🗓️When: Friday 20 March, 3–4pm
📍Where: 407 Babel Building, The University of Melbourne – Parkville Campus
“Nature as Norm: Rousseau, Foucault, and the State of Nature as a Regime of Truth”
The various accounts of the “state of nature” are often treated as modern political philosophy’s origin stories: speculative prehistories designed to explain why society, law, or sovereignty become necessary. This talk proposes a different emphasis. Focusing on Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, and guided by Foucault’s analyses of truth and normalisation, I read the state of nature less as a doctrine about beginnings than as a truth procedure, a way of making particular claims about “the human,” “society,” and “corruption” appear self-evident. I argue that Rousseau’s state of nature works by three recurring operations, namely flattening, partition, and normalisation, through which “nature” is rendered legible as a baseline for critique while remaining vulnerable to the charge of circularity: the very move that promises a standpoint outside society can re-import social norms under the sign of the natural. These three operations are not merely features of Rousseau’s conjectural history; they are recurring patterns of meaning-making that shape what can count as truth and critique in Western modernity. Read in this light, the state of nature emerges as a regime of veridiction whose legacy is not confined to eighteenth-century anthropology. As well as offering a template for a central modern predicament, namely how to criticise the present without covertly canonizing it as “nature”, it also serves as a laboratory in which we can watch a wider modern operation at work: the world is made legible by flattening, made differentiated by partition, and made governable by normalisation.
Christopher Watkin is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Monash University, and General Editor of the Australian Journal of French Studies. He is the author of The State of Nature and the Shaping of Modernity: Tracing the Roots of Colonialism, Secularity, and Ecology (Cambridge UP, 2025), and Michel Serres: Figures of Thought (Edinburgh UP, 2020). His research explores French intellectual history and theory, with particular interests in modernity, political thought, and the conceptual vocabularies through which societies make sense of themselves.