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Dismembered: Citizen Sacrifice in Rousseau's “The Levite of Ephraïm”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 April 2019
Abstract
This essay seeks to explore the position of citizen sacrifice in Rousseau's political theology from The Social Contract to “The Levite of Ephraïm.” To summarize, I contend that Rousseau's political theology starts out by seeking to prohibit religious sacrifice as something inimical to both natural and positive law, but ends up attempting to appropriate or internalize this sacrificial economy within his theory of citizenship. If Rousseau presents his theory of civil religion as a means of neutralizing the violence of sectarian religions, for example, I contend that this civil profession of faith is itself a species of sacrificial theology which is explicitly designed to create a citizen who is capable of sacrificing their life to the state. In “The Levite of Ephraïm”—a prose poem which begins and ends with the dismemberment of a woman—Rousseau's political theology of citizen sacrifice assumes its most graphic allegorical form.
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References
1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 5, The Confessions and Correspondence, including the Letter to Malesherbes, ed. Kelly, Christopher, Masters, Roger D., and Stillman, Peter G. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998), 491Google Scholar.
2 References to Judges are to the Authorized (King James) Version.
3 To get a sense of the range of assessments of Rousseau's “The Levite of Ephraïm,” see the following: Kamuf, Peggy, Signature Pieces (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Still, Judith, Justice and Difference in the Works of Rousseau: Bienfaisance and Pudeur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bal, Mieke, “A Body of Writing: Judges 19,” in A Feminist Companion to Judges, ed. Brenner, Athalya (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 208–30Google Scholar; Wingrove, Elizabeth, “Republican Romance,” Representations, no. 63 (Summer 1998): 13–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kavanagh, Thomas, “Rousseau's The Levite of Ephraim: Synthesis within a ‘Minor’ Work,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Riley, Patrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 397–417Google Scholar; Weber, Caroline, Terror and Its Discontents: Suspect Words in Revolutionary France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Kochin, Michael S., “Living with the Bible: Jean-Jacques Rousseau Reads Judges 19–21,” in Hebraic Political Studies 2, no. 3 (2007): 301–25Google Scholar; Morgenstern, Mira, “Strangeness, Violence, and the Establishment of Nationhood in Rousseau,” Eighteenth Century Studies 41, no. 3 (2008): 359–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marks, Jonathan, “Rousseau's Use of the Jewish Example,” Review of Politics 73, no. 3 (2010): 463–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ziolkowski, Theodore, “The Dismembered Body in Myth and Literature: Isis and Osiris and the Levite of Ephraim,” Comparative Literature 69, no. 2 (2017): 143–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A number of scholars comment on Rousseau's revisions to the text: Kavanagh contends that Rousseau's “expansions derive from a clearly pleasurable imagining of what might have been the Levite's actions and reactions within the bare skeleton of the biblical narrative” (“Rousseau's The Levite of Ephraim,” 406), whereas Kochin argues that Rousseau “sentimentalizes Judges 19–21, one of the most violent passages in the Hebrew Bible” (“Living with the Bible,” 302).
4 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, “The Levite of Ephraïm,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 7, Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, trans. Scott, John T. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2009), 365Google Scholar.
5 Ibid., 358, 365.
6 See Wingrove, “Republican Romance,” 30–31; Kavanagh, “Rousseau's The Levite of Ephraim,” 413; Weber, Terror and Its Discontents, 53; and Kochin, “Living with the Bible,” 325, for a range of readings of Axa as passive sacrificial victim, free political actor, or some combination of the two. I discuss these interpretations in more detail below.
7 See Kavanagh, “Rousseau's The Levite of Ephraim,” 404, Wingrove, “Republican Romance,” 21 and Morgenstern, “Strangeness, Violence, and the Establishment of Nationhood in Rousseau,” 15–17, for different readings of “The Levite of Ephraïm” as a theological allegory for the social contract. I return to these interpretations in more detail below.
8 See the following for a range of assessments of Rousseau's social contract theory from different perspectives: Crocker, L. G., Rousseau's Social Contract: An Interpretative Essay (Cleveland: Press of Cape Western Reserve University, 1968)Google Scholar; Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Starobinski, Jean, Transparency and Obstruction, trans Goldhammer, A. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Bertram, Christopher, “Rousseau's Legacy in Two Conceptions of the General Will: Democratic and Transcendent,” Review of Politics 74, no. 3 (2012): 403–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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10 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch, Victor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, I, 7, 53.
11 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality amongst Men, or Second Discourse, in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch, Victor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 127Google Scholar.
12 Ibid., 150.
13 In Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 303.
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15 Ibid.
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17 Ibid., 321–22.
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19 Ibid., 464.
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23 Rousseau, Julie, 321.
24 Rousseau, The Social Contract, IV, 8, 150.
25 In The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, 17.
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27 Rousseau, The Social Contract, IV, 8, 150–51.
28 Ibid., 149.
29 Ibid., 147.
30 For the most famous modern reading of Hegel's master-slave dialectic as a political struggle to the death, see Kojève, Alexandre, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, assembled by Queneau, Raymond, ed. Bloom, Allan and trans. Nichols, James H. Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969)Google Scholar.
31 Rousseau, The Social Contract, IV, 8, 150.
32 See the following for readings of Rousseau's theory of civil religion to which I am indebted: Fourny, Diane, “Rousseau's Civil Religion Reconsidered,” French Review 60, no. 4 (1987): 485–96Google Scholar; Bertram, Christopher, “Toleration and Pluralism in Rousseau's Civil Religion,” in Rousseau and l'Infâme: Religion, Toleration, and Fanaticism in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Mostefai, Ourida and Scott, John T. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008)Google Scholar; Beiner, Ronald, Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; and Karant, Joshua, “Revisiting Rousseau's Civil Religion,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 42, no. 10 (2016): 1028–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 Bertram, “Toleration and Pluralism in Rousseau's Civil Religion,” 139–40.
34 Karant, “Revisiting Rousseau's Civil Religion,” 1029.
35 Beiner, Civil Religion, 14–15.
36 Rousseau, The Social Contract, 234.
37 Rousseau, The Social Contract, II, 5, 64.
38 Rousseau, Julie, 717.
39 If Axa, and “The Levite of Ephraïm” more widely, can certainly be read as a (dismembered) part of a larger body of work on female sacrifice—which would also comprise Julie and especially the drama “The Death of Lucretia”—I would argue that it merits close attention in its own right not only because of its still relatively obscure status in his corpus but because Axa's sacrifice is not directly comparable or analogous to the (quite literal) deaths of the other women. In Axa's figurative rather than literal sacrifice—her “half-dead” (demi-morte) state—I believe Rousseau more precisely captures the formal character of the political sacrifice he demands of the ideal citizen: they have both formally promised to give up their individual lives for that state as a condition of their entry into society even if that sacrifice is never, in actuality, given.
40 See Kavanagh, “Rousseau's The Levite of Ephraim,” 404; Wingrove, “Republican Romance,” 21; and Morgenstern, “Strangeness, Violence, and the Establishment of Nationhood in Rousseau,” 15–17.
41 Kavanagh, “Rousseau's The Levite of Ephraim,” 404, 409, 412.
42 Arthur Bradley, “Let the Lord the Judge Be the Judge: Hobbes and Locke on Jephthah, Liberalism and Martyrdom,” Law, Culture and the Humanities, May 16, 2017, doi:10.1177/1743872117708352.
43 Marks, “Rousseau and the Jewish Example,” 480–81.
44 Rousseau, Second Discourse, 250.
45 Rousseau, The Social Contract, II, 2, 58.
46 Rousseau, The Social Contract, 17.
47 Rousseau, Julie, 314.
48 Rousseau, Second Discourse, 173.
49 Rousseau, “The Levite of Ephraïm,” 365.
50 Ibid.
51 Rousseau, Emile, 537.
52 See Schwarz, Joel, The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Elizabeth Wingrove, “Republican Romance”; and Ice, Tamela, Resolving the Paradox of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Sexual Politics (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009)Google Scholar.
53 Wingrove, “Republican Romance,” 13.
54 Wingrove, “Republican Romance,” 18–19.
55 In the Social Contract, Rousseau famously condemns voluntary servitude as essentially unnatural or inhuman: “To renounce liberty is to renounce one's quality as a man, the rights of humanity and even its duties. There can be no possible compensation [dédommagement] for someone who renounces everything. Such a renunciation is incompatible with the nature of man, and to deprive one's will of all freedom is to deprive one's actions of all morality from his acts” (Social Contract, I, 4, 45). To be sure, Rousseau's critique of slavery would seem at first blush to contradict my sacrificial reading of “The Levite of Ephraïm” but, as Kochin rightly remarks, Axa's self-sacrifice is obviously to be distinguished from a simple act of self-enslavement: “Such sacrifices are not renunciations of one's freedom, voluntary self-enslavements of the sort Rousseau condemns as inherently self-contradictory in the Social Contract, but free acts of renouncing inclination for duty” (Kochin, “Living with the Bible,” 325). In Rousseau's description of Axa's critical moment of decision, moreover, the young woman is clearly depicted less as a slave who has renounced her humanity, than as one of those citizen martyrs we have already encountered who are willing to sacrifice their lives to their duty: her passage à l'acte is clearly an expression of her liberty (at least in the negative sense of being physically uncoerced), it is specifically made out of a sense of duty to her father rather than being a dereliction of duty and, as the story's final sentence makes clear, it is the confirmation of her virtue and that of her tribe rather than a surrender of her moral autonomy (“There are still virtues in Israel”).
56 Rousseau, “The Levite of Ephraïm,” 364. See Kavanagh, “Rousseau's The Levite of Ephraim,” 41; Wingrove, “Republican Romance,” 30–31; and Kochin, “Living with the Bible,” 325, for readings of Axa's submission which explicitly name it an act of sacrifice.
57 Rousseau, “The Levite of Ephraïm,” 364–65.
58 Rousseau, The Social Contract, I, 7, 53.
59 See also Wingrove, “Republican Romance,” 27. In her words, “Rousseau would much prefer that his Republicans freely choose to be forced, rather than force them to be free.”
60 See Kavanagh, “Rousseau's The Levite of Ephraim,” 404; Wingrove, “Republican Romance,” 21; Weber, Terror and Its Discontents, 53; Kochin, “Living with the Bible,” 325; and Morgenstern, “Strangeness, Violence, and the Establishment of Nationhood in Rousseau,” 15–17, for a range of positive and negative readings of “The Levite of Ephraïm” as an allegory of the formation of a political state.
61 Weber, Terror and Its Discontents, 53.
62 Kochin, “Living with the Bible,” 325.
63 Wingrove, “Republican Romance,” 30–31.
64 Rousseau, The Social Contract, IV, 8, 150.
65 See Jourdain, Annie, “Robespierre and Revolutionary Heroism,” in Robespierre, ed. Haydon, Colin and Doyle, William (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 54–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
66 Robespierre, Maximilien, Œuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, 11 vols. (Paris: Société des études Robespierristes, 1912–2007)Google Scholar, X, 574. Translations my own.
67 See the following for critiques of the secular assumptions of modern histories or genealogies of political thought: Cavanaugh, William T., “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House”: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” Modern Theology 11 (1995): 397–420CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sheehan, Jonathan, “Assenting to the Law: Sacrifice and Punishment at the Dawn of Secularism,” in After Secular Law, ed. Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers, Yelle, Robert A., and Taussig-Rubbo, Matteo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 62–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Condren, Conal, “The History of Political Thought as Secular Genealogy: The Case of Liberty in Early Modern England,” International History Review 27, no. 3 (2017): 115–33Google Scholar.
68 Bellah, Robert N., “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 1–21Google Scholar.
69 Kahn, Paul W., Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 92Google Scholar.
70 Kahn, Paul W., Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 156Google Scholar. In Kahn's work, Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac is the prototype for this sacrificial theology but we might argue that Axa works at least as well: Isaac, after all, survives intact.
71 See the book forums at Immanent Frame (https://tif.ssrc.org/tag/paul-w-kahn/) and Political Theology Today (https://tif.ssrc.org/tag/paul-w-kahn/) for a range of critical responses to Kahn's Political Theology.