Now as the nature of the human species requires that there be those differences among the individuals belonging to it and as in addition society is a necessity for this nature, it is by no means possible that his society should be perfected excepts…through a ruler who gauges the actions of the individuals…so that the natural diversity is hidden through the multiple points of conventional accord and so that the comunity becomes well ordered. Therefore I say that the Law, although it is not natural, enters into what is natural.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract
The child is a metaphysical being. As in the case of the Cartesian cogito, parents have nothing to do with these questions…For the unconscious is an orphan, and produces itself within the identity of nature and man. The autoproduction of the unconscious suddenly became evident when the subject of the Cartesian cogito realized that it had no parents, when the socialist thinker discovered the unity of man and nature within the process of production, and when the cycle discovers its independence from an indefinite parental regression.
––Gille Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus
In the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides famously distinguishes two forms of perfection, that of the body and that of the soul. The former consists in the prohibition of wrongdoing and the cultivation of moral habit, or civic virtue, whereas the latter takes place in intellectual apprehension of God and the order of being. The perfection of the body thus functions as the ground and condition for the perfection of the soul, which Maimonides explicitly names the ultimate perfection. At the beginning of the Guide, he deploys the parable of the golden apple set in a lattice of silver filigree as an image of the nature of truth: for human beings who have already lost their paradise, truth and falsity become accessible only under the modality of good and bad, that is, under the guise of the silver filigree.
Rousseau, by contrast, while fully acknowledging the cultivation of civic virtue as an indispensable component of political life, in a sense transcendentalizes nature as the originary condition from which human history departs and toward which it secretly tends: he foresees the ultimate perfectibility of the human being through the proper use of our sociality, such that we might re-enter a harmonized relation with nature. In this framework, the cultivation of virtues—which for Maimonides belongs to the perfection of the body and serves as the indispensable grounding of intellectual perfection—becomes, for Rousseau, itself the eventual telos at which the human being, as citizen, is reconciled with nature.
The Law, therefore, functions for both Maimonides and Rousseau as a means of returning the human being to an originary situation characterized by nature; yet their conceptions of that nature differ decisively: for the former, it is ordered ultimately to the vita contemplativa, whereas for the latter it is a pre-social, pre-moral, and perhaps nearly pre-conscious condition marked by amour de soi.
The divergence between Maimonides and Rousseau with regard to nature and law, which also registers a transformation from an ancient (or medieval-classical) to a modern horizon, sketches a broader contour of intellectual history—namely, the widening rift, as thinkers such as Strauss and Heidegger never tire of insisting, between physis and nomos. For Maimonides, God, as the supernatural source who both originates and governs nature and man, can be conceived as pure intellectuality or apprehension. One might even call Maimonides an “idealist” in the restricted sense that nature, as well as convention, appears as an instantiation of the divine intellect, a set of ordered effects whose ultimate reason lies in a non-sensible, intelligible cause. Rousseau, by contrast, grounds the legitimacy of governance not in any esoteric intellectual divination of the whole but in a reconstructed state of nature: here physis becomes the explanatory prior of nomos, such that “what is” (the nature of human beings and their relations) becomes the telos of “what should be” (the properly constituted political order).
Rather than treating this transformation in the concept of nature as a merely doctrinal shift, the following pages take it as symptomatic of a broader mutation in human self-understanding: a mutation in which the very alliance between science, law, and perfection is progressively reconfigured. By reading the Guide closely, I will begin from a horizon in which Aristotelian teleology and revealed legislation still form a continuous space of intelligibility, and in which law can be said, in a strong sense, to “enter into what is natural” for the sake of an ultimate contemplative end. I then turn to Rousseau, for whom nature has already been dislodged from cosmology and reconstructed as an anthropological and historical fiction: the state of nature and the sedentary revolution that first binds human beings to property, language, and law become the scene in which the human being is not simply a “political animal” but becomes one, and in which the legitimacy of law is measured by its capacity to bend convention back toward a lost equilibrium. Finally, I consider a late-twentieth-century version of the same problem in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, where a molecular, nonteleological image of nature—drawn from microphysics and molecular biology—grounds an ontology of desiring- production in which the very distinction between nature and convention collapses into the tension between molar aggregates and molecular flows.
For the sake of exposition, the essay will be thematically divided into three parts. The first explicates Maimonides’ central claims in the Guide concerning the two hierarchical perfections, the relation between the true and the good, and the triadic nexus of Law, nature, and intellectuality. The second turns to Rousseau, bringing into relief The Social Contract and, more briefly, Émile and the Discourse on the
Origin of Inequality, in order to extrapolate the structural centrality of the concept of nature and to show
how that concept diverges from Maimonides’ usage while remaining, in a deep sense, haunted by the desire to let nature legislate for convention. The third and final part introduces Anti-Oedipus as a third moment in this trajectory, in which nature is identified with molecular production and law is recoded as one molar apparatus among others; from the vantage of a classical discourse of natural right, I suggest, this molecular ethics can be read at once as the most consistent attempt to think politics after the eclipse of teleology and as the point at which the very question of the best life “by nature” threatens to disappear into an ethics of non-fascist experimentation.
Maimonides: Hierarchy of Perfection
From the outset of the Guide, Maimonides articulates the purpose of the divine legislation in frankly teleological and politico-theological terms. In the introduction, he remarks that “God, may He be exalted, wished us to be perfected and the state of our societies to be improved by His laws regarding actions” (Maimonides 8). This lapidary sentence already installs a double end: on the one hand, the perfection (shlemut) of human beings as knowers, and on the other, the improvement of social and political life as a field of ordered actions. That initial bifurcation is later formalized in III.27 in the doctrine of two perfections: “a first perfection, which is the perfection of the body, and an ultimate perfection, which is the perfection of the soul” (Maimonides 509). The first perfection concerns health, material sufficiency, and, crucially, the civic arrangements without which those goods cannot be stably maintained; it is attainable only “through a political association, it being already known that man is political by nature” (509). The ultimate perfection, by contrast, consists “in his knowing everything concerning all the beings that it is within the capacity of man to know,” that is, in having an intellect in act—“to become rational in actu” (509–10). Moral action and civic order belong to the first perfection; the second is purely noetic. Yet Maimonides insists that the first is “prior in nature and in time” and that only on its basis can the ultimate perfection be realized (511).
The famous parable of the golden apple in the silver filigree, in the introduction, provides a hermeneutic key to this structure. Commenting on Proverbs 25:11 (“A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver”), Maimonides describes the “settings of silver filigree-work having very small holes” as an image of prophetic and legal discourse that has both an external and an internal meaning (12). The external sense must be as beautiful and coherent “as silver,” while the internal sense is nobler still, “as gold is to silver”; moreover, the external must contain features that hint at the inner sense, “as happens in the case of an apple of gold overlaid with a network of silver” through which a perceptive glance can discern the gold beneath (12). The parable thus encodes at once an epistemic hierarchy and an esoteric-exoteric structure: the same Law and the same scriptural text present themselves to the multitude as a beautiful silver object—ethico-political guidance, narratives, rituals— while the philosophically trained few may perceive within that external order a different, more recondite content.
In I.2, Maimonides radicalizes this configuration by rereading the Eden narrative as an allegory of human cognitive structure. He distinguishes between the properly intellectual categories of true and false, and the “generally accepted” categories of fine and bad, or good and evil (25). Before the Fall, Adam’s cognition is ordered exclusively to truth and falsity; after eating from the tree, he begins to see the world under the evaluative register of tov and ra‘ (25). The point is not merely exegetical. For human beings as they actually exist, the horizon of good/bad has phenomenological priority over that of true/false. The entry into the world is mediated by estimative, moral, and political valuations, not by disinterested theoretical judgment. Read together with the golden-apple parable, the implication is that speculative truth—the “gold”—can only be made available to such beings under the guise of the “silver,” that is, in the form of norms, stories, and practices that address the register of good and bad.
Law, as a discursive and institutional apparatus, occupies that silver zone in which the ethical-political and the cognitive are inseparably entwined.
When this anthropological insight is brought into contact with the doctrine of the two perfections in III.27, the architecture becomes more precise. Maimonides explicitly defines the first perfection as bodily and political: it consists in a well-ordered life in which bodily needs are met, violence and mutual injury are curbed, and character is formed in accordance with civic virtues (509–11). The second perfection, by contrast, is exclusively intellectual: it is the state in which one has acquired true opinions about “all the beings that it is within the capacity of man to know” and, above all, about God and God’s actions (510–11). The commandments as a whole, he says, “aim at two things: the welfare of the soul and the welfare of the body” (511). The welfare of the body is achieved by the abolition of injustice and the inculcation of “moral qualities that are useful for life in society so that the affairs of the city may be ordered”; the welfare of the soul is achieved by “correct opinions corresponding to the capacity of everyone,” ultimately oriented toward a more adequate apprehension of the divine (511– 12). The latter is “nobler” and is “the ultimate end”; the former is prior and foundational, “for man cannot achieve the welfare of the soul except after he has achieved the welfare of the body” (511). The law’s ethical-political dimension is thus strictly subaltern, but also strictly necessary, to its noetic end.
It is in this context that Maimonides’ striking claim about the relation between law and nature in II.40 can be situated. After emphasizing the radical diversity of temperaments among individuals—some so cruel that they can kill their own children in anger, others so gentle that they pity the killing of an insect —he notes that such differences are natural to the human species (382). Human “nature” thus requires both significant intra-species variation and social life: “society is a necessity for this nature” (382). Yet a society composed of such heterogeneous individuals cannot be perfected except “through a ruler who gauges the actions of the individuals, perfecting that which is deficient and reducing that which is excessive, and who prescribes actions and moral habits that all of them must always practice in the same way, so that the natural diversity is hidden through the multiple points of conventional accord and so that the community becomes well ordered” (382). The key sentence follows: “Therefore I say that the Law, although it is not natural, enters into what is natural” (382). Law (nomos) is not simply an expression of physis; it is an intervention into nature, an imposed regime of actions and habits that overlays and modulates natural differences, producing a second nature in which the species can persist and in which higher perfections become possible.
Yet this extra-natural Law is mediated into nature by a faculty and a subject that are themselves described in naturalistic terms. In Maimonides’ prophecy theory, particularly in II.36–37 and II.57, prophecy is not sheer supernatural intrusion but the consummation of human capacities under the influx of the Active Intellect. The prophetic subject must already possess a perfected rational faculty, purified moral habits, and, crucially, an “imaginative faculty” brought “to an ultimate perfection owing to its natural disposition” (Maimonides 374). In II.57, he distinguishes three cases: an overflow that reaches only the rational faculty (the class of speculative men of science); an overflow that reaches both rational and imaginative faculties, in a subject whose imagination is in a state of maximal perfection “owing to its natural disposition” (the class of prophets); and an overflow that reaches only the imagination in the absence or weakness of rational training (political rulers, soothsayers, and the like) (374). Prophecy, and with it the capacity to legislate, thus presupposes a naturally given psychic configuration—an exceptional imaginative faculty—which is then actualized and completed through study and divine influx.
II.40 explicitly links this psychic economy to the political question of lawgiving. It belongs to the “wisdom of the deity with regard to the permanence of this species of which He has willed the existence,” Maimonides writes, that God “put it into its nature that individuals belonging to it should have the faculty of ruling. Among them there is the one to whom the regimen mentioned has been revealed by prophecy directly; he is the prophet or the bringer of the nomos” (382). Nature itself contains, as part of its providential configuration, individuals capable of rule and, in the limit case, of prophetic legislation. The content of the Law and its authority do “not belong to nature” but “enter into what is natural”; the capacity to receive and translate that Law, however, is grounded in a natural disposition of the imaginative and rational faculties. The prophet-lawgiver is therefore a liminal figure: situated at the intersection of divine intellect, human nature, and political order, mediating an extra- natural normativity into the domain of the natural by means of a naturally perfected imagination.
Taken together, these elements allow a relatively determinate reconstruction of Maimonides’ architecture. God, conceived as pure intellect, wills both human perfection and the improvement of human societies (8). Human beings, after the loss of paradise, experience the world first under the register of good and bad rather than true and false (25); consequently, truth can reach them only under the form of law, narrative, and moral evaluation—the silver filigree that both conceals and indicates the golden apple (12). The perfection of the body (health, civic order, moral habit) is effected by a law that “enters into what is natural” without being itself natural; the perfection of the soul (intellectual apprehension of the whole of being) is the ultimate end, attainable only on the basis of that prior political-ethical regime (509–12, 382). The prophet-lawgiver, whose imaginative faculty is perfected “owing to its natural disposition,” functions as the hinge at which an extra-natural law is inscribed into nature as second nature (374, 382).
This configuration will prove decisive for the contrast with Rousseau. For Maimonides, law is not an immanent expression of nature but a divinely grounded intervention into it, justified by a teleology that culminates in the vita contemplativa of a few. Nature supplies the raw psychic and social material— passions, diversity of temperament, the faculty of ruling, the imaginative disposition—but law, though “not natural,” reorders that material toward a transcendent intellectual end. Rousseau will preserve the figures of nature, law, and the lawgiver, yet reconfigure their relations: nature becomes the normative horizon to which law must conform, and civic virtue, rather than contemplative knowledge, becomes the figure of human perfectibility.
Rousseau: Perfectibility and the Immanentization of Law Rousseau’s account of nature and law unfolds along two interlocking axes: a genealogy of inequality that narrates how human beings fall away from a pre-social state of amour de soi into a corrupted civil condition structured by amour-propre; and a constructive political-juridical project in which the Social Contract and Émile attempt to recover, at a higher level, the lost equilibrium between nature and sociality.
In both registers, the decisive category is perfectibility: the capacity of the human species to transform itself through history, technics, and institutions. Nature, in this perspective, is not an already moralized teleology but a withdrawn origin whose traces persist as a normative horizon against which positive law must be judged.
The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (hereafter Discourse) provides the structural premises for this account. In the second part of the Discourse, Rousseau traces a developmental sequence beginning with the emergence of language—the “chance coming together of several unconnected causes” that allow human beings to fix representations and attribute predicates (Rousseau, Discourse 68). Language, by making possible adjectives and comparative terms, opens the space in which properties and persons can be evaluated: “Each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a value” (73). What appears first as aesthetic or agonistic preference—who sings or dances best—quickly hardens into moral and social differentiation: “this was the first step toward inequality, and, at the same time, toward vice” (73).
The origin of inequality thus lies in a vicious circle between symbolic recognition and material differentiation. As soon as human beings discover that “it was useful for a single individual to have provisions for two,” the formal structure of possessive predicates is translated into the material structure of property (74). The desire to appear “something other than what he in fact was,” grounded in amour-propre, drives a race for esteem that is immediately convertible into economic advantage: wealth becomes “the most immediately useful” form of inequality because it can “buy all the rest” (88). Laws, instituted under the pretext of protecting all, in fact “gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich,” consolidating a hierarchy in which the poor are transformed into the weak and finally into slaves (79, 87). The circle is clear: symbolic difference (reputation, honor, distinction) generates material inequality, which in turn enhances the capacity to dominate the symbolic field.
The Social Contract (hereafter SC) is written under the pressure of this diagnosis. If inequality is rooted in the dialectic of recognition and property, the problem becomes how to constitute a political order in which the general will—defined as the “general interest” that results when the pluses and minuses of private wills cancel out—is both sovereign and protected against capture by particular interests (Rousseau, SC II.3–4, 172–74). The general will, Rousseau famously insists, “is always right” in its object, but the judgments that guide it “are not always enlightened”; it is necessary therefore “to make it see objects as they are, and sometimes as they ought to appear to it” (II.6, 180). The act that expresses the general will under these conditions is the law: “the subject matter about which a statute is enacted is general like the will that enacts it. It is this act I call a law” (II.6, 179). Laws, properly so called, are thus nothing other than the general will made normatively operative.
Yet Rousseau immediately complicates this apparently clean schema by introducing the figure of the legislator, a quasi-prophetic subject whose status recalls, in a thoroughly secularized form, Maimonides’ prophet-lawgiver while simultaneously deviating from it at every decisive point. The general will, Rousseau writes, “must be made safe from the seduction of private wills; it must be given a sense of time and place; it must weigh present, tangible advantages against the danger of distant, hidden evils” (SC II.6, 180). For this reason, “there arises the necessity of having a legislator” (180). But this legislator’s task is paradoxical: to found a constitution, he must already possess the “social spirit that ought to be the work of that constitution,” so that “the effect would have to become the cause,” and “men would be, prior to the advent of laws, what they ought to become by means of laws” (II.7, 182).
The legislator must, in short, function as a supplement to nature and to the people: neither of them suffices on its own to ground legitimate law, so an extra-ordinary figure appears whose authority is “of a different order,” capable of “compel[ling] without violence and persuad[ing] without convincing” (182).
The tension intensifies in II.12, where Rousseau introduces the fourth, unnamed law—“mores, customs, and especially opinion”—that forms “the true constitution of the state” (SC II.12, 191). This law is “not engraved on marble or bronze, but in the hearts of citizens”; when written laws “grow old and die away,” it “revives and replaces them, preserves a people in the spirit of its institution, and imperceptibly substitutes the force of habit for that of authority” (191). On the one hand, this internal, affective-ideological layer is precisely what corrupts the general will when “partial associations” transform general questions into private opinions, requiring an increase in “repressive force” when the gap between mores and laws widens (III.1, 193). On the other hand, it is also the silent infrastructure without which no constitution can endure. The legislator’s “secret occupation” is therefore with this unengraved law, which both threatens to contaminate the general will and constitutes the only medium through which durable civic virtue can be formed.
The paradox of the legislator is thus double. First, the legislator must regulate mores and cultivate civic virtue—the very dispositions that, empirically, are required for his own democratic emergence. Second, the legislator himself appears as a quasi-transcendent being whose existence Rousseau simultaneously postulates and problematizes: a figure who must be “behold[ing] all the passions of men without feeling any of them,” who “had no affinity with our nature, yet knew it through and through,” and whose happiness is “independent of us, yet who nevertheless was willing to concern itself with ours” (SC II.7, 180). The Social Contract thereby displaces onto a single exceptional subject the burden of reconciling nature, law, and mores. The structural role played by Maimonides’ God and prophet- lawgiver—ensuring that a non-natural Law can “enter into what is natural”—is here secularized and internalized, but at the cost of an unresolved aporia concerning the very conditions of the legislator’s existence.
Émile reconfigures this problematic on a different scale by shifting from the level of the polity to that
of individual formation. Instead of asking how a people can be made capable of general-will legislation, Rousseau asks how a single child can be educated so that his enjoyment and judgment align with a normative conception of nature. The guiding principle is the distinction between dependence on things and dependence on men. If “the laws of nations could, like those of nature, have an inflexibility that no human force could ever conquer,” dependence on men would be transformed back into dependence on things, and “in the republic all of the advantages of the natural state would be united with those of the civil state” (Rousseau, Émile 85–86). Paradoxically, the way to approximate this condition pedagogically is to produce a social environment that mimics the neutrality of things: the child should encounter resistance only in objects, “never in wills,” so that the dialectic of recognition and amour-propre is deferred (66).
In Émile, Rousseau’s concern with the regulation of enjoyment comes to the fore. The child’s cries, he notes, are not pure expressions of pain; they quickly become signifying acts oriented toward an Other whose response is anticipated. “Whatever injury a child may do to himself,” Rousseau observes, “it is very rare that he cries when he is alone, unless he hopes to be heard” (77). Desire, in other words, is already structured as a performance before an imagined gaze. The educator’s task is to disentangle natural need from socially mediated desire: “one should distrust what they desire but are unable to do for themselves and others have to do for them. Then true need, natural need, must be carefully distinguished from the need…[that] comes only from the superabundance of life” (86). The pedagogical strategy is a logic of supplementarity: social relations and symbolic mediations cannot be abolished, but they can be arranged in such a way that the child’s enjoyment remains tethered to needs that arise from an immanent vitality rather than from the demand to be seen and valued by others.
The gendered dyad of Émile and Sophie, introduced in Book V, further complicates this schema by distributing the work of supplementarity between masculine and feminine positions. Sophie, as previous work has shown, functions as a metaphor for the supplement itself: she is not the direct agent of political autonomy, but the one who curates the affective and domestic environment in which male agency can appear as natural. Her role is to “govern him who commands,” to “constitute he who constitutes” (Rousseau, Émile V; cf. 365–70). In this sense, enjoyment becomes a political factor: the alignment of the male citizen’s pleasure with virtue and with the general will depends on a carefully orchestrated economy of desire in which woman is assigned the function of mediating mediation. The ecological metaphor that emerges—nature, law, mores, and sexed subjectivities forming an interdependent system—culminates in Rousseau’s political ecology: the ideal republic is one in which positive laws and “natural relations” are always in agreement, such that, if the legislator errs and “takes a principle different from the one arising from the nature of things,” the laws weaken until “invincible nature has regained her empire” (Rousseau, SC II.11, 190).
In contrast to Maimonides, then, Rousseau does not conceive law as an extra-natural imposition that “enters into what is natural” from above. Rather, nature itself—understood as a speculative construct that “perhaps never existed, and yet about which it is necessary to have accurate notions in order to judge properly our own present state” (Rousseau, Discourse 37)—assumes the role of normative horizon for law. The legislator’s task is not to translate a divine intellect into nomos but to discern, at the level of mores, enjoyment, and institutional form, the principle “arising from the nature of things” and to make civil law coincide with it. Where Maimonides stabilizes a hierarchy in which the perfection of the body grounds an ultimate contemplative perfection of the soul, Rousseau reimagines perfection as a collective, civic equilibrium: a state in which dependence on men approximates dependence on things, and in which freedom, which “keeps man exempt from vices,” is joined with morality, which “raises him to virtue” (Émile 86). The law, in this configuration, is not a ladder toward vita contemplativa but an attempt to render nature immanent to the political—always under the threat that nature, in its “invincible” aspect, will reclaim what law has misjudged.
Deleuze: Molecular Science and Immanent Ethics What is at stake, beneath the familiar genealogical narrative that runs from premodern natural law to contractualist modernity and on to a late-twentieth-century “critique of representation,” is less a simple succession of doctrines than the progressive disarticulation of a very specific triad: teleological nature, law, and human perfection. Classical natural right presupposes that these three terms can be held together within a single conceptual space; the modern scientific imaginary, and later the molecular one, systematically pulls them apart.
In the Aristotelian horizon that Maimonides still presupposes, “science” is not a neutral description of fact but an inquiry into physis understood as an order of forms and ends. Physics culminates in metaphysics, metaphysics in theology, and theology finds its juridico-political expression in a revealed law that is legible as the historical instrument of a pre-given teleology. Hence the well-known Maimonidean insistence that there are “two perfections”—that of the body (social peace, moral habit, ordered passions) and that of the soul (intellectual apprehension of “everything concerning all the beings that it is within the capacity of man to know”)—and that the former is both subordinate and strictly necessary to the latter (Maimonides 509–11). The Law is the device by which the first perfection is secured so that the second becomes possible.
The famous remark in II.40 condenses this architecture into a single formula. After emphasizing the radical heterogeneity of human temperaments—some so cruel that they can kill their own children in anger, others so gentle that they pity the killing of an insect—Maimonides concludes that such a species, whose nature is both political and internally diverse, cannot be made just without a ruler who prescribes a uniform regimen of actions and habits; “therefore,” he writes, “the Law, although it is not natural, enters into what is natural” (382). Law does not arise as a spontaneous crystallization of human inclinations; it descends, as it were, from a higher order of intellect into a lower order of embodied life.
Yet once it “enters” nature, it operates in thoroughly naturalistic terms: through the imaginative faculty, through the passions, through habituation, through the institutions of the city. The prophet–lawgiver is precisely the figure of this insertion, whose rational faculty has been perfected by study, whose imaginative faculty has reached “an ultimate perfection owing to its natural disposition,” and who thereby becomes capable of translating metaphysical truths into a network of commands and narratives addressed to beings who first encounter the world under the register of good and bad rather than true and false (Maimonides 374–75, 25).
The modern scientific revolution breaks the back of this continuity by a reconfiguration of nature. In the wake of Galileo and Newton, nature becomes a homogeneous field of matter and motion governed by universal laws, physis is no longer the bearer of intrinsic purposes. The same science that describes falling stones and planetary orbits cannot, without conceptual violence, be made to yield a substantive account of the human good. “Nature” risks collapsing into brute facticity, leaving law either groundless or else dependent on a voluntaristic act of will. Rousseau’s work marks an attempt to stave off this collapse by relocating nature from cosmology into history and anthropology, and by inventing a different way in which law might still, in some mediated sense, “follow” nature.
In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, the state of nature is explicitly posited as a hypothesis that “perhaps never existed, and probably never will exist,” yet one must nevertheless construct it if one wants to “form a proper judgment of our present state” (Rousseau, Discourse 37). Nature is no longer the actual order in which human beings live; it has become a retrojected standard, the narrative of an origin prior to language, property, and amour-propre, in which human beings are defined by a simple amour de soi and an inarticulate pity. The emergence of comparison, symbolic recognition, and juridical property generates the spiral of inequality that the Social Contract is supposed to arrest. But the measure of that arrest is still called “nature,” now redescribed as “the nature of things”: “What makes the constitution of a State truly solid and lasting,” Rousseau writes, “is that the natural relations and the laws are always in agreement on the same points and that the latter serve only to assure, accompany, and rectify the former. But if the Legislator is mistaken about his object and takes a principle different from the one arising from the nature of things, the laws will weaken imperceptibly, the Constitution will be altered, and the State will not cease being agitated until it is destroyed or changed, and invincible Nature has regained her empire” (Social Contract II.11).
The legislator and the pedagogue thus inherit, in an attenuated and internalized form, some of the functions of the prophet. They no longer translate a cosmological teleology into revealed law; instead, they must manufacture conventions such that, when viewed from the right angle, those conventions can be said to coincide with the “nature of things.” Émile radicalizes this demand by showing that even the approximation of nature requires the most artful artifice: the child must be surrounded by a milieu in which he encounters only the resistance of things and never the arbitrary will of others, so that “dependence on men” will slowly be converted back into “dependence on things” (Rousseau, Émile 84– 86). Nature, once the transcendent horizon into which the Law “entered,” is now a lost equilibrium that can be approximated only through an elaborate choreography of institutions, mores, and pedagogical ruses. A return to nature is still the ethical desideratum, but it can occur only “by convention,” precisely because the science that underwrote the older teleology has been displaced.
Anti-Oedipus inhabits still another configuration of this problematic, one in which even the Rousseauian
reconstruction of nature as anthropological origin is abandoned. It takes as its starting point neither the teleological cosmos of antiquity nor the hypothetical state of nature of early modernity, but the molecular sciences of the twentieth century—microphysics, molecular biology, genetics—as the privileged image of what nature now is. The opening pages formulate the gesture in the bluntest possible terms: “Everything is production: production of productions, of actions and of passions; productions of recording processes, of distributions and of co- ordinates that serve as points of reference; productions of consumptions, of sensual pleasures, of anxieties, and of pain” (Deleuze and Guattari 4).
Recording and consumption are not external to production; they are “productions of one and the same process.” On this basis, Deleuze and Guattari can write that they “make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry” (4). Industry here is not opposed to nature as artifice to given order; it names the mode in which nature produces itself as man and through man. The human being appears as “the eternal custodian of the machines of the universe,” connecting and disconnecting “organ-machines and energy-machines” in an endless series of couplings—breast and mouth, tree and body, sun and anus (4). Desire, no longer lack, becomes the name of this immanent, productive force: “desiring-production is the principal concern of a materialist psychiatry, which conceives of and deals with the schizo as Homo natura” (4).
Yet Homo natura immediately folds into Homo historia. The delirious Nietzsche who “consumes all of universal history in one fell swoop” or the schizophrenic who traverses in a single movement the stages of social formation exemplify a deeper thesis: the unconscious is “a unity of history and of nature, from Homo natura to Homo historia” (Deleuze and Guattari 50, 304). There is no pre-historical nature behind history, no pre-social desire behind social production; there is only desiring-production itself, simultaneously natural and historical. This is where the Spinozist and Nietzschean undertones become decisive. On the one hand, the book installs a Spinozist plane of immanence: there is one substance, one natura naturans, whose attributes appear at once as physical processes, social formations, and psychic investments. On the other hand, it explicitly rejects any negative or lack-based conception of desire, aligning itself instead with Nietzsche’s affirmation of will to power: “we oppose a conception of desire that would derive from a lack, a flow that would be used to fill in an emptiness; we hold desire to be always in excess” (Deleuze and Guattari 26–28). The classical triad man–nature–history is here collapsed into a single formula: man = nature = history = production.
What makes this more than a metaphor is the appeal to molecular biology and microphysics as exemplary sciences of a nonteleological nature. Against any nostalgia for organic wholes, Deleuze and Guattari cite Jacques Monod’s description of a “domain of chance or of real inorganization” in which blind combinations at the molecular level, preserved by a “machinery of invariance,” are “converted into order, rule, necessity” (317). Under the action of DNA and genes—performing “veritable lottery drawings” and creating “switching points as lines of selection or evolution”—“large configurations are organized that necessarily reproduce a structure” (317). What appears, from the macroscopic point of view, as teleological form (the organism, the species) is, from the molecular perspective, an emergent effect of statistical processes. No end directs the combinations; teleology is a molar illusion produced by the way those combinations are filtered and stabilized.
This model of molar/molecular formation is then transposed directly into the theory of the unconscious. A genuinely molecular unconscious cannot content itself with genes as its basic units, because genes remain expressive and tend toward molar synthesis; only proteins, Deleuze and Guattari write, are both “products and units of production,” constituting “the unconscious as a cycle or as the autoproduction of the unconscious—the ultimate molecular elements in the arrangement of the desiring-machines and the syntheses of desire” (318). Desiring-machines, in turn, “represent nothing, signify nothing, mean nothing, and are exactly what one makes of them, what is made with them, what they make in themselves” (287). At “man’s most basic stratum” there is the “schizophrenic cell, the schizo molecules, their chains and their jargons”; the same desiring-machines traverse organic, social, and psychic “machines” alike (317–18). Any distinction between nature and convention, or between natural right and positive law, is displaced onto a distinction between molecular processes and molar aggregates.
It is at this point that the ethical and political project of Anti-Oedipus emerges. Law, in its classical sense —normative, limit-setting, grounded in a conception of the human good—is recast as one molar apparatus among others, one configuration in the realm of nature by which flows are coded and desire is made to “desire its own repression.” There are, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “two major types of equally social investments”: one “sedentary and biunivocalizing, and of a reactionary or fascist tendency,” the other “nomadic and polyvocal, and of a revolutionary tendency” (340). At the former pole, desiring-production is subordinated to large aggregates—family, class, nation, State; at the latter, molecular flows impose their logic on molar forms, opening lines of flight that deterritorialize identities and institutions. Schizophrenic process, in this sense, is not simply an individual pathology but the name of a limit-movement that capitalism itself unleashes and represses: the point at which decoding and deterritorialization threaten to carry the entire social field beyond its own capacity to reconstitute itself (62).
The preface names this orientation without euphemism: the “major enemy, the strategic adversary” is fascism—not only the historical regimes of the twentieth century but “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (Foucault xiii). Anti-Oedipus is described there as “a book of ethics,” an “Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life,” whose maxims include: free political action “from all unitary and totalizing paranoia”; withdraw allegiance from “the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna)”; seek “what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems” (xiii–xiv). The injunction to “return to the molecular” is thus an ethical imperative: abandon those molar organizations of desire that bind us to our own subjection, and experiment instead with assemblages in which desire flows along non-fascist lines.
From the perspective sketched in the first two parts of this essay, this molecular ethics is both legible and deeply disquieting. It is legible in that it can be seen as the most uncompromising consequence of the same process that dislodged Maimonides’ Law from its teleological cosmos and forced Rousseau to reconstruct nature as anthropological fable. Once one accepts that there is no longer any teleological “nature” in the classical sense, and once one declines to reintroduce such a nature in transcendental guise, the options narrow to the alternative of surrendering ethics to sheer decision, or grounding it in some immanent ontology of processes. Anti-Oedipus chooses the latter and gives it the name of desiring-production.
Yet precisely in this fidelity lies the disquiet encroachment of ethics by an immanent nature. In the Maimonidean configuration, the statement that the Law “enters into what is natural” is answerable, at least in principle, to an account of what the human being is and what the human good is: the contemplative life stands as the standard by which the prophetic legislation can ultimately be judged, even if only a few ever ascend to that standard. In the Rousseauian one, “nature” has been historicized and psychologized, but it still functions as a normative horizon: the legislator and the pedagogue succeed or fail according to whether their artifices bring dependence on men closer to dependence on things, whether they reconcile freedom with morality. In the Deleuzian one, by contrast, “nature” names the incessant production of the real, and the only explicit norm that survives is the avoidance of fascism. One is told, with considerable rhetorical power, that certain investments of desire are fascistic, reactionary, “paranoid,” and that others are revolutionary, nomadic, “schizophrenic” in the affirmative sense. But on what basis, other than an immanent preference for flows over unities and multiplicity over identity, can these be said to be better? If all teleology is dismissed as molar illusion, then the vocabulary of “non-fascist life” risks becoming parasitic on a notion of life that it can no longer articulate.
Viewed from that angle, the movement from Maimonides to Rousseau to Deleuze is not simply the story of how law loses its transcendence, or how nature is gradually interiorized into history, but also the story of how the very question of the best life by nature becomes harder to formulate. A teleological science supported a law that entered nature for the sake of an ultimate perfection beyond politics; a post-teleological science forced law to imitate a reconstructed nature within politics; a molecular science of production now displaces the question of law into the question of desiring-machines and flows.
What remains, perhaps, is the unresolved tension between an ethics that wishes to be rigorously immanent—to molecular biology, to microphysics, to the unconscious—and a residual intuition, inherited from an older discourse of natural right, that not all non-fascist experiments with desire are equally worthy of the name “human.”
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, Penguin Classics, 2009.
Foucault, Michel. “Preface.” Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Penguin Classics, 2009, pp. xi–xiv.
Maimonides, Moses. The Guide of the Perplexed. Translated by Shlomo Pines, 2 vols., University of Chicago Press, 1963.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. Edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch, Cambridge UP, 1997.
—. The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings. Edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch, Cambridge UP, 1997.
—. Emile, or On Education. Translated by Allan Bloom, Basic Books, 1979.