English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Excerpt from Antigone and the situation of the three friends at the Stift 0:00 You dared to break my decree? Because it was yours, that of a mortal! A mortal can break it, and I am simply a bit more mortal than you. To die before my time, which I think is going to happen to me, I say that I will gain from it. For those who, like me, live an unhappy life, is death not of some profit? What's more?
0:30 What torment I would have felt if I had left my brother without burial? Now I await what will be done with me. But nothing torments me. The gods do not want to see the mangled body left uncovered by the earth. But if it seems to you that I have lost the sense to fear their anger rather than yours, then let a fool now be my judge! The hardness of the hardest iron disappears in the heat of the furnace.
1:04 You see that every day, but she, she takes pleasure in disturbing the established laws. And it is to be insolent twice over to do what she has done, and then, having done it, to boast of it, to laugh about it. To be caught doing wrong, and to say one has done something admirable, that is what I detest! And yet, she who is of my blood and who has offended me, I, who am of her blood, do not wish to condemn her thus.
1:43 I ask you a question. What you did in secret, having become public, would you agree to say it? You would then avoid a severe punishment, should you regret it. So tell me why you persist. Let's say, as an example.
2:23 Good evening everyone. Good evening friends, good evening comrades. We finally get back to our serial, delayed by a week. Our reading of femininity and community, the relation of aesthetics and politics within the Hegelian system. And I've said often enough, and I'll say it again, that the figure of Antigone is the diagonal that structures my little book, not in order to better convey my thinking, but because this diagonal runs through practically the whole of Hegel's life as an author.
3:13 today, we're going to properly enter into the conflict of Antigone, and not just for this or that passage, to illustrate some general problem, but into what constitutes, in a way, the heart of what Hegel does not hesitate to call the supreme ethical opposition — moral, in certain translations. I'll come back for a moment to this distinction, which is not entirely innocent.
3:49 The correct translation being 'ethical' here — well, we do need to agree on the words, all the same. Yes, it runs through the whole of Hegel's work, I recall. You'll tell me I've already said this several times, but I'm glad to see there are more and more newcomers on the boat where, I was about to say, where I'm taking you along, isn't that right?
4:21 But the connotations of the term are a bit strange, so I prefer to say in our little studious community. I recall the main stages. He translated it as early as age 15, when he was at the lycée in Stuttgart. He never stopped discussing it — I would have liked to be a little mouse — in the famous garret, wouldn't you know.
4:58 Which brought together the three friends, right? Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin. Sometimes at one's place, sometimes at another's. At the Stift, that is, the faculty of theology at Tübingen, which trained future pastors. I also recall, too bad for those who've already heard it, and besides it can serve as a refresher, that these young men, from a purely socio-professional point of view, as we'd say today, these young intellectuals, had this privileged outlet of the pastorate, or private tutoring.
5:48 It was a matter of escaping a poverty we can no longer even imagine today. They weren't in it — it wasn't the most unfortunate part, socially speaking, of the population of the time, far from it, when you see the rural poverty. Don't forget that as long as there's no industrial revolution, as long as agriculture is the main resource, France is by far the richest country, from that point of view, from the point of view of agrarian production.
6:18 And I'm not talking about financial wealth — Germany is relatively very poor. I'm talking about the populations. So the main authors, the Romantics too, are surrounded by... well, their biographies are punctuated by brothers and sisters who committed suicide because of poverty or who died young.
6:48 Well, you lose count of them. So, to escape this rural, in fact peasant, proximity, which is never very far off, in these little villages — let's not forget these are little villages in Swabia, all of that. Hölderlin was born in Nürtingen, and Hegel was born in Stuttgart, but anyway... to escape this poverty and at the same time capitalize on their studies as apprentice pastors.
7:26 Theology was the obvious path, especially since it was also a unique opportunity to do philosophy. Don't forget there were no philosophy credit units, no philosophy departments as widespread as they are nowadays. It was barely embryonic at the time. And it depended not on some hypothetical Ministry of National Education — let's not be anachronistic — but on what was called the Ministry of Religious Affairs. It was closely watched by the religious authorities, especially after a century of Enlightenment, on the other side of the Rhine in particular — that is, on the French side — which had undermined the prestige and authority of religion in general and of Christianity in particular.
8:14 What's more, it pleased their mothers, it was job security — let's not forget pastors could marry, so it wasn't an enormous sacrifice on that front — and they fully intended not to languish in the pastoral vocation, if I may put it that way, I mean not to spend too much time in it, and to quickly find a tutoring post, for which their prior theological studies made them particularly recommendable, you see.
8:49 So there's this little detour into the professional sociology of that milieu, of the German intelligentsia of the time. I of course exclude from this those who, by birth, had no such problem, but that's the exception. Look at the greatest French authors, from the Middle Ages up to today, from Villon to Aragon, to stop at periods we have some perspective on.
9:25 You'll find hardly any aristocrats in there. There are the Maxims of Cardinal de Retz, there are the admirable aphorisms of La Rochefoucauld, of course, the Maxims. There's Saint-Simon for the connoisseurs — readers don't exactly rush, don't rush anymore. Proust was a great reader of Saint-Simon, and he was quite right, very well written, that cranky, resentful old man. Anyway, it's hyper marginal. The peasants were illiterate, so they weren't exactly worried about publishing books, as you can imagine.
9:59 They were illiterate, practically up until the war of 1914. So there you have it, this petty bourgeoisie which is the vis motrix, as they say, of the intellectual ferment at that time. Same in music — the Schuberts, the Schumanns, the Brahmses, the Wagners, these people who don't come, don't come from a ducal family, or a count's, or a margrave's — that is, a viscount's, in German.
Hegel, Hölderlin, and the Sophoclean model of tragedy 10:38 So, that said, the three friends, especially Hölderlin and Hegel, who were very close to one another, and both had a great deal of admiration for Schelling, who, although a bit younger, was already the most referenced at the time, very young, precocious, and the most brilliant, as we'd say today.
11:11 But in the conversations between Hegel and Hölderlin, the discussions about art in general, aesthetics in general, tragedy in particular, and the Sophoclean model — if I may coin this epithet, if you'll allow me — of tragedy, that is, the most emblematically classical moment of ancient Greek literature — let me quickly recall that there is the archaic period in the civilization of ancient Greece, taking everything together: historians, philosophers, writers, poets, painters, sculptors — there is the archaic period, there is the Hellenic period, which I just left as the epithet 'classical,' as always the middle term, which is in the middle, and finally, supposedly decadent, not always pejorative, but often so, the Hellenistic period.
12:22 Sophocles, you see, Aeschylus before him, the other great Greek tragedian, a bit earlier, that's the archaic period — it's not the same language, is it? The dialogues take up much less space than in Sophocles, because that already presupposes a developed dramatic evolution, but on the other hand, the choruses hold a very important place — the chorus, rather, holds a very important place, or the passages recited by the chorus in Aeschylus, there you go — and Euripides, well, some occasionally criticize him for being a bit more aestheticizing, interiorized, a bit more modern, isn't that so?
13:06 Compared to the classical period, which isn't entirely wrong, you see what they mean — what's stupid is turning it into a value judgment, when you see a fabulous masterpiece like the Bacchae, which upsets all these classifications and plunges at once into what is most fascinating in archaic Greece and at the same time most elaborate in Hellenistic Greece — that gives grounds to nuance the point.
13:39 So there you have it: Aeschylus, in chronological order, Sophocles, Euripides. Back to Sophocles. The two most performed, most well-known, most mediatized tragedies, if you recall, are of course Oedipus and Antigone. Antigone being the daughter of Oedipus, I remind you — it's a Theban cycle, the cycle of the Labdacids, from the ancestor Labdacus, like Orestes, Iphigenia, etc. That's the cycle of the Atreidae, Agamemnon and company — the cycle of the Atreidae, named after the distant ancestor Atreus, there you go.
14:15 Let's get back to the Labdacids and to that unfortunate family. So, I repeat the chronology: he translated it as early as the lycée, when he was about fifteen. It was the subject of endless discussions between him and his great friend Hölderlin.
14:47 Hölderlin, from whom I will quote a few excerpts at the end of the session, from his last prose text, his last essay — it's not a poem, it's his last essay — in which he ventures before the reader in general, just before the collapse, just before the madness — this last text is Remarks on the Translations of Oedipus and Antigone, on Sophocles's tragedies Oedipus and Antigone.
15:20 So you see it's not only for Hegel on this front. Let me come back to what this tragedy represents for Hegel. He translated it at 15, he discusses it with Hölderlin when they're barely 20. It plays a crucial role in the first chapters of the second volume of the Phenomenology in the Hyppolite edition, for example, that is, in the chapter whose overall title is Spirit, whose first historical embodiment turns out to be the ancient city.
16:06 It is through tragedy in general and this tragedy in particular that he analyzes problems, problematics which go, as we'll see today, well beyond the merely aesthetic sphere in the strict sense. In another chapter, toward the end of the Phenomenology, in the final chapters, that is, immediately before the absolute knowledge that closes this book, decidedly unclassifiable, there are precisely the three moments of absolute spirit — not of absolute knowledge but of absolute spirit, absolute knowledge being the crowning achievement. Let me explain: the three subsections of the chapter 'Absolute Spirit' are, in order, art, religion, philosophy.
17:08 Absolute knowledge only comes in within the element — you know what that means now, it's like the surrounding medium of philosophy — and not within religion, you see, one had to dare at the time. It's not the last stage of knowledge, it's not the last figure in the search for truth — the religious; it's philosophy. I don't want to introduce a contradiction, I'm pointing out an audacity, to say the least.
17:38 So, a few textual illustrations, not very long texts, very short quotations — yes, sorry — and here we're in the Phenomenology, this is the mature Hegel; in the Lectures on Aesthetics, he goes so far as to say — you know, this sentence that's often quoted, which I've also quoted in particular — that of all the masterpieces of Antiquity and of the modern world, you know I'll find it for you, there — I'm going a bit fast — in the Aesthetics, so it's the Aubier-Montaigne edition, the one I'm showing here, translated clandestinely, during the Resistance, by Samuel Jankélévitch, same family as Vladimir's father, and which, in this French translation, in four volumes, let's say the third part —
The Aesthetics: city and family, ethics and morality 18:49 Hegel had built it in three parts, and the third part is divided into two volumes — here, the second volume, so practically the end of this immense edifice, no doubt the longest work, not written by Hegel, because I've already said this, I repeat it, these are notes taken by the best of his students, validated by him of course, which we call Hegel's Aesthetics — but it's not his own writing, it's not like Les Fleurs du Mal for Baudelaire, that is — but still, there are sentences where you recognize the master's style — the main opposition that, after Hegel, Sophocles treats in a remarkably beautiful way, is that of ethical life, in its spiritual generality embodied by the state — the state here being the power of the city — and of natural, no longer spiritual, morality, represented by the family.
19:47 You have to get used to it, you need to have this reflex like multiplication tables, oppositions between nature and spirit, etc. Spirit would not exist without nature, but it only exists from the moment it emerges from it and opposes itself to it. That's not at all contradictory. These are the purest powers of tragic presentation, since the harmony of these two spheres — the political, which is our subject, and the city and the family, if you prefer, or, in purely political terms, the public and the private — these are the purest powers of tragic presentation, since the harmony of these two spheres, a harmony not realized nowadays, you'd agree, since all we talk about is the distortion between the two, since the harmony of these two spheres and their harmonious action within their respective reality constitutes the whole reality of ethical life.
20:50 Yes, it says 'moral' in the text I'm reading there. I say 'ethical' each time, to get you used to it — in the translations, this distinction between moral and ethical, far from being a snobbery, tries to stay faithful to two different terms in the German manuscript. Morality — Moralität — so, Latin root — moralité, that's what's often called subjective morality, isn't it?
21:25 It's morality in the ordinary sense, if you like — the ought-to-be: one simply must, it would be necessary to do this, and that's not good — in short, driving too fast, smoking, and making eyes at the neighbor's wife. I'm not passing judgment, I'm saying, that's this kind of morality. And then there's ethics. Ethics is objective morality. Why? Because without worrying about whether it's good or bad, it's the study of mores.
21:59 And there you find the Latin term at the origin of 'mœurs,' which is 'mores,' which also gives 'moral.' You see why this distinction had to be made, don't you? Among the ancients too, morality is rarely internalized and subjective, as it has become in our modern world, especially with Christianity, the Christian civilization we come from.
22:31 And not only that — we are also marked by ancient civilization, but still, we are above all steeped in Christian civilization. So it's important to recall that when Hegel says 'ethical,' it's when he says not 'moralisch' or 'Moralität,' but 'sittlich' or 'Sittlichkeit.' 'Sittlichkeit' is this objective morality, the study of mores, and 'Sitten' is simply the ordinary German word for 'mores.'
23:03 A common expression in families in Germany — it exists in French too, you know, in French we say 'other country, other customs.' At my place, we eat with chopsticks, us, with forks. 'Andere Länder, andere Sitten.' 'Sitten' means customs. I'll close this terminological parenthesis, but you understand why I wanted to say 'ethical' here. So it's enough for me to recall in this regard Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes, you see — he comes first chronologically, Aeschylus — and even more, Sophocles's Antigone.
23:43 Antigone venerates the ties of blood, the underworld gods. I won't dwell on it, we've seen it, but since we're about to plunge back into it, right? It's good to recall what runs through this tragedy like a nerve. Antigone venerates the ties of blood. It's not the bond of citizenship. I don't have a blood tie with another member of the same political party as me, or simply with another voter. Even if he votes the same way I do, that's not blood ties.
24:15 These are freer ties, in the sense of being less determined. We didn't ask to be born with the blood that runs through us. On the other hand, we're a bit freer to choose, to vote, not to be... That's how one has to speak of freedom and determinism. It's not by cutting it off cleanly — one is free, one is not free — it works out to being more or less. One is freer being a citizen than being someone's son or brother or sister. There you go.
24:46 It's so obvious that we don't think about it, and he does think about it. Hegel, what interests him is the concrete, isn't it? So, Antigone venerates the ties of blood, the underworld gods, whereas Creon venerates only Zeus, the power that governs public life. One votes in the agora, the city, the Pnyx, in broad daylight, and it's on this that the good of the community depends.
25:16 This too is often forgotten — that Zeus is not merely the thunderbolt or the king of the gods. He's not the Louis XIV of some Versailles that would be Olympus, that's not it — he is also the one who instituted and who guarantees the laws of the city. He's the god of political order, if you like. Don't forget that if he survived his father Cronos's voracity, who devoured his children at birth, it's thanks to his mother's trickery, of course.
25:48 You'll recall that she gave a stone to Cronos — time, with its blind voracity, swallows everything. But Zeus never forgets that he emerged from chaos. He is not a god of the chaotic, not a god in the sense of the gods of the ocean, the mountain — no, no, no, quite the opposite: order, rationality, clarity, legitimacy, etc. So I repeat this sentence and move on: Antigone venerates the ties of blood, the underworld gods, whereas Creon venerates only Zeus, the power that governs public life and on which the good of the community depends.
26:29 I haven't put it in the texts available to you on the screen because there are already many, and I don't want to confuse things, and above all because these are reminders — I won't put the old texts back on screen every time in addition to the new ones. Well, and here, he adds this famous sentence, which poses the problem we've had since the beginning of our reading of this book. This is content valid for all periods and whose representation, in spite of all national differences, so, whatever the era, whatever the nation, history, geography, always obtains our human participation and satisfies our artistic taste.
A content valid for all eras; being cultivated 27:09 You know that we started off — you need a problem in order to start philosophizing, but the problem has been this: Hegel's relationship to aesthetics. There is this work of which he says it is the summit of all aesthetics. That's why this is an exception, since usually he always ties an aesthetic manifestation to a historical, geographical, cultural context — one would say "today" if you prefer. There, I'm going very fast. And here, you see, he confirms it. I recall that Marx says exactly the same thing about Greek mythology and the works that derive from it, that is, essentially, moreover, of epic and tragedy — the Iliad or Sophocles' tragedy, for example.
27:57 Marx himself is astonished. So how does that happen? In Marxist terms, it's even more obvious than for Hegel. Such a superstructure — aesthetics is part of the superstructures — is produced from an infrastructure determined in a historical here and now, a geographical here and a determined historical now. I remind you in passing that I often give my anti-ecologist speech, but I'm not entirely stupid, am I?
28:27 I have often, I have always, and I will increasingly, give an anti-naturalist speech, but I have nothing against nature, all the more so since I know that without it I wouldn't be here and we wouldn't be here. That's why I clarify again, isn't it, that it is a determinate historical moment that explains art, but not only that — also a geographical place. There cannot be quite the same thought, the same relation to the world, can there?
28:57 in Tahiti, with the — I don't know — it's enough to have the coconuts right above your head to get juice, something to drink, with a very, very regular climate, apart from a few cyclones, without ever any brutal temperature changes. And the Tuareg who live in the middle of the desert, for example. The place was nothing other than the desert. There you go.
29:27 But let's leave Montesquieu aside. Montesquieu's greatness was that he was the first to take that materiality into account, that geographical materialism. So, not only do I not criticize him, but I simply recall that this must not be so reductive as to overlook historical determinism as well, since in the same climate and the same vegetation there are quite different customs and a quite different sensibility, a different interiority, depending on whether one lives in a magnificent five-room apartment with a view of the sea or the mountains, whatever, or the finest neighborhoods of the city, or a house on stilts watching out for the saber-toothed tiger lurking near the baby asleep in the hut, or simply an infiltrated enemy from the enemy horde not far off.
30:27 So there it is: this is content valid for all periods and whose representation, in spite of all national differences, always obtains our human participation and satisfies our artistic taste. Why? I don't know — the works of that era, and especially this one, are always just as relevant today. That is what Hegel affirmed here. I'm not forcing you to agree with him on this point, but what, in the logic of the Hegelian system, allows him to say that?
31:04 We must realize that this seems to contradict what he usually says about other moments in the history of art. The Phenomenology. I won't read you all of it, but there's another passage where he says in the Phenomenology: "Of all the masterpieces of antiquity and the modern world — and I know almost all of them, and everyone can and must know them — Antigone seems to me the most perfect," and he adds, "the most reassuring." I remind you, I always say "I remind you"
31:36 because it seems to be somewhat my duty to take advantage of these philosophical stock-takings to do a few stock-takings of what I hate calling — the expression "general culture," but we understand each other. But this is becoming almost a militant matter now, seeing the way our executive is wiping out entire sections of the curriculum of that glorious history that was national education — whose only shameful aspect was that it was reserved for a social handful.
32:11 There were, for example, when I was a student, between 6 and 8% of people of working-class origin at university. But on the other hand, some people fought — I was one of them — to extend this marvelous transmission of a world heritage, even if it was sometimes too Eurocentric; nonetheless, what I know, what I learned very early about China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and so on, comes to us from school after all.
32:51 And that it is not in all cultures that people take an interest in other cultures. I would even say that — and here I take the opposite stance from culturalism, that is, from the poorly digested legacy of Lévi-Strauss — I'll say the poorly digested legacy of Lévi-Strauss, pardon my French — because he himself is worth more than that, but still, he did nothing to prevent it — namely, that the different cultures would be like animal species scattered across space rather than like moments unfolding across time.
33:28 Where am I going with this? To this sentence, which I offer you just as I think it, I don't want to dwell on it too long and I'd like to return to my subject, so I won't linger on it, but for now I offer it to you. To be cultivated, for me, is to step outside one's own culture. It's not saying — it's not "in my Corsican culture," it's not "in my African culture," it's not "in my culture," as if there were one African culture — there are 1,200 African cultures, an extraordinary richness, quite different from one another.
34:02 It's not "in my Breton culture" — no, I'm not saying there aren't Breton cultures, Corsican cultures, that's just as interesting, I'm not making a value judgment, I'm saying that being cultivated is not being content to twiddle your thumbs without learning anything, simply because you were born into a culture and therefore believe you possess that culture because you were born into it. Farmers know what agriculture is, don't they?
34:32 It gets watered, it gets weeded, it gets grafted, it gets worked, it gets dug, it gets plowed. Being cultivated means emerging from your lack of culture, and it means emerging from your own culture — it means taking an interest in the cultures of others. We are in the process of talking about the culture of ancient Greece; that's not exactly the Berrichon tradition to begin with, or the Corsican one. So, I was on the Phenomenology, I'll continue the chronological stages of Hegel's interest in this tragedy, as a reminder, always — I'm still in reminder mode — the Philosophy of Right, we're arriving at the end, at the old Berlin Hegel: that's a book, his treatise, seen from a distance as political, if you prefer, but it's above all institutional, juridical, and above all philosophical; there are reflections on negativity that go well beyond the political and are, well, well beyond that, quite transversal, valid within the political, the aesthetic, the moral, the scientific, of course,
Philosophy of Right: piety as the law of woman 35:43 in philosophy. Now, he is precisely at a stage, at a moment, as one says with Hegel, where one passes from the private sphere that is the family to the public sphere, and this is — let me read it to you — a remark found at, and which closes, paragraph 166 of the Principles of the Philosophy of Right, commonly called Hegel's political testament, which dates from around the 1820s.
36:17 "Thus, in one of its most sublime representations" — we'll note that the epithets are hyperbolic every time he speaks of Antigone — "thus, in one of its most sublime representations, Sophocles' Antigone, piety is expressed above all as the law of woman." You saw the short video excerpt that Pierre-Elin and la Gentillesse aired in the opening credits.
36:47 You will notice that what she reproaches Creon for is going against, is imposing his law against that of the gods. Human law, the law of the city, secular law, versus the law — not of God, that's something else again — but the law of the gods, that is, unwritten laws whose origin nobody knows. And that, isn't it, is the province
37:23 — and I remind you — of woman. "Thus, in one of its most sublime representations, Sophocles' Antigone, piety is expressed above all as the law of woman." That's the law — I've never seen people as pious as my aunts and cousins among the traditional Corsicans. That must change a little bit, mustn't it, with time, but anyway everyone sees very well what I'm talking about, and this time in every culture.
37:54 it is the law of subjective, sensuous substantiality, of an interiority that has not yet reached its full realization, the law of the ancient gods, the gods of the underworld — she says it herself, Antigone, in the excerpt you saw, the gods of the underworld — the image of an eternal law, at once real and symbolic.
38:27 Symbolic: day, night, the obscure, the manifest, the hidden — very well, but it is also real. Femininity is most often shut up within the walls of the house, in the shade, sheltered in the shadowy retreats, as Baudelaire says in a beautiful poem addressed, moreover, to a woman from Malabar. The law of the ancient gods, the gods of the underworld, the image of an eternal law of which no one knows since when it appeared, represented in opposition to the manifest law, that of the State.
39:02 This opposition is the supreme ethical opposition. These are grave affirmations, made just like that. And consequently, the most highly tragic one. In it, femininity and virility are individualized. But of course — I well knew it wasn't entirely inopportune to recall these reflections for those who believe that it's only today that we're reflecting on gender. Well.
What is overdetermination? 39:33 You see, all the way to the Philosophy of Right. So why this extraordinary exception? That has been our question from the start. We had made some progress — I reminded you, and I read you some texts, I'll actually reread one — Hegel recalls that the family, still, in relation to the authority of the city — let's leave the tragedy of Antigone aside for a moment. When there is no conflict between the family and the city, when it's simply the relation between the two, the everyday relation, if you prefer, of the two, the family is nonetheless the element of the private.
40:11 That is to say, there's no need to make public the menu of my lunch this morning, prepared by me or by my wife or by whoever, or by servants, depending on the household. That's the sphere of the private. And so, you see, this is the occasion — as it will be today — to better understand what overdetermination means in philosophy.
40:44 Others give it, I don't know, more ideological meanings; I'll settle for these. I'm not saying I'm immune to all ideology. I'm talking about real ideology, the unconscious kind. I'm not talking about explicit ideology — it's clear that I have some, I'm not the only one. No, I'm talking about the ideologies that move us even as we believe ourselves to be in pure, simple, transparent objectivity. Still, I'm trying to give the most extensive possible sense of this notion of overdetermination.
41:22 To simplify, I would say, you know, that it's typical of what's called mise en abyme. You know, the Cerebos salt box, back in the day, where you see on the box the iconography — a cook, a white toque holding a box of salt, which itself, the Cerebos box, shows the cook holding a box of salt, and so on to infinity, down to the point where the eye can no longer perceive it, until it's too small. That's overdetermination. You could also call it Russian dolls.
41:53 And I'll give an example. The opposition here between family and State, therefore between public and private, therefore between man and woman. You already see three different determinations here: that of the sexes, that of economic-political status, public-private, which converge here, that of day and night, that of the hidden and the manifest.
42:29 It's always the same opposition, but on different determinations each time. So we mustn't leave them in this disorder — we must see the order in which they unfold and which determination overdetermines the others. That's what will occupy us in particular during this session. So I'll illustrate my point right away, in particular the fact of setting the opposition between family and State — such as the tragedy of Antigone pushes it to its paroxysm — but more generally, even when it's not at all the figure of Antigone that is at the center; I'm thinking simply of what's called, for example, clan-based factionalism.
Rousseau and the Draft Constitution for Corsica 43:24 isn't that so? And for that, I would like to read you the first text that's going to appear here, taken from a work I cannot recommend to you highly enough, not only because I was asked to write the preface, but because it's one of Rousseau's most important texts. And I pay tribute here to Barbara de Negroni, who knows political philosophy in general well, the eighteenth century in particular, and Rousseau's developments in that field.
44:03 I say that because she prepared the critical apparatus for the Garnier-Flammarion edition of a volume I recommend to you at least as much because it combines the Project for a Constitution for Corsica and the Project for a Constitution for Poland — that is, the two political texts where the Social Contract is no longer a work of political philosophy in general, but is politics applied to a determined here and now.
44:38 Poland is not Corsica as a context, and so on. So, to see what was invariant in Rousseau, at the same time as what varies according to empirical data. So I return to this volume, which also has the advantage of being bilingual, which is rather rare — Corsican-French — in which the editors had the marvelous idea of putting, as an appendix, if you prefer, in postscript, as one says, the incredible correspondence between Rousseau and the envoy of Pasquale Paoli, the man behind the independence of the short-lived Corsican Republic, isn't that so, the first implementation of a good part of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, of the Enlightenment current, before France, before the United States — Pasquale Paoli.
45:31 So, in this work, at a certain point — I'll tell you very quickly — Rousseau, exhausted by persecutions, his works burned in public squares, he's declared subject to arrest, meaning that if he's found, he can be killed, by the three most important powers in Europe, isn't that so — Prussia, Austria, France — and even, there you go, he thought he was freer in Switzerland when he signed himself "citizen of Geneva," the Swiss Republic, where one is not a subject of the king but a citizen of the Republic, and there he is being persecuted because of his religious writings — very quickly — and he goes from residence to residence, because his own home in Switzerland was stoned, at Môtiers, in the Val-de-Travers, a marvelous region, a route I recommend to you that runs down from our Pontarlier, in France, all the way, ending at Lake Neuchâtel, passing through the Val-de-Travers, don't hesitate to make a little stop
46:41 in the house, where he was forced to evacuate at top speed, soon to take refuge on the Île Saint-Pierre. Now, precisely — excuse me, let me refine this — there, he even goes so far as to say — but you have the text anyway.
47:19 It's this excerpt that interests me, isn't it? The Corsicans had just freed themselves — it's a bit, as I said, the Vietnam of the era for the intelligentsia, and people admired this small people who had shaken off several centuries of Genoese occupation and were soon going to fight against the armies of Louis XV and collapse at Ponte-Novo, isn't that so, the Battle of Ponte-Novo, losing their short-lived independence. But in the meantime, it aroused the admiration and attention of many thinkers of the time, as Voltaire already said: "Europe is Corsican. Without friends, without support, without money, without an army, enslaved to terrible masters, alone, you shook off their yoke."
48:06 "You have seen leagued against you, one after another, the most formidable powers of Europe. They flooded your island with foreign armies." Corsica was a major geostrategic stake, still is even now, in fact — there's a nuclear submarine base at Solenzara, in southern Corsica. French. "You have overcome everything. Your courage alone did what money could not have done. Had you wished to preserve your riches, you would have lost your liberty. One must not conclude from the other nations to your own."
48:37 "The maxims drawn from your own experience are the best ones by which you can govern yourselves. It is a matter less of becoming other than you are." Rousseau is not the revolutionary who's going to change the people entirely from top to bottom, not at all — like those so-called lovers, or worse, husbands, because that supposedly gives them an authority, if not of right, at least in fact, who, out of love, supposedly, for their spouse, absolutely want to transform her.
49:11 "They have learned to obey their equals." Sorry, excuse me — "the Corsicans have gained much since becoming free. They have joined prudence to courage. They have learned to obey their equals. They have acquired virtues and customs, and yet they had no laws. If they could remain thus, I would see almost nothing to do. There would be no need of me to draw up a constitution. But when the peril that united them recedes" — so when the dangers are removed, listen carefully, I was talking about clan-based factionalism earlier regarding families within the city.
49:47 "When the peril that united them recedes" — that's what united them — "the factions that it kept at bay" — the peril — "will be reborn among them, and instead of joining their forces for the maintenance of their independence, they will use them one against another." It's vendetta. He never once set foot in Corsica. I also recall that when Rousseau received this letter from Buttafoco, Matteo Buttafoco, and Paoli's envoy asking him to draw up a constitution for Corsica, Rousseau begins by replying: "It's a great honor you do me — you see all the admiration he has for the recent struggle for liberation of the Corsican people — but it's too late, I'm tired, I'm old, I have the stone disease, I have trouble getting around, I'm pursued by the armies of the major powers of Europe, I go from lodging to lodging, and I'm at the end of my rope."
50:54 And then, as the other man persists, it's this correspondence that you find at the end of this volume, which is why I recommend it to you, in particular, beyond of course the constitutional project itself. Rousseau ends up being tempted by a piece of work as a consultant, if you prefer — one would say today, he asks for information as a consultant, tries to put together a file: what are the customs regarding this, the clergy, what relation between power and the church, what are the economic resources of each region, the distribution of the population by region — there are deserted regions in Corsica and populated regions, wastelands and very cultivated regions.
51:41 So there you go, and then, suddenly, starting from the fourth letter, he says: "Let's forget this constitutional project, it's too late, but let me come die among you." We almost had Rousseau's grave in Corsica, isn't that so, and he says: "But watch out, I'm not Bernard-Henri Lévy, I'm not the adviser of princes — what I want is to live forgotten in a canton among you, not near the Paolist presidency, among you; my wife and I have always provided for our own needs without anyone's help." You know Rousseau copied music by hand — there was no fax machine, no photocopier, no reprography of any kind at the time, let alone computers, and that's how he earned his living — a tedious but reliable job, and a bit like Spinoza, to remain free of the powers of this world and owe them nothing,
52:51 polishing lenses — it was the very beginning of optics, after Galileo's telescope. So there: my wife and I never cost anyone anything — and of course it was when the armies of the Corsican Republic collapsed before the powerful artillery and infantry of Louis XVI that — one doesn't draw up a constitution for a people who have just lost their independence. And so the project came to nothing. There, so much for putting what he says into context.
Clanism and the art of divide and rule 53:23 But look, for someone who has never set foot there, it's already been said, it's always a bit complicated to go to Corsica—imagine at that time, in the state he was in, the fatigue, the legal, police, medical troubles. And look at this lucidity about clannishness: they will wear each other down against one another and will have nothing left to defend themselves with if they come to attack them again. That is already what must be prevented.
53:54 He was speaking of the oppression they had suffered from outside, and now he warns them against their own danger, the danger that comes from their own culture, I'd say, from their situation, quite simply, from their respective history and geography. The divisions among the Corsicans have always been an artifice of their masters to make them weak and dependent.
54:26 The colonizer in Madagascar—the French authorities, by you and me—managed to set the coastal peoples against the aristocracy of the high plateaus. It's always easy to flatter resentments, isn't it? The Belgians in the Congo—that's the greatest massacre in the whole of colonial history, and it still continues. It's the whole of the African Great Lakes region, Rwanda, Burundi, Rwanda, the greatest genocide, with red hands, of the century.
54:58 And Rwanda, Burundi, and of course the immense former Belgian Congo, which is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Belgians, in particular the missionaries, spent their time telling the Tutsis—the great Tutsis, who are herders, and among whom milk and dairy products are the foundation of their diet, and the essential part if not almost the whole of it—
55:34 And so, you know well the effects of calcium on growth, especially of the skeleton—they are considerably taller than their Hutu compatriots, who are shorter. But you see, don't go believing those who talk to you about an ethnic war. For once, these were not two originally different ethnic groups—it's the same language, when there's no map more fractured, is there, than the linguistic map of sub-Saharan Africa. It's the same language. And yet they put it into the heads of these great Tutsi herders that they were descended from the pharaohs of Egypt, and from the pharaohs—well, from fairy tales.
56:12 Imagine a murderer—and that they shouldn't have to depend on these wretched slave races, these pygmies, these near-pygmies. That's how things were presented. Always divide and rule, you know the saying well—but also the Kabyles against the Arabs in Algeria. The French always played that card. This is to illustrate that in saying all these things, Rousseau places himself within a tradition that is not that of the powers that be.
56:45 That is already what must be prevented. The divisions among the Corsicans have always been an artifice of their masters to make them weak and dependent. But this artifice, employed constantly, has finally produced the inclination and made them naturally restless, agitated. That ends up forming a character, unfortunately. Restless, agitated, difficult to govern, even by their own chief. Good laws are needed, a new institution is needed to restore the harmony which tyranny—foreign tyranny, understood—has destroyed down to the very desire for it.
Phenomenology: war and death, absolute master 57:21 Corsica, subjected to foreign masters whose harsh yoke it never bore patiently, was always in turmoil. Now its people must undertake a new study and seek peace in freedom. Remarkable text. So why? I'll come back to Hegel. Because precisely when he speaks of Antigone and the opposition between family and state, he quotes this passage that I already read you in another context, but which here again takes on a new, overdetermined meaning—the same text.
57:57 So here it is, we'll display it here, the text of Hegel, taken from the Phenomenology, since I already read you the one from the Philosophy of Right. So you'll find it, still in Hyppolite's translation of the Phenomenology, second volume, on page—I believe it's 23-24, 22-23, sorry.
58:38 The community—so let's go back to the city. The community can, so, may I remind you, I had pointed out to you the nuance between 'can' and 'must.' The community here, as soon as it's a matter of division into clans, of the private beginning to proliferate, he says 'can,' doesn't he? Whereas unification is on the mode of 'must,' it is what it ought to be. The community can, then, on the one hand organize itself in the systems of personal independence.
59:13 It's not up to the city or the state to tell me what I'm going to eat tonight. Organize itself in the systems of personal independence and of property, of personal right and of real right. Likewise, they can articulate themselves, on the other hand, and make themselves independent, a second time, in their own associations, the modes of labor for ends that are, in the first instance, singular. Not the labor that a good part of the Athenians performed to build the walls leading to Piraeus and reinforcing the fortifications of Athens against possible invaders.
59:55 That's a work of public utility, we'd say today. No, labor for oneself, so as to enrich oneself and the family, the household. The association of the modes of labor for ends that are in the first instance singular. Two aspects: those of acquisition—there's having—and of enjoyment. So much for what the private individual has the right to do.
1:00:25 The spirit of association, we come back—look at the rhythm of breathing here, we were in the multiple, we come back to the one. The spirit of universal association, and yet simplicity—it's always, always one, there's always a nuance of negativity in that term in Hegel. It's not at all simple in the sense of easy. And yet the simplicity and negative essence of these systems in the process of isolating themselves.
1:00:55 So as not to let them take root and harden in this isolation—for this crumbling that goes as far as clannishness, if everyone starts thinking of their own family's interest, etc., to the detriment of the rest of the community, you see what catastrophe that can produce in case of a common threat—so as not to let them take root and harden in this isolation, so as not to let, so as not to allow, sorry, the whole to disintegrate, Hegel insists, and the spirit to evaporate—we see clearly what 'spirit' means here, it's the community when it is conscious of its unity, mind you, but you see that this not only doesn't prevent, but actually implies, the freedom of its members.
1:01:42 So, in order not to let the whole disintegrate and the spirit evaporate, the government must from time to time—and here it's no longer 'can,' it's no longer 'may'—shake them in their intimacy through war. Through war it must disturb their order once it has become habitual. I stop right away for those who think he's saying it's a duty for government to wage war as often as possible. No. War, unfortunately, is there, especially at that time, isn't it?
1:02:16 When Athens wasn't at war with Sparta or some other city, suddenly all the Greek cities together were at war with the Persians, weren't they? And a bit later, the Macedonians and the Romans followed suit, good enough. So here he's speaking of something, of a function of war that goes beyond its purely military function. Isn't it? Look closely. The government must disturb their order once it has become habitual, violate their right to independence—violate, that's a strong term.
1:02:55 Just as, for individuals who, by sinking into this order, detach themselves from the whole and aspire to an inviolable being-for-self and to the security of the person. What's so timely about all that? The guy who's in the arms of his beloved, and they tell him, 'the Persians are attacking, you're going to the front.' The government must, a second time, in this imposed labor, make them feel their master—their master, all of them, all the clans, all the individuals, all the factions, man, woman, king, and the simplest peasant.
1:03:27 It must make them feel that their master is death. Death, which Hegel sometimes calls the absolute master. Because usually there's a relativity, you know—the slave, the more he works, the more the master depends on him, so the slave ends up becoming master of the master. Well, not here—death is the absolute master. There, I wanted to introduce this extraordinary text by way of Rousseau's, which responds to a commission from a specific state, and not from a state two thousand years earlier, isn't that so?
The family, the singular and the universal 1:04:10 So, I'll suspend for now the texts you have before your eyes and complete them with a few quotations taken from more or less the same works—but you see, maybe I don't need my glasses, it should be fine like this with this light—yes, so, you see, still to illustrate the fact that the family is the moment where what is put in parentheses—and this is Hegel's obsession—is the universal, that is to say, not the interest of one person against another, of power against, or of the city against families, but the interest, by definition, of everyone; otherwise it's not the universal.
1:05:18 It's not the abstract universal that gets stamped on—no, it's the concrete universal, look closely. The opposite of the universal, the singular, that is, the absolute particular, the singular seeking the pleasure of enjoying its singularity—that is its right—finds it in the family, always, when he analyzes this moment of the ancient city. And, sorry, excuse me, the family—there—and the necessity in which pleasure disappears is its own self-consciousness as a citizen of its people.
1:05:57 which is knowledge of the law of the heart as the law of all hearts, self-consciousness as the recognized universal order, is virtue, which enjoys the fruits of its sacrifice. It realizes what it aims at, that is, it raises essence to actual presence and its enjoyment to this universal life. So, another example, you see, you have it here, this is a passage I already quoted but which is remarkable for our purpose, particularly for the figure of Antigone, since here it is indeed femininity.
1:06:44 There. Once again, the proper aim of the family, its positive aim, is the singular as such. The family isn't concerned with the citizen in general—it's concerned with the child who is there in the house, isn't it, with his education.
1:07:21 In order for this relation to be ethical, neither the aim acting nor the one to whom the action refers must appear as something contingent, as happens in some aid or some service rendered. The content of the ethical action must be substantial, must be whole and universal. Ethical action can therefore relate only to the singular being taken as a totality, or to the singular being insofar as it is itself universal. In other words, the good education of the child—people often asked Hegel what the best education for a child was, and he would answer with a maxim from an old Greek lawgiver of antiquity, who, when asked how he should raise his child—a question Hegel was often asked, what is good paideia, good pedagogy—the lawgiver would answer: make him the citizen of a state whose laws are good.
1:08:13 Antigone, you see, the inseparability of the pedagogical and the political. And here there's going to be a direct allusion to Antigone—he never gives proper names, but look closely—the action, then, which embraces the entire existence of the blood relative, does not concern the citizen, for the citizen does not belong to the family; children do not belong to their parents.
1:08:54 The collectivity delegates, doesn't it? Power over the child to the parents—it's a delegation, it's important to remember that. Many martyrdoms would be avoided if this were remembered from time to time, isn't that so? The action, then, which embraces the entire existence of the blood relative, does not concern the citizen, for the citizen does not belong to the family—the citizen, nor the one who will be a citizen, the child, and thus ceases to count as this singular individual, as opposed to the universal.
Duty toward the dead: wresting death from nature 1:09:26 So, what does the family's action aim at? It has as its object and content this singular being belonging to the family, but taken as a universal essence withdrawn from its sensible—that is, singular—actuality. This action no longer concerns the living, it is underlined, but the dead. And we arrive directly at Antigone. He who, outside the long succession of his being-there, of his existence, dispersed, would only be in a single completed figuration, the corpse, and outside the unrest of contingent life, has risen to the peace of the simple universal.
1:10:06 Building a tomb, going to the cemetery, laying flowers—it's often women you see doing this, even now. Not exclusively, but so overwhelmingly for the most part. Serious thoughts are those that reflect on what is, and not on what ought to be. But it is only as citizen that he is actual and substantial. The singular being, insofar as he is not a citizen and belongs to the family, is merely a shade without force and without effectiveness.
1:10:37 This universality that the singular as such attains is pure being, death. That's the incredible sentence—death is, the definition of death in Hegel, the immediate being-there become nature. It is only at the moment of death that we have an immediate relation, without intermediary if you prefer, to family, without language, without thought, without customs, without cultural acquisition. Without a priori. Not the operation of a consciousness, and consequently the duty of the family member is to add this side too, so that his final being, this universal being, does not belong to nature alone.
1:11:18 Otherwise, one would let the corpse rot peacefully like the animals, wouldn't one? Decompose. Now that's what horrifies Antigone. You saw when she says, 'I would rather disobey you than disobey the god, for he would hold it against me to have left my brother's body to the wild birds and beasts of prey to tear apart.' She's so right that all of Thebes is scandalized, even if it doesn't dare go against the terror exercised by Creon.
1:11:56 Still, one need only look at the extraordinary dialogues between Creon and Tiresias—the same Tiresias who appears in Oedipus, the blind bard. It is the blind man who sees, he who predicts the future. The only one who sees, the only one who tells Oedipus the truth that Oedipus is searching for everywhere on the outside, is the one whose eyes are closed, eyes closed forever. Tiresias tells Creon that he oversteps the most sacred rights when he forbids granting burial, performing the rites over which the woman essentially presides—but not only, but essentially—the rites accompanying the passage from life to death.
1:12:43 The laying out of the condemned man, as we say. But insofar as—yes, sorry—the duty of the family member is to add this side too, so that his final being, this universal being, does not belong to nature alone—a death that would be accidental, contingent, is dreadful—and does not remain something irrational, but is the deed of an operation, as it were—this is a very fine anthropological analysis, because he makes us understand the meaning of funeral rituals; he doesn't say this is good, this is bad, as Pascal says in a magnificent passage, everyone makes himself God by judging that this is good, this is bad—what presumption, I don't know—he does better than that: he makes us understand the meaning, that it is rational, what seems monstrous, barbaric to us in other cultures, etc.
1:13:39 has a reason for being—that doesn't mean that those who do it are right, that they do well, but it means there are reasons why things happen that way, and if one wants—and if one wants to abolish this state of affairs, take the death penalty for example, I'm against it, so it doesn't bother me at all that we want to abolish it—one must abolish the reasons that, in ancient societies where they exist, made it seem self-evident. I'm not talking about an eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, as it still was in our time, moreover—in the Gospel, more than 2000 years ago already, the question is put to Christ: to trap him, the Pharisees say to him, 'Look, in the law of Moses we're told it can be tooth for tooth, but you say if someone strikes you on one cheek, turn the other'—one has to reconcile the brushes there, get the fiddles in tune, sorry, and not mix up the brushes as I'm doing—Christ answers, and this is no doubt one of the first instances of historical relativism, and not geographical relativism as is fashionable today—yes, that's true—
1:14:50 'for the Bantu but not for us, for us but not for the Bantu'—no, no, historical, which is far more important: we are always the same, and yet we have changed. Listen closely: 'it is because at that time your hearts were hardened'—that is, at that time a kind of taming was needed, but we no longer need those monstrous things—and that's where he adds: 'and as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man'—you and I—'be lifted up.' None of that is innocent, is it? So you see, when he says 'operation,' underlined, it means—it's almost touching—it means it's a way for man to make sure he has a hand in death, that it's not simply something he suffers—which is the case for the most part—but it's a way, isn't it, of trying to extend the kingdom of freedom right up to the point where it is least at home, that is, into necessity—to count freedom, the necessity of dying, for instance, let's say better—
1:16:01 since the repose and universality of self-conscious essence do not in truth belong to nature—the meaning of the action, of the action of all these rituals that Antigone performs in disobeying Creon, isn't it—the meaning of the action is to remove this appearance of such an operation being usurped by nature—dying is natural, isn't it, nothing to be done, that's just how it is—and to restore the truth, the active part of nature in this being—it is the aspect according to which its becoming presents itself as the movement of a being; this movement itself falls within the ethical community and takes this community as its end—death is the fulfillment and the supreme work that the individual as such undertakes for it. There, you see, I could go on multiplying examples—so certain authors, in particular the Heideggerian readers of Hölderlin, annex Hölderlin's poetry, which is rather monstrous when you see—good grief, I forgot—
Conclusion of the Remarks: a political and republican form 1:17:11 anyway, to send to Pierre-Alain, I'm thinking of it now—as you'll see, there are a few texts we're going to look at—but I forgot the conclusion that Hölderlin gives to his remarks on Oedipus and Antigone, so I'll read it to you first, to take the opposite view from those who try to oppose Hölderlin to Hegel: Hegel opposes family and state, that's all he sees in the tragedy of Antigone, whereas Hölderlin sees the opposition between the human and the divine—you see, they've understood nothing of what overdetermination is; it's as if one said he opposes day to night, he opposes the hidden to the manifest, he opposes man to woman, and he's understood nothing of the opposition between the human and the divine, as if all that weren't linked, isn't it, as if each of these oppositions were quite separate from the others, isn't it—when really they're variations on the same theme, one might say, as in music, and for example—
1:18:21 sorry, that's Hölderlin's text. Yes, listen, it can be summed up like this—I won't waste time looking for the passage—but one of Heidegger's chief French disciples, Beaufret, who translated—that's why I have this volume—
1:19:38 in addition to the Pléiade edition, because it has the advantage of including Hölderlin's remarks on his translations of Oedipus and Antigone, once again the last attempt Hölderlin made to make himself heard by others, before being walled up in his own madness. The advantage is that here the text is presented bilingually, so if there's any small dispute, there's still the German text alongside it, which is quite precious.
1:20:15 There.
1:20:45 Besides, the book is in pieces, so... Yes.
1:21:20 Well, there, I'm looking for it without finding it, but trust me—the passage where Beaufret says, we see to what extent Hölderlin's conception here surpasses, and I quote word for word, in depth and in scope, Hegel's analysis, which saw in the conflict of Antigone only the opposition between family and state. So, without going through all the overdeterminations. Now let me take Hölderlin himself, and I'll begin right away with the conclusion of his remarks.
1:21:53 He begins with remarks on the tragedy of Oedipus, then on that of Antigone, and so here is his conclusion. You see, it's the end. Because after this, here, there is an excerpt from the chorus of Sophocles' Antigone. And at the end, Hölderlin says this: "The rational form," he is already closer to Heidegger here, "which develops here, in these tragedies, tragically, is political."
1:22:30 It's terrible, and not political. And more precisely, republican. There, he makes his case worse. Because between Creon and Antigone, between the formal and the counter-formal — formal, that's Creon applying positive law. I'm just clarifying notions that are very familiar to legal specialists, but especially to legal historians. You see, when positive law is opposed to natural law, that was a great conflict at the end of the eighteenth century.
1:23:06 So, at the time when these young people were thinking, it's not entirely irrelevant, just as when we speak of positive religion and natural religion. Positive religion, positive law, is what is posited. Take it quite simply with the root of the word. That is to say, here I am, a young Saudi, an Iraqi, I'm raised in the Muslim religion, and very early on I have obligations placed before me to do my five prayers a day, and things like that.
1:23:38 And among Catholics, it will be thinking about the gifts for Christmas, things more or less profound or superficial, doesn't matter, but that's part of all this — it's the positive, it's what is contained, when we say "I am a Christian," what is posited. Whereas natural religion is the one that exists in every man, independently of what men have instituted. Yes, these are... Natural here is not naturalistic at all, it means universal here.
1:24:14 I come back here to this conclusion. The rational form that develops here, in these tragedies, tragically, is political and more precisely republican. Because between Creon and Antigone, between the formal Creon and the counter-formal Antigone, it is through excess that the balance is maintained in equality. This is especially seen at the end where Creon is almost mistreated by his own servants. Conclusion, the last paragraph: Sophocles is in the right.
1:24:47 Such is the division of his time and the form of his homeland. One can indeed idealize, for instance, choose the best moment, but the modes of representation of the homeland must not, at least as regards subordination, be changed by the poet, who represents — listen carefully — the world on a smaller scale. For us, such a form is precisely, the republican form, is precisely adequate, because the infinite, as the spirit of states and of the world, otherwise cannot be grasped except from an awkward point of view.
1:25:28 The native forms of our poets, or those that exist, are nonetheless to be preferred, because they are there not only to teach us to sustain the spirit of the time, of the era, of the Zeitgeist, which is coming back into fashion, but to maintain it and to feel it once it has been grasped and learned. So now, we'll move on to the first Hölderlin text I had planned, having set this one aside. And I ask your forgiveness in advance for inflicting these texts on you.
The most perilous moment, the edge and the apparition 1:26:02 I'm not apologizing for their incredible beauty, by the way, but simply for the incredible density of their difficulty. If you don't understand everything, tell yourselves you're not the only ones. And many passages remain enigmatic to me, as they do to those who have been reading them for a long time. But still, a logic emerges from reading and rereading them. Watch closely.
1:26:32 The riskiest moment — this notion of risk, from the pen of someone who is risking himself for the last time in confronting his contemporaries, in having an intellectual exchange, before isolating himself. The riskiest moment in the course of a day or of a work of art is when the spirit of time and of nature, that which is heavenly, that which seizes man and the object of his interest, stand face to face at the height of the fierce.
1:27:07 Because the sensible object only goes halfway, while the spirit awakens at the height of its power, there where the second half catches fire. I'm not interrupting myself, we mustn't muddle things, we'll come back to it. It is in this moment that man must hold most firmly. It is also there that man stands up, fully open, and takes on his own contour. The tragic moderation of eras without brilliance, not sought far off, whose object presents no real interest for the heart — behold it follows, in the most excessive manner, men, like a spirit in broad daylight.
1:27:55 But they are heard, yet then it is merciless, like the spirit of the ceaselessly living, of the unwritten savagery — I think that's it, yes — spirit of the world of the dead. So, let's go back to the beginning of this text, if Pierre-Adam wouldn't mind scrolling back a few lines. Thank you very much. The riskiest moment.
1:28:30 Hölderlin is also famous, for those who know his work at any rate, for an aphorism, for a magnificent hymn. Patmos, one of the last great hymns — the hymns are poems that run several pages, almost in a single breath, aren't they? A rather rare genre in French poetry. We spoke about this, that is, the French prefer the small form, the sonnet, for example, most of the time. Epics, apart from great exceptions like Hugo, are rare.
1:29:02 But Hölderlin had begun Patmos with this true lyrical cry, that is: "Nah ist der Gott und schwer zu fassen," "Near is the God, but difficult to grasp." It is what is near that is hardest to grasp. And then he adds: "It's difficult, but where there is peril, grows also what saves." What saves is on the side of where there is peril, a danger. One day, you've probably often said, I'll get around to it someday.
1:29:33 I'd really like to — it's a plan, I'm telling you, so you can encourage me to do it, if I linger too often on other things — I'd like to do a whole cycle on the notion of the edge. Because every edge is perilous, every edge. You say it well, he's a bit borderline, that guy, you see? The edge of a cliff. The switching of horizontal and vertical.
1:30:03 The bank of a river, the switching of solid and liquid. Of what remains and what passes, you see? All this makes Racine say — look how many times the term, the phrase "bank"/"shore," appears in a tragedy. I don't know, like Phèdre for example. "What charm drew her to these dreaded shores. That happy time is no more, everything has changed, since on these shores the gods brought the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë."
1:30:34 The riskiest moment, in the course of a day or of a work of art, is through the strange. A day, a work of art. And in the work of art par excellence of classicism, which always takes Greek culture as its model, that is, seventeenth-century French tragedy for example. You know the rule of the three unities. It must take place in one day. The riskiest moment in the course of a day or of a work of art is when the spirit of time and of nature, that which is heavenly, that which seizes man, is on one side, and on the other side, the object of his interest, his everyday concerns, stand face to face — the profane and the sacred, the everyday and the exceptional, stand face to face at the height of the fierce.
1:31:27 Because the sensible object — what I see, what I hear, what I feel — only goes halfway, it merely makes a sign. Whereas the spirit, which is not only the sign but wants to have the meaning, awakens at the height of its power, there where the second half catches fire. It is in this moment, when this encounter occurs, isn't it? We see clearly here what "divine" means, it's everything that goes beyond, isn't it, the poor consciousness of each individual.
1:31:59 That's where we see, as I've often said when I taught my course on the logic of the subject, that the subject is much deeper than consciousness. Consciousness is the iceberg — it's what we see of the iceberg, it's the small emerged part of the self. It's almost marginal. In my consciousness, I'm like a decent fellow, I'm a good guy who has always been taken advantage of by others, so, if we look closely at my unconscious, catching it in the act — not doing hermeneutics, reading between the lines, but if we look at my actions, my expressions, we'll clearly see that I'm a scoundrel without scruples.
1:32:44 So, you see, the sensible only goes halfway, while the spirit awakens at the height of its power, there where the second half catches fire — the half I'm usually not conscious of. It is in this moment that man must hold most firmly. There. And it is also there that man stands up, fully open, and takes on his own contour. Because in the Greek world, it was only to the gods that statues were made, that a contour, a plasticity, was given.
1:33:17 In the tragic conflict, man acquires a contour, even if it is to his detriment. The tragic moderation of eras without brilliance — moderation, the opposite, you see, of the tragic situation — whose object presents no real interest for the heart, behold it follows, thanks to this shock, in the most excessive manner, the spirit of time and its uprooting. And this then makes its apparition.
1:33:48 Apparition, that's how "phenomenon" must be translated in philosophy. It is not appearance — appearance is Schein. In English that's "shine," it's not all that glitters, it's not gold, it's an appearance, Schein. Whereas the phenomenon is Erscheinung, apparition. Fierce, we cannot spare men, like a spirit in broad daylight, but it is merciless — fierce, but does not spare — like the spirit of the ceaselessly living, of the unwritten savagery, that was Antigone's formula.
1:34:20 "You speak to me of the law that you decreed for the city, a law which scandalously, moreover, forbids what until then was sacred for everyone, namely the duties owed to the dead. And I speak to you of the laws that have existed since no one knows when, and that is the unwritten law." There's an expression that recurs from Hölderlin's pen, it's insurrection.
The Hesperian and the sun as moral center 1:34:52 So here I'm going to ask for the second Hölderlin text, if you look closely, after this one. There. I hope I didn't make a mistake sending my texts.
1:35:32 Otherwise I have the original here, it's not a big deal. I'll ask our Régis if there... I'm sorry, Dominique, but there's no second text. You didn't give me any others, in any case. Alright then, I'll... It's fine, I'll find this one.
1:36:15 Yes. That's it. So I'm going to... Ah yes, I know, since the text was a bit long, perhaps, yes, I held off. I'll read it to you in full, without stopping too much, except for passages of current interest. Everyone will take from it what they can — again, it's so dense that not everything can be clarified at the same level.
1:36:47 But... I'll read you this passage in continuation, more or less, of what I just read. Certainly, still in the remarks on Antigone: "Certainly, the manner in which, right at the center, time turns, is hardly modifiable. No more than the manner in which a temperament categorically follows categorical time. Nor that in which this passes from the Greek to the Hesperian." There, I have to explain this to you.
1:37:18 There is what is Greek for Hölderlin and what for us is modern. What he calls, for us, modern, he calls Hesperian. "Hesper" is the Greek version. You find it in "Vesper," in "Vespers," the evening masses. It's what is the setting sun, the West. That's us. So, you see, in the course of a day, as in that of a work of art, it's already clearer. A day, what is it?
1:37:48 It begins with the East, the day, that is, with morning. "I think of you, Myrtho, divine enchantress, of your brow flooded with Orient's brightness, of the black grape mingled with the gold of your tresses." So, a day is the sun rising over the first civilizations of human history, the great civilizations of the Far East, the Middle East, doesn't matter, isn't it — Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, etc.
1:38:20 That's the morning. Then this sun, isn't it, hangs at noon above Greece, at the classical moment, at the moment of a miraculous balance, and from there, declines down to us, isn't it? The decline is not a value judgment, it doesn't mean we are inferior, far from it. You'll see that Hölderlin, who long believed Greece was unsurpassable, will come to understand, late, like Hegel and like others, like Rimbaud too, that the West brought something more still.
1:38:54 So, all this to tell you that when he says Hesperian, think of it as an occidental twilight, so to speak. That's geographical, and historically, it means what is modern, as opposed to what is ancient, in opposition to what is ancient. So, here it is. "Certainly, the manner in which, right at the center, time turns, is hardly modifiable, no more than the manner in which a temperament categorically follows categorical time, nor that in which this passes from the Greek to the Hesperian."
1:39:28 "It is otherwise with the divine names, under which the highest" — you see, he doesn't say "God," some proper noun, the highest — "is felt or comes to pass." "The reply relates to Creon's curse." He quotes here, very briefly, an excerpt from Sophocles' text: "It will not be much longer, father, under a jealous sun." And there, it's this figure of the sun that has often been a divinity in many... Look at the Incas, look of course at the cult of the sun under Akhenaten, in ancient Egypt.
1:40:03 Let me take this opportunity for a little historical aside. Historians specializing in this period, particularly in Roman decadence, which is long and very rich in religious beliefs. You know that in Pompeii — Pompeii was the Beverly Hills, the Hollywood of Rome, more or less — there were the second homes of the wealthiest Romans.
1:40:34 In Pompeii, there was a temple of Isis, the Egyptian goddess, there were all sorts of Eastern religions, the cult of Mithras, the solar divinity was highly developed. There you go. And it's been noted that this went well with the imperial cult in decadent Rome. Why? Because the sun is not transcendence — it is there, we see it with our eyes, it is not a beyond, it is not a kingdom that is not of this world. On the contrary, the sun is the very lamp that illuminates and magnifies the world around us.
1:41:05 It is the world of the here-below and not that of the beyond. But, compared to the stars for instance, the sun centralizes the sky. It is the hearth of the rays. And as such, you see how the symbolic order works. It is a prefiguration — and this will happen soon — because Christianity is going to settle in Rome and drive out all the other gods, isn't it, for all of Europe and for a good long while. So, it has often been noted that the solar cult, if it was so fashionable at the moment of the passage from antiquity to the modern world, from pagan antiquity to the Christian modern world, is precisely because it already prefigures monotheism — but an immanent monotheism, not a transcendent one.
1:41:56 I'm telling you all this because you'll see he lingers on the example of the sun. "On earth, among men, the sun, just as it physically becomes a center of relation" — a center of relation, you see the symbolic order — "can no less effectively become a center from the moral point of view." Let me just check, it sounds like the security services — I hope there's no fire in the house. I'll tell you right away.
1:42:26 So, no, it's fine. OK. So, I don't have... OK. So, excuse me. What is that?
1:43:04 Yes, it's fine. No. That's off. It's fine. "On earth, among men, the sun, just as it physically becomes a center of relation, can no less effectively become a center from the moral point of view." And he quotes — all this while analyzing the text — "I know that, like the desert, she has become..." He's speaking of Niobe. "No doubt the highest trait of Antigone" — there it's Hölderlin taking up the pen again — "the sublime presumption" — you saw how she defies the head of the city; among the Greeks, it's unthinkable to stand up to the city like that.
Niobe, sublime presumption, and the desert 1:43:41 "The sublime presumption is the sacred delirium and the highest manifestation of man" — it's the sacred delirium, not the kind of delirium you see in bars any old time — it's the sacred delirium and the highest manifestation of man, here more soul than speech, surpasses everything she has been able to say up to now." You see the superlatives? It's not only in Hegel, from earlier. Ah, the poor wretches!
1:44:11 Poor wretch! And we must also speak here of beauty in the superlative, because man's supreme bearing rests, among other things, also on the superlative of the human spirit and of heroic virtuosity. "It is a great resource of the soul in its secret work, that at the moment of highest consciousness" — in this dialogue she has with Creon, which is in public, she humiliates him in public — "it is a great resource of the soul in its secret work, that at the moment of highest consciousness, it eludes the soul of consciousness, and before the present God actually seizes hold of it, it confronts him with a bold, and often even blasphemous word, thus keeping alive the sacred possibility of the spirit."
1:45:03 Well, I must say, that's a spirit — it's not very conservative, this spirit here, it's not an idealist spirit. Consciousness — but what became of the sun? We're getting there. "Consciousness at its peak always compares itself then" — look how Hölderlin teaches us what the symbolic order is — "to objects" — a symbol is a subject figured as an object, by an object — "which have no consciousness" — an object which has no consciousness, since it is an object — "but which welcome, in their sharing, the form of consciousness."
1:45:43 If it's obscure, don't worry, he explains right away. Such an object, that's what a country that has become a desert is, we return to it in the sun. I'm talking about global warming. Do you think I'm joking? No, quite the opposite, I'm being as serious as can be. I'd even say that the seriousness of the problem of global warming, essentially, lies there. That is, it's in our heads well before it's...
1:46:13 There is a warming, but nothing extraordinary about it, or even tragic for its inhabitant. I lived for a long time, as I've told you, in Sahel countries, for example, I'm thinking of Niger or Mali—there's such richness in rock engravings in the most desolate and deserted places in the world, the most uninhabited, in perhaps the most desert-like spot in the Sahara, which is immense, namely the Ténéré—there are rock engravings over kilometers and square kilometers, depicting what? Animals, but animals...
1:46:52 Often they're bovids, but a bovid already eats quite a lot of grass and fodder. But there are hippopotamuses, which eat 150 kg of grass a year, there are elephants! Can you imagine what it takes to feed an elephant every day? I'm not saying the Sahara was Normandy, but it was a marshland. It wasn't the desert it is now. Does that mean the Earth has been warm for 10,000 years, well before the pressure of industry, which humans contribute to and worsen the situation? That's no doubt undeniable. But we mustn't mix things up.
1:47:22 On the other hand, there is in us a fantasy of drying up, of anguish, of the dry mouth, of moral thirst, of spiritual thirst. We speak of crossing the desert for mystics who can no longer write or express themselves. Now, here's what he's saying. Consciousness thus compares itself to a country that has become a desert, which, in the original exuberance of its fecundity, excessively amplifies the effects of sunlight and thereby becomes arid.
1:47:55 We saw this in Nerval, there's a dream in Aurélia, isn't there? Where he is in a garden where you almost need to put stakes under the branches, so much does it bend under fecundity—the opposite of dryness—bend under the weight of the fruits. But precisely, there's such a profusion of vitality that it ends up draining all the energy, doesn't it? And the garden becomes a desert again. Remember that dream from Aurélia. The fate of Niobe the Phrygian, as everywhere, the fate of innocent nature which everywhere, in its virtuosity, moves toward the excessively organic, in exact proportion as man approaches the aorgic, in more heroic circumstances and in the movements of the heart.
1:48:42 Niobe is thus truly the symbol of premature genius. And here, he quotes something that applies to Danae. Perhaps painting lovers know the many illustrations that painters of different eras, particularly the great Italians, but not only them, have given to the myth of Danae. You know that Zeus has several ways of impregnating a mortal. Sometimes he disguises himself as a swan, doesn't he? And that gives the union of Zeus and Leda, which will produce Castor and Pollux.
1:49:16 Sometimes in the form of a heifer, sometimes—and this is one of the most original—he disguises himself as a shower of gold. There's a very beautiful painting. Not by Veronese, excuse me, I have Veronese on my mind. But, ah! Well, there are several.
1:49:46 There's a Rembrandt, there's a Veronese, and then there's one of Danae where you see the... the shower of gold with the servant standing there, beside the nudity of Danae's body. And here, Hölderlin quotes an excerpt from the chorus of Antigone, where the chorus reminds Antigone that many other bold women like her have suffered fate and the punishment of the gods. They counted, for the Father of time, the strokes of the hour with golden chimes.
1:50:26 A practical exercise I recommend: put Danae into Google Images, and you'll see marvelous paintings. It's difficult to depict, isn't it, the impregnation of a woman by a shower of gold. The seats of the symbol, so to speak. So, there you are. I'm watching, yes, the time for questions is approaching.
The relevance today of the public-private divide; Hegel against naturalism 1:50:56 And since the material is rich, before handing over to you, I'd still like to say that if I've gathered all this material today, it's first of all to really get into the character of Antigone. And we're going to see... we already see more and more in what way she represents the supreme ethical opposition. Why can this tragedy, written 2415 years ago, still deserve our attention? Because the opposition... what must remain public and what must remain private?
1:51:30 That's a question that has rarely been as topical as it is right now, isn't it? Look, a dominant ideology coming, as if by chance, from Puritan cultures—Protestant, hence Puritan—which have dominated the world since Waterloo. Perhaps for better, perhaps for worse, I'm not even deciding, I'm trying to be honest. In any case, they are Puritan, that is, they want flagrant offenses, they want to accuse in public. There's no private life for these cultures, there's no that sacred separation, isn't there, that Hegel tries to articulate between the necessity of preserving a public domain and the necessity of preserving a private domain.
1:52:13 And to do this, before we part, I absolutely want to... Yes, that's it. So... That's roughly...
1:52:52 There. I'll finish with a text that will force us to dialecticize those who think that Hegel gives primacy to unity, to the city, that he's almost on the side of Creon against Antigone, who represents, doesn't she, the liberal temptation, the private if you prefer.
1:53:37 So, you'll see that things are much richer than this one-sidedness. First, there's a critique of ecologism. Yes indeed, a critique written in 1820—delicious. Conceptions of innocence, of the state of nature, of the simplicity of manners of primitive peoples. We're stuffed with that, the media, 100 times a day, every day.
1:54:07 And on the other hand... So, on the opposite side, you see how dialectical he is. You see that he dismisses both sides equally. Sensuality, for whom, in a very general sense, needs, their satisfaction, the pleasures and comforts of particular life are absolute ends. The libertine and the traditionalist, if you will, both have the same corollary. Well, well, the same consequence—how strange.
1:54:38 The belief in the external character of culture. Both reject culture. In the first case, among traditionalists, it's regarded as corrupting. In the second, as a mere means, a means to my ends. Both opinions denote a misunderstanding of the nature of spirit and the ends of reason. Spirit, reason, culture, all go together. And here, Hegel's point of view, you see it clearly, spirit has its reality only...
1:55:10 So, you see that... So it's not always the case, but under certain conditions—you'll see which one...
Reading of Hölderlin's hymn The Rhine 2:03:29 I don't know—wait, the point had disappeared from the outline, so it was just there, hold on—ah, there it is, an excerpt, you know, that I've already told you, I'd even quoted it, but it had gone into Hölderlin. I've already told you, I'd even quoted a few excerpts, that in these last great hymns, Hölderlin often takes rivers as his subject, precisely. So here's the connection, the rivers. At the source of the Danube, the Rhine, the Ister, which is the ancient Greek name for the Danube.
2:04:01 There are quite a few like that. And here's what he says here, in the hymn called The Rhine. One of the most magnificent. About the relationship between the river and its banks. Look carefully, it's incredible that Jean-Paul sends me this. It's to thank him that I take the liberty of sending it back. Here, I'm in the Pléiade edition. Here's Bread and Wine. We're all set.
2:04:41 There. So, the period of the great poems, here they are. I'll take it from the beginning because The Rhine. So, it's less obscure than the texts we've just read.
2:05:12 These are the last great hymns before the... a more difficult problem. Amid the dark ivy, at the edges of the forest, I sat at the very hour when golden noon, golden noon, mind you, visitor of the source, descended step by step the mountains of the Alps. I remind you that the Rhine and the Rhône, R-H in both cases, come from an old root, which we also find in Heraclitus's 'everything flows,' panta rhei, to flow.
2:05:50 We also have the word 'rhythm,' R-H, don't we? So it's no accident—Hölderlin, who knows all this very well, knows Greek well. Amid the dark ivy, at the edges of the forest, I sat at the very hour when golden noon, visitor of the source, descended step by step the mountains of the Alps. The Rhine and the Rhône take their source in the Alps, a stone's throw from one another, one, descending royally toward the Mediterranean, and the other, magnificently, heading north.
2:06:23 While the Danube, which rises in the Black Forest, not far from there, goes most mysteriously back up toward the origins of history, toward the east, doesn't it? Hölderlin thought a great deal about these three figures. Since the sentence can't be broken up, I'll repeat it and continue. Amid the dark ivy, at the edges of the forest, I sat at the very hour when golden noon, visitor of the source, descended step by step the mountains of the Alps, that celestial architecture, the Alps, which is for me named the citadel of the gods, the fortress of the gods, according to ancient belief, but from which even now many a decree, as if there were a storm, many a decree mysteriously reaches men—thus it was that of a fate I made the discovery, unforeseeable, for it says the poet, for just now my soul was still in reverie, à la Rousseau, taking its siesta, for just now still, my soul, in the warm shade, lost with itself in many a conversation, 'wandered the length of Italy.'
2:07:26 Look, we're on the banks of the Rhine and he dreams of Italy, beyond Greece, look carefully, 'the length of Italy and the shores over there of the Morea'—the poet dreamed on the banks of the Rhine of Greece. But now, we come back, 'when deep within the mountain, far below the silver of the peaks,' we come back here, into the northern forest setting, and beneath the joyful green, there where the trembling forests and the rocky peaks, one above the other, lean toward him throughout the days, down there at the most icy point of the abyss, I heard the long plea for deliverance raised by the youth—for at the start, even the greatest rivers are torrents, moaning, they make noise—the long plea for deliverance raised by the youth, and moved with pity, his parents listened to him crying out his furious reproaches to his mother, the earth, and to the master of the thunderbolt who begot him.
2:08:20 But mortals fled that place, for it was a fearful thing, while, twisted in those blind bonds, the demigod's anger raged. That is, the Rhine's, of course, like any great river. That was the path of the noblest of rivers, the one born free, the Rhine, and hope led it elsewhere. When to his brothers up there, the Ticino and the Rhône—you see—he had said farewell, drunk with departure, and toward Asia, impatient, his royal soul carried him, like the Danube, he wanted to return to the origins.
2:08:53 But before destiny, all clear-sightedness refused itself to desire, and the blindest are still the sons of the gods. For man, man knows his dwelling, and the beast the place to build its own. But this, to the sons of the gods, was given—this flaw, in their utterly naive souls—not to know where they are going. That is why their word rises, we're getting there. The dialectic of the banks and the river, I really like what Brecht says about it—that is why their word rises like a cry of joy.
2:09:27 It cannot be content thus, like other children, with swaddling clothes and tears. See, at the place where the banks—Jean-Paul—where the banks begin, treacherously, to bend at his side their caress, to enclose him in their greedy embrace and burn to seize him, to keep him forever, the reckless one, ready for their fangs—how he laughs, the Rhine, and breaks that serpent's knot and rushes on with his prey.
2:09:58 And if some higher power does not tame his leaping, see him grow. It's the lightning that streaks and tears the earth, followed by a fleeing procession of enchanted forests amid the collapse of mountains. Well then, this is cataclysmic here. This is excess. It's not even human anymore. But look at what follows. I'll end on the first paragraph of what comes next, I promise. But a god could not abandon his sons to this tumultuous life.
2:10:28 And he smiles when the rivers, from out of the depths, thus the Rhine, irrepressible and yet contained by the sacred Alps, cast at him the roar of their fury, a thundering forge, a crucible, where among things the purest is elaborated. And how beautiful it is, then—we're passing from the river's adolescence to its maturity—and how beautiful it is to see it, far from the abandoned mountains, savor the rest of a slow journey across the German countryside, when it grants relief to its longing through deeds full of effect.
2:11:07 The builder of the country, you know, the one who drives mills, dams, dikes, the builder of the country, the Rhine, the father, to his beloved children, bringing nourishment to the cities he founded. You see, it began in the inhumanity of the very high mountain where there's nothing left but rock, not even trees anymore. That's beyond the timberline, as the Anglo-Saxons say. And now it's said, isn't it, in the cities, to his beloved children, bringing nourishment to the cities he founded.
Faith and doubt; the edge in Rimbaud and Nerval 2:11:39 There, thank you very much Jean-Paul, and bravo, and good luck with the rest of this magnificent campaign, of which you're far from done. A nice formulation from Abderrahim, I quote it—it's not a question, but a fine formulation that deserves to be shared.
2:12:12 Faith requires doubting one's certainties and being certain of one's doubts—a long road before getting there. That makes me think of two things, doesn't it? A Christian one and a Nietzschean one, which couldn't be more opposed, but which both converge with what Abderrahim just said here. I think first of Nietzsche—I'm not taking it in chronological order, I'll quote the Gospel after Nietzsche, but anyway, Nietzsche, in Zarathustra, in the first part actually, Zarathustra says to the crowd, it's not your sin that scandalizes heaven, it's your satisfaction.
2:12:54 It's when you're pleased with yourself that you see sins only in others. It's not your sin that scandalizes heaven, it's your satisfaction. And yes, in the Gospel, there are many people who crowd around Christ like that, who adore him in the pejorative sense—and in the pejorative sense, when I was a kid, I was at an aunt's who was still very traditionalist, and I said to her 'Oh, I adore the way I made the potatoes with bacon,' and I got a slap and she answered me, 'We only adore God.'
2:13:28 So, in the pejorative sense, one mustn't over-adore either. Christ answers: 'Those who say to me Lord, Lord'—well, those who, in all religious manifestations, are among the most caricatured forms of adoration—'those who say to me Lord, Lord' and who insult their brothers will be called liars. Bear in mind that the community must first reconcile with itself before looking any higher, mustn't it?
2:14:03 And then, there, that gives two elements that come to mind to illustrate Abderrahim's fine remark. So, the edge as that which brings us closer to the limit—yes, exactly, but don't tempt me, that doesn't deserve the time of an answer to a question, that doesn't deserve a session, it deserves a whole cycle of sessions, the notion of the edge, doesn't it?
2:14:33 Take, for example, The Drunken Boat, doesn't it? It's the text of eccentricity, for instance, moving away from the center—it comes somewhat from the Middle West, I'm serious, it begins with 'As I was going down impassive Rivers, I felt myself no longer guided by haulers: Yelping redskins had taken them as targets and nailed them naked to colored stakes.' Oh my, we're far from the decadence of the period, the blur, the impressionism—not blurry at all, as Rimbaud mocks all that, suddenly, vivid colors, nailed them naked to colored stakes.
2:15:15 Well, and then you see, and from then on I bathed myself in the Poem of the Sea, it's eccentricity, there's no limit there, the sea is limitless, it's not the river with its banks. In the Poem of the Sea, infused with stars, and turning milky, devouring the green azures. I'll skip some. Glaciers, silver suns, waves, pearly skies, embers. And then all of a sudden there's a gold, O-R, however, in the middle of the poem, we've arrived at the edge, at the limit, and the movement of return is going to happen, isn't it?
2:15:50 You see? Now I, a boat lost beneath the hair of coves, thrown by the hurricane into the birdless ether—I, whose wreck, drunk with water, neither Monitors nor the sailing ships of the Hansa would have fished up, drunk with water, free, smoking, risen from violet mist. The Hansa, the Hanseatic maritime companies—if you see the German cars, sometimes there's HH marked on the license plate, that's Hamburg, Hansestadt Hamburg, Hanseatic city. I, whose wreck, drunk with water, the Monitors and the sailing ships of the Hansa would not have fished up.
2:16:20 I, who pierced the reddening sky like a wall—you see, there's no limit. When there's a wall, you pierce it. I, who pierced the reddening sky like a wall, bearing, exquisite jam for good poets, lichens of sunlight and mucus of azure—no one before this 17-year-old kid had dared, in a text, associate azure with mucus. I, who trembled, feeling groan—you see, all this is past, there's been a reversal—I who trembled, feeling groan fifty leagues away the rut of Behemoths, the great monsters of the Bible, and the thick Maelstroms, eternal spinner of blue immobilities, I miss Europe with its ancient parapets.
2:17:03 Good grief. We started from the Middle West and we're returning to old Europe. And note, not to just any Europe, not to Piccadilly Circus or the Champs-Élysées, no, the Europe of ancient parapets. We're at the opposite of the sea, of the liquid, of the limitless—the parapet, the limit, the edge, the rampart, the hard. Perhaps we must retreat indefinitely toward the limit.
2:17:33 I say this, I'll leave the poem there. I saw stellar archipelagos, the constellations of stars, I saw stellar archipelagos, the sea became the sky and islands whose delirious skies are open to voyagers. Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep and exile yourself, millions of golden birds, oh future Vigor. There. Yes, this is a text which, among a thousand others, illustrates, doesn't it, the function I call "switching".
2:18:09 It's a term I borrow from computing, of which I don't know much, but I think I understood that it's a way of passing from one thing to its opposite, its inverse. I was telling you earlier, "switching" of the vertical and the horizontal when it's the cliff, isn't it, of rest and movement when it's the riverbank. It makes… And remember that specialist on Nerval, I don't much like the word specialist, that great connoisseur of Nerval's work who said that Nerval, he was commenting on that extraordinary letter to Georges Bell where he says of one of his last journeys, a year before his death, "a marvel yesterday evening on touching the banks of the Rhine."
2:18:56 So a bank is not just any bank, the bank where France ends, where Germany begins, how overdetermined that is, it's not just any bank. A marvel yesterday on touching the banks of the Rhine, and we know that his mother is buried far away, beyond the Rhine to the East. I found my voice, VOX, again, and my faculties. I felt myself blazing in the sunlight of my finest days and I composed a sonnet, you see, as if — and this is what the critic says, I wanted to quote him, he says, Nerval was one of those beings for whom borders are not lines — before the line, you're not there yet, after it, you're no longer there — but spaces on which one can remain, remain balanced on this edge, exactly as I had concluded the last of the analytic reveries that we published, and I'll allow myself to recommend it to you, the series on the reading of Promenades et souvenirs by Nerval, whose subject,
2:20:06 and it starts like this: it is truly becoming difficult to find lodging in Paris, it is truly becoming difficult to find lodging in Paris — which is the connection with the dead — is that in the end, after trying other solutions, living in the suburbs, this, that, he ends up, because of a rainstorm at Senlis, taking refuge in the wagon, in the caravan, of traveling people, of Roma. Of Roma — he realizes, when he is in the caravan where he is kindly welcomed, that they are in the middle of working, rehearsing plays, because these are people who earn their living by putting on shows, street shows, as we'd say today, at each of their stops.
2:20:46 He says, but that's the solution: neither be sedentary nor nomadic, but both at once. To be in a house, a home — there one is sedentary — but a home that moves collectively. So I refer you to that, and there, you see, we've arrived at an edge of a problem too. Before, it was either sedentary or nomadic.
2:21:16 Now, where I'm speaking to you from, there are conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, between herders, the nomads, since the herds must go through transhumance, between the nomads, the Fulani for example, and the farmers, and that often causes deaths. And there, it's both at once. That's the reflection, a bit of an analytic reverie, that I'll allow myself to pass on to Marc.
2:21:51 That is, I answer these questions with another question. And this question brings me back to Hölderlin, who, in exactly the same spirit, poses this question, which seems simple, but is strange. Look closely at how it's phrased. Where — grave accent — where shall we want to stay? Not where shall we stay, that rather depends on fate, but where shall we want to stay?
2:22:25 In what place — I think it's the edge, personally — but in what other place could one decide, there, now, here, we can stop, here it's worth letting time flow, letting it pass. Where shall we want to stay? Here is a modern question, here is a present-day question. Where might that be? In what form of constitution? In what state? In what regime? Where shall we want to stay?
2:22:57 "Where" with the grave accent implies there's a movement, a quest, a journey, we're in the middle of walking, we haven't stopped walking for a long time. Someone who says that has been searching for a long time. And at the same time, there's the word "stay," the opposite of all that. There, I'll leave it on these dialectics. Yes, just a moment, I think there's a small problem.
2:23:37 So there, one couldn't better sum up this dialectic of the edge than with this question. Yes, each word is simple, the question seems simple, and yet it's strangely phrased. Where shall we want to stay? I repeat that, for once, I'll allow myself to recommend one of my talks, the one in two parts on culture, followed roughly by one of Nerval's last texts, "Promenades et souvenirs",
2:24:14 and which begins with a question that has never been more relevant — I'm thinking especially of young people, poor things — which is: "It is truly becoming difficult to find lodging in Paris." It's simply getting more and more expensive. He tries everything, the suburbs, etc. And he ends up sheltering, because of a rainstorm, at Senlis, in this house, in this Roma caravan. For that, I did it in two parts. The first is "Should one be nomadic?"
2:24:46 The Fulani, or "sedentary"? The Hausa, as I illustrated earlier. One could take plenty of other examples — the Maasai and the Kikuyu in Kenya, for instance. It's an old story. And in the Western genre, that's practically all there is. It's often the conflict between the Texans who want to drive through those 2000 cows that come to graze on the crops the farmer had such trouble growing in the drought of Kansas. There. So, nomadic or sedentary?
2:25:17 And so, taking shelter in that caravan, seeing that family begin rehearsing little street-show scenes, Nerval says, "But that's the solution!" And I called the first part "nomadic or sedentary" for the question. The second, "nomadic and sedentary." Where shall we want to stay? Perhaps, perhaps — I don't know in how many generations — perhaps in an immense space station, which would be the caravan of the future.
2:25:57 There, I'll stop there; beyond that it becomes a bit idly speculative. But thank you in any case for that question. Now, Abderrahim — him too, I greet, and I also greet our listeners from Algeria, they are numerous, and I put myself in their place. It's easy enough for me to say this, I know how hard it is.
Migrants, the Terror, and the order of the Encyclopedia 2:26:27 But, who says this fine formula: alienated democracy is probably far more murderous than the worst of tyrannies. The epileptic crisis is inevitable. Christian Régnier asks this question: "Letting human beings die by the thousands at sea while fleeing the odious present that the powers impose on them."
2:27:00 I'm very grateful to Christian for saying not that their totalitarian states impose it on them, but that the powers do. You see, he leaves it undetermined, and he's quite right. Let's not forget that Gaddafi's Libya, that wasn't my cup of tea, but still, it wasn't today's nightmare, was it? Look at the reports on slavery — but it was appalling. Anyway. And the poor wretches who drown every night.
2:27:31 Now, today, it's not just the Mediterranean anymore. There were 20 deaths today, weren't there, in the Channel, among migrants heading from Normandy to England. 20 dead, 26 rescued, and 20 pulled out for whom it was too late. Letting human beings die by the thousands at sea, says Christian. So they don't say by their totalitarian states, but by the powers. Now, Iraq and Libya have been plunged into this chaos since the foreign interventions.
2:28:03 And in particular since the Second Gulf War, which the UN hadn't even authorized. Yet the UN isn't such a fearsome police force. There. So, I look. Christian, again, asks me: "Death as absolute master," taking up Hegel's formula, "is this the revolutionary terror as the necessary eruption of the negative?"
2:28:33 Now there, I'll allow myself to dodge — no, not to shirk it, let me reassure him, on the contrary, this deserves a very detailed answer — but I'll answer through Hegel himself, who devotes an entire chapter of the Phenomenology to this question, called "Terror." Well, a sub-chapter, an important division called "The Terrors." I'll simply tell him, to anticipate a little on the content, that Hegel says at that point that heads are cut off like cabbages.
2:29:07 It's a moment when he warns against revolutionary formalism, not against revolution. Hegel never ceased proclaiming his fidelity to that immense dawn, as he himself puts it, which the French Revolution was, and which was nevertheless much opposed in Germany in his time, in the midst of the Restoration. But still, I mean, as to its excesses, he said: beware of revolutionary formalism, one would need to…
2:29:38 Now, two texts by Hegel that I quoted, Abderrahim, again him, who says: "One should offer this kind of text to the representatives of the UN, it might save them precious time wasted in illusory conjectures." Can one see, asks Guillaume, in the clan division described by Rousseau, a link with the first moment of the will described by Hegel? Yes, of course, but the dialectical movement can proceed in whichever direction one likes.
2:30:12 One can start with the second moment and follow with the first. I'm alluding here to the very last paragraph of the immense Encyclopedia. It's often said that the proof Hegel is an idealist is that in the Encyclopedia he says there are three circles that link together, the logos, nature, spirit — so everything begins with the logos, with ideas — but on the next page, he says one could just as well start with nature, then the logos, then spirit, or with spirit, then the logos, then nature, it doesn't matter.
2:30:42 It's like a rectangular box that one could rest on whichever face one likes. The point is that it always keeps the same structure and the same order. There. I think we'll stop there for today, because I've imposed on you texts of rather exceptional density, especially those devoted to tragic conflict by Hölderlin. And I thank you, I see through your question how deeply you've engaged with our journey, with the small community we form along this path, and I'm very grateful and thankful to you for that.
2:31:29 I wish better temperatures on Abderrahim, who says that while waiting for global warming, he's freezing cold. There. And I wish you excellent days until next time, in two weeks. We'll see you then. But in the meantime, you know well — and this will be my last sentence — that I haven't forgotten all those who have asked questions and to whom I haven't replied, either today or last time, when I was a bit rushed talking about the wokes. So don't worry, no question will be forgotten, even if it means holding special sessions between two episodes of our serial on femininity and community in Hegel.
2:32:14 Have a very good evening, and thank you all. Thank you.
