyed; but in a republic, men are needed. The morality of this proposition is that women themselves would gain if the republic restored the natural order, for in a perverse society man scorns the woman he must obey: "Cowardly devoted to the will of the sex that we ought to protect rather than serve, we have learnt to scorn them while we obey, to outrage them by our railing concern." And Paris, guilty of the degradations of language, is again incriminated: "And each Parisian woman in her apart- ment assembles a seraglio of men more feminine than herself, who know how to render all kinds of homage to beauty, except for that of the heart which she deserves" (ibid.). The "natural" image of woman, as Rousseau reconstitutes it, emerges slowly: exalted by man but submissive to him, she must govern without being mistress. One must respect her, that is to say love her, from a sufficient distance so that the forces--our own and those of the body politic--are not breached through it. For we risk our constitution not only by "cohabiting with women" (instead of containing them within domestic government) but also by regulating our society according to theirs. "They [men] are affected as much as and more than, women by commerce that is too intimate: they lose only their morals, but we lose our morals and our constitution". The contest is not equal; perhaps that is the most profound signification of the play of supplementarity . This takes us directly to the other form of substitutive perversion: that which adds moral to physical love. There is a naturalness in love: it serves procreation and conservation of the species. That which Rousseau calls "the physicalness of Love" is, as its name indicates, natural, and thus joined to the movement of pity. Desire is not pity, to be sure, but, according to Rousseau, it is prereflexive like pity. Now one must "distinguish...between what is moral and what is physical in the passion called love" (second Discourse). Within the "moral" that substitutes itself for the natural, within the institution, history, and culture, female perfidy, thanks to social usage, works to arrest natural desire in order to capture its energy so that it may be directed to a single person. It thus makes sure of an usurping of control: The physical part of love is that general desire which urges the sexes to union with each other. The moral part is that which determines and fixes this desire exclusively upon one particular object; or at least gives it a greater degree of energy toward the object thus preferred. (Discourse) -- ※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc) ◆ From: 163.25.118.131