Although almost always in a latent way, the figure of Rousseau was a constant presence in Deleuze's work. Not having dedicated a great book to him, like other philosophers of his stature, this course of 1960, whose typed summary is first published in Castilian, becomes a document of immense value. It constitutes, together with a brilliant fragment of twenty years later, that accompanies him in this edition, the reading that this left us of the thinker of the Social Contract.
However, precisely this structure far exceeds the Rousseau that is usually presented to us, that of a naked political philosophy, in its formal and comparative aspect with the rest of legal-political theories. Rather, it is illuminated-and it is always a birth when Deleuze reads-a Rousseauan ethic, where perhaps a Spinozist tone is discovered behind the thinker, something like a sound that one must know to hear or touch.
And then the Rousseau that emerges is completed with very precise readings of fragments of the Emile, the Confessions and the new Eloisa, also of letters and small manifestos. And what emerges from this reading is a thought of the concrete situation, where morality gives way to an ethic. Against the dualism of interest and virtue, its materialist confluence: to establish situations where we no longer have an interest in being evil (the opposite of a society).
Thus Rousseau's solitary passer, between the original goodness of the state of nature and the daydream of the pure passage of time, presents to us what may be his most radical contribution, the materialism of the sage, which gives title to the book he always wanted to write . When we can not be alone, because we are no longer naive or not yet innocent enough, a selective action on concrete situations linked to the modes of existence it enables.