The community of solitary walkers

Abstract

Chapter 2 addresses a recent reinterpretation of Rousseau by Peter Sloterdijk, which prioritizes his late work The Reveries of the Solitary Walker as politically more important than the theory of sovereignty in The Social Contract. In contrast to Sloterdijk Prozorov reads these two works as by no means opposed but affirming the same thing, the sheer existence of the subject, individual or collective, subtracted from all particular predicates. It is this mode of subtractive subjectivity that Rousseau wishes to oppose to partial interests in society that perpetually threaten to corrupt the general will. Prozorov then shows how the contemporary critique of biopolitics relies on the same logic of subtraction, which necessarily leads it into the same aporia as it did Rousseau: if democracy is only conceivable through the subtraction from all particularism, it ends up unsustainable and indefensible in the face of this very particularism.