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Assessment of aesthetics and the place of the text in the Phenomenology 0:00 Lasciatemi morire. Good evening everyone.
1:02 I greet of course those who are following us remotely. I already see a few of you. I thank you all the more. I promised you that tonight, we would be among ourselves, so to speak, but we will again have guests, because the format seems to please you almost as much as it pleases me, and us in any case. I promised you we'd meet to close, provisionally,
1:35 It's not a definitive closing, on a subject like aesthetics. You can well imagine that your humble servant is not about to run dry on it. But instead, I'd like to close it on an answer that contains, and that sums up—if you've been good students—the progression we've followed, that I've tried to follow up to now, from the start, on this subject. And for that, I've chosen two texts, precisely, very vertical ones, if I may say so, which concentrate along a vertical line most of the themes we have addressed.
2:12 And so, you were able to see them. I'll start with Hegel's. And I'm going to read it to you twice, without commentary. I say without commentary—I'll make a few small interruptions, but that's just for explanation, very quickly, to make little paraphrases when the formulation seems a bit abstract or obscure. But otherwise, without commentary, in any case as to the content.
2:44 I'll read it to you twice, because you have the luxury of benefiting from two translations. The one that was posted this morning, which you have for today's broadcast, today's live session, and another one that should be at the top of our Facebook page, Dominique Pagani, and which begins with the sentence "In the state of law."
3:19 The text goes back a bit further. There we go. So, I'll first read you the text you found for today's live session, next to this little menu. So I'll read it to you without further ado. Ah, well, actually. Still, I'll place it within Hegel's work. It's the excerpt from the Phenomenology of Spirit, second part, second volume, the chapter titled "Religion," which is divided—though this shouldn't surprise you anymore—into three subsections.
4:00 It's often like that with Hegel. Into three subsections: natural religion—it's basically animism, to keep the anthropological order. Natural religion, aesthetic religion—that's the Greek world, ancient Greece of course, that's classical aesthetics in general, and the Greek world in particular, although none of that is named as such in the Phenomenology. And thirdly, revealed religion, or manifest religion, it depends a bit on the translations—"offenbar," "offen," that's open, we think of "open" in English.
4:39 So, which, of course, is connoted with Christianity under Hegel's pen, but it's a historical Christianity, isn't it? Which took a very, very long time to enter into reality, since according to Hegel, we have to wait for the French Revolution for the Christian message to begin passing from essence into existence. There, I'm moving fairly quickly over these fascinating notions, and we won't fail to have occasion to revisit their logical status.
Double reading of Hegel's text: Lefebvre then Hyppolite 5:16 For now then, the text I'm telling you about serves as a transition between aesthetic religion and revealed religion. In historical terms, that's from the Roman world to the appearance of Christianity within Rome itself, moreover, at that moment. And I'm telling you this beforehand, and I'll close my little introduction here before the direct reading of the text.
5:49 Basically, you'll recognize that what Hegel is talking about has as its context the very last days of the Roman Empire, when all spirituality seems abandoned—this great transition between a splendor that once was and something radically new that is about to appear. A kind of...
6:19 "Zwischenspiel," as they say in German—literally, an interplay, a play between. There we go. And so I'll read you the text which is set in this context of the last days of Pompeii, to paraphrase a famous title. Last sentence of my introduction: you'll see that to describe this world, he always contrasts it with the previous world he studied in the section before, which is the world of the Greek city, to contrast between...
6:54 There we go. So, without further ado, I'll read you this text. "Trust in the eternal laws of the gods has fallen silent, just as have the oracles which made known both what was particular to the Greek city. The statues are now corpses from which the animating soul has fled. Just as the hymn is now no more than a string of words from which all belief has fled.
7:25 The tables of the gods' banquets are empty of drink and spiritual nourishment. And consciousness no longer sees, returning in the festivals and games, the joyful unity of self with essence. The forces of the Muses lack—meaning, the works of art. The forces of the Muses lack the strength of spirit which arose from the crushing of gods and men, the certainty of self.
7:55 He's alluding to tragedy. They are henceforth, then, what they are for us: beautiful fruits plucked from the tree. A friendly fate has made us an offering of them, as a young girl might do with her fruits. There is, implicitly, there is no longer either the effective life of their existence—we're talking about the fruits, that is, the works of art—nor the tree that bore them, nor the earth, nor the elements that constituted their substance, nor the climate that defined their determinateness, nor even the alternation of seasons that governed the process of their becoming.
8:47 Thus, then, fate does not give us, along with these works, the world of that art—the spring and summer of the ethical life, of the good customs and the tradition through which they flowered and ripened—but only the veiled memory of that effectivity. That is why what we—you guess that "we" means us, you and me, it's the moderns from the Renaissance on—that is why what we do in enjoying these works of art is not an activity of divine service through which the perfect truth that is our consciousness's own, and which would fulfill it, would come to it, but is an external activity.
9:34 I'll open a small parenthesis—think of the French term "connaisseur." There, that fellow's a connoisseur in painting, in such-and-such. You see, an external activity, the kind that, for example, wipes off raindrops or fine dust—think of works in a museum, or books in a library—fruits detached from the tree; the raindrops or fine dust deposited on these fruits, there he's alluding a bit to what have become the wrinkles, which, in place of the inner elements of the surrounding, productive and spiritualizing effectivity of ethical custom, erect—that's what connoisseurs and specialists do, mind you, that's me adding this—erect the vast scaffolding of the dead elements of their external existence: language, you know, when someone says, ah, but baroque music, it wasn't customary to do the trills like that, you started with the upper note and not the lower one, well, the useful external elements, of language, of the historical, and so on.
10:40 You see that Hegel, this philosopher of history, is above all not a historicist—you see the relative contempt with which he treats the merely historical approach to works of art—not to engage one's life in them, but only to represent them to oneself. But then, I tell you, of course, this will be my only comment—watch out, here comes the great turnaround of the text—but, since up to now everything was negative: just as the young girl who holds out her plucked fruits is more than the whole nature of these, spread out in their conditions and elements—the tree, the air, the light, etc.—which offered them immediately, whereas now we have the mediation of the young girl, who offered them immediately, inasmuch as she gathers, she, the young girl, all of that in a superior manner, that is, superior to the natural order, isn't that so?
11:43 In what? In the ray of her self-conscious gaze and in the gesture of offering. Likewise, vast comparison, likewise, the spirit of destiny that presents its works of art to us—let's say it's an exhibition, or we're going to see each other tomorrow for a concert—likewise, the spirit of destiny, collective memory, which presents its works of art to us, is more than the ethical life, in the Hegelian code that's the Greek world, than the ethical life and the effectivity of that people, for it is the memory and interiorization of the spirit still externalized within it.
12:32 It is the spirit of tragic destiny which gathers together all these individual gods and attributes of substance into the single pantheon, into the spirit conscious of itself as spirit. There you go, without more—I take good care not to comment on it, I just have a few small explanatory notes—I'll move on to Hyppolite's translation, which you'll find on pages 281 and 282 of the Aubier edition of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and which you'll find was posted on our Facebook page, the same one.
13:27 So, here's what the same text becomes. Both translations are good, this isn't a value judgment at all. "In the state of right"—so, the ethical world, the text begins a bit earlier—"in the state of right, then, the ethical world"—that's the Greek world in the Hegelian code—"and its religion, aesthetic religion, have sunk into the consciousness of comedy." Hegel is always recalling the end of the previous chapter.
13:58 Comedy, in Hegel's aesthetics—the comic is always the end of every aesthetic cycle. The comic and comedy. Basically, the laughter of Aristophanes' comedies resounds over the ruins of an Athens invaded by the Macedonian Empire. "In the state of right, then, the ethical world"—the Greek world—"and its religion have sunk into the consciousness of comedy, and unhappy consciousness is the knowledge of this total loss."
14:32 It's strange to see this connotation of comedy with unhappy consciousness, as if it were a grating laughter. "For it, are lost"—for consciousness. "For it are lost both the intrinsic value of its immediate personality as well as that of its immediate personality, thought personality." And now we come to the passage for which I read you another translation.
15:03 "Mute has become the eternal trust"—in the gods. Here we are again at the end of the Roman Empire. "As well as trust in the oracles, which was supposed to know the particular. The statues are now corpses from which the animating soul has fled. The hymns are words that faith has abandoned. The tables of the gods are without spiritual food and drink. And the games and festivals no longer restore to consciousness the blissful unity of itself with essence."
15:40 "The strength of spirit is lacking, which used to see, springing forth from the crushing of the gods, the certainty of self." Henceforth these works—that is, the Muses—"they are henceforth what they are for us: beautiful fruits detached from the tree. A friendly fate has offered them to us as a young girl. There is no longer the effective life of their being-there, nor the tree that bore them, nor the earth, nor the elements that constituted their substances, nor the climate that made their determinability,"
16:20 "or the alternation of the seasons that regulated the process of their becoming. Thus, fate does not deliver to us the approaches to this art"—sorry—"their world, the spring and summer of the ethical life of the art which nourished them, but only the veiled memory of, or the interiorization of, that effectivity." "Our operation"—I remind you this means us, moderns—"our operation when we enjoy these works is thus no longer that of divine worship, through which our consciousness would attain its perfect truth which would fulfill it."
17:03 "The external operation which cleanses these fruits of a few raindrops which, in place of the inner elements of the ethical effectivity that surrounded them, engendered them and gave them spirit, erects endlessly the dead elements of their external existence—language, the element of history, etc.—not in order to penetrate their life but only in order to represent them to oneself." And here comes the turnaround that I noted already in the previous translation, that I see here and here.
17:38 "But just as the young girl who offers the fruits of the tree is more than their nature which presented them immediately—nature deployed in its conditions and its elements, the tree, the air, the light, etc.—because she, the young girl, synthesizes in a higher form all these conditions in the gesture that offers the fruits. Likewise, the spirit of destiny"—collective memory—"which is more to us than the ethical life of this people"—which is Greek, there you have it—"it is the recollection and the interiorization"—plurally, because it's underlined in the text, the word interiorization—"of the spirit formerly dispersed and still externalized within it."
18:37 There, I'll stop here. This reading also has a second advantage: it's the kind of text of such density that it really deserves to be read twice—you're starting to become a bit more familiar with it, its logic appears a little more clearly. I'll go back over it, of course, with commentary. I'll take the first translation, since that's the one you underlined, if I may.
The tone of elegy and the progression of the arts 19:13 So, "trust in the eternal laws of the gods has fallen silent, just as have the oracles which made known the particular." There's a great elegiac tone. You know, elegy is a lament, basically—it's the literary genre of lament. It can be either a love elegy, right? Someone lamenting—I don't know, Ariadne on the rock counting her wrongs after Theseus abandoned her. I remind you this is the subject of a superb madrigal by Monteverdi, composed in the sixteenth century, by the man who essentially founded the vocal dramatic genre of opera.
19:50 And we've lost what was surely meant to be his masterpiece, Ariadne—Ariadne on Naxos—and all that's left, regrettably, since we don't have the rest, is the magnificent lament of Ariadne on the shore of Naxos. So, it's the tone of elegy, and this elegiac tone is always in the imperfect tense, you see? "Trust in the eternal laws of the gods has fallen silent, just as have the oracles which made known the particular."
20:23 "The statues are now corpses from which the animating soul has fled, just as the hymn is now no more than a string of words from which all belief has fled." Why didn't I stop there? Because there's a series. Let me go back. Here I'm unfortunately commenting. From the first paragraph: trust in the laws, since there are the gods—that's God. The oracles, the temple—God. Then afterward, the statues, sculpture—the aesthetic world. Then the hymn. You'll find here, for those who know the text, exactly the progression—it's therefore not by chance—of the development Hegel devoted, in the previous chapter, to what he calls aesthetic religion, which goes, among all the arts—that's why this allows us to draw up a balance sheet, doesn't it—from the art most engaged in empirical, material exteriority, architecture, with all its spatial dimensions, they're all there.
21:25 Then, sculpture, which individualizes, a bit like there was the statue of the god inside the temple. The temple is architecture, it's the dwelling of the god, then inside, there's the statue of the god which individualizes him. That is to say, the thing becomes subject with sculpture, but it's a subject that still remains entirely within real, three-dimensional space, if you will. You can walk around a sculpture.
21:59 If you walk around the painting of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, you'll immediately have 20 guards falling on you. The statues, then the hymn. And there, we abandon all spatial dimension, to arrive at the temporal dimension of the art of sounds, of music, of song, here of the hymn, which is a collective chant. There you go, it's interesting to see that we have the same progression. I'm telling you now because, oh surprise—but is it one?—we will find the same progression in the text I'll take up after Hegel's, in Rilke's, such that there is a certain logic to this progression, because Rilke and Hegel didn't consult each other at all.
22:48 Rilke was not a reader of Hegel. Well, he may have been at odd moments, but he read much more of the French avant-gardes of his time, of course, in the wake of Baudelaire's posterity. Nevertheless, there is a great—especially between these two men of their time, I won't go into a technological phenomenon, but there you go. So, the same progression of art, from the most engaged works to the most interiorized, music.
The dead cult and the birth of modernity in Rome 23:24 Isn't that so? So, you see that this prepares the ground for the young girl with the fruits. So I continue. "Just as the hymn is now no more than a string of words from which all belief has fled." We had gotten there. Do you see it coming? As often happens, moreover, like the Catholic Church over the centuries, we keep saying Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, having completely forgotten, mind you, its deep meaning, we do it out of habit, because on Sunday you have to go to church, otherwise the priest will think badly of you, or I won't be able to show off my dress to the neighbor, right?
23:59 And there you go. A little parenthesis—don't think I'm bashing priests, I mean, nor am I praising them either, but it's a historical and sociological fact. It was well known in the countryside that it was on Sunday, right after mass, that the men went to see the prostitutes, who knew this, who were around the church—look at Le Grand Meaulnes, which is anything but an X-rated novel, the somewhat murky passage where Augustin meets prostitutes, it's behind the church of Bourges, the cathedral of Bourges.
24:37 So, there you go, while the women were preparing the roast, you see, the husbands had gallant rendezvous—so what I said isn't at all incongruous. In short, worship becomes nothing more than a habitual worship, fossilized, dead. You can apply this to a political party that has completely forgotten its ideals and now does nothing but keep an apparatus running. You see, I'm teaching you to think structurally, here, without being a structuralist, you see, to see the anthropological invariants.
25:14 There you go, "the hymn is now no more than a string of words from which all belief has fled." I'll give another illustration because I do want to make a comment. So, if it eases the tension a little—though it's quite hard to measure up to such a beautiful text—compare the choruses in Wagner's Parsifal, his testament, and yet arguably his most accomplished work, but they are ghostly choruses, at times you'd think they were choruses of the living dead.
25:46 Because precisely, the community of the Grail, the Grail knights who are supposed to be the choristers, intoning these hymns, are in a state of decay in Parsifal because the king has lost the spear and had it stolen from him by the sorcerer—for example, he was in the arms of the great seductress, and since the spear is no longer there, the Grail no longer nourishes the knights and no longer makes them invincible in battle.
26:18 So, you see, the ritual continues, but, as we say very well in French, "the heart isn't in it." That's what runs through this whole first part of Hegel's text—the heart isn't in it. "Just as the hymn is now no more than a string of words from which all belief has fled. The tables of the gods' banquets"—the Roman orgies, this isn't Plato's Symposium in Greek, you see, that's what he's saying here—"the tables of the gods' banquets are empty of drink and spiritual nourishment," because for the other, well, that's how it goes.
26:50 You know that among the Romans, wine could hold up a spoon with spices, with mustard, too. The tables of banquets and of the gods are empty of mustard and of rituals. You see the contrast with this banquet of Plato's, before drinking. In fact, the question is raised by Eryximachus right at the beginning of Plato's banquet, the doctor of the group, who says isn't it better if we discuss before drinking?
27:21 There is spiritual nourishment before nourishment that is properly Dionysian and quite material. The two are absolutely not contradictory. And consciousness no longer sees the joyful unity of self with essence return in feasts and games. Here it's even more obvious to compare the gladiator combats, which often turned into the Olympic Games.
27:53 That is, to the simple laurel wreath placed on the victor's head. So much for feasts and games. What is lacking in the works of the muses, so in the works, especially here in tragedy, is the strength of spirit for whom the crushing of gods and men has arisen. Here we recognize the punishment of hubris throughout classical tragedy, in Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides.
28:26 If you want the chronological order, it's Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, if you insist. So, the strength of spirit for whom, out of the crushing of gods and men, self-certainty has arisen. So all these fruits have lost their savor. They are henceforth—and here the passage moves quickly and strikingly—what they are for us. That means that once something appears in history, it isn't radicalization.
28:56 By the way, when one says urbs, which will give us urban, urbanity, suburban, etc.—in Latin, when one says Urbs, meaning the city as a common noun, without specifying, when nothing is specified, everyone knows it means Rome, the great city. Urbs. That is where modernity would have appeared. Modernity. Even the rich Romans, particularly the court of Augustus, at the height of the Empire, with the great poet of the Augustan era, Virgil.
29:33 You'll tell me, but Virgil's great works don't take place in Rome, they take place in the countryside. In fact, it's the province that gave rise to, that is the origin of, the French word campagne (countryside)—Campania, that is, the region around Naples, which is a bit like the Beverly Hills or Hollywood, if you like, of the Roman establishment. That's where the Cocody was, for those who know Ivory Coast and Abidjan, with its lovely villas on the lagoons. That's what the countryside was—that is, Pompeii, Herculaneum, places like Capri, etc.
30:13 So it is precisely at that moment that our modernity would have arisen. And I tell you, it's not contradictory that Virgil speaks to us of the countryside. On the contrary, it's exactly our environmentalism of today. Virgil spent much more time at the court of Nero, of Augustus, believe me. He wasn't too eager to stay away for long. And when he says one of his most famous lines, "O fortunatos nimium agricolas bona si sua norint"—if I get the case wrong, my editor will rap my knuckles.
30:50 I say this because Aymeric Monville is a great Latinist, a great Hellenist too. I salute him here. Happy, all too happy farmers, if they knew their own good fortune—one would think of the disciples of Pierre Rabhi, I don't know, and the return to the peasant land. All this is very contemporary. It's striking to see that it begins at that very moment, at the moment when Christianity is about to establish itself, moreover. So, as a state religion soon, with Constantine.
The fruits plucked from the tree; determinability and determination 31:23 They are therefore works of art, they are works that are for us, beautiful fruits torn from the tree. Hyppolite says detached; here, torn off, it's a bit more violent. So you see, removed from their natural support. Imagine what happens to a plant when you tear it up, when you pick it—it withers. A fruit, if you pick it, will soon rot in your bowl if you don't eat it.
31:55 A friendly destiny has made us the offering. I'll point out that some people have devoted more than ten pages to the German word here, in this text of Hegel's, just for the word "friendly"—to show you that I'm going very fast. You thought I was taking detours and dawdling? "Amical" is the translation of "freundlich." Now, it's not Freundlichkeit, friendship in the sense of being pals. It's more gracious, more kindly. Anyway, I won't spend ten pages on it. Just to say, the text is dense.
32:26 A friendly destiny has made us the offering to take, and it is here that the image of the young girl arises, for it is an image, as a young girl knows how to do, with her fruits. There has been, for quite some time as you know, south of the Sahara—and you don't even need to go that far, it's enough to cross the Mediterranean already—to see that this is a common fate. Alas, all these young girls from families who don't have the means to send them to school, because the young girl is an asset, she goes to fetch water, she does the housework, she looks after her little brothers when her mother goes to market, because the young girl is an economic agent, almost as much as her mother.
33:08 And so, the girl with the fruits, in Hegel's time—I'm not saying it's Africa, but I mean, given Germany's backwardness, which didn't even have the beginnings of the industrial revolution that France and England already had—it was still common to see young peasant girls going door to door selling fruit. So, this is not a fruit of his imagination. As a young girl knows how to do with her fruits, there is, there is no longer, neither the effective life of their existence, nor the tree that bore them—you see, he comes back to it—to what?
33:43 To the whole natural, or rather natural, element—neither the climate, it's very beautiful, it's a prose poem—nor the climate that defined their determinacy. One more remark, lexicological or linguistic, as you like: here the translator says "determinacy," whereas Hyppolite says "determinability."
34:13 There you go—so don't be too fetishistic about it; it's not the case with Hegel's terms that you'll see the translators themselves can translate the same German word in two different ways. What matters, and here I'm doing philosophy, is what it designates—that is, determinability and not determination. If you want to understand it definitively, at least through an image—conceptually it takes longer—you enter a room, a detective, in a room where a corpse has been found, right?
34:45 She looks a bit at the objects, she senses that someone has passed through—you see, there is a determinability, but she doesn't yet know who; this determinability for knowledge doesn't go as far as the determination that it's this one and not another. You see, there, roughly—I go back to this beautiful sentence: there is neither the effective life of their existence, nor the tree that bore them, nor the earth, nor the elements that made up their substance, nor the climate that defined their determinacy, nor even the alternation of the seasons that governed the process of their becoming.
Erinnerung: recollection as interiorization 35:25 It's beautiful, how we see spring, summer, autumn, and winter pass over these buds, these flowers and these fruits. And so destiny does not give us, along with its works, the world of that art. We are no longer in that world—in that world, we are no longer in being, we are in essence—and then the springtime of a life concerned with good customs; we know the Greek world, it's the ethos, and the custom in which they blossomed and ripened.
35:58 But what does it offer us, if not merely the veiled remembrance of that effectivity? And there you find again the progression from earlier, from the temple, from architecture sunk into exteriority—I underline EX twelve times, right?—to remembrance, which is an interiorization—I underline IN twelve times—all the more so since the term here, they use the same German term to translate remembrance: IN—Er is a prefix, and IN, that's in English, it's inside, it's making something pass inside—for the term, the act, Erinnerung, the act of making pass inside, interiorization, that is what it means literally here; the term translated as "remembrance," literally in German, says interiorization.
36:57 That is why what we do in enjoying it is not an act of divine service—only the veiled remembrance of that effectivity. And so, what we do in enjoying it is not an act of divine service through which the perfect truth would come to our consciousness—he's alluding to, I don't know, 10,000 Athenians on the tiers of the stadium, stupefied and mute with terror and pity, to speak as Aristotle does in defining the two great springs of tragedy, before the misfortunes of Oedipus, which they know by heart, which they've heard told since they were children in evening gatherings, but which they still discover, as we do watching a western—just as we know there's going to be the same reckoning at the end, but when the western is a masterpiece, as they existed in the '50s, we're on the edge of our seats as if seeing the myth come true for the first time.
38:02 My parallel is due entirely by chance to the founding of a new world, as it appears in the American historical legend. You know, it's an appalling genocide, as I sometimes make a point of noting, and unfortunately it's not just a quip—more intelligently than the Germans, the Americans carried out the initial solution instead of waiting for the final solution. They took all their precautions, then they wiped out everything that was there, apart from a few alcohol-soaked reservations that remain, in order to invent the legend of a virgin land into which one need only advance with the Bible in the left hand and the rifle in the right.
38:43 And so, you see, this lends itself to a founding of that kind. That is why what we do in enjoying it is not an act of divine service through which the perfect truth that is its own would come to our consciousness and would fulfill it—which is what happened on the tiers in Athens—but rather it's an external activity. So we come back a bit to what I said earlier, the world of connoisseurs, of aesthetes that we modern people are, those who, for instance—not the artists, but the aesthetes—those who, for instance, wipe away the drops of rain or the fine dust deposited on its fruits, and who, in place of the interior elements of the surrounding, producing and spiritualizing effectivity and of concern for good customs, erect—it's implied, content themselves with erecting—the vast scaffolding of the dead elements of their outward existence, of language, of the historical.
39:49 At that time, architects used to erect wooden scaffolding, etc.—not in order to engage one's life in it, but only to represent it to oneself in transformation. All this is very negative and almost hopeless. This is where, just when we think it hopeless, dawn arises out of the contradiction.
The girl with the fruits and the self-conscious gaze 40:20 I won't read the sentence here, let's take Hegel's sentence in one of his letters. But just as the young girl who offers her picked fruits—which, I remind you, are torn off, she's vital in the biological sense—just as the young girl who offers her picked fruits is more than all the nature of these fruits spread out in their conditions and elements, the tree, the air, again, the light, etc., which offered them immediately, once she gathers all that together—then we'll see in what way she is superior—once she gathers all that in a higher way in, listen carefully, the ray of her self-conscious gaze.
41:10 The path from consciousness to consciousness—the cow is perfectly conscious that a train is passing by. She doesn't know it's called a train, but she doesn't care. She's conscious that there's wind, that there's noise, that there's something worrying, that there's rich grass, I don't know, or that it's lacking. The fly is conscious that there's sugar somewhere, through all sorts of systems, sensors, whatever you like.
41:40 Consciousness is not unique to man; self-consciousness is when the projector turns itself upon itself. We've seen that this isn't possible without a mirror, so we're in reflection—we moderns, this is not in reflection. All this is unified not in the eyes, not in the young girl, not in her eyes, not even in her gaze. I'm going to make of what appears more and more immaterial, whereas we've just seen that it was nourished by a whole history and a whole geography of the past, but made present by what?
42:21 By this ray. The Egyptian world—there are pharaohs, of course, fortunately—there's another Egyptian world that is starting to be seen, and it annoys others to see all sorts of foreigners arriving who are only interested in taking their place. It's a fascinating country, so it will sell itself through Egypt. And this fascinates the whole Arab world too, moreover.
42:55 The world of the pharaohs has disappeared. But no, it is present through its works of art. The interiorization of the sacred, all the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians about death, was exteriorized in stone, in painting, in fantastic architecture. So you see, I come back here to what seems most immaterial.
43:27 Once she gathers all that in a higher way in the ray of her self-conscious gaze—I recall her gaze—but this gaze, when it truly happens in the ray. Hyppolite's translation is "in the gleam of her eye." You see? Every time there's a difficulty, something profound, hence difficult to translate, to render, the translators diverge, which proves how rich the content is, right? The gleam.
43:57 It's Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, I believe, here, isn't it—the translation. I think so. Yes, yes. And—because I had a third one, but that's it, that's Jean-Pierre Lefebvre's. And in Hyppolite's, the ray becomes the gleam. The common point, the invariant—let's rise to the invariant—is that there is an act of radiating, of shining forth. The interior is in the process of exteriorizing itself.
The spirit of destiny as the common heritage of humanity 44:30 It's not abstract. There you go. Spirit, of itself, then—let's leave the comparing term now and go back to what is compared—the spirit of destiny; I told you that means our collective memory, our common heritage, the spirit of destiny, and when I say common, common to humanity. I'm very glad that an institution like UNESCO decided that not only Notre-Dame, but Borobudur, on the island of Java, which is one of the pinnacles of Buddhist architecture through the Buddhism of Indonesia—the road to the Indies was kept only on the island of Sri Lanka—that the temple of Borobudur was surprisingly listed as a World Heritage Site of humanity, that the temple of Abu Simbel, wonder of wonders, when you go up the Nile toward Nubia, subtle and turbulent sea of all the arts, as Edgar Allan Poe says, a foreigner—that's Nubia, that's today the land of Black people.
45:42 and the Black pharaohs. Put into Google one day AXUM, A-X-U-M, AXUM, the Black pharaohs. Type that in, you'll discover marvels that are too often kept silent. It's a whole art that has the splendor, the mystery, the grandeur of ancient Egypt, often the same divinities, but in the land of Black people, to the south, in the land of Punt, where the Egyptians imagined paradise to be.
46:15 So this interiorization, the spirit of destiny, the common heritage—once again, the temple of Abu Simbel—I'm very glad that UNESCO went as far as financing—not a lot, sponsoring, it's above all a super consultant, UNESCO, it doesn't have huge funds, well, it drew on several funds—that made possible incredible work, cutting up the whole temple of Abu Simbel so it wouldn't be submerged by the realization of the pharaohs' old dream, Lake Nasser, which resulted from the Aswan Dam that the Soviets built in the 1950s at Nasser's request—I open a parenthesis.
47:05 Nasser had nothing pro-Soviet about him at first; what he wanted was Egypt, its guardianship in which it found itself under the imperial powers, was quite present, wasn't it. You know, it's the only thing that brings in a bit of money in Egypt, where there's little oil and not much else besides tourism, namely the canal. So he asked the Westerners, who were his familiar contacts, he was very...
47:42 the whole intelligentsia, the whole establishment of Egyptians like to speak French because of the French and Champollion, France being a matter of war [heritage]. He was rather turned toward the [Western] world. He asked them for—the pharaohs' old dream—to build the Aswan Dam, so that Egypt wouldn't be—they turned him down, they said no, we won't even look at it. He was engaged for... So it's this lake that submerged the area where the temple of Abu Simbel stood, and which was therefore rebuilt a bit higher up.
48:21 There you go. I'm glad that all this is part of a heritage common to all humanity. Let me pick up my thread, the spirit of destiny. I'm going to backtrack, then come back to a series of pages of the philosophical lectures on aesthetics. Now, among the various singular things, there's the Egyptian spirit—roughly what we would call culture, if you like, but that's a bit vaguer, culture, especially a bit more, a bit more aestheticizing, except for anthropologists who know that even a tool is part of the Dogon, or the Basque, culture.
49:22 But there is also the spirit of the world when we rise above the different spirits toward spiritual globalization. Well, you see, the spirit of destiny that presents its works of art to us—so you know today it wanders around, whether we agree or not—when one is old as I am, when the world comes to you, they can just look at Chinese calligraphy, it happens on the screen, or at sculpture.
Art, a thing of the past, and the immanence of the sacred 50:07 So, the spirit of destiny that presents its works of art to us, just as the young girl is more than the fruits she offers, is more than the ethical life and the effectivity of that people. Here we stop regretting the Greek world, for it is this spirit. And here it's said clearly for the first time: remembrance, Er-Innerung, and interiorization, is what still makes spirit exterior.
50:38 So you'll tell me there's something a bit grand in this text. Fine, it's very beautiful, poetically, all one could want, but I mean, that means that art is a thing of the past. This is stated in so many words in the Aesthetics: as for its supreme destination, art is for us a thing of the past.
51:16 This is the famous passage that leads some commentators, completely mistakenly, to say that Hegel declares art dead. As for its supreme destination, it was still alive for people who lived within the immanence of the past. My old aunts, they really think there's something sacred in wood and in metal.
51:49 When I say naively, it's profound. I don't know if it's very Christian that the divine principle is there, in herbis, in stones, in things. You know that's also part of what separates Protestants and Catholics somewhat. That's why, regarding communion, the Protestants don't think there's a true presence in the [reunion/communion]—and the wars of religion.
52:23 What there is, in fact, is that the [reunion/communion]—that is, it's the immanence of a dangerous and perilous immanence. I'll say that we are the aesthetic culmination of the Greek world because the gods are constantly on the verge of rubbing shoulders with them and encroaching on their territory, committing hubris—starting from when there is a hubris that's too excessive.
52:57 There's no marked boundary in the sky. The world is complicated. So between this world of immanence and immediate immanence to things, you see that it's not empirical, it's not just the old Corsican woman kissing crucifixes. I'm thinking of those who wear something around their neck, and I quite like their syncretic side.
53:33 They're not in the world where they live. They've kept no account of anything. In Fatma's hand there's a little Christian cross, and there's a little charm against snakes, quite pagan, you see. There's the immediate and, all at once, a mediation between us and the fruits.
54:08 It's the gesture of offering these fruits, more than human fruits. From the era, and quite the era, of the song of the 50s. Like that song, which is also a fun little note. It slips in. There was a great hit song from the 50s, one of the most famous, by Brigitte Bardot, that immense jazz guitarist, somewhat in that vein, we know, in the general public it was Sacha Distel, and his hit song came about because he started doing songs when he realized, singing Scoubidou, Scoubidou, that he was earning 10,000 times more than doing admirable solos alongside the greatest musicians in films of the time.
55:08 So you put that alongside Distel. But there, I come back to Scooby-Doo, which starts from a woman, doesn't it, who was accosted, who was selling apples, pears, you see, the young girl. It's a bit... And... Let's not go any further with Scooby-Doo.
55:40 I don't know. Let those who can understand, understand. Well, I told you, we need a fun note, we're on holiday, and besides we're in France. For a little bit of Gallic bawdiness. It's serious. Because earlier I said that all aesthetic cycles end on a comic note. So as not to remain... It's for those who haven't... The final part of the text, what we gain from this disappearance.
Mediation deeper than the immediate: the diffusion of music 56:19 And that art has become nowadays museums, concerts, such that people who know, who listen, and however you say it, enjoy Mozart or Clifford Brown, I don't know, or Charles Trenet, no matter for now, that today, thanks to broadcasting, to mediation, the opposite of immediate, it's no longer the immediate world.
56:50 I too regret, I was too young, never having known Charles Trenet in the music hall, at his beginnings, when all those people had started out. There, there, there, on stage. It's great, you know, on stage. You had to know how to do everything. It could be done by the ham actor. In fact, they'll be drawn along by what is already famous. On the boards, moreover, there, grant me just five minutes. You see?
57:23 But you always have to do that. Thanks to intermediaries, one must never underestimate the importance of the middle term in dialectics. It's not the first time I've told you that. Often, and this will be my last example to insist on mediation, which is deeper than the immediate and which should tear us away from the sides — the Jacques of the first part of Hegel's text, on the loss side — it's the way people talk about public mediation.
57:59 But practically, here's our musical example. I'm astounded to see what they call music. It's really extraordinary. On the TV sets. And this isn't a value judgment on my part, because I love all kinds of music. That said, there can be castles — I'd rather have a botched symphony played by the best musicians in Europe.
58:33 Or elsewhere, well, they make you believe, when they talk about classical music, that it's for old people, for the rich, I don't know, I'm barely exaggerating, because there are many young people who hold these prejudices. Well, I guarantee you there have never been so many young people. That's in the millions. Never has technology reached classical music like this — Asia, which is taking over in an extraordinary way, this will be the end of my digression — a European artist tried to defend himself, at first, by saying, 'Yeah, but it's just that.'
59:13 That's always how it starts. When I was a kid, people talked about Japanese junk. Simply put. I do mean Japanese junk. At the time, neither Sony nor Yamaha was known. You see, all the same, I'm only talking here about what is mainstream. I'm not talking about electronic and computer components and so on. Even less about the research level.
59:44 So, people can defend themselves all they like by saying, 'They're robots.' Yes, that's very easy. Without making a mistake, but still, it's a bit mechanical. But no, that's not it either. Because sometimes they have wonderful performers, women from Japan. It's the country that has had the most access to Western media.
1:00:15 from that time. But also from Korea, admirable Korean pianists. But when I say admirable, it's not just a personal judgment — they win the most coveted prizes in the world of piano, the Chopin Competition in Warsaw and the grand prize of the Moscow Conservatory, the Tchaikovsky Prize. It's worse than war, what those competitors go through. So, there, I could go on at length about the melancholy of the first part.
Commented reading of the seventh Duino Elegy by Rilke 1:00:53 I'm moving on to Rilke's text. 8:30. I'm going to Rilke's text. It'll go much faster because, as I said, let's pick up again, so we move on to poetry. Again, as we said, Hegel's text was a real prose poem. I'm not the only one who thinks so. Every unconscious return of the world has such disinherited beings, to whom what has been no longer belongs, and what is to be, not yet.
1:02:01 From the very first line, we're in the present. For even the nearest things are far from men. Ah, there we find again the outer, the inner. For even the nearest things are far from men. Let that not trouble us, but help us to preserve within us the figure — take it in the sense of society, recognized society. This once stood among men.
1:02:31 In the midst of destroying fate, yes, in reality, fate — this once stood. Once it stood. In the midst of the uncertainty of roads, this stood, as though endowed with being, and drew to itself the stars out of the finished heavens. The power of art, made by the wretched larvae that we are, we humans. Fabulous power of art to draw down the stars.
1:03:01 isn't it so? This once stood among men, in the midst of destroying fate, this stood in the midst of the uncertainty of roads, this stood and drew to itself the stars out of the finished heavens, above the angel. The angel is a very important figure in his poetry, and one shouldn't think it's something rather rosy — his relationship to the angel is not the pink angels you find on Christmas trees, it's often a terrible and unsettling relationship.
1:03:41 Every angel is terrifying, alas for me — it's written in the First Elegy. 'Angel, to you I still show it.' There, before your gaze, you see, it's always an ambivalent relationship to the angel, of fascination, of adoration, and at the same time of hostility. 'Angel, to you, there, before your gaze.' Let that stand. What does he show the angel? Something sacred, something divine. He shows the works of men, doesn't he? The works of man.
1:04:12 'To you, there, before your gaze, let that stand — saved at last, now finally, upright. Column, pylon, sphinx.' You'll note the same architectural order first. I told you, from the outer to the inner. 'Column, pylon, sphinx, the soaring thrust of the cathedral arch.' We move from the dwelling of the gods to the dwelling of God, don't we?
1:04:42 From the Middle Ages on. 'The cathedral emerging, gray, above the dying city. Was this not a miracle? Be amazed, angel!' For it is ours, note well. 'O great angel, we who have been able to do such things, proclaim it. My breath would be too short to celebrate it.' The poet's breath is too short — the angel, with its trumpet, will be able to make its works resound throughout the universe.
1:05:13 I'll open a very short parenthesis here. If you go to the Jardin du Luxembourg, near the Arcadia — that's what I call it — there's a well-known little corner with beehives and bees and a few fruit trees among the pear trees. There's a bust of Baudelaire nearby. And whoever placed it there had the good taste to put this stanza of Baudelaire's, the last one of his poem dedicated to all the great painters of history. There's the connection to our subject. After detailing what is proper to each, he generalizes and says, 'For it is truly, Lord, testimony to our dignity.'
1:05:54 It's carved on the stone in the Luxembourg. 'For it is truly, Lord, the best proof we can give of our dignity, this ardent sob that rolls from age to age and dies upon the shore of thine eternity.' You see? So, a breath would be too short to celebrate it. Thus, in spite of everything, we haven't lacked those spaces, despite all our flaws, our failings — those great bestowers, these spaces that are ours, must be terrifyingly vast, since millennia of our feeling do not fill them.
1:06:33 But a tower was great. Respect, if you will. But a tower was great, wasn't it? O angel, it was. You, Chartres was great. And music — you see again the progression of the arts, from arts of space to arts of time — and music went further, higher still, and surpassed us. And indeed, what could there be above sculpture, above architecture, above sculpture, painting, music?
1:07:05 What could there be? And even a mere lover, alone at the window, did she not reach up to your knee. You see, he depicts — the Venus de Milo, where he depicts an action, a venus-like figure. Be it love, isn't it? A relation. Do not think that I'm making a request, angel, and even if I called you, you would not come, for my invocation is always full of refusal.
1:07:40 We find the ambivalence again, you see? He calls to it and at the same time puts a distance. 'Against so strong a current, you cannot go, all history there.' Like an outstretched arm is my call. And its hand, the hand of my arm, which to grasp opens upward, as if to shake the angel's hand, remains before you, open, like a defense and a warning — o you ungraspable one, wide open.' There, I've quoted you a text that you might see again sometime.
Questions: the postmodern, the comic, and the end of cycles 1:08:18 Whether it be in the mountains, in the sea of Sissi — I haven't spoken of Corsica, but I wish it for you, I wish it for you. Go ahead. So, Agnès's question, right, do you have any comments to make on postmodernism as comedy? Can it be understood as the end of a cycle?
1:08:52 That's very good. By way of an anecdote, a big detour through that magnificent painting of Alexander visiting Diogenes — I'll say, I'll repeat, at the time when there was still the Musée d'Art Moderne, right near the Trocadéro, before Beaubourg existed — quite a few collections have since been transferred there. And I had gone there because of an exhibition whose program fascinated me.
1:09:28 It was perhaps a bit less — but it's Calder's mobiles. It's movement. Kinesis in Greek, that's movement. The image in movement, it's not. So my studies end up being precisely about the relation between the arts of time and the arts that are at the dialectical origin — it's an incredible part of the history of art, not of postmodern art, but of the most avant-garde eternity.
1:10:06 The postmodern comes after in relation to the gaze. When we start dealing with art — I went to see art — to introduce, to still time, it's extraordinary. I know, I see a sculptor explaining to us how he made time enter into art, and there, with a flourish, between thumb and forefinger, he spins his little sculpture on itself, and there you go.
1:10:54 There I burst out laughing inwardly because I'm on your side. The market, to be with us, who are very busy with a very beautiful exhibition of paintings at their place in Norway. There. I'm in the middle of it, by the way. If someone says that because of Jacques Sienne.
1:11:51 So that's what we take from it. That the final stage of all the great aesthetic cycles, very key, the example of Aristophanes and ancient comedy. We can also see it as romantic, and to whoever wanted to hear it, he said that he wasn't a very great poet because what he lacked, to be a great poet, was, well, a great love passion.
1:12:33 And the poor old man, he had both, and George Sand at the same time. He indeed had this very fine cycle in relation to the nocturnal — what does he say, Alfred de Musset, with a somewhat irreverent side, and of course, the emergence of a figure, that of Heinrich Heine, a German romantic.
1:13:20 It inspired Schumann, who, up to that point, the word communism in his memoirs is extremely rare. He is one of the very first to use it. And he speaks of his position with regard to communism — there was no party, but he said, I am not part of it.
1:13:50 and he is feared. I'm answering Jacques's question here, because he is mainly known — and that's why he's hated — in a certain German tradition, because his laughter, you see, comes to mock those who take romanticism at face value, which gives rise to the — really — the romantic count and the number of literary or aesthetic rejects.
1:14:33 So, I recommend to you that he can't help saying that he thinks of his tears from the very beginning. So, putting all that together later, saying that history never repeats itself twice in going from tragedy to comedy. I'm paraphrasing him here.
1:15:03 That is to say, the first time an event arises in history, it gives tragedy. When people want to repeat it by force, there are many who are haunted by historical precedents and believe that things will happen again the same way. No — when it happens again, more or less as is, it gives... to use the term... there. So that Hegel, like Marx, assigns it the role of a consciousness superior to...
1:15:34 No, because they're children, but not in the sense that we're going to their level. But we laugh among the children who believe in Santa Claus at face value. It's a bit like having that immediate adherence. Just as we might envy children without going through the young girl with the fruit — but we shouldn't regret the wisdom that laughter expresses, which raises us up.
1:16:11 For how we would wish to go back to the time that makes us laugh now. You can guess how, Jacques Carles, quoting Nerval — 'Ignorance, wasn't it called?' Yes, if there are no other questions, yes, I was waiting for this opportunity. There. Philippe has the nerve to go on holiday. Isn't that right? So he's going to abandon us for a while.
1:16:41 And we'll meet again at the end of August. But in the meantime, I'll keep to Wednesdays because that's our habit, and for an exceptional occasion I'll let you know. But I don't know, it will probably be pre-recorded. I think I'll allow myself to do the operation live, since I can still manage the editing, even out in the countryside.
1:17:16 There. Next time I'll tell you whether it can be live or not. And without Philippe, I wish you all the best holidays possible. We owe ourselves that. And thank you for this evening in any case. No other questions, Philippe? Thank you all and see you very soon on the web.
