Rousseau’s Silent Assemblies
This chapter examines the centrality of popular assemblies to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of popular sovereignty by taking seriously the role they play in “maintaining sovereign authority,” which can only be done by sustaining or reenacting the source of that authority: the living body of the people themselves. Rousseau’s sovereign assemblies are often taken to be the clearest expression of his investment in what Jacques Derrida called a “metaphysics of presence.” Even as Rousseau’s sovereign assemblies provide the foundation of collective self-rule, however, the occasion through which the people’s will is expressed as law, they also serve an underappreciated ritual function, giving reenacted form and continuity to the very people whose will is expressed through them. The assembly form is the necessary—and necessarily hidden—supplement from which the people’s seemingly unmediated will is derived. The sovereign assembly is at once the source of the people’s collective autonomy, and the heteronomic support which provides its ongoing conditions of possibility.