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Poetry or Body Politic
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Book Chapter
Poetry or Body Politic
2017
Overview
Jean-Jacques Rousseau gives freedom a body when he opens the first chapter of The Social Contract with the famous sentence: “Man was/is born free [est né] and everywhere he is in chains.”¹ His argument draws its force not only from a strong opposition between nature and culture but also from a multivalent temporality. Where English forces a decision, birth, in Rousseau’s French, assumes either a historical or an ontological cast depending on how one reads the verb est. A first reading transposes the biblical story of the fall into politics, recounting that man was born free but is now enslaved.
