Original Vengeance: Politics, Anthropology, and the French Enlightenment

IN THE VIEW OF ERNST CASSIRER, Enlightenment thought is inhabited, even obsessed, by a paradox: the question of the origins of humanity. Haunted by its origins, the Enlightenment is condemned to a process of continual regression with respect to itself. Fundamentally, the question of origins runs counter to the central project of the Enlightenment, that is, the development of rationalism with a view to progress. More precisely, Cassirer writes that A fundamental feature of the philosophy of the Enlightenment appears in the fact that, despite its passionate desire for progress, despite its endeavors to break the old tables of the law and to arrive at a new outlook on life, it nevertheless returns again and again to the original problems of humanity.' The spectre of origins is the skeleton in the closet of Enlightenment political philosophy, the evil spirit that haunts it, the ever-present threat of incompletion. As we shall see, what is at stake in this problem of foundations is no less than the very fundament of eighteenth-century law. Ranging somewhat further afield, we might consider this problem in the light of Jacques Derrida's more recent general exploration of