English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Aesthetics and politics: two conceptions of the poet 0:30 Good morning everyone, good evening rather. I've lost the habit. In sub-Saharan Africa, our African friends say good evening from 12 noon on.
1:00 Always very happy to be back with you, friends, comrades, the confined, the de-confining—I don't know how to put it anymore, because even France has been singled out. People in Europe, it's one of those most threatening to re-confine. It's not the only one, but it's one that... Yes, just in case the Gilets Jaunes take the opportunity to come back to the forefront, that wouldn't be good after all. So it's always good to have an iron in the fire to say...
1:30 The first one who doesn't comply, whatever it may be, there's always some pretext found, distances, etc. Everyone will be re-confined. Anyway, the confined, the de-confining, let's not be pessimistic for now. I'm happy to invite you this evening to reflect on the relation of the aesthetic to the political—politics, I mean, not political politics of course, but...
2:02 In short, from the aesthetic field to the political field. Now of course, that makes two big... I was going to say balloons. Those are two big subjects that would take us too far, for which we absolutely wouldn't have time to speak seriously, as one would need to do if it were a course over several weeks, several months, on even just one of these two notions. But our subject isn't aesthetics or politics, it's the relation between the two.
2:32 And to go very quickly, the relation, in particular the antithetical relation, in that there are artists—I'm thinking especially of writers here—for whom, for example, the aesthetic, through the arts of language, essentially poetry, literature in general and poetry in particular, must be the highest expression of the collective.
3:20 That's the original vocation of the griot, I spoke about this at length on other occasions. The griot, the aoidos, the bard, whatever you want to call it, existed in every culture. But since sub-Saharan Africa is the continent of orality par excellence, even if literacy is making very noticeable progress, I like the figure of the griot as a metonymy to speak about all this.
3:53 and who, as you know, is at once poet and historian, since he does the genealogies of princes, a bit like in the Bible, you see—one says Solomon, son of David, Isaac, Jacob, son of son of son of—the lineages, since in a memory that was originally oral, this has to be understood. Oral memory cannot go back as far as written memory.
4:24 Imagine if the ancient Egyptians hadn't had access to writing—we'd be in trouble, we'd have stones without text. And we wouldn't know that, say, in such-and-such a year, the pharaoh crushed the Hittites. And so on. First conception: total conjunction of the poetic—to sum up the aesthetic world, I'll qualify this later, we'll nuance it—of the poetic and the political, to make a sort of little symmetry, if only for the ear, and an example: the griot.
5:12 And then, not only that—all the writers and poets who each, in their own way, positioned themselves as the supreme expression of the collective interest, the collectivity being able to be the city, the tribe, whatever, here, more rarely a nation. Let's take two extremes, if you will.
5:43 The bard of the collectivity—that's mostly in antiquity, but we'll see through some very beautiful texts by Victor Hugo that it can carry on into the modern world—and at the opposite end, the accursed poet. Nothing is less accursed than the great dramatic poets of ancient Greece, for example. The Sophocleses, the Euripideses, were considered demigods, to the point that there are legends and myths surrounding their biography.
6:16 Aeschylus, they say he died because an eagle came down from the clouds and split his skull open, you see? A sign of election, the emblem of Zeus, of demigods. Whereas the accursed poet is the one who agonizes in a garret, nobody publishes him, and he's haunted by anguish, by madness, even suicide, or both. I'm thinking of Nerval. There you go. But so as not to remain abstract, I'm warning you right away that there's a certain order to what we'll see today.
6:55 I'll start by illustrating these two points of view: the poet as expression of the collective, and on the contrary the poet for whom true poetry and art have nothing to do with goals external to art itself. I'm thinking of course of art for art's sake, which is typical of this point of view here, and whose sole purpose is to produce beauty, not truth, goodness, beauty, truth, goodness, justice. That's the business of politicians, men of action, jurists, doctors while we're at it, but not of the artist, who must devote himself to producing beauty.
7:34 So we're going to start by illustrating these two points of view, to make it a bit more concrete, and then we'll see clearly that the concepts get blurred when you move from one to the other, that it's not as opposed as all that. And so in a second part I'll be a bit more abstract, and we'll reflect on the concept of aesthetics itself, right? And in what way it's a part of philosophy.
8:06 Why is it necessary in philosophy not to skip over aesthetics? This will allow us perhaps to review the fundamental options of philosophy, without of course leaving aside the political question either. Right, so I told you: the poet expressing, the poet as the standard-bearer of his collectivity, right?
Reading of Hugo's "Stella" 8:36 You have a beautiful poem by Hugo, taken from Les Châtiments, called Stella, which means "star" in Latin. You'll easily understand through the text what it's about. A small remark in passing: Rimbaud, who is very harsh toward all those who preceded him, in the famous "Letter of the Seer," where he writes to his rhetoric teacher—a literature teacher at the time—reversing the roles, says "I'm going to give you a lesson in literature."
9:07 He's 17 years old, addressing his teacher—a teacher who was appalled, fascinated, and who had great affection for this exceptional pupil, lost in the Ardennes, if I may say so, in Charleville. But as Rimbaud says, in the provinces you feed on mud and starchy food. So Rimbaud, regarding this poem, this poem by Hugo that I'm going to read you, that is, Stella, after showing Hugo's qualities and his flaws, in this letter measures all the poets before him by this criterion—it's famous—to what extent are they seers?
9:47 The poet must be a seer, I say one must be a seer—it comes back obsessively—and so he reviews, from the Greeks up to his own time, all the poets, to what extent they have seen. Until he reaches, practically his own era, where he says Baudelaire is the first of the seers, king of poets, a true god. But still, a few had some glimpses before him, and Hugo, and he says Stella gives roughly—so the poem I'm going to read you—the measure of Hugo's sight.
10:24 So that means in this poem we find the best and the least beautiful of our national Victor. But judge for yourselves. Ah yes, of course, the poem was written while he was in exile, you know, on the so-called Anglo-Norman islands, Jersey and Guernsey. "I had fallen asleep at night near the shore. A cool wind woke me. I rose from my dream."
10:55 "I opened my eyes, I saw the morning star. It shone at the far end of the distant sky, in a soft, infinite, charming whiteness. The North Wind fled, carrying the storm with it." You know, Aquilon is the north wind, the bad weather. "The North Wind fled, carrying the storm. The dazzling star turned the cloud into down. It was a light that thought, that lived."
11:26 "It calmed the reef where the wave broke. One thought one saw a soul through a pearl. It was still night. The shadow reigned in vain. The sky lit up with a divine smile." You'll tell me, I don't see where the contribution to politics is. Let's be patient. "The gleam silvered the top of the leaning mast. The ship was black, but the sail was white. Gulls standing on a bluff attentively gazed gravely at the star."
11:59 "Like a celestial bird made of a spark, the ocean, which resembles the people, moved toward it, toward the star, and roared low. It watched it shine and seemed afraid of making it fly away. An ineffable love filled the expanse. The green grass at my feet trembled, overwhelmed. The birds spoke to one another in their nests." He's right, Rimbaud. I don't know if there's lesser quality in it, but in any case, there's the best of Hugo there, in pure poetry.
12:31 "The green grass at my feet trembled, overwhelmed. The birds spoke to one another in their nests. A flower that was waking said to me, 'It's the star, my sister.' And while in long folds the shadow lifted its veil, I heard a voice that came from the star, and which said: I am the star that comes first. I am the one believed to be in the tomb, and who emerges. I shone on Sinai, I shone on Taygetus."
13:05 "I am the golden and fiery pebble that God casts, as with a sling, at the black brow of night. I am that which is reborn when a world is destroyed. O nations"—plural. "I am burning poetry. I shone on Moses"—you see, the great leaders, the great guides of peoples—"I shone on Moses and I shone on Dante. The ocean lion is in love with me."
13:38 "I am coming. Rise up, virtue, courage, faith. Thinkers, spirits, climb the tower, sentinel. Eyelids, open; pupils, light up. Earth, stir the furrow; life, awaken the sound. Rise, you who sleep, for he who follows me, for he who sends me on ahead, is the angel Liberty, is the giant Light." Ah yes, that's contemporary with the barricades and with this century whose coming Rousseau had sensed when he said we are approaching the age of crisis and the century of revolutions.
Baudelaire and the heresy of teaching 14:19 There you go, as if he had sensed in advance the extraordinary portrait of Gavroche drawn by Hugo in Les Misérables. Now, the antithesis: I'll move on to a text by Baudelaire taken from a text titled "New Notes"—plural—"New Notes on Edgar Poe." Baudelaire is one of those who, most decisively, introduced Edgar Poe into France, and who quickly became a guiding master of the whole new literary movement, and who translated him, sometimes making mistranslations.
15:02 He wasn't a professor of English like Mallarmé, but he had such empathy with Edgar Poe's content that his translation remains an unmatched reference apart from a few small mistranslations here and there that a good final-year student wouldn't make, but which are rare. So this text, "New Notes on Edgar Poe," is called that because it serves as a preface to Poe's New Extraordinary Tales.
15:32 There you go. Three volumes essentially of narratives, of short stories, very dense tales in Edgar Poe—the Extraordinary Tales, which include the famous "Purloined Letter," on which Lacan gave a seminar that opens the collection of his writings. The New Extraordinary Tales, the Grotesque and Serious Tales, but in between, the New Extraordinary Tales have as their preface these famous notes on Edgar Poe, which I'll read to you now.
16:08 It's a long preface in which he attacks a bit the enemies of Poe, and he suddenly arrives at the passage I'm going to read you, which is precisely a reflection on what must remain properly poetic and what is external to it. "But there is another heresy which, thanks to the hypocrisy, heaviness, and baseness of minds, is far more formidable and has greater chances of enduring."
16:43 An error with a longer life. "I mean the heresy of teaching." He has nothing against teachers, but he says that in poetry it's a heresy to use poetry to teach anything whatsoever. You see, the word isn't chosen at random. Poetry is an almost sacred order for Baudelaire. The poet being the one who precisely opens up the mysteries of a world that isn't that of politics but of a vast world of correspondences and symbols.
17:21 A fault in poetry is like a fault in religion, hence the word heresy, if you will—you see the importance. "So, I mean the heresy of teaching, which necessarily includes as an inevitable corollary"—so watch out, here comes his general critique—the heresy of teaching, which has three sub-heresies, watch closely: "the heresy of passion, the heresy of truth, the heresy of morality." A text very interesting historically—well, in literary history and thus also in the history of ideas—because how can one speak of the heresy of passion, consider passion a heresy in poetry?
18:00 This is where you see we've turned the page on Romanticism. With Baudelaire, we've turned the page on Romanticism—well, on Romanticism in the strict sense, the one that ends in the middle of the century. Between Romanticism and Baudelaire there was—I won't go back over it, I've said it often—there was Realism in the novel, an anti-Romantic reaction bringing us back to things, to the world here below, and Parnassianism and art for art's sake in poetry.
18:35 That's a bit the field in which Baudelaire cut his teeth. Indeed, Les Fleurs du mal is dedicated to Théophile Gautier, who is an emblematic representative of art for art's sake and not of art for politics, for goodness, for morality—a priest of art who would fall into the heresy of wanting to teach something external to art, in this case to poetry.
19:08 So I'll continue, because he's going to detail this, you see. "I mean the heresy of teaching, which necessarily includes as an inevitable corollary the heresy of passion, of truth, and of morality. A crowd of people imagine that the purpose of poetry is some kind of teaching, that it must at times strengthen the conscience, at times perfect manners. An immoral poem is a bad one for these people."
19:38 Whereas there can be a masterpiece even if the poetry isn't very moral. True morality mocks morality, as Pascal would say. "At times, finally, prove something useful. Edgar Poe claims that Americans have particularly sponsored this heterodox idea." You see, in that puritan world, an author must above all have good morals. "Alas, one need not go as far as Boston to encounter the heresy in question."
20:10 "Right here it besieges us, and every day it undermines true poetry." So he's said what shouldn't be done. Now, something a bit more positive. "Poetry, provided one is willing to look within oneself"—now you see, that's the complete opposite of the movement at the end of Hugo's poem earlier, where the star said "I am the angel Liberty, the giant Light," turning outward, toward the world and toward society. Here, on the contrary, there's a withdrawal into interiority, right?
20:41 "So poetry, provided one is willing to descend into oneself, question one's soul, recall one's memories of enthusiasm"—all that is interiority, memory, remembrance—"poetry"—we still don't have the verb—"has no other purpose than itself. It cannot have any other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name poem as one that will have been written solely for the pleasure of writing a poem."
21:18 So you'll say, yes, but still, what use is literature then? And here he qualifies. "I do not mean that poetry does not ennoble manners—let it be well understood—that its ultimate result is not to elevate man above the level of vulgar interests." You see, its ultimate result—but it mustn't be the initial one, the poet mustn't have that as a goal before writing the poem. "That its ultimate result is not to elevate man above the level of vulgar interests would obviously be an absurdity."
21:54 "I say that if the poet has pursued a moral aim, he has diminished his poetic strength, and it is not imprudent to bet that his work will be bad." In short, it's not with good ideas that one makes beautiful verse, nor even with just ideas. There are many who don't like a certain writer because he says things that disagree with the political position of the one reading him. I don't know if that's how a writer should be judged. One must, all the same, judge his writing from time to time.
22:27 A writer. It's as if all painters who painted nudes were immoral painters. I don't mean... Well then... "Poetry cannot, on pain of death or decay, be assimilated to science or to morality." We've dwelt enough on the fact that poetry mustn't teach morality, but it mustn't teach truth in the scientific sense either. Science is there for that. He has nothing against truth, Baudelaire. "Poetry cannot, on pain of death or decay, be assimilated to science or to morality."
23:00 "It does not have truth as its object. It has only itself. The modes of demonstrating truth are other and are elsewhere." "Truth has nothing to do with songs." This recalls a bit Verlaine, a disciple of Baudelaire, who begins his Art poétique with "Music before all else." Music says nothing at all. So it speaks, yet says nothing. "Truth has nothing to do with songs."
23:30 Everything that makes for the charm, the grace, the irresistible quality of a song would take away from truth its authority and its power. Cold, calm, impassive, the demonstrative mood pushes away the diamonds and flowers of the muse. It is therefore absolutely the opposite of the poetic mood. Pure intellect reigns there. So, science, for example, aims at truth. Taste shows us beauty, and the moral sense teaches us duty.
24:02 You see, he really separates the domains. And it ends with this much more positive passage where he suddenly reveals to us the essence of what he thinks is the highest poetry. And I'm reading this to you because, although it's no longer about politics directly, at least indirectly it's something else — it's such a resurrection of Platonism in poetry, isn't it?
24:34 I can't help saying, this admirable passage. "It is this admirable, this immortal instinct for beauty that makes us consider the earth and its spectacles as a glimpse, a correspondence with heaven." You see, why get politically involved when everything we see there is a bit of a game of mirrors and illusion, where what's interesting is the extent to which what is there — you know, the back of Plato's cave — is there to make us think, to evoke by analogy, by correspondence, another world, just as the intelligible world in Plato is transcendent to the sensible world in which we live.
25:13 "So the insatiable thirst for all that is beyond, which life reveals, is the most vivid proof of our immortality." You see, there's a mysticism here. Not a religion, a mysticism. It's close, but it's not at all the same thing. It's both through poetry and through music that the soul catches a glimpse — implicitly, by flashes, by moments — that the soul catches a glimpse of the splendors situated beyond the grave.
25:48 "And when an exquisite poem brings tears to the edge of one's eyes, these tears are not proof of an excess of pleasure" — such as would now be claimed by the cognitive sciences — "they are rather the testimony of an irritated melancholy, of a postulation of a nature exiled in the imperfect, and which wants immediately, on this very earth, to seize hold of a revealed paradise." You can't get two texts more opposed than these.
Poet and hero, griot at work, Nerval "of the building trade" 26:23 So, on one side, again, the poet who is not only in solidarity with the collectivity but is its most advanced expression — the expression, there are those who act. This makes me think of a very beautiful poem by Hölderlin called "Bonaparte." I remind you that at the time, it wasn't yet Napoleon, and Bonaparte symbolized for all German minds this great figure of the French Revolution that was approaching, approaching, and that would soon rid them of their tyrants, going back to the dark ages, to the Middle Ages, their margraves, their palatine counts, and other feudal lords.
27:12 And, oh no, but that's not why I'm mentioning it. It's precisely for this relation between action and the poet and the hero. Because this poem begins like this, very short — that's what I'm alluding to. "Sacred vessels, such are poets." In a vessel, you put something, don't you? "Sacred vessels, such are poets, in which rests the soul of heroes," the elixir of heroes.
27:45 You see, the poet is the one who preserves, who immortalizes the exploits of, say, an Alexander, an Achilles, whether real or imaginary heroes, it doesn't matter. But this hero, what vessel could contain him? It is not in song, it is in the world that he acts and develops. Well, there you have it. So Hugo, I don't know, accompanies society, and in particular the rising forces, the society from below rising upward — we'll come back to that — the wretched, who seek to emancipate themselves, but he is not in material production like them; rather, as we'd vulgarly say today, he coaches them through his songs.
28:41 Now, I remember, in sub-Saharan Africa, that the griot — yes, I had actually started there — surely the most socialized of poetic modes of expression, the griot, again the bard, the aede, depending on place and era, the griot streaming with sweat, bent over next to the one who, in the Sahel, because there's a very short rainy season, where you have to harvest quickly before it's too late and the soil becomes hard as concrete, streams with sweat, the griot with his underarm drum, where the notes vary by pressing on the strings with the elbow — the griot is there to encourage what was called the work song in the United States, in the cotton harvests that are at the origin of many elements of jazz and blues, isn't that so?
29:30 And on the repetitive, haunting side of the blues, for example, because when you repeat the same work gestures, there's a rhythmic recurrence — I remember the griot streaming with sweat and encouraging with his words and his song the one who is digging the millet, the peanuts, the food crops. And I'll end this relation between the poet and his people, if you will, to show that it's not the case that one does nothing while the other works, but that there is a division of tasks, so to speak.
30:03 There's a more humorous anecdote about Nerval strolling through the October nights — one of those rare entirely nocturnal walks — through the streets of Paris at a time when everyone was asleep, near the Les Halles district, where no one slept at the time since it was still the market, the belly of Paris, as Zola's fine title would put it. And there he goes with a drinking companion. They're doing the rounds, as we'd say today, at night. So he takes him to Pantin around 2 a.m.
30:36 Pantin in 1840, at 2 a.m., a dive, a little popular dance hall, can you imagine? And there he notices that there's a small room behind, one where people were dancing with red hangings, and that there's what would be called a republican banquet at the time, a gathering of freemasons, freethinkers, in short, very popular gatherings as there were at the time. So he goes over to look, and someone at the entrance says to them, "Are you of the trade?" Meaning: mason, "Are you of the building trade?"
31:07 "My friend made the expected signs, and we were able to go in. And I made this reflection" — this is Nerval speaking — after all, he says, "It's true that we are of the trade, we poets. Amphion" — he cites a Greek poet of antiquity, Amphion — "through the chords and the rhythmic lyre, the construction of the Parthenon, Amphion was of the building trade." There, I'll stop there. And now, to begin — we're not really into philosophy yet, this is a reminder of the material on which we're now going to reflect and bring a reflection to bear, starting from these fragments of literary history.
Rereading "Stella": pure poetry in Hugo 31:48 Because it's not that simple. I go back to "Stella." Baudelaire says — and one can't help agreeing with him — that it's not because feelings are generous, words are just, and actions are pure, that one will produce beautiful verse. The best pianist is not necessarily the most moral, the most reasonable.
32:21 So when Rimbaud says "Stella gives roughly the measure of Hugo," that means I'm going to reread it now, showing that there is in Stella a purely poetic part in the sense Baudelaire demands. The extraordinary opening. But precisely, where he doesn't speak of the people — well, he speaks of nothing else, but in a way that goes through symbols, not directly. So I remind you of this kind of pure poetry in the Baudelairean sense.
32:54 I'm deliberately blurring the lines, you see; here it's Hugo who shows himself perhaps even more Baudelairean than Baudelaire in this admirable opening of pure poetry, which goes at times as far as impression, in the sense of impressionism. You'll see for yourselves. "I had fallen asleep at night near the shore. A cool wind woke me." A cool wind — that's not a feeling, it's a sensation on the skin, fresh, it's cold, warmth, it's about touch. A cool wind woke me.
33:24 "I had fallen asleep at night near the shore. A cool wind woke me. I came out of my dream." Already, this was an intermediate state between waking and sleep that Rousseau was the first to record in lines and in writing, in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, this state where reason is suspended and sensations prevail, especially over ideas, over feelings. "I came out of my dream, I opened my eyes, I saw the morning star."
33:58 "It shone in the depths of the distant sky." Look at the next line. "In a soft whiteness, infinite and charming." A soft whiteness — really bold, for Hugo, isn't it? "In a soft whiteness" — like cotton wool, you see — "infinite and charming." "Aquilon fled, carrying off the storm, the shining star was changing the cloud into down." Look at this sense of material nuances.
34:28 You see? Here, we're not dealing with grand abstract ideas. We're not in versified thought that takes itself for poetry, which produced a lot of romantic poetry's output — quite a bit of dross, isn't it — thought put into verse. Instead of drawing out the thought that emerges from the verses even without the writer's knowledge, which is even better, isn't it? "The shining star was changing the cloud into down."
35:02 "It was a light that thought, that lived." You see? It's not him thinking, it's the light itself. "It calmed the reef where the wave breaks." Look at this mixture of the imperfect tense verb and the present tense verb. This polytemporality within a single line: it calmed the reef where the wave breaks. "One would think one saw a soul through a pearl. It was still night, the shadow reigned in vain. The sky lit up with a divine smile."
35:32 We see a crescendo, the day breaking. "The gleam silvered the top of the leaning mast." Again, the imperfect of "silvered" and the present of "leaning." "The gleam silvered" — because it always begins from the top — "the dawn." And here I jump from Hugo to Rimbaud, Rimbaud's "Dawn." "I embraced the summer dawn, nothing yet stirred on the front of the palaces." You see? You see the analogy? There's no sea in Rimbaud. There are palaces. Here, there's the sea.
36:02 But the common point is the relation between above and below. Light begins first from above. "The gleam silvered the top of the leaning mast." Besides, in Rimbaud's "Dawn," we find "on the silvery summit, I recognized the goddess," the dawn. "The ship was black, but the sail was white." That's rather more conventional Hugo, with the grand antitheses. A bit à la Corneille: "The ship was black, but the sail was white." "And, perched on the peak, it longs to descend."
36:33 We find this in Corneille's Cinna. Stylistically, it's called an antithesis. "Gulls standing on a cliff, attentive, contemplating the star gravely." Like a celestial bird made of a spark. "The ocean, which resembles the people" — this is the first time a notion with political connotation appears. "The ocean, which resembles the people, went toward it, toward the star."
37:03 "And roared very softly." We're still in the realm of grand sensations. Who hasn't put a big seashell to their ear and heard that distant roar of the marine element that it makes? We immediately understand what he means here. "And roared very softly" — how can one roar very softly? It's magnificent. You see, roaring in principle shatters windows. "And roaring very softly, it watched it shine and seemed afraid of making it fly away."
37:35 "An ineffable love filled the expanse. The green grass at my feet trembled distractedly." This too is seeing in the Rimbaldian sense. The thousand little blades of grass which, on a lawn in the morning, with that particular gentle wind that only exists in the morning, which comes to soften a bit the icy quality of the night, bends all the grass like crowds both exalted and prostrate. "The birds spoke to each other in their nests."
38:07 "A waking flower said to me, 'It's the star, my sister.' And while the shadow slowly raised its long-folded veil, I heard a voice that came from the star and that said —" And here indeed begins a section that somewhat justified Baudelaire's criticism. He's finally going to say what this star symbolizes: the people, liberty. Very well. But you'll see that we're no longer in the greatest poetry. Judge for yourselves — unless those who are thrilled by the ideas Hugo develops here, which make them think of barricades.
38:37 That's fine. I'm the first to say so — likewise, for those who are on the barricades. But that's not the point. Compared to what we just read, judge for yourselves. "I am the star that comes first. I am the one believed to be in the tomb, and who emerges. I shone over Sinai, I shone over Taygetus." Sinai, that's where Moses received the revelation of the Ten Commandments. Taygetus, the mountain of the muses in Greece, isn't it? "I am the stone of gold and fire" — which God throws, as if with a sling, at the black brow of night.
39:09 Hugo looks at his own poetic power. "I am what is reborn when a world is destroyed." Still the antitheses. "O nations!" There started to be "oh's" and "ah's." There started to be emphasis. "O nations! I am ardent poetry. I shone on Moses and I shone on Dante. The ocean lion is in love with me. I am coming. Rise up, virtue, courage, faith." Well, that's getting a bit... isn't it. "Rise up, courage, faith." That's not quite the same as "in a soft whiteness, infinite and charming."
39:44 "One would think one saw a soul through a pearl, a cool wind woke me, I came out of my dream." But what a contrast, isn't it! So, "Rise up, virtue, courage, faith, thinker, spirit, mounted on the tower, sentinel — eyelids, open; light up, pupils." You see, when the Parnassians say that the Romantics sometimes neglected form, here's an illustration of it, isn't it? It's a bit slapdash, this string of exclamations.
40:14 "Earth, stir the furrow; life, awaken the sound." The apostrophes: "Earth, life, rise up, you who sleep, for the one who follows me, for the one who sends me forth — the first, and the end, however political it may be, is a fine achievement — it is the angel liberty, it is the giant light." There you have it, yes, it's to show — I don't want to muddle things, isn't it — that it's difficult to cut with an axe, so to speak, between purely aesthetic, purely poetic value on one side, and, of course, the rightness of the political causes at stake in a given action.
Hölderlin's "To Mother Earth": breath and spirit 40:57 So now I'm going to hurry, before moving on to the concept and reflecting on what beauty is, what art is — I can't avoid these questions today, nor exhaust them, as you might imagine, today — but we're going to try to pose them in a way that doesn't repeat, we're going to try not to repeat the nonsense one often hears at this level, well, let's say, what's been said ten thousand times, and above all in a more rigorous and more conceptual way.
41:31 But before we get there, I'm going to read a text which, although written before those two, right at the beginning of the century — I'm thinking of Hölderlin — synthesizes the two and even builds its entire structure on this opposition. Isn't that so? So there isn't a poet of the collectivity on one side and, on the other, a poet of individual, decadent interiority folded back on the sacrosanct self, but rather someone who shows that both are moments each of which can produce poetic summits.
42:09 And this poem, you'll find it on the page called "To Mother Earth" — it's a hymn, the first that opens the series of the great hymns from the end of Hölderlin's output — "To Mother Earth," "Song of the Brothers," "Ottmar," "Hom," "H-O-M," "T-E-L-O."
42:39 You don't need to be versed in ancient languages, in dead languages, in Greek in particular, to understand that "Telo" — you see, the adjective "telluric" in French, that's the earth, of course — "To Mother Earth." "Telo" is earth, "Hom" is man, of course, H-O-M. And "Ottmar" is interesting — before I read you the text — "Ottmar," you see, "Atem" in German means "breath." A-T-E-M, that's a beautiful word, "Atem."
43:10 The breath. Now, it is said in the Gospel, when Jesus is asked, "But what is the Spirit? God, the Father — we roughly picture him as..." as a kind of Superman, as Spinoza would say, a man with all the flaws and virtues of a man, though immortal all the same. In short, very anthropomorphic — God the Father; then there's the Son, whom we can picture, the suffering, which is closer to us, to the human condition.
43:40 What is the Spirit? And Jesus answers, "You hear the wind, the breath; you know neither where it comes from nor where it goes. The wind blows where it wills." Rarely has the Spirit, the concept of Spirit, been brought so close to freedom. It's not... You see, we come back to Hugo here. The Spirit blows where it wills. So Atem, the breath. Now, I told you it's interesting when there are drawers like this — I won't open them all, we'd never finish. But it's to make you want to keep researching on your own.
44:10 I don't know — one of the most profound notions of Hinduism, from Brahmanism to Buddhism, which often oppose each other but agree on this — is the word translated as "soul." Yes, soul, spirit, breath. It's Atman. Atman, the same word as here. Ottmar, Atem, breath in German. Atman, A-T-M-A-N, transcribed with our alphabet. It's the soul in the tradition of the Indian subcontinent.
44:41 There you have it. You still need breath for poetry. It's the art of speech. Proclaim it. "My breath would be too short," as Rilke says, to celebrate it. When Rilke speaks to the angel, he says, go on, proclaim the greatness of man, because as for me, my breath will be too short to celebrate it. All right, let's go. So, three characters. Curious poems, aren't they, divided into three characters. The first, Ottmar. So, breath. "I sing of an open community, thus a string rings out, touched at first as if in trial, by radiant hands."
The people's song makes the sacred manifest 45:20 "Thus a string rings out" first. There are always subordinate clauses that are the anguish, the main clause in Hölderlin. Well, I'll try not to add too much voice-over commentary afterward, rather than during. It's such a beauty. "I sing of an open community, thus a string rings out, touched at first as if in trial, by radiant hands. But in its joy, more gravely, soon the master bows his head over the harp, and the notes, for him, prepare themselves, take wing."
45:51 "As many as they are, and this sounds together at the touch of the awakener, and full, like the ocean, springing up and rising infinitely, the cloud of consonance." So that's the solo poet, if you will. The bard, again, the griot, the poet — "take up your lute and give me a kiss," as Musset says. Homer, who before recounting Achilles' wrath, would strike a few chords on the lyre, isn't it? And then would do a kind of slam, wouldn't he?
46:23 between speech and song. Chanted. But this will be something quite other than a resonant harp. That was the soloist. But this will be something quite other than a resonant harp. Song, the heart of the people. Because he's going to justify why the people's song goes further than the soloist. Listen carefully. For though he has enough signs, I'll tell you right away, he's speaking of God, for though he has enough signs and floods in his power and flames of storm, as thought, the sacred Father would certainly be inexpressible and manifest nowhere among the living, so God would remain unknown.
47:14 If what? If the community for song had no heart. But not yet. Did you hear that? We live in Germany, in a bourgeois world, separated from one another, each in his own bubble. We're no longer in Greece, then, but not yet either. Nevertheless, as the rock was first forged in the shadows of the forge, the bronze foundations of the earth, even before the torrents flowed from the mountains, and groves and cities flourished on the banks of rivers.
47:50 A beautiful image. Flourish on top. First there is the rock, the magma, then when it cools, there is the earth, plants grow, and little by little — and groves, that's the vegetation, and cities, flourish on the banks of rivers. Thus, in a clap of thunder, he created joys, already a pure law, and pure sounds founded. So here is a glorification of the collective poet, but one that goes very far, since he even says that if it weren't for the collective poet, we would have no idea of the sacred.
48:24 It would not be manifest among the living. So it exists or it doesn't, either way, that wouldn't do us much good, because we wouldn't even know it existed. The sacred. That which binds men together, don't forget that's the etymological meaning of religion — whether one believes in God or not, there are things that bind men together. You need only look at a crowd in a stadium or at a concert. Howling with excitement or silent in recollection, isn't that so?
The one who sings alone: the path of interiority 48:55 And the beating heart. So now it's Homer taking the floor. And you'll see the contrast. Spare, however, the powerful one — so he's speaking again of the sacred, isn't he — spare, however, the powerful one, him who sings alone. So this isn't the soloist from earlier who plays alone, but rather someone who doesn't play all alone, who plays for a crowd, as Homer sang at the table of kings, princes, chiefs, warriors.
49:29 isn't that so? Homeric. Spare, however, the powerful one, him who sings alone, him who is far from everything. And give us enough song until it be said as we understand it. So this takes time. The secret of our soul. So this is what Baudelaire demands, isn't it — the soul, interiority. This requires passing through each person's interiority.
50:00 Here I can't help but dialecticize the individual and the collective. That's the philosophical stake of our reflection here. You see clearly. I'm going to approach this from an evolution of the productive forces, to come back to a very Marxist field. Don't worry — well, for those it worries, anyway. We're getting to the most concrete and the most interesting part. I mean the introduction of the piano into households from the early nineteenth century onward.
Pure music and the piano in bourgeois homes 50:35 Amazing — what's the connection? You can guess: the connection is what Hölderlin is talking about here. Interiorization. Music, for instance — this has been noted in the history of music. It took a long time to compose what's called, somewhat imprecisely, pure music. Meaning, for instance, that opera is not pure music because there's music, there's text, there's set design, there's dance. It's magnificent.
51:05 When one loves it, there's a lot of mixing, a lot of arts telescoping together. It's not music alone. Pure water is water that has only water, not lemon juice added to it too. So pure music is more or less instrumental music. Now, for a long time, music was only an auxiliary of song. Even the shepherd, alone, far from his village, uses his pipe, his flute, his bagpipe, out there in the distance, alone like that, in solitude, to fill up the immensity and the distance.
51:41 And look at the admirable opening of the poem of Tristan — I mean Wagner. The poem, the music, let's not even talk about it, its beauty has been sufficiently noted, but the text, at the start — it's the lookout man, because it begins on a ship crossing the Irish Sea, carrying Isolde to King Marke, with Tristan who does not come to see her, who stays loyally at the bow, at the prow of the ship, for his sovereign. Leaving that aside, it lasts five hours, that would take us too far.
52:12 But that's the very first character, when the curtain rises. It's a single voice, all alone, without the orchestra, without anything, without even a pipe. Like that — his gaze goes westward, he watches toward the horizon, toward the west, but his heart goes eastward, since he comes from the direction of Ireland, where he left his beloved. Child of Ireland, is it your sighs that swell the sails.
52:42 This solitary song — you see here, music took a long time to move toward pure music. The very notion of a concert is late. One has to wait until the seventeenth century for people to travel to go and listen to concerts of instrumental music. Before that, music had existed since man existed, practically — one of the oldest instruments is the musical bow that the Pygmy hunter still uses, when he's deep in the forest, and time drags on a bit, between two rains in the rainy season, with his teeth, etc., and a string.
53:18 He makes notes with his mouth, like that. That's the origin of all stringed instruments — the musical bow, very early, the hunter. You see, all this comes from subsistence production, from the social production of their existence. As Marx says, men enter into necessary relations, independent of their will, relations of production. The act of pulling on the string, the string, like that, very early, expressing to the hunter's ear, out there, in his solitude, the sonorous power, the sonorous virtues of the vibrating string.
53:55 So music was originally in the service of song. Sacred music, Bach's chorales, the cantatas — every Sunday Bach had to compose a cantata, where the instruments accompany a passage of sacred text. A psalm. Music in the service of a king's victory over his enemies. How many composers — Handel — wrote Te Deums, that's the abbreviation of Te Deum laudamus, we praise thee, O Lord, Te Deum laudamus, following a crushing victory of the English navy over the Dutch or French navy, etc.
54:40 So we're at the opposite pole from pure music. That doesn't mean these aren't masterpieces, but for now music hasn't become interiorized. It's still there to celebrate collective events. For sacred music, that's obvious — the kind sung in the temple, at Mass, gospel music. You know, when there's a version in the twentieth century, from the end of the nineteenth on — why am I getting to the piano now? Because with this live music, the kind heard at Mass, at the temple, in the anthem sung at the stadium before matches — same thing, it's not pure music, it's music to the glory of the teams, the peoples who are there, the traditions clashing.
55:26 The admirable — the Welsh songs that make the audience tremble a little, even those supporting the other team are impressed by the Welsh chants, aren't they — or the rituals, whether in Fiji or New Zealand, the All Blacks team, isn't that so, that ritual both choreographic and vocal, which has the function of intimidating the opponent a little, because it's derived from combat songs and dances.
56:04 So why the piano? Because the piano is the first hi-fi system, there, in my living room — the bourgeoisie starts to appear, the middle class; it's not the lord anymore who could order Bach to come play in his salon, or Mozart, or Lully — Louis XIV protected Lully a great deal, and even danced in certain comedies set to music by Lully. Yes indeed, the king dances, the king amuses himself.
56:35 And there's a magnificent film by the greatest Indian filmmaker, Satyajit Ray, R-A-Y — don't miss a film by this immense filmmaker. Especially if you have children, show it to them, it's not only a children's film, but it's the story of an elephant, Pather Panchali, it's a marvel. It's a bit like an Indian Visconti. And here I'm thinking of a film called The Chess Players.
57:06 A raja, while England is gradually seizing province after province of India for itself, doesn't concern himself with politics. He's a king in love with poetry and music. And he dances like that with his musicians. Well — the chess players, not Satyajit Ray's chess player. So, the piano, technically, is an instrument, it's not the flute, it's not the violin.
57:41 You can do everything with the piano. You cannot make an orchestra with a flute. You can do wonderful things that only a flute can do, but you cannot use the flute to imitate all the other instruments. For example, when rehearsing an opera with choruses, solo voices, women's voices, men's voices, tenors, baritones, sopranos, it's too expensive to pay an orchestra for every rehearsal. So you pay a pianist who, here, sums up the entire orchestral score.
58:11 And when he's good, he really makes it audible, even though it's always the same instrument. The piano, here, I do the voice of the horn, here, of the flute, dream to dream and flute to horn, as Verlaine says in his Art poétique. And I should mention that one of the greatest pianists of the century — of the twentieth century, since he died before the century ended — I'm thinking of Sviatoslav Richter, the great Soviet pianist, isn't he? That doesn't mean much, 'the greatest pianist in the world.'
58:42 It comes down to a certain level — there are about twenty of them who are above the fray. And after that, it's a matter of taste for each person — one plays Beethoven better, another plays Bach better. Anyway, Richter, truly, who is at those heights, by far, began his whole career as an opera accompanist, which proves his profound musicality. Well, the piano — brought into the apartment — I'm a bourgeois, I want to show that I've succeeded, I have a piano, my daughter is learning piano, we're cultivating ourselves, you see, I can say to the pianist, 'won't you play that bit for me again?'
59:23 You couldn't do that at Mass, you can't do that at a concert in public, you can't say at the stadium, 'won't you start the anthem over again, I quite like Deutschland über alles.' But I mention it not because it's the German anthem, but because Germany's anthem, paradoxically, was composed by good old Haydn, Mozart's great friend — there's nothing less militaristic than the German anthem musically, though the words, yes, the words are terrible, they were changed at the end of the war, because it used to say von der Maas bis an die Memel, from the Meuse to the Memel.
1:00:00 But apart from that, this anthem, as few people know, is taken from a melody for string quartet — not even for full orchestra; there's nothing more intimate than Haydn's string quartet, the quartet still called today the Kaiserquartett, that is, the Emperor Quartet. So, you can't ask the anthem to start over with the hi-fi system — you can, though, you can dig into it, and that's where I wanted to get: this mediation is necessary, one mustn't stay alone, one must return afterward to the collectivity, but a collectivity whose meaning has been understood because one has cultivated oneself in the individual's interiority, through that mediation.
Interiority as mediation toward the collective 1:00:42 One was able — and for musicians this is essential — one was able to refine the passage from major to minor, we've seen that transitions, variations, all that, could only happen through instruments; the voice couldn't do it, the voice has technical limits, doesn't it. So, you see, there's a dialectic here between the individual and the collective, such that they oppose each other less than one might think, and so in this magnificent hymn by Hölderlin, you see, this entity — 'spare, however' — and now think of my hi-fi system, my piano if you will, which allowed millions of you, of us, young people, less young people, old people, to discover — I don't know, beautiful songs with lyrics, if we're talking about popular music, string quartets, jazz musicians — in detail, to play them over 50, 100 times, depending on whether they fell in love with them or not, and at that point, you all know,
1:01:52 each and every one of you knows very well that the better one knows a piece of music, the more rewarding it is, the more, each time one listens to it, one feels it unfold — one anticipates it and at the same time is surprised each time, marveling at the genius. I myself, you see, I'm an old man, there are works I've been listening to since age twelve, I couldn't tell you how many times I've heard them, and I'm still surprised, I discover details — you see, 'for long is the time,' I return to Hölderlin, 'but the true arrives,' so let me start this passage again, it won't be any clearer: spare, however, O powerful one, him who sings alone, and give us enough songs, until — you see the importance of duration, of time, of digging deep, of listening for a long time, of repeating — until it be said, as we understand it, the secret of our soul, which has such trouble being expressed, succeeding in public — here's yet another determination, why we need to be alone to approach certain contents, because sometimes we don't dare express too much emotion,
1:03:02 in the presence of another. There's a magnificent passage — in the third elegy, no, in the seventh, sorry — the great elegies of Rilke, the Duino Elegies, in the seventh, which is a song of triumph, after all the doubts of the previous elegies, where he addresses prostitutes — I don't put it quite like that — where he says that everyone, every human being, has known, if only for a few seconds, eternity, veins, as he says, full of existence, moments of grace, and he says, 'you knew it, even, girl, in the festering streets,' etc., you knew it — but this is where I get to the modesty of our feelings — but we forget so easily what the laughing neighbor does not envy us for. Especially among boys — boys are modest about feeling, they will never admit certain emotions, not in front of others, they'll play tough, I don't know — so, spare, however,
1:04:12 O powerful one, him who sings alone, or who enchants himself alone, if he listens to the song, isn't that so, until — and give us enough song, plural, until it be said, as we understand it, the secret of our soul, for often I have lent an ear to the canticle — that's the collective one, of the ancient priest — thus prepare my soul in its turn to give thanks. But in the arsenals, men, hands knotted in idle time — those are the times of political abandonment, aren't they — men pass by and gaze at the armor gravely, and someone tells how the fathers of old drew the bow — implying no one knows how to draw the bow anymore, an allusion of course to Ulysses — how the fathers of old drew the bow, sure, far from the target, and all believe it, yet none can attempt it, like a god, men's arms fall back, as if in resignation. The festive garment — that's collective too — does the festive garment not befit every day?
1:05:23 One must resign oneself to it; there are no true festivals, moreover, except when, far from the festival, one has toiled — Clouscard insisted a great deal on this, against those who in '68 always talk about 'the festival, the festival' — he says when there's always a festival, it's never a festival. When one has slaved away at the grape harvest — the harvest is terrible work — then the harvest festival is worth it. What each of you, each of us sums up is true when we say 'after effort, comfort,' but a festival is a collective comfort. So, likewise, the festive garment does not befit every day; the temple columns stand abandoned, in days of distress. Indeed, him who sings alone cannot have it both ways — it's not the same moment as when the whole community, isn't that so, sang hymns skyward, to the gods; so the temple columns stand abandoned in days of distress — in short, the Greek temples have become, for us now when we visit them, ruins; no doubt the echo of the north wind resounds deeply on the forecourts, and the rain purifies them, as if the rain came to wash away
1:06:35 the dust of time, the moss grows, the swallows return in the days of spring, but within, the god remains nameless — indeed, since there is no longer the song of the collectivity, as we saw at the very beginning, through which alone the sacred becomes manifest among men, but within, the god remains nameless, and the cup of gratitude, the vessels of sacrifice, and all the instruments of worship, the discreet earth refuses them to the enemy — in short, a beautiful landscape of winter, of autumn, when nature seems to abandon itself, seems to — and here is the last part: like water, like earth, which would give thanks before receiving and answer before hearing, when a higher one speaks, one must not interrupt the harmonious discourse, he has much to say, and other rights too, and there is one that never ends within the hours, and the times of him who creates are like the mountain, which, in the swell from sea to sea, stretches out above the earth.
1:07:45 Not everything is very clear in this ending, but I'm deliberately reading it to you, because, as Baudelaire saw very well, there may not be a single, univocal truth to what's being said, etc., but still, there are unforgettable images — look closely: many travelers speak of it, and the game wanders in the chasms, and the herds on the heights — you see, a kind of return to natural chaos, the herds, flocks of deer, we seem to have returned to nature — many travelers speak of it, and the game wanders in the chasms, and the herds on the heights — but this is the fall, careful — so, opposed to all this apparent chaos, but in the sacred shadow, on the green slope, dwells the shepherd, and the shepherd, we spoke of him earlier, here he finally is, and gazes upon the peaks thus.
"La Vie antérieure": unwitting homage to history 1:08:48 There. So I'd like to be a bit shorter than usual, not go beyond this long introduction, and give you the floor. But first I'd like to slip in a hypothesis — I'm not imposing it on you, it's just a hypothesis — but I'm sure that, I see in the comments, some of you who have a good ear, sometimes extend in a very significant way what I might venture here or there, extend it in the right direction.
1:09:19 Nothing is dearer to me than this kind of teamwork, isn't that so? Proclaim it, my breath will be too short to celebrate it. Even, and I return to Baudelaire, even when a poet defends an interiority that owes nothing to the collectivity, to the social and political world, to collective stakes, in short, the moods of an opium smoker on his couch — that's Baudelaire's case — even at that level, and even when he writes a poem whose subject is 'previous life' — we're fully in mysticism here, life before birth, life after death, but life before birth, isn't that so?
1:10:03 Well, look — if we take the text closely: 'Long did I dwell beneath vast porticoes' — he who lived in a wretched garret, poor Baudelaire, in a very working-class district of Paris, isn't that so, from where he saw, as he says, rivers of coal rising into the firmament — it was far more polluted then than today, when every house in Paris was belching wood smoke, but anyway, in passing, or I'll get worked up. 'Long did I dwell beneath vast porticoes that the sea suns tinged with a thousand fires, and whose great pillars, straight and majestic, made them at evening resemble basalt caves.'
1:10:43 Here it's a bit sculptural — basalt columns, that's hard material. Remember, 'I am beautiful, O mortals, like a dream of stone' — but look right away: 'the swells, rolling the images of the skies' — there's the movement, the swells, and that's formlessness — 'mingled in a solemn and mystic manner the all-powerful chords' — there's the sound — 'of their rich music reflected by my eyes in the colors of the setting sun.' 'It was there that I lived in calm voluptuousness, amid the splendor of the sky, the pomp, and the naked slaves, all steeped in scents' — and he imagines his reverie, in a previous life, as an oriental prince, with slaves fanning him — 'who refreshed my brow with their palms, and' — listen carefully now — 'whose sole care was to deepen' — and this is the last line — 'the sorrowful secret that made me languish.'
1:11:45 So we're not... The poem, betrayed here, takes the opposite stance from the ideologue Baudelaire. The poem admits that even in this previous life, it wasn't paradise regained, because there is a sadness. The secret... Even in this previous life, there is a sorrowful secret that made him languish. What does that mean? It means the poet has a premonition of everything that preceded him in the real history of humanity, because none of us is born from zero.
1:12:18 Our birth is not a beginning. Our birth is the culmination of millennia of traditions, transformations, progress, regressions. The fairy tales are right to speak of fairies at the edge of the cradle. That means that from the very first seconds of the infant's life, there are words circulating above the body and soul of this poor infant, depending on whether they are good or bad fairies — that is, they pronounce, mind you, blessings, good words,
1:13:01 Curses. There — that's the suggestion I'm making, that even unconsciously, the poet attached to the inner self ends up paying homage to the immense collective creation that preceded his individual interiority. And thus, without realizing it, he pays homage to history. There, I'd like to stop there. The material is rich enough, and it's agreed that policy-wise we'll do a second part, as we did for the lie.
The toppling of statues and the class struggle 1:13:34 I'm going to ask Philippe, in our control room, if there are any questions. Let me look. Indeed, well, well, well. Ah yes, there's Alt går bra. Right, let me greet — I ask you to greet our friends from Alt går bra, our Norwegian friends who were kind enough to invite me to give a talk in Bergen, as I've already told you once, and who are truly doing, I repeat, I never tire of saying it, and who are currently putting on an extraordinary exhibition on themes that started out architectural.
1:14:14 The couple who are the driving force behind this Alt går bra association, which means in Norwegian 'everything's fine' — forgive my pronunciation — the couple Agnès and Branco, whom I greet in passing, to whom I send all my friendship. Agnès is president of the Association of Visual Artists of Norway.
1:14:46 So, I'll now read the question she's asking me. Dominique, since you talk about art and politics, can you offer some reflections on the destruction of statues today by anti-racist movements? Indeed, you must have heard in the news that there's been a whole movement of attacking symbols, following a savage, barbaric murder that took place in Minneapolis.
1:15:26 Yet the victim was a titan of a man, almost two meters tall, so you really have to put your back into it to suffocate someone like that. Besides, there were several militiamen on top of him. So, in the wake of this act of barbarism, there have been quite a few demonstrations, you should know. So, I'll answer the question. I say bravo. Bravo to the toppling that took place in England, of the statue of Cecil Rhodes.
1:16:00 That won't mean anything to you, because your generations haven't heard about Zimbabwe, and never anything good about it anyway. But Zimbabwe is the African name taken at independence by a country that was called Rhodesia, the English colony, which was virtually the private property of the famous Cecil Rhodes, a slaver, a racist, an architect of apartheid. And that statue was there, wasn't it.
1:16:30 I applaud the fact that it was toppled, as was done with the statue of the king of the Belgians. He, well, he breaks all records — but I don't want to be a voyeur here. The greatest carnage of all time, even more than the Second World War, on a single people, I mean. And I weigh my words. That's what was suffered by so-called Great Lakes Africa, the former Belgian Congo, plus Rwanda, Burundi.
1:17:01 I'm talking about the massacres that took place before the contemporary genocide, in the sad year of 1994 — the carnage that took place in that country, the Belgian Congo, at the time, which was the private property of the king of the Belgians, whose statue stands in almost every Belgian city. Fewer and fewer now — one was toppled in Antwerp the day before yesterday, I believe.
1:17:34 Isn't that so? All the same, I applaud it. There, I'm clearly answering the question. But at the same time I'm worried about a certain aspect of these demonstrations. You see my answer is nuanced. Are there some who are taking advantage of this to obscure the class struggle within the race struggle? To make clear what I'm going to say, I'll be provocative. I'll tell you: Arabs are very well received in France. Obviously some will jump up, and I understand them, because they think I'm doing...
1:18:08 What are they called? The Émours. I can't quite understand... anyway, there's a popularity, there are even plenty of young people who criticize him but listen to him anyway. Anyway, what kind of publicity are we giving to people who aren't worth it. Well anyway — no, no, I'm not talking about those kinds of things. Apparently Arabs are well received in France, no problem — but that's not what I'm saying. It's not just any Arabs. But if you go to the Georges V hotel, on the Champs-Élysées, the moment an emir arrives with his entourage, an oil king, you'll see all the staff — each of whom individually might be racist — groveling to welcome him, and sincerely happy that he's come back.
1:18:48 Because they're short of clients, and my God does he pay well. And as for the king — I was about to say Hassan II, forgive me, I mean Mohammed VI of Morocco — how could he not be warmly welcomed when he arrives in France or elsewhere, in a Northern country? And Condoleezza Rice, a woman and a Black woman, you know, supposedly from oppressed minorities, women and Blacks, unleashing Atlanticist barbarity on Iraq, against the opinion of the UN, against the international community.
1:19:20 So it's not Blacks versus Whites that's the problem. And here, I recommend — I don't have time to read them to you now, I'll take the time later — but I beg you to take a look at an article about the biography of one of the greatest basses, to come back to music, of the twentieth century, the one who immortalized, you know, that song every American knows, Ol' Man River, about the old man of the Mississippi River, who proclaimed his solidarity at a time when, really, you know, in the 1930s, before the war, there weren't many Africans — I mean, notice my slip — Afro-Americans, who spoke out against those in power on the strength of his fame as a singer, because he had a bass voice that stunned everyone.
1:20:25 Yes, yes, Paul Robeson, yes, of course, I hadn't even named him — Paul Robeson, yes, it's spelled Robeson, absolutely — but listen to him, because his voice alone is phenomenal, no doubt the most beautiful renditions ever made of the Internationale and of the Soviet anthem, he did it all, the Marseillaise too, of course, but above all it's this: when he says that his struggle is in solidarity with that of the white workers of Europe. It's not Blacks against Whites, it's still not Kemi Séba, and the communitarianism that delights fascists of both stripes.
1:21:02 So there, my answer is nuanced. Now, those who topple statues of Cecil Rhodes — it seems they went after Churchill too, I don't know if the police intervened at that point — but there you have it, you know that Churchill made a name for himself, when he was still quite young, in the famous Boer War in South Africa, where the expression "concentration camp" appeared for the first time, with the prisoners. There. And the English, who during the Sepoy Mutiny, made their killed enemies' prisoners lick the blood off the steps of the stairs, dripping with the blood of the Sepoys.
Aristotle, Baudelaire, and de Maistre 1:21:51 There. Thank you for asking the question. I hope I was clear, and nuanced. Jean-Vier Axel, Sébastien Vrenoy, he was also supposed to ask — I'll tell you — where, in your view, would you situate the return to Aristotle's poetics in Baudelaire? Could you clarify your thought? Well, that would take too long — the question isn't uninteresting, far from it, but it's too abstract, if you like, because Baudelaire is much more concrete, as we saw earlier, whereas the principles of Aristotle's poetics run very deep.
1:22:28 Let me remind you roughly that in Aristotle, for example, the purpose of tragedy in poetry is to inspire both terror and pity. And as for art in general — I don't want to go into it, you can see the dizzying developments one could make from there — the most important and most general statement Aristotle made about art is: "Art sometimes imitates nature" — that's the famous mimesis, from the verb 'to mime' — "sometimes it imitates nature, sometimes it extends what nature by itself is unable to complete."
1:23:12 A big problem, which I leave open for reflection to whoever kindly asked me the question: does art sometimes imitate and sometimes extend, or does it never do one without the other? Is what we believe to be imitation, mere photography, always at the same time an addition to the natural given? Because after all, in the word 'art,' there is the root of 'artificial.' The Greeks did not know our opposition between the technical and the artistic — quite the contrary.
1:23:43 The Greek word for it is precisely techné. A trace of it remains in French when we speak of 'the art of tending one's garden,' or when Bach writes The Art of Fugue with great humility, implying: here's how a good craftsman should go about writing a fugue. So much for Aristotle. I think Baudelaire, as a good Christian reading de Maistre — yes, so I told Sébastien not to dwell too much on de Maistre's counter-revolution, those sorry figures Burke and de Maistre — that Baudelaire was influenced by that; but that's not Baudelaire's political thought, that's not what's best in his work.
1:24:27 I prefer Baudelaire's Invitation to the Voyage, or Voyage itself. That's just to show, you see, that one can hold an extremely reactionary view and still write unforgettable verses — that's not a contradiction — and even very generous ones. But when Baudelaire, influenced by de Maistre, writes in a notebook that there is nothing good in the city except the poet, the priest, and the soldier — even Marine Le Pen wouldn't dare say that today. But let there be no misunderstanding, I'd like to nuance this for you.
1:24:58 Because in those same short pieces on Edgar Poe, where I read you the defense of pure poetry against the heresy of didacticism, Baudelaire stands in solidarity — and here we return to the first question, about race and solidarity — with the Black man whose cheek, he says, speaking of America, the homeland of Edgar Poe, whose cheek, whipped by the master's rod, swarms with pride. That too is in Baudelaire. I prefer that Baudelaire to the Baudelaire of de Maistre.
1:25:33 All those rivers that carried the mud which formed the estuary of Nazism. Brunin — you're too young, Sébastien, you're too young to get stuck in that. We're not going to be fooled twice, are we. So then, there is — I can't quite see — ah, all right, I understand, because it seemed to me there was one more.
1:26:04 Ah yes, yes. All right, all right, indeed, I see. I thank him enormously. The movements, yes, indeed, we've covered it all. Well, it remains for me to thank you for your attention, for being here, first and foremost. There. I hope Sébastien Brunin doesn't hold it against me. I have a lot of affection for these contributions.
1:26:34 And then, one has to go through certain stages, but one shouldn't dwell on them too long. There. And I also thank Philippe, who has done an admirable job with the texts. It's not easy, given the very modest means we have at our disposal. And I'll see you again very soon, since now we've managed to keep to a weekly rhythm. I'll be delighted to see you again next week, for the next live session. Good night, and see you soon.
1:27:04 and un-confine yourselves as much as possible. Un-confine yourselves from one another as much as possible.
