(iPoster) Sacrifice and Construction of Communal Politics in Rousseau's Lévite d'Éphraïm

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Foundations of Political Theory III & Comparative Political Economy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory III

Abstract

Scholarship on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's widely overlooked prose poem Le Lévite d'Éphraïm largely considers the work an allegorical representation of the transition from the state of nature into the social contract. The Lévite follows the disintegration of a political community and its (apparent) reintegration through citizen sacrifice. Previous scholarship on the Lévite has argued that the political community Rousseau presents is fractured, then reconstructed, through the violent sexual sacrifice of women, in a manner Rousseau presents in the poem's conclusion as heroic, even necessary. I argue that the role of sacrifice in constructing the Lévite's communal politics is distinct from previous understandings in two ways: first, I identify three forms of sacrifice within the poem that each serve distinct political functions: self-sacrifice, other-sacrifice, and religious sacrifice. Second, I argue that the self-sacrifice with which the poem closes does not restore the political community to wholeness; rather, it continues a sacrificial mode of communal politics that Rousseau presents as innately destructive. By tracing the role of sacrifice throughout the work in constructing communal politics, I reveal that Rousseau presents the final self-sacrifice to, rather than restore the communal (body) politic to health and wholeness, (re)construct a political community that contains its own undoing.

Author

• Magda Smith, Georgetown University