English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Baudelaire, Debussy, and the Parnassian reaction 10:10 and you'll see why, with certain preludes of Debussy that we've just heard, and I move straight on to this connection. Now, it wasn't your humble servant who came up with the fantasy of making this connection; it's almost a classic one, I mean, Baudelaire inaugurates in literature, in poetry, a movement that was called much later symbolism—the greatest poets of that movement, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Baudelaire, the first chronologically, never called themselves symbolists; anyway, the word didn't exist—the word 'symbol' did, but the word didn't yet exist to designate a literary movement. I prefer to speak of impressionism because it's more familiar to the audience, one thinks of it immediately. And Debussy being the emblematic representative of French musical impressionism, roughly speaking, along with Fauré and Ravel—I note in passing that we always sacrifice one of the very first to have brought about this miraculous
11:27 renewal of French music, namely good old Chabrier. Since he had a boisterous temperament and livened up evenings—though in a far more festive way than a DJ—by playing the piano with all the virtuosity he had, breaking two or three strings along the way, so much heart did he put into it. As a result, people don't notice how prophetically profound his music already is. There you go. But anyway, it's mainly Debussy I have in mind. And so, that's not what I want to get at, because everyone—well, at least everyone with a bit of musical culture—knows very well that Debussy and Baudelaire belong to the same aesthetic world roughly speaking, even though Debussy comes a bit later; he died during the war of 1914, whereas Baudelaire is in the last third, if you will, reaches into the last third of the 19th century.
12:28 So they belong roughly to the movement, let's say, initiated by Baudelaire. Debussy—I'll keep saying what everyone knows in conservatories and libraries—Debussy set quite a few of Baudelaire's poems to music, as did Fauré and others. There you go. Just as later, I don't know, Boulez would use a text by Mallarmé to write Pli selon pli, Debussy used the poem by Mallarmé titled 'Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun' to write one of the most beautiful orchestral pages of French impressionist music, isn't that right, and which is a ballet—a ballet of extreme slowness, which is fascinating.
13:23 And created by Nijinsky, by the Ballets Russes of Diaghilev at a time when it was the Russians who were animating Paris's musical life, the Ballets Russes. So I mention the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun because Debussy writes a short note to Mallarmé, whose text, again, had inspired his musical poem, his symphonic poem, telling him this.
13:55 Debussy, speaking of his own score, to be quite clear, says: 'My Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun is what remained of the dream at the bottom of the faun's flute.' You see, this Debussy is very different from the one I'm having you listen to tonight, whom I'm connecting to the Baudelaire I've chosen tonight, because—it would be reductive to think that what I'm about to say about these poems now holds true for the whole of Baudelaire.
14:26 Likewise, what I'm going to say about Debussy's Preludes doesn't hold for all of Debussy. But let's not muddle things. I've chosen, in particular with Beauty, for instance, the poem called 'La Beauté'—a Baudelaire who isn't actually my favorite. Don't think I'm indulging my own pet obsessions. But I'm concerned with conveying something. And what am I referring to? A Baudelaire who went through, as all his biographers know, the so-called Parnassian phase, isn't that so?
14:59 The Parnassian school of poetry being the first reaction to Romanticism, which was starting to go out of fashion by the middle of the century. Since these things are fairly well known, I'll go through them quickly. Look it up—it's all very well documented. Some even like to date the end of Romanticism, for those who absolutely want it to happen at midnight on December 31st, as though we moved from one world to another overnight—dating this end with the failure of Hugo's play titled 'Les Burgraves' in 1853.
15:34 So, let's say, from the mid-19th century on, people were weary of Romanticism. And there are two major reactions that occur. In the novel, it's what would soon be called Realism—literary giants like Balzac, like Stendhal of course, Flaubert a bit later, Zola, who would radicalize certain aspects of Realism into Naturalism. Well, we're not here to give a literature course. That's the anti-Romantic reactions in prose, in the novel.
16:06 But there's also a reaction in poetry. There's a poetry against Romanticism, which it accused of neglecting form somewhat in favor of sincerity, of the outpouring of feeling. A poetry that aspired, I quote, to be 'marmoreal.' 'Marmoreal' means made of marble. And you see, Beauty says 'I am beautiful, o mortals, like a dream of stone.' You can see a semantic field beginning to take shape here. This is the Baudelaire I say isn't quite my favorite, but who wouldn't have become the Baudelaire we love if he hadn't gone through this Parnassian, anti-Romantic reaction in which the perfection of form had to be restored.
16:52 He would have wanted to cling, isn't that so, to the stone breasts of the chimeras that decorate the Schönbrunn park—which literally means Fontainebleau, incidentally, Bellefontaine, Schönbrunn, in Vienna. Well, so this marmoreal, neoclassical, Greek, plastic side, so to speak, that was needed to re-educate the poet toward a concern for detail, for form, for a job well done, accomplished like the craftsman who knows to perfection how to make a table, the cabinetmaker, the jeweler—pick whatever metaphor you like—who doesn't just say to himself, like the Romantic poet Musset, 'Ah, strike your heart, that's where genius lies.'
17:46 You see? Well, that's this reaction. Now, it would be foolish to reduce Baudelaire to that. And that's why I chose the other poem, 'Harmonie du soir.' I'll navigate between the two. And what's the antithesis of that? Do you find it in Baudelaire too?
Sounds and scents against the statue; silence in Debussy 18:17 Sounds and scents. You know, there's a very famous line of Baudelaire's: 'Sounds and scents whirl in the evening air.' That's the one from 'Harmonie du soir' that you have before you. But you also have, in 'Correspondances,' colors, scents and sounds answering each other.
18:50 You see, it's a frequent association. Now, what do the art of sound, the culinary art, and the cosmetics of the great perfumers have in common, if I may put it that way? It's the fact that it's by closing your eyes that you best appreciate what they produce. It's the complete opposite of the visual world, of well-defined form, of contour, of Greek plasticity. There you go. This is not the world of Apollo. This is not the world of noon. You see, I return to my nocturnal theme.
19:22 Scents and sounds are more nocturnal than colors and shapes. There you go. We'll move quickly. Now, I could have found—and we do find them—in Baudelaire, plenty of passages where, on the contrary, we find that stasis, that somewhat cold static ideal of beauty which is here, isn't that right? Marmoreal, made of marble, which also means cold. Look: 'I sit enthroned in the azure like a sphinx'—a sphinx doesn't talk much.
19:53 'I hate the movement that displaces lines.' There's the line that sums up the whole poem in itself. The most anti-dynamic, the most anti-musical line there is, isn't it? 'I hate the movement that displaces lines.' There you go. So you'll ask me, why did I choose it, if it's not the poem I prefer? Because I still find a theme developing in this text, and it's very profound, but it's clearly emerging here—that's why I chose this text—it's the desire to stop time, to freeze time in a plastic snapshot.
20:36 Those who remember a film like Last Year at Marienbad—I'm not much of a film buff, I don't know cinema the way I know music, which I know only a little less—but it struck me, in that film which apparently is a cult film for some cinephiles, I was struck by some stunning zoom effects in a French-style park, where Greek statues, precisely, are suddenly zoomed in on, if I may use that barbarism, you see, in a rather abrupt way, as if Diana or Apollo were moving, were unleashing themselves a fraction of a second before the filmmaker's shot, and just as they appear on screen, they're frozen.
21:23 Click! As Valéry says in Le Cimetière marin, 'Achilles motionless in giant strides.' There you go. So, what interests me is this way of wanting to stop time. Now, that brings me to Debussy. I've chosen two preludes—there are some, some where things do move in Debussy, but still, there's a majority tendency—one can't say all, one may be ignorant of music, that's not the point, but those who know Debussy's music well, and who know Baudelaire's poetry well, realize that there is, tendentially, a growing tendency in Debussy, especially compared to his youthful works, to cultivate sound, sonic resonance for its own sake, almost freezing it, as if all the music could suddenly come to a halt on a chord, on an extraordinary chord, and become motionless.
22:22 In fact, there's a title of a piano piece by Debussy called 'And the Moon Descended on the Temple That Was.' You see, it's quite in the somewhat decadent taste of the era—it's superb. 'And the moon descended on the temple that was.' Whereas the piece I've offered you, the first one, is called 'The Terrace of Moonlit Audiences.' You see, we're truly in a nocturnal vein. Now, listen carefully to this music—it never stops exploring silence. You'd think it only resonates to help us gauge the extent of the silence.
22:58 And right up to the end of 'The Terrace of Moonlit Audiences,' just after—the only passage of slight dramatization, and this doesn't go in the direction of stasis, 'drama' meaning 'action' in Greek—the slight dramatization that comes a bit before the end suddenly calms into sumptuous chords, as if the piano wanted to produce velvety post-Wagnerian brass sonorities, in the manner of Bruckner or Mahler.
23:29 And likewise for Canope, the second piece—look closely, it's a kind of colonnade, a succession of perfect chords unfolding one after another. You know that canopic jars are vessels from ancient Egypt; it's as if we were strolling, isn't it, through the rows, through the propylaea of columns at Thebes or Memphis, in ancient Egypt, and you can already see the role of silence in our relationship to ancient Egyptian art, whose chief quality is no doubt mystery, and mystery always goes together with silence, doesn't it?
24:04 'I sit enthroned in the azure like an unfathomed sphinx,' says Baudelaire's Beauty. A sphinx is mystery. And mystery reigns through silence, doesn't it? At the risk sometimes of provoking, I slide from the word 'mystery' to 'mystification.' Let's return to Debussy. So, at the end of Canope, there is almost a harmonic ecstasy, isn't there, with a chord—I don't want to get into analysis, but a second chord, isn't it—that's meant to freeze time, while at the same time leaving the chord open to show that it could resonate like that infinitely.
The school of disenchantment and L'Invitation au voyage 24:42 So, let me sum up the gist of what I'd like to convey right now. There is in Baudelaire, stemming from the reaction that followed the failure of the 1848 revolution, as with so many others of that generation, whom a literary critic like Bénichou—who devoted a study to it with that beautiful title, isn't it, 'The School'—sorry, 'The School of Disenchantment.' You see? It's disenchanted, whereas Romanticism is always enchanted.
25:13 Here it's the school of disenchantment. A kind of ivory tower—the poet isolates himself from the crowd and seeks out tapestries, sumptuous interiors, gleaming furniture, polished by the years, would adorn our chamber, the rarest flowers mingling their scent with the faint aroma of amber. Of course, I'm quoting the admirable 'L'Invitation au voyage' by Baudelaire. Rich ceilings, deep mirrors, oriental splendor.
25:44 'Everything there would speak, to the soul in secret, its sweet native tongue.' Let me make a small remark about 'native.' I don't want us to keep to our timing too rigidly, but still, some people have written pages and pages trying to determine whether Baudelaire was inviting us to Holland or to Portugal, because in Lisbon there isn't much vegetation. Baudelaire doesn't mention plants. He speaks of canals, of seeing on those canals sleeping vessels—so maybe it's Holland. Whereas Baudelaire says it right in the text: 'Everything there would speak, to the soul in secret, its sweet native tongue.'
26:16 Don't look any further, it's paradise lost. It's the soul's homeland, the one from which it fell in order to be born. You know there's a whole neo-Platonic mysticism in Baudelairean aesthetics that we also find in Mallarmé, who speaks of that anterior sky where beauty blossoms. There you go. So, that closes the parenthesis on the sweet native tongue.
26:46 You see this luxury—rich ceilings, deep mirrors, interiors—while the man who wrote this lived in a garret, isn't that right, like a poor wretch materially speaking, to be linked to his dandyism, and then of course to the refrain of 'L'Invitation au voyage': 'There, all is order and beauty, luxury, calm and voluptuousness.' You see? So, let's move on to 'Harmonie du soir.' You'll understand why I'm speaking about it last, for the Baudelaire part.
The invisible score of "Harmonie du soir" 27:18 Because this poem synthesizes these two tendencies in Baudelaire. The Parnassian tendency—it was necessary, I remind you, to return to a search for formal perfection after the pages and pages, sometimes a bit padded, where the Romantics believed they were writing poetry but were often writing versified thought—or versified reflection, which is not quite poetry.
27:49 The greatest Romantics are of course safe from this criticism. I'm speaking here of the French Romantics—everyone knows that the greatest Romanticism isn't French, apart from a few rare exceptions. It's Nordic. So, I return to this poem, 'Harmonie du soir,' because from the very title there's a musical connotation. And the fact that it speaks of the evening, of twilight, of the end of the day—in short, of an intermediary process, in this case, between day and night, let's be precise.
28:27 Instead of talking about the text, let's try to let the text speak. As Van Gogh said, we can only make our paintings speak—that's honesty. The evening comes to contradict what I was saying about the plastic vein, where time is suspended, where we've returned to the eternity of form, of stone, of statue. Ah no, here it's harmony—already it resonates, it's sound, you can close your eyes, it's not visual, it's for the ear.
28:59 And of the evening—well, you'll see that in this poem, which begins exactly opposite to Beauty, the poem bearing that name, the eponymous poem, very, very marmoreal—you see, it opens with this stanza that I'll dig into a bit with you. It's a fireside chat this evening—except there's no fire at my place.
29:30 It's too small, 18 square meters, there's no room for a fireplace. But there's a cat who warms me, and whom I warm. Though he still prefers the radiator. So, 'Here come the times'—that's the first stanza, isn't it? 'Here come the times when, vibrating on its stem, each flower evaporates like a censer. Sounds and scents whirl in the evening air, melancholy waltz and languorous vertigo.'
30:01 I'll stop there. Why? To draw your attention, even before the meaning of the words and what it's about—we'll come back to that—the twilight, the evening—to the score-like quality of this text. There's an invisible score, but not invisible to the ear. To the ear it's very audible; it's even made for that, to be heard. Let me explain. Look at this stanza I just read. It alternates lines, or rather the break in the middle of the line, what's called the hemistich, the cut, isn't it, the caesura.
30:39 Since these are alexandrines, you count six feet and you're at the midpoint. 'Here come the times,' one, two, three, four, five, six, 'when vibrating on its stem,' etc. 'Sounds and scents,' one, two, three, four, five, six—there. It stops at the hemistich, but it stops on a syllable that's sometimes masculine, meaning the sound stops on the syllable—'Here come the times,' silence—and not on a mute e. Now the following line—'Here come the times, when vibrating on its stem'—next line, 'each flower evaporates,' you see, the sixth foot is 'pore,' and since the mute e is followed by a vowel, it isn't pronounced.
31:20 That's the rule, isn't it? 'Each flower evaporates, like a censer.' As if there were an r' to 'évapore' and it flowed into the a of 'ainsi.' 'Each flower evaporates, like a censer.' Whereas the first line, I come back to it, 'Here come the times'—there you have a big M, masculine, a masculine syllable. And at the end of the line, 'when vibrating on its stem,' there's a mute e, the sound lingers, feminine, M, F. Next line: 'each flower evaporates,' feminine, 'like a censer.'
31:53 The sound doesn't stop, F, F. There could be a mute e, it wouldn't change anything, since it would be mute anyway. Next line: 'sounds and scents,' M again. 'Whirl in the evening air,' F. You see the score that's there, invisible, the regularity, the recurrence. Exactly like jazz musicians improvising—and it's true that they improvise, but not on just anything. As I often told my students at the music center in Niamey, Niger, funded by your taxes—it was the European Union that funded it—improvisation doesn't just improvise itself.
32:31 You improvise on a theme, so you have the theme in common, which doesn't move, at a certain tempo—nobody deviates from that. After that, everyone does what they want, like on a racetrack, to use another metaphor—everyone does the same circuit, but nobody passes through the exact same spot, down to the millimeter, with their car. There you go. So, fortunately, there is a score. I'm drawing your attention to this because I'm not just playing a formal game. You might think, 'ah yes, we see where you're going, of course.'
33:03 It's well known that the dominant theme of Symbolism in poetry—indeed the manifesto of this poetry is found in Verlaine's poem called precisely 'Art poétique,' which begins with that famous opening stroke: 'Music before all else.' And for that, prefer the Odd, more vague and more soluble in the air. There, we're at the opposite of marble. 'Prefer the Odd, more vague and more soluble in the air, with nothing in it that weighs or poses.' Superb! You can take 'poses' in every sense, including in the sense of posers.
33:37 So, 'Music before all else, and for that, prefer the Odd, more vague and more soluble in the air, with nothing in it that weighs or poses.' Well, that poetry was initiated by Baudelaire, even though it's Verlaine who penned this admirable opening of 'Art poétique.' Besides, the whole poem is superb. I refer you to it for another time. But it's not for this formal game alone. That you'll find in literature textbooks. It's not only for that. It's...
The frozen sun: from the malady of the century to the century of malady 34:07 I've stressed the recurrence of invariant structures. You see? M, F, F, F, and so it goes on. Now, we said 'Ah!'—here's something that isn't made of marble. This is a poem, 'Harmonie du soir,' which is rather in movement since it's steeped in music. Not quite that much, though. And you'll see that through verbal magic, through this sonic magic—what's been called for Baudelaire 'evocative sorcery'—through this sonic magic, like a sorcerer from deep in the jungles of central Congo, you see?
34:43 The poet is going to freeze the one thing that moves in all this. It's the sun that's setting. What am I referring to? Because at the start, we're only in decline. Let me repeat, or rather develop it. 'Here come the times when, vibrating on its stem, each flower evaporates like a censer, sounds and scents'—that's not marble at all. 'Sounds and scents'
35:13 I remind you that there are two things one can feel when closing one's eyes. "Sounds and scents turn in the evening air, melancholy waltz and languorous vertigo." And now we take up a line again, this is called a pantoum. It's of Malay origin. "Sounds and scents turn in the evening air, melancholy waltz and languorous vertigo." "The violin quivers like a heart that is afflicted." I say the violin not to be precious, but so that there are six feet. "The violin quivers like a heart that is afflicted."
35:44 "Melancholy waltz and languorous vertigo." "The sky is sad and beautiful." And my masculine hemistiches, "The sky is sad and beautiful like a great repository." So we continue, and each time we take up a line from the previous stanza and new ones arrive. "The violin quivers like a heart that is afflicted." "A tender heart that hates" — from the verb "to hate" of course, you have it before your eyes. "A tender heart that hates the vast black void." Ah! We learn all at once.
36:14 He hates the night that is about to come, the vast black void. That means that the author, or this tender heart he speaks of, both about himself and about many others, turns his back on the coming night. No, no, I am not interpreting. All my listeners know that I hate interpretation. I only analyze. I am alluding to a verb that is in the poem. Look at it. It's near the end. "A tender heart that hates the vast black void." That's the end. "Gathers every vestige of the luminous past."
36:45 You see that he turns his back on the coming night, and like Proust, he is in search of all lost time. Something that was in the process of taking shape at that time. Is that right? Something like a foreboding, a dread of this century for which people spoke of the mal du siècle — the century's malady — a malady that ravaged the Romantic era but worsened with Baudelairean spleen, taking on an almost physical, hypochondriac dimension, as people liked to say at the time.
37:15 This century characterized by the mal du siècle, this century will be succeeded by the century of carnage, the century of evil. After the century's malady, the century's evil. A tender heart that hates the vast black void, gathers every vestige of the luminous past. What we call the decadent schools is this immense twilight of European civilization that extends up to the war of 1914. Centuries are not numbers, it's not 1800, 1900.
37:47 That's abstract, that's numerical. No, it's 1815, it's not Waterloo, for instance, from which a new world takes shape in which the Anglo-Saxons begin to dominate the world up to today, roughly speaking. So, especially since the Berlin Wall fell, they have had a monopoly on domination. I mean, even though, as you know, there are great powers challenging them and having rather notable successes, and not only in economics. I'm speaking of those thanks to whom we have a few masks in Italy and France.
38:21 So this tender heart turns its back on the horror to come, a tender heart that hates the vast black void, gathers every vestige of the luminous past. And there, right after this line, there's the line that is proof of what I've been saying — well, it's proof that I'm not interpreting. It's not that I'm merely being attentive to what the text says. I give the floor back to the text. "The sun has drowned in its congealing blood."
38:52 To congeal is to return to the immobility from which I started, with beauty, with the statue. Yes, yes, we did indeed start from twilight, from a decline, from a movement. The stems of the flowers vibrated, the sounds evaporated, all that was evanescent, the opposite of the immobility of stone and marble. But now, through his verbal magic, like a magician, like a sorcerer, the poet has forced, at the end, in his text of course, the blazing star to remain still, just as his friend Monet — yes, Claude Monet, well, actually his friend was mostly Manet, but Monet, who is the most emblematic figure of Impressionist aesthetics in painting, will look at this sun which, thanks to Monet's brush, is immobilized in its decline, in the paintings he made of London and the Thames, with this sun coloring the Thames in a bloody manner, so to speak, like a sort of eternal twilight, a bit like what
40:02 Wagner wanted to do in Twilight of the Gods, isn't that so, which ends with the burning of the gods' palace — so, all this is actually, all this is almost more rigorous than mathematics, you understand that, I'd like to draw your attention to this. As I often say to my friend the mathematician, a brilliant mathematician, Thomas Larochefoucauld, a member friend and one of the founding fathers of our association — well, I say father, though for me he's really a little founding brother, as I often say, because I know it always makes him jump when I say it, but he understands very well what I mean — the only difference between mathematics and poetry is that poetry is an exact science. And he knows very well that this isn't a criticism I'm making of mathematics — quite the contrary, their power lies precisely in their operative side, which cares little for mere exactitude alone.
40:59 So, once someone gets around to telling me, "minus zero squared equals i," well, the poet has managed to immobilize the sun. So where do I want to go with this now? Because right now I'm in poetry. Well, I want to arrive at a part of contemporary ideology, a counter-revolutionary ideology. I'm not saying this to send them to the gulag. There are some scoundrels in there, and then there are some very interesting people, mind you, even though I maintain that they are reactionaries.
Lévi-Strauss: music and myths, a negation of time 41:34 I'm thinking of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whom I respected enormously because of his immense musical culture, and not only that, I don't know. And with whom my friend Clouscard never stopped crossing swords, especially in his later works, and for good reason. We're getting there. You'd think — we started from Baudelaire, but yes — immobilizing time. Now, what does Lévi-Strauss say in the preface to the work entitled The Raw and the Cooked, the one that opens the series known as the Mythologiques?
42:12 Where he favors the study, in so-called societies without writing — not to say primitive, savage — of things that are at once imprecise or reductive, as people said before him. Before him, Lévy-Bruhl went so far as to speak of a prelogical mentality. Whereas Lévi-Strauss showed that there is an unassailable logic in what he calls, in a fine title, the savage mind. So, from The Raw and the Cooked onward, Lévi-Strauss, inaugurating a new series, a mythological series, imposes on his voyage, on his itinerary, a certain deviation, a clinamen, as they would have said in Antiquity.
42:57 Up until then, his compass, his model, was linguistics, which had been such an important discipline, the flagship discipline of the whole structuralist movement. Structural Anthropology is also a title by Lévi-Strauss — it was linguistics, mind you, and not just any linguistics, that of Saussure, which emphasizes the importance — far less than the structuralists who are ideologues, whereas Saussure is a scholar, an erudite, let's say — but still, unquestionably, Saussure rehabilitates a dimension that had been neglected in philology, in the study of languages before structural linguistics: the so-called synchronic dimension, that is to say, precisely not the diachronic one, not the one that unfolds over time.
43:44 Yes, in French, there's this turn of phrase because — I'm just saying something at random — they invaded Italy, and there they took a certain word, you see, one explains language through history, whereas structural linguistics has shown that language can evolve, and often does evolve, according to factors that are internal, proper to it. For example, in English there is no "u," there is no "u" sound, so between P and T you can say "put," "pet," "pit," whatever you like, but not — I dare not say it — not with the "u" sound. So this imposes, already like a crossword grid, this imposes possibilities of development for the language, and impossibilities.
44:23 That's what is studied in phonology — I won't dwell on it — quite distinct from phonetics, because there is a phonology for each language, whereas phonetics is common to all human throats. I'll come back to it. Why was I talking about Lévi-Strauss? Because I'm coming back to The Raw and the Cooked, to its preface. The first title of a series where he says: it is less linguistics — which remains very important, of course, for Lévi-Strauss — but he blends it with the importance of music. You see how we come full circle.
44:55 And he says why music? Because he specialized among the Indians of the Brazilian forest, particularly of the Mato Grosso. He specialized — I don't much like the word, but neither did he certainly — but anyway, I mean, he concentrated, especially from The Raw and the Cooked onward, on myths, their narratives, how they explain the origin of fire, the origin of language, the origin of cult objects — in short, the origin of the brevity of life.
45:25 And in this preface, he says there is something in common circulating between music and myths. It is a common negation of time. You see there is a continuity in what I'm telling you, and why I began with Baudelaire's beauty. "I hate the movement that displaces lines." And here Lévi-Strauss tells us in the preface — that's the last time I'll say preface, I'll tell you the real title.
45:58 In Lévi-Strauss's book, there is no preface, because his whole book is placed under the sign of music, and to express this better to us, he divided all his chapters, including the preface, with musical terms. So there is no preface, he calls it "Overture." So if you come across The Raw and the Cooked, don't hesitate to read the admirable overture in which he says this sentence — now I'm getting to it. "Everything happens as though music entered time only the better to leave it." Well, that's Debussy's music, you see.
46:28 Music is an art of time — that's classic stuff, I've actually thought about it a great deal — just as sculpture, architecture and painting are arts of space. Which doesn't mean, mind you, that a painter cannot give the impression of time passing. And conversely, a musician can very well, through a chord, express the immobility of a monument — I'm thinking of Debussy's The Sunken Cathedral, precisely, tuned.
47:00 But, but, but from the point of view — I'm speaking here of the works themselves, not of our gaze or our way of looking, but of the result of the creator's work. That is to say, there isn't a left side of the painting that is at 4 o'clock and a right side that is at 4:10. Whereas between 4:00 and 4:10, in a Beethoven symphony, you don't hear the same things at all, not at all. You can go, in 10 minutes, from a spellbinding silence to an outburst of sound of a brutality that is sometimes frightening, in Beethoven.
47:38 Common, yes. So, common — this isn't me saying it, but I recall it for anyone who might still be so bold as to be unaware of it — that there are the arts of space, called the plastic arts in French. And then there are the arts of time — poetry, music, etc. All this needs to be nuanced. In poetry you have everything that belongs to the order of speech, which is of course a temporal flow, but you also have images, and these images borrow, like painting, from the visual.
From aesthetic escape to burning current events 48:12 Well — "see on these canals sleep these vessels" — we get images in our heads. Anyway. So, here's where I wanted to get. There is a strand of thought — because earlier I said there's a movement of withdrawal after the failure of '48, there's a counter-revolutionary movement, already, or one that claims to be, in any case, independent of all politics — art for art's sake. There you have it, a pure aestheticism, beauty for beauty's sake. Let humans squabble over trifles, shall we?
48:44 And let us drink the golden cup of legends, isolating ourselves ever further from the crowd. I'm paraphrasing here a rather ironic text by Nerval about that era, at the beginning of Sylvie. And now Lévi-Strauss suddenly reminds us of our own era. He's even one of the most decisive thinkers of the contemporary period, one who played a decisive role in the movement that did the most, in the properly philosophical field, to make Marxism look outdated.
49:16 For those for whom it worked, I mean someone who really thinks Marxism is outdated — this is the era of the triumph of a capitalism that has since been thought immortal. Questions are being raised, and it is precisely the crisis we are living through that convinced me to start with what seems furthest removed from it, you see, with these forms of art or thought that seek to escape as far as possible from current events. There's the circuit that has led us from beauty — "I am beautiful to mortals like a dream of stone"
49:51 to Lévi-Strauss's singular statement. Very profound: everything happens as though music entered time — since he cannot deny that — only the better to leave it. Now, what is the most burning current event? You're going to tell me the lockdown. No, no, that's not really burning. It can be frustrating. Let's speak plain French, it can be a pain in the neck, whatever you want to call it. It can be restful for some, it depends a bit on the social bracket one moves in.
50:27 If you have six rooms, a big garden and all that, the lockdown doesn't pose quite the same problems. I'm delighted for those who have that. Provided they're well aware of it and don't talk about it the way some idiots I saw on Facebook did, who seemed to have found paradise and couldn't understand why not everyone appreciates the silence, the flowers, the birds like that. Those with three kids underfoot in two rooms, or a room and a half, don't feel quite the same way.
50:59 No, no, the lockdown is not the most burning current event. It's the death toll, it's the virus, that's serious. I'm not talking about it lightly. It's serious, and it's not over. The wave of mortality probably hasn't yet quite reached its peak, even though we know it will come back down. But anyway, I mean, we haven't even reached a thousand deaths out of 65 million inhabitants yet — for those who still have a bit of a historical sense, unlike the dominant world, that of America, that is, a country without history, I'm exaggerating on purpose, a country that doesn't have much historical depth, that prefers geography, wide open spaces.
51:42 That's very good, it has produced admirable films, and I'm not criticizing it. But it's like grids, you see, you can see what that implies and what it excludes. America is at odds with history, with Hegel and Marx. Karl Popper is at odds with Hegel and Marx, well, yes. And Lévi-Strauss, mind you, only truly became Lévi-Strauss during his American parenthesis, where he did very well to go, since it's thanks to that he was able to stay alive during the most shameful period of our contemporary history, without which he wouldn't have been able to give us the masterpieces he produced afterward.
52:22 So, without history, there's a dominant mindset that means — I'm struck, with many young people, probably because of new school curricula, by historical gaps — but I'm not a historian, I'm not trying, I'm not a champion of the thousand-franc quiz game, that's not the point, I'm not a champion of history quizzes, but still, I mean, what used to be assumed common knowledge, including for my aunt who hadn't gone much further than her middle-school certificate, is completely absent, you see. And if I looked at school textbooks — I used to think it was just talk from somewhat conservative, right-wing people, saying school isn't what it used to be, for different reasons — where am I going with this?
53:12 What I want to get at is that when we experienced the Asian flu — I was 12 — another death toll far worse than this one, and I'm not even talking about the Spanish flu, it's tens of millions of deaths that this death toll amounts to, I say we're not even at a thousand in France, it's tens of millions of deaths, which started in the United States and produced nearly two million deaths in China, for example, through importation. But yes, these are things being recalled by current events.
53:43 All this is very well documented on YouTube, I'll leave you to look it up. There's a young Canadian, a young Quebecer, who makes rather good programs on this. Very objective, if I may say so, not very ideological, he gives us chunks of history with solid documentation. But anyway, it's also enough to just open a history textbook. So, of course, it's serious. I'm the first, mind you, to put gel on my hands when leaving the supermarket, aren't I?
An unprecedented economic crisis; aside on the performers 54:18 Even though it might be me who's contaminated it, who knows. I'm talking about the formidable economic and social crisis that is barely beginning. Today, I'm talking about today, not about our era, not a metonymic "today," I mean today, which is March 26th. We now know that 5,000 billion, 5,000 billion, are going to be, are going to flood the capitalist world in an attempt to save it.
54:57 You know, for the most constipated to reach this kind of diarrhea, something must be happening. I'm paying attention. You know, stock market and finance stories — there are people who only check them when there's a crisis, who suddenly get interested and take a quick glance and learn what the Dow Jones is, the S&P, which is actually much more meaningful than the Dow Jones for the health of the American economy. No, these are things you follow every day, or there's no point. There you go. Well, there are accidents of my biography that mean I follow this every day.
55:27 I never owned a single share, unlike my father, but I read Le Monde's financial page. And well, these are indicators, you see, and Marx, mind you, devoured the stock market, finance, and economic news. And Hegel said he read the daily papers, the gazettes; he said it was his morning prayer. I say this for those who say, well, how can you listen to BFM Business, etc.
56:01 It's not their ideological vomit that interests me. It's the sheer quantity of information you find nowhere else. Where else would you learn that such-and-such an Estonian bank is on the verge of bankruptcy? I mean, that's rarely what you'll get from Léa Salamé. Or on Canal+, or on TF1. There you go. So what's happening — I'm 75 years old now, well past it — it's unheard of. The CAC 40 dropping below 12 points in a single day — that was the case one recent Monday, last week — the CAC 40, that had never been seen in the history of the CAC.
56:41 not even during the great crisis of the 1930s, you see. I hear alarming statements coming from circles least inclined to worsen the situation. Because most of the people who work in finance and who have media outlets at their disposal to speak urbi et orbi, their main activity throughout the year is to raise dough, to speak plain French, to raise money, to encourage shareholders, savers, to buy this or that stock.
57:15 So they mustn't say things are going badly, otherwise people stop buying, they sell. But now, they're all saying we haven't seen anything yet, that what's brewing is monstrous. Today — I'm coming back to today, I'm only talking about today's news, March 26th — American unemployment increased by 4 million people in a single day, that had never been seen before, not even during the Great Depression, which saw a record 20 million unemployed in the United States, at the worst point of the crisis.
57:48 Here, there are 4 million in a single day. And already, some ten days ago, it was being forecast that there would be 30 million unemployed in Europe by the fall. I'm telling you this because statistically it threatens you far more than catching the virus. One doesn't rule out the other. I'm not trying to downplay the virus. I mean, you're more likely to die at the wheel, statistically, than to die from the virus. Good thing we're not driving much these days.
58:20 There you go — no, but things need to be put in their proper place. On the other hand, what's brewing — well, you see, all our social gains, the rights we managed to obtain, the few concessions Macron made on this or that point given the movement, both in the streets and in the unions and in the public services — they can all be swept away by saying, "Wait, there's a crisis here, be quiet, it's up to us to act urgently, what's happening now is serious." So you might say to me, "Where are you taking us, Pagani?"
58:52 We started from Baudelaire and Debussy. We started from barely audible sound vibrations in Debussy. Let me dig a little into Debussy. I've chosen a recording with an excellent sound quality. There's a very good performer, Zimerman. Nothing more to prove there. But still, there's better for Debussy. I'll tell you right away, the reference is Walter Gieseking. Gieseking, G-I-E. I didn't pick Gieseking because the 1950s recording is a bit ungrateful in terms of sound quality, and when someone is meant to discover this music, they need first of all to be able to hear everything.
59:31 But still, from the point of view of interpretation and the way it's inhabited. There's Gieseking, and then there are others, there's Samson François, there's a whole French school of piano. There's Alain Planès today, not just the great ancestors. There, I'm making this little clarification. And then, there is perhaps the most deeply probed, the most hallucinatory version of this living enigma, I was going to say — he's dead now — of that immense pianist who was, not so long ago, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, one of the greatest pianists of this century.
1:00:04 Racing driver. Mountaineer! Yes, there are people like that. Idol of the whole young generation of European pianists. Careful, this isn't someone cancelling two concerts out of five because the hall's acoustics, or I don't know, the piano has some odd sound. Someone a bit... You have to see his interpretation. You have the entire thing on YouTube, the Debussy Préludes, book one, book two. There, I'll close that parenthesis.
1:00:34 What are you dragging us into all of a sudden, talking to us about 30 million unemployed, about this din of the present time that we'll have plenty of time, won't we, to sort out later, when we were in the magic of the moonlit audience terraces where you could hear a pin drop? The common point is repetition. And here again, I need to explain myself.
The repetition of crises of capital and of carnage 1:01:04 The crisis of capital. Marx announced it. And for three generations bourgeois economists have laughed about it. Marx, nonsense. Every time he saw the crisis coming for the following week, didn't he? A bit like the early evangelists believed the apocalypse was going to arrive within the coming weeks, right? Two thousand years later, we're still waiting for it. Marx's crisis is like that. But how, how, how? The crisis came. Inform yourselves about the crises that occurred in the 1880s, 1893.
1:01:39 Collapse of prices, or on the contrary, inflation. Inform yourselves, I'm not here — you live in an era where you have loads of data that lets you know largely what's needed for the point I'm making now. On the other hand, how do we get out of it? Through carnage such as had never been seen. I'm Corsican; in Corsica there are villages with war memorials where there are more inhabitants listed on the memorials than in the whole village.
1:02:09 Corsica is one of the départements that suffered the most, because, you know, there was an army management policy where they sent to the heaviest gunfire the Moroccan tabors, the Corsican shepherds, well, those who weren't very great losses for the investments the Republic had made in engineers or things like that. I'm not railing against army management. And so, on the war memorial you see Giudicelli-Antoine, Giudicelli-Toussaint, Giudicelli-Dominique, and Giudicelli-Mathieu — there's a woman who lost her husband, maybe two brothers, a son.
1:02:46 Michel Clouscard said it had been capable of that, of liquidating the French peasantry. That's the balance sheet of 1914, which over the centuries had made France, hadn't it? And not just France, but had given such great importance to this rural power that France was. The war of 1914, that's what it was: the liquidation. Well, that's how crises get postponed to later. The crisis came, but capital gets a reprieve through carnage.
1:03:19 Ah, but peace returns. Here we are in 1918. Right? Yes, not for long. The crisis doesn't calm down for long, because in Germany, first premonition — I'm not talking about the 1930s, I'm not talking about Nazism — no, in the 1920s, under the Weimar Republic, the greatest inflation of all time. You understand why Mrs. Merkel, the Bundesbank, the Buba, as they say in financial circles, right? And the most constipated organization in world finance.
1:03:49 Right? You can drop dead, it won't pay out a penny. Whereas now, that's it, it's opening all the floodgates, panic is gripping them. Yes, because precisely, they were traumatized by that inflation. It was the era, that is, when they printed on the banknotes — the older ones among you know all this — they'd put a 2000 note, then on top of it, they'd put 2 million, then 20 million, but within the same week, the currency was collapsing that fast. You see? So the crisis is there, Marx's crisis. There was the parenthesis of the carnage, and as soon as we're back at cruising speed, once capitalism returns to normal functioning, so to speak, the crisis comes back.
1:04:32 And it produces an even greater carnage than the previous one, one that makes the previous one pale in comparison. Repetition, recurrence — after the mal du siècle, the century of evil. I began with two poems from The Flowers of Evil. We think we're done with it. And then, not the crisis of the 1930s, you're aware of that.
1:05:03 An economist of the time spoke of the absurd spectacle of crowds starving to death in front of overflowing granaries. How can granaries be too full? They made you believe it was a crisis of overproduction, as if children had too much milk. But children were dying of poverty. Look at The Grapes of Wrath, with Henry Fonda's admirable acting, right? Of course, read Steinbeck's masterpiece — the level of misery the American proletariat had reached during that seamless war.
1:05:38 Now here again, capitalism repeats the same strategy. Today, 3 million Americans have lost their jobs. And mind you, there's no pôle emploi or ANPE, nothing at all. That's why they're unblocking things fast, they're unblocking. There, that's it. You'll tell me, but the stock markets are euphoric, they've been climbing for two days now. Well, that's for those who only watch the stock market in times of crisis. On the eve of the 1929 crash, the stock market had climbed higher than it had ever climbed.
1:06:11 That's called a technical rebound, if you like. Let's not dwell on it. That's the language of stock speculators, not mine. There, it's called a technical rebound. There are clever ones who say it's dropped so low that we'll do a trade, it'll go back up anyway, so we'll get a technical rebound, so I buy and I'll sell quickly again as soon as it plunges again, because it's going to plunge again. Because today — this is the third 'today' I'm doing — first today, 3 million more unemployed in the United States in one day. Second today, 5,000 billion dollars.
1:06:44 Five times France's budget — you don't realize. Five times the budget of France, of French national education, of the health budget, of the civil service budget, of the defense budget — in fact, all of that combined, and I'm leaving things out, tourism too. Five times that coming out of the pockets of those who generally don't like digging into them, in any case not for the paupers that we are. Because next to that, we are all paupers. As Pascal would say, the finite annihilates itself before the infinite.
Those who rejoice at the crisis; conclusion 1:07:18 I mean that in the face of the infinite, 100, 1 million, 1 billion, all of that is nothing. Third novelty: you'd think, these are people who know, they have advisers, they plan, people tell them but it's going to be a social catastrophe. But no, no need to worry. Because there are some who will rejoice.
1:07:50 I'm not talking about those who make a living from it. You know, don't worry, there are those who, in crises, never make as much of a fortune as during crises. No, that's not what I'm talking about. No, no. I'm talking about people as little rich as you and me. I'm setting aside our differences for now, if you'll allow me. I live in 18 square meters, my cat takes up two thirds of it. I'm delighted about that. I'm the one who encourages it. And I'm not complaining, I've never been so well. But, no, no.
1:08:22 I'm talking about people who are barely less destitute than I am at that level. Who talk about happy sobriety, a return to father Malthus — sorry, Malien as pronounced. My friend Loïc Chéniaud, whom some of you know well, and I'm sure moreover that there are members of the valiant cohorts of the IHT, of the Institut de l'Homme Total, listening in. Loïc Chéniaud had sent me, without comment — well, with a tiny comment, he knows very well that with me there's no need to insist — the reflections of, let's say, a class, not to name anyone, a class in a French high school he attended, where the students were saying, 'But sir, this virus is wonderful.'
1:09:14 'It's wonderful. This way, there'll be less carbon in the atmosphere.' You see, when I say there are those who rejoice over the crisis. Those in the world of finance and economics adore it. Those who rejoice that there are the 30 million unemployed, that we're deindustrializing — which we didn't just start doing today, but which we'll finally be able to accelerate to irreversible degrees. There.
1:09:45 I'm going to ask my favorite stage manager whether I'm not overrunning the allotted time. Oh really? We've already gone over? Well, in that case, that suits me, because I was saying I'd like to close with 'I hope I've been clear.' Let me sum up. Forgive me, but I really need to sum up. Well yes, very quickly, I started from forms of expression in poetry as in music.
1:10:18 We can no longer set it in opposition to everything that is political, current affairs, economics, and even less the economy of the modern, industrialized world, etc., but rather to archaisms. The earth, these moonlit audiences — one thinks of the Maharaja's audiences in India, I don't know, Canopus, ancient Egypt, yes, all that exoticism, both geographical and temporal, far off in history and far off in geography. Ah, that's it, escape, escapism. I started from there to arrive at the most burning current affairs.
1:10:48 That's how I'll sum up what I've said today, by showing the invariant. The invariant is repetition, the recurrence of the crises of capital. The continuation, during the week, or in any case not long after, since we've decided, as you know, to do two sessions a week. There. I'm checking my monitoring to see — I must be making the PRCF people jump, with the way I use English words.
1:11:23 That must be the stock-market atmosphere. I don't know, no, I fully approve of the courageous work Gastaud does in defense — well, not like someone on the right, there's a right-wing francophonie, but no, because languages don't carry quite the same values. There. So, are there any questions? I don't think so, I see some very interesting remarks, not counting the abandonment of fundamental freedoms — thank you, Raphaël, who is not blind — the destruction of labor law, you're aware that's already begun.
1:12:04 Already, partial unemployment was an old demand of the MEDEF, and now here it is, the miracle solution. There, I'll end by encouraging you to consult not the Attelé(e)s de la Confinitude, but to consult at least for a few moments BFM Business — not BFM TV, BFM Business TV, you see?
1:12:34 Horribile dictu, you see? And then Boursorama, you're very well informed too — click on Boursorama, don't get lost, and you'll see what you'll see, because that's where our destiny is being played out, well, that's where it's legible, excuse me, there, and see you very soon, and many thanks to Philippe Moreau.
