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A workshop on confinitude around « Féminité et communauté » 1:00 Hello everyone. Hello, and thanks to the regulars, if I may say so, for the loyalty of the old-timers, and hats off to the boldness of the newcomers, or their recklessness. I hope I know it myself.
1:33 and that their access to our sessions on confinitude, as I keep calling it, because the Goscinny center, where I should normally be receiving our usual audience, is unfortunately still closed, still confined, because it mainly runs activities involving well over ten people—that's actually its role, as a neighborhood community center—and so we can't make use of it.
2:11 So I'm doing this from home. In a way, this remains a context of confinitude. I'm delighted to be here with you again. And I want to thank Philippe Moreau once more, who handles all the technical side of these broadcasts, these transmissions. I also thank him for having had the idea of replacing the workshops we can no longer do live in the big hall of the Goscinny center, in the 13th arrondissement, with these more domestic, fireside-corner sessions.
2:51 I don't have a fire, I don't have the space. There you go, my cat providing a bit of warmth. The warm, watchful animal, as Rilke puts it. So, today, please forgive us if you notice a few audiovisual glitches—no matter, but for now it seems that's not the case. It's because the network—they were at least courteous enough to post it—the network is faulty today. Is it overloaded? I have no idea.
3:28 But we're told the connection on Skype isn't very good these days, at least at the hours when we've arranged to meet. So, first novelty of this session, for once. Of course I'm going to take on texts, but to illustrate what?
3:58 That's the new thing: to illustrate the main reference of this session, which is the book I published with Éditions Delga a few years ago. I'm quite embarrassed talking about my own book, but well, since I was pushed into it, and it's true that my book is titled Féminité et communauté chez Hegel, and since we've already spent two sessions developing the theme of aesthetics and politics, I had to admit that, after all, skipping over what I said about it, over roughly a hundred pages, wasn't entirely inappropriate.
4:52 There you go. But having said that, since I don't see myself—I think I'm incapable of saying, in my book I say this, I start with that, and here's how I see things—I asked a few loyal associates, members of our association or simple followers, I asked them, or both of course, I asked them to kindly, and who are familiar with reading my book—perhaps they even understand it better than I do, after all, it's not for me to judge, a book belongs first to its readers.
5:30 And I asked them to kindly put to me the questions that seem most relevant to them, given the subject we've been dealing with over several sessions, the relation of aesthetics to politics in the Hegelian system, in Hegelianism. There you go. Before moving on to their questions, I should point out that this wasn't a random choice on Hegel's part—after all, following Kant's Critique of Judgment just before it, it's still the most monumental aesthetics, and the first systematic one, to appear in modern times, if we set aside Aristotle's important Poetics, and also texts that were not at all…
6:28 As for the word 'aesthetics,' the word didn't exist—it dates from the eighteenth century, it's a recent and modern invention, we'll come back to that—whereas politics, the second term of our conceptual pairing, politics is as old as man; the notion of aesthetics is much more recent. Art, no—the pyramids of Egypt are there to prove that art is as old as the first historical societies, even prehistoric ones of course, at least as far as the plastic arts are concerned, because unfortunately the music of our ancestors at Lascaux or Altamira, we have no real means of reconstructing it or getting any idea of it.
7:20 Well, art is very old, but aesthetics is not art. It's a branch of philosophy whose object is reflection on artistic corpora, which is quite different, and we already understand a bit better why aesthetics came late in history. Yes, I was saying, just before Aristotle, not to go further back—there are also, in Plato's dialogues, aesthetic considerations quite often in this immense artist of thought that Plato was, but there are two works devoted to the problem of the beautiful, and it's interesting to see that it's almost always tied to the problem of eros—I'm thinking here of course of the Symposium, whose subject is love, eros, and in which Plato gives us his theory of the beautiful, as it happens, and of course the Phaedrus.
8:27 There you go, the two dialogues where the aesthetic developments are the most important. But now, back to today's session—I'm going to ask the control booth, Philippe, if he'd kindly begin right away to send you Alexandra's question. There are two questioners, a woman and a man, let's be clear: Alexandra, who lives near Montauban, in that magnificent region called the Lomagne, in Beaumont-sur-Lomagne, and who is also the author of an excellent book I recommend to you, I don't know if it shows on screen, called La truelle et le marteau [The Trowel and the Hammer], because Sandra—I'm going to make her blush—is a great intellectual, but one who builds earthen houses with her own hands in the southwest.
Question on Hegel's supposed classicism 9:37 So, I recommend La truelle et le marteau—you'll learn some choice truths, always very pertinent and delivered with a lot of perspective and humor about the developments, let's say, the ideological drift, particularly in the intellectual world, over the last half-century or so, to put it briefly. And since among my listeners there are many who are interested in Clouscard's thought, she often refers to it, as well as to that of our friend Negroni, François de Negroni.
10:23 There you go. So, Philippe, if you can send… Oh yes, just before the question—I thought it would be livelier not simply to scroll through the text of her question, so that we can hear her voice, since she was kind enough to record her question. So, we can send Alexandra's question. Hegel is criticized, in his aesthetics, for having centered his work on classical art—overdetermination of the term 'classical,' which sometimes means the historical model and sometimes refers to 'classical' in the school sense.
11:03 Goethe, Schiller, all that. So Hegel would be, according to most of his exegetes, centered on the classical model, and wary of the moderns, his contemporaries, wary of any Germanomania. In short, he would have neglected the avant-gardes, for example Schubert, Beethoven, etc., within his system—or I don't know how to say it in German, but anyway. Could you show, on the contrary, how Hegel allows us to think in respective determination, and precisely, how he allows, or how he lets us conceptualize the permanent oscillation that follows between the nineteenth century and our own time, between Romanticism in the broad sense, in all its forms, and Classicism, and how this conceptualization allows us to think about our modernity.
11:57 There you go. I believe you heard the whole of her question. Well, her question illustrates what I was telling you a moment ago, namely that she's a reader, a good reader, and formidably perceptive, insofar as she goes beyond… she anticipates certain…
The story of Sophocles' Antigone 12:28 an approach to the figure of Antigone—of course, this is Sophocles' Antigone—there she anticipates a bit what constitutes the diagonal, so to speak, of my little book, whose title, I remind you, is Féminité et communauté [Femininity and Community]—you understand better now why 'femininity'—it concerns the emergence of the figure of Antigone facing the ruler of the city, of Thebes, Creon, in the tragedy, and who…
13:07 yes, I can say, it is a bit the diagonal of my book, because, in Hegel's aesthetics, this figure occupies a place that is both invariant and decisive. Let me recall, before answering Alexandra's question directly, since she knows all this, but not everyone does, first the plot, for those who might not know or might not have revisited in a while, the story that underlies Sophocles' tragedy of Antigone.
13:50 Thebes has long been at war with another city, and the war takes place between two brothers, who are, moreover, two sons of Oedipus—because all of this is Oedipus's family, this cursed family, the Labdacids—and one of the two brothers—and we know how much, so for now, the struggle within the sibling group, ever since Abel and Cain, or Romulus and Remus, we know it's particularly invariant in mythologies, in fact, and not only Mediterranean, and even European ones.
14:45 The tragedy of the Nibelung also begins, doesn't it, with the murder of one of the two giants, of the giant Fasolt by his brother Fafner, well, anyway. So the war has been going on for a long time, and one of the two brothers had the audacity to commit the worst possible crime in Greek eyes, in the Greek ethos—so we're talking about ancient Greece—the worst crime, since the highest value was the city in the world of ancient Greece, to the point that, unlike our own culture, which, when we have the possibility and the means, escapes from the city toward what we wrongly call 'nature' and which is, nine times out of ten, merely the countryside, which is quite different—that is, a nature transformed by man over more than 10,000 years—among the Greeks, one escapes from nature into the city; the city is the highest value, that of security. There, I won't elaborate on that, not in this introduction anyway, and so,
15:57 one of the two brothers committed the most appalling crime in Greek eyes: he allied himself with the enemy city in order to come and fight against his own city of origin, Thebes. He loses his life in the battle, and Creon, the ruler of the city, the political authority reigning over Thebes, promulgates a law forbidding that he be given burial—this crime being monstrous, as his father's already was, monstrous—that of poor Oedipus—to purge this monstrous crime, no one is allowed to give the criminal a burial.
16:49 and so his corpse is abandoned, volucribus et feris, as Cicero says somewhere regarding the death of Socrates, that is, to wild birds and beasts of prey. And it's then that the figure of Antigone arises—that is, his sister. His sister, heeding not only the voice of the city but the voice of blood—it's a Corsican speaking to you here—considers that it would be an even greater crime than the one her brother committed to leave him thus, to leave his corpse to the violence of the elements and to desecration.
17:37 And so she buries him. When the curtain rises—when the tragedy begins, there was of course no curtain, on the tiers of seats—when the tragedy begins, we've just learned that she has buried her brother. And of course, the whole tragedy, the essence of the tragedy, is her dialogue, how she justifies this by openly defying political authority, that of Creon. Down to the passage that is most often quoted when this tragedy is mentioned, when Creon says to her, 'How could you dare transgress my law?'
18:15 It's not his in the personal, anecdotal sense. Don't make an anachronism here, we're not in the modern world where the individual… No, no, no, no—'my law' means the law of Zeus. Zeus is the one who instituted political order in the cities. So, 'How could you dare transgress my law?' She answers, 'It is my Zeus who dictated it to me, not yours—the Zeus of the world below and of the dead.' So she invokes the gods of the underworld, she invokes an eternal law that predates political law, and it is this conflict, this opposition between the voice of blood and the properly political bond, that of citizenship, that fascinates Hegel.
Antigone in Hegel, from youth to the Berlin texts 19:08 Now, let me come back here to Hegel. Throughout his career—and when I say throughout, you'll see—he began by translating Sophocles' Antigone; they were all seasoned Latinists and Hellenists, that is, Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling, the three companions who would soon meet up at the theological seminary [Stift] in Tübingen—we're in the years when the French Revolution is unfolding, you see, the 1790s, etc.
19:42 So, at fifteen, Hegel, at the gymnasium—the equivalent of high school in France—was already translating this tragedy, you see, he got to it quite early. It serves as the framework for the most important development that Hegel devotes to the aesthetic problem in the Phenomenology of Spirit, his first great decisive publication, in 1807, in a chapter I recommend to anyone, a fascinating chapter called 'Religion in the Form of Art.'
20:20 And finally, quite literally, at the end of his career, when he was in Berlin, his last posting, and where he would die, in… And twice this tragedy comes back under his pen: once in the Lectures on Aesthetics, where his investment in this work wrings from him this cry of pride: of all the masterpieces of antiquity and the modern world—and I know them all—and then he adds, of course, because he's there to transmit, not to define an elite, and everyone can and must know them, which is exactly what he's engaged in by publishing the many volumes of his monumental Aesthetics.
21:14 Of all the masterpieces of antiquity and the modern world, Antigone seems to me the most perfect, the most reconciling [apaisant]. And I'm quite pleased that Alexandra, a keen reader, noticed that the word 'reconciling' is not entirely accidental here. Coming from a philosopher who most often analyzes problematic contradictions, even conflicts, it is not only their appeasement.
21:47 So, even if the notion of 'Versöhnung' in German—reconciliation—of course plays an essential role in his philosophy. Returning to the figure of Antigone—so much for the aesthetics—and in the Philosophy of Right, again in the last Berlin texts, in the 1820s, which are his political testament—that's generally how it's regarded, at least in what he chose to publish, because otherwise there's his very last text, a few days before his death, where he criticizes the proposed reform of the English Parliament that hands over the interests of the state to private interest.
22:32 That's quite topical, which is why I brought it up. In the Philosophy of Right, at the moment of moving from the family to civil society, he cites the case of Antigone and says that this conflict between Antigone and Creon, which seems to us tied to an archaic context, interesting but no doubt outdated, is—I quote him—'the supreme ethical opposition.'
23:09 'In her, femininity and manhood are individualized'—and there you have an opposition valid in every place and every era, and Hegel grants this tragedy—which is why I'm dwelling on his investment in this work—an extraordinary exception to his usual stance, which is precisely to have put an end to the timelessness of values, whether religious, aesthetic, or political—that's Hegel—and in doing so, he opens the path that will lead to Marx, of course, since for Hegel there is no masterpiece valid in every art and every era; every human production expresses, in its own way, the historical constellation in which it appears.
24:02 It does not have that timeless value which he grants here, in an exceptional and surprising way, to the tragedy of Antigone. It's precisely this apparent contradiction that intrigued me, as they say, and that kept me up at night, so to speak, on a problem of this kind. For a work so important, and toward which his attachment never wavered, this exception surely has a meaning.
Against anachronism: the family, between nature and institution 24:38 And I asked myself what allows Hegel to grant Antigone this patent of timelessness, of still being valid today—we'll come back to this—when it appeared in a world that was that of the ancient Greek city, a world which, however much reverence we may owe this model, is a stage that Hegel himself is the first to say has been superseded, if only immediately afterward, in historical terms—when the city is absorbed by empire, first Alexander's, then the Roman Empire, of course, and by a slave-based world, in short, a whole set of determinations that make this world of the Greek city like a distant planet, so to speak, one we can admire from afar but which is quite foreign to our world—and he shares this idea with the developments his friend Hölderlin devoted to the culture
25:48 and Greek aesthetics, and not merely different but the exact opposite of ours. I'll read you a few short excerpts where Hölderlin expresses this difference like no one else, particularly in letters that have become famous. Now, here I'm very glad about the way Alexandra formulated her question and centered it around this theme: she is quite right to denounce the anachronism whereby, when people talk about Antigone today, quite often in the world of theater and culture in general, they turn her into a little leftist—the anachronism, that is—a bourgeois feminist, American-style if you will, who supposedly represents here the boldness of the heroic individual facing the wicked totality, that of the city, embodied by the man, of course, and all of that,
26:58 which is completely foreign to Sophocles' text. I'm not offering you an alternative interpretation against that one. I'm sticking to the text, and the text does not say something different—it says the opposite. It is not the individual rising up against a necessarily totalitarian city, but one community rising up against another community. I summarized the story on purpose to remind you that it is in the name of the blood tie, which is crucial in traditional society, particularly in Mediterranean society—again, it's a Corsican speaking to you—it is in the name of the blood tie that she buries her brother.
27:48 she owes that to her family community—a community, and I put this in quotation marks, a 'natural' one. Of course, the family is not a natural community; marriage does not result from an instinct—sexuality is an instinct that did not wait for man to appear in living beings, if you will, so it is of natural origin, but marriage is not an instinct—look closely, even in its very root, it is an institution.
28:23 Just as little as one can explain the institution of the meal by the mere instinct of hunger, because being hungry does not explain why here you must eat with chopsticks, there with the three fingers of the right hand, and elsewhere with forks and knives, why one eats at a certain hour and between other hours, why in another context women stand while the men eat—one could multiply examples that have nothing to do with the biological program of hunger.
29:01 and why children are taught right away, in nearly every culture, to be discreet about the opening of their mouth when eating, a bit like when yawning, isn't that so? It's not good to show the engine when you want to sell the car—you hide it behind a nice body. So, just as the meal cannot be reduced to the hunger instinct—the meal would never have existed, would never have appeared as an institution, if there had been no hunger to begin with, but if there is only hunger, there is still no meal.
29:48 Likewise, if there were only sexuality, we would still be far from marriage. So it doesn't matter whether it's monogamous or polygamous—it's an institution. So the blood tie—an institution—proves, to pick up my thread again, that the family is not natural; it is already cultural. Every family, even the oldest, is nonetheless more natural than the political bond, that of the city, the one Creon invokes when he says to Antigone, 'You dared transgress my law.'
30:24 There you go. So it is the family bond, and insofar as it is a blood bond, the ascending-descending relationship is due to nature, while the relation of collaterality—the fact that the same blood flows in the veins of brother and sister—owes nothing to the city or to culture. So the family partakes of both realms, doesn't it? It appears in a natural context and then organizes itself according to principles—call them what you like—cultural, historical, spiritual, everything that stands opposed to nature, if you look closely.
31:07 Historical. If we take history to begin at the moment when nature retreats under the efforts of human praxis, in other words, from the very first chipped pebbles onward—I'm giving history an extension here that includes prehistory. History as a discipline, on the other hand, requires waiting until there are written traces of that activity. So, bravo to Alexandra for insisting on the anachronism when she says this reading that claims to be 'modern'—
The individual, an ineffective shadow, and the essence of the tragic 31:42 makes Antigone a sort of fantasmatic ideal type, the woman as incarnation of the individual, already fairly anachronistic. And Hegel quite often says, when he works on the model of the Greek city, he says that in that world, the individual is an ineffective shadow. I challenge you: read the Iliad and the Odyssey and all the tragedies of Sophocles or Aeschylus or Euripides fifty times over, and try to deduce for me whether Achilles is blond or dark-haired, whether he has a beauty spot on the left side of his nose, whether Ulysses prefers peas with bacon to smoked fish.
32:25 I mean, everything we know, everything we know in full detail, in literary modernity. You open a Balzac novel, from the very start of the novel, you know everything that's on the mantelpiece, the bills — how does Baudelaire put it? A big chest of drawers cluttered with ribbons, glasses, love letters, lawsuits, romances, with — and this is very Balzacian — heavy locks of hair rolled up in receipts, conceals fewer secrets than my sad brain.
32:55 That's what Baudelaire said. There you go. So she is perfectly right to denounce a double anachronism: the individual, which is a notion that hasn't yet appeared at that time — what matters is citizenship, it's the citizen who counts, especially as long as he is alive, and she insists a great deal on this, I insist on it myself, because it has a bearing on this tragedy: as long as the citizen is alive, he belongs to the city, which can send him, ask him for the supreme sacrifice by sending him to fight against the Persians, for example.
33:31 But the moment he is dead, the family must be left in peace. The rituals of washing the dead, of burial, are the family's affair. So there is a double fault or double crime, a double hubris, to speak the language of Greek tragedy, a double transgression of the laws of the gods of the city. Antigone is wrong to disobey the authority of the city — I'm not saying this, it's not me judging her — within the conception of Greek ethics, mind you, it is a crime.
34:05 And Creon is wrong to go beyond his political competence to the point of prescribing what should be done with the corpse. That he must leave to the family. It is sacred. And that is exactly what Antigone reminds him of. Which proves that we are indeed dealing with a tragedy. There can be no Christian, modern tragedy, compared to the Greek world. Because there will always be a happy ending. Gospel means good news.
34:35 He is crucified on the cross, it's appalling. But there is a happy ending. It goes badly on Friday and on Sunday there's the resurrection. So there can be no tragedy. I'll come back to this in another context. There is infinite suffering, but no tragedy. Tragedy is this clash of two irreconcilable principles that mutually destroy each other. Yes, because — I haven't said it, but it must be recalled, for those who don't know — that of course Antigone is condemned to be walled up, to perish walled up, while she is a virgin, having never even known love, walled up to expiate this crime.
35:22 So much for expiating her fault. And as for Creon, his son, who was in love with Antigone, his son Haemon, kills himself. So you see, both sides lose feathers. That's tragedy. There, there is truly dialectic. There aren't good guys against bad guys. There isn't the nice heroic individual or the nice heroic Greek Joan of Arc against the wicked totalitarian city.
35:54 You see, no, each one loses feathers, each one commits a fault and takes responsibility for it. That is what leads Hegel to say that this morality, which can sometimes seem shocking to us, since we were raised in a modern morality, that of Christianity in which intention counts, in which one cannot abstract from the subject and its responsibility — there, from the person more than the individual, the person outright — Hegel says, yes, it is doubtless cruder, but it is more courageous.
36:28 It is more courageous. One cannot hide behind the hypocrisy of intention. A crime is a crime. If you enter the sacred grove, even by accident, you cannot say, among the Greeks, "Oh dear, I didn't know, I didn't see the sign." You are a criminal because you entered the sacred grove. That is what distinguishes objective morality from subjective morality. Let's not stray, let's go back from the moral domain to the aesthetic domain.
36:58 So it is quite another reason, a very different reason, that makes Hegel insist on the figure of Antigone throughout his career. I tell you, I'm dwelling on the end of Alexandra's question when she says, "In short, if you could deal more fully with the inability to distinguish between analysis and interpretation" — I've just done that, haven't I? One only has to analyze Sophocles' text without interpreting it to see that it is always a community, that of family and blood ties, that Antigone wields against Creon, and not herself as an individual.
Analysis versus interpretation, heritage and bourgeois feminism 37:40 That would be an unbearable hubris to Greek ethics. A very widespread degenerative disease, interpretation, which prevents the transmission of philosophical heritage. I fully agree with Alexandra. It's not only an anachronism, it's that by reasoning this way, by reasoning with the values of the moment, those of the dominant ideology, dominant in our space and especially in our time, we impoverish ourselves considerably from a cultural point of view.
38:13 We're not only in falsehood, we're in impoverishment, we're in the loss of what each and every one of you is entitled to, which is your heritage. I'm not talking about heredity here, that's natural, that's not my field, I leave that to biologists who know more about it than I do. I'm talking about heritage, about patrimony. The last time I went to Rousseau's tomb in Ermenonville, which does not contain his ashes, which are in the Panthéon, but where there is the cenotaph that had been built for his ashes, which the authorities of the Convention came looking for by torchlight one night at the end of the 18th century, in the midst of the Revolution, to bring the ashes to the Panthéon.
38:57 The first time I went, there was a stream of Japanese visitors coming to pay their respects at Rousseau's tomb. When I speak of heritage, I'm not self-centered, I'm not ethnocentric. And conversely, Westerners file past the pyramids of Egypt, this marvel — the Buddhist temple of Borobudur in Java — and so on; the world is rich at that level.
39:28 So it impoverishes our relationship to this heritage to always stew in this kind of rancid-smelling soup, marked by the dominant ideology, and to turn Antigone into a mini Hannah Arendt. So I'm very grateful to Alexandra for insisting on this, especially since she puts it well — the "best-of" effect in the reading, I'm quoting her, the best-of effect in the contemporary reading of Sophocles made by some, which ultimately amounts to taking whatever suits us best, out of opportunism.
40:08 In what we imagine to be the text, considering only its echo, taking that echo or that resonance for the legacy, the tradition, taking the sound produced by the rebound for the original sound, confusing the noise of the echo with the voice that emits it — which amounts to only listening to that rebound on oneself. Yes indeed, I would even say narcissistically, the bourgeois feminist idea — because there is a very great feminism which I fully endorse, which consists in restoring to women the same economic rights conferred on their male counterparts.
40:42 We see her brothers, her fathers, and we see her companions. The bourgeois feminist idea lurking in this interpretation, with the fact — you know, I call bourgeois feminism the kind that says, well this has nothing to do with class issues, there's man and woman and that's it. That's convenient — the powers that be love this kind of opposition, you see, they love it. Because then our finger is no longer pointed at them, at power; it's like ecology. The guilty party there is no longer power, it's all of us. All of us who are filthy consumers driving the planet to ruin, right?
41:16 And all of us who enslave our wives, our mothers, our daughters and our sisters — I would love to have a thousandth of the power held by the former director of the International Monetary Fund who, moving on, became secretary of the European Union, or the former Secretary of State of that war criminal Bush Junior, when he fomented that war against Iraq, against the very life of the international community, and who had as his minister a Black woman, Condoleezza Rice.
42:05 I say this because it shows that identities must not be sacralized, it serves no purpose. And so, Alexandra — I take up what she says — the bourgeois, Butlerian feminist idea, I'll add, lurking in this interpretation, with the feminine seen as archaic and therefore necessarily resistant — yes, of course, it was better before. Antigone as a figure of resistance with a traditional, natural aspect, contrary to Hegel's idea, which places tradition not on the side of nature but of the tool, the tool precisely enabling transmission.
42:40 And yes, all the progress that led from the first chipped flints or the first houses on stilts, much later in the Cro-Magnon era, up to us — all sorts — I'm speaking of progress objectively here, I'm not speaking of progress in terms of values, what do I know, I don't think there has been progress at the moral or aesthetic level, that's another problem — but on the other hand, there is a measurable progress: the time it takes to secure one's food, the time it takes to make this table, and so on, that can be measured; as productive forces develop, less working time is needed to produce an object.
43:21 So, the revolt of the subject as the motor of history, says Alexandra, whereas it is only its expression, its momentary incarnation — the qualifier used by Hegel about this myth, she quotes Hegel, in quotation marks, "the most soothing masterpiece," I was alluding to that, which would run counter to the idea of a subject burning in both senses — a subject that is topical and a subject that is consumed. A superb parallel, drawn by Alexandra, ready to wall itself up with itself for centuries and centuries, amen, she says, with the fine irony that characterizes her, I would even say the humor.
44:02 There you have it. There is also a question — I haven't finished answering it — but since I say that the figure of Antigone serves somewhat as a diagonal for the book I published with Éditions Delga a few years ago, I'd like to address the second question, Hugo's — I believe you have the text, but I'll read it to you, it's shorter, so if you have the text, you'll have both the audio and the visual.
Reading of the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit 44:35 "At a key moment in your book, starting from a famous passage in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, you stage two crossed pairs: beauty without force and understanding on one hand, death and spirit on the other." If that sounds cryptic, I'll immediately, right after reading the question, read Hegel's text to which it alludes. "In this repetition, in the theatrical sense but also that of the repetition compulsion in psychoanalysis, a dynamic operates in this sense."
45:09 "Beauty without force" — that's the formula Hegel uses, he says kraftlose Schönheit — "beauty without force recoils into its mortally narcissistic impasse before the black sun of finitude which it flees, whereas the mortal negativity borne by the understanding seems able to grant us the true life of the spirit. So what is at issue here? Here are my questions: What connection do you make" — and I believe you have this in front of you — "what connection do you make between beauty without force and narcissism?"
45:42 "In what way is the latter's fate an impasse? Finally, why does the difficult assumption — taking on — of the idea of finitude, which is, for everyone, at the very least unpleasant, to say the least, promise on the contrary a more favorable outcome?" So, first, to be quite clear, I'll read you the passage from Hegel, taken from the preface to the Phenomenology, a crucial passage, often commented on, a strange passage, which I have indeed translated in dramatic terms, in the theatrical sense of the word, right?
46:23 Because there are characters who rub shoulders there, and an action, rather, at play. Hegel was speaking — well, we weren't at the theater — he was speaking of the understanding. A term inherited from Kant, the understanding. The understanding is, roughly, if A equals B, B equals A — I'm simplifying, but broadly, the understanding is that, it's the intellect; it's not reason, which has a moral concern. You know that the understanding is rational — ratio means reason — but it isn't certain that it is reasonable, that's not its function at all. You see, language shows well the gulf between the cognitive function to which the understanding is limited, even though it has infinite power, as we'll see in this domain, and an ethical aim, let's say, to include both morality in the subjective sense and action and practice and the ethics implied by the notion of reason.
47:19 Now, he was speaking of the understanding and of one of its favorite weapons, which is analysis. You know, the analysis of water — Lavoisier analyzes air and water at the end of the 18th century, they do chemistry, scientifically. To analyze is to break down into constituent elements. But what did I just say? I just said break down — a corpse decomposing. Medical students begin by studying anatomy.
47:51 With the body, one begins by studying the corpse, anatomy. One cannot study the anatomy of a living man. That would be far too incomplete. So why am I insisting on this? Because death is going to come up in the text that Hugo alludes to, which I now quote: "The activity of dividing" — so dividing, breaking down, analyzing — "The activity of dividing is the force and the labor of the understanding"
48:21 The term is underlined. Comma. "Of the most astonishing and greatest power there is, or rather of the absolute power." A solemn, strange text. All the more strange and incongruous given that Hegel is speaking in the full flood of German Romanticism. The work was published in 1807, and nothing is more opposed to the spirit — the feeling, if you prefer — of German Romanticism than the cold understanding, the intellect, whose most emblematic form of exercise is mathematics.
48:59 It's not exactly the world of Romantic enthusiasm and passion. So Hegel knows this very well. And it is indeed in this work, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and in this preface, that he announces his protocol of rupture with his own absolute Romanticism of youth. So we are witnessing here this rupture through the very fact that he rehabilitates the importance of the understanding, which is not sufficient, since the understanding does not go as far as reason, which involves dialectics.
49:30 whereas the understanding is limited to non-contradiction. But the fact that he rehabilitates it and says it is absolutely necessary, if not sufficient, is already an anti-Romantic provocation. Let me pick up and continue. "The activity of dividing is the force and the labor of the understanding, of the most astonishing and greatest power there is, or rather of the absolute power." Go on, take a segment AB. Say it's 2 cm, 3 cm, whatever.
50:05 Between 1.8 cm and the other end, which is at 2, between 1.8 and 2, you can still divide the remaining interval into as many fragments as you want. Absolute, infinite power — power of the pure self, as he says, of the abstraction that the mind alone can perform. Hence, "of the most astonishing and greatest power there is, or rather of the absolute power."
50:35 What I just said about the segment in space could equally apply in time. You know, there are people who tell you dreams with such impossible twists and turns that it would take a volume's worth of novelists to render them. But when you objectively measure the time they spent asleep, it's sometimes three and a half seconds, which stretches into an almost infinite duration. Nerval expresses this very well in Sylvie when he says: "That state, when one is falling asleep, that state in which the mind still resists the bizarre combinations of the dream, often allows one to see crowded into a few instants the most striking scenes of a long period of one's life."
51:16 So, back to Hegel: the circle, the opposite of the understanding, that which is truly substantial, closed, not divided, wholly full, the circle that rests in itself, closed upon itself, and which, as substance, is the opposite of the subject, and which, as substance, holds all its moments in immediate relation, arousing no astonishment — but that the accident as such, separated from its surroundings — hold on, I'll explain right away in voice-over, otherwise you'll say Hegel is difficult.
51:48 I have the screen here, my tablet, I can isolate the right side — it isn't at all isolated in reality, it's contiguous with the rest of the tablet, but I isolate it in thought, which is what the understanding allows me to do. When I say "look at the right side," you look at the middle of the right side, you look at the corner in the middle of the right side, the top corner, you look at the bottom corner, and so on. That's what's illustrated here — "but that the accident as such, separated from its surroundings" — which is effectively real only in its connection to something else, in this case the side here to the whole tablet, to something else — "obtains a being-there of its own, an existence, a being-there of its own and a distinct freedom — that is the prodigious power" — the word recurs — "of the negative, the energy of thought, of the pure negative self," because I have to negate the totality offered to me and perform divisions within it. "Death, if we wish"
52:58 "to call this unreality that" — and there, I had told you death was coming, the moment I reminded you that to analyze is to break down, decomposition is death — "death, if we wish to call this unreality that, is the most fearsome thing" — a strange page — "and to hold fast to what is dead" — that is, to confront this absolute power without being annihilated by it, right, this annihilating power, to face it — whereas in Greek antiquity you must not look at Medusa, she's a mythological deity, because you're immediately turned to stone. It's the same in the Old Testament, in the Bible — I don't know, about our culture where we tend to systematically oppose all these things, it's always more or less the same structures found again — when in the episode of Sodom and Gomorrah the Lord says to Lot, the only man who is going to be saved from the destruction, "do not turn back" — some even hypothesize that this recounts a nuclear attack.
54:08 right, because he must not see it, or else he would be blinded by the flash of the explosion — and going from one anachronism and one delirium to the next — but his wife, on the other hand, cracks, right, it's the opposite of the myth of Orpheus, it's not the man who cracks here, it's the woman, and she turns back and is instantly changed into a pillar of salt. That is what happens when you look the negative in the face. Well, that is what Hegel asks of the philosopher. "Death, if we wish to call this unreality that, is the most fearsome thing, and to hold fast to what is dead is what demands the greatest strength" — and here comes the most important sentence of all these pages, the one on which Hugo would like me to expand — "beauty without force" — and here he's alluding to the fashionable Romantic beauty of his time, this isn't about Antigone here, it's a feminine figure, in the feminine — "beauty without force hates" — the verb to hate — "hates the understanding" — Romanticism does not like the intellect — "because the understanding expects of her what she is not capable of accomplishing." It is not this life, I'll say straightaway, that of narcissism
55:18 of a certain narcissistic Romanticism — it is not this life which recoils in horror before death and preserves itself pure from destruction, "but the life that bears death and maintains itself in death itself that is the true life of the spirit" — a sentence that seals this whole passage and sums it up: the spirit wins its truth only on condition of finding itself again within absolute dismemberment. Yes to identity, but on condition that it takes on the greatest otherness. There you have it, and that's why, if we truly want to be anti-racist, we must not be identitarian — that is, we must, on the contrary, measure ourselves against otherness; it's through otherness that we obtain our identity. French national feeling, as all historians know, appeared belatedly, at the end of the Middle Ages, around the 15th century, following a century of conflict with England, the Hundred Years' War. An external opposition is needed, a great Other is needed for a national feeling to appear; until then, there were Picards, and even, in certain regions,
56:28 for a long time still, I don't know, Provençals, Corsicans, Lorrainers — there was no "French," it took confronting otherness to achieve that. So that's my commentary on the part of Hugo's question where he says beauty without force recoils into its mortally narcissistic impasse. Then he asks me in what way is this impasse deadly. A system that is closed in on itself, that is absorbed by itself, is a figure of narcissism, is condemned to death. Read that admirable text by Kafka called The Burrow — it's part of a series of short stories, even though it's one of the longer short stories, in the so-called animal series in Kafka, there are many stories featuring an animal, and sometimes it is the animal itself who speaks, who is the narrator of the story — that's the case here, an animal
Kafka's The Burrow, figure of the narcissistic impasse 57:38 apparently a burrowing animal, since it spends pages and pages describing its burrow to us, the tricks it has devised, the storerooms where it keeps its provisions, how it hides them, the false galleries — in short, an animal living in terror, we're really in Kafka territory — the terror that one day a predator, as it says, that one day it might feel a predator's teeth in its flank. To guard against any attack from outside, you see the connection to what we were just saying, it builds itself a burrow — but of course it has to come out eventually, when it needs to restock its supplies. To be a living being is to leave the cell, the original cell, the foundation of biology — it is to go out, to put oneself in relation with the outside world, to take risks; without that, any absolutely narcissistic impasse is absolutely deadly. And since I mentioned Kafka's admirable text called The Burrow, I can't help — Kafka is never funnier than when he is perhaps
58:48 at his most anguished, but it's superb — the narrator, so the animal, let's say a rodent or a badger, I don't know, tells us at that point about one of his outings to fetch food, and when he comes back on a sunny afternoon, when he returns, he says: "I am moved to tears when I find the vicinity of my burrow again, when I see where it is — no one else can see it but me, because I've put branches and other things to hide it, it can't be seen — and at that moment I shed tears of emotion at the sight of the efforts I've made to render it invisible," and he has this magnificent line: "I believe my burrow never protects me as much as when I am outside it." So there, I've answered the second question, and as for the third, it's more complex: why the difficult absorption of the idea of finitude, which is for everyone, at the very least, pleasant
Classicism: Ifé, Attic stelae, Rilke's elegy 59:58 does it promise on the contrary a more favorable outcome, so I must say here that I'm alluding to the avant-gardes, right, people have often reproached Hegel's aesthetics for praising, for not taking too many aesthetic risks - I'm quoting his commentators, who weren't entirely off the mark, but well, I've already told you that I'm neither a Rousseauian nor a Clouscardian, I mean these are unavoidable references for me but I mean I take from each of them what advances the issue, and so people have often said that he privileges classical art, classico-romantic art if you will - I don't want to dwell too much but well, these are familiar notions especially in Germany - classicism appears
1:01:08 in an overdetermined way in Hegel, either as a reference to the ancient city which is its cradle - even if there's an eternal narcissism, we can speak of a Bantu narcissism, of a - excuse me, I'm getting mixed up - it's a Bantu classicism, a Chinese classicism, I mean in every era, in African art, in African sculpture and in masks you have for example the extraordinary tradition of the Ife masks, I-F-E, look at that in the images section on Google, you'll be amazed, you'll say these are African heads, we recognize them clearly, and yet they have Greek plasticity, they have perfection - yes, that exists in African sculpture too, there's a classical moment there, its cradle is a region straddling present-day Nigeria and Benin, so don't fail to go see the extraordinary Ife art heads in classical Benin art - I'm speaking of Benin here in the historical sense, which includes Nigeria
1:02:18 so of course the reference point of our classicism, of the whole West, is the Greek moment, and even before classical Greece there is archaic Greece, the language of Hesiod who gave us the first great G in Greek mythology, the language of Aeschylus, the oldest, the most archaic of the three great Greek tragedians - Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides - and that of Homer of course, legendary founder of Greek literature, it matters little whether this designates an individual or a collective - here it must surely have been a griot, a bard, it doesn't matter, or the set of texts compiled and linked under that name, which underwent oral transmission long before being written down - the one we know is not expressed in the classical language, and later, conversely, in the Hellenistic period
1:03:28 it's called that to distinguish it from the classical and Hellenic periods - the Hellenistic periods - you have in the sculptures a decadence, some say, I don't want to make value judgments for now, but it's true there's a somewhat forced, somewhat realistic side, you start to see veins, muscles, convulsed images jutting out, fine, a kind of realism - compare the discus thrower who does like this, who is very famous, and who is almost too realistic, to the discus thrower who holds his discus quietly on his hip like this in classical sculpture - and I think, I won't run through all the symbols of classical art, but I can't better sum it up than in this passage from one of Rilke's great elegies, in the first elegy, where he addresses lovers in general, couples of lovers who, as he says, veil from each other their destiny, their faces brought close in a kiss only masking the destiny behind the face, until the moment when, as he says, the first
1:04:39 moments of emotion, like the drinker of the act, strangely escape - but that's not what interests me, it's what he contrasts with the grip of the kiss, and especially its modern depiction - I'm thinking here of Rodin's Kiss, which Rilke greatly admired, but to which he opposes as a counterpart the Greek moment in sculpture, and he says this passage which sums up the classical approach to art: have you not seen on the Attic steles the prudence of the human gesture, despite the vigor swelling the torsos - I add a voice-over: you can also see this on the admirable Etruscan tombs which come from the same Hellenic culture, you see powerful, colossal torsos like this, of couples where the man wisely places his hand on his companion's shoulders like this - have you not seen on the Attic steles the prudence of the human gesture: it meant, such is our affair, pressing harder is the affair of the gods. So people have reproached
Measure is not the extreme center 1:05:52 Hegel for limiting himself to this classical approach of measure - not the mean, moderate kind - he's no more opposed than Hegel is to the extreme center that has dominated us politically for three generations now, ever since the center-left then the center-right, ex-Vichyist Giscardian, the center-left ex-Vichyist Mitterrandist, cooked up the mess that leads to Macron via Sarkozy, Hollande, whatever you like - ever since the two great forces of the Resistance, on the right - but at least it had this much honesty, that it never denied being on the right - Gaullism, and on the left, communism, gave way to this mess which quickly absorbed what claimed to be to the left of the communists and turned out to be to the right of de Gaulle - I'm thinking of the extreme of Jospin who ends up declaring, a generation later, my program isn't even - this is my addition - isn't even socialist, I don't know, and the unraveling of the social gains of the Liberation
1:07:02 happened nowhere as much - and that's saying something when you see how Macron is at it - than under the reign of the Bérégovoy, Jospin, and other so-called socialist governments. So no, I'm not talking about this extreme center that passes itself off as a moderate position and which is violent, which is extremist - I'll take advantage of this, it will take us a few seconds off track, but still, I have something stuck in my craw because I posted a quote from the immense singer of prodigious bass voice that was Paul Robeson - I talked about him last time - and I posted a statement he made to the Peace Movement in Paris at the end of the 1920s, you see, well before today's anti-racist demonstrations, where he says long live the unity of Europe's poor whites, of the white proletariat, who by uniting with the oppressed Blacks of the United States have the same adversary - to show that
1:08:12 in order not to take sides in an odious way, as people tried to make us do, either for one color against the other in any sense whatsoever - I had the misfortune of quoting it, it seemed clear to me that it meant yes to anti-racism, but the real kind, the one that attacks the sources of racism, which are social and not identity-based - because after all the King of Morocco is very well received in a palace in Paris, so let no one say Paris treats Arabs badly, but like the majority of North Africans, who aren't all Arab, the majority of North Africans and sub-Saharan Africans don't quite have the standard of living of the King of Morocco - in the imaginary, but the imaginary is not the truth, which is why it's very dangerous for it to seize power all on its own, the imagination, as happened in the 1930s in Germany - look at the great Nuremberg rallies with torches at night, you'll understand what imagination in power means when the imaginary can't help but, when you say an African, a North African, connote it with what it knows
1:09:22 in statistical probability, that is, with the poor person - it's a hatred of the poor, racism as "filthy poor person" as the admirable film Traversée de Paris ends. So that's why I'm making this detour, because I mentioned the extreme center, and when I say Hegel is an admirer of measure, which is the key word of classical art, the metron, which at every moment guards against hubris, against the temptation of excess - that's the best translation of hubris, which gives us "monstrous," "hybrid," all that in our language - excess, that's the best translation. So you see, it's the complete opposite of a comfortable middle ground where I distrust extremes, coming to safety in my abominable extreme, extreme center - this extreme center I've already cited, which inspired my late friend and one of the greatest playwrights of the postwar period, Arthur Adamov, whose name was always associated with Ionesco's and Beckett's at the time when people spoke of the theater of the absurd
1:10:32 and which people stopped naming alongside the other two once it had the bad taste to join the French Communist Party at a time when everyone was leaving it, when many people were leaving it - so Adamov had written this play called Mr. Moderate - I don't need to make him some great serial killer, Mr. Moderate - no, measure, and now I'll stop referencing the extreme center - the measure that Hegel favors when he speaks of classical art is a measure, if you want a representation of it since we're in aesthetics, it's good to have a representation that gives us a rest from abstractions - it's not that of the golden mean in the center of my house, in my living room, on my sofa facing the TV, no, it's that of the tightrope walker balanced on a wire - ah yes, there you need a happy medium because otherwise there's danger, a millimeter left or right and it's death, it's risk, it's the quest for this difficult
Hölderlin's letter to Böhlendorff 1:11:42 measure between two abysses, between two infinities, which the Greek metriotes expresses - and here, before quoting Hölderlin's poem to you, let me quote this famous letter, one of the most beautiful letters in epistolary literature, which is part - I'm not the only one to say so - part of the summits of his work, a letter he sends to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff - you can forget the name, it's on page 1009 of the Pléiade volume, but it's very important, so I'll dwell on it - a letter he wrote just as he had returned from the fatal trip to Bordeaux where his madness declared itself - these are thus the last moments when he still addresses us with all his wits, so to speak, before sinking into psychosis - so he had gone to Bordeaux, to explain the context, a letter written at the very beginning of the 19th century
1:12:52 right, we're in 1801, 1802 - "My dear friend, it's been a long time since I wrote to you. Meanwhile I have been to France and I saw the sad and solitary land, the shepherds of southern France, and certain beauties, men and women, who grew up in the anguish of patriotic doubt and hunger" - he crossed these regions at the time of the wars of the Revolution and of the Vendée - "the powerful element, the fire of the sky" - for the first time this German, used to the mists of the banks of the Neckar or the Rhine, saw up close what he had always dreamed of when Greece was mentioned in his Greek and Latin dictionaries - Greece for him was maps, words, works of Sophocles, verses learned by heart - but here all of a sudden it hits him in the face, and it's not by chance that his madness declared itself following this shock - in any case there is a chronological correlation - so I repeat: "the powerful element, the fire of the sky, the silence of men, their life in modest and contented nature, seized me constantly, and as is said of the heroes" - understood, of Antiquity - "I may, I may well say
1:14:04 the sentence sums it up, worth reading in my opinion: "I may well say that Apollo has struck me" - you see that the figure of Apollo here is not measure, balance, harmony, the centrist - no, Apollo formidable - "in the regions bordering the Vendée I was interested in the wild element, the athletic aspect" - you see, he's still thinking of the Greekness of the southerners - "amid the vestiges of the ancient spirit, I became more familiar" - here we get to it - "with the nature of the Greeks" - he speaks of it to better convey our difference, we moderns - "I learned to know their character and their wisdom, their body, their way of growing up in their climate, and the rule by which they preserved" - you see, there's always a sense of threat, Hölderlin threatened here by his own madness, and he thinks deeply about how the Greeks fought against this threat of the oriental infinity from which they come - "their way of growing up in their climate and the rule by which they preserved the presumptuous genius of the violence of the element - this is what determined
1:15:14 their ethnic character, their way of assimilating - the opposite of racism - of assimilating foreign natures and communicating themselves to them: that is their original individuality" - what beautiful dialectic - their individuality, their originality is to communicate themselves to foreign cultures, that is their original individuality - "which translates in life through the fact that supreme intelligence is the power of reflection in the Greek sense, and this becomes understandable once one has understood that the heroic body" - he's thinking of the status of the Greeks - "their popular character is tenderness, as ours is sobriety - the impression made by the sight of the ancients" and capital A, so we have proof that he passed through Paris on foot on the way back - the antiques, that's the Louvre gallery, where he finally saw the originals, having known only reproductions in engraving or drawing - "the impression made by the sight of the ancients made me better understand not only the Greeks but more generally supreme art" - so he too is a classicist - "in supreme art which, even in movement" - thinking of my tightrope walker - "and the supreme phenomenalization of the concepts of every serious
1:16:24 opinion, maintains every thing in its permanence for itself, so that security thus understood constitutes the supreme form of the sign." So I come back here to the criticism made of Hegel - isn't this letting the avant-gardes off cheap, because the century that opens as he's writing his aesthetics, which will go on developing through the 19th, the 20th, and up to us, this element is going to be what has been called since then the avant-gardes, a term that has become familiar to us but wasn't at the time - at Hegel's time the avant-garde was the Romantics, who upset all previous aesthetic canons - now Hegel isn't very kind toward them, a bit like his colleague Goethe - Goethe said: if someone has something to tell me, let him tell me clearly, that's not romantic at all, and he adds: as for obscure and problematic things, those I already have in myself are enough for me
1:17:34 so, to show that it's a misreading to think that Hegel ignores the avant-gardes, I'll go so far as to say that Hegel is the first to theorize the avant-garde, even before the essential works of the avant-garde appeared, which came after Hegel's death - you might tell me, come on, that's going too far, Hegel couldn't anticipate things as new as Impressionism, let alone abstract art, Cubism, Tachisme, what's it called, conceptual art, where there's very little art and no concept at all, I'll say more about that another time when it's relevant - but how could he anticipate all that? Well, listen to what he says, how he characterizes modernity - I'll go quickly - the whole history of art for Hegel, or rather
1:18:44 all the art deployed throughout history - that's more important than a simple history of art, which one can learn excellently, for instance, at the École du Louvre, but that's not what's at stake - the philosophy of history is not history, it's about seeing the stakes since, I don't know, the first cave paintings or the art of the first oriental empires, China, India, Egypt, etc., up to today, at Hegel's time - he divides it into three great sections: symbolic art, classical art, romantic art - you see how fast we're going - of course there's a lot that's inaccurate in what I'm saying when we make such big abstractions without detail, I'll give two details afterward, you'll see how concrete it actually is, but as it stands it's abstract, poor without abstraction - symbolic art, so let me now give you the key: what runs through each of these three stages is that each time art seeks to reconcile content with form. In symbolic art, oriental art, the content, which is human infinity, cannot manage
Symbolic art, classical art, romantic art 1:19:54 to find adequate form, because it is infinite, and the form - and so it makes matter explode - it's a beautiful approach: look at the proliferation on Hindu temples, sometimes there's not a single cubic centimeter that isn't sculpted, there's an overabundance - I'm not making a value judgment - it's superb, sculptures everywhere. Look at the illustration of the sacred books of Chinese or Thai Buddhism, Siam as it would have been called then. Look at the gigantism of Egyptian art, whether the gigantism of tombs or of statues - take the colossi of Memnon for instance, or the statue of Ramses at Abu Simbel, where the divinity crushes the creature - isn't that something terrifying and mysterious that makes up the unmatched splendor of Egyptian art, its main quality being this power of radiance, of mystery - proof of which is that one of its most emblematic objects is the Sphinx, and a sphinx is a source of riddles. Now symbolic art
1:21:05 so it's the infinite content seeking, in finite being, in being-there, in the here and now, a form and not finding it - well, it does find it, let's move quickly, in the Greek moment, the noontime moment, that's the classical moment, balance between content and form - no more gigantism, the Greek statue is your height, mine, that of an ordinary man, even if it's an ideal man who isn't twisted by suffering - it's not yet this creature writhing in suffering on a cross, that will be the next stage, what Hegel calls romantic or Christian or modern art - you're starting to understand the system of equivalences - no, on the contrary, it's someone balanced, smiling, the mouth opens to speak, as Hegel says, and not to eat, and there it is, and with loose, free limbs, less rigid than the Egyptian statue - and that's classical art. So let's sum up: content seeks its form in symbolic, oriental art, next stage
1:22:16 it finds it in classical art, it goes beyond it in the third stage, in romantic and modern art - here I'll get to the avant-gardes - that is to say the spirit has become so aware - and we've worked on this enough together, you see, it all holds together, I won't go back over it - it's the moment of absolute knowledge - the modern is one who knows too much to be able to keep painting like Fra Angelico, who painted the Virgin and the Saints on his knees, so much was he at first-degree religious substantialism - you'll say, but you're contradicting yourself since Fra Angelico is Christian - yes, well, Catholic, I don't want to pass judgment on religion, but my Corsican aunt, who would kiss crucifixes like this, piously, that's the faith of the charcoal-burner, without any calculation, or who would pray to Saint Anthony of Padua to help her find her ring when she couldn't find it anymore - that's more fetishism than Christianity in the strict sense - one cannot say "my kingdom is not of this world," it very much is of this world, and people even ask the Saints, who here are what the Arabs called djinn, spirits, intermediary
1:23:26 divinities like that, to help her find her ring. That's for the Saints - which is why in the Protestant Reformation there are no more Saints, one doesn't say "the Passion according to Saint John" or "Saint Matthew" in Protestant musicology, one says Johannespassion, the Passion according to John. So the content has become so infinite, so interiorized, that it can no longer leave to the outside, wait for the outside to manifest the sign it seeks - very quickly here I'll illustrate this so as to make understood this interiorization essential to modernity, which is fatal to a certain form of external representation - that's why he goes so far as to say that architecture and sculpture - ancient art culminates in architecture and sculpture - whereas modern art, more interiorized, culminates rather in music and poetry, passing through painting which is already a plastic art that abstracts from an entire dimension, depth, which is replaced by perspective, an interiorization of real, external depth. I won't dwell on this
1:24:37 but to show how much more concrete all this is than one might imagine, I'll dwell a bit longer on the comparison between the Greek temple and the cathedral, taking two equivalent figures of the dwelling of the sacred - the essential thing in the Greek temple, think of the Parthenon, or rather, the most beautiful Greek temples are not in Greece, they're in Sicily and Asia Minor - the temple of Segesta, of Paestum in Sicily - the Greek temple, essentially, is made to be seen from the outside, the interior doesn't matter much, you may note that a poor goat was sacrificed inside and a few libations poured, but the essential thing is made to radiate, made to shine under Apollo's arrows in the light of the world - whereas in the cathedral, the light of the world is filtered through the stained-glass windows to restore what is essential, which is the inside of the cathedral, even though there are admirable things - gargoyles, portals, sculptures on the façades - of course all that is magnificent, but the most important thing, the sacred, the tabernacle and the sacraments
1:25:47 the temple is the house of the god, or of God depending on the religion, is on the inside - this interiority - I don't want to dwell too much, but to make understood that we're heading toward something so interiorized that it defies all representation - it seems that the drama of modern literature, especially after Hegel, will be creative impotence, when Mallarmé says, I quote, "I no longer have the art of dressing up" - very Hegelian-sounding - the modern poet is one who no longer has the art of dressing up - you see, "dressing up," hastily putting clothes, an external appearance, onto something we know too well to be able to mask it, we perceive too much the truth behind its mask, it's not that it's no longer enough to hide what is formidable in the truth - and I'm thinking of Rimbaud
1:26:57 who says in A Season in Hell: "I noted the inexpressible, I fixed vertigoes" - you see, literature, poetry here signals the near-impossibility of fixing what is so interior that it can no longer be an object in spatiality, in the exteriority of representation. So what does this have to do with the avant-gardes? Well, I'm going to give you proof - I haven't read this elsewhere, sorry, I'm putting myself forward for once, but it's because I would have liked to find it and I note that there is a description of an abstract painting in 1840, practically contemporary with Hegel, in a text by Edgar Poe that Baudelaire translated - so I'll give it to you in Baudelaire's translation, it's fairly well known, I believe several film adaptations were even attempted - The Fall of the House of Usher, one of Poe's best-known stories, but people don't sufficiently notice the passage I'm about to read - so I'll skip ahead, this is Poe, during a whole autumn
An abstract painting in Edgar Poe 1:28:08 day, a dark, dull, silent day, all the clouds hung heavy and low in the sky, I arrived in the evening within sight of the melancholy House of Usher - that's the first sentence I'm quoting from memory - and then, well, he's been called by a friend who is neurotic, like many of Poe's heroes, who lives in terror of one hardly knows what, and he speaks there - so let's get right to his artistic works - he played the guitar, I won't dwell on his compositions - and he speaks of his paintings, here's the text: "As for the paintings which his elaborate fancy" - in the Anglo-Saxon, Nordic, German sense, that is, the creation of fantasms, images, not fancy in the frivolous sense - "as for the paintings which his elaborate fancy brooded over, and which grew, touch by touch, into vagueness at which I shuddered" - you feel the vagueness coming, the disappearance of the subject that begins with contours blurring starting with Impressionism and disappears entirely in abstract painting
1:29:18 and which grew, touch by touch, into vagueness at which I shuddered the more thrillingly because I shuddered knowing not why - this is nothing yet, otherwise I wouldn't have allowed myself to interpret it, if there were only that, a shudder all the more penetrating for shuddering without knowing why. As for these paintings, so vivid to me that I still have their images before my eyes, I would try in vain to extract from them a sufficient sample that could fit within the compass of merely written words - in short, one of these paintings, exceptionally little indebted to words, through the absolute simplicity, through the nakedness of its designs, arrested attention, riveted it - he's speaking of the sample, if ever - listen carefully to this sentence - if ever mortal painted an idea, we're in full abstraction, if ever mortal painted an idea, he had never heard of conceptual art, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me, at least, in the circumstances then surrounding me, there arose from - listen carefully to the word - pure abstractions, the word is there, I hate interpretation, there arose pure abstractions
1:30:28 which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvas, an intensity of intolerable awe, of which I have never felt even the shadow in the contemplation of the reveries of Fuseli himself - a great draughtsman and engraver of the period, F.U.S.E.L.I, see his strange engravings on your search engines - undoubtedly striking, yet still too concrete - you see, the creator who comes closest at his time, a painter who really existed, Fuseli, and Poe finds him still too concrete to approach the abstraction of Roderick Usher's works - one of the fantastic conceptions of my friend, partaking not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth, although feebly, in words - so we're going to be able to describe it somewhat, and which can be sketched, though faintly, in speech: it was a small picture presenting the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, without interruption or device, certain details
1:31:38 of the accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth - I think of Kafka's burrow - no outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, no torch or other artificial source of light was discovered; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor. I've given you proof that this was already conceivable, that it was already in the air - let no one say Hegel couldn't have had any notion of pictorial modernity, of abstract painting, which goes even beyond the Impressionism of the late 19th century, far beyond, up to us for a good part still despite neo-figuration - and it was already circulating in Hegel's time, and Hegel is quite right to say that the stage of absolute knowledge which modernity reaches leaves room only for an alternation, afterward, between romanticism and attempts to exit romanticism called neo-classical - but let's not get ahead of ourselves - second example, I'll stop there - a letter from Baudelaire to Richard Wagner, at the time
Baudelaire, letter to Wagner on Tannhäuser 1:32:48 there was an enormous scandal, like that of Hernani, there was a cabal against the first performance of Tannhäuser, an early opera which is still a romantic opera, not yet a lyric drama - I'm not giving a musicology lecture - it's not yet Wagner with Myrien, but without being fully there, it's a very beautiful romantic opera - so there was a scandal, there were Jockey Club members - the establishment of the time - who had brought whistles, so that at every silence there were whistles in the hall, anyway, in short - and so Baudelaire, somewhat outraged, writes the day after the scandal this letter where he begins by saying: Sir, you are not the first man for whom I've had to blush for my country, but I don't want you to count me among those idiots, I don't know - that's to set the context - and he tries to describe what he felt in his music, so he too, like Poe, tries to describe the non-figurative paintings of Roderick Usher, non-figurative avant la lettre - here Baudelaire tries to say what he felt in his music by saying, well, I have no technical
1:33:58 musical knowledge, even though Baudelaire is an immense art critic as you know - so he says this: "The first time I went to the Italiens" - that's what they called the Opéra Garnier at the time, the Italian repertoire occupied an overwhelming place - "the first time I went to the Italiens to hear your works, I was rather ill-disposed, and I confess even full of prejudice - but I'm excusable, I've been fooled so often, I've heard so much charlatan music with grand pretensions - by you I was conquered at once. What I felt is indescribable" - so again, like Poe, "and if you deign not to laugh, I will try to translate it for you. At first it seemed to me" - which is pathetic to me in this letter, that Baudelaire writes like a kid, though he's an immense poet already not far from the end of his life, he writes like a kid, and at the end, which I won't read to you, I'll just give you the last line, a postscript: "I'm not giving you my address so you don't think I have something to ask you. What I felt is indescribable, and if you deign not to laugh"
1:35:08 I will try to translate it for you. At first it seemed to me that I knew this music, and later, thinking it over, I understood where this mirage came from; it seemed to me that this music was mine, and I recognized it as any man recognizes the things he is destined to love. For anyone but a man of intelligence this sentence would be immensely ridiculous, especially written by someone who, like me, knows nothing about music, and whose whole education is limited to having listened, with great pleasure it's true, to a few beautiful pieces by Weber and Beethoven. Next, the character which struck me most was grandeur - this represents the great, and pushes toward the great - well, we're not yet in abstraction - I found everywhere in your works the solemnity of the great sounds, of the great aspects of nature - it could be figurative - thickets, no, no, the great sounds is a sound, it's not even visual - and the solemnity of the great passions of man; one feels at once carried away and subjugated. One of the strangest pieces - I'm quoting the passage in the intermediate part - and the music at the same time
1:36:19 breathes sometimes the pride of life. Finally I felt also - and I beg you not to laugh - sensations which probably derive from the tenor of my mind and my frequent preoccupations; everywhere there is something rapturous and uplifting, something aspiring to rise higher, something excessive and superlative; for example, to use a comparison borrowed from painting - and here he's much more relevant, I suppose - before my eyes - listen carefully to the picture he describes, tell me if you see anything figurative, I'll get to the honorable part and say to myself, here it is, Wagner is set up - I suppose before my eyes a vast expanse of dark red. If this red represents passion, I see it arrive gradually, through all the transitions of red and pink, to the incandescence of the furnace: it would seem difficult, even impossible, to arrive at anything more ardent - he describes admirably what's called in music - it would seem difficult, even impossible, to arrive at anything more ardent - and yet a last flare traces a whiter streak which serves as its background; this will be, if you will, the supreme cry of a soul risen to its paroxysm. What have you seen
1:37:29 one hears a great many things, one sees nothing figurative, there's neither a rabbit wandering in the grass - no rabbit, no tree, no house, no lake - let me repeat just the key line: "I suppose before my eyes a vast expanse of dark red" - I think of Rothko, I don't know at first - "if this red represents passion, I see it arrive gradually through all the transitions of red and pink" - tone-on-tone, chromatic studies as they say in painting - "to the incandescence of the furnace, it would seem difficult, even impossible, to arrive at anything more ardent, and yet a last flare traces a whiter streak on the white which serves as its background; this will be, if you will, the supreme cry of a soul risen to its paroxysm." In short, modern art, contemporary art, the avant-garde exists from the very beginning, from the very first emergence of Romanticism, from the very start of modernity - and so, a thesis I often repeat, but since people don't want to hear it I persist in repeating it, since
The end of art and the Oedipus with an "eye too many" 1:38:41 the time when Hegel says - not that art is finished, that's said by ignoramuses who've never read him, he says on the contrary that art will never cease in the future to progress and perfect itself, but what is finished is the possibility it once had of representing the absolute as it had promised, for the artistic movements that raised up the cathedrals or the Greek temples or the Egyptian pyramids - since the appearance of this modernity which knows too much - that's the third time I've said that modern man knows too much to be a fully-fledged artist - and so I know this seems scandalous, I'll quote you the sentence of his companion Hölderlin - I'm drawing the parallel because I want to snatch Hölderlin from the obscene clutches of Heidegger, right?
1:39:43 because generally when one says Hölderlin, one thinks of all the writings Heidegger devoted to him as the absolute poet - yes, except that the Hölderlin I'm talking about is the opposite of Heidegger's, right? Heidegger turns him into a Nazi machine singing the homeland, the Grund, German soil, whereas Hölderlin was actually investigated for his opinions favorable to the French Revolution, let it be said in passing - well, but I won't dwell on it, I'll get worked up - so Hölderlin says in one of his most beautiful poems, In Lovely Blue, he says this: King Oedipus has one eye too many - doubtless we, we moderns, are all this King Oedipus who has one eye too many, whereas the Oedipus of Antiquity tore out his own eyes when he learned the truth, his eyes which had served him for nothing since with his eyes he searched everywhere for the culprit, but his eyes couldn't turn back on himself, on the unbearable - that would have broken this bedrock of narcissism that we all have, and which Freud calls the ego ideal - he cannot kill his father and marry his mother. So there you have two examples, right, two examples
1:40:54 of creation that I borrow from literature, because I'm not here to project paintings for you and show you photos of architecture from around the world, but the description of Roderick Usher's painting in Poe and the way Baudelaire visualizes, pictorializes if I may risk this barbarism, the musical overture of Wagner's Tannhäuser, is a highly detailed and nuanced development without the appearance of a single atom of figuration. That's what I wanted to answer to these two questions - have we run over time, Philippe? Yes, have we reached the hour and a half mark? Good, so since the subject seems - I can see from the comments you've kindly sent - since the subject seems to interest you, I intend to devote... you know these workshops
1:42:04 have a different form from my public workshops, it's more intimate, more thoroughly explored on one hand, and so I believe we won't have too much of a third session on this subject - "Aesthetics and Politics," if that's the title of the work, the work I published in written form, because it seems to me that the essential stakes of the history of philosophy are condensed there, and since I've been told that this book was a bit too allusive - which is true, a bit too concentrated and dense - I'll need at least a third session so as not to lose the essential substance of its marrow - I'm thinking of Hölderlin's poem that I sent you, called "German Song"
1:42:47 which I don't want to botch in the last seconds of today's session - I'm going to leave room for questions from those present, if there are any, or else we'll set a date for next time, when I'll move on to grasping this extraordinary poem called "German Song." Agreed? Very good, but in that case, I thank you for being here, and I'll see you next week, since for now, as long as Philippe can and wants to, right?
1:43:18 I know he wants to, but I'm not sure he'll always be able to, and I thank him in any case for keeping up this weekly rhythm, through which I'm very happy to find you again each time. See you very soon, and thanks again.
