PARTISAN REVIEW
413
Paradoxically, the enormous range of possibilities destroys the
possibility of a stable, integrated, indissoluble "being" which the self
can securely call its own.
When one night Saint-Preux goes to bed with a girl he has met;
his hysterical guilt leads him to draw reactionary political conclu–
sions from the sexual politics of the affair - he was led astray by
freedom; from now on, he will seek escapes from this ambiguous,
dreadful freedom.
The impulse which Saint-Preux blames for his infidelity, and
tries to reject in himself, is an impulse which he shares with all mod–
ern men, a force that animates them and drives them all, and gives
modern society its distinctive form: this is what Rousseau calls
avidite,
"avidity." In the
Social Contract
it will appear as the mo–
tive force behind "the turmoil of commerce and the arts, the avid
pursuit of profit" - a force which Rousseau considers absolutely in..;
compatible with democracy. Here it appears at the heart of Parisian
life, and Saint-Preux condemns it as the real motive for his crime.
"They looked at me with
a violent avidity .
.." -
and he looked back.
Avidity is linked with avarice, the bourgeois desire for money and
profit; but it is a great deal more than avarice.
As
Rousseau sees and
feels it, it can express itself just as well in sexual desire, or in aggreS–
sive violence. Indeed, it floats freely between one object and another.
This ambiguity is a key to the deeply ambiguous character of the
s0-
cial system it sustains. In modern society, sex, money and violence are
hopelessly entangled with one another, need and greed are inter–
twined, for modern society both liberates impulses and mixes them
up, with catastrophic results. What is to be done? From this point,
Rousseau went off in two radically opposite directions. Sometimes,
as we will see later, he tried to make distinctions, to disentangle the
different kinds of avidity, to separate need from greed, creative from
destructive energy. At other times, as we have seen already, he saw
them all as one, condemned them all, root and branch, and tried to
reject modernity as a whole.
The same logic that led Rousseau to despair of Saint-Preux's
capacity for fidelity in the modern city also led him to despair of the
capacity of modern men for democracy or community. What made
them such bad material for democratic citizenship and participation
in communal life, Rousseau believed, was their free-floating avidity:.
