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 crises and wars: the continuity of a discourse 0:07 No but well, uh.
3:21 Richard Desmeules.
12:05 There we go, minutes — yes, but I hope that's the knot, well I'm sorry for this interruption, it's my modem which apparently has a fault, but nothing seems to be working again, I hope you can hear us — well, yes, I was telling you that given the title and the outline I had communicated for my talk this evening, you might get the impression that I'm going zigzag, since I'm going from one extreme to another, from a talk that was very political, in inverted commas, in the ordinary sense at least, very
12:51 connected to the tragic warlike current events which have unfortunately served as our backdrop for some time now, and it's not over — and there I was going to go back to tackling literary problems, again in inverted commas, or rather I want to say, and this is the first part, the introduction of the outline I'm giving you, I insist on the continuity of my discourse, on continuity in the midst of these zigzag appearances which I fully own, and I mean by that that those who, like most of you — and I thank you sincerely—
13:37 regular, faithful and attentive listeners must remember that when I tackled the notion of the edge, I had stopped after ten years — I would have liked to go on digging to continue our reflection on my blog, my little book, Aesthetics and Politics, is equal — for the intelligibility of which the question of the notion of the edge will be useful to us — and then, given current events, I said, well I believe, that we'd dig into it another time, and that other time is tonight. So you see, there is continuity, I'm keeping
14:25 to the announcements I had made, without however turning my back on current events. I'll actually start by recalling — I flagged this too in the outline — but the most faithful among you, that is those kind enough to have listened to me since the beginning of the broadcasting of my talks on the internet, that is, since the earlier ones, more than seven years now, will remember that my first lecture cycle was titled 'Between Crises and Wars, To Philosophize', meaning that the time of philosophy, that of my transmission, unfolds in a rather narrow space
15:12 caught between two poles: that of crisis and that of one of the — pardon me for using a word that sounds positive for something as terrible as war — one of the solutions anyway, at least the one that capitalism has always favoured as a way out of even the gravest crisis capital has known before the one we're living through now, namely that of the 1930s: 50 million dead, a trifle, a repetition of a slaughter that had taken place barely 20 years earlier, the war of 1914 — already the press clippings of the time
15:59 just a little before the war of 1914, it was common in what we today call the media, that is at the time essentially the press, the written press — it was common, as the drums of war grew louder, to say: no, there won't be a war, today's weapons are so powerful that humanity would be exterminated. Nobody yet knew anything of nuclear weapons, that's what was being said back then about conventional weapons — and yet even in the conventional field, in the field of explosives, we have made some progress since then, alas, in destructive power and in
16:45 in the destructive power of so-called conventional weapons, as opposed to nuclear ones. You see, then, when this first worldwide slaughter — which originated in Western Europe, let's not forget that, the West here, in this case specifically Western Europe — had barely ended, voices immediately rose, not only from the great international bodies like the League of Nations, saying never again, right? And then 20 years later, here we go again, and on such a scale that — I mean even the war of 1914 seems
17:31 small — not for France in terms of the number of dead, but for the world, those 50 million dead I alluded to, through which capital carried out an enormous reset, how should I put it, a kind of computer-like wipe, a space of resetting to zero. And I say this because I find it quite troubling, and I doubt I'm the only one, that war should return to Europe at the very moment when we really have to ask how the biggest so-called Western countries — you know, I don't like this concept, I'll clarify a bit later, but so we understand each other for now, even in a rather
18:17 imprecise way, the Western countries, Japan included — that's to show you how much this is not an obvious concept, I don't know, but I'll come back to it — no longer knew how to get out of the debt crisis, which has reached such proportions — go look on the internet for a graph, a graph of the growth of American debt over the last twenty years, you won't believe your eyes, it's like that, I'm not joking, it's like that. It's clear that this debt could never be settled, so I say that it's still quite
The Odyssey framed by two carnages 19:02 troubling that war should break out at that very moment — as if there were this repetition of the slaughter. Now I started from the continuity of my discourse over seven years, and you'll understand that these zigzag appearances I make — and it greatly simplifies understanding what I say — regain all their meaning in light of this continuity. I had begun with 'Between Crises and Wars, To Philosophize', and a little later, three lectures in, for the first introductory lecture on the nature and origin of philosophy and the whole properly cognitive part
19:48 theory of knowledge — I'll take this opportunity to thank Alexis, who devoted this volume to it, which Delga was kind enough to publish and which sells not badly at all, which focuses right here — but then, four months later, I approached it through the figure of the lily, I posed the problem again — well, it wasn't called war or slaughter anymore then, I say this for those who hadn't followed that period, I'm going to
20:35 recall a point that I'm bound to recall because, quite simply, I mean to say — there are so many glosses and commentaries on Homer's texts, since these are the very first texts of the West, of Western literature if you prefer — so I don't mean to say anything that hasn't already been said, and yet precisely this point, which strikes me as it goes along in all simplicity, I'm embarrassed to have to say that I'm surprised it hasn't been noticed — the point I tried to develop in the first part of a piece called 'The Philosopher's Odyssey', right after 'Between Crises and
21:22 Wars, To Philosophize', which was the continuation of that beginning, namely that Ulysses's odyssey seems to be the exemplary illustration of the happy ending of the tribulations, of the adventures — one has the impression he's going to lose his life there, or at least most of his companions do lose theirs — but in the end, return to Ithaca after twenty years' absence, ten years of war, there's the Trojan war, there's — it's called the war of Ilion, the war between the Greeks and Ilion, between the West
22:10 of the Hellenic peninsula and the immediate East — I said 'nearby' because we mustn't exaggerate, it's present-day Asia Minor, or rather, now, Western Turkey if you prefer — most of the great pre-Socratics come from there, at the time it was called Great Greece; Thales of Miletus, Heraclitus of Ephesus, they're in Turkey — but then, ten years of war, plus more than ten years of wandering before Ulysses finds his homeland again, which will give Monteverdi the occasion
22:56 the immense, the immense Italian composer, founder of opera — even if the very first opera isn't entirely his, he's the one who first wrote masterpieces for this genre so new that people fainted at the premieres — and the title of the opera in question is 'Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria', the return of Ulysses to his homeland. Ten years of war plus ten years of wandering in the Mediterranean, that's a lot of edges piled up, isn't it, to go off-course as they say in seafaring terms
23:44 say, 20 years of absence, and so there's the wandering Ulysses, the one from the Odyssey, whereas in the Iliad, by contrast, it's the one who is on solid ground and who, thanks to the ruse he proposed of the horse — that ruse is the occasion for a first slaughter, the sack of Troy — read the text, reread the text and you'll see how appalling it is, even if — I say this because I don't have much time — I'll sum it up so we don't wander off and we'll come back to the heart of our subject — on the notions of death, I recall Racine, for instance
24:31 pardon me, you see — my — our roots, in Andromaque there's an allusion to that appalling night when the Greeks burst in — how would you like it, the worst nightmare, I'm in my bed with my wife, my children, and there, within the very walls, it's as if in a thriller someone had bolted the door, locked themselves in at home — in fact the monster is inside the house, not outside the bolted doors — and Racine, in Andromaque, has Pyrrhus say — everything was fair game then, old age and
25:17 childhood leaned in vain on their weaknesses for defense; victory and night, more cruel than us, urged us on to murder deep within their walls. But we, a few lines further on: I think of what once was that proud city, so fertile in heroes, mistress of Asia; and I look, in the end, at what became of Troy's fate, and what its destiny is — I see nothing but towers covered in ash, a river of blood, a deserted countryside, a child had to—
26:02 these lines to say that when I speak of slaughter, I am not exaggerating — sad eyes — who is behind it, who came up with the idea of the horse, Ulysses — I'm not demonizing him, he's doing his job as a warrior, he's going to make his side triumph, no, it's slaughter — and there you have civilians, soldiers, the difference seems quite flimsy. And then afterward, now it's him who's on his guard during the Odyssey, once the war is over — thanks to his ruse, they all embark, everyone goes back home
26:47 Cassandra didn't in Argos — your father Ulysses, and near the lily [Pylos?] ended his misery — well, a series of returns, everyone goes home except Ulysses, who — I won't tell you the whole story, but recall what vengeance from the gods, Poseidon in particular, for I don't know which act taken for hubris, has him condemned for ten years, right, unable to find his way back to solid ground, Ithaca, his capital, his little kingdom
27:35 I recall — and finding his wife again — and in fact he does succeed in the end, that is the return par excellence — and it's precisely in the final pages of the Odyssey that a second slaughter occurs, the massacre of the suitors — but don't take my word for it, look at the detail, we're spared no detail — and this institutes once again the reign of Ulysses. Everything happens as if, nicely, it's a
Dialectic as internal contradiction; the edge as schema 28:20 little bit our conclusion — I'm doing this on purpose so it's clear, before we get lost, since we risk getting lost in details in my discourse and in the texts we're going to look at, I'm deliberately recalling what's at stake here — let's not forget, we're in philosophy, one forgets that a bit when one is plugged into immediate current events, and this isn't the moment for that — so this is an occasion for an important review of the notion of dialectic, materialist — I often think of Bernard [Friot], the first time I met him, it was at the Librairie Tropiques bookshop, at the time when the skies shone beneath the scarf
29:07 of Iris — sorry to quote that beautiful line of Nerval's — there was a cordial understanding between them at that time, but in Africa, Dominique Masure, which has been overshadowed by a few clouds since then — it's not my place to comment on this passage from fine weather to storm, but anyway, I remember that Bernard, who had just been introduced, I was struck right away by the man's kindness, its most obvious attributes, if I may say so — and I remind you that Mme, having taken me aside a bit, had said to me: Dominique, you'll have to explain to me what this dialectic thing is
29:53 and I hastened to be able to explain dialectics to Bernard Friot, who should have recognized right away, before asking me about this — my friend, when you start asking the question like that, it's because you're beginning to doubt the thing — and since he now forms a duo with those who are among the least dialectical thinkers there are, all due respect aside, I recall that one of the essential aspects of dialectics is not only contradiction or opposition — there was an opposition between Giscard and Mitterrand, nothing dialectical about it precisely because it's a position between two different men — but one must add
30:40 internal contradictions, these inner contradictions within myself, when I am caught between two poles, right, in which I am equally involved in one as in the other, and yet which mutually exclude each other — that's when I'm in the dialectical movement. Now we've seen that this is precisely what characterizes edges — I won't have time, going into this question as I intend to do tonight, I'd have had time to remind you that every edge expresses — I'm not sure if I'm putting it in those terms, I'm showing off a bit because it's not my field — but anyway, having understood that switching is precisely something that allows
31:25 suddenly a change, and what a change — the one that takes us from the horizontal, in the case of the edge of a cliff for instance, to the vertical — see right away the rising dangers we face as soon as we get close to the edge — or else, if it's not the edge of a cliff but the bank of a river or watercourse in general, the passage from the stability of the ground I walk on to arriving at the bank, the edge, where the water flows, in contrast to solid, firm ground, the 'cow pasture floor' as we say colloquially in France, in French, where on the contrary everything flows
32:12 of Heraclitus, one never bathes twice in that water — so the distinctive feature of the edge is that it resembles somewhat, and I say this here for those enrolled in philosophy studies, pursuing it for its own sake, even though I'm not doing the history of philosophy, I recall that the edge here rather strangely recalls one of the most important and profound concepts, though more complex to grasp, in Kant, that of the schema. I recall that thinking of a schema, if you prefer an airlock — not in Germany, but as
32:57 you enter a restaurant in the middle of winter, there's always a little entryway like that, with two doors, on the right or on the left, before you can enter the restaurant where it's warm, where it's well heated — and then outside, behind your back, the entrance door of the restaurant has closed, and in that airlock, that's what is neither quite outside nor yet inside the restaurant — that's a schema, it's something homogeneous to two apparently incompatible things, here the outside and the inside. So there's dialectical contradiction when it's internal — suppose a subject, where else would you want interiority except in a subject, there is no interior to a pebble, but far less — how, how do I—
33:44 I can very well break it in two and see what it's made of, from the outside, it's always from the outside — when you break the pebble open, you don't see its inside, you see a new state of its externality. If I now take the case of the human body, to dig further into the question, forgive me, during an anatomy lecture at the faculty of medicine, one can always look inside the body — that's a way of speaking — but when you see the guts exposed to the air, that's still exteriority, that's not it, that's not our interiority — not that our interiority is
34:29 indifferent to what happens in the guts — let that pass, agreed, one must be a materialist — but the inside isn't that, it's a more complicated notion. When I talk about internal contradictions, don't rush to understand — you'll learn many concrete examples to begin realizing what a dialectical contradiction is — columns there, there, there, with a list, here we are, right — and so I wanted, I don't know if it's all right, Alain, could you display the outline — well, thank you very much, the—the—the
The hinterland and the edge, between two poles 35:17 the Trojan War doesn't take place far from — sorry — Troy, right there where only the Greek soldiers will manage to get in thanks to the ruse of the horse — it's in what's called in geography 'Hinterland', a term of Germanic origin meaning 'the land of the interior', if you prefer, as opposed to the shores. It's this dialectic that I wanted to highlight tonight, translating 'Hinterland' as there where there's the city, the settlement — it can be a village in prehistoric times, a small town, or a metropolis, the city
36:05 Hölderlin, in a very elliptical fragment, says this — it's very short: 'At the falls of the river the towns' — it's often in towns that you see a small drop in elevation, in the town center of the Rhine, the Danube, the Seine, the Yonne — a drop in elevation which was a source of energy at the time, used by mills — the river must cease to be adolescent, must stop being just like that, straight, but must undergo a first fall or castration, a drop, a rout — forgive these sexual metaphors, but still, so that suddenly the water becomes useful and constructive and
36:53 industrious. 'At the falls of the river, the towns.' Tonight I'd like to insist on the dialectic that unfolds between the link, the back-and-forth — I say this often, you see, in the introduction — back and forth between the network, taken at a collective level, and the Hinterland, of the town, the settlement — it can be a farm, it can be a fortified castle, it doesn't matter — anyway you can guess that what characterizes it is security, whereas, on the contrary, there where one exposes oneself to being absolutely other — I spoke earlier of switching — the
37:39 edge — there there there, the edge — I'm no longer within the security of home, I confront the outside, if only when I open my window, already, right, the house exposed to the weather, but also to the spring breeze, since that's the season we're now fortunate enough to be entering. So, as for this introduction, let me sum it up — these are the issues I wanted to be clear about: first, we are indeed in the continuity of my discourse over seven years; we're in a between-two of my early
38:28 lectures, between crisis and war, or between Hinterland and the intermezzo — the 'mezzogiorno' in Italian is the literal translation of our 'midi', midday, the middle of the day, 'mezzo giorno' — and just as with us the word also has a geographical sense, it's the south of Sicily and Apulia, and everything south of Naples. So I insist again on this continuity, we were at—
39:15 the space, the place, the time, however you want to put it, where a properly philosophical transmission can unfold, is situated between two poles which both threaten it equally: on one side excessive stability, if the Hinterland, the intermezzo, home, is on the contrary excessive fluidity between granite and rivers — that means excessive stability, as I—starting from when you should know—
The Burrow and Kafka's animal stories 40:02 as security — that's where I broke off my introduction and where I'm beginning the first part. I'd like to ask the technician to display the text of 'The Burrow' — there, this is Proust's text — this comes after Kafka's text, 'The Burrow.' There we go — I remind, for those who know it, and for those who wouldn't know this text, that first, you'll find it — for those lucky enough to be able to get hold of the three volumes of Kafka in the
40:47 Pléiade edition — that's quite an investment given the unit price of the volumes — there's the second volume, one of those I'm particularly attached to, you see, volume number 2, which contains all the — sorry — all the stories, Kafka's short stories, some of which are a quarter of a page long, and some run to about forty pages, I'm thinking in particular of, toward the end of his life, the final texts — 'Reflections of a Dog,' 'Memoirs of a Dog' — but it's rather 'Reflections,' like — the original literal text — 'Reflections of a Dog.'
41:33 The burrow, champion of the young — all that is techniques, and it's good with the burrow, you can guess we're on the side of security, the opposite of the marine floods. We're not only telluric — everything relating to the earth, to the soil — but we're actually underground, protected in addition to whatever might happen on the surface of the earth, of which the burrow is part — one of a whole series of Kafka's stories that we usually classify among what are called his animal stories. It's been noted that there are many stories where either an animal speaks, or we speak of an animal.
42:19 Kafka's most famous text, The Metamorphosis, does it not have as its central character an insect — the poor relatives, insects who find themselves legs in the air, think of a cockroach, scarab, whatever you like, a kind of beetle stuck on its back, agonizing a bit — a double of this story, while remaining in a visual and auditory fog, the words of his family. Another animal story, the extraordinary Report to an Academy, where it's a monkey who speaks of.
43:05 Twenty years, an academy of scholars, of anthropologists, to tell them how he was captured, isn't that so, Report to an Academy. And there are plenty of them, but there was of course — I'm alluding to it from memory — Investigations of a Dog, reflections of a dog, one of Kafka's most moving side quests, where it's a dog speaking in the first person. He asks himself the central question: where does food come from? A bone, thrown by kind gestures — people often do such things to dogs — should one water the earth to
43:50 make the food come out, or does it come from above? A fairly comic allusion, given that dogs are always lifting their leg to urinate, isn't that so — should one water the earth, or does the food... I come back to my subject, animal stories. Here the narrator, the animal that built the burrow, is someone who is silent and who is terrorized — it has taken on the language of things, a name, it's more than us speaking, yes it is terrorized. So it's a text that's rather — I won't go into the details, but
44:36 the longest part of the text is about all the ruses of the construction of this burrow — including, along the way, the trompe-l'oeil, the dead ends, the impasses, the great central chamber that it took him so long to make with his head — think whatever you like, a mole for example, an animal like that — and the number of galleries or chambers that serve no purpose but are decoys for possible predators who might improbably appear in this underground world. Yes, this costs everyone, everything, and everyone.
Too much security: from Nuremberg to Nazism 45:21 But here's the moment I chose about his burrow, it's exceptional, and this is where it becomes brilliant — the dialectic begins. He does need to go out from time to time to renew his stocks. Security is all well and good, I've got nothing against it — I'm answering the question of how you can speak of excess when I spoke of the two poles. In any case philosophy isn't security and fluidity — how can there be too much security? Because if there's only security, you die of hunger, you no longer move.
46:08 Food security, yes, but for that you have to expose yourself, you have to go out, you have to confront the seasons, the earth, watch out for the sea — I'm thinking of fishermen — the jungle, hunters — it's the whole history of us as nomads. But as men, and still with the taste for it, almost all the houses in Germany have geraniums at the windows, one gets the impression it's been that way forever, nothing has disturbed it — as a general paraphrase, one gets the impression that these little village squares in Germany with beautiful half-timbering, it's the setting of the second act of Die Meistersinger by Richard Wagner
46:53 with fountains murmuring like that in the night, one gets the impression it's more secure than ever, never, never, without the slightest sign of the insecurity that's coming — and it's from there that the greatest carnage of all began. Yes, a beautiful old German city — all those who knew it at the time agree unanimously — it was Nuremberg, Nuremberg, sorry — yes, the capital of Franconia. Yes, we don't say 'France' because that could cause confusion, it's the country of the Franks, Franken in German, Franconia, Franken, the land of the Franks — it's the geographic heart of Germany.
47:42 Not far from Thuringia, which in Germany is called the Grüne Herz Deutschlands, the green heart of Germany — one can't be more German than that, right in the middle. And if the high places of Nazism — there's a misunderstanding in France, people think Nazism historically stems from Prussian militarism — the major sites of Nazism were the South: the good humor, the feather in the hat, the leather shorts, the yodeling, all that stuff, unique — the beer-hall putsch in the fumes of beer and urine, all that stuff owed to Bavaria, where the beer festival takes place every year, and of course clearly Austrian too.
48:28 Austria — you can't get more deutsch than that regarding the origins of Nazism. Don't make me say what I haven't said, I have no illusions — the populations of southern Germany aren't condemned to be horrible fascists, and during the revolution of '48, and also towards the end of the war in '14, the most rebellious populations in Germany, the most politically advanced, created genuine workers' soviets in Hamburg, in Dresden, and in Munich. Well, anyway, that's the region.
49:15 I remind you that one shouldn't trust appearances too much — that's not the best way to put it, but Prussian tariffs, that's conservative, undeniably, but the Nazis were something other than conservatives. You see, a few days of vacation I owe to Dominique Mazu, and I speak of my arms and tricks earlier, I thank him in passing again — even now I haven't forgotten that he took it upon himself for us to go to Corsica in that role, my only condition being to try to act as guide, because that's something I like doing. So one May we ended up in Calvi, we came across one of the most ravishing
50:01 libraries in France, a small municipal library — I believe it has changed status and no longer exists as a library. My wife noticed it was octagonal with glass sides all around, quite small, like a sort of little kiosk, a pavilion on a tiny square in the middle of the oldest houses in Calvi — and there, upon entering, a bookseller, readers can't skip such a radiant place — Paris — we go in, there was a young person running this bookshop, who visibly had an Asian appearance.
50:46 And we learned, talking with her, that she was Kazakh, had arrived in France a few years earlier, and had been put in charge of running this library on behalf of the municipality. When she saw that we were interested in theoretical, political texts — well, a few days of vacation in Calvi, look, is there such a thing as chance? Let's not be paranoid, let's not believe everything is meaningful, but still, it was quite a find — she pulled out a text by Wilhelm Reich, the well-known Freudo-Marxist, so to speak — a text that wasn't the tame postwar, Cold War Reich with his libertarian side.
51:32 No, it's a text from the early years of Nazism — an extraordinary text. Ah yes, it reveals that Goebbels railed against the party militants who were too straight-laced — going back to my point about the sassy South — too straight-laced and who kept wanting to lecture German women, telling them to be good wives, kinder — how do you say it — Kinder, Küche, Kirche — no, not that — children, Kinder, Küche, the kitchen, Kirche, the church — published as Kinder, Küche, Kirche — look up 'church' in English.
52:20 No, no, I was being told — ah, German women, modern types, would accept, if they felt like it, to see a lover, accept it, don't get involved — 1936, or slightly libertarian — I close the parenthesis, don't trust appearances, so I'll stop this anecdote there. Of course Mazu was delighted to get hold of the pamphlet, which is certainly in his archives now, which is why I mention it — and you see, at the time these high places of Nazism, the South with its geraniums at the
53:07 windows, this stable Germany where nothing seemed destined to depart from security, tips the world over into horror and chaos during one of the worst periods in human history. I recall there's a significant passage — I was alluding earlier to the second act of Die Meistersinger by Richard Wagner, which takes place on one of these little squares in Nuremberg — as it happens, my remarks aren't so disjointed — everyone agreed unanimously it was the most beautiful old city in Germany, that it remained practically untouched by
53:53 Anglo-American bombing — Berlin, hit by the Russians — so, yes, this is a bit provincial, it's the only comic work among Wagner's, in many respects — Die Meistersinger, isn't that so, and there's a serenade, a classic one, sung by a ridiculous suitor to the heroine of the piece, the beautiful Elisabeth — no, let's leave that, it's Eva, excuse me, I'm confusing myself — one of its greatest interpreters, if not the greatest, was Madame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, so in '51, under Karajan's baton — is that still not
54:39 Karajan, quite so, still at that time — and this serenade one night on this peaceful little square, the very night of the Feast of Saint John, the 21st of June, the sweetest night of the year, in a country where winters are harsh, but what sweetness suddenly — the embalming scents, unter den Linden, under the lime trees — these two indications, this square lined with lime trees, and symbolically, night, the most famous, the Champs-Élysées of Berlin, that is, Unter den Linden, under the lime trees, and his serenade wakes up first one, then another of the
55:28 little windows opens with its tenants, and it starts hitting each other in this city, like a saloon brawl, in this city where everything had been so quiet while one waited only for the murmur of the fountains — a gigantic brawl breaks out, blood flows, the girls scream, the old women scream, the men insult each other, and then suddenly one hears the horn of the night watchman, because at that time, besides the church bells, there were night watchmen who walked the streets to check that everything was quiet, and who sounded the hours with their horn — with his horn, as it were, but it deceives — well, well, as soon as one hears the horn
56:14 no more of him after that, each one goes home, as if we had all been half dozing off, a bit like the Carabiniers of Larrieu — nothing more is said, oh, I thought I heard something — no, nothing, I didn't see anything, strange story — seeing perhaps in it an emblematic image of security, and of an eternity of security, being on the edge of horror. So I come back to our animal, the burrow: from time to time one has to go out because the stocks run low in the
Reading The Burrow: watching oneself sleep from the edge 57:00 burrow, one can't be content with the few animals that show up there in the galleries of underground rodents — all that's in the text — because the food gathered on the surface is much better, agreed. Now, the excerpt I've chosen from this rather long text, after all these pages I've skipped over, about all the ceaseless efforts he makes, which he will make until the end of his life to secure his burrow, especially through the ruses, the detours, the flaws of this gallery — well, after a year, ah, it does him good to get out into the open air. So I'll read you the text: 'I hurried away from the entrance and I come back just as quickly' — don't forget it's an animal
57:46 underground speaking, living in fear always — and I come back just as quickly, I look for a good hiding place, and watch the entrance to my house — you see, he doesn't go straight home when he returns from hunting outside, from his search for food; he stays for a while in a hiding place from which he watches the entrance to his burrow, which of course, through ceaseless labor, no one would ever suspect to be the entrance to a gigantic burrow — it just looks like a small patch of moss blending in with the forest floor. I repeat: 'I hurried away from the entrance and come back just as quickly, I look for a good hiding place, and watch the entrance to my house,' this time from
58:32 outside, day and night — you understand, he has to find food, but there he's in danger, he's exposed, so he should hurry, since he lives in fear, back into his burrow. What is it that keeps him outside, at this boundary, at this edge between this inexhaustible reserve of food that is the forest — but then with dangers one can hardly imagine — I won't paraphrase the text — and the security of his burrow? What is it that keeps him between the two? One can find it, that's it, that's mad — here's his answer, and it gives me indescribable pleasure. It reminds me: the narrator of the burrow is never
59:19 as secure as when he watches over it from outside, seeing something touching, even more than all the work he has done, how perfect this burrow is, how well it must protect the one who is inside. So look how mad this is, as he says: 'It seems to me then that I am standing not before my house but before myself as I sleep, and that I have the good fortune to be able to sleep deeply while at the same time keeping close watch over myself.' Yes, this splitting, this contradiction within the subject, between the one who watches and the one who sleeps under the protection of the one who watches, of which — 'I have, so to speak, the faculty of'
1:00:05 seeing the ghosts of the night not only in the abandon and blind trust of sleep, but at the same time in reality, where I encounter them with all the power of a wakeful mind and the calm exercise of the faculty of judgment — security of intelligence, faculty of judgment, of lucidity. 'I find, curiously, that things aren't going as badly for me as I often believed, and as I will probably believe again once I go back down into my house.' You see, no joke, he feels more secure when he contemplates his burrow from the outside — what's the use of all this effort, one wonders, only when he's inside, as if this security were only an
1:00:52 image that one pursues ceaselessly without ever reaching it. 'I find, curiously, that things aren't going as badly for me,' when I look at it from outside, 'as I often believed, and as I will probably believe again once I go back down into my house.' In this regard — in other regards too, but particularly clearly in this regard — these outings are truly indispensable. You see, we had thought they were essentially motivated by the need for food, and here we see what deeper reasons underlie them. So, you see, this burrow well symbolizes the bunker — burrow, bunker, hinterland, what's inside, that's the word for it, isn't it, under the earth.
In Our Synagogue: the animal on the ledge 1:01:39 And one must go out, place oneself at the edge where he watches himself, whether compelled by the need to renew stocks, or perhaps, as we've just seen, to reassure himself for good by contemplating his burrow from outside. So I planned to move from this to the antithesis, that is, to a text where Proust, on the contrary, shows us a moment of destabilization of his main character, the principal character of his novel. But before that, I'd like to read you a few excerpts from a text, since we're beginning to see that between the good burrow, the
1:02:24 stable, security, and the insecure floods that are proper to the proximity of edges, one gets old — we begin to see it's necessary, since one of the two, as we've just seen, is indispensable, the moment of the edge and the moment of security — it's what induces the necessity of a permanent back-and-forth from one to the other, from one pole to the other, and that's the dialectic, there's determination, there's internal contradiction, as we've just seen, and the movement it engenders, this back-and-forth. Now there's another animal story — sorry, you'll understand why I'm laughing
1:03:10 animal story that's very short — much shorter, no more than three pages, but I can tell you everything — called In Our Synagogue, a short story. I wanted first the beginning, to give context — imagine a synagogue in Russia, in Ukraine, in Czech lands, in Central or Eastern Europe, full of doors, before the age of low-cost airlines — a synagogue in the proper sense, and we're there during the service. I forget the text: 'In our synagogue there lives an animal about the size of a marten.' So, you see,
1:03:57 mustelids — you know, the family of the ermine, the marten — the hero here is already a letter, where he snoops around, it happens that one can deal with — there are mustelids that are quite familiar with human dwellings, like the dormouse in the countryside — who hasn't had a dormouse in their attic making a racket at night? 'In our synagogue there is an animal about the size of a marten. One can sometimes see it quite well, for up to a distance of about two meters, it tolerates the approach of men' — so again, an animal that's afraid, it tolerates an approach up to two meters, then it disappears. 'Its color is a pale blue-gray' — that's pure Kafka, a pale blue-gray — 'no one has ever touched its'
1:04:44 fur, so nothing can be said about it. One would almost be tempted to claim that its actual color too is unknown — perhaps the visible color is merely the color of the dust and mortar that has caught in its fur, which incidentally is not unlike the whitewash on the inside of the synagogue, only a bit lighter. 'Apart from its timid nature, it's an extraordinarily calm and sedentary animal.' We're back again on the side of stillness, of the interior, inside the sacred, the secure — the synagogue, where the community gathers, protected by the Eternal, in addition to whoever might seek His protection. 'Apart from its timid nature, this animal, extraordinarily calm and'
1:05:29 sedentary — so they live there in this synagogue, if it weren't so timid, it probably wouldn't change its place so often. So it's the presence of the faithful that makes it move — barely, no doubt, is what would change its place. 'Its favorite dwelling place is the grille' — sorry — 'is the grille of the women's compartment' — as in traditional society, as in churches at one time, they hadn't stopped their part — 'its favorite dwelling place is the grille of the women's section, where, with a sort of well-being, it digs its claws'
1:06:16 into the holes of the grille, sits there and looks below — yes, looks down. Imagine this little animal in the prayer hall. This position seems to please it, but the sexton has sworn never to tolerate it settling into that spot for long, and one cannot allow it, because of the women who are afraid of it — the reason for their fear is obscure. It's true that at first sight it looks terrifying, in particular its long neck, its triangular face — coming down from above and jutting out almost horizontally — and a row of sharp bristles, visibly very hard, that frame its upper lip and pass over it. All this can indeed frighten one, but
1:07:01 one shouldn't take long to realize that all this fright is unwarranted. Above all it keeps its distance from men, it's more attached, all things considered, to the building than to the woodland animals it resembles, and seems to be bound only to the building. Its personal misfortune, no doubt, lies in the fact that this building is a synagogue, which has periodic very lively gatherings. If one could come to an understanding with it, one could console it by telling it that the community of our small mountain town is diminishing year by year, and that even now it has trouble meeting the costs of maintaining the synagogue. It's not impossible that in some time the synagogue will be turned into a barn or something else of the sort, and that the animal will finally know the rest it so painfully lacks, being sedentary but constantly disturbed by the people who come and go for the
1:07:48 service. In fact it is always disturbed and in motion. So it's this movement that I'd like — I want to give a few passages — you'll characterize it, but even the women aren't really afraid of it — that would be too strange, to keep fearing such an animal day after day, year after year, decade after decade. Of course the women justify themselves by saying the animal draws nearer to them than to the men, and that's true — it doesn't dare venture down below, and it has never yet been seen on the ground. So it always stays a bit above the faithful, except — and this is what one sees — when it's chased from the grille of the women's section, it settles on the wall opposite, at the same height. There's a very
1:08:33 narrow ledge there — and here I'm going to leave the domain of edges, look at where the story is going to settle — there's a very narrow ledge there, barely two fingers wide, that runs all the way around the synagogue on three sides. Sometimes the animal runs from one end of this ledge to the other — I mentioned to you this back-and-forth between the two extremes — sometimes the animal runs from one end of this ledge to the other; most of the time it crouches quietly in one particular spot, facing the women. It's almost incomprehensible that it can use this narrow path so easily, and its way of turning around when it reaches one end of the ledge — there it is,
1:09:20 another fine thing — since it's right at the edge of the wall, it manages to fling itself into empty space when it reaches the end of the ledge — worth seeing, since it's already a very old animal, yet it doesn't hesitate to make the boldest of leaps, which it never fails to complete. It turns in mid-air and there it goes, already continuing on its way — so it arrives at the other end, where its blue eyes appear, and it pushes off again, and always running. It must be said that once one has seen this several times, one soon has enough of it — there's no longer any reason to keep looking that way. It's not, moreover, out of fear or curiosity that stirs the women; if they cared more about praying — as in traditional societies — they could forget the animal entirely. The pious women
1:10:05 would do so, if the others, who are the vast majority, the impious ones, allowed them to — but these are always eager to draw attention to themselves, and the animal comes in very handy to provide them with a pretext. If they could, if they dared, they would draw the animal even closer to them, in order to have the right to be even more frightened. Their husbands wrote — but in reality it's not at all that the animal wants to come near them, so as not to attack them — it cares as little about them as about the men. No doubt it would rather live hidden — yes, like the animal of the burrow — as it does during the hours when there's no service, probably in some hole in the wall we haven't yet discovered. Well, I'll read you the last paragraph.
1:10:59 What danger, then, would a lunatic pose by thinking of harming it? One always comes back to fear, fear at the heart of security. Has it not lived for many years now, entirely left to itself? Men pay no attention to its presence, and most of the women would probably be unhappy if it disappeared. But since it's the only animal in the building, it has not the slightest enemy — it could well have come to understand that as the years passed. And certainly the divine service, with all its commotion, may be very frightening for the animal, but it repeats itself, always the same, modestly on weekdays, more intensely on feast days, regularly and without interruption — even the most timid animal would long since have grown used to it, especially if it noticed that this noise was not the doing
1:11:44 of a persecutor, but something it doesn't understand at all. And yet its fears — is it the memory of some long-past peace, or the presentiment of times to come — around this old animal, is its age not longer than the three generations that gather each time in the synagogue? The last paragraphs: many years ago, it's said, they really tried to explain the animal away. It's quite possible that's true, but more likely still that this is a fabricated story. It has nevertheless been established that the matter was examined from two points of view of religious law: whether such an animal could be tolerated in the house of God. The opinions of various famous rabbis were sought, and opinions were divided.
1:12:29 the majority of them were for expulsion, this was a new consecration of the temple, but although it was easy to decree this from a distance, in fact it was impossible to seize the animal, impossible therefore to expel it, for only if they had been able to grab hold of it, carry it far away, could one have had the approximate certainty of being rid of it. I wanted to recall this characteristic movement on the edge of the wall, back and forth, between fear and fear, all of that in search of security
Swann's Way: Swann exiled in the drawing room 1:13:16 So now we're going to do the reverse, aren't we, I'm going to go back into the text of Proust that I'm now going to move on to, I'll very quickly give the context. We're first of all in an interior, in a salon of the Parisian aristocracy, cultivated bourgeoisie working in concert with the aristocracy — today they'd say the elites, I don't much like that word, for me the elites, that's Mozart buried in a common grave, that's not wrong, money alone can't make elites, Liszt and the best
1:14:02 it's more a reality than a quantity, than the measure of a bank account. So we're in a salon; at that time there wasn't recorded music, and an excellent musician was invited to give a small musical performance. It's a sonata for piano and violin here, and so it's live music, in real time, with musicians in flesh and blood, and Swann, the hero of the novel, lends his name to only one part of Proust's immense work, which as a whole bears a single generic title, In Search of Lost Time, made up of a succession of — after two unified works with combined titles
1:14:48 the first being Within a Budding Grove, for which he won a prize in competition, and had the manuscript rejected by Gallimard, and then The Guermantes Way, Sodom and Gomorrah, place names, the name, Time Regained, Albertine, etc. — this is the eldest, but among the subtitles of this general title, this is the only one that speaks of the main character in the third person; all the rest of Proust's work, it's the narrator who speaks in the first person, never telling us his exact age, which we guess through the context. So this is
1:15:34 an excerpt from Swann in Love — that interesting indefinite article, it's not 'the love,' which greatly displeased people in the romantic era; we're in the 20s, 30s, well mostly the 20s and a half, there was the antiromantic reaction of the realist novel. We think when we're happy, when we're in love, that it's crazy, that it's unique, what's happening to you, on the side, that one's an exceptional character, but in fact it's what happens to everyone in the same way — but yes, but yes, vanity of singularity, and so that's why he uses an indefinite article
1:16:19 Swann in Love, we understand, he has no other — well yes, this is an almost surgical piece of unimaginable lucidity, and here we are at the moment, as young people say today, when things are 'dead,' the love relationship with Odette de Crécy, the demi-mondaine who comes from a social milieu noticeably inferior to his own, whom he met in a bourgeois and virtuous salon. So it's dead, well, he can't try to reassure himself anymore that it's really over, and he's atrociously unhappy, and he's dropped by out of courtesy to an invitation at the lady's house who's giving this evening, and
1:17:06 he intends not to stay, to go back home and brood over his grief in solitude, either there or elsewhere — May, but the concert begins, and at the first notes, out of courtesy, no one's going to make noise, someone's sonata for piano and violin is being performed and everyone listens in silence, so out of courtesy Swann waits, thinking he'll leave after the end of this piece — but the concert begins, and Swann understood that he wouldn't be able to leave before the end of this new number on the program; he suffered from being kept shut in among these people whose stupidity and
1:17:52 ridiculousness struck him all the more painfully since, being ignorant of his love — most of these people belonged to what's called society, or snobbery, but that doesn't mean anything, businessmen, minor nobility, high bourgeoisie and aristocracy — ignorant of his love, incapable, had they known of it, of being interested in it or doing anything but smile at it as at a childish thing, we've all known that, or deplore it as a madness, they made his love appear to him as a subjective state that existed only for him — which is the very definition of the subjective, isn't it, nothing external confirmed its
1:18:38 reality; he suffered above all, to the point that even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry out, at prolonging his exile in this place where Odette would never come, where no one knew anything of her — we've all known this, a total incompatibility between what's gnawing at you inside, what's absorbing all your attention, and the outside context where no one knows anything of her, from which she was entirely absent, full stop. But suddenly it was as if she had entered, and this apparition was a tearing pain for him — I won't make you think that she's entering again through the door
Vinteuil's little phrase: reminiscence and switching 1:19:25 it's not visual, it's sonic — but suddenly it was as if she had entered, and this apparition was a tearing pain for him, made his heart ache, it was that the violin had risen to high notes where it remained as though waiting — there, so, during long phrases it stays on a border, without trying to go from the shore toward the hinterland, toward the interior, or to plunge into the water; it tries to remain on this margin, this incredible, fabulous switching, he wanted to cry out, no one, but, suffering, knows this — he wished he could escape — but suddenly it was as if she had entered, and this apparition
1:20:12 a tearing pain that made his heart ache, it was that the violin had risen to high notes where it remained as though in expectation, an expectation that kept extending, without ceasing to hold them, and our hostess with a violin, alone in the high register, in the exact position where the violin was, to catch sight already of the object of its expectation, which was clinging on, with a desperate effort to try to last until its arrival — yes, leaning forward as if I were on the edge, at the very point of welcoming it before it expired, the tragedy of not yet finishing, to maintain for it
1:20:57 still one more moment, with all its remaining strength, the path open for it to pass through, as one holds up a door which would otherwise fall shut — and before Swann had time to understand, to say to himself, 'it's the little phrase from the Vinteuil sonata,' let's not listen — now, it should be known that within the pages of the novel there is, one might almost say in every one of Proust's books, a little signature tune, a bit like the national anthem of their love, of the two of them, and so in this sonata there was a little phrase which they particularly loved, which was private, something like that — it's the little phrase from the Vinteuil sonata, an imaginary
1:21:43 composer — there's been a great deal of research to find out what music Proust was thinking of — some fools think it's César Franck's sonata, that's quite close to it, or Fauré's, that's certainly part of it; what's less known, I'll say this because I know there are music lovers among those listening, informed and knowledgeable, I'll tell them that I had a friend who did research on this little phrase and noticed in the course of her research that Proust's first idea, which he later abandoned, was that this phrase was the famous phrase known as the Good Friday
1:22:30 Spell in Wagner's Parsifal — I close that parenthesis, but here we should indeed think of things happening among Fauré, Debussy, and Franck, and it hardly matters for now, these French princes — all these memories of the time when Odette, there, let's not listen, all these memories of the time when Odette was in love with him, and which he had managed until that day to keep invisible in the depths of his being, deceived by this sudden ray of that time of love he believed had returned, because of the notes of music, had awoken and, on the wing
1:23:16 had risen back up, singing to him wildly, pitiless toward his present misfortune, singing to him what? The forgotten refrains of happiness — so there's one of those famous paradisiacal reminiscences that punctuate this immense work, In Search of Lost Time; the most, its scales at the little madeleine, more developed, this is certainly the one — is that not too hasty, but it is sonorous — is it because they always triggered the same process? So let's dig a little into this process instead of speaking abstractly, because we've just said this reminds him of the time when he was happy, but he must have remembered that from time to time before this evening — but the difference is where, if you look closely, or the abstract
1:24:02 expression 'the time when I was happy,' 'the time when I was loved,' which he had often uttered up until then without suffering too much, because his intelligence, in the proper sense, his intellect in the narrow sense, that is, where nothing of sensibility appears, his intelligence had locked up the past there only as supposed extracts which retained nothing of it; whereas he found again, through the notes of music, that lost happiness had fixed forever its specific and volatile essence — look at the semantic field, volatile essence, we're at the opposite of the stable, of the burrow, the walls, right, the geraniums on the windows and the little square in the heart of old Nuremberg
1:24:49 — we won't see it any more, no, and look, his memories come flying, that flies, and there, whoever had kept of that lost happiness the specific and volatile essence — we return to this idea of floating, flying — like the snowy, curled petals of the chrysanthemum which she had thrown into his carriage, which he had kept, that's the work, that of a carriage, of a trunk of course, the raised address of the golden house on the letter he had read, his hand trembles so hard as I write
1:25:35 the drawing together of her eyebrows when she had said to him, in a pleading tone, 'it won't be too long before you send for me' — he smelled the odor of the hot iron with which his hair was smoothed while Loredan the servant went to fetch the little seamstress, the rainstorms that fell so often that spring — there, we're just coming out of a first wave of spring rains, the fresh scent, well, that's me changing tack — the icy return in his Victoria carriage by moonlight, in short all the meshwork of mental habit, of seasonal impressions, of skin reactions in
1:26:20 August is no longer intelligent, it's no longer the sixth — so, the reflection and the sensory impressions in which his body was caught up again, and Swann perceived, motionless facing this once-lived happiness, an unhappy man he pities because he doesn't recognize him right away, so much so that he had to lower his eyes so no one would say who it was, full of tears, it was himself — let's keep digging into what triggered this switching, this passage, an intensity of past happiness that has become unbearable to any taste
1:27:06 to the point of suffering from it, as Hölderlin says, speaking of himself, haunted by memories, at Bordeaux at a good age, when he had come back to Germany at the moment madness was about to break out, where he says, 'to the point of suffering from it, yet the smell of lemon and olive oil still rises to my nose,' an element that recalls the land of Gascony, Bordeaux announces the — the leap of recognition, yes, so all this we must now dig into: what could have triggered this — as if the instrumentalists had played the little phrase much less than it demanded
1:27:53 than it demanded of them, for it to appear to him almost magical, and to perform the necessary incantations to obtain, to prolong for a few instants the wonder of its evocation — of its evocation — it's the little phrase, it's the central character of this text, this little musical phrase — of its evocation, Swann who could not see it, that its hand was not held back, an ultraviolet world, I've told you it wasn't seen, who savored it like the refreshment of a desired metamorphosis, a metamorphosis in the momentary blindness with which he had been struck upon approaching it. Swann felt its presence, like a protective goddess and confidant of his love, and who, in order to be able to reach him through the
Scent, sound and flight: Hegel, Dolphy, sublimation 1:28:39 crowd, drew him aside to speak to him, had put on the disguise of this sonorous appearance — see, all the semantic field, slippery, fluidity of movement, in a triangle, last being said that she is — and as she passed again, light, soothing, murmuring like a perfume — I'll stay on perfume, another digression, but it's to get to the heart of what we were looking at — the common point between the world of perfumes and that of sounds is that by closing your eyes, not only do they not disappear, but it increases their intensity; in any case it draws our attention to
1:29:26 them; I pay tribute here to Caroline Champion, one of the six who allow, although quite young, refounders of our association, along with Samuel Zarka, whom I also salute, for working on an excellent essay called The Logics [of Scent] — she talks about odors — there too, he's brought out a very interesting text about the fragrances, right, of the great perfumers — so when a perfume reaches you, the gesture is almost to consider closing your eyes for a moment, that doesn't make the intensity of the perfume disappear, far from it — these common points, the keys are — so you see, it's not by chance if
1:30:13 a musical phrase suggests to him the comparison with perfume, and as it, the musical phrase, passed lightly, soothingly, murmuring, yet like a perfume telling him what it had to tell him, and which he scrutinizes, and all the words, regretting seeing them fly off, fly away again so quickly, he made a long, beautiful gesture with his lips, the movement of kisses in passing, that harmonious and fleeting body, all that mobility — but it's disturbing to say because a car is mobile too, but it's not the same, there isn't this — its capacity for movement makes me think of Hegel's Aesthetics, when he gets to the chapter on music, the volume on music, well the part on music, where he says that the property of
1:31:01 sound is that it's no longer there as soon as it's there — there you have it, that's dialectics, he shows, indicates, an internal negation, no longer there as soon as it's there — so the sound gives rise to its contradiction, it needs another sound, and so on, which sublates and preserves the preceding sound — that's what he says admirably, and just now you also noted this, where there's the held note, the violin holds — so, the movement of kisses in passing, that harmonious and fleeting body — I just quoted, in a completely different field, I'd like to quote one of the greatest jazz musicians, not the most famous
1:31:48 slightly after Coltrane but not in free jazz, who probably knew how to go furthest into the distortions one can produce from a canvas, a theme, without giving up frequencies the way the partisans of free jazz did — I'm thinking here of Eric Dolphy — I remember when he'd come to sad little restaurants on the rue du Chat-qui-Pêche, now you can't even see it anymore, where there was the jazz club called Le Chat qui Pêche, one of the best-programmed venues in Paris at the time — Miles Davis played there too, as did others, it doesn't matter — I remember Eric Dolphy so well, entering, opening the door like a saloon door with his feet because
1:32:34 he had three cases [of instruments], and he also played admirably the flute, the alto sax like Parker, very Parker-like in his phrasing, and moreover, an even rarer and more fabulous instrument, the bass clarinet — so why do I mention him, because he says somewhere, in one of the rare recorded interviews we have of him, about music, 'almost captured' — 'almost captured,' 'almost caught,' but always fleeing — that's exactly the same thing, Dolphy — so I repeat just that line: he made a beautiful, drawn-out gesture as it rises, the movement of kisses in passing, that harmonious and fleeting body of his sorrows which had now become its own
1:33:22 comes back to the start, but without any hope of ever being freed — we know this in heartbreak, in what's 'dead,' as they say, we tell ourselves it will really be like this until the end of our life, that we'll never be cured of it — it seemed to say to him, as once before of his happiness, always the little phrase, it seemed to say to him, as it once had of his happiness — you see the quotation marks — its little phrase that passes, what is all that, what are all these sufferings, what is all that, all that is nothing — but here we come, we almost reach, the deepest hope of the analysis Proust is making here, when it was the little phrase that spoke to him
1:34:08 of the vanity of his sufferings, that it's nothing — Swann found in it the same sweetness as in that very wisdom which — remember the beginning — had seemed intolerable to him when he thought he read it on the faces of an indifferent person who considered his love a trifling matter of no importance; it's the same statement, but what — what are you hurting yourself over with all that, these childish things, it's nothing, everyone's known that, forget it — he had the answer, look, it's extraordinary, that the little phrase, on the contrary, whatever opinion it might have of the brief duration of these states of soul, saw in them something not
1:34:55 less serious than positive life, but on the contrary, of something superior to it, that alone was worth expressing — a superb sublimation of all suffering, everyone in their own bubble of suffering, as Proust says elsewhere in the Search, each person is quite alone at times, but where we do find ourselves in a paradisiacal community is in the works produced thanks to that suffering — I'm thinking of Baudelaire, in a private notebook, addressing Paris: 'you gave me your mud and I made of it'
Conclusion: measure at the center of politics 1:35:40 gold — I wanted to illustrate this back-and-forth, and my conclusion, the good old one, I hope you have time to see the outline, but the conclusion will be that this is perhaps the essential task of politics — but truly with a capital P, this is the opposite of petty party politics, of the courage to go and vote; petty politics also has its importance and its moment which makes it necessary in its own way — well, when I say here that the main concern of politics should be to send toward, right here, these two extreme moments of
1:36:26 the hinterland, stability, security, and the edge, with the peril always induced by the position on the edge — yes, what charm draws one to those dreaded edges — so these two moments, by their very contradiction, force, produce a movement, induce, like a door handle — I've always said to those who wear a mask, as collective as asbestos, or to whoever's talking about dialectics, that it's the movement you make with a door handle, up to the right here and down to the left, and that's what produces movement, the same form in two opposite directions, the same force, precisely
1:37:15 these two extreme moments, of the hinterland and of the edge, raise the question of measure, which must be at the center — a typo, excuse me — at the center of all political questioning, in the sense that in a political scene, it's not a matter of ignoring security, but it's also not a matter of making it the alpha and omega of politics — no, it's no coincidence that the Americans, among the best things they've produced artistically in their filmic epic — I'm thinking of the classic Western period, before the spaghetti westerns
1:38:01 before it became a bit more, well, before it became much more polished, refined, with slow-motion shots of blood freezing in the marrow — let's get back to serious things — or externals as simple as an ancient tragedy, where there's a lost valley, individuals arrive, solve a problem plaguing seven valleys, and leave at the end singing, like the 'lonesome cowboy' — look how they glorified this period when they were retreating, what they call the closing of the frontier, the space they had colonized — and yes, this country which spent its time denouncing other people's colonialisms,
1:38:48 starting with the French in Algeria — but not, from the point of view of the FLN, no, it was more with the people of the OAS, of French Algeria, who wanted to secede, it's their own instinct, the record — it's established that there were contacts between the OAS people, of course, and American services, enemies too of de Gaulle — de Gaulle never came so close to death, even having lived through the Second World War, as he did brushed by bullets from the OAS — I'm thinking of the Petit-Clamart assassination attempt — so how can one not sympathize with these people who nearly eliminated the one who was, diplomatically, their worst enemy at the time, because of his
1:39:35 hostility toward NATO — all that seems far away, or as close, as a problem, as NATO and the Brussels bureaucracy's dictatorship — I love the people of Brussels, who are exceptionally kind, in Europe — so measure, which must be at the center of all political questioning, you see, must do this back-and-forth, like that little animal we saw earlier, but this time not between two edges into the abyss, but in such a way as to guarantee the security without which nothing can be done
1:40:21 but also to encourage citizens to go to the limit, to the edge — Klein reminded us that 'Krajina' means border, these myths of the border — one tries to make of it a nation-state, and NATO by all means tries to make it into a set of nations, that's a culture and whatever you like, but that betrays vain efforts if we believe the etymology, which means that it has always been a passage, a crossing between Russia and the rest, like any passage, touched by the two contenders, like all
1:41:06 edges, all crossings, there is a part of one side within the other — why cut it off, that's what's tragic and heartbreaking in this Ukrainian affair, these allusions to the West too, as it's just like the West that lends its ear to the war in Ukraine — that's where we really see selective pity, selective compassion, since pity shouldn't be selective by citizenship — for eight years now the Ukrainians of the east, what's now called the Donbas, have been getting massacred, there's a special cemetery for the number of children, about a hundred, who were massacred, the general indifference toward all those
1:41:53 who are now on the edge of the risk, of the war into which we would all sink if it broke out, God forbid, a nuclear war, all for refusing to give Russia the security guarantees it was asking for — nothing, to those who believe the war began on February 23rd, it's extraordinary, that means they show a cynicism, an indifference, obviously, because covering the war that was happening at that time would have contradicted the affirmation — excuse me, turn to Asia — but no, it's
1:42:39 marginal in Asia, it's nothing at all — I've even heard people begging, well, they only make up 2%, what an admission — but if indeed 2% of the population, that's not impossible, I'm quite glad for the Ukrainians, but if they're 2%, how is it that they alone make up more than a third of parliament and are especially the most prominent forces currently in the Ukrainian national army, in particular at Mariupol, where the Azov battalion is currently living its final hours — so, help us, we are on the edge of leaving the
What does "perpetuated edge" mean? 1:43:25 philosophy for them in flashes, so — I think I've done enough to keep, at least somewhat, my promise to come back to the notion of edge, which I had announced the time before last, and I'd like now to know whether that has generated any questions on your side. So thanks to Curie for the comments, I'm also thinking of Pyrale, our dear Stavisky, some of whom are truly faithful, and Pipo, for good questions — I like this business of handing out gold stars.
1:44:10 What does 'perpetuate' mean in 'perpetuated edge'? Well, it's Proust's text that illustrates it — watch, I'm going to reread it — excuse me, I'll have to ask again for the Proust text a moment — starting from... yes, starting from 'but suddenly it was as if she had entered' — starting from the second paragraph — yes, 'but all at once it was as if he had entered' and, seven apparitions, oh, a rending... suffering, such that he had to put his hand to his chest — starting from the flesh — and Stavisky, Proust doesn't try to go back; if he says to himself, well, it's the little phrase, this morning — a listen — no, but it's too
1:44:56 late — he is struck by the little phrase, it's not... and it generates so much happiness, even if it's a tragically past happiness, that he cannot leave it. So above all he does not seek to go beyond it, to leave the room, or to go back to the moment when he was exasperated by the stupidity of the people around him — no, he stays the whole time on this edge that it presents to him, this edge between the state he was in and total destabilization. Look closely, everything, everything — Proust has the secret of making sentences that embody this fluidity of affective processes, that the violin had risen to
1:45:41 high notes where it remained as if in expectation, an expectation — Stavisky, it's really important that we're in this expectation, we're skirting the edge, we're not paddling in the sea, we haven't gone back inland, whatever power there might be in the village in those parts, no, we're skirting the shore, the edge, or the edge of the cliff if you like, so the edge of the river, which as an aside I still haven't answered — Stavisky, this even perpetuates itself between texts, look, someone like... the snow melting, I'm going to show you I'm not married to a certain category of literature — we are truly the emblematic representatives, since we mentioned roots earlier, of the same
1:46:27 current, classicism, with La Fontaine — 'And beside a clear stream, a dove was drinking' — and it begins like that, it's beautiful as an opening, isn't it — clear — yes, it's the dove, the ant, it ends tragically, I refer you to the woman, all these women, either on Wikisource, or even better known still, it's not the heron — 'One day on his long legs, going who knows where, walked along a river on his long crooked beak' — well, it could stop there, the crook arrived afterward — they render man for... he was walking beside a river, but no, we linger, because the author has
1:47:14 been captivated by this edge — what a charm, being drawn to its banks — with... yes, 'he was walking beside a river where the water was transparent as on the finest days, my dear gossip the tempting carp and her companion the pike' — you see, that's what I'm going to let perpetuate itself, these efforts — we'll come back to Proust — thanks to Pyrale, I take advantage of her shamelessly virtuosic side for the common cause, and I thank her — that our violins had risen to these notes, it remained as if in expectation, an expectation that was prolonged without his knowing it, and
1:48:01 Stavisky, of holding them in exaltation — exalted, word for word, look at the root: these halts, these stopping points, going from bottom to top, alto, altitude, altimeter, that you lead, Highness, and height in the figurative sense — in the exaltation of being able to glimpse already the object of his waiting, he glimpses it but is not yet there — you see what an edge is — the object of his waiting was approaching, lingering, so that this approach never finished approaching, and with a desperate effort to try to last until its arrival, to welcome it, the object of his waiting, to welcome it before expiring — then that would be the end of the edge, as if we were delivering — there I answer more deeply the
1:48:46 excellent question — perpetuate means here to prolong the little death, not the great one that would put an end to everything, so the little death, yes, it's an act, a single organ, well then, and before welcoming it, before expiring, to hold open for it, with all his remaining strength, for one more moment, the passage through which it might pass, as one holds up a door that would otherwise fall shut, and before Swann had time to understand, to say to himself, 'it's the little phrase from the Vinteuil sonata, let's not listen' — no, timid, and it's to go back — timid and... yes, sure, isn't it, let's not listen to all these memories of the time when the debts... he took that one, he is on the edge of the present, of this unbearable evening in which he was plunged by
1:49:32 constraint, so as not to disturb his hostess by making noise while leaving the room — and his past, which he alone sees, can suddenly project itself all around him, and above all inside him, isn't that so, thanks to the little phrase all these memories of the time — so look, everything passes through, but it scrolls by on a death, on the edge of the one scrutinizing his memory — at the edge, if I may use the expression, and crowns — a man leaning over his past, if one leans over, it's death, like the edge of a well's coping, alas all these threads pass by for that, rather than being able to take the edge of a river where it scrolls by, isn't that so, what... it scrolls by, watching the
1:50:19 succession, yes, instead of expression — let's go down again, third paragraph, the voice, we'll go down again, thanks — instead of the abstract expression 'the time when I was happy' — that's too fixed, not edge-like enough, precisely — 'the time when I was loved,' as if it were a well-determined period, 'so I was happy' falls easily but had been uttered before, they had all suffered because his intelligence had closed off the past as mere supposed extracts that concern us not at all, he found it all again — you see, in what scrolls by when he leans over the death of his past, he finds again all of that lost happiness which had fixed forever, unbeknownst to him, he believed it had been abolished forever
1:51:05 it is there, present, until something magical suddenly makes it surge up, and here it is not a thought, a reflection, a strategy, but an impression, to impress, a sensation — he finds again all of that lost happiness which had fixed forever the specificity, the volatile essence, he relives it all, you see the procession, the petals of the games and curled, there — I won't redo the whole text, but very different things, and likewise the seasons, isn't it, all the more perhaps because it's the season right now, the storm rains that fell so often that spring — I also note that this procession of
1:51:53 memories is not conjugated so much in the imperfect, as it usually is, most of the time, in the evocation of happy times — 'it was the time when we used to go,' etc. — I mean, a good writer, what I've said are commonplaces — so no, here it's the simple past, which proves once again the answer to the question of what perpetuate means: he is all the time in the surging-forth of this new event which began with the little phrase and which continues while he listens to it, hence the shift to the simple past, and... more storm rains that fell so often
Proust, Oedipus and the sobs of the bedtime scene 1:52:38 that spring — and let me say, thank you very much, I hope you know that... you know that one understands better what I meant here by edge-perpetuated, meaning perpetuated by the subject who insists on staying, this time, on that edge, losing nothing from either extreme, even at the risk — in the safety of seeing return, as she says, 'pitilessly for present fortune, memories come flying back to sing the forgotten refrains of happiness' — while Charlotte, Proust's mother, is perverse, Alembert, afflicted by the complex of letters, 'like when my mother, it was in the evening that she left me alone with my despair,' hence the complex
1:53:24 of Oedipus, that one — that's possible, I think we're living a bit in abstractions here, without wanting to hurt Cardiac, who is often a bit carried away — that's not a flaw — Hölderlin, a magnificent fragment: 'Have you had enough of courage, or not? Have you enough love? For you have always loved out of love' — yes, of course, of course they don't experience the Oedipus complex, isn't that so, except that, I take it, he does indeed reach borderline states — Chakhua, this extraordinary passage of 'going to bed' when he is a child, while his mother is receiving guests late in the evening, he absolutely wants her to give him a final kiss, whatever the table, or wherever she is receiving her guests, that she come
1:54:10 dancing in to give him one last kiss, without which he cannot fall asleep — it's too much, what we're hiding here — there's a pathological side, there are pathologies of neurosis, in all this there's a maternal fixation, in one direction or another, without absolutely needing the language of the clinic — but no, but what interests me is that at the end, when, as she climbs the stairs again, and — she has refused, of course, she has had the good fairy, the messenger, say that she cannot come for a childish whim like that — and what can one say — you have there a perverse woman and a vigorous temperament, fairly well
1:54:57 well, one mustn't be too harsh either — it's not easy having a child — and so she climbs the stairs with... and all at once she sees the little narrator, who, in pajamas, has gotten out of bed and is standing there like a madman, eyes wide open at the top of the stairs, and, terrified, sees the light of his father's candle following her up the stairs — they collide, this kind of scene — I'll be brief — but the father, against all expectation, instead of getting angry, ends up saying: 'We'll sleep with him, we can't leave this child'
1:55:42 the mother replies — 'listen, who's telling you, no one's asking you to do it just like that, we're not gurus after all, we're not' — and there, all at once, a state of grace, which makes the narrator say that the father always surprised him and that one could never thank him for it, that it was a bit like grace — like the duke of... his lieutenants who had struggled hard, and there, all at once, there's no anger toward him since, since this child is suffering — and at that moment, here is where I'm getting to, an extraordinary passage, when 'the time to come' is well known, but what one notices — and here we'll come back to the perpetuated edge, to the earlier question — I'm sure that whoever is still listening, it's worth it, believe me, I'm talking about
1:56:28 Proust, if not about myself — namely that as soon as he is alone with his mother, once his father has left through the door, he bursts into sobs, the hundred words he had managed to hold back until then, and he adds, they never ceased — and this is someone who is on the edge of dying, for Proust began writing, writing endlessly like that, a race against time, against death, against illness, isn't that so, because for the rest of his life before that he'd had trouble writing, because he thought he was a failed writer, that everything had already been said better by others — and so, at the end of his life, he ends up saying: they never ceased, only now, only now have I forgotten, do I begin to hear them, and he has this admirable comparison, like those bells
1:57:15 tolling in the evening, as the day's noise fades away, one hears them ringing again — so it's against this backdrop of tears that his whole life passed, there — that's to say Cardiac isn't entirely wrong to underline here, quite beautifully, the language of the clinic — well, it's not quite the treatment the narrator gives it here — so, another question, Geoffrey, I'm very glad to find you again, Geoffrey — his metamorphoses, does it seem to you in keeping with the analysis of Patrick Tort, a friend who considers that man inherits the symbol which already operates in the animal kingdom through sexual selection, if
From animal to symbolic order 1:58:00 metamorphosis — careful, because the best I know of a metamorphosis, why not, I mean it's true that after all it's a sage who becomes almost human when he gives his report to an academy, but why not, it's always somewhat the same problems, I'm not talking about the... I'm not objecting, I'm not saying that what Geoffrey says here is banal, I mean, it's the wrong way to pose this kind of problem if we keep trying to place a cursor, to try to fix it at the point where one passes from animal to humanity — we'll never find it, because it's a process,
1:58:46 a process that produces man, and painting can't fix it — as if music expressed it, music would express the history of the world, the history of spirit, without a needle, or historical materialism expressed in sonorous form, not the history of music but the music of history, there — there is no end point, I keep repeating it, but apparently it makes sense — until the end of my life I will never stop embodying, in part, the animal that I am, by the simple fact of needing to eat in order to live — that's not what's proper to man, in that
1:59:33 we all share that with the animal kingdom, agreed, but what makes it so that, in order to satisfy — in the end, to satisfy the need to eat, without which life would not be possible, life in the biological sense — the manner of satisfying it, that's where the difference is made, not all at once, not in one go, but over millions of years, by the fact that man does not merely eat to satisfy his hunger, he makes a meal of it — this is not merely instinct but institution, with rites, behaviors so non-natural that they vary — if it were natural,
2:00:18 like breathing or eating, that's common — the Chinese put it in a bodice, the Inuit don't — but the fact that we eat here, that the meal here is to the sound of chopsticks, elsewhere to the clink of forks and glasses, and elsewhere still that it's men who sit at table while the women, having made the meal, stand behind them as in certain traditional societies — no matter, the meal is an institution, and above all, the most universal thing, the fact that man proceeds to cook his food, whereas before that he might have fed on raw meat
2:01:06 but as their... rather than putting everything all at once, man on the contrary puts things into the fire, then had cooled it in water — what matters is that man consumes something that he has produced, that he doesn't merely take fruit from trees like monkeys, gather from flowers like bees — the carcass places itself from the animal's point of view, in order to express this — knowing, yes, but on the animals which are within the symbolic order — I can't understand how it's so hard to grasp the radical differences and the infinite gulfs between
2:01:52 these three orders — well then, when one starts from the order of the real, then that of the imaginary, and the order of the symbol, and one need not be Lacanian for that — well, when I say 'hold the high ground,' I don't mean it in the material sense only, at first — yes, that's why I say there's always this, and the other, at the start, you know, there used to be a gutter with — filth in the middle of that little open sewer that flowed down the middle of the streets, isn't that so — which means the higher ground was a bit cleaner, and when it was equal, one would let, say, a lady take the high side of the pavement so she wouldn't get soiled, and so
2:02:39 that's a cute little detail — but when one later says 'His Highness,' the height of the pavement has nothing more to do with height in centimeters — one can call someone 'His Highness' who is a dwarf — the symbolic order, the one produced through language, which does not exist before language, presupposes that one has already left nature, for there are, in the animal kingdom, many species that have developed extremely sophisticated modes of communication — I'm not blind or deaf to that — I'm thinking of dolphins, of course, sonorously, etc., I'm thinking of bees, their figure-eight dance, that's been studied, and so many others —
2:03:25 well, that has nothing to do with language — I won't go over it all again, there is not the double articulation, the one of the throat: each animal species can emit a certain number of sounds, of more or less limited frequencies — man cannot go as high as a bat, up to eight octaves, we don't know, or even like... a sandwich — whereas a dog hears ultrasonic whistles used by police that we can't hear at all, dogs pick them up immediately — so that's the first level of articulation, given that the human throat can emit — it can emit, but every language, here it's no longer
2:04:11 within nature — every clan cuts out from this whole range of sounds, this biological ensemble which belongs to physiology and phonetics, two classes here, and one can draw up the list of cuts made within it, a more restricted number characteristic of that particular language and of a linguistic identity — I'm thinking of English, which for example dispenses with the sound 'u' — ask an English speaker to count to ten, you'll get one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine — that's what I said, yes, but there's no 'u,' whereas in German
2:04:57 well, in short, I mean culture always appears very close to nature but is not produced by nature — I also refer you to Freudian concepts, I refer Geoffrey here if he wants to dig into the question and the many questions he's raised tonight, which prove how capable — the Freudian concept of sublimation is one of Freud's most profound — there is a drive at the start, I was talking earlier about the end/purpose, but that doesn't necessarily produce a meal, it produces the fact that one must eat, not that one must make a meal of it, with all the characteristics that come with it, and among those characteristics, some that contradict
2:05:42 the very act of eating — when, for instance, one is served first, or when the interminable succession of dishes passes through a whole hierarchy before reaching him — well yes, because it ends — so consider the concept of sublimation, it can be that sexual energy is sublimated into love, a feeling, all at once, in the human species — so this concerns, at the very least, from the point of view of the drive itself, but certainly not the effect it produces on the subject — I won't repeat here what I've often said, that there is a surplus
2:06:29 which has as its cause, at the very least — thus the benefit, the surplus value studied by Marx, not the same thing at all, in the same way — surplus value and rendering benefit have this in common: that it presupposes labor which is not paid at its full value, which is paid less than its value — in short, this presupposes a time of toil, labor — in the same way, the myth of Prometheus shows that man's superiority, his surplus, over other animal species — it's the myth that speaks, I'm not making a value judgment — his superiority, if only in terms of technical intelligence, comes at the outset from a lack, because he did not have
2:07:16 the strength of the elephant, the agility of the bird, the badger's claws to dig himself a den in a few minutes, no feathers like a bird, no thick fur like a bear, so he is forced to produce the world in which... otherwise it is not viable, and to compensate for this lack relative to most animal species, ill-equipped as he was, the Titan Prometheus went to steal from the gods — this is the beautiful metaphor, Geoffrey — fire, but fire again, I take it both in the literal, material sense, for one needs fire, thanks to this material, to melt metals and set praxis in motion, for example, as well as fire in the sense of warmth, that which
2:08:04 is clear in the figurative sense, that which is in the expression 'Age of Enlightenment,' the fire of intelligence, of knowledge, which comes to illuminate the darkness of obscurantism, of obscurity — that's not a flaw, everyone is subject to it, myself no less than anyone — but what is less forgivable is obscurantism, taking the side of darkness against the light, as is done all too often, some backlashes, and so on — so I mean, this is where the symbolic order must not be neglected, by always looking back toward nature, because it has long since left nature — a kind of knowledge and another reality is set in place, it's not only that it's different from that of nature, and more than radically different, it
2:08:50 is often opposed to it — there — and what could be more directive than being a human being, that is to say, being all the time on the edge, solicited either by nature or by the demands of the world in which one lives, which is a world that is not only the earth as with animals, it's a Roman world, the world of seasonality, the world of preciosity depending on times and places, the world of village festivals — there, Mounir Boumati, good evening Mounir, I don't remember your name but
Gramsci: the present as edge 2:09:37 don't trust my declining memory — Gramsci's invitation — Mounir is a reader of Gramsci, he does well: 'the old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear, and in this chiaroscuro monsters arise' — I thank Mounir very much, I tell him a great 'show man' — I don't know if people get this reference — because he has understood well what I was getting at with edges, between the world that is dying and the world that is slow to appear — at a certain moment you were saying, 'we came too late into a world too old'
2:10:25 he understands very well what I mean by one sense of the word edge, and it's not the least important one: being all the time in the act of hesitating between a past that is slow to flee, in what is gone forever, and a future that is even slower still, isn't that so, to emerge like a sea monster, or simply like a new land rising from the surface of the ocean — given what's happening in the East and the consequences to come, wouldn't it be more ethically honest to note earlier — meaning rather, following Gramsci — that an old world is being reborn while the new is slow to disappear, and among those who obscure it,
2:11:11 would link up the brave — I think the second part of Mounir's question implies a slight regression compared to the first part, because in the first part Gramsci says precisely that we are led neither into the past nor into the future, that's what the present is: the present is always an edge, at almost any moment in history — except that sometimes events make us realize — it's not that things simply move, it's the famous Hegelian dialectic, well illustrated in his preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, between the evolution of the... continuing on the temporal ray, and the revolution
2:11:59 which is more sudden and which thereby lets itself be perceived — he takes the example of the fetus, after, and I quote him, 'after a long and silent nourishment' — there, as for evolution — 'after a long and silent nourishment of nine months, the first breath interrupts the merely quantitative growth by a qualitative leap, and it is only then that the child is born' — I'm not talking about the fetus in its mother's womb, I'm not talking about the child that has just been born, the edge is the moment of childbirth — go figure where the inside and the outside are in all that, in that moment
2:12:47 and so this will perhaps — I will certainly come back to it — since I'm doing a whole cycle on the edge, following the subtitle of my publication, aesthetics, politics, Hegel, isn't it — and I'd like — I'll conclude shortly with the last page, you'll understand why — of this work, there — so I'll answer, I'll first finish answering, it would not be more honest, in a way — it's not a matter of intellectuals giving out moral lessons, because in the end, the
2:13:33 true morality mocks morality, as Pascal would say — one should note rather that an old world is reborn — when it is reborn, that means the transition is already over — it's the example of the child I just gave: if it's born, that means we're no longer in the process of childbirth — what interests me, the edge, is rather difficult, you see, in the perpetuated edge, to prolong it a little, as Swann was doing earlier, interested as he was, then, in the little phrase, whose expectation he tended so carefully, the time of waiting that does not inherit the waiting — there, excellent question Mounir, thank you very much, and a very good comparison — a fine play on words.
The West, death and sanctions 2:14:21 Dominique, on the subject of security, what do you think of this West that has locked up... locked up its terrified population because of a virus, and then embraces a self-destructive regime of sanctions — well, that's a good question, since you're asking me about security, and I don't think you're the only one, but here I'm speaking to Thanh, on the question of security, pointing to your question on this subject, that the West — I'll take the opportunity to make some points so obvious that we never think about them — so let's stay well within philosophy, that is, the questioning of things of current affairs, what you...
2:15:07 want — I'm not a specialist in names but in words, the words by which we exchange our representations of this reality. I'm thinking here of the word 'Occident' [West] — already this word has nothing to do with security. In Old French, from the fourteenth century, it means 'I kill,' and the Occident is what is in the process of bearing death — the death of what? Ah, well, the death of the day! The sun rises in the Orient in the morning, wherever it may be. I told you I'd come back to it — why I don't like this word.
2:15:53 In geopolitics you could very well say 'the sun sets ablaze in the West' — it's magnificent, the word doesn't bother me at all, it means that it's dying in the West, at least this vision — I understand that, it heats up a moment ago, and, coucou, Geoffrey, the symbolic order — in fact the real sun, astronomically, doesn't die, it's not the sun that moves anyway, it's the earth turning on itself which makes us go from night to day and from day to night, but on the surface, what we see, that's not the reality studied by astronomers and physicists — the surface is splendid, there's red and gold, the most frequent colors at dusk, and at that moment they're colors.
2:16:40 Heroic, which make one think of the death of a hero, a great figure — the world falls asleep in a warm light, like something out of Baudelaire — sorry, yes — the order there, I think Geoffrey grasps well what I call the symbolic order. This sun has nothing to do with the astronomers' sun, but with this subject in which we all live every day, the one that is declined in the feminine in the German language and in the Nordic languages, because in countries with a cold climate like that, this sunlight does so much good, coming to warm, to take the edge off the cold a little.
2:17:26 our friend — you see the whole scene in spring, so there you go, hum, hum, yes, well seen, Thanh — and there is no country more of death — which is what 'Occident' literally means — where there is more denial of death. Death is present everywhere in traditional societies, and I have nothing — I'm not for morbid behavior, always at peace — no, but it's interesting to...
2:18:12 always remember the word itself, which expresses a decline, and there is nothing more perilous and dangerous, honestly, than the West, which is in the process of passing the torch — economically, militarily, and progressively technologically too, though not yet quite, but when you see that the United States made up 45% of the world economy at the end of the last war, and now they make up about 20%, that's a strange amputation of fingers.
2:18:58 And this declining curve is not that of China's economy, which is coming out of a torpor — it hasn't been so long since it was stuck in torpor — but that's since the Western countries carried out destabilization, even into the holy of holies, especially when they sacked the Summer Palace — so let's not sugarcoat anything, no culture, no civilization has brought as much death to the planet as this Occident that I'm now flagellating myself with, since I'm part of the West.
2:19:46 But nothing is more dangerous than an Occident that is unaware of itself. The best way to limit these dangers is to become aware of them, and not to say — as Pagny sings — 'the devil is always a new lightning bolt': when it's not Putin, it's Saddam Hussein; when it's not Saddam Hussein, it's Assad, already 'the butcher of Syria' — and I've already told you that if I were in Russia I wouldn't vote for Putin. It's extraordinary that I have to keep repeating this for those who don't want to hear it — they don't want it; when it's not enough that we're against Putin, they also want us to be pro-Atlanticist, so, in favor of this death I'm talking about, this planetary carnage.
2:20:33 The three million dead of Korea, and don't forget the three million dead of Vietnam, and the two million dead in the Middle East — I worry. I said earlier that there are those who date the start of the current war in Ukraine, which is atrocious — you must not say a single word in favor of this war, you'll tell me it's easy — I mean everyone is more or less controlled, watched over there, those who play tough, those who put skulls on their insignia there.
2:21:19 who went in and who use civilians as human shields when they feel the end is near, and the Russians won't show mercy once there are no more civilians between them and the Russians — no, no, I'm not saying that about the war, the ideal would be for all this to stop, of course, but history, sir, doesn't unfold in the ideal — but the important thing is — no, I've never been against a people, not against Ukraine, not against them, not against the American people either, nor against the Western peoples, the countries that inhabit what we...
2:22:07 designate by 'the West.' I am a philosopher, human, against — against the discourses, against the way in which what's happening over there is expressed, with an obscene and dangerous unanimity, extremely dangerous, and it's against that I rise up. So, once again, that's perhaps what I'm alluding to when he says 'a self-destructive sanctions regime' — once again, here I'm not talking about the things but the words that designate them, and maybe economists — some of them should be consulted — seem to go in the direction of what Anne is saying.
2:22:53 who say that the sanctions are more destructive for the West than for Russia. A very simple example: wheat. When I was about thirty, the drama was the dysfunctions in Russia's agriculture, in its effort to resist militarily the most formidable armada of all time, which was and still is, more than ever, NATO — and for that it had to forgo a lot of things that it would have had if it were at peace — no, but that was much more useful, much more enriching in every sense of the word. In short, the harvest...
2:23:40 of wheat, being always in deficit, Russia had to import wheat from abroad, by definition — excuse me, it had to import wheat, particularly from the United States. Today Russia is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, exporter of wheat, along with Canada, in the world. Ukraine was also one, which suggests — you're right — that as for the harvest, Ukraine, being forced — it can't wage war and plant at the same time, still less harvest — that's it, that's not what I meant, then the sting, how...
2:24:26 it went from scarcity to overproduction, which allows it to export — thanks to the sanctions. For a long time Russia's sanctions were a providential thing, letting it doze lazily on raw-material rents; it saw that by processing this raw material and changing markets, orienting itself toward Asia, by far the biggest market in the world in number of consumers — though not, however, in the combination of number of consumers and standard of living, because then that would also be called the Western market.
2:25:12 it became an exporter — thanks, sanctions! There's the reason, Thanh: the sanctions are more self-destructive for the West than they are destructive for Russia. I'm talking about sanctions on energy, on food — and I'm not even talking about the censorship affecting Tchaikovsky, Chekhov, and so on with skis — it's mind-boggling. But you realize, every death caused in Ukraine by the Russians, by others, whoever, for now — every death is a calamity, an irreversible misfortune by definition — she's pushing at open doors.
2:25:58 But still, I mean, the number of deaths in this war, even adding both sides together, doesn't come close to what the Atlanticist world has produced on the planet in these past years. Did we break off diplomatic relations? Did we blacklist the English — and thank goodness we didn't — can you imagine banning Shakespeare because of the policies of Obama and the Clintons, Bill, Iraq, the two interventions in Iraq, the lies, in short...
2:26:44 Now the Sahel — but that's another story. I'd like to send my greetings here to my former students, I thank them for this group and association in Niger, and for being kind enough to let me know they're very well informed — Thursday, in passing — for anyone who might be surprised by what I'm saying, they should know, they should understand well, that a taxi driver in Bamako, a bike-taxi rider in Abidjan, is better informed about what's going on in the world than a professor at Sciences Po. That's what I wanted to say, sorry, I'm looking at the screen because of the questions, but I repeat, yes, I claim that a taxi driver of...
2:27:33 Bamako, of Ouaga, of Dakar, or a bike-taxi rider of Abidjan or of Cotonou or of Douala is better informed about the state of the world and what's happening there, politically speaking, than a professor of geopolitics at Sciences Po — I'm not even talking about the medical specialists, when they call up a retired general, who, all of a sudden, is just bombarding us with expertise — well, why is that? Well, me too — that's what I think about this West. There would be much more to say, but I thank you for this opportunity given to me, and I remind you to remember...
The mask, the image and the disappearance of discourse 2:28:20 the origin of the word — you can even worry, good evening — 'the wearing of the mask has confiscated speech and promoted the image by showing the invisible' — well put. I'm not going to take sides on the matter — I wore the mask, I wear it everywhere it's required, I tolerate it very badly, but I'm not the only one — I won't say whether it's useful, that's another debate, I have a few ideas about it but I don't think that's the most important thing. But it's interesting indeed — so, he's speaking in the past tense, yes, I'm sensitive to verb tenses.
2:29:06 You noticed — he says 'has promoted,' 'has confiscated' — yes, and already well before the mask, weren't we already flooded with images at the expense of text? But it's true, and I admire the way you sum it up so well here: the wearing of the mask has aggravated what was already an extremely detrimental distortion, simply to the balance, to peace. It has promoted the image by showing the invisible — in the current conflict, the image serves as argument, there's no more discourse. What does this change signify? Ah, well, that's a very good question — for those passionate about it, I'm not...
2:29:52 another war, much more deadly, incomparably so, even if, once again, every death in Ukraine is one death too many — must those who are eager to be censured feel obliged to keep repeating it — I'm thinking of the Vietnam War, its three million dead, and the greatest quantity of bombs ever dropped on a territory, along with Cambodia and Laos, the former French Indochina, which grouped together, in colonial terms, the geographical notion of what lies between India and China — and India — why am I talking about this: seeing images, seeing the invisible, that's exactly what's being said here, moreover.
2:30:38 that's the essential point. During the Vietnam War, a news flash shows me an American soldier firing his rifle at an old pro-communist Viet Cong fighter of the time, who now exercises power in Vietnam. The next day, or five minutes later, or ten minutes earlier, a Viet Cong soldier firing, not at, but on an American soldier, and the spectator concludes, finally, 'man is violent' — don't forget the trap of the image: images show what is here and now, by definition; what the image shows there does not show what came before and after.
2:31:25 the context, the causalities, the meaning — the image doesn't show that. You'd have to go through the whole history: what the hell were the Americans doing there, ten thousand kilometers from home? It's because the country had chosen the communist option, and the Monroe Doctrine — because the United States decided, through a doctrine like that, which implies a common action here — madness — declared war, or blew up some little vessel, let's say, in the Gulf of Tonkin — look it up, that's how the Vietnam War was equipped — yeah, I don't know, I'm not basing myself on Wikipedia either, but that's the minimum of consensus, though...
2:32:10 when it's not the most important thing that triggers the connection — the Americans, damn it, our ships were fired on, some torpedo boats almost hit us, a squadron — it turns out, American historians have since admitted, that it was a fabricated pretext for intervention. It's like The Blue Lotus — look at that episode, which decides Japan's entry into war with China, seventeen million dead in the war between Japan and China, the greatest number of deaths from a war after the world wars, Russia, the two nations — curious, yes — in The Blue Lotus, look at how the Japanese fabricate a railway incident.
2:32:56 produced by so-called Chinese terrorists — it wasn't based on the image, it wasn't the camera — the image shows very well, but there, there's a stream of images, it's not a single isolated image, there's a context, a before and an after. The image shows every time the Japanese parliament waving white and red flags: 'we absolutely must change, the threat that China poses' — can you imagine, for the China of that time? Example, well, in short, there you go — thank you first for reminding us that I take my image of Vietnamese soldiers firing on the American and vice versa, shown as an image on a television, teaches us nothing about what actually happened — it comes back to that.
2:33:45 It's past 11pm, I won't take the last two questions because that would take us until midnight — but I'll take the opportunity to apologize for having to watch time go by so much, to measure time passing, and I thank you for your contribution. I am very, very happy and proud, because it's thanks to you, thanks to Pierre-Alain, and thanks to me in part, because this little community we form tries to cast a few glimmers of light into the darkness that surrounds us. Thank you again, and until next time.
