PARTISAN REVIEW
417
from pain." Indeed,
«aU our desires which are too alive are dead–
ened here.
. . ."
At the heart of the idyllic dream, Rousseau makes
clear to us, is a wish for death.
For some time, we have recognized the death wish - con–
scious or unconscious - as an ominous undertone in the cultural
mythology of romantic love, but Rousseau's vision of the Upper
Valais shows us how the self-destructive impulse can animate radical
politics as well. We can see it now as a longing to
turn off.
If
only,
as Baudelaire said, we could make a leap "anywhere out of the
world"; if we could detach ourselves from body, weight, movement,
time; if we could be less ardent, less avid, less passionate, less pro–
found, less human, less alive;
if
we could tum off "all the desires
that torment men in the world below"; if, once and for all, we
could just stop being
ourselves
-
then
we could be happy! Rous–
seau's image of the Valaisian republic projects this longing onto a
social and political plane. The recipe reads like a morbid parody of
the
Social Contract.
It
is as if the Valaisians have mutually agreed
to tum off and tune out, to tranquilize themselves. When people
are drained of avidity - or brought up in such a way that avidity
will never develop - freedom will no longer be risky; men and wo–
men can be secure in their fidelity, and citizens will be perpetually
loyal and totally committed to the state. Here, at last, a final solu–
tion to the problems of modernity. The urge to get away from
it
all is, in the end, a death trip.
IV
Avidity
is at the heart of Rousseau's dialectic. On the one hand,
avidity compels men to pursue profit and power, to compete against
and exploit one another. On the other, avidity alone can infuse men
with the daring to get through the masks, to feel and know them–
selves and each other, and to fight to fulfill their real
potentialitie~.
Avidity has liberated human energy
for
bourgeois society - it has
set men and women free to develop their powers in pursuit of power
over one another, ending only in death. Now, Rousseau argues,
it
will take avidity to liberate human energy
from
bourgeois society–
so that people working together, in a genuine community, can de–
velop themselves and each other more fully than possible before.
Rousseau persistently felt an urge to run away from modernity,
