English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
A Beethoven quartet played by an orchestra 3:00 Good evening everyone, a big thank you for giving me the chance to meet you again at our Wednesday appointments. At our Wednesday appointment. Thank you, and forgive me. Forgive me for speaking up and breaking, for not leaving a little more time for the silence that follows this marvel. It is Beethoven's last quartet. I'll take advantage of that a bit.
3:32 Almost off topic, though you'll see, it isn't quite. On a broader musicological level, to recall it, Beethoven is still known; he's one of the classical musicians who has a certain audience among what's called the general public, although, given the vast offensive being waged for three generations now to make classical music outlawed, I'm barely exaggerating, you'll see.
4:02 I'm laying it on a bit thick, yes, but I'm not exaggerating. I'll tell you right away why I chose this version. Because connoisseurs ask me what's the point, why are they throwing us a string orchestra when Beethoven wrote his last... String quartet? Here there are more than four. It's a tradition going back to the nineteenth century already; Mahler had already orchestrated, for strings only of course, that sublime slow movement of the Sixteenth Quartet, by Beethoven, whose other movements are much stranger.
4:50 I'll make a sub-remark for connoisseurs, but I remember a program on France Musique a very long time ago, back when there was less talk on France Musique, but what was said was already a bit more intelligent. And I'm not saying everything was better before, far from it, but on that score, it certainly held true. I won't even mention the evolution of France Culture, but there was a program called Accords Parfaits.
5:22 And the host would play us a piece of music, and we had to guess what it was, and then he'd say, bonus question, what do you think of it? And in the comments the following week, he would decode it, he'd read the comments, and among the comments, some said that the other movements, the somewhat faster ones in this quartet, made them think of Webern, that is, the most avant-garde music there is, the most disorienting, for the vast battalion of music lovers, let's say, used to not going much beyond Debussy—and even then, you know, there are already some for whom Debussy, a contemporary of Monet, I don't know if you see, from the late nineteenth century, is already too modern.
6:13 So I chose this version, even though I'm not a purist, but like everyone who knows this repertoire a bit, I prefer the string quartet version. So let me come back to it—why did I take the more broadly orchestrated version, to vent my spleen a little, to make fun of one of the forms taken by the censorship of classical music that I was alluding to, which consists in saying, this is music for old people—well look, here are young people, very young ones—ah but it's Eurocentric music—well look at the number of Asians who were there, all very young, boys and girls, and the conductor himself is one of the greatest living conductors,
7:24 it's Seiji Ozawa, a Japanese man—there you go, that's why I wanted this to be said, that beyond being conducted by the great Seiji Ozawa, I mean, it doesn't lose much compared to the original—but the original, all the same, for string quartet, I'll save for the closing credits, when, regretfully, I will have left you, we will have parted ways; I'll play you—not the slow movement again, of course, that was for the opening—but the finale, and there, I get into the debate that has occupied us for a while now, about the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Hegel, first of all—a link that seems external, like that, between Beethoven and Hegel, an external link, contingent, some would say, you see, that doesn't seem rich in deep determination: they were born the same year, 1770,
Born in 1770: the revolutionary great intermission 8:38 Hölderlin was born the same year—Hölderlin, Beethoven, Hegel, that's not a bad vintage. Napoleon born in 1769, a year earlier—I'm not putting, I know there are faithful followers of Guillemin listening to me, which honors me by the way, because Guillemin makes unforgettable videos, on Pétain in particular, which I warmly recommend to you, on Rousseau—for Napoleon, he's a bit—don't think it's because I'm Corsican that I defend—well, I'm not defending Napoleon, that's not the word, but I mean, he doesn't have a dialectical vision, he doesn't see, like Hegel, the stakes of the Napoleonic moment, far beyond the small ambitious, and greedy, and grasping person, why not, that was Napoleon.
9:29 In any case, what interests me is that he was born in '69, and three others, Beethoven, Schilling—Beethoven, Hölderlin and Hegel—in '70; these people are twenty years old at the storming of the Bastille. So, the matter of dates is less and less external; there are generations like that. They are right in the middle of that famous intermission I often allude to without developing it much—we're no longer in the Ancien Régime.
10:01 Well, at their birth, yes, but by then, when they're twenty, we're no longer in the Ancien Régime. And we're inaugurating the new regime, but we're not yet in the regime that governs us. We're in the great intermission. I'm surprised there aren't more people underlining the importance of this intermission between the end of the Ancien Régime. And—I always leave the choice, not just out of courtesy, I try to be intellectually honest—between the storming of the Bastille and, say, Thermidor, or Waterloo, as you like.
10:43 I take Waterloo, not because I'm saying that when Napoleon leaves the stage everything goes wrong—no, it's because it's from that moment on that, up until today, the planet has been run by mostly Anglo-Saxon powers, one of which—which will grow more and more important when it takes over from its mother country, so to speak, from England.
11:14 No, I'm not racist either. Oh my, how poor the world would be without all the contributions of what's called the Anglo-Saxons—I prefer to say the British on one side, the Americans on the other, which is already quite different. It goes without saying that, no, what worries me is the union they form in Atlanticism. I'm forced to repeat often that, to put it a bit colloquially, I don't hate on Americans, I hold it against Atlanticism.
11:48 It's not the same thing. There are African, Asian politicians who are hyper-Atlanticist. It's not—okay, the United States is the flagship, of course. But still, there's more to the United States than that, thankfully for them. So I'm dwelling on this because we are living through grave hours.
12:20 In the middle of the Cold War, that's my generation, there were tensions. It was tense at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I saw mothers in French cities going shopping, buying sugar and provisions, afraid war would come back. You see, that's nothing compared to the tension we're experiencing right now. During the Cold War there was the red telephone between Khrushchev and Kennedy, between Brezhnev and Carter, whatever.
12:52 There was a dialogue, there were space rendezvous between the Americans... There were moments of more than peaceful coexistence—that's what this period is called, peaceful coexistence—but even of scientific cooperation. Whereas now, I see Russophobia and Sinophobia taking on logarithmic growth, day by day. I don't like opinion being prepared for war by bad losers.
13:31 It's like a bad team that wants to stop the match when it sees it's going to lose, right? So, there you go. Let me come back to Waterloo. It's not irrelevant to know that it's from Waterloo onward that the planet is run by powers. Here, I'm no longer talking about peoples, I'm not talking about the British, Scottish, Irish peoples.
14:02 So many wonderful things they have to offer, which have given me a great deal and I hope it's not over. And Americans, let's not even get started, every mixture combined, with African-Americans, Latinos, whatever you like. And so on. And of course, there are so few left, but we still shouldn't forget them, the indigenous peoples. I wanted to dwell on this a bit because, you see, it's not that Napoleon leaves the stage, that's not the problem.
14:40 It's what takes over. It's not that suddenly the Republic finds again, you see, the freedoms and promises of the night of August 4th, the abolition of privileges, the abolition of slavery, which we had wanted to reinitiate, starting with Haiti, etc. No, no, that's not what saddens me, to put it mildly. It's what followed, that is, NATO—well, it wasn't called that at the time, it was called the Holy Alliance.
15:17 It's quite a program. There's the return of religion against the French Revolution, against the Enlightenment, the counter-revolution. Yes, all of that is in these dates. So, Beethoven, let me come back to him. I told you why I chose this version: youth, extra-Europeanness, more than a mix of men and women in the orchestra, a blending of ages, sexes, genders as we say now, and cultures, as it's fashionable to say—for me, being cultured means stepping outside one's own culture of origin, implicitly.
16:12 I'm very fond of the Sardinians. Sardinia is an extraordinary place. And they have an even stronger concern than we do in Corsica about heritage, and that's saying something. Because in Corsica there's been a growing awareness in recent years, all the better—but I mean, a Sardinian who only knew Sardinian culture, that's not the case, fortunately, there are immense, immense intellectuals among the Sardinians, aren't there?
16:42 Some even know Chinese or Japanese culture well, but being cultured means stepping outside one's culture of origin. It's the complete opposite of the so-called anthropological connotation of culture that has resulted from a somewhat misguided use of Lévi-Strauss, let's say, which he did somewhat encourage. He's not a die-hard anti-Marxist, but he took a mischievous pleasure in taking the opposite stance to Marxism, which is his right.
17:16 He has, moreover, made excellent contributions to anthropology, but this isn't the best one, that of comparing cultures—whose rich abundance is my delight in particular, but I hope it's everyone's delight—by expressing them as animal species scattered in space rather than as stages in historical time, which is not the same thing.
17:46 So yes, you'll hear at the end of the video the finale of this quartet, a total contrast, which is why I want you to stay inside this magnificent work. I remind you that it closes Beethoven's magnificent gallery of quartets.
18:18 I don't like to say—to repeat what connoisseurs say, but here I'll just repeat it one last time for connoisseurs. I was saying earlier that Beethoven is one of the classical musicians with a certain popular base among those who listen to classical music. That's not a huge crowd. Let me pick up my thread—but that's more true of the symphonies, the orchestral works. Everyone knows those, or the Pastoral, or the Ninth, not to mention it—even before the European Union defiled it.
18:48 But connoisseurs know that the Beethoven who goes furthest, the one from whom everything that will matter afterward, among classical composers, among modern, avant-garde, even contemporary composers—in Beethoven, that will be his last works for piano and his last quartets.
19:18 They're all magnificent, all sixteen. This is the sixteenth. They're all magnificent. I mean, there's a turn in what's called Beethoven's third period, I won't dwell on it, where he seeks to go beyond the form most in use in his time, which he inherited, after all, from the hands of Haydn and Mozart. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven form what's called the First Viennese School, or musical classicism. Sorry, I'm taking the opportunity to leave a few markers that should be familiar as soon as one leaves elementary school, but well, we're far from that.
From fugue to sonata form: a dialectical form 19:55 So why am I dwelling on this? Because we're coming back to Hegel. It's no longer an external link now. Sonata form is eminently dialectical. I'll continue these musicological considerations, a bit pretentious because for now I'm staying very basic rather than musical.
20:34 The main form before sonata form, let's say, if I go back to the generation of a Bach in the Ancien Régime, that is, someone straddling the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who is the greatest representative of what we're used to calling the Baroque—I don't really know what that means, in any case I know none of the musicians of the time would have called themselves that. The most commonly used form—I say form, I don't mean genre, I'm not saying symphony, sonata, mass, sacred music, secular music, those are genres, differences of genre.
21:09 I'm talking about form, that is, what organizes the piece from within, and not what differentiates one piece from another externally, the way a mass differs from a piano sonata. No, no, I'm talking about what structures the piece from within. It's a bit harder to see a structure, a form, in a temporal unfolding than in space, to put it more immediately visibly—a bit more, one needs a trained eye to see certain structures in space. But, generally speaking, it's much harder to maintain formal unity, formal mastery, in time, in what is no longer there as soon as it is there.
21:52 Now, sonata form was preceded, as I was telling you, by the so-called imitative form, whose most emblematic model is the fugue. I'll take the opportunity to say to those kind enough to grumble in their comments—well, to grumble very kindly and very courteously—saying, 'So when are you resuming the Musicosophies with Aymeric Monville?'
22:32 I'm pleased to announce, for those who hadn't noticed, that the series has just been relaunched, so to speak, or brought back into autumn season, in any case. And I thank Aymeric again for his availability. It's been on YouTube for three days now; type in 'Musicosophie' and you'll come across a little reflection on the relationship between music and memory.
23:03 And in it, I build almost this entire episode—that's why I'm mentioning it, otherwise it would be a digression—around a prodigious fugue written by Mahler, who would have thought it. Mahler isn't usually associated with the fugue, but he knows very well how to write one when he wants to, proof of which is a marvel. It's the fugue that closes, that forms the finale of his Fifth Symphony—these are gigantic symphonies compared to what was done in Haydn and Mozart's time.
23:34 I mean, in the time it takes to play one Mahler symphony, you could play four or five Haydn symphonies, each in four movements. So, let me come back to it. The fugue was the form before sonata form. What are the differences? This is where, as we were saying, dialectics comes in, the fugal or imitative form—I always use the example of 'Frère Jacques' for those who don't know this repertoire at all, because everyone is supposed to know it, right? It's one voice, then another, imitating the previous one, hence the term 'imitative form,' quite simply.
24:08 Even though in a fugue it's more complicated than in Frère Jacques, which is a simple canon—that is, exactly the same melody repeating itself—with fugal form it's a bit more complicated. And it requires an effort of memory, but if you want to know more about that, watch the latest Musicosophie. What interests me here is that there's a single theme that carries the whole fugue, with countersubjects, whatever you like, variations, but there's only one theme. Let's take an example.
24:38 The magnificent theme of The Art of Fugue, which is Bach's contrapuntal testament. Second voice.
25:13 After that, there's the third voice, the fourth voice. There you go. That's the fugue. One theme, and then ornamentation, imitation—it's like a vegetal growth, if you like, if we were to use a metaphor. There's none of the sudden leaps of an animal. Now, what characterizes sonata form is precisely no longer monothematism, a single theme, but plurality, often bithematism. That is, in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which everyone knows, that's the one that does that—that's the first theme, which asserts itself in a rather brutal way.
25:53 They asked Beethoven—I don't know if it's true, these are anecdotes, they'll be, extra-musical anecdotes, but why not—they asked him, what do these four notes mean, ta-ta-ta-ta, and he supposedly said, that's how fate knocks at the door. Well, but by contrast, there's a development of that theme—almost everyone knows it—and suddenly there's a second theme, much more tender, much more beautiful; so they say a virile theme, a feminine theme, because in traditional society, the distinction of genders overlaid a whole dichotomy of qualities, modesty, the reserve of women as opposed to—well, my own somewhat sour, old-fashioned side—I'll leave it to each of you to judge whether this belongs to the realm of the imaginary, whether it corresponds to realities; well, when it's prescribed for a thousand years, it ends up having a certain reality at times, in any case—and the fact remains that this is what characterizes sonata form: there's a contrast that couldn't be more pronounced,
27:03 between the themes, and a great interpreter of Beethoven, of the symphonic Beethoven, like Furtwängler, said that in Beethoven, the themes clash like the characters in a drama. Now there, we're in dialectics. We really are—drama simply means action, in Greek, let's not forget, right? There's a tension created by this disparate quality between themes that everything seems to oppose.
27:33 I say this for those who would like to dig a bit deeper into the question, to look into—because Beethoven is, forgive me for using sporting terms, though it's not reductive at all—Beethoven is a champion of contrasts, whether contrasts between extreme high and extreme low—there's a chaos rumbling below and then a motif trying to emerge over there, in the light—or between fast and slow, or between high and low, as I just did, or between legato and staccato, right?
28:19 Between smooth and detached, if you prefer—you play it staccato—he plays on all these contrasts that feed what's called, in music, and by sound engineers—here we're no longer in music, we're in acoustics, but you understand what I mean—what's called dynamics. Now, what could be less far removed from dialectics, right, than this way of proceeding by opposition.
28:52 like this, right, by contrast. And these contrasts induce an energetic tension, and the composer's task is to manage that tension. I'm deliberately using an economic term, not to end up on Wall Street or at the Palais Brongniart, at the Stock Exchange, no, no. But when I use a word, I take on all its connotations.
29:22 But I try to use it in the sense in which Freud speaks of libidinal economy. How to manage the libidinal drive, right, should it be sublimated, right, unleashed, repressed, allowed to express itself in small touches. It's this management of the fundamental energy, of the energy induced by these contrasts of high and low, low and high pitch, fast and slow, that make the genius of the sonata form in general, that make up the whole interest of this form, which is the very expression of modernity.
30:00 It's no accident that it appears at that moment. It appears precisely at the moment of this modernity which, as I keep endlessly repeating, is yours, mine, ours. Because there is a modernity in the general sense—I won't repeat it, but I'll say the shift from hunting and gathering to sedentary life tens of thousands of years ago is already, right, an extraordinary modernity. The building of the pharaoh's palaces compared to houses on stilts, these are extraordinary modernities.
30:35 No, no, I'm not annexing modernity in general, I'm talking about our modernity. And of course, for historians, modern times begin with the birth, at the end of the Middle Ages, that is, in the sixteenth century. No, no, I'm talking about the one which, well, one can never repeat it enough, arises from these two great fractures that are the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution, and in which we are still immersed, since it's at that moment that the countryside gives way to the city.
31:05 when I speak of managing this energy's economy all the way through, I say that it is characteristic of sonata form to lend itself to this challenge, that it is no accident, I'll sum up now, that it appears in the modern era in the sense I have just marked out chronologically, starting from the end of the second half of the eighteenth century.
31:37 And finally, nowhere is it managed in such a masterful way as in Beethoven, right? And he still serves as a model for contemporary and avant-garde musicians, right? So you wouldn't tolerate three or four bars. Well, I'm talking about those who aren't used to it. You get used to anything if you make an effort and listen to it several times. If you play the Moonlight Sonata to a pygmy, he's surprised.
32:11 He's surprised. These aren't at all the intervals, the sound scales, he's never encountered such a thing. Anyway. And conversely, when we listen to Chinese music, what is it? These intervals are strange? Yes, but of course, we don't hear them. We don't hear them because we're not used to hearing, for example, quarter-tones which the Asian ear delights in. For us, the smallest is a half-tone. It's a small interval, right? It's between two consecutive notes on the keyboard. And so, it's like muscles—when you don't use them, they atrophy.
Hölderlin, parataxis and "Muss es sein" 32:41 Since our ear is no longer used to going below a half-tone, violinists, yes, violinists, when they tune, you can hear a whole slide, a sound, a little glissando, an eighth of a tone, a quarter, an eighth. There you go. So, yes, Beethoven, Beethoven is sonata form, we're in full dialecticity. So it's not so foreign that he's of the same vintage as Beethoven and Hölderlin, right? Here, there's the beginning of a hymn by Hölderlin, untitled, like that, it's among the great late fragments, a little before the madness, which begins with this exclamation 'ways of the wanderer,' plural, 'ways of the wanderer,' exclamation point, 'for shade of the trees.'
33:31 You'll tell me, sorry, there's a verb missing, yes, that's right. Theodor Adorno, the most eminent figure, or in any case the most musically pertinent, of the so-called Frankfurt School, a neo-Kantian school which doesn't present only advantages, but which is at least very pertinent on this level, Adorno wrote an admirable essay on Hölderlin, on parataxis in Hölderlin, right? And he takes the opportunity to tackle Heidegger along the way, who has the nerve to say that when Hölderlin speaks, during his journey to Bordeaux, of the time of March, that is, of spring, of spring, in the South, for him it's the South for a German, right?
34:10 He discovers Greece, yes, for us Bordeaux, for us there's further south, but still, for a German, right, there are the vines, it's bookish for him, right? The Greeks, bread, art, wine, there are the vines, there are the fig trees, there is the softness of the air compared to the mist of the Rhine, there's all that. Now, he says, on a soil as soft as silk in the land of olive trees and delicious foreign parts, it's clear he's speaking of that region.
34:44 there where dark-haired women tread this soft soil. Heidegger has the nerve to claim it speaks of German women—there, he really tackles him. But anyway, it's not to talk to you about that, I mention it in passing just to show how far blindness can go. That's what parataxis is, it's sentences full of holes, a verb is missing, but we understand each other. Look at the contrast, ways of the wanderer, you see, suddenly, all at once, a clearing of the sun, horizons, perspectives, ways of the wanderer with an exclamation point, like a cry of enthusiasm, that's very Beethovenian.
35:23 And all at once, for shade of the trees, look at the contrast, for however great their courage, they, the ancients, needed, for the soul's sake, shade too, and coolness. This is drawn from a hymn called The Rhine, right? Sorry, The Ister, that is, the Greek name for the Danube. Excuse me. Like the late Hölderlin multiplies allusions to rivers, plural, I'm mixing things up a bit.
35:56 So there you have it, you'll hear this final movement which couldn't be more contrasted. And I want to tell you, and this time you'll hear it in the string quartet version. I want to tell you that this finale, at the start, somewhat picks up the slowness, in those very first bars, the slowness of the movement we just heard, but in a more dramatic way, seeming to raise question marks, and then suddenly, an explosion of freshness, lightness, a spring breeze, all centered around three notes, one of which seems a question and the other the answer.
36:42 I'm making the rhythm, and varying it endlessly. At the level of intervals. Now, Beethoven wrote on the score 'Muss es sein, es muss sein.' You see, it's rare, I don't know, to write words on a score, not just notes, right? 'Muss es sein,' that's interrogative. 'Must it be?' Answer, 'Es muss sein,' it must be. And when Beethoven, a difficult character, you know, you know the image with his hair, says 'Es muss sein,' it must be, people have made metaphysical glosses about it, saying it means Beethoven bringing order, form, into chaos, why not?
37:22 That fits rather well, after all, with a large part of his work. But no, no, it's more wonderful than that. This is Beethoven's very last piece, this opus. It was the cleaning lady who had left a little note. Should I do it? 'Muss es sein,' I don't know, the bed, the dust, the cleaning, the dishes. And Beethoven had written 'Muss es sein, es muss sein.' And there, it ends on a burst of laughter.
The supreme ethical opposition as the middle term 37:52 The Titan's work. There, I'm saying this for the introductory video and the closing credits. Now I would like, I would wish—I don't dare say I want, given everything Pierre-Alain gives us, gives me in particular, and therefore gives you—I would like him to pass me the outline that I'm going to send and which I'd like us to come back to for a moment, right?
38:30 Afterward, we'll move on to resuming our reading of the texts. But there is, for the outline, I used—I didn't tire myself out. I took the table of contents, right, of my little volume from Éditions Delga, because the headings of this table of contents correspond to the great divisions of the work. There's the introduction, which we've been wrestling with since—that's more than four sessions now, right? Then there is, as the first major part after the introduction, the supreme ethical opposition, which we shouldn't delay too long in getting into, since we practically finished the introduction last time, in which I speak a great deal about Antigone, and this time in detail, that is, by carefully reading the passages where Hegel gives his analysis of tragedy and of the stakes it represents, of the conflict between family and city, between the bond of blood and the political bond, of citizenship—I won't go back over it, we'll come back to it in time, and, you see,
39:41 the first part, the supreme ethical opposition, is what we're going to call, throughout our reading, the middle term. The middle term between what? Between aesthetics and politics, between our two extremes, between—remember our problem of hierarchy—between the young Hegel, who places art above everything, including, this isn't political, and the Hegel of Berlin, who places not politics above everything, but at any rate the relation to the other, yes, right?
40:14 Because after all, even the enjoyment of works of art is also a way, right, of forming what Kant would have called, right, an intelligible community. So, the supreme ethical opposition, the conflict between Antigone and Creon, and in the classical stages of dialectic, this constitutes precisely the moment of mediation, the middle moment.
Art brings man closer to his truth, then aestheticism 40:49 So, yes, I didn't start at the beginning, but at the middle. And from there, now I can distribute the beginning and the end, that is, the beginning, divine service, the glory of truth. That's a quotation from Hegel, I don't allow myself to make pompous phrases like that, but in fact it's precise. That is, there's a link between art and the religious sphere, divine service, and this goes far beyond Christianity, divine service in the glory of truth.
41:19 That means there's a whole part of the history of art—alright, now I'm really getting into the content. A whole part of the history of art during which art never ceases to bring man closer to his truth. And in this sense, it fulfills a divine service, divine in the sense that truth, which is common to all men, right, is something that binds us together, and that's the etymological sense of religion, without going looking for metaphysics, the immortality of the soul, all that is almost secondary compared to the historico-anthropological function that religion has always had.
42:09 And art never ceases, the evolution of art never ceases to bring man closer to his truth. And then, at the moment, right, when he is very close to it—this truth carries so many threats, it collapses so many certainties, you remember the pairing of certainty and truth, absolute knowledge is access to a truth that collapses my previous, prior certainties.
42:43 So, it reaches a threshold where truth is so close and so frightening, right, that it gets repressed. And at that moment, aesthetics becomes aestheticism and art becomes an artistic pretension that turns into stubbornness. I'm making a very common pun in Hegel between 'eigen,' one's own, proper sense, right, and stubbornness, 'Eigensinn,' right, in German.
The plan of the Aesthetics: from architecture to poetry 43:14 So, it will be much clearer if I take the opportunity to reveal another outline to you. This one is the outline of my little booklet. But the outline, the vast outline that Hegel proposes in the numerous volumes, four in the French version, right, of his aesthetics, of his lectures on aesthetics.
43:44 I remind you that this wasn't written directly in his own hand, but that these are notes taken by his students, validated by him, of course—he was a very scrupulous student, the students were. And before moving on to this second outline, that of the lectures on aesthetics, allow me to comment on what seems a bit odder, from the statue to comedy, or from Goethe to Solger. Who are all these people? We'll try to see. Toward the end, I'm telling you in advance, because when we get there, there will be so many details to take into account that we risk getting confused.
44:21 That's why I prefer, not that we waste time, but that we spend time absorbing the vision of the forest as a whole before getting lost in the branches and in the trees, in the trees, in the branches and in the leaves. Toward the end, the last stage of art, the last stage, seen from Hegel's side, that is, leading up to his own time, which is that of the explosion of Romanticism, which, I remind you, is the expression of modernity, the first and most notable expression of the modernity I was telling you about earlier.
45:03 That's why one mustn't confuse modernity and the avant-gardes. Well, the avant-gardes had as their fundamental principle to oppose, to try to leave Romanticism behind, to take the opposite stance. I don't want to point out here, well, I don't want to point out—it's a case of preterition since I'm doing it as I speak—that just as the modern person hates modernity and prefers Baroque music, right, or Tchaikovsky, because, I don't know, because it's bad taste, it's good taste.
45:38 There are a lot of people who like that, so already, that's one of Adorno's flaws. When a piece of music is already too popular, for him, that's a bad sign. Precisely, Romanticism as the first expression of modernity, when it arrives at Hegel's time, it's strange—this is a hypothesis I'm proposing, I haven't picked it up elsewhere, so each time, for honesty's sake, I warn you.
46:12 When it's something that comes from me, you should still check it, right, I don't have the authority some people have, after all. Namely, that the stages Hegel assigns to the evolution of the artwork, whose outline I'll now give you, which goes from architecture to poetry, passing through sculpture and painting and music—architecture, sculpture, painting, up to that point, we're in the plastic arts, in the arts of space, in the arts that unfold in space, whether a three-dimensional space, architecture, sculpture, or a two-dimensional space, I don't know, when it's a photo—excuse me, it's the cover of L'Avant-Scène, which reproduces a very beautiful painting by Fragonard, right?
47:04 So, from the eighteenth century, I still have that silk dress in my eye, I think it's the painter dazzling me here, if I may say so. So, these stages, the plastic arts, architecture, sculpture, painting—I'll come back to what distinguishes them from each other too—but anyway, they have in common that they're always in space. Then, right, beyond painting, with music, all spatial dimensions disappear, and instead, the temporal dimension reigns as mistress.
47:42 Which is also true for cinema, for example, which unites the two. Cinema, like opera in music, brings together the visual, hence space—you need a screen to receive what the projector sends into time, right? Or what is communicated by a beam, now it's digital, to our flat screens. And then there's sound, speech, text, drama, action, which belong to the order of time.
48:19 These are impure forms—not at all pejorative. There's an overlap between the plastic arts and the arts of language, dialogues, for example, in a film, or in an opera. Exchanges, duets, trios, quintets, sextets, whatever you like. What are we watching, then? The progression of the artwork, then, beyond music.
48:51 As for me, I'd happily stop there, music above everything, you know me. And that romantically was their view too. Hegel, however, goes beyond. He goes beyond, right? To reach poetry—it's a complicated matter. I'll dwell on it in more detail, but here I'm just giving the outline, so I'll go quickly. It's not entirely contradictory with music, because you're going to reign over seas laden with sodium chloride.
49:28 That's not the same as sovereign of the seas that must bear you. In both cases, I'm not dealing with music apparently, though in the first phrase I give a meaning, it's the same meaning in the second. You shall reign over seas, yes, sovereign, that is, ruling over—sovereign of the seas that must bear you. Racine, in Mithridate. Except that here, suddenly there's particular care given to sonorities, to meter, to prosody, to music.
50:04 So when I say that for Hegel, the last stage, the summit of art, is not music but poetry, this is not a way of leaving—it's perhaps a way of leaving purely instrumental poetry, what is rightly or wrongly called, that's another debate, pure music. Right? In the sense that opera, as I said, is impure, for example. We see interesting problems here. I'll leave it open, I won't settle any of it. But I did want to point out that what makes a text pass from prose to poetry, everything that's not prose is verse, as they say, that's the gentleman's word, right?
50:49 It's when to the elements of language—and this is its own kind of language, and that's why Hegel doesn't want to remain only in the musical night, he wants there to be the daylight of the concept, of words—sovereign of the seas that must bear you. There are, after all, things we also see, things we hear, it evokes realities and representations, etc.
51:20 So here we grasp both the common point, what makes us pass from prose to poetry—it's not an added element of meaning, it's the same meaning. Once again, you're going to rule over oceans laden with sodium chloride, sovereign of the seas that must bear you, it's the same thing, it's the same meaning. But for that, aesthetically, no difference.
51:50 What's the difference then? It's the joining of a musical and temporal dimension, because until then there were only concepts. Sea, ocean, salt water, and everything that can be deduced from that afterward. Now, we arrive then at his own era. In poetry, now I'll start dividing a bit, there's lyric poetry, at the summit of everything, for Hegel; there's dramatic poetry, if you prefer, theater.
52:23 I do say dramatic and not tragic. Molière is an immense dramatic author, right? Even if we laugh a lot. Don't confuse dramatic—it means there's action. There's action. There's action, and even, you know, something terrible in Molière, watch out. Things could turn out very badly if there weren't, by miracle, like that, a few recognitions and a few artifices that make everything suddenly end well. Right? But look at things like The Misanthrope or The Learned Ladies, I mean, there's great tension, I'm not even talking about Tartuffe, right?
53:00 Or Don Juan. So there you have it, dramatic art, dramatic poetry, poetry, then, in the texts, which feed, are spoken by the characters in theatrical performances, if you prefer. And so we arrive at his own era. Now, here's what I propose next, I've made a somewhat technical little detour, now I'll get to it, so I ask you to verify it.
Goethe, Schiller: the history of art replayed in one generation 53:33 These stages curiously correspond to the stages of its generation. That is to say, if we now take up again the statue, then painting, that is to say German idealism, a formula slightly more extensive than German romanticism—it contains philosophers as well as poets. German idealism begins with great figures who bring Germany into the European literary concert, in the vast...
54:09 Goethe and Schiller, isn't that so? We are here in the... They mostly belong to the last third of the eighteenth century, even though Goethe in particular lived a long life. Schiller died young. Goethe zu Gendisch auf Jüngling. "Educate yourself, young man," he wrote. The last, at the time of his madness, on a piece of paper, isn't that so? It said "Schiller" in large letters as a title, and the only statement was that: educate yourself, young man.
54:44 I remind you that Schiller was named honorary citizen by the very young government of the Convention during the French Revolution, because of the eminent place he gave to liberty in his work. "The necessity of shaking off the yoke of tyrants." Yes, so, it begins with Goethe. Precisely, it begins with the plastic. We take up the same order again, but this time over one generation and not over twenty centuries.
55:18 That's my proposal. I find the parallel troubling, isn't that so? As if Hegel, in his articulation of the history of art, was influenced, more or less unbeknownst to him, by what was happening in his historical present. Goethe goes so far as to say, in several statements, that his entire literary work—for which he was a veritable living god in Germany—one must also see the importance, not political in the narrow sense, but the profound importance.
55:56 When, in every country where this has happened, there is thus an author who suddenly endows his people with a national written poetry, a national literature. There you go, it happens like that. You see, people wrote in Spain before Cervantes, but one had to wait for Cervantes for masterpieces to suddenly appear that could hold their own against the summit of the other old literary nations, isn't that so?
56:27 It's Goethe's Faust, it's Shakespeare's tragedies for England, it's of course the work of Cervantes, in particular Don Quixote, for Spain, it's the Divine Comedy, Dante's work, for Italy, there you go. I have the impression of stating the obvious. But that's exactly where we're getting to. So, he had great popularity. So much so that he went as far as saying, "Bah, my whole career as a writer has been a way of compensating myself for my failed career as a painter—he would have liked to be a painter."
57:02 I'm telling you, Goethe's investment in the plastic arts is well known to all who study his work. If you go visit—a city I recommend to you—Weimar, little Weimar, small, it's not a great megalopolis, it's not Berlin, it's not Frankfurt, it's not Munich, it's not... No, no. But strolling through... It wasn't too destroyed during the war, not too much. And in Weimar, you go from Schiller's house to Goethe's house.
57:37 You'll already see the contrast, moreover. Goethe's house is almost like the Louvre. It's a museum with an unbelievable quantity of statues, imitations, copies, Greek and Italian statues—in short. On one hand, that's for cultural plastic art, but also natural forms. It's the same thing—collecting fossils, isn't that so, animal skeletons, there you go, passionate about... about...
58:08 everything that can offer itself, isn't that so, to visual gluttony. And one of these characters in Faust, a very minor character, since he's the one who keeps watch in a little tower in a castle, begins a famous tirade with Zum Sehen geboren, "born to see." I don't know if the jellyfish, isn't that so, has other things, has antennae, gadgets, perceptions—all animals are sensitive to plants that we call sensitive plants, or to touch, they retract, isn't that so.
58:51 But to see the splendors of autumn unfold before oneself, through... Zum Sehen geboren—so there, we take up the progression again, isn't that so, and then, by contrast, we move to the temporal arts, Schiller, who is well known rather for his hymns, and you see, when I say hymns, you almost feel the song rising in your throat—we move from the plastic arts to music all at once, and it's no accident that it's a text by Schiller and not Goethe that was chosen by Beethoven for the prodigious finale reconciling all tensions, to close his last symphony, isn't that so?
59:37 The text written by Schiller as a hymn to joy, the Freude. Hegel dialecticizes the two, the statue and the hymn. The statue, he says, is too immobile in relation to reality, to spirit; it expresses less the truth of what we are because there isn't enough temporality in it.
1:00:11 Careful, he's not a fool. I think, like him, that it's a thousand times better to have a beautiful, well-made statue, isn't that so, than a failed hymn. But there you have it, if you will, the element for which sculpture is less suited, even though it's ideal for other determinations. On the other hand, it is dynamic. And the hymn, too, has its flaw: it follows the smallest convolutions of the soul, as everything musical does—which is very good.
1:00:43 But on the other hand, it is too evanescent, precisely, it is too much in time—that's the other extreme. And there will be a synthesis; look at the progression in the Olympiad. But yes, in the Olympiad, we find the human body again as in the statue, but a living body, and a body where the author is both the author and the work. Isn't that so? The athlete, isn't that so?
1:01:13 Produces his corporeality, here, in any case, the one that enables him to succeed in his feat, through training, through... And there are hymns by Hölderlin, so we arrive exactly at what is contemporary with Hegel, isn't that so? Allow me—we won't dwell on it, but I'll still read you the... So, well... Ah yes, the passage that corresponds to this parallel I'm daring to suggest to you, isn't that so?
1:01:49 So, let's try to find our way. There you go. You see. You see. No, sorry—so, for such an unexpected hypothesis I won't allow myself to give proof, this would just be—I give clues. The first of these clues, I read here starting from page 117 for those who have the little volume—the first of these clues appears in the disturbing impression of parallelism that arises in us as soon as we compare the respective moments of aesthetic religion—the stages in Greek art, the statue, the hymn, the Olympiad—as soon as we compare
Reading the book: statue, hymn and the chorus of an entire people 1:03:03 the respective moments of "aesthetic religion," in quotation marks, and of German romanticism, the world contemporary with Hegel. The first moment, that of the statue, in Hegel's analysis, corresponds precisely to what is called in Germany classicism, that of the gods of Weimar—if you go to Weimar, which I recommended you do, there is a statue of Goethe and Schiller with their arms around each other's shoulders, standing in front of the National Theatre, the first national theatre in German history. The first moment, that of the statue—it's the case to say it—corresponds precisely to what is called in Germany classicism, that of the gods of Weimar. Now Goethe is precisely the most plastic of the authors of this period, which unfolds between the early Sturm und Drang—the awakening of sensibility, somewhat as expressed with Rousseau in a work like the New Héloïse, which takes the opposite stance to reason, somewhat against the exchanges of the Enlightenment—which unfolds between the early Sturm und Drang and late romanticism. In this, Goethe is opposed to the moment that immediately follows him and that will place music well above all the arts. Let us cite here a musician quite interested in this problem
1:04:13 of the evolution of romanticism, Richard Wagner, who indeed declares regarding Goethe—I found this extract in Wagner's essay called Beethoven—"the conscious inclination toward plastic art was so strong that, during an important period of his life, he wanted absolutely to consider himself predestined to practice it, and that in a certain sense he was able to regard his entire poetic creation as a kind of expedient meant to compensate him for his failed career as a painter." I'm not making this up, but here—let me continue. Just as little as, in aesthetic religion, in the Greek city, was the artist's disquiet found in the serenity of the statue, just as little did romanticism hold to Goethean measure—the hostility of Novalis, the most emblematic representative of German romanticism—moreover, we leave the world of plastic arts, of space and of light, of what is seen in broad daylight or in Apollonian sunlight, since Novalis's best-known work, a masterpiece, is the Hymns to the Night—there we're in the nocturnal plunge of German romanticism, remember Isolde's death from last time
1:05:23 to sink, isn't that so, versinken, "to sink" in English, isn't that so, to sink, ertrinken, to drown myself, isn't that so, in universal voluptuousness, in the field of the world—that's the headlong rush of romantic madness, which wasn't the case with Goethe. A little anecdote—I told it a few years ago, but there are many newcomers, and to thank them anyway I'm happy to tell it again because it's rather amusing but also profound, to show just how much Goethe's prudence—Rilke took a long time to belatedly understand Goethe's troubled greatness, because his Apollonian, classical, plastic side sometimes makes him seem a bit cold compared to the romantics, whereas it's a way of protecting himself, and with good reason, when you see the carnage suffered by another neo-romantic German victim, Bettina Brentano—you know, I like her, she went through German romanticism like a bacchante, she knew Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, and Hölderlin quite closely
1:06:34 in short, I'll skip the rest—and so she writes a letter to her mother. She's very young, not quite seventeen, eighteen years old, and she meets Goethe, who's already sixty, who is a god for all of Germany. You can imagine how impressed the girl is, and she recounts in her letter, she says, "I was so moved by him that I suddenly started sobbing." So he, good old Goethe, put his hand on my mouth saying, "Calm down, that's what we both need." I understand everything—there's the prudence, I'm sure you'd like it, but there's good reason. But here, just as little, in aesthetic religion, was the artist's disquiet found in the serenity of the statue; just as little did romanticism hold to Goethean measure—the hostility of Novalis, the Hymns to the Night, toward the author of Wilhelm Meister, in the letter illustrates rather well the limits of plasticity. That's why it falls to Schiller, therefore the second stage, to embody the next phase, that of the hymn—the hymn, as evanescent and fluid in the air
1:07:45 as the statue is immobile in its stone, in its mineral nature—and Schiller even writes this Ode to Joy, which, amplified by the Beethovenian chorus, becomes the hymn par excellence of the Frühromantik—we're not even at the Frühromantik yet, we're only at the very beginning of romanticism. But let's listen again to Wagner spell it out: "Both of them also met in their presentiment of the essence of music, but in Schiller this presentiment was accompanied by a deeper view than in Goethe"—which Goethe, in keeping with his whole tendency, grasped in it only that pleasant, plastically symmetrical element, like those who are content in baroque music to see that there's a repeating rhythm, like symmetrical columns—I think it's rather warm, but anyway, some people especially like that, whereas there's much more to baroque music—"pleasantly symmetrical of musical art, by which it happens that the art of sounds in turn manifests an analogical resemblance with architecture." Now let me pick up again to say: let's slip in, as an aside, this remark of Hegel's
1:08:55 drawn from volume 1—that makes a lot of converging clues—from volume 1 of his Aesthetics, where he says this: Hegel—it's as if it were a continuation of what Wagner says, though Hegel would not have appreciated Wagner's chattering at all—"but while Schiller plunged into the exploration of the intimate depths of the spirit, Goethe's tendencies carried him toward the study of the natural side of art"—spirit and nature, the nature of the external world, of plant and animal organisms, of crystals—you know it well, frequently found in Goethe—"so with Schiller it's a hymnic communion that German poetry expresses," and we sense at last—as soon as we say "hymn" we feel it coming—we sense at last the one who closes this ascending phase, at the upper limit of which we had left the consciousness of aesthetic religion, the one with whom we go from the hymn to the living work of art—quoting Hegel—or at least to the proclaimed imminence of this last one. For just as, in aesthetic religion, the fluidity of the hymn was too evanescent to be capable of giving presence
1:10:05 to political truth, this spiritual day of presence, to speak like Hegel—likewise this hymn of Schiller, of Hölderlin, demands to be sung here and now on national soil, no mistake about it, and I quote Hölderlin: "But what will come, what will come, will be something quite other than the song of a harp, than the song of a soloist, than mere lyricism—it will be the song, the chorus of an entire people, and the holy Father"—we always find the little theologian again, isn't that so, from his youth—"and the holy Father," meaning God himself, "would remain mute and solitary in his darkness"—you see the audacity—"and would be found nowhere among the living if the community did not know how to sing him with one single heart." If there is no chorus, no collectivity on earth to sing it, not much remains—it's sacrilege, indeed, that's what he says, make of it what you will. There's our parallel—I'll end my parallel there. Our parallel becomes here so manifest that it ends up
1:11:15 being posed by modern consciousness itself: the German poet Hölderlin knows that a new—alas—a new Greece is in the process of appearing on his soil, and he even states the reason for the difference that delays this appearance—what is it that makes Germany not a failed Greece? In his Hymn to the Germans he lets slip this cry where hope gives way to an admission of powerlessness. He addresses Germany and says: "But where is it, at Delos, where is it, at Olympia"—these are the gathering places of the Greeks, the League of Delos, all the rival Greek cities that made a truce in their conflicts to come to the Olympic Games at Olympia—"but where is it, at Delos, where is it, at Olympia, the call to unity so that we might all meet there at the supreme feast?" There, that was to say that we were speaking, but not entirely arbitrarily either. I maintain that it's a hypothesis, and that it would be interesting to draw it out further. So now I return to the text I announced to you, in what was published on Facebook, that is, the final pages that close the first great part
Antigone, an exception to the historicity of art 1:12:26 I hope I'm being clear—the final pages, I'd rather say the conclusion of the first part, which follows the introduction, that is, the part called "The Supreme Ethical Opposition," by which Hegel always designates, of course, the conflict between Antigone and Creon—and I won't go into detail this time, that will be for next time, I promise—but on the other hand, so that next time will be much clearer, we immediately see the outcome: the conflict between Antigone and Creon is not, I'm reading it straight through, is not only—still relevant in Hegel's own time, it is more relevant than ever—the historical content of this modern misfortune alone is capable of grounding this recurrent timelessness of the tragic conflict. There I have to stop and give a brief comment, isn't that so, on what I mean when I say "this recurrent timelessness of the tragic conflict"—I'm speaking of the conflict between Antigone and Creon, you see, I started with the first sentence
1:13:36 up above, the conflict between Antigone and Creon, not tragic conflict in general, even though it could apply to tragedy in general—but why particularly to Antigone's? Because Antigone, as I said very quickly in the introduction to all this, but here I have to dwell on it a bit more, is, on Hegel's part, the object of an incredible derogatory clause with respect to his aesthetics in general. What am I alluding to? Generally speaking, Hegel's aesthetics comes down—and this is a somewhat pre-Marxian side, to use cautious terms, let's say, but undeniably so—to the fact that he doesn't traffic in anachronism; he always relates the aesthetic expression of an era, isn't that so, to the historical content it expresses without being aware of it. It's not a matter of condemning art to illustrate, isn't that so, contents external to itself, and so
1:14:47 I mean there is no such thing as timelessness like that, there's no eternal beauty that mocks historical determinations, as it were. I still want to give you a concrete example before showing how the tragedy of Antigone is an exception to what I'm in the process of developing, and a derogation. I go back first to the general rule to illustrate it, isn't that so—let's take for example the figure of the Sphinx—there we're in sculpture, if you will, in the plastic arts—the Sphinx of Egypt, isn't that so, or the Sphinx of mythology that appears in the tragedy of Oedipus, isn't that so. You know that Oedipus, isn't that so, when he arrives in Thebes, doesn't want to go back home—he still doesn't know that they are adoptive parents, his own, isn't that so, who believe they are his parents—and so, as the oracle he went to consult at Delphi, like a good Greek, had told him that one day he would kill his father and marry his mother, he is so terrified by the prediction
1:15:57 that he doesn't even go home, so as not to give the prophecy the slightest chance of coming true, and he goes to Thebes, where his real parents are—well, his mother in any case, since his father he has killed, but he doesn't know it yet, isn't that so, because he blocked his way in a moment of irritation at the crossroads, at the sanctuary of Delphi, in scorching heat—one gets irritated quickly—and so Oedipus, when he arrives at Thebes, in order not to go back home, and about to discover this city, the entrance to Thebes is blocked by the figure of the Sphinx, a monster, the Sphinx, like in Egypt, which has both human and animal aspects in its morphology—let's leave the detail, it's well known, of course, you know it well—it's known above all for posing riddles, it's a real sphinx, that thing, meaning it's quite mysterious, isn't that so, the enigma—the traveler
1:17:07 isn't that so, is supposed to decipher, to solve a riddle; if he doesn't solve it, the Sphinx devours him, but if he solves it—which has never yet happened—it's the traveler who kills the Sphinx, who puts it out of harm's way. Most of you know the rest, isn't that so—the riddle the Sphinx poses to Oedipus is: what animal walks on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening? And Oedipus answers: it's man—man who walks on four legs like the baby we all once were, in the morning of his life, who walks on his two legs when he's grown, and who helps himself with a stick or a cane, three legs, in the evening when he's old. And that's how the Sphinx stops terrorizing the entrance to Thebes, and the people of Thebes are so happy to be rid of it that they crown Oedipus king of Thebes, Oedipus Rex, and fate is fulfilled because, having earned it in the mind of the Theban people, out of gratitude, he marries Laius's widow, his father's widow—where we must get to
1:18:20 in relation to what we were just saying, before, to bring historicity—not historicism, historicity—into aesthetic expression: there was a sphinx in Egypt, and Hegel goes so far as to say that one must stop making anachronisms. There are those who claim that extraterrestrials came to build the pyramids—it's a commonplace, it's so, so pathetic compared to reality, it's much more moving to see that, despite very limited technical means, people managed to do such astounding things—even beyond the Egyptians, prehistoric men transported enormous blocks, you know, of dolmens, of menhirs, on wooden rollers, they put water, mud, so that things would slide, would be a little easier to transport—it's so much more moving to see human resourcefulness and intelligence, isn't that so, than to do it like "Open Sesame" with a laser sword. So, Hegel goes so far as to say
1:19:31 that the Sphinx was an enigma even for the Egyptians—one mustn't think that the Egyptians had the solution to the riddle. Now what Hegel points out to us is that the answer to the riddle of the ancient Sphinx is man—it's Greek humanism beginning, isn't that so, an emancipation of man in relation to—implicitly—in relation to god, because it's the divine that is—I won't say terrifying, but that crushes the creature in the Egyptian world, isn't that so, if only because Pharaoh himself is a living god, don't forget. There you go, this isn't at all about aesthetic value, isn't that so—Egyptian art is unequaled, for example, for its sense of mystery, for example—I'm isolating one determination, isn't that so, I'm not dragging all the others along with it—but there you have it, there's historical progress between an entire society dominated by a—
1:20:46 and that's still not it—there are slaves in Athens—but there's a community of men who have the same rights among themselves, and in disputes they can only be settled by speech, in parliament, where one speaks, where one needs philosophy, the sophists in front of the public like that, where one has to speak to convince before the vote, there you go, on the agora and on the Pnyx. There's an example showing that works of art cannot appear with all their proper determination just anywhere, anytime, in history or in the world—there are reasons why they appear here and not there. For example, there's an exception: it's the tragedy of Antigone, because Hegel spends his time saying that it's a tragedy valid across all arts and all times. What's fascinating is that Marx—it's rather rare for Marx to speak of aesthetics—well, the rare moment when he does speak of it is to say the same thing. He says: why are the creations
Why Antigone holds for all times 1:22:01 of Greek mythology, why Greek art in general, whether its literature or its sculpture, why do we feel concerned by it, even though it belongs to a mode of production long since gone—namely, what there is moreover in the whole—why does it still concern us? It's this dérogation that I'm going to try to answer during this first major part, called "The Supreme Ethical Opposition"—I take this formula from a passage in the Principles of the Philosophy of Right, where the old Hegel, since it's his political testament, says precisely that in the tragedy of Antigone, the conflict between the public and the private, the family, the state—sorry, the city and the family—is the supreme ethical opposition and therefore the most highly tragic. And he says, in the Aesthetics
1:23:11 moreover—it's the same period, Hegel of Berlin—"of all the masterpieces of antiquity and of the modern world"—I've already quoted this to you—"I know them all, if each person can and must know them, Antigone seems to me the most perfect, the most satisfying; in it, femininity and virility are embodied," and it's a work valid across all times. Why this dérogation, as if there were something extra-historical, so rare in Hegel, isn't that so? So I'll tell you right away, since I told you I wouldn't go into detail this time but next time, what I've found, at the end of my research, seems to be an answer to this question: it's the fact that Hegel develops the idea that the family is, by instinct, by essence, the interest of a restricted community—implicitly, one that can come at the expense of others. The family first—not to condemn it, especially among Corsicans, believe me, but simply
1:24:21 to remind us that there are ties of proximity quite different from the solidarity that leads certain people to make donations when there have been floods in another region, far from their family, in a more collective way, if you will—so the family, a restricted collectivity, a small radius of action, a small space, I mean in any case in the number of people concerned, compared to the political, historical, civil collectivity, civil society. And that's where I'm going to ask Pierre-Alain, this time, to display another text, I'll come back to this one afterward, which will show—there, you see—an extract, again, from the Phenomenology; he says more about aesthetics in the Phenomenology—well, certain things are more developed in the Phenomenology, particularly in the chapter on aesthetic religion, than sometimes in the Lectures on Aesthetics. Here it's a question
The ethical world: war and death, absolute master 1:25:31 of volume 2, an extract called "The Ethical World," which I've already told you concerns the ancient Greek city, the community—you remember what the family is opposed to, isn't that so, the community that Creon directs, the community of Thebes for example, the city of Thebes. The community can therefore, on the one hand, organize itself—can, not must, it can, it has the state's permission, the city's, the government's, to organize itself—"in systems of personal independence and property"—there, an economic notion begins to appear, you'll see we're not far from the result I'd like to reach with you—"of property, of personal right and of real right" likewise, so still the same idea, can, always can, not must, articulate themselves, on the other hand, and become independent "in their own associations, modes of labor for ends that are, in the first instance, singular"—for particular ends, not a universal end, it's not working for the fatherland or the nation—the potter makes pots, the fisherman mends his nets, the warrior
1:26:41 trains at the gymnasium, works his muscles, I don't know what, the poet works on Pindar's odes—Pindar links the odes together, isn't that so—so there you go, although this is the world of unification, it's not always in opposition to the private; the public makes it possible—can—for the particular to enrich itself in every sense, independently, "modes of labor for ends that are, in the first instance, singular"—make a profit, colon—and there are the ends, those of acquisition and of enjoyment. So the family is nonetheless linked to an economy that today we would call liberal, in any case to an aim of property, of private appropriation—
1:27:51 privative—that's on the side of the particulars, of what he calls the singulars. But implicitly, the spirit of universal association—now we're at the opposite of the particular—"the spirit of the government of the city is however the simplicity and negative essence of these systems in the process of isolating themselves." You see there's a tension there between the dispersion—between systems that tend to isolate themselves and forget collective solidarity—and, on the contrary, an exaggeration of abstract authority. You see, here, when there is an inverse exaggeration, that of the private forgetting, isn't that so, the universal in its own, in its own singular aims—what happens?
1:28:40 you have the answer, and it's striking: "in order not to let them take root and harden in this isolation"—so, in order not to let the whole, the city, disintegrate and the spirit evaporate—we clearly see what "spirit" means here, isn't that so, it's a historical acquisition—"the government must," it's no longer enough from time to time "to shake them"—the private individuals, the particulars who are somewhat in the delights of Capua, as they say in Rome—"to shake them in their intimacy through war"—don't make me say what I haven't said, don't make me say things about Hegel that he didn't say—there he's analyzing the moment of the Greek city; the war with the Persians, it wasn't the Greeks who chose it, they didn't decide to make war because they were bellicose, isn't that so?
1:29:24 they were already fighting enough among themselves—no, no, but there, all the cities united, even Sparta and Athens, isn't that so, who fought each other so much, united against the Persians—think of Leonidas at Thermopylae, isn't that so, the Spartan. So the government must, from time to time, shake them in their intimacy through war, must disturb their order that has become habitual, violate their right to independence, just as individuals do, there I'll need the rest, who, sinking into this order—implicitly, into enjoyment, and today we'd say into consumption—detach themselves from the whole and aspire to an inviolable being-for-self, and, excuse me, I'll say it, I'm mockingly alluding here to libertarians, you know, those who wait for the tax man with a rifle at the entrance to their ranch, isn't that so?
1:30:24 and yet in the United States taxes aren't very high, isn't that so—"who, sinking into this order, detach themselves from the whole and aspire to an inviolable being-for-self and to the security of the person, the government must, in this imposed labor"—and there we see the depth of Hegel—"make them feel their master," and it's a reminder, a reminder of why we are together—it's not just to hunt the mammoth better, it's not merely utilitarian, we have a profound purpose that is the very essence of human association, quite different from all animal societies—death, I should note, moreover, regarding this astonishing text, that good Hyppolite—good in every sense, a very fine translator, but also a man of great kindness for those who attended his lectures, as I had the chance to do a few times, not often enough because it was rather toward the end of his career, as happens to us—we would go from time to time, it wasn't part of my own curriculum, of my own exams, but still it was so marvelous—so here, Hyppolite adds a small note to this text.
The family, civil society and the machine 1:31:34 Isn't it about the role of death, the absolute master—we'll see a bit further on regarding the meaning of terror in the French Revolution, Hegel will take up the same idea: the death to which the community exposes an individual is thus the meeting point of the two laws, since divine law has as its essence the cult of the dead. There, I recall that in passing, and now I come back to the text—sorry, I'm asking Pierre-Alain to go back and forth—I come back to the four pages that unfold from 72 to 76 of my little book, and we'll close on that. Now that you know there is contamination—not of Antigone's person, but insofar as she defends the family—we mustn't forget, and this is a point granted to Creon: just as Creon is wrong to go beyond the prerogatives
1:32:45 of the city, instead of quietly letting families and their sacred rites tend to their own domain, which is that of the care owed to deceased parents, to dead parents—in any case, I mean, if not Antigone herself, then at least the family she defends, the solidarity of proximity—we also must not let the particular, which is her horizon, come to compromise centuries, sometimes even millennia, of collective destiny. There is a whole dialectic here, a cursor to be found, and that's what I'm going to develop in the following lines that we're reading, insofar as, at the threshold of its absolute spiritualization, the last danger threatening spirit is engulfment in natural being-there. You see the individuals who, sinking into the daily grind, into consumption, are engulfed in a natural being-there—the opposite of what Hegel calls the spirit of history—it becomes manifest
1:33:55 that for him, Hegel, who from the time of Jena had already been able to discern the actual place where such an engulfment occurs, the supreme imperative is of a political order. What, at the time of the decline of the ethical order, was still limited in the Greek era to a few systems in the process of isolating themselves—which is what I've just read to you—has become, with the limitless power of the machine, a wild beast. What are we witnessing? There's the answer to the question: why this exception, Antigone?
1:34:26 Why does it hold true for all times? What is timeless about it? What is still relevant to us today in the tragedy of Antigone? I recall the questions, and now I continue moving forward in the answer. It's that if the family stands to the city as the private stands to the public, all the families, the juxtaposition of families, form what we today call civil society—an intermediate status with all the ambiguity there is in everything that is in the middle, which is colored a bit by both extremes; you never know quite where you stand—between the family properly speaking and the state, the two extremes, and the impersonal collective, what Rousseau will call the general will in The Social Contract. Between these two extremes there is civil society. If you have trouble seeing what it consists of, take it at its first stammerings: take two hunters from the Amazon forest, two Indians, two young men leaving the village
1:35:36 moving away from the village, that is from the city, from the collective, because you do need to go now and then to renew supplies, right? Moving off a little and finding themselves in the forest—it's not the state, and it's not the family either. They're a bit freer there, there, there, you see, the two of them—they can share confidences, things they should never say in public. Civil society is a bit like the place where anything goes, isn't it?
1:36:10 It's the street, it's the school of the street. So this civil society, that is, the society which capitalism would like to be the sole horizon of any society, with no state to crown it—of course capitalism loves there to be a state apparatus, even a repressive one, but a state apparatus is not the general will, it's the will of a few imposing itself on all, thanks to an apparatus that it makes us believe is the state, that it's collective. That's interesting, what we see there. Now, with the machine—that is, with what appears in Hegel's time—civil society's power to engulf itself in natural being-there has taken on a force that did not exist at all at the time of the Greek city. And here I'm obliged to remind those to whom I haven't yet read a text I had dwelt on in other circumstances—the famous text that Hegel wrote a little before the Phenomenology, in Jena
Jena: money, an existing material concept 1:37:20 a few years before, and which is called the first Philosophy of Spirit, written in Jena in 1803, four years before he finished the Phenomenology. And after a very Marxian passage on the appearance of machines, on the misery they can generate—he even takes the example of a pin factory, you'd think it resonates in harmony with the forty pages of Capital—he says this: these various labors, speaking of the industrial world, the English model of his time, these various labors aimed at the satisfaction of needs, taken as things—fetishism—must likewise realize their concept; their abstraction, their universal concept, must likewise be a thing like them, I'll tell you right away he's talking about money, about the fiduciary—money, it's underlined, is this material concept existing—money, existing material concept, an existing concept, not a concept in the head—the form of unity, or again the possibility
1:38:30 of all things of need—but the possibility, not the realization; there's a long way from the possible to the real—with a little acorn like that, you have a possible oak tree, but you don't take your nap in the shade of an acorn or such things, right, you can forget it. And need and labor, raised to this universality, thus form for themselves, in a great people—and that is the world we live in—an immense system of community and reciprocal dependence, a life that moves within itself, autonomous. This is civil society's economy, the economy of civil society—a life that moves within itself, autonomous, of a dead reality, a life which in its motion stirs in a blind, elemental way, and which, like a wild beast—and that's what inspired my title from Clouscard—and which, like a wild beast, needs continually to be, and here you see Hegel is no liberal, tamed and mastered with severity, the state
1:39:40 must control the excesses of civil society—what China does with certain people who had somewhat forgotten, in Chinese enterprise, who had somewhat forgotten that there's something else besides their own interests, the private interests of their company, in the People's Republic of China. There, I'd like to stop there this time, because I don't want to eat into your question time. You see how fascinating what we're about to get into is—yes, you didn't expect it—that a little taste sends us back to the economy of civil society, not it alone, not it by itself—the family, yes, the particular, the private, the clan. I need to look, I think Pierre-Alain must have received—ah, but I have a message from Guillaume, whom I greet in passing: Hegel thus raises to the summit spoken music, music that recovers the language and the words of the tribe—yes, bravo Guillaume, I fully subscribe
Philosopher, mathematician, poet; law as a bridge 1:40:51 to—I admit I'm particularly gratified. Don't think I'm pleased—well, not that I'm not pleased, but we're not here for me to be pleased—but I am gratified when I see several interventions on several different subjects that I've raised, and I see an audience gathering them up, seeing clearly the stakes at play, running through them. Yes, when I go on to try to develop, for beginners, the initiation into philosophy—that is, what I had put under the heading of the nature and origin of philosophy, we still have to start there—I had concluded this first approach to what is specific about philosophy: it's that somewhere it has a relation to language, the Socratic 'what do you call...'—we don't only question the sky, that we didn't wait for Socrates to do, right, the Hindus, the Chinese, the Egyptians, the ancients, and no doubt even the ancestors from before writing, from prehistory. No, what is new
1:42:01 from Socrates onward is that we question the words by which we transmit these things—what do you call courage, what do you call art, what do you call beauty, what do you call politics, justice. Now what relation is there to the question? The relation the philosopher shares with two other figures who also have a very different relation to language: the mathematician, who has a relation to language that is first negative, who sets aside everyday language because it's too imprecise, too ambivalent, too indeterminate, and who needs notions that are univocal and always mean exactly the same thing—not left to the café conversation, to each person's judgment and mood, to whatever suits the customer. And that's why, progressively, in the evolution of mathematics, algorithms end up replacing words: y equals f of x—those aren't words, they're signs lined up, but governed—it's very discursive, there's a syntax to all these signs, there are rules of algebraic calculation, but they aren't
1:43:12 words. They've been emptied precisely of everything that relates to our desires, of any presence within them of the subject that we are—that's what the positivists will never understand. There are still some stuck on Wittgenstein, on positivism or neopositivism, or the analytic school, whatever you want to call it—I prefer that to irrationalisms, right, and the monsters that rise from the night of confusionism. I have nothing against confusion, I'm full of it, I've already said so—but I hold it against confusionism, against deliberate confusion, against Nacht und Nebel, as a certain SS organization was called during the war, right, night and fog—so we're quite far from Novalis's Hymns to the Night. Still, one must be wary of apologizing for darkness. So mathematicians need nothing murky in what they say. At the other extreme
1:44:24 there is someone who has a relation to language like the philosopher, but unlike the mathematician, namely the poet. He keeps the words of everyday life, but not at all in the same order or the same function—it's not for practical reasons, like 'pass me the salt'—careful, there's a stop sign there—that's using words, and fine, for very utilitarian reasons, for external considerations. And that's why Mallarmé—and Guillaume alludes to it very well here, he's quite right—says the poet is the one who gives a purer sense to the words of the tribe. You find that formula in the Tomb of Edgar Poe—the tomb is a poetic genre, a text one might write on the gravestone of the one who lies beneath, fiercely resting before having ripened what lies beneath. Yes, Hegel raises to the summit spoken music, raises to the summit of the edifice of the arts—well I like how Guillaume phrases it, he doesn't say poetry, he uses a periphrasis
1:45:34 but one that captures exactly what it means—that's what I was trying to convey earlier, but he sums it up very well: spoken music, music that recovers the language and words of the tribe. Thank you Guillaume. Yes, in such a way that one can at once keep the advantage that Hegel sees in language over music—namely clarity, and avoid, as I just alluded to, the monsters that can arise from confusion—and at the same time the other extreme, that of music, that of sounds, on the somewhat nocturnal side, even if it designates nothing precise, but which in any case carries us, which is our first relation to the other, as I alluded earlier to the babbling of the Rhinemaidens, right, the song of the sea, the song of lullabies, right, and the song of the sirens which would have us believe that the sea is not dead, that it's not a dead fountain but still alive, and which sends us to throw ourselves into the arms of a specter—I'll leave that hanging, it's fascinating
1:46:44 Raoul, who is also a faithful among the faithful, whom I'm happy to greet this evening: legal matter should throw a bridge between the musicality of words and algorithms. But listen, here's something—here's a proposition that speaks to me. If I had to talk the way one often hears, I wasn't thinking of the legal domain at that moment—I think of it often, for major reasons, because the domain of law is a major domain. You know that the whole work of Plato ends with a dialogue called the Laws. The Social Contract expresses not a theory of law but the foundations, the principles from which a philosophy of law could flow, and there's the great Montesquieu, who inaugurates, along with Pierre Bayle no doubt, the admirable Age of Enlightenment—the one Michelet
1:47:54 in the 19th century called the great century—I mean, gentlemen, the 18th—and is known above all for his masterpiece The Spirit of the Laws. So I am very attentive to what Raoul proposes here. Yes, we often speak somewhat pejoratively of formal law, right, as opposed to law that has concrete content—well, you see how well this notion of form relates to music, right, and could even encompass mathematics, algorithms. Bravo Raoul, I'll keep the suggestion, we'll dig into that, and it could bring us back to the cycle we had tackled—and I greet Christophe in passing, he had helped us precisely explore it, make more than an interesting incursion, when we tried to throw a bridge between the human sciences and the hard sciences—well, between the sciences, are the so-called human sciences scientific?
1:48:58 I'm not very sure of it. In any case I do think Marx left us the wherewithal to elaborate sciences of history, but I'm not sure that, on the foundations he left us, what needed to be built afterward has been built—for now, in any case, there's still a lot of work to do. So thank you Raoul, to be continued. Yes, legal matter should throw a bridge between the musicality of words and algorithms—I'm also not forgetting the semantics of 'bridge' [passerelle], which brings us back here to Kant, who is a bit of a jurist of philosophy, if not of law. There, thank you Raoul, we have familiar faces this evening. In the absolute, there are no wrong notes in music, unlike in writing—ah, well, I agree, though we'd need to clarify what 'in the absolute' means here. I'm sure Car Cha has something precise in mind, we'd need to express precisely
Wrong notes in music, mistakes in writing, expression 1:50:08 this precision, but it's true that—look, if I play a piece by Bach like this, you see, for example—no wrong notes—ah, yes, I do make some, but I don't wonder—there's once, and then all of a sudden in the development he does this—ah, I made a mistake—ah no, no, that's not me, that's in the Bach—ah, he doesn't dwell on it because the first does this and the other is the horizontal logic
1:51:21 You see then—I don't know if it's clear, look, I'll slow down—already this isn't very consonant, but in a moment it's worse—it's not—that is, a major second, there's this here, there's actually no more than a half-step gap. You know that the closer the notes are, the more dissonant it is to play them together, right? I'll start again—there, Car Cha is right, that's not a wrong note there, because it's justified by the July—two leading tones, sensitive tones, that's the one separated by a half-step gap—one last time and I'll go on
1:52:31 There, it's apparently a wrong note, but when you look closely at the economy of the piece, it's perfectly justified by what comes before and after. There is a horizontal dimension to music that has been turned vertical—vertical is all the sounds resonating together at the same time, those written on the same vertical line on the score, but music is an art of time, so it's horizontal that makes the chords, the harmonies—look at all these notes together, there's one that seems dissonant, but that's more interesting; if I had Nutella every day—when there's too much consonance it's not very interesting either. Look, you see, it's a piece by Bill Evans, so bravo
1:54:04 but on the other hand, where I have a reservation is what follows. Unlike in writing—in writing there are also things that can seem like mistakes. Take Aragon, I can speak like him, I had the same reaction as him, but I'd rather let him speak, he speaks much better than I do. And Aragon said that when he first read Rimbaud's poem 'On the bare branch of the lime trees dies a sickly hallali... but spiritual songs flutter through all the gooseberries'—sorry—he meant to say 'among'—I had the same reaction as Aragon: he wanted to say 'among,' he made a mistake—no, no, no, a stroke of genius by Rimbaud, that's it, 'flutter through all the gooseberries,' that's like—and I'll give now the most famous writing 'mistake' of Rimbaud's, and perhaps one of the peaks of his genius, that's the famous 'I is another.' They'd rap your knuckles at school if you said 'I is,' you say 'I am,' 'he is,' but he has become
1:55:15 so foreign, the one I can no longer say 'I am,' that I never said 'was,' and that could never be, right—'I is another,' well before the psychologies of the depths and other psychoanalyses, the poet, right, had seen this profound truth: that inside us there is someone who is just as foreign, even sometimes hostile, right, to what my conscious part desires or wants, etc. And 'I is'—it's an apparent writing mistake, there, that's the one caveat I liked. Thank you very much for the music—perfectly true, but for—we can also extend these to writing, to expression in general, it's the extensive category, especially in matters of art and aesthetics—it's expression. Communication is one thing—pass me the salt, careful, there's a stop sign—we communicate, there are practical stakes, utilitarian ones if you like, but to bring out things that are hidden until then, to give them an existence so that it doesn't remain only interior, that's expression
1:56:25 to make what is inside—interior, unconscious, in—pass to what is outside, but not outside like the sun that I see, or, careful, stop sign there, or the lighthouse I see in the distance on the road—that's an exteriority I passively undergo. I'm talking about what is interior in me and that I expel, that I express—it's strong, the act of expressing. I express—you know the proper sense, you find it in expressions like 'expressing the juice of an orange,' making that juice which swells it inside come out. That's expression. Thank you very much Karcher, ah well, someone—I'd advise a thing
1:57:35 whatshisname, to get on YouTube and put on traditional Chinese music, because you never know, he might stumble on a soap opera or he might stumble on a subtitle or something like that, I'd say, depending on whether it's an import from who knows where, translated—well, we get nowhere—but let him put on Chinese theater, traditional Chinese theater, because often the musical accompaniment of traditional Chinese theater includes remarkable music. There, and there he'll see—not just quarter-tones but even eighth-tones, I guarantee it. He might even end up managing to spot them, I don't know, to see nuances and differences where at first one thought one heard only a single note, so it seemed monotonous, whereas the extreme-oriental music lover, equally, sees a diversity where we don't see it, because we're not trained—our auricular muscles, on the image, aren't attuned enough for that. There's the advice, since he's asking me for advice, the advice I give him is: you have the chance to have all the streaming services in the world to skim through
1:58:46 the worst or the most, so to speak—look for your music, plural, traditional Chinese, right, or Chinese opera, traditional Chinese opera, put both each time, because in Chinese opera nowadays there can be a trend producing masterpieces—careful, I'm not mixing in Western symphonic music. To illustrate his point properly, with quarter-tone Chinese music, it's better to refer to what for thousands of years was proper to authentic Chinese mode. There, thank you for that interesting question, whatshisname. I see Sébastien, I'm very glad, I felt a bit guilty toward him because he'd been asking me several times—he's one of those, you see, I wasn't naming names—who kept saying, 'so Musicosophie, when does it start again?' and every time I wanted to answer him I ran into new obstacles. Aymeric also had some on his side—there are the troubles of being a father
Berlioz, Xenakis and the spatiality of music 1:59:58 there are, on my side, the handicaps of old age, and then the holidays, then the lockdown, all that, so we had suspended it. I'm glad to be able to tell him now: that's it, it's back. And thank you very much for keeping the pressure on so we'd continue, that was a great encouragement. There, so his question—I hope the question won't be too long—it seems that for The Trojans, which is certainly Berlioz's masterpiece, that's probably true if you take each work on its own, but at equal scale, it's an opera, stage music, Berlioz had imagined distributing in space four mini-orchestras which, at the moment of the entry of the Trojan Horse, would take turns successively carrying the melody in order to give the listener the impression of physical movement. Doesn't the evolution, or one of the evolutions, of music up to our day consist
2:01:08 among other things, in an increasingly thorough taking into account of the spatial element in music? Well, I don't say no to his question, but on the other hand I don't want—Webern or Varèse, Xenakis, yes I'll say why afterward, but I don't especially see the spatiality of Webern or Varèse, who are extremely musical precisely, and very temporal, almost to the point of evanescence in Webern's case—Sébastien knows it well—he wrote several of the shortest pieces there are, in reaction to the giantism, right, that in the end afflicted the post-Wagnerian musics, the immense symphonies of Mahler, of Bruckner, Strauss's operas, etc., the very rich but gigantic orchestrations. Now Xenakis is trained as an architect—there's actually a discipline, or an art if you like, that partakes at once of architecture and music, it's the Architektonik—'Ton' in German meaning music, and 'tonic'—you see, ton, these are terms with a strong musical connotation
2:02:18 So there, and as for Xenakis, perhaps his work that is probably the most successful, the best known—I ask you to look it up—he's a contemporary musician, one could say post-serial, that is, later than the first Viennese school, you see, who took back liberties with respect to the rigor of serial, dodecaphonic discipline, etc.—we'll explain those notions another time, it's technical, and it'll come in due course. But Xenakis, who is one of the most important of the post-serial musicians, Greek of course—and I say of course because of his very name, even though he lived a long time in France—mathematician, architect, fond of aleatory, stochastic music if you like—Xenakis, his work, I was there, one absolutely must listen to this work, it's a masterpiece—one might quibble or nitpick about this or that piece, but one must listen to Metastasis, and the title answers
2:03:29 Sébastien—sorry, Sébastien—Metastasis, transformation, Metastasis, translation—there is exactly what he says about Berlioz's Trojans: there is a going-beyond in space. You'd think you were hearing, I don't know, the takeoff of a Boeing or the erection of a gigantic crane, and there you see glissandi—this makes me think of Car Cha's earlier question—that is, we see things that defy the discontinuity of half-tones or tones, glissandi, we all know what that means, you slide from one sound to another. You see, this corresponds in painting to what are called chromatic studies, gradations of blue moving imperceptibly from the lightest to the darkest, or the reverse—you see, there's a sonic equivalent. So I'll go on with his sentence nonetheless: the spatial element of music, and thus to revisit—not refute or reject, but revisit, that's always an excellent idea—the association which tends to become
2:04:39 exclusive between music and time. Well, I too reject the word 'exclusive,' it shouldn't be exclusive. Time is the element of music in the sense that water is the element of fish—in that sense, not in the atomistic sense, but in the sense that all music unfolds first of all in time. That doesn't mean a piece of music can't express the spatial—there are chords that suddenly make you think of, say, a steeple suddenly detaching itself from the rooftops and rising toward the sky, why not, of course many musicians know very well how to do that, there's no incompatibility at all. Only, even spatiality, to express it, music does so through sounds, and any sound whatsoever needs, even if it's a billionth—it's imperceptible, so a fortiori when it's more—for us to be able to perceive it, the shortest interval of time
2:05:49 that we can hear with the ear, however short it may be, is still far greater than a billionth of a second. So in any case, all music unfolds, all sound generally unfolds, in time—perceiving a sound already means being in time, a sound must last a minimum in order to be a sound. There, whereas all the parts of a painting are coextensive—which doesn't stop the eye from going left to right across the painting and taking its time doing so, but that concerns the viewer, it doesn't concern the work—whereas the work, the sound made by the violinist, the cellist, or the guitarist, right, resonates in time. There, well, I'm bowled over by the relevance of your questions. I don't know if I understand Raoul's question, he has another question—'existed which is not this idea'—I wonder if a word is missing, I don't know
2:06:59 I'm trying to see, there's a 2 after, I'm coming, I'm having trouble seeing, let's see, there, I'll go look for my mouse which I'd lost—'existed which is not this idea,' I don't know if I understand the question, it would need to be phrased differently, maybe it's because my brain is tired with age, which I never rule out—'existed which is not this idea,' it's the 'which' that necessarily refers to someone, right, whereas 'idea' is more general than 'someone,' so more abstract. There, I'm a bit perplexed, so I'm not dismissing the question at all, not at all, I'm not saying it isn't interesting, but I'm not sure I understand it, so I wouldn't want to distort it by answering a different question that I've misunderstood. That's kind, well, listen, I don't know if it's better to be half-alone than half-there, but
2:08:10 thank you anyway. Well, I'm going to say to Pierre-Alain—I'll allow myself an indiscretion behind Pierre-Alain's back—but Pierre-Alain is in the process of moving, the lucky one, to Italy, right, and I know he has all the little hassles—it's a joy to move to Italy, and I wish him a glorious continuation of his activities there, but I wouldn't want to take up too much of his time at a moment when he has all the problems of settling in. There, in any case I'm very happy with your questions, you see we've opened doors that lead onto paths we only ask to continue exploring, I hope so anyway, that's certainly my intention. Next time, I'll meet you in two weeks for the continuation, but before that we'll meet again, as you know, in short formats, if only for question-answering sessions. Very good night, very good evening, and thank you again
2:09:20 for your questions, and don't forget the quartet version of Beethoven, isn't that so...
