English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Between crisis and war; Racine's line on edges 0:00 Good evening everyone. I don't know if I should apologize for these changes of programme, we're living through a troubled period, as everyone knows, and I promise you I have nothing to do with it personally. But I thought that, for all sorts of reasons that will certainly seem obvious to each and every one of you, the opening credits we had planned together with Pierre-Alain, which sometimes had a playful side to them, etc.
0:48 They might have been a bit out of place given the context we're going to be dealing with today, because you can guess that I'm rather compelled to come back to the problem of war and peace. But I had told you, at the outset, before events started accelerating, that I intended to talk to you about the edge of edges. So I'm not going to do that today the way, with the developments I had planned, but I'll save that for next time.
1:29 As a follow-up, if you like, to what I'm going to say briefly today about edges, before moving on to the current events that concern us and even preoccupy us. If I put up this beautiful line by Racine — you'll tell me which line of Racine isn't beautiful — "What charm drew him to those dreaded shores?" Question mark.
2:00 There, now I'm a bit into the theme I had planned for this evening, which is going to be jostled by the machinery of war, isn't it? By the noises of war. And not at the other end of the world this time, is it? So close, just a few cable-lengths from our borders. I'm still going to start with what was my original subject, and you'll see that I always end up talking about the same thing a little.
2:37 I didn't wait to talk about the edge — nearly seven years ago, when I made my very first recordings, recorded ones, I had chosen as a title "Between Crisis and War, Philosophy." Don't think I'm happy — I'm glad, if you like, to be confirmed in the fact that it's not an untimely subject. But still, I can't say I'm glad that current events come here to feed the relevance, in the logical sense of the term, of that title "Between Crisis and War, Philosophy."
3:18 I'll start with this notion of the edge, because after all we do say we're on the edge. We can start there — we're on the edge of war — but let's not go too fast, because there are so many variations on the theme of the edge that we could already multiply plenty of examples without yet having posed a single properly philosophical problem. So I go back to Racine's line, because it has the merit, in the richness of its content, of being profoundly symbolic — profoundly, meaning that its logic escapes the author, fortunately, fortunately great authors aren't computers who say "I'm going to say this because it symbolizes that" — otherwise they wouldn't produce masterpieces, would they?
4:13 He'd be doing programming. No, no, this line contains more or less all the ingredients necessary for the problem of the edge, doesn't it? What charm — the edge attracts. Don't lean over. You know, parents, when they see their child — children are among the first to be drawn to the balcony, you want to look down from the sixth floor — excuse me, I'm a bit old now, from the fortieth floor.
4:43 There's a charm, and at the same time everything that is ambivalent in the notion of charm — think of the charm of the Lorelei. And yes, a title by Nerval, borrowed from his friend, his best German friend, a German Jew — you'll see why I specify this — because if he is a great exception, and if he has this corrosive humor, he owes it also to his Jewish origins, even though he is more Germanic than many Germans, in his poetry.
5:20 Yes, all German schoolchildren have learned a poem by Heine called Lorelei, which begins by alluding to that song one can't manage to shake off. Nerval took up the title — it was among his first publications in prose — and, well, one might stop me for not really talking about the edge yet, I'm alluding to it, nor about war either, right?
5:52 Nor am I hesitating between the two — I think I know where I'm going, but I'm deliberately problematizing these notions, I need to. And, a bit in the mode of letting myself drift a little, a controlled drift, as they say, a controlled skid if you will — I'm trying, in the mode not of the Thursday workshops, that is, where I would rather have continued our Antigone and the relation between aesthetics and politics in the Hegelian system, but rather in the series of our analytic reveries — that's a bit the tone I'll take today, but asking you to trust the signifiers along with me. I'm not just drifting at random like that, or rather, it's when we think we're trusting chance that we're most in the grip of necessity.
6:53 There are interesting pages where Freud tells us: "Try the experiment, ask someone to say a number at random" — well, between zero and infinity, there's plenty of choice — he'll always manage to produce a number that has a connection to his most fundamental problems, and if you don't believe it, try the experiment, it's interesting. You should never believe such things just on someone's word — unless, well, it's with gurus that one has to believe everything, but frankly, nothing is further from my kind of transmission, I hope, than that of gurus.
7:31 For my part — for those who listen to me, I don't know, but for my part — I reject that status more than any other. So I hold to rationality. Don't take my word for it, check. At most, when Racine says "what charm drew him to those dreaded shores," you have the charm, you have the peril in "dreaded." But who says that, actually? Let's recall, it's in Phèdre.
8:02 But it's not Phèdre, it's not Theseus, it's not Hippolytus, it's little Aricia, the little goody-two-shoes to whom no one paid attention at first. The one Theseus has condemned to live walled up in her home, as it were, since she's the last offshoot of the line of her brothers whom he exterminated to seize power in Athens — power that Aricia's family, the family of Pallas, the Pallantides, held before — which makes Hippolytus's confidant say: "What, my lord, do you yourself persecute her?"
8:44 "Never did the gentle sister of the cruel Pallantides take part in her treacherous brothers' plot — must you hate her innocent charms?" And this passage where the confidant turns tempter — "charms," everyone in the audience knew that meant the bosom, the figure — this art of saying everything without naming anything directly. Three centuries before Mallarmé said: "To name an object is to strip away three-quarters of the pleasure it gives."
9:14 So, what charm! A charm attracts, I've just shown that, to those dreaded shores. You already see the ambivalence there — danger and attraction toward the shores. I come back to my very brief contextualization. She says that, apropos of what, little Aricia? She says it in an important scene, the one where there's news — which will turn out to be false — where a messenger comes to say that Theseus will never return, that he is dead, that he went astray, lost, in one adventure too many, in still too perilous travels.
10:03 He has even gone, mind you, to dishonor the bed of the god of the dead. That's why "what charm drew him to those dreaded shores," because the rumor was going around, just before his death, falsely announced — wrongly announced, I mean — the word was that he was going to wander on the shores separating the world of the living from that of its members, to help his friend Pirithous, who reigns over the underworld, for a female conquest — anyway, always Theseus the philanderer, even on others' behalf.
10:40 "Could I believe that before his final hour, he saw the dark abodes of the dead — what charm drew him to those dreaded shores." And Aricia says this, it's Aricia who says this to Hippolytus, when Hippolytus tells her that his father is dead, that the news has arrived: "The gods at last deliver to the homicidal Fate the friend, the companion, the successor of Alcides."
11:15 And there, as if it were off-topic, off-text, Aricia, who has eyes only for Hippolytus standing before her, with whom she's a bit coquettish — she has never admitted her love, has she? — and we saw in the preceding scene with her confidante that what she loves about Hippolytus is that he's shy with women. Very subtle, this passage circling back. Yes, I am going to talk about the war, so let me stay just a little longer at the edge, at the charm, before entering the horror.
Aricie, Theseus in the underworld and Célénie in Nerval 11:49 We are right in the middle of it, in the edge in the sense to which I'd like to accustom you, aren't we? At the edge where one protects oneself from what is behind and what is in front. I'm thinking of an extract from Hölderlin, from the time of his madness, nevertheless: "Forward, backward, we do not want to see, we do not want to let ourselves be rocked like a wavering boat upon the sea." I'm pausing a bit for now before getting to the current events that unfortunately concern us and even preoccupy us — I'd like to finish, because many things can be drawn out from here like the thread of a ball of yarn, can't they?
12:31 ...from that opening line. She had told her confidante that seducing Theseus would be easy, he's a ladies' man, a philanderer, easy to enter a heart open to all comers. No, what she wants is precisely to seduce the one who seems indifferent to everything feminine, to everything erotic, to all the pompous tumult of Athens and the court, who prefers that small residence where the whole play takes place — the scene is set in Trezen, a city in the Peloponnese, that's the stage direction given for every act of the play: the scene takes place at Trezen — in other words, at Versailles, we're not in Paris, we're not at the Louvre, we're not amid the crowd, we're not in high society, no, no — the small Versailles, back when it was still Louis XIII's hunting lodge. That's what suits Hippolytus, you see, that's what I want.
13:41 It's she who's speaking: "That is what irritates me... Hercules would have cost less to disarm than Hippolytus." And here they make her out to be a little innocent, a little victim — I don't mean to say she's a criminal either, but still, a bit mischievous — the one who doesn't even look at her, or who doesn't like looking at women, still less speaking to them, is exactly the one she wants. "That is what I want, that is what irritates me — Hercules would have cost less to disarm," she says — Hippolytus already strange the first time, but the second is that she says this a bit off-topic, as if speaking to herself: "What charm drew him to those dreaded shores" — we've just said he's dead, you see, as if she weren't only interested in Hippolytus, but her unconscious was drawn as well toward that irresistible seducer who has troubled others too, hasn't he? I say this because those who followed the seminars I gave, the series of workshops I did on a close reading of Phèdre...
14:51 ...you'll find them of course on our site and on our YouTube page — you'll see that I insist on this aspect, the fact that Aricia, like Phèdre, is in love; the ideal for her would have been a Theseus who was Hippolytus's age — there, my word, having it both ways, isn't it? And then suddenly she says, "What charm drew him — could I believe that a mortal, before his final hour..." There's something rather fantastical in this rumor, that he frequented what everyone avoids, the entrance to the underworld: "Could I believe that a mortal, before his final hour, penetrated the dark abodes of the dead," and that's where she says "what charm drew him to those dreaded shores" — meaning sacred — Theseus, even on those fearsome shores...
16:01 ...isn't it, he was going to let his libidinal charge roam, one might say in more prosaic terms. So that's why I wanted, from there, to unfold a whole series of very homogeneous texts across very different periods, in very different styles and literary schools — but those who followed, in our analytic reveries, in whose spirit I place myself today — spirit, otherwise it's a workshop, you'll see, "Between Crisis and War" — even those who followed our close reading of Promenades et souvenirs remember that marvelous, almost prose-poem extract from that text called Sylvie: "Célénie often appears to me in my dreams" — it's a memory of a little childhood friend, a little peasant girl, Célénie — you know that the moon is called Selene in Greek mythology — "Célénie often appears to me in my dreams like a water nymph..."
17:11 ...already you see there the proximity of tempting water — "naive, wildly intoxicated by the scent of the meadows, crowned with sedge and water lilies, revealing in her childish laughter the pearly teeth of the Germanic water-sprite" — and indeed, look, here we come to the edge — "the hem of her dress was often wet, as befits her kind, one had to pick for her the flowers that grow on the marly banks of the ponds of Commelles, among the reeds and the farmsteads of Coye" — that's a village, you see, how we come to prowl on these shores, as if one could almost walk on water. That was my plan, and current events came to convince me that it might not be inappropriate, but perhaps incongruous — almost in the mathematical sense, isn't it — in relation to everything that has been preoccupying us since war came back onto the agenda, and not only...
The edge as switching: from being to becoming 18:21 ...its ghost or its prospect, but its first crackling sounds. So I promise we'll develop this term of inexhaustible richness, the term "edges" in general, but before setting it aside, let me say right away its philosophical interest, to sum it up very quickly: an edge is always a kind of switching, as they say in computing, isn't it — either it's the conversion of the horizontal into the vertical, think of the edge of a cliff, you see all the peril there — incidentally, those who have seen the cult film Rebel Without a Cause, a great classic of 1950s American cinema with James Dean, and these young people who race their cars to the edge of the cliff and jump out of the car at the last moment, letting the car plunge into the void — well yes, that's how rich the United States is — you don't hold back when you've plundered three-quarters of the planet, you can allow yourself that, and I'm serious.
19:33 Saloon brawls, smashing everything — there are societies that can afford that, whereas in the bareness of a small African village, whether at the edge of the desert in the Sahel or deep in the forest in more central, equatorial Africa, everything is in a supernatural sobriety, everything is clean, everything is in its place, isn't it, and one is afraid of breaking even the smallest bird's wing. So: switching, either, as I just said, from horizontal to vertical, or from solid to liquid — you see how inexhaustible the edge is — in more philosophical and metaphysical terms, from being to becoming: when it's the edge of a river, you see, there's the solid, dry land, and then you arrive at the edge and, hop, there you never bathe twice in the same river, and there it passes, we're no longer in the order of being, we're in the order of becoming. That's a lot of transition already, from one thing...
20:43 ...to its opposite — not to a different thing, but among all possible differences, to the one that expresses exactly the inverse of the initial position. That's what I thought this notion was — and I'm not doing mountaineering when I talk about the cliff, I'm not doing geography when I talk about the riverbank, I remind you always that what interests me here is the richness of the semantic field opened up by these words, since they are words of language — and it's no accident, since that's not my domain, the things, the thing itself — geographically, the river, its flow, etc., whether it's muddy or crystal clear, that's important too — but from the moment, and as far back as collective memory goes, and even beyond history, into prehistory, since language carries very quickly the usage...
21:53 ...proper, in the literal sense — you were taught how to say "literal sense" in primary school, it distinguishes the literal sense from the figurative one — very quickly the word is enriched with a practically infinite figurative power, as is the case each time with the image of edges. So I'll set that aside, just long enough to repeat that I hope we are not on the edge of a sudden conflagration, and so I would like, in all humility, since I'm not a geopolitologist, I'm not a military man, to share with you the state of the problem playing out here, illustrated in tragic fashion in eastern Europe — because I've noticed that in Germany they say a Frenchman is a little man with a mustache who doesn't know his geography well — every country has such images of other countries, but still...
Geography, history and Putin's speech on the Donbass 23:03 ...as for geography, small parenthesis, you see we share that with the Americans — the French and the Americans, we have many things that differ us, even oppose us, but there's one thing in common: both of us have been, and still are, references — a somewhat past one for us, more current for the Americans — a more cultural radiance for us, isn't it, more civilizational, versus a more economic, even military one for the Americans — but I mean, it's the hearth toward which the disadvantaged converge, isn't it, the American dream, and of course France too. And so this has a double consequence: we're perhaps among the two worst nations at learning foreign languages, since the whole world speaks one of our languages, French — at one time, you know Frederick the Great in Berlin, the King of Prussia, who was better off with his soldiers than at court, than with any other company...
24:15 ...forbade German being spoken at his court, he said it was a language good enough only for horses, he forced his whole court to speak French. So: French like American, for different reasons, except that in both cases, depending on the era, each has embodied the power of the moment — a double consequence: bad at geography, why take interest in what's far away when everyone takes interest in us, and at languages, isn't it, we're fine, we're sure that if we go to Russia we'll find plenty of people who speak French, and it must be that — read a Russian novel, three times a page there's a note where it says "in French in the text," whether in Tolstoy or Gogol or Tolstoy, whichever, it doesn't matter — so this, the current situation, is often veiled by a fairly common ignorance among our compatriots regarding geography...
25:25 ...and thereby history, because if I talk to you about the conflicts that opposed the Princess of Elis to the Queen of Trebizond, if you don't know where that is, let me tell you right away that Trebizond is the ancient name of a city in Turkish Anatolia — but that's the name it had in antiquity, now it's very small, very near an ancient one, well anyway — if you don't know geography, historical references don't mean much, do they — so it's one and the same subject, historical geography if I may say so, even if one can specialize in one or the other. So, I seem to be dwelling on this a bit, but it's only a beginning, because I intend to give a brief reminder during this session of the context in which the events that currently tend to accelerate, in a rather dramatic direction, are set — I take that in the strict sense...
26:35 ...in the sense that drama means action, where suddenly something happens, isn't it — I didn't say fast, even though it can be, of course, that's not what defines it, well a comedy is part of dramatic art too, provided there's action — how does that oppose the lyrical, which throughout expresses a single feeling, nostalgia, or jubilation, or melancholy — a drama has to move. And we can't say things aren't moving right now in these parts, between the Volga, the Don, and the Dnieper — the Dnieper, which risks becoming, in time, a border separating two parts of Ukraine. First, this is a reverie I'm indulging in, but in the rigorous sense — in the sense that when you let your reverie run free, you are in rigor; it's when you want to direct it that you are neither in the real nor in the dream, you're in a kind of mishmash. One must trust the logic of the signifier...
27:46 ...and I begin by reflecting on the toponym itself, "Ukraine" — I'm not a Slavic speaker, I don't know if I have the right pronunciation, I've heard — I know quite a few Russian friends who've pronounced it, I try to imitate them clumsily — you'll notice I'm trying — I must be giving the impression of being modest tonight, I'm not usually pretentious, I don't think, but I am vain, of course — but that, when one is vain, it's because one is aware of one's weaknesses, one's nothingness, one's worthlessness — I say that in passing, it could serve as a moral theme, couldn't it — the proud man is the one who takes himself seriously; I am not that, I am vain — some people say, "How can I be proud but not vain," as if that were moral progress — no, it's because I know I'm not much of anything that I absolutely must become something through the gaze of the other, by putting on a show — I like that, but I myself can't manage to convince myself...
28:56 ...of the talents I pretend to display — but here I'm objectively modest, that is, once again, I repeat, I am not in disciplines — history, geography — that are truly my own, even though I've been devoted to them for a long time, but truly as an amateur, and above all now we arrive at politics, don't we — let's go, in medias res, as they say, otherwise the introduction never ends — at the heart of the matter, for the Latin expression — when one begins like that, like Mozart in his symphony, right away it starts — well usually Mozart makes a long, somewhat majestic introduction before the allegro begins, but here suddenly it begins in medias res — so, in medias res, I refer to Putin's speech last night, when suddenly he announced that events were going to accelerate, that he had decided — he hasn't decided yet...
30:07 ...that Russian troops would cross the border — I'll come back to "border" — I was on the word "Ukraine," don't forget, you'll see there's an etymological link — but it's this nocturnal speech, well, where he warned that he had decided to recognize the two self-proclaimed enclave republics — say the Ukrainians, the Westerners, the Atlanticists, the Americans — of Luhansk and Donetsk, which are located in the far east of Ukraine, very close to the Russian border, which have of course from time immemorial been Russian-speaking, and which — going back to geography and also economics — have always been, even in the era of the tsars, one of the industrial lungs of Russia, then of the Union...
31:17 ...Soviet, and again today of Russia, because there were originally immense coal mines, there was iron — so with coal and iron you make steel — well, and then later iron came from the Urals, from the region of Kursk — I mention, for those interested, that there is so much iron ore beneath the ground corresponding to the city of Kursk, where the largest land battle in the whole history of warfare took place, after Stalingrad, wasn't it...
31:53 ...a battle mainly of tanks, but not only — so there is such a quantity of iron beneath the ground that geographers say — that when planes fly over that area, the compass, right, goes haywire, to the point that in geography they speak of the "Kursk magnetic anomaly," you see? Well anyway, it's a great industrial region — so we used to say "Ukraine" — but no, no, it's not all of Ukraine, it's this eastern part, isn't it, which looks toward Russia and not toward the West, and which seceded from the new Ukraine — the one that has existed since 2014, so quite recently — and for which the triggering element of the secession, let's not forget, came neither from Moscow nor from those self-proclaimed republics, but from the government in Kyiv — at the time it was Poroshenko, the previous Ukrainian head of state — who wanted to abolish...
Ukraine means border: cleavages and march 33:05 ...the use of the Russian language in regions that had spoken it from father to son for centuries — that lit the powder keg. So it's the most industrial, working-class region, whereas the whole west, especially around Lviv — Lvov on old maps, Lviv — very close to Poland, well there we go to the other extreme, toward the west, the most western part of Ukraine — you see that geography and history are inseparable, if you don't have competence in one, as it were, you won't understand the other — that's a much more rural region, less industrial. The divide also runs through religion, since this west is a variant of the Catholic faith, whereas of course the Russian part is Orthodox — linguistic divide, Russian-Ukrainian — we'll see afterward whether it's a language or a dialect, we'll come to an agreement — none of that is ever fixed, what is a dialect at one level becomes a language relative to another when brought into relation, or vice versa — maybe French will only look like a dialect...
34:15 ...when we're all babbling some sort of European gibberish, I don't know, I hope not, but it's possible. So: linguistic divide, a divide to the point that there's been talk of banning Russian in regions that have always been Russian-speaking, religious divide — well, this is the moment to come back to it — I started from the word "Ukraine": it originally meant border, limit, march — you know how one says "march" — that's where the word "marquis" comes from, you know, those were the warriors and all that, the feudal titles, duke, count — duke, you know what that is, duke comes from ducere, it's related to "lead," "one leads," it comes from there, "to conduct," these are variants of the Latin ducere — the Markgraf is the one who — the count, Graf, is the count who occupies the march, the border.
35:25 In the vicinity of Berlin, in the southern part of former East Berlin, you have a charming part of the city — you'd think a rainbow had dropped itself onto a pine forest, a pine forest full of houses like something out of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — I won't go on, yet we're practically in the near suburbs of Berlin — I'm thinking of Köpenick-East, because the fruitfulness of reflecting on edges gives its proof right here.
36:35 The dramatic and perilous region is the one where you never know where you are, if you will—you remember that beautiful letter from Nerval to Georges Bell after one of his most difficult, one of his most painful crises of madness. There's always the same process: when he's cured, there's the journey, the desire to travel, and he sets off once more toward the East, toward the Orient, so toward the Rhine. I should mention that his mother's tomb at the time was in a cemetery that is today in Poland, and which at the time was in what was called East Prussia—which he never reached because it was very far, and because he didn't quite have the means. He got as far as Leipzig, still, and he was haunted by literary sterility, the quintessential modern symptom. And there he writes to Georges Bell: 'A miracle—last night, touching the banks of the Rhine'—a border if ever there was one, Ukraine means border—'a miracle, last night, touching the banks of the Rhine.'
37:46 'I found my voice again'—VOX—'and my faculties. I composed a sonnet'—there's the literary, poetic fecundity returning—'I composed a sonnet on the train to Baden.' He was shuttling back and forth between Strasbourg and Baden, on this side of the Rhine and beyond the Rhine, if you will. 'And long extinguished, I felt myself ablaze again in the sunlight of my finest days.' A very beautiful letter, isn't it, all of that—by touching, by a miracle, by touching the banks of the Rhine, 'I found my voice again and my faculties.' And there's a dream in Aurélia that begins: 'One evening I became certain'—he doesn't say 'I dreamed,' because it can happen in broad daylight, and that too is a symptom of madness—'one evening I had the certainty of being transported to the banks of the Rhine.' So there, Ukraine—yes, there are those who take it that way. That's why I wanted to make a few clarifications. Humbly, I'm telling you what I've learned, what I've gathered in history and geography on this matter of Ukraine and Russia and their relationship, and by giving them back their historical depth.
38:58 Without which one doesn't understand much—in which one is more military than militant, and more militant than scientific. So let's stay, for now, if we're to be objective—that's why I spoke a little about humility, not modesty, I insist, as I insisted earlier, on the distinction between vain and proud. Generally people say 'proud' as a warning, that vanity is a flaw but pride is not. For me it's the opposite: I defend vanity. After all, we have the right to try to make whatever impression we can on others, when we know that, on our own, we're not much—that's what matters. And so when one shows humility and not modesty—I can be humble, know that I'm not much, without playing dead and playing clever, without being 'toqué' as they say elsewhere. So I recall all this because there are things that need recalling.
Natural borders, Ukrainian neo-nazism and NATO 40:09 Precisely, reminders about situations—and I began with this incredibly ambivalent position of Ukraine. Ambivalent, I don't mean morally, but geographically. It's not a surface, so to speak—national identities are not tied to geographical homogeneity. There are those who still believe that, who still believe in natural borders. Yes, indeed, when you see the Pyrenees, that kind of wall—much more of a wall, if you will, than the Alps, where there are lots of transverse valleys even though they're higher—that seems like a natural border. But then what about rivers, of course—the Rhine, you just mentioned it—that's fine, you can say it's a natural border, it always sits between France and Germany. So why do we stay in France when we cross the Rhône or the Loire? None of this is rigorous. I'm not even talking about flat countries—you saw that the Russian tanks arrived partly, not only—
41:19 most arrived from the south through Crimea, but I'm talking about those who arrived through Belarus in the north—it's a plain that stretches for several hundred kilometers, truly a 'pole,' which gave its name to Poland, by the way, incidentally—of very great agricultural wealth, it was the breadbasket. That's not Ukraine—that was the region, at one point, before we found the Kuzbass basin in Siberia, which is one of the biggest steel-producing regions in the world. But it was steelmaking—its center, there's still steel activity in eastern Ukraine, where those so-called self-proclaimed republics are, of Luhansk, a bit south of Kharkov, which is Ukraine's second city. So you see, this is a rich region, but it's a plain—it's within a plain. So with a river, a powerful mountain range, you can pretend it's a natural border, even though after two or three historical episodes, what was a border suddenly becomes—
42:29 in the middle of the country. Otherwise every time you cross the Appalachians in the United States you'd find yourself in another state, wouldn't you. Besides, the word 'border' is very interesting—look, in 'border,' listen carefully, it's written right there: there's 'bord,' Ukraine. It means 'edge, before Ukraine.' We're in a Europe that begins to be Western, and indeed this is the region furthest to the right—excuse me, I'm not making slanderous claims here, I'm distancing myself from the media that poison us, if you will—there's a war propaganda on the other side too, on the Russian side. I think it was Churchill, I don't remember who said it, that the first casualty of war is always the truth. No, no, I'm not—I mean, the worst Ukrainian Nazis, those who collaborated, if you will, the Banderites—look it up, Ukraine, Bandera, B-A-N-D-E-R-A—it gives me chills just—well, among the worst atrocities, among the worst camps—
43:41 of extermination, not just concentration, extermination, if you will, and created by the Nazis, were carried out in Ukraine, in a region that had welcomed them with open arms, if you will, in order to turn against the Soviet regime at the time—so it turned against—you see, there are grievances, I'm not taking sides here, there are those who think it might be good to be a Nazi, I'm not even settling that, you see how far I'll go—but one mustn't hide the trickery either, that would be dishonest, because truly, that would give me an inconsistency if we say it's in the name of freedom that we're defending Ukraine, when within the Ukrainian government there are openly neo-Nazi elements, with the insignia, not hiding it, and who, right from the change of regime when Yanukovych was ousted following the events of Maidan—you know that, it's practically a law—
44:51 because the media talked about it right away—I mean, history was being rewritten, and the worst pro-Nazis were being rehabilitated and justified. Compared to that, Pétain is a choirboy—I mean, sure he's a criminal, but he's a choirboy next to the Ukrainian Nazis. And that's in the western part—I'm not saying Ukrainians are Nazis, it's precisely the western part, let's say, more you go toward the western part, that's not more—it's the part that borders Slovakia, Poland, etc. And so, you see, a border is not just a line, and it's not a line only between two countries—there it separates two economies: more agrarian in the west, the politically more conservative part, more agrarian, Catholic, so it's a political border in the—
46:02 abstract sense of the word border, but it's also a religious border, but it's also an economic border—agrarian in the west, heavy industry in the east. You know the Antonov aircraft, among which is the biggest plane in the world—I always forget its number, 79, 24, I'm not sure—well, it's always impressive to watch maneuver, I mean the factories that make it, that made it, they're rusting now, the factories—that's in present-day Ukraine. The Soviet Union, which lost feathers, the former Soviet Union, the former USSR—and you see, I'm not deciding rightly or wrongly, one needs to know all this, that's what matters. Afterward one judges as one likes depending on how one positions oneself—that's less important than not forgetting the facts, which are stubborn. And this part in the east, everyone with a minimum of culture knows the great Russian authors—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky—
47:12 Turgenev, Gogol, of whom many say he's perhaps the most Russian of Russian writers—it's Russians who say that, I don't know, it's not for me to settle things like that, maybe it's false, maybe it's a collective imaginary, I'm telling you what's said, I'm passing it on—and Gogol is, in origin, Ukrainian. In our media currently, we constantly oppose—they say there's a war, a conflict between Russia and Ukraine. No—the first correction I'll make, and I'm committing myself here—there's a conflict between Russia and NATO, its most advanced tip, driven into Russia's belly, and now that's Ukraine. If you don't believe me, you should never take my word for it—only gurus ask to be believed on their word alone—read the texts, the publications, you can find them everywhere. Among the most malevolent men of our time—some say the most beneficent, it depends where you stand—there's Brzezinski, who was the advisor to—
48:23 several American presidents, Carter, who defined the strategy that the United States should target—he's an intelligent man, he said, look, we Americans, we're the number one world power, yes—he has a Slavic name, but like many Slavic émigrés, they're not the best, those who have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, and Brzezinski, in a publication, made this reasoning, which is intelligent: we are the strongest, but that won't last forever, no power has lasted forever, almost—he's intelligent. Marx says somewhere that what he dislikes so much about Hegel's dialectic is that people fantasize about it, that you have to turn it right side up, upside down, on its head, on its feet—what Marx himself prefers in Hegel's dialectic is that it forever forbids any substance from claiming to be eternal, stable, definitively acquired—as if Marx had anticipated—
49:34 Aragon's beautiful poem, isn't it—'Nothing is ever given to man, neither his strength nor his weakness nor his right, and when he thinks to open his arms his shadow is that of a cross, and when he wants to hold his happiness close he crushes it, his life is a strange and painful divorce.' Yes, I'm in the style of analytic reveries, but to stay at the heart of the reality that concerns us—so at all times there has been this: Ukraine has never signified a substance but a relation, a relation between what is on that side of the border, what is on this side and what is beyond. You just have to turn your back for it to reverse—but no matter, for the Russian it's the Ukrainian who is beyond, for the Ukrainian it's the Russian who is beyond. But I just said something foolish—there's no Ukraine 'to the left'—Ukraine is what's between the two, it's not a line, it's a surface that separates immense surfaces, just as there is that thin band—well, the narrow strip on the map—
The Sahel and Nerval: the border is not a line 50:44 it's bigger than France, the Sahel strip, which separates, if you will, Africa where it still rains, where it rains most, equatorial Africa there—when you go toward the equator, furthest south, up to the equator, then you go back up, then it's the savannah, still quite green, but no more dense virgin forest—that's Kenya, if you will, that's Out of Africa, the domain of the big animals, because in the virgin forest there are big animals, but they're the biggest of the small ones—the biggest spiders, biggest snakes, well there, the biggest mosquitoes, etc.—whereas the big animals are small: there's a small forest elephant, a small forest buffalo, a bit reddish at the edges, let's leave that—that's the forest, then after that there's the savannah, the great herds, the savannah buffalo, that's something else than the small forest buffalo. And then beyond that we go back up and we fall into the desert, into the biggest desert in the world, the Sahara, which means 'great desert' in Arabic. But between the two, before passing from the savannah, there are always transitions in reality—reality is concrete, it's not cut with an axe, reality between the two, there's a band—
51:54 roughly as wide as France, which in Arabic is called 'shore,' Sahel, meaning that beyond it, watch out, it will be the desert—a beautiful metaphor, as if the desert were an ocean and the last strips of land before entering that magnificent nothingness that is the desert were called the Sahel, where tufts of grass still grow, where you can graze herds over immense areas, but it's not watered enough to farm—not even vegetables, fruit, food crops—so you really have to irrigate when you're lucky enough to have a river not far away, the Niger, or marigots, leftover pools from the rainy season in some clay basins there. The border between useful Africa, so to speak, in terms of human settlement, economy, fertility of the land, and the total desert—between the two there is a border, but this border—
53:04 is not a line, it's not the abstract border. There have been very interesting studies—the notion of a border as a line is modern, it starts, this won't surprise you, roughly at the time of Descartes, that geographers start to agree on this notion. Before that, one said—for example, take someone in Chambéry who crossed the Alps to go sell his dairy products or his cheeses on the other side in Italy, in Turin, when you go back down the other side into Italy, if you will, even as far as Milan, why not—and who brought back from Italy fabrics into the Alps, which were quite lacking in them. It wasn't a line, the border—we know very well that when you come back down from the pass, well, there's the notion of an abstract border—or else it's the river, one was beyond the river, until the day a conqueror makes the river run through the middle of his empire and not at its periphery. The notion of a border—
54:15 abstract—I don't know where it's marked, 'beyond this line your ticket is no longer valid,' or else 'beyond this line you are no longer in Poland, you are in Russia, you are no longer in Germany, you are in Poland, you are no longer in France, you are in Germany'—abstractly like that, and it's recent. Ukraine isn't that—it means border, limit, march. I like that old term, which gave rise to 'Marquis,' the one who watches over the confines of the Empire, of the kingdom, of the fief—it's a surface, it's incredible, because we're going to find Nerval again and the 'banks'—yes, I told you earlier that admirable excerpt from the letter to Georges Bell: 'A miracle, yesterday, touching the Rhine, I found my voice and my faculties again.' A commentator, a critic of Nerval, said this admirable formula: he was one of those for whom borders are not lines but surfaces—you can stay there, it's not an edge like a thread—
55:26 or like the edge of a razor blade—no, it's a surface where one could stay, almost protect oneself from what's before and protect oneself from what's after. I've always been fascinated that in border zones, especially the most watched ones, where the stakes are highest, there's what's called—it's very telling—it's in the English language, because the planetary colonization of the world by the English at one time, at the Victorian era in particular, meant the term became widespread in English—there's what's called a 'no man's land,' you know, the land of no man. You've left the border but you're not yet in Germany, you're—no, I remember when there was the Wall, if you will, the Berlin Wall—you'll see, I'm not losing my thread, my thread is the new determination we've just found with Nerval, if you will, that borders are not lines but surfaces, and that perhaps a solution would be to stay all the time on that surface, neither on this side—
56:36 nor on the other side. There, on the Wall, you weren't supposed to go, there were mines, watchtowers, things where they'd shoot at you, electric alarms, whatever you like—but precisely because it was so quiet in terms of human presence, nobody ventured there, so it was teeming with animals, it was a little ecological paradise, there were rabbits, sometimes a doe darting away—I'm getting warm—he was one of those beings for whom borders are not lines but surfaces. I've mostly talked about Ukraine there; now I'm talking about Russia—Russia, which has always dominated Ukraine if we go back to the earliest times when the term Ukraine is spoken, is pronounced, always with this designation of being a march, a limit—we arrive at what's called—
Grand duchy of Kiev, Varangians and the Volga 57:46 in history textbooks, as early as the 8th century—that's the time of Charlemagne, I don't know if you can picture that, it goes back far, Charlemagne, he was illiterate, he created many schools, that's good, for signing his name he needed a monk to guide his hand to make a cross—no, those were barbarous times. There was, especially in those areas, the great duchy of Kiev, present-day capital of Ukraine, which is older, and which had as vassal what is called today Russia, which wasn't yet called Russia—but the word 'Rus' already existed to designate what? Who? Not what—
58:28 a people, a people—a Scandinavian people. Yes, identities take a hit—but yes, there are the Slavs who are opposed to Germanic peoples who are opposed to Latin peoples—first of all, these are all Indo-European languages, but it's true there are differences—but that these differences would be of origin and not due to historical events, that's what we're seeing now, isn't it. At the outset, what constituted Russia?
59:01 The Volga—look carefully at its course, it starts way up north, not far from Scandinavian countries, not even far from the Finnish border, roughly, and then it becomes—it's the longest river in Europe, nearly 3,000 km—and then it flows into the Black Sea, which was, after all, an annex of the Mediterranean—well, for Nordic peoples, we're really in the south there, if you will. The Russian cities on the shore of the Black Sea, Sochi and so on, there are palm trees, I dream of going one day to Abkhazia, you have your coffee there by the sea, under the—and then an orange falls onto your coffee cup because the avenues are shaded by orange trees—nobody ever talks about these places, they're strange places behind, and mountains that are 1,000 meters higher than Mont Blanc, that's still speaking to you—but this proximity of very high mountains and the sea and the oranges fascinates me. Well, that's the south for the Russians, that's where the residences, the holiday resorts always are, if you will.
1:00:08 The Yalta treaty was signed there. This axis, the Volga, was traveled because there were no roads, especially in those parts—there are marshes, it wasn't just insecurity, above all there are the marshes, the roads—it's a—well, it's not a country blessed by the gods, France, with the temperate zone besides, the most varied, most diverse, mildest place, neither too—it's going to start after the north of France—nor too dry as in Castile, it's going to start south of the Pyrenees—the 45th parallel passes right through Bordeaux, 45, half of 90, exactly equidistant between the pole and the equator, the ideal, so to speak, happy as God in France, as the Germans say, if you will.
1:01:00 Not like God in paradise—what paradise, France—happiness above salvation in popular sayings, 'happy as God in France,' so with 'glücklich wie Gott in Frankreich'—and that's not the case, we're in countries where there can be a drought that carries off 40% of the grain harvest in Ukraine, in Russia even more so, in the new lands—or on the contrary, if you will, a winter that drags on, a frost that kills all the fruit trees, the fruits, the orchards—in short, it's much more brutal, it's not temperate, hence the beauty of the springs—you know, when the Vistula, the border, which flows through Poland, when the Vistula thaws you hear thunderclaps, when the ice melts like that, people say they thought it was thunder, like in a tremendous storm—yes. So these were Scandinavian traders—
1:02:10 who were called the Varangians originally, but who were called 'Rus' by the people of the mainland who traded in amber—amber, which played such a big role in the coquetry of women of the south, women of the Orient, of the Mediterranean, of Greece, etc., the eastern Mediterranean especially. Now, amber is gathered on the shores of the Baltic—which is 'balt,' to be watched in what's currently happening with Ukraine—nowhere collaborated more with the Nazis, nowhere were more Jews deported per capita than in the Baltic states—listen carefully to what I'm telling you—and what a disgrace, in a former Baltic state, since the fall of the Wall, they tore down the statue of the war memorial of the Soviet soldier, if you will, even though tens of thousands of Soviets fell to liberate that little country, in Estonia, and they replaced it with the statue of a guy, a former SS man—there we're dealing with facts—
1:03:20 we're not—so maybe it's better to be SS, I'm being humble tonight, I'm telling you what needs to be known, afterward you do what you want with it. So it begins in the Baltic states and it flows straight into the Caspian Sea near Astrakhan with an enormous delta, almost as big as France—the Volga, there were no roads at the time, I told you, it was an unreliable, unsafe terrain, mud when it thaws, dust where the wheels of carts sink in—so they took the waterways, not like for a long time in Europe, if you will, like the barges carried the wines of Bordeaux, if you will, from the vineyard toward the estuary, toward the royal Garonne, that was the last, and their waters joined the mountains—
1:04:30 of grapes surging into the Dordogne—there, rivers are the oldest roads, it's no accident that the few names remaining to us from the Gauls—German has fewer words of Gaulish origin than French has words of Arabic origin, one should know that, there's been a linguistic replacement long before the replacement some people dread. So these are mostly river names everywhere: there's the S—Saône, Seine, Siagne, Sioule in the Auvergne, well, there are so many. These traders carried amber down south and brought back from the south things to adorn their women—I'll add, it's true they didn't only bring that back, they brought back luxury, civilization for people who were still barbarians, a bit less rough, materially—and that's what's at the origin of the Russian people: a mix of Germanic peoples, including the Germanic Vikings—
One and the same people: Mussorgsky, Gogol and the judgment of Solomon 1:05:40 and of those peoples called sometimes Lapps, Samoyeds, from the far north, and who have slightly more prominent cheekbones, who are a bit more Asiatic, whose eyes tend to be slanted—I salute a friend here who will recognize herself, if you will, and who is a great activist, and who deserves credit for being an activist in the beautiful country of Norway—it was she who told me, after inviting me to give a talk with her friend, whom I salute here, Bronco, who had invited me to give a talk at the campus in Bergen, Norway—she told me: 'actually we should warn him, when he talks about philosophy here, it's exclusively analytic philosophy, neo-positivism'—I'll close the parenthesis by saying, on the entropy of what philosophy has become in the richest and most developed countries, that Norway, and even more so than Switzerland, has the highest income—I'll close the parenthesis. Yes, so these are a mix of Germanic and Lapp—
1:06:51 to simplify, if you will—the Russians, there are a lot of blond blue-eyed people among the Russians, if you will, remember, I showed you an excerpt from the film The Forty-First—she shoots her beloved, the Tsar's soldier, with his beautiful blue eyes, his refined manners, his beautiful fine blond hair, there you go—and the Russians were vassals of the great duchy of Kiev at the time. Don't take this to mean the Russians were dominated by the Ukrainians—that would be anachronistic, the Ukrainians weren't quite yet Ukraine, Ukraine wasn't quite yet Ukraine, and Russia wasn't quite yet really called Russia, it was the most northerly part of the great duchy of Kiev. And one of the most monumental works ever dared to be written for piano, so difficult, what splendor—I alluded to it last time, it served as our opening theme with our Japanese-German or Nippo-
1:08:01 Germanic pianist, as you like, the one who came to the piano barefoot, Alice Sara Ott—she performed this masterpiece by Mussorgsky, a composer from Odessa, even though he is among the most Russian of Russian composers—the famous Pictures at an Exhibition, where there's a theme that wanders around, a visitor to a painting exhibition passing from one painting to another, there's like a leitmotif, this motif when he trots from one painting to another—we'll try to do it like that, very Russian—right away, at the end, there are variations of all kinds, some dark, if you will, others frightening, others comic, and then at the end there's this grandiose finale, the Great Gate of Kiev, the Great Gate of Kiev, in one of the—
1:09:11 most Russian works of the composers—well go and sort that out. Well yes, it's not a line, it's a surface, or what's now called Russian in a more exclusive, more abstract way, and Ukrainian in an exclusive way, that is, opposed to Russian—what sadness, when all this was once the same people. I told you, Gogol, who is of Ukrainian origin—today he would be a citizen of Ukraine, after the split with Russia; Mussorgsky, his most Russian work, and its finale, the Great Gate of Kiev, is among the glories of Russian music. You see, go ahead and cut that with an axe, you might as well cut in half—not the child that Solomon wanted to cut in two, he didn't intend to do it, but he knew that the real mother—
The Russian, "negro of whiteness" 1:10:21 would say, no, no, no, I'd rather leave him to the false mother who's claiming him than see my son slaughtered—that's the atrocity of it, that's what's being done. Everything has been done to set Ukrainians against Russians, everything has been done to flatter the worst kind of nationalism. Another time I'll do a dialectic of nation, region, and internation—I've never been for bourgeois cosmopolitanism nor for chauvinistic nationalism, I'm for proletarian internationalism, which is the synthesis of the two, that is, a fraternity between different peoples where one brings their couscous and the other their pot-au-feu, as happens in working-class households, as used to happen at a time when things were less divided, if you will. And there again, you can sense that I have a tenderness for the Russians—but because I lived in Black Africa—
1:11:31 what's the connection, you might ask—I find that Russians are often more racist. Well yes, there can be—imagine, you see a Black man in the middle of the plain, I don't know, between Leningrad and Moscow, between Kiev and Kharkov, not so long ago, when you didn't see them everywhere—it was 'a golliwog, where did he come from,' and if there was a rape somewhere they'd say it was him—in the United States, they lynched tens of thousands of Black Americans as soon as a girl had been raped, even before they'd verified the fact, moreover—they'd start by shooting a few 'n*ggers,' as they said there. So why do I have an affection I owe to Black Africa—what's the connection with Russia? Because the Russian, for me, is—it's a formula, but a personal one, and I'll pass it on to you because it seems to me like a duty to pass it on—it's the n*gger of whiteness. The white race—we have our n*ggers, they're the Slavs in general, and among the Slavs the Russians in particular.
1:12:41 For those who have visited Venice, they know very well that you visit the magnificent Quay of the Slavs, the Slavs—it's the slave, where they used to unload, where entire cargoes of slaves were unloaded, slaves who came from Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages. And yes, again, slavery didn't disappear on one New Year's Eve at midnight in antiquity, and then Christianity appeared and, poof—no, it was gradual, and for a long time it didn't count, these peoples—Charlemagne, they often reduced peoples to slavery, for half a century he fought against the peoples of the east, he even fought against the most German part of Germany, he who was himself Germanic—I mean the Saxons, he had a lot of trouble with the Saxons. Saxony is really Thuringia, which is part of Saxony, the Thüringerwald—oh haye—there's a soul, I'm quoting an excerpt from a poem—oh no, no, no, as they say in the shadow of place names, oh no, sacred—
1:13:51 Thuringia is called in Germany 'Grünherz Deutschland,' the green heart of Germany—yes, we're at the heart of Germany. Well, at the time it wasn't 'the world,' it was a foreign, barbarous country that had to be converted by fire and sword with Charlemagne's armies, if you will—and I'm not passing moral judgment, well, that's history—and that gave rise to the Saxons, who apparently occupied England. It's complicated—the closer you look, the less complicated it is; the more you approach the language, the more things become clear and take shape, if you will, and you notice it's in any case less simple than what one thought one could make out in the darkness or in the imagination—there's reality. So for a long time, that's why—with my past stays in Africa, I find turns of mind that I often find among Russians too—a certain way of joking, a certain respect for elders, in the tales—
1:15:01 a familiarity with the totemic, animal world—look at Peter and the Wolf, look at the battle between the tin soldiers and the mice and rats in The Nutcracker, if you will—there's a fantastical, childlike world that's typical of a certain mentality that the ethnologist Lévy-Bruhl had the nerve to call 'prelogical,' as if there weren't a logic in all that. And for that purpose, one should speak of peoples without writing, originally, which brings together here both the Pygmy, if you will, and the Slavic hunter of the Pripet marshes, who gave the Germans so much trouble during the war. There was a time when the Russians were enslaved—I'm not condemning the duchy of Kiev of that era for having enslaved the Russians—that's much later, in the 17th century, between the 17th and 18th—
1:16:11 18th century, the Poles reduce the Ukrainians to slavery, to serfdom—these Poles who are now standing behind the Ukrainians, saying, in fact if you have a problem come take refuge with us, we're all pro-American, and yes, these are countries that always look toward the richest and strongest. You have to be rich and strong for even the poorest social attire—the cowherd, the cowboy, blue jeans from Genoa—to become the emblem of the superior race—it's not that everyone wants to have that in the east, as they called me at the time, in Eastern Europe. And yes, the paradoxes—at a time when billionaires weren't going around in ties but were entering the Carlton Hotel in Cannes in jeans, not during the festival—there we go, yes, there was an era—don't believe those who say these are irreducible identities. What's tragic is that we've thoroughly stirred up these hatreds—if there are embers you shouldn't blow on, it's exactly this—it's as if we were exciting tribal differences—
1:17:22 in sub-Saharan Africa, there are those who haven't been spared—one of the greatest massacres in all of human history, in Rwanda, was in large part—I'm not saying it's the sole cause, out of epistemic caution, you see, we try to be intellectually honest—but it was stoked by Belgian missionaries at one time—well, it's the Belgians who held that part, French missionaries did the same elsewhere, but there the consequences are terrible. It was a Belgian who told the Tutsis, if you will, that they were herders for whom cattle are sacred, like the Fulani in West Africa, so that they were used to consuming only red and white, only meat and milk—cattle, bovine of course, mainly—it's sacred. Where am I going with this? Milk, calcium, dairy products, the importance of calcium for skeletal development—the Tutsi herders are on average 20 to 30 cm taller than the Hutus, who may not be Pygmies, but who are much shorter. And the missionaries—
1:18:32 mocked them, saying, how could you—given your stately physique, no doubt descended from Pharaohs—when you put that in people's heads, it drives them mad, if you will—descended from Pharaohs, how could one defend these near-dwarfs that are the Hutus—and racism becomes physical, and then it's the Jew's nose, and then it's—yes, when you play with things like that, it's serious. I heard Zelensky, the current successor to Poroshenko, the current president of Ukraine, say today that the West must defend Ukraine—why not, he's playing his role, the responsibility his people are supposed to have entrusted him with. But what came next, he shouldn't have said it: 'for we are a shield against Russian barbarism'—me, I am the limit of civilization, me who am further west, and beyond that there's the barbarian. That's what the French used to think of the Germans—
1:19:42 when there hadn't yet been the industrial revolution—the Germans were the 'pébourg,' the peasant, a bit heavy, a bit slow, a bit stupid—that perception changed afterward, that he was quick for someone heavy. And it's the same attitude from the French—Versailles, French ease, the lightness of champagne bubbles, their sunny, golden connotation—versus the cabbage-eaters and beer-drinkers. It's the same divide that Germans have with Poles—they don't say 'Poles,' they say 'Polacks,' if you will, when they want to say it contemptuously, like the ignoble anti-Arab racism, saying 'bougnoule'—I'm exclaiming because the terms are inexhaustible. 'Polack,' one could say the same of the Poles that the Germans said of them—what the rural German once was for the French, that's what the Pole was for the German, not so long ago—for a good part, moreover, they're the immigrant workers now—and for the Pole, it's the Russian.
1:20:53 You see why I have a tenderness for this n*gger of whiteness, because there is nothing lower than the n*gger—the n*gger is a concept here, I'm not talking about Africans, I'm speaking in the sense used in publishing—look, 'he's the ghostwriter for such-and-such a novelist,' that is, someone who writes in his place—that's the slave I'm talking about, Slav. There, I wanted to end on this note, to say that there are demons one should avoid stirring up. I'll say more when I answer your questions, because I'm sure that those who are kind enough to follow us find these subjects fascinating, and I'm sure you'll give me material to make a follow-up—not to this geopolitics lesson, it's not a lesson at all, it's not my specialty, it's not my discipline—but to reminders that I'm passing on, which it is useful, no doubt more useful currently, to pass on. And I see there are questions—Dominique, I can display them for you—so, precisely—
Putin's speech against Lenin and the Bolsheviks 1:22:04 I need to click on comment, right, you started talking about Putin's speech which hadn't been developed, you know — yes, yes, I thank Pierre-Alain for reminding me of what finally decided me to address the ongoing conflict in the east of Europe tonight, it's the unease and the relief I felt — the relief and the unease, I don't know, in any case it's more and more the unease that I feel — when there was Putin's speech, because of the content of that speech when he announced, now almost 48 hours ago, not yet, that the Russian army was going to intervene beyond Russian borders into present-day Ukraine, but moreover, even beyond the republics of, of Lugansk, but the speech
1:23:15 that he gave when he simply said, I have decided to recognize them — you know, that was an announcement, the Russian Communist Party had been insisting for a long time for that recognition to happen, you'll see why I'm making all these reminders, the hour is solemn — and that twice, when I, when I seemed to defend Russia against Atlanticism — yes, I will always defend Russia against Atlanticism, we're not going to compare, for me every death is a trauma, well I mean, for now there's no carnage — in Vietnam there were 3 million dead, in Korea there were 3 million dead, I mean Syria, Iraq, it's not over, the bloodbath continues, it wasn't the Russians who started the war in Iraq, in Syria and in Vietnam — there are Christians among you, I'm sure, sincere ones, not communists, that's two
1:24:25 or not entirely incompatible, but there are anti-communist Christians — meditate on the parable of the mote and the beam, you'll understand what I mean, I say this for those who are unbelievers and who have the misfortune of not knowing this admirable text, one of the sayings at least, of the Gospel, when Jesus says, avoid removing the mote from your neighbor's eye when you don't see the beam in your own — there you have it, giving lessons on human rights when you come from NATO, which has sown death and desolation for more than half a century across the entire planet, from the bloodiest dictatorships of Latin America — I believe the record for deaths per capita is Guatemala — in the world, if I set aside, if I remove the two great genocides, Cambodia, the anti-Soviet pro-Chinese Khmer Rouge — I recall that there was sympathy at that time from our, our pro-Chinese people, who are now trying
1:25:35 to reclaim today's China, which makes me laugh a bit, and which on the contrary, right now, discreetly but effectively sides with Russia — the latest statement, right, from the Chinese vice-minister, was to say that Russia was justified in worrying about its security — the country most attacked of all time, objectively, that can be measured, the people, the people of Russia — so yes, before giving the floor, I wanted to insist on that point, it's in, in his statement where he said he wasn't going to recognize — it lasted about 55 minutes, this speech by Putin with which everything began, I'm talking about the acceleration of events, he went further back but precisely he made a historical recap, and there he went back almost, as I did earlier, almost to the Varangians, almost to the
1:26:45 grand duchy of Kiev — very quickly, in 50 minutes, there were maybe only 10 minutes left where he announced, that's it, now I have decided to recognize the two republics — and beforehand he gave a summary of contemporary history, in the sense of the 20th, 21st century, of Russia, with an anticommunist and antibolshevik aggressiveness — he never, he never claimed to be a communist, his political career even begins under Yeltsin, that is to say under — well, we'll have to talk about that one day, Yeltsin, the only head of state in the world, in the modern world, as far as I know, find me another one, who used tanks to fire on the elected deputies of his own parliament in Moscow because he wanted to remain loyal to the USSR — he caused 150 deaths, we never talk about that, that's why
1:27:55 a news item, I mean information from flash news bulletins that rests on mush, as Hegel says, the mush of feeling that doesn't rise to the level of the concept, it's abject — that said, so he never presented himself as a communist, I've never seen him make such a charge, on the contrary, he's often anticommunist domestically, he's not stupid, it's his main opposition party in particular — he carried out a pension reform that was very unsocial, and there the Communist Party went on the offensive and was in open conflict with the government over the pension issue — but when it comes to foreign policy, they're often aligned — foreign policy — but one shouldn't conclude from that, when people count, when they've tried to make people believe in conflict, they still keep trying to make people believe it because they pile up the most contradictory faults onto this man's head, whom I am not defending, you'll see, on the contrary — I'm on the same point that worries me about him, people make people believe
1:29:05 that he wants to resurrect the Soviet Union, but no, he only speaks ill of it — he says it's from the moment Russia, meaning Holy Russia, that of the tsars, became Bolshevik — it's not communism, in Russia at that time they said Bolshevik, meaning the majority party, because Bolshevik means, the big show — it's when Russia became Bolshevik that they made, forgive me, the stupid mistake of giving sovereignty to a bunch of peoples who until then were simply parts of the Russian empire and who took themselves for nation-states — Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, well, in short, all of them — he recalls that it was a federation, right, the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — he came down harder, more, on Lenin than on Stalin, I know that will please some people, that detail, that's not me
1:30:15 that's not my case, right, there are anti-Stalinists who aren't on my side either, I'm thinking of the Trotskyists and others, right — you know, I always use the example — one can be anti-Gaullist for opposite reasons — how many times did I confide in someone, I say I'm anti-Gaullist, the guy says me too, I'm glad, look, I voted against De Gaulle because of his social measures at the time — as if I approved, as the Communist Party used to say at that time, back when it was still a powerful and balanced French communist party, it said we do have to recognize a few positive aspects of General De Gaulle's foreign policy — there you go, not the social policy, but well, that speech in Phnom Penh where he condemned the war in Vietnam, decolonization, the referendum in Algeria from which Algeria becomes independent, and so on — that's a lot of things that went in the direction of France's withdrawal, the empty chair policy at the so-called common market, of little Germany, of little Brussels Europe — you see my slip
1:31:25 the withdrawal from NATO, especially France's withdrawal from the integrated command — from which it never left the Atlantic Alliance — he simply decided that it was up to France alone to decide the supreme choice of whether to go to war or make peace — it's not some other people who decides, some deranged American, some Dr. Strangelove who decides to start a world war and we automatically get dragged into it by Article 5 of the NATO charter — it's serious, we've gone back to it since Sarkozy, Hollande, and it continues — so I can say I'm against De Gaulle, and the other guy too, but the other guy, it's because he's far-right and the other guy will say, but De Gaulle sold out Algeria to the Arabs — right, but it wasn't quite for the same reasons that I opposed De Gaulle, but on the contrary to defend, at a time when Abdallah and Jean-Michel were both on strike at Billancourt and benefited from the same advantages when the strike had a positive outcome — so I was surprised
1:32:35 by this attack — so I don't know, I told you, I'm resolved to be intellectually modest tonight, not as a pose, unfortunately I'd like to see things more clearly — but is it because the Communist Party keeps growing stronger in Russia, because it's the main opposition force, that this is a way of taking a jab at it in passing, saying that if Russia has all these problems now, it's because of the regime that the Bolsheviks gave too much importance to the Ukrainians here, the Kazakhs there, the Balts, the Belarusians — especially since under the Soviet Union, few people know this, so since tonight I'm in a mood of reminders, Belarus and Ukraine had a separate vote at the UN — that was clever, so the Soviet Union effectively had three votes — one properly Soviet, Soviet Russia, the Russian Federative Republic, then Ukraine, then Belarus — you see, quite a strange autonomy after all, to have a right
1:33:45 to vote at the UN — so this attack surprised me, and so I told myself, I did well to take the precaution of recalling — but it needs to be recalled because it's not understood, I repeat it several times — I told myself during these years since I've been giving public talks, that if I were in Russia, nothing proves that I would vote for Putin, and many things, right, rather push one to think the opposite — I would rather vote for the Russian Communist Party, that is, the main opposition force to Putin — but I was surprised by this attack at a moment when he might need to unify, right, the Russians around the fight he's now leading, now that everything has been done, right, to get the Russian bear to start getting angry, right — I hear extraordinary things in the comments right now — there, I'm again defending the Russian point of view, but not Putin's point of view, you see, I'm trying to be nuanced
1:34:55 'If you have reason and heart, don't show them, they will never believe you,' says Hölderlin, right — okay, I'll stop there because I can't hog the floor too much, I'm sure all of this will come back through your questions — can Pierre-Alain, who is here, suggest questions to me that seem to him — because he's very good at this, he knows you, he knows me, so he knows which questions please both sides and he knows which are more relevant — okay, I'll start with our friend Sébastien, our comrade too, whose cinephile culture I envy — I mean each time he must blush because he's a rather modest young man who doesn't act vain like me — so, hi Dominique, good evening everyone, I have a question, there's a statement that tends to come back more and more systematically whenever the resurgence of Nazism in Eastern Europe is mentioned, and particularly in Ukraine — people say, we have to understand them, they suffered so much from communism — what would you say to that kind of statement? — I'll answer first and foremost
"We must understand them, they suffered under communism" 1:36:05 my answer will go beyond that but I'll answer first — thank you, Denis, it's incredible that so many people are indifferent to this kind of statement — we have to understand — well yes, we have to understand the Nazis when we've suffered from communism — so since we're talking about the Baltic states, I told you earlier that they smashed the monument to the Soviet war dead, after the immense sacrifice, in thousands of human lives, that the Red Army had to make, right, under German gunfire, to liberate the Baltic countries from Nazism — let's not forget that these were Teutonic kingdoms at the time, I'm giving this example to deepen my answer to Denis — you know, the Teutonic Knights, Teutons is a bit of slang to mean the Germans, the Krauts, but Teutons — originally the Teutonic Knights are those who moved mostly along the coast, because sea navigation was much faster at the time — I said this earlier — than the swamps or the forests or the ambushes or the nonexistent roads
1:37:15 of the land route — and so that's the maritime trade route, right, which was later called the Hanseatic League, the Hanse, that sort of consortium of the great merchants of northern Europe, right, which of course included northern Germany, Bremen — today Bremen, Bremerhaven, the port of Bremen — Hamburg of course, the biggest, Lübeck, the capital of marzipan as they say, almond paste — well, all these ports are the ones through which — it's not a great colonial power, Germany — but it's in these ports that a few tropical goods arrived, or coffee, right, and almonds, right, from the Orient or the Maghreb and Spain, which arrived like that in the northern ports, after which there's Lübeck where they make an excellent almond paste — there you go, I say this for those who are interested, the real Lübeck almond paste — yes so it starts in Germany then Poland, these were the Germanic enclaves, hence the problem of Danzig which was one of the causes of the start of the last war, right
1:38:25 Gdansk in Polish, Danzig in German — but these were German-speaking enclaves surrounded within one of the Slavic countries for millennia — even the current site of Berlin, archaeologists know this quite well, was populated by Slavic peoples before the Scandinavians came down, right, from the tip of Scandinavia, I should say from the current Scandinavian peninsula, Finland, Sweden, Norway — then Poland, Courland, well, these are regions the French have trouble placing — then we get to the north of Russia, to Finland, north of Russia — in all these, these countries, there were German enclaves that collaborated but that were thrilled to see the Nazis arrive, we mustn't forget, there's no coincidence, currently
1:39:35 the regimes — we don't talk about this, so I don't have to say it — the most Nazi-leaning regimes, you see, if you don't want the term Nazi, where there is the most sympathy and leniency toward the Nazis in any case, and hatred of those Slavs, of the Slavs, of the Russians, are the Baltic countries, Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia a bit, a bit more than the Czech Republic — well, anyway, so they suffered but there were some who had a field day — yes, the Soviets, when they arrived in the Baltic countries, they had to do some cleaning up — listen frankly, I mean, the country that carried out the most deportations of Jews, of communists, of Bolsheviks, of whatever you want, per capita, during the last world war — we only ever talk about what they suffered — yes, they suffered under Stalin, no doubt, yes, but they had made others suffer in an equal or even worse measure — that's why I use this example, it's the best way to answer the question — can you send it back to me please?
1:40:45 yes, thank you, because I like to respect the exact wording of the question — yes, here it is, he says there's a statement that tends to come back more and more systematically whenever people mention — me, I've been hearing it for a long time — ah, we have to understand them, they suffered so much — okay, second example, there I was in the Baltic countries, okay, let me go a bit further west, toward Poland — you don't have to walk far, you have to walk on the beautiful dunes by the sea that border the Baltic — it's among the most beautiful beaches in the world, well the water's a bit cold — okay, let me lighten things up a bit because the atmosphere is heavy right now — the first time I arrived at the Baltic, in front of a beach, it was in the days of Germany, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, right near the Polish border, a magnificent island, almost a little Corsica, a bit like the island of Rügen, almost a lovely little Corsica, with herds of deer in the conifer forests and beaches, wild boars coming out of gigantic forests and prowling around the tent you'd pitched
1:41:55 at the edge of the beach — there are places that are seaside resorts, there were thousands of them at the time, workers coming from southern Germany — it strikes me oddly, by the way, to see workers — yes, workers, back home they'd been the forgotten ones, right — occupying the grand houses of former great landowners, because northern Germany is a region of great landed estates where there was agricultural rent with serfs, right, who, practically until the war of 1914, up to contemporary times, made the fortunes of grain-growing landowners above all — and so there are wealthy houses, a bit like on our French Riviera, if you see, it's the symmetrical equivalent, climate aside, on these happy shores — and it struck me oddly to see workers in bathrobes with Ray-Bans during their paid vacation, whereas in Nice it was at the Hôtel Beau Rivage that I saw that, but those were German tourists — well, anyway, you see what I mean, I've quite forgotten that Germany now
1:43:05 so I, I move on to, to, to Poland — I had an excellent friend, I still do, I see him less now because he's started a family, well, keeps busy — but I'm thinking of my friend, he'll recognize himself, my friend Arnaud, right, my Breton friend, who is one of the best-informed people I've known on geopolitics, because he did studies — that's how I met him, because he came to Paris to continue his studies, I'd started studying with him in Rennes, he continued at Sciences Po in Paris, and he knows world geopolitics well, in part, even if for professional reasons he now knows the geopolitics of the Muslim world well — he had revealed to me — I knew there were exchanges like that, but in this case I can't even remember the name, but I'll ask him, I promise, I'll leave it in writing — the number two of Poland, of Pilsudski's regime, the Polish regime, right at the moment the war breaks out
1:44:15 right, discusses with Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister — but a few weeks before the moment the Germans are going to enter Poland, what doesn't the Pole tell him? He tells him, fine, we have disagreements, there's tension over Gdansk, over Danzig, over the Danzig corridor, but after all, we're talking between civilized people, not like with the Russians — you see this racism that's always been there, me, the Pole, I look west, toward the Germans, and, forgive the expression if I may, it's black-and-white, I mean, no way we're going to confuse the two, right, here we are among civilized people with Mr. Ribbentrop — there you have those about whom people say, we have to understand them, they suffered so much — they made others suffer above all — and when the Soviets, when Hitler didn't yet have all the cards in hand, even militarily, when he said, when he
1:45:25 sorry, when he — when he would back down before the firmness of Mussolini, when Mussolini sent divisions to the Brenner Pass in the Alps, Hitler didn't dare at that moment to annex, right, he pulled back the annexation of the — the Anschluss, plus Slovakia, he was still afraid of Poland — the Westerners hadn't yet made all those concessions, how could he — mainly the French and the British who were going to give in exactly as is being done with Ukraine now — so Hitler, the number — the foreign minister says to Ribbentrop, you see, you could say, from the number two of the Polish executive, yes, we're talking between civilized people, you see what — today the head of state of a Ukraine that has existed for barely a few years says, we are the bulwark against barbarism — there you go
1:46:38 I'm answering Sébastien, whom I thank because he's pointing here to a permanent semantic scandal, an argumentative scandal, right — so, here, I'll repeat his question: there's a statement that tends to come back more and more systematically whenever the resurgence of Nazism in Eastern Europe, and particularly in Ukraine, is mentioned — people say, we have to understand them, they suffered so much from communism — what would you answer to that kind of statement? — to conclude on this point I'll say again, thank you to Denis who allows me to bring this conclusion, Sébastien, sorry, I'll conclude by saying: listen carefully to all the comments, that's all there is right now, it's the flash news, special program — you haven't missed it — listen to how many times people bring up the Nazi dimension of the current Ukrainian government — you see, I'm being honest, the Nazi dimension — there aren't only Nazis in the government, obviously — the main party, Svoboda, is openly neo-Nazi and maintains a cult
Relations between Ukraine and Israel 1:47:48 it's not regiments — the ones that collaborated the most, the forces, the Bandera followers who collaborated the most with — with the master race, there you go — another question — yes, thank you — so, Marwan Zeineddine, good evening Marwan — how can one explain the close relationship between Ukraine and Israel given the existence of decidedly fascist, even neo-Nazi, Ukrainian movements? — well, I know there's a dispute between the Arabic-speaking Arab world, the Maghreb world, and Israel, and then there are reasons — I'm not trying to moralize, but I mean, we shouldn't see everything through this prism either — I mean he's right, I mean there is a close relationship, but I recall that Muslim Turkey also supplied drones, both very high-performing, both to Ukraine and, more recently, and this was tragic and dramatic, to the Azeris, to Azerbaijan, which allowed them
1:48:58 to crush the Armenians, who had already been victims of the genocide we know about in the Turkey of the previous century — so it's not as dichotomous as that, and moreover Marwan should know that there are political forces in Israel, in the Knesset in Tel Aviv, who protested against the sympathy that Israel — that is, the government of Israel — had — well, I'm not defending it, the Israeli executive is so aligned with the California-Texans, I take the two US regions where people are most right-wing — I'm not talking about San Francisco, I'm talking about California in general, those who know the context understand what I mean — as for Texas, let's not even get into it — that they said, watch out where this is going, if we're sympathetic to Ukraine only because we have the Americans
1:50:08 on our side — which is all well and good for us, but I mean, that's no reason to consort with Ukrainian nationalists who bash Jews every chance they get — it's not just when there's no microphone around, that's it — so there isn't a — there's a state-to-state relationship between Ukraine and Israel, but I can guarantee that the Ukrainian far-right circles are above all antisemitic, and Arabs are Semites too, watch out — Clouscard used to say that capitalism will always manage to carry civil war into the ranks of the poor — the real conflict isn't between Israelis and Arabs, without even celebrating what one suffers from outside — I'm not defending Israel, the policy of the State of Israel, of the Israeli executive, is unspeakable, right, and in some respects it's fascistic — but yes, to the great dismay of many Israelis who protest — but to whom
1:51:18 one never gives the floor, right — not a majority, far from it, but there are more of them against it, than — and who haven't lost the memory, right, of what happened to their people in the Europe of blond, blue-eyed people — now, it's not between the peoples, I mean, it's above all out of political opportunism that Israel has completely aligned itself with American policy, which, for reasons of opportunism, plays the most anti-Russian card to the hilt — the most anti-Russian in Europe is the neo-Nazi one, and neo-Nazis are nowhere as widespread and nowhere raise their heads with as little shame, if you will, as in the Baltic states, Poland and Ukraine — I'm not saying that all Poles are dyed-in-the-wool Nazis, nor the Balts either, but that's where neo-Nazism is most developed, and in any case, and this is the most serious part, especially where it's in the executive, the governments — and I'm not lecturing these countries because they're a bit on the margins
1:52:28 of the longer-established, wealthier and more developed countries of Western Europe — because in the Scandinavian countries and in many other Northern European countries — I'm thinking of Austria in particular — Northern relative to the Mediterranean, but I extend that to the Scandinavian countries — there are plenty of government majorities, executives, that would not be in power currently if there weren't, or rather whose government consists of a coalition or includes far-right parties — there you go — so, how can one explain the close relationship between Ukraine and Israel? Ukraine is backed to the hilt by the United States, and Israel swears only by the United States — even though the United States under Trump, at one point, right, swore only by Israel — Biden does too, but he's smarter, he doesn't put everything in the same basket, but he pursues the same policy at that level — so I say this because we shouldn't believe the conflict is really between Israelis and Arabs — it's not there, it's not between those
Trotskyists, neutrality, the Khmer Rouge and Dugin 1:53:39 who say Salam and those who say Shalom — I find that rather close, they're brothers, that ought to be brothers — well, it's well known since the beginning of humanity, see the Bible, Abel and Cain, right, that brothers can kill each other — that's my answer to Marwan, whom I thank for his question — Mathieu Nercess, whom I also greet, who often posts pertinent things, I remember that the Trotskyists of the Fourth International, in June 1944, right in the middle of the Allied landing, headlined 'they're all the same,' putting the Third Reich and the Allies on the same level — can we honestly remain neutral in this conflict by calling it an imperialist war, without distinguishing between the fascist factions and the others? I understand what he's saying, I partly agree, but I don't see the specific connection with the conflict between Russia and NATO through Ukraine — I'm not talking about the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, there is a conflict
1:54:49 between Russia and NATO — well of course Russia is starting to try to break free from the trap in which people have been trying to enclose it for 30 years, starting with Ukraine, because it's not — which is not yet in NATO — so it can't benefit from that famous clause number 5 — if they attacked Poland then there would be a risk of a worldwide conflagration, and then we move to nuclear weapons — so there you go — can we honestly remain neutral? No, no, I'm on the Allies' side — but I do think Mathieu knows at least as well as I do that among the Allies at that time, the main one, the one that made the greatest effort in the fight against Nazism, and by far, in loss of human life, in material, in budget, in everything you like, in suffering, was not the Westerners — it was the Soviet people, it was the peoples of the Soviet Union — so in that sense, I agree with him, if of course we count the Soviet peoples among the Allies — all we need now is for them not to be
1:55:59 there — ah no, we can't be lumped together — you know, I'll make a confession about the Trotskyists — I don't mean the Trotskyites, I don't know, I'm becoming — I have historical respect, I respect the Soviet Trotskyists, those who were slaughtered in Stalin's time — yes, I know I'll shock the comrades, I'm not saying I take their side, that they were right, I don't know — I've always thought, like Lenin moreover, that Trotsky was on a wrong path, except that Trotsky — Lenin never said, therefore, he must be shot — it's even the opposite — for example, on one specific point, Trotsky was not keen, he was even opposed to signing the peace — the war of 1914, the Russians suffered more than any people, right, apart from the Germans of course — although alongside the Germans, one might say — when Russia entered the war, the steamroller is on the move, people made it seem like the immense Russian people would just, I don't know, they were poorly equipped, in plenty of units
1:57:10 there were some who had wooden rifles — don't just take my word for it, read the specialized history books, your source will be mine — out of 10 rifles, 9 were wooden and one was real — they were sent to the slaughterhouse, to the butchery — it's no accident that among the first to join the October Revolution were the armed units that had truly been sent to the butchery — in short, to put an end to this appalling carnage, Lenin decides to give up territories — I recall that Putin criticized him for this later, the day before yesterday evening even — but let's get back to the question — by saying, we'll just abandon what's fully to the west, there, and territory that they took back, of course, after having crushed Nazism — so, to tell you, imperialist war
1:58:21 the very first decisions taken by the young Soviet state under Lenin's leadership, well before Stalin was at the top of power, were two decrees — the law on land, the collectivization of land belonging to enormous landowners, and the law on nationalities, the emancipation of nationalities — the exact opposite of oppressing national identities — there were more newspapers in non-Russian languages in the Soviet Union than there were newspapers in non-French languages in France in the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s — check today — yes, there were newspapers in Kazakh, there were newspapers in Ukrainian, there were newspapers in Estonian, in whatever you like, yes, in Belarusian — 'white Russian' — there you go
1:59:33 so, it's important not to make a confusion at this point — I'll close this point — it's not because I have political disagreements with the Russian Trotskyists that this is a reason to cut them to pieces — on the other hand, the Trotskyists, from the Cold War onward, when they got co-opted at the highest level, that is, at the level of the American State Department and the Pentagon, all the way to freeing up the discourse of the 'French doctors,' right, those French '68er leftists, who did such a service to the worst adventures, right, whether it be the Khmer Rouge — well, anyway, you know that the Westerners, Americans in the lead, voted in favor of the Khmer Rouge throughout the period when they were in purgatory at the border — well, on the other side, another border, between Cambodia and Thailand, right — I say this because there are some, I'm thinking of Badiou, who never renounced Maoism, their Maoism of the time, that of the Khmer Rouge, who fed off Soviets and pro-Soviet Vietnamese, to the benefit of the Cambodians
2:00:43 well, of the Khmer Rouge, pro-Chinese — it wasn't all Cambodians, most Cambodians were rather their victims — there you go, but yes, I'm here to make reminders — the biggest genocide of the 20th century along with that of the Hutus, in which the communists are completely absent — I've even pointed to a source: Belgian missionaries at the origin of the hatred between Hutus and Tutsis, stoked by the imaginary of the race of the pharaohs, and so on — and the other great and atrocious genocide, that of the Khmer Rouge, which some cynically used to justify their anti-Sovietism — the Khmer Rouge were above all anti-Soviet, they were pro-Chinese at a time when tension was at its peak between Russia and China — the Red Guards, those kids even 14 years old who, with a rifle pointed, denounced Mao's companions who had made the Long March as sellouts, apparatchiks, bourgeoisified — I don't know, they must have found a plastic toy in their house, they said
2:01:53 there, they've gone bourgeois — fortunately, China got rid of that scourge and rehabilitated exactly as Lenin did during the NEP, the New Economic Policy, which encouraged a private market in sectors that are not the property of the major means of production and exchange, but making sure that the collectivity, in particular the political sphere, in this case the Chinese Communist Party, remains the highest economic authority — that is, when they misbehave, they get hit — there you go, so I'm making reminders, things people never bring up — the Khmer Rouge, whom I prefer to call the Khmer Green, as long as they're barely red, went after, first, even before emptying Phnom Penh and massacring their own people, their first victims were the Vietnamese refugees in Cambodia fleeing the American bombings — there's an article from Le Monde at the time
2:03:03 but look at the archives, where it said the Mekong carries corpses like waterlily leaves on a pond, Vietnamese — that's how it started, the Khmer Rouge, Khmer Green, I call them Khmer Green because they started out saying we must empty the city and go back to the countryside — there you go, thank you Mathieu, it's an occasion to make reminders that have a distinctive profile in these times — it's a two-part question, so I've put one after the other, the next question, all right, it'll be two parts — the question that's coming — that works — that of Théo Delestrade, is that right — that's it — good evening — what do you think of Douguine's fourth political theory which, with Putin's attentive ear, proposes to go beyond the three major political theories — sorry, excuse me, I'm not blowing against you, I'm blowing against — not against Douguine in particular — against all these kinds of mystical populist traditions
2:04:13 Russian — it's not mine, I mean, far-right extremism often comes out of it — well yes, I'm sorry, I'm not a red-brown, even though some try to pass me off as a red-brown — 'when you have heart and reason, don't show them together, no one will believe you,' said Hölderlin — there you go — doubtless someone intelligent, sometimes cultured, a bit fixated on one subject at the expense of others — but but there — that said, I'm not analyzing his position on the fourth way, so I'm not really answering your question because that would require other developments and especially because put like that it's too abstract — federalist — there can be a criminal federation and an exemplary federation, it's not the status — one doesn't really commit oneself to abstract, general balloons like that — and then the mystical side, well, that gave
2:05:24 rise to movements — now, that's not a criminal movement, I'm thinking of, at Lenin's time, there was Zemlya i Volya, well, before, before Lenin brought order to all that, I mean in his writings, he deserved credit because what confusion, there you go — Zemlya i Volya, land and freedom, you see, there was always a great religious resonance, there was a great mystical tradition — so I respect it, careful, especially aesthetically — what could be more beautiful than the Slavic liturgies, as they say, right — it's magnificent, especially when it's magnified by a composer who has the genius of a Mussorgsky, who immersed himself in these archaisms in an extraordinarily modern way — the main character of his most famous opera, Boris Godunov, the main character, it's been said, I'm not the first to say it, is the people, the Russian people, but the people in the sense truly of the grassroots of the heart resonating, right, from which sometimes emerges, as a soloist, the fool — the fool who sees clearly, right — no, no, I have respect for this mystical tradition
2:06:34 but the religious and the political must be kept separate — the religious has infected the political enough over the millennia, we're not going to start that again — we're only just beginning, since modernity, to emerge from the confusion of the political and the religious, we're not going to start again — there you go, I'm answering simply and very sincerely to Théo, whom I thank for his question, because taking an interest in Douguine proves that he's looking for ways out, and in that sense I approve, but he needs to look further — I'm going to bring in Daniel Arias who made several comments, they're not really questions — yes, I think you can react to them, well, react to these comments — I'm always very happy to hear little remarks, on the excellent advice of Pierre-Alain, to listen to Daniel Arias, whose balanced pertinence I always admire — so he quotes, for now, first he quotes, well he offers us a quote, sorry, from the head of state, the first head of state of independent Ukraine, of the Ukrainian nation-state
Svoboda, the freedom of the victors and the far right 2:07:46 which has only begun to exist in very recent years — and here's this quote: our children will go to school, theirs, those of the Russians, of the pro-Russians, of the Russian-speakers — they don't even talk about the Russians, excuse me, I have trouble saying Saint Petersburg, I say Leningrad — no, no, he's talking about the Ukrainians, right, who have the misfortune and the baseness of being Russian-speaking, right — our children, there, those who speak a language that was — okay, it's like Corsican and French, I won't dwell on it too much, I mean all Ukrainians have spoken Russian for a very long time, and I'm not saying it's not out of love for Russian, it's that peoples aren't stupid, at a certain collective level they adopt a vehicle, a vehicle that's practical — throughout the whole Mediterranean basin, for a long time people spoke the koine — don't go looking for a country, no, no, it's not a country, it's a Greek word, there you go — because the Greeks were great merchants, traders, there was a Greek merchant everywhere, in Alexandria in Egypt, in Lebanon, they were everywhere — so by speaking Greek
2:08:57 People made themselves understood from Spain to Turkey around the Mediterranean basin; those who know West Africa well know very well that this role is played somewhat by what is called Dioula in West Africa, even in countries that don't want to admit they understand it — they understand it very well. I'm thinking of my friends from Côte d'Ivoire, whom I mention very affectionately, without taking sides in the debate they often have with their brothers to the north. But Dioula — don't look for it, it's like koinè, don't look for an ethnic group, it's not the name of a people, an ethnicity as they say — I don't know, the Baoulé, the Bambara, the Wolof, the Toucouleur, no, or the Fula, no. Dioula means merchant. It's a function, and often what people think is an ethnicity is actually a social or economic function. You see, since I'm in West Africa, there are age-old struggles between the Hausa — one of the most powerful ethnic groups in black Africa, numbering over 40 million people, which is enormous for sub-Saharan Africa.
2:10:07 The powerful Hausa, who are mainly found in Nigeria but also in Niger, extending even into the desert — there are some in Agadez — the Hausa often clash with the Fula. These are hatreds, shall we say hereditary hatreds? No, it's not hereditary — it's that the Fula are herders, originally nomadic herders, and often still are, whereas the Hausa are farmers and/or butchers. Think about it a moment: it's a supplier-client relationship, and that always creates conflicts. You find exactly the same pattern where there's no black skin at all, far from Africa — you find it in Westerns, when they're well made, where you see the struggle between the herders who drive their cattle through, trampling the fences painstakingly put up by the farmers who were growing crops, vegetables, salad greens, whatever you like. You find this in a masterpiece, for example, like Shane. Now, 'our children will go to school, theirs into the cellars, into the cellars.'
2:11:17 Into the darkness — the Russian as the 'negro' of whiteness, the color black, isn't it, seen from the white man who takes himself, who believes that white is salvation. 'Our children will go to school, theirs into the cellars' — this wasn't said by some tattooed skinhead with a swastika tattooed on his left shoulder, it was said by the head of state whom everyone praised and defended — well, almost everyone: our rulers, our politicians. And there, you know, left and right — the divide doesn't weigh much, whether it's the Socialist Party, the Republicans, or the far right, etc.
2:11:57 We supported a good part of the far right, we supported, didn't we, Poroshenko, because it was Ukraine resisting, finally freeing itself from the Russian yoke, isn't that right — these are terrible disputes, all of this. You see, I've tried to show the disturbing side and the anti-communist side of Putin, whom people try to make you believe has all these faults because he wants to restore communist Russia. It's frightening — with the most developed means of information humanity has ever known, peoples have never been kept in such ignorance about such serious issues. Thank you, Daniel, thank you for that quote which sums up many of the demonstrations well — Daniel — Svoboda, you see, I was just naming it, we hadn't coordinated — Right Sector, that's the name of the party over there, and the Azov Battalion, these are units, elite units of the army, so to speak, of the Ukrainian army, which Arte presents to us
2:13:07 as heroes. But yes, look closely, they have an insignia — I've forgotten the name — but it's an insignia even more Nazi than the swastika of the Third Reich. It was like the swastika but with a kind of arrows at the ends of the bars, if you will — I'm sure some of you will recognize it — like the prongs of a trident, that's it. Svoboda, Right Sector, and the Azov Battalion. And of course Svoboda means 'free' — svoboda, isn't it, in the Slavic language. Here I'll open a small parenthesis: we always come back to the 'free world,' isn't that right — it's frightening. In stylistics we'd call that an antiphrasis, isn't it — like a criminal, a con man, a criminal of all time, calling himself 'the lamb.' You see, Svoboda, liberty, yes it's true, frei, free, which will give 'free' in English, frei is the Germanic word, Freiburg, free city, Freiburg is literally 'free town.' Where I want to get to is that this liberty is not at all political liberty and democracy — it's the exact opposite. It's the one who is victorious in combat who points his sword
2:14:17 at the throat of the defeated man and says: either you work for me as a slave, or I slit your throat on the spot. The one who agrees to be a slave will be dominated by the race of free men, the Franks. Yes, the Franks, who gave their name to France, you see — that really shakes up those identities that would oppose the eternal Gaul to the eternal German. No — what gave a name to our country, France, is one of the most powerful Germanic tribes, whose cradle, its geographic homeland, for a time — because the more one digs, the more one sees it comes from elsewhere still, almost all the Germanic peoples, from what is called Scandinavia, as far as we know, one must be very cautious — but otherwise the homeland in Germany of the Franks is one of the most beautiful regions there is, whose capital will be Nuremberg, which is now called Franconia — we say Franconia so as not to duplicate 'France,' so as not to say 'Francia' — and 'Franken' is what they say in Germany — and which I mentioned earlier when I spoke of Thuringia, the green heart of Germany.
2:15:27 There we go — Bamberg, Nuremberg, all these places, isn't it. Free — here you have to be wary of the trap — free here means the throat-slitters, the warrior, the victorious warrior. It doesn't mean the guy attached to democratic values. We're not in Rousseau's social contract, we're among the worst enemies of Rousseau — the worst enemies, sorry. There, thank you, Daniel, for these references. In Europe, in southern Europe, we have Vox in Spain. Yes, poor old left in Western Europe — well, elsewhere too, but especially in Western Europe — not only does it no longer exist, but the only forces on the rise are the greens and the far right. But it's not everywhere — there must be a connection, I mention in passing — one of the most fervent supporters of the war against the Russians is Jadot, for a long time now — 30 million dead isn't enough, we still have to keep killing them. In southern Europe we have Vox in Spain, which is gaining strength with regular fascist marches in Madrid — and yes, it's raising its head again. Where is the Spanish Communist Party? It's the only one that opposed it.
2:16:37 Clouscard told us once: the only times the fascists were scared was of the Red Army — watch out, they were terrified then. It doesn't exist anymore, so they're raising their heads again, they're not going to hold back, especially since they've been unhappy, so they've become meaner than ever. I'm alluding to the first sentence of Spinoza's admirable treatise, which begins with this sentence: 'Men are for the most part wicked and unhappy,' with that simplicity in saying the most complex and profound things, which is the secret of Spinozist expression — not to reuse a concept of his, 'expression,' but yes — they're raising their heads and they're meaner than ever. They're not just conservatives, and sympathetic conservatives at that — well, that's not my camp, but still, one can share certain values, dining in a pretty little mill by a river with curtains, little curtains, red and white checked panes in the windows, good cooking, French traditions — why not, there's nothing criminal in that. What's criminal
2:17:47 is that a small elite lives well while those who are at the origin of all this wealth are the ones who enjoy it the least. So I clarify here — they're raising their heads, yes Daniel, but why? Because the only force that had scared them no longer exists, or exists only in such an embryonic state — even if there seems to be some stirring with someone who would like it not to be only the rich who eat well and drink good wine. I don't agree with all of Roussel's positions, but I'm appalled by the opposition he encounters — what contempt for the people of France. There, I'm not getting into the election campaign, we're heading that way, apparently they don't need me for that. But yes, of course, and it's not just in Spain, isn't it — if you look closely, the only political forces on the rise are the far right and the greens in almost every country in Europe. Look at Austria — it's literally neo-Nazis in power alongside the greens.
Dialectic, science of the crossing of edges 2:18:57 Same thing in the Scandinavian countries. And yes, when you demonize man and deify nature, you're not so far from the far right, because in 'nature' there is N-A-T, natal, birth, heredity — I get goosebumps. Well spotted, Daniel, thank you very much. One last question, yes, thank you. If the edge is a switching — some people are listening, hello Guillaume, I knew he had an ear trained by musical culture, that's confirmed — if the edge is a switching, an interface — yes, in the physical sense, quite so, I was even thinking of an airlock earlier, you see, when I was thinking of Nerval, for whom borders are not lines but spaces — that space is an airlock, dialectics performing syntheses through negation — negation was the science of crossing edges — yes, exactly, yes, and I'll give an example of it, it's going to seem
2:20:07 a little bit difficult — frankly there's much more difficult, I think, from Hegel's pen, so I give fair warning — but Hegel has a very classic theme, very familiar to all those who study Hegel, even at undergraduate level without going as far as the agrégation: it's his critique of what he calls the bad infinite, or the abstract universal. They're linked, not quite the same thing, but they overlap. The bad infinite is the one where you just need to add plus-one, which is never closed, an abstract infinite characterized only by quantitative difference, which is very useful in calculation — I'm speaking in any case not to define the true infinite, in the sense in which we say that God is the infinite. God deserves better than the quantitative infinite, than just plus-one, plus-one — it's not the largest number, it's not only that. God, isn't it — and moreover, an excellent Arabic speaker, a friend of Syrian origin — well, Syrian, I said 'of Syrian origin' but he lived — whom I used to meet in sub-Saharan Africa, told me that etymologically, Allah in Arabic is the sequence of two articles
2:21:17 a singular and a plural, it's as if in French we had 'le' and 'les' — yes, the multiple. Back to the quantitative infinite — yes, it's the largest number, the 'le les,' but it's not only that — God, we can well imagine, is also the blessed one among Muslims as among us. It's not — the largest Muslim countries are not Arab, it's — it's Indonesia, Pakistan for example — let's never forget that Arabs have not always been Muslim, see the Thousand and One Nights. I take this example, which is significant of the bad infinite in Hegel, in order precisely to contrast the true infinite with this abstract infinite where you're always adding one more pebble, a pile of pebbles that never ends, or one whole number to a gigantic whole number, but we're still far from having reached everything that could be added to it, since the set is declared infinite — it defines itself somewhat
2:22:28 empty, hollow, and idle, of merely quantitative infinity. He replaces it precisely — because Guillaume, if I may use this barbarism, intuits it very well here — that is, this infinite is grasped when one crosses the limit, when the field, right there, becomes forest, the field opens onto the infinite. There, dialectic is at work, not in the heart of the forest, not in the middle of the field, but at their meeting point. Rather beautiful — that's dialectic, isn't it — at the meeting point of nomads and settlers, of the city and the countryside, of Europe and Africa. Thank you for that very fine question. Yes, dialectic is the science of crossing — Hegel would say, in his Logic, of limits — but here, of edges, it works just as well; the edge is a limit on both sides. When I swim in the river, the limit
2:23:39 the bank of the river is its limit, beyond which I reach dry land, and when I'm on land it's the reverse. So the edge is always a limit, and that's why it's always linked to danger. 'What charm drew him to these dreaded shores' — an edge is always dreadful. I'll go into this further, I promised you, I'll do a special episode, but I'll give a few leads for what I'm going to develop, because of Guillaume's question. I've often happened to think of a tiny little puffin chick — you know, those seabirds — I could also take a baby albatross, I'm thinking in any case of seabirds, you'll see why — because they're often born in abysses. There, for the vertical: if there's a cliff, it's because there's an edge; if there's an abyss, it's because there's an edge which is at first horizontal, but the more one advances along that horizontal, the closer one gets
The edge as refuge: the fledglings and Wagner's intermezzo 2:24:49 to the edge beyond which one falls, and these birds often grow up on tiny crevices, even on the cliff face. Pascal said there were people who couldn't help — when he speaks of the power of the imagination, of the madwoman of the house, of imagination, he says: I know that when merely thinking of being suspended above an abyss, ordinary people couldn't stop themselves from trembling and sweating, even though they're standing firmly and have nothing to fear — just from thinking about it. But as for me, just thinking about these chicks, isn't it, chirping in distress while waiting for their parents to come back with food, with a few fish in their beak, isn't it, and they're stranded between the horizontality of the last few yards of moorland that reaches to the very edge of the cliff, to the edge, sorry — you see, they're between this horizontality and the verticality of the fall, isn't it. Soon they'll practice, they'll have wings, that's it, they're out of danger, they're going to dive into that abyss of which they will become masters, isn't it.
2:25:59 And it's a very beautiful poem — but Hölderlin compares them to bridges, bridges between mountain peaks — eagles, for example, eagles are like those light bridges that rise from one peak to another; we cannot go directly to the peak, that's reserved for the sons of the Alps, he says, speaking of eagles. There I think of these seabirds, but as chicks, trembling with their feathers in an icy wind like that. I imagine one that manages to hoist itself up to the surface, that passes onto the horizontal, and who could at that moment be threatened by a fox delighted to find such an easy prey. So you see, in a way, the edge can also be a refuge space. And I'll finish my answer to Guillaume by extending the notion of edge to that of intermezzo — yes, playing on the meaning it has in theater, in performance. I'm thinking perhaps of the most beautiful — well, the happiest scene, the most beautiful, changing register here, I'm talking more about myself than about the thing, but in any case
2:27:09 the most objectively happy scene in the immense Ring by Wagner, isn't it, which unfolds over four days, a prologue, The Rhinegold, and three days in chronological order: The Valkyrie, Siegfried, The Twilight of the Gods. If we take the geometric middle, so to speak, of this whole tetralogy — tetralogy meaning four, three days plus a prologue, The Rhinegold — the middle, the second one if you will, is the second act, so the middle act — there are always three acts in Wagner's works — it's the second act of Siegfried, in the middle — oh, why did I say middle, I was in the process of talking about intermezzo, mezzo, middle, interlude, intermezzo, Zwischenspiel, as they say in German — zwischen means 'between' — which happens between, between the extremes, Zwischenspiel, interlude — and it's the famous 'Forest Murmurs' scene, you see, in the forest, it's the only moment, the happiest of the whole Ring, where you hear birdsong, where the branches of the immense conifers
2:28:19 come alive like that over the string tremolos of the orchestra, and where the instruments, above all the woodwinds, chirp in all directions like that, until they converge on a solo instrument that will be the bird who will guide him toward her who sleeps within a circle of flames, isn't it. And it's no accident that at the happiest moment, he comes to be enclosed in a place equidistant between the beginning and the end of the work, where there is nothing but dark and dramatic things, in a kind of refuge. We understand better and better why the limit, the frontier, the border, Ukraine, can be a space, and even a hospitable space, and not only a line. Thank you, Guillaume, we'll talk about it again musically. We can stop there for tonight, okay, isn't that a bit abrupt
2:29:29 I'm not saying — thank the audience, oh yes, yes, people can hear you there — oh really, all right, all right, no, no — I just meant you were telling me, without further ado — yes, yes, no, because I'm so happy about these questions, I'm so unhappy with myself for not having answered, without fail, most of the ones that are there. And you know that all this is going to be recorded, so, as I always say, we're in the process of multiplying, with Pierre-Alain, the answers to the questions, and you'll — there's one that's all ready, that's my fault, it's been delayed by two days, it should even have come out before this Thursday, I'll answer you, Pierre-Alain — I won't commit too much, thinking around this weekend or so, there, I'm telling you in preview. You'll have plenty of questions from those who think I've forgotten them, and you'll see that I forget no one, I just take time — that's one of the deformations of the age I've reached, I act as if I still had all the time in the world. Anyway, thank you for being here this evening, and now more than ever we must make an effort of lucidity and humility, to think in these times we're living through, to be wary of the abyss
2:30:39 that separates our certainties from the truth — and it's not a skeptic speaking. Have a very good evening, and until next time.
