So mutually resonant are our projects, I often considered Roberts’s book and his review of my own as exercises in self-criticism. In the variation in our archives and emphases, I recognized limitations in Fugitive Rousseau. There are, however, fundamental differences between our projects, best captured by Friedrich Nietzsche. In On the Genealogy of Morals (I.13), Nietzsche criticized the tendency to project a “doer” behind every deed ( e.g., calling a flash the action of a prior “being” called “lightning”). Axiomatically, I tried to heed—though it is very difficult given conventions of modern Euro-Atlantic thought—Nietzsche’s warning and will use his suspicion of the subject to answer Roberts’s queries in regard to experience, the distinction between Rousseauian and Rousseau, and finally the import of Josephine Baker.
Why insist on “experience”—an ambiguous category? Is experience deeds? Or does it refer to a subjectivity behind acts? Might experience sometimes indeed enable capture by making subjects knowable? Surely, a slave or former slave would enact freedom differently than Rousseau, who was never enslaved but, I argue, nonetheless linked varieties of unfreedom to slavery. However, the difference between, say, Frederick Douglass and Rousseau need not be explained by subjectivity but by the dissimilar resistances their respective deeds must answer.
When it comes to Rousseau’s projection, through his many autobiographical texts, of a “self” behind his writings and actions, Nietzsche’s statement that the subject is a fiction superadded to deeds could not be more true. Rousseau’s many self-reflections rhetorically conjured subjective depth behind his deeds, but if these texts themselves are acts, they cannot un-problematically serve as adequate explanations for other acts. Indeed, especially for Rousseau, self-reflection often deflects from, rather than explains, other acts. Consequently, I avoided addressing Rousseau’s reports of his struggles as a fugitive as truly illuminating his theorizing of unfreedom.
Even when Rousseau himself is not distracting readers with self-conjuration, interpreters gladly do, following the many scholarly conventions for assembling deeds/texts to project a precedent authorial intention. It is restrictive, however, to attribute too much to what Roberts calls “the stated position of ‘Rousseau.’” By contrast, to insist on a “Rousseauian” line of thought does not pretend to a comprehensive truth behind the writings. Unmooring texts/deeds from an author-function releases them from subject-driven expectations that discrete deeds need refer to one another or be internally coherent. Texts/deeds can thus be assembled otherwise, to stage other truth-effects.
Constantly upsetting expectations for “experiential” coherence or clarity, Josephine Baker seemed to me an apt figure for concluding Fugitive Rousseau. Certainly she could be inserted into a genealogy of the Black Atlantic, but for me Baker emblematizes in the most paradoxical way a Rousseauian fugitive body politics: by submitting to French imperial fantasies, she became a fugitive in Paris. She proves that freedom involves not a pure escape to a distant space or isolated culture, but instead involves impure acts of compelled, serial performances that court public scrutiny while deforming social norms, not least by deflecting from, and rendering uncapturable, any possible abiding doer behind her deeds.
