English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Resumption of the workshop and three reasons for asking questions 0:00 I'm very glad to be back with you. It's a bit solemn for me, in any case. First of all, to find myself alive among you after the cardiac incident I went through. I got back on my feet thanks to the excellent care at the Pitié-Salpêtrière. If something happens to your heart, go to the Pitié. Apparently people even come from Japan, from California. So, let's not stray from the subject. I'm very glad to be back with you because, quite seriously, our first year, "Between crisis and war: philosophizing?", had a taste of the unfinished.
0:38 Or at least it finished a bit like a damp squib, whatever metaphor you prefer. Insofar as the rich material of the last part of the course, the part called philosophy of action, was rather rushed for chronological reasons. I'm not saying it was botched, but I mean there was too much material relative to the time we had to think it through together.
1:11 So I'm all the happier to be able to resume the discussion. And on that note, I think it was also a trial year. It wasn't premeditated, but objectively it was the first time this had been done between us. So we do need to take that seriously, that is, as for the negative points in particular—I'm practically only thinking about that, I mean, in your absence, about what we could improve.
1:44 It seems to me there wasn't enough interactivity. That was said when we held our little general assembly. Some said everything was fine, but they ended up conceding that it's still better if speech circulates a bit more. Now, I know there are some who want to know what comes next and who stay silent. But I've already said, and I'll say it again here, I'll have other occasions to repeat it, that there is at least—it's a formula I recommend to anyone who teaches, whatever the discipline.
2:17 There are at least three reasons to ask questions, at least three. The first, the most important, is that you haven't understood and you still want to go back over the subject until you do understand. The second reason: you've understood but you don't agree. That's also a very important reason, especially in a discipline like philosophy, where it's been agreed, hasn't it—there's a beautiful image Plato gives, that the spark doesn't come from one of the two stones rubbing against each other, but from their very friction.
2:50 So I mean, if there's a disagreement, it can only be beneficial once it's made explicit. It can only reinforce the previous truth, or at least give it a new, more satisfying version for all parties. So, second reason: you don't agree. Third reason: you've understood, you agree, but you'd like to know a bit more on that point. You see, that makes at least three reasons. So I reiterate them, I mean, but so that it doesn't remain a pious wish, I'll come back to the aspect that seems to me more problematic—not about this or that passage of the course, which stretched over several months after all, of the course of the curriculum, I mean, the chat we've been having about it.
The title of the workshop and the historical present 3:45 But about its very principle, as I tried to condense it in the title—a title that several of you must have thought didn't always show the connection between the details of what I might tell you and the title itself, which is provocative, you see: "Between crisis and war, comma, philosophizing, question mark." I didn't do it on purpose, it was above all what's happening now. Now, people flatly say we're at war, it's official.
4:15 We're going to talk about speech today, you'll see—speech, whether public or private. Of course, the title alludes to the present situation, to a historical present, not an immediate present, not to the news of the day, not to the editorial. But to the era we're living in, if you will, the one Hegel spoke of in one of his notebooks, as a private reflection: you can never be more than your time, but at best you will be your time.
4:57 We must give up the illusion, the chimera, of believing we can anticipate the future, or that we're thinking the past—we manage to think the past like that, with everyday language. Whereas in fact, when we think about origins, we imagine how the first men came together to form society, as Rousseau does in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. And in other essays, in the 18th century, everyone tries to imagine like that how man appeared, plus the Darwinist debates afterward, etc.
5:34 In short, every time we think about origins, we believe we're thinking the past, and in fact it's the interests of the present that are reflected in our thinking. That's what Hegel says: you can never be more than your time, but at best you will be your time. That means you and I, each of us, is always behind our own historical present. It's the hardest thing to think, the historical present—it would be a bit like the limit, in the sense mathematicians give that term.
6:04 Among mathematicians, what's nice is that the limit only asks to be transgressed. That's interesting. So the present would be this limit, wouldn't it? A bit like the limit that makes the field cease to be a field where the forest begins, and vice versa. The forest stops where the field begins. Nature has as its limit culture in the most proper sense there is, the field. And vice versa. So this horizon of the present time that resonates in the title I gave this workshop—not without reason—it was bothering me.
Socrates and the city: the principled complicity of philosophy and crisis 6:48 It seemed to me I wasn't the only one it bothered. We're not here to chat personally—which is an excellent exercise, but one that can be done at the corner café, or at home, or among friends, that's different. Here, yes, the questions of the universal, all the same. I recalled right at the start of our sessions, and I insist here as I take up the thread again, because it hasn't changed, it's even truer than ever, that there is a complicity, at least historical, if not principled, logical, but not merely chronological, between philosophy and the notion of crisis.
7:25 I think all those who attended the workshop last year remember this. I recall it for the few of you joining our collective stroll, in the hunt for ideas, as Plato says in the Theaetetus—this tension of the hunt for ideas. "But those three are like hunters on the hunt." It's a poem by Hölderlin where he alludes to Jesus Christ, to Dionysus, and to Heracles. Who knows why, but that's our story.
7:55 I refer you back to that very text, where he says: "But those three are like hunters on the hunt." So, it was important that we saw this fundamental complicity. I won't indulge in fancy technical words, but still, if I said "principal," it would lack force. Because I want to say that it's part of the essence of philosophy, and not just of this or that moment in its history. Just as enclosing a space is part of the essence of the notion of geometric figure.
8:29 So, its relationship with crisis. I recalled that philosophy begins with the questioning of an individual who is going to be put to death because of his questioning. By the city, no less. And not by personal revenge, by a local vendetta. No, no, no, no. A tribunal. A majority of one vote. And under the pretext—you know, the pretext invoked—that Socrates (it's always the same ones who put the intellectual on trial) was, because of his questions, weakening belief in the god of the city, firstly.
9:19 And secondly, that he was corrupting the youth. But you're welcome to judge for yourselves the corruption I exert toward you. In any case, I had compared Socrates's situation with the city to the general situation of the philosopher with his historical and political present. "Polis"—let's say something other than "city" after all. Namely, as an invariant, in Socrates's case, I spoke of a "misunderstanding," with a lot of scare quotes, because there's something a bit accidental in a misunderstanding, which is a bit unsatisfying, but still.
10:01 Namely: is it Socrates's critique, is it the philosophical questioning, that brings discord into the city, which amounts to justifying the accusation? The problem isn't settled. Or else, is it because the city is in crisis, because it's already in crisis, because discord has been settled there for a long time, that all of a sudden the emergence of the Socratic question imposes itself, in an attempt to save what can still be saved?
10:40 And in that case, I compared Socrates to the night watchman, you know, who gets up to say, hey, wake up, or you'll go up in flames in your bed. And the other kills him, bam, because he's given him the displeasure of waking up, to take revenge for the displeasure that's been inflicted. It's true it's not pleasant to be woken up.
11:10 For your humble servant, no less than for any one of you. We're attached to our things. We have an interest, as Freud says, in our investments, in our errors, etc. But so, it's not pleasant to wake up, because we're being questioned. But still, maybe it's better—that's all that needs weighing. I don't have the answer. But I'll come back to the source of the question that means we philosophize today in crisis, as at the origin, as in the principle.
Marx, Nietzsche, Freud outside philosophy 11:44 Namely: is it that the drawbacks that can arise from the fact that we ask questions, we reflect, as Merleau-Ponty says, that we start giving reasons—other reasons come to oppose them, and respect disappears. That's why in extremely structured institutions, like the Church and the army—I think that's where, that's the second time I've cited Freud tonight, it's a coincidence, but let me note, small parenthesis, I'm not losing my thread, don't worry—I've been in the Church and the army, far from it.
12:15 I recall all the same that the three great events in the history of thought, subsequent to the closure that Hegel in fact wanted, in short, to the end of philosophy as it appears at the end of the 18th century, at the beginning of the 19th, at the proclaimed end of philosophy—proof that it's not the end of thought—the three great events, in chronological order, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, those who have spilled the most ink, that's not a value judgment, since then, are each of the three situated outside philosophy.
12:50 This is a reminder I'm making in passing: the young Marx writes The Poverty of Philosophy, if you recall, I'm not making it up. Freud is a doctor, he never claimed to be a philosopher; on the contrary, he happens to unearth in philosophical stances or positions elements that seem familiar to him in his bestiary, that of the unconscious, or in his theater, as you like. Oedipus isn't a beast, after all.
13:21 And as for Nietzsche, he always said—he was rather mocking toward philosophers—philosophy, for him, is a set of plays on words, isn't it? He likes to quote Molière, and not just any Molière, but the one who, in The Imaginary Invalid, has that question—some of you probably know this passage, not only in Molière but in Nietzsche quoting Molière—namely, to the question (you know what Molière thought of the doctors of his time, he wasn't entirely wrong, you know they'd bleed you the moment you had a cold, so they were often charlatans, and often, in ignorance, the fullness of the word comes to fill the emptiness of the thing), he would answer in Latin—when they had no scientific explanation, they'd answer in Latin—so they were asked, why does opium make you sleep?
14:10 An observation known since antiquity: opium, drunk, opiates, is a hypnotic—and the doctors answer, quia est in eo virtus dormitiva, because there is in it a dormitive virtue. For Nietzsche, that sums up pretty well the philosophical way of proceeding, doesn't it? You answer with a tautology—what does "dormitive virtue" mean? It means there's something in opium that makes you sleep. So why does it make you sleep? Because there's something in it that makes you sleep—well, we've really gotten somewhere. Why does the car move? Because in it there's a motive faculty.
14:42 You're laughing, you're laughing, and you're right, Molière is made for that. I had a literature teacher once—it was his pet peeve—every time we used the word "genius," when you're a teenager, he'd cross it out and say, that's enough, a genius, Molière. There you go. I'll leave it at that, but all the same. And so Nietzsche, you see, reminds us he's a philologist, he studies languages, and therefore their rhetorical devices.
15:12 Tautology is a figure of rhetoric after all. And above all, Nietzsche would have been very amused by the wave of Nietzscheanism that has been obscenely flooding contemporary thought for the past 40 years, or ideology, in the most reactionary forms of contemporary ideology, in the thought—bo, bo, bo, as I call it. Bourgeois, bohemian, Buddhist, and even bonobo, after all. Yes, there's a lot of bonobo-ism in reactions to the terrorist attacks. I'll come back to that.
15:44 Yes, I speak of obscenity, because after all, Nietzsche, poor old man, paid for it in person. When he collapsed in Turin, you know, when he embraces that mistreated horse, when he crumples in the street and the psychiatrists get involved and it's the beginning of the end, madness declares itself in Turin over a mistreated horse—he gives it a big smooch. He, who throughout his entire body of work, had said that the anti-value par excellence, the least Nietzschean value, is pity. A pathetic figure, poor Nietzsche, isn't it?
16:15 And now they've made him into a demystifier, a stripper-away-of-illusions, etc. Well, I have a lot of tenderness, of affection for him, but still, I'll quote him—there, so as not to talk behind his back, you have a long poem in the middle of Zarathustra that has a refrain, a rondo, Nietzsche knows his music well—better to let him speak rather than speak in his place. And this refrain is, addressed to himself: you, friend of truth, friend of wisdom—she is not in translation, meaning philosophia, strictly—you, the philosopher, come now, full stop, nothing but a fool, nothing but a poet.
16:51 So, Nietzsche didn't have this pretension now attributed to him of being the master thinker of philosophers. I'll close this rather long parenthesis on Nietzsche, which was necessary because he takes up a lot of space—well, a pseudo-Nietzsche takes up a lot of space, and above all takes the place of the real, poor Nietzsche, who is far more interesting. In contemporary ideology, and in disorder, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Onfray, I mean—they agree on nothing except that they're all hyper-Nietzschean, which is strange.
The Church and the army; the origin of words 17:23 And so these three, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, situate themselves outside philosophy. So, yes, Freud pointed out that the Church and the army—I'm not losing my thread—he studied these two crowds. It's not his field. He's a psychiatrist by training, etc. He allowed himself to extrapolate a bit from his experience. He makes hypotheses. He's very cautious. He's very humble. When he strays from his own domain, his domain of competence—we'd say today, on résumés—he's very humble.
17:55 He says, what I'm saying from here on is purely speculative. He says, I'm not at all sure. And then, often, he backtracks. I like his way of proceeding, which is not at all dogmatic. So, with risk-taking and course corrections. Or on the contrary, sometimes he digs in. And there, two crowds without women, the Church and the army. Reread that text. It's an admirable text. Yes, in strongly structured institutions, it's obvious that any questioning—I come back to my point about the emergence of philosophy—any questioning of everyday certainties is a bit more perilous.
18:35 Isn't that so? The more structured the institution, the more subversive its questioning is, in the etymological sense, vertere, turned upside-down. You know, like a sweater you turn inside out, like a glove. It's worse than a wound, that. Like that, you turn it. It's the same sense found in "revolution," with the fact that the origin is astronomical, all the same. What is below is above, and what is above is below.
19:05 The revolution of the stars. The revolution of the moon around the Earth. That's the etymological sense. It's always interesting to see where a word comes from. You'll notice we've talked quite a bit tonight about words and language. It's always interesting, when you get tangled up in labyrinths of abstraction and no longer know quite where you stand, to think about what the original field of the word you're using is. Does it come from agriculture, from astronomy, from law, from military language? I'm thinking of the events in Mali tonight.
19:36 Now, Mali—I used to work quite a bit overseas, like other times. It's one of the "pays du champ" [countries of the field]. That's how they're referred to. Some of you may know this expression, "pays du champ." And there you go. When you're a cooperant, for example, in Côte d'Ivoire, at Easter break, you cannot go, regardless of today's events, it's always been so, in your status, in your contract, you cannot go to Burkina Faso without asking permission from the French embassy, because you're in "the field."
20:07 So we thought a lot about it—what are the "pays du champ"? Is it the francophone countries? No, because there are countries—Canada, francophone—that's not a "pays du champ." You can't send a cooperant there by plane. So it's... or Belgium? So it's... The former colonies, that's closer, it almost matches, but no, because Sierra Leone, which was a former English colony, never a French colony, is now part of "the field." I don't know what that means. I know the list of countries concerned.
20:38 Basically, the countries concerned by development aid, those supposedly unable to manage without me, without you, without us. I've never seen one country help another become its competitor, but we'll talk about that another time. I've never understood development aid. Already, already, the French, Germans, English are tearing each other apart commercially—I'll say Spanish too—over who's going to sell its trains, its nuclear plants, its stuff, its cars. Now you want us to help whom? Nigeria get into the game? No, that doesn't work.
21:09 What's this hiding, still? It's been going on a long time. The track record isn't cheerful. Well, that's not our subject. Still, the metaphor is military, "the field." You see the origin—we can clearly see these countries were originally the object of an invasion, something like that. So, it's true, I'm not against it—when you're over there, you should have a certain duty of restraint, speak of your country differently than when you're at home in France. I'm not disputing the principle. But there you go, it's always worth remembering the original domain of the term you're using.
Beyond misunderstanding: the Athenian crisis 21:44 So, there you go, I'm really situating the problem in terms of misunderstanding for now. Let me clarify again that it's not entirely satisfying—it's a misunderstanding because there's a slight contingent, accidental side to it, namely: ah, if only they'd really talked it over, they would have understood that Socrates, if he woke them up, if he exposed them to the displeasure of having to wake up—I stop again, yes, displeasure, I'm not fashionable, philosophy isn't fashionable, there are plenty of fashionable philosophers. But philosophy, as I recall it in its emergence, in its essence, isn't on the side of hedonism—that's the philosophy of pleasure, isn't it?
22:19 Hedonism, that's what it's called, isn't it? It's the official doctrine, at least if you believe France Culture. Listen to France Culture in the morning, won't you? Especially in July, we get Michel Onfray—apparently it's over now, but I read that. But Onfray, we talk about hedonism, that, on the beaches, you can be on the beach, like that, and hear, between the ebb and flow, the voice of Onfray. A seaside philosopher, like that, saying, well yes, I've had enough of unhappy consciousnesses, and romantics, and I don't know what, Christians, sub-somethings.
22:57 Nietzsche knew a thing or two about the pleasure principle himself. You only have to look at his photo next to Lou Salomé, it's telling. I recommend this photo, not the 36 photos of Nietzsche, after all. The photo of Nietzsche at 3000 meters altitude, with a girl who almost married him, that time, he wasn't far from having his wish. And, well yes, we make him out to be the guy of pure enjoyment and all that, fine, but not at 3000 meters altitude in a frock coat, Herr Doktor, next to the future husband, the two of them pulling a little cart, Swiss-style, it's a folkloric thing, for tourists, like that, and with Lou Salomé on top, with her whip, whipping our two sidekicks, Nietzsche and company.
23:49 It's an extraordinary photo, not made up, you have to see it. There. Something bothers me in this story of misunderstanding, because, whatever you say, if there had been an explanation, we wouldn't have shot Socrates, we would have said, ah, good thing you woke us up, common sense, it's true that if we'd kept going like that, we wouldn't have seen that Philip of Macedon was preparing an offensive on Athens and was soon going to devour the city and put the Empire in its place.
24:21 That's really what happened, isn't it? Here we are at what's called the Greek miracle. I don't believe in miracles, always... When you look closely at the genesis of a process, the miracle evaporates. What I mean is that when you look closely, there's a lot of the Orient in Greece. It doesn't spring from nowhere, even if there's a threshold, still. Astarte, that smells of Ishtar, the great Babylonian goddess, whom you can see at the Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, you see what I mean.
24:53 It's fertility that will give us Astarte, our Venus. So there, still, there really was a crisis. Because while the Athenians were discussing what is the beautiful, what is this, what is the good, etc., in the Symposium, between Agathon, Alcibiades and so on, meanwhile the Macedonians were sharpening spears, javelins, swords, blades. There, up north, a bit more barbaric, a bit cruder, up there.
25:23 And they would soon bring everyone into agreement. First Philip, then his son, who would extend it into an Empire, and then it would be picked up by the Roman Empire, and we pass from the city to historical Empire. So Socrates was right to say, watch out, we need to wake up, things are happening, things are happening. We have a model that is sick. And I told you we were going to talk about words. It looks like I'm wandering off into things, not at all.
Depoliticized language and the ostrich policy 25:55 Because the illness, its symptom, and this is the whole genius, in the sense of daemon, not in the sense we'll get to, this is what's decisive about Socrates' initiative, having understood that the illness expresses itself in the words, in the words of the city. M-O-T-S [words]. The ills, M-A-U-X, of the city express themselves in the words, M-O-T-S, of the city. There's a symptomatic side to it.
26:28 I'm struck—I'm making this long introduction because I'm struck by the treatment of the most burning current events. While the political, with a capital P, such as we rarely see, is knocking on our doors, and on our most intimate doors too, you see, we sometimes wonder whether we should go out here or there, we witness, in discussing it, a depoliticized language, more psychological than ever. But yes, we must show that we keep on living as we liked to, that they resent our values.
27:02 Who is this "we"? To me it seemed that French society had deep divisions well before all these events, already. It's hard to bring it back to a common "we." And now it suddenly seems—is it a milieu, the milieu of the "B, B, B"? "B, B, B"? Shall we make it four B's? Bourgeois, bohemian, Buddhist and bonobo. I'm the one adding "Buddhist" and "bonobo." I'll tell you why "Buddhist."
27:32 because you know my anti-eco side, I won't hammer that point. I'm annoying. But, on the Buddhist side, I had the chance to be in Vietnam in 1945. And so, yes, I say this because as a child, around my parents, it was the classic reactionary discourse of the expatriate world of the time. We gave them hospitals, schools. Anyway. And I often heard this, as a kid, I often heard: the Vietnamese, they're not good, they don't like us, they're nationalists.
28:05 This is before the American war in Vietnam. It was just at the beginning of the so-called Indochina war with the French. You see, I'm placing this in context a bit. They don't like us, they are... I'm not deciding the substance of it, maybe it's nothing. Whereas the Cambodians, they're gentle, they're Buddhist, they're nice—one of the biggest genocides of the postwar era, a million and a half dead. Those weren't the Vietnamese reds, that was the Khmer Rouge. I'm wary of... I'm wary. I don't know, everyone says he's nice, everyone says he's kind, and our habits and our values.
28:38 Our values. We share our values with the boss of the West, that's the United States, right? It's not among my values to put an innocent 14-year-old in the electric chair. Well, still, they're not yours either, I know. Most European countries have abolished the death penalty. I don't know, it's a personal game. There are things I admire about the United States. I don't feed on American stuff, you can see that. There are people on the right, you eat American. I eat NATO. Well, same thing. Sometimes it's linked. Let's say it's the flagship. But still, there are excellent things about the United States.
29:09 I'd like to see it at home. But there are also counter-values. And suddenly, we'd have homogeneous values. I wouldn't want the gravity of the situation to be monopolized by a milieu that, more than ever, practices the politics of the ostrich ["autruiche"]. The pun isn't mine. I wish it were. It's not bad. It's Lacan, you can bet on it. That's his specialty, wordplay.
29:40 Lacan speaks of the politics of the "autruiche" [ostrich/Austria pun] when consciousness wants to know nothing. Total denial. Because it's the politics of the ostrich, as you'd guess, you know, of which it's said that when it's in danger, it puts its head in—so you can no longer put anything past it. So, a tactic I don't recommend. But it's also about the relation to the other ["autrui"]. The ostrich, but also the other. And of course, Austria, homeland of the founder of psychoanalysis. So it's a triple pun. Not bad.
"What do you call?": laxism, failure and crisis 30:10 There. The politics of the ostrich is more fashionable than ever, isn't it? That is, it consists of continuing, more than ever, the discourse that preceded the events shaking us, events which are nonetheless the most glaring refutation of everything we'd heard up to then. If I were in Russia, I'm not at all sure I'd vote for Putin. I'm speaking freely with you. Not at all sure. But what is sure is that it wasn't Putin who came and sprayed people at the cafés in the 10th arrondissement. Yet the danger, that was supposedly him, not so long ago.
30:40 He was the threat above all. Ah, the Russian threat. And worse, Bashar al-Assad. We always say the full name, first and last, Bashar al-Assad. We personalize it. Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Gaddafi. Meanwhile there are these anonymous people at the head of great trusts—Anglo-this, American, German, French, whatever you like—whose very names we don't even know, and who run the world with far more power and efficiency than Bashar al-Assad, believe me. There. To live happily, let's live hidden, and not lie down.
31:15 There. So, you see, once again, the ills of the city express themselves in the words of the city. And I pointed out, at the very beginning of our workshop—which does have the form of an initiation into philosophy, or a reinitialization, to speak like computers, for those who've already done it before—in a perhaps more radical way, since let me remind you that the fundamental Socratic question is not "what is it" between us, but "what do you call...?"
31:45 Thank you. Ah, it's good to hear an echo. "What do you call...?" Yes, because "what is the being of the thing" already assumes it's given. Whereas "what do you call...?" is truly the real starting point. That is, for now, I only have a word circulating between us. Who knows if it corresponds to something that exists. We often hear now that we've been lax with the terrorists. Do you hear that word? We hear it all the time. Lax—the proof is that a law was just passed.
32:17 Careful. I don't know if it will be used for terrorists, but anyway, just in case there are social riots—because, hey, not so long ago we were only talking about economic and social crisis. We don't talk about it anymore. That's already something gained. Thanks, terrorists. The day there are riots, we'll have a whole apparatus ready. But well, we're not there yet. It's no accident that this is the fifteenth reinforcement of the law tightening repression. Still, in a matter of a few years, I should say. You have to keep up.
32:47 Even though I'm more attached to security than anyone would believe. But still, we hear talk of laxism. You see? So the word itself, if I analyze it, if I take it seriously, means that these are people with good intentions, but who aren't serious, who have relaxed their vigilance regarding the dangers threatening us. That's laxism. As they say, Jospin failed. Remember Jospin? He failed.
33:18 What does that imply in both cases? It implies that the aim pursued by those concerned—those who were lax, or Jospin—their aim is the right one. But unfortunately, they failed at achieving it. Isn't that so? But I'm not sure. Maybe we could say Jospin succeeded. After all, it was under Jospin that there was the most privatization, the most liberalization of the economy. Maybe that's the historical function of the Socialist Party.
33:48 What do you want me to say? It's a hypothesis. Of social democracy in general, in the Socialist Party, there's everything you like, even people who criticize that side of it. I'm not a politician. There are excellent people. But still, we can say: nice job, Mr. Jospin. Nice job. Yes indeed, it's been measured. I mean, a right-wing government could never—Giscard d'Estaing pinching diamonds with his pinky raised while drinking tea—he can't get certain things through.
34:21 He's too clearly identified as right-wing. But a social democrat can do it. There. So let me remind you that when the last upsurge that could have opposed Hitler in the German streets occurred, when the Nazi party's vote share kept swelling and the centrist voices were collapsing, as often happens in a crisis. I don't know if some of you have already seen these models in what's called political science—which I'm not criticizing, I'm not being ironic.
34:54 But there are curves, you know. There's the Gaussian curve, the most common curve, the normal curve as it's also called, right? Because it's like in pétanque, right? Balls that land 50 meters from the jack are quite rare, balls that touch the jack are quite rare, most are in the middle, as they say, the Gaussian curve. So most people vote roughly center-left, center-right, and then there are 2 or 3% who are extreme right. I can cut this—that's up to me.
35:26 We cut Mozart, the digital Mozart, we can win. So, it was—I lost my thread. The Gaussian curve, thank you. For me it was like that almost all through my youth, the extreme right made up 2%, I don't know, the extreme left, there were movements, Van Aert, Trotskyists, I don't know, the Maoists weren't showing up yet. It came to about 1.5%, and then a large majority sat between the two.
35:59 Then it approached the center, and the curve had the shape of a Ballon d'Alsace, you know, that's an eroded mountain, not the Alps, it's pot-bellied. And then, in times of crisis, look, I'm in the 1930s in Germany, the center collapses and it becomes a U-shaped curve, and that's more worrying. Yes, U-shaped, with the extremes recruiting—the National Socialists, and then who beat up the Spartacists in the streets, the German Communist Party—well, it was a Social Democratic Party man who liquidated in the street the two great historic leaders of the German Spartacists, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, a cop-minded man from the Socialist Party who said, I will be "der Bluthund"—
36:44 I will be the bloodhound. So, I'm not joking, I'm being serious today. A situation that speaks to me, in a way, if you will. I say this because things are happening in Bamako. You see, I was thinking of Paris, huh. I remember, I was in Bamako not so long ago, a few years back. With a friend to whom I said that in the most working-class alleys at 2 a.m., she was safer there—well, as a woman, safer as a woman, as a white woman, though the bag could still be tempting to steal, that goes for a man as much as a woman.
37:20 But as a woman, she's less harassed at 2 a.m. in Bamako than on Boulevard Saint-Germain on a Friday night, if anything, I mean. It's true that sub-Saharan Africa, or Black Africa if you will, is one of the most peaceful regions in terms of civil life. I mean, apart from a few big cities where there's always some underworld, like Abidjan, but nothing that compares to the great gangs of Chicago. Anyway. So now we can't even have a drink in Niamey, I don't know, Bamako, soon Ouagadougou.
37:57 That's really extraordinary. Nothing has changed in those countries. It's us who changed, in Libya. We opened the floodgates. Boom! Look at the map. Now nothing stops horror from coming into this region, which was one of the most peaceful in terms of civil life. People deserved credit for being peaceful, because good grief, what they endure materially! The poorest countries in the world, the LDCs, as they say in Brussels, the least developed countries.
Euclid: first statements as demands 38:27 So really, that's not right, Bamako, it sticks in my throat. There. So, is it critique that provokes crisis, or is it because there's a crisis that we must philosophize more than ever? We come back to our question. And if I recall that the answer can only be found by taking into account words—M-O-T-S this time, I'll now set aside the ills, M-A-U-X—it's to make another reminder: I had said that the philosopher finds himself in a strange companionship when grappling with words, because there are two others, not that they compete with him, but who also take reflection on names, on statements, as their object.
39:18 It was the mathematician, originally, and the poet. You can't get more opposite—well, more opposite in common consciousness, since nothing stops a mathematician from writing excellent poems in his spare time, and vice versa. I think of Lautréamont, a great poet, who in a famous text says, I don't know, "severe mathematics"—he must know something about that, a fine tribute to mathematics. There. And I also think of Évariste Galois, you know, that prodigious mathematician who died at what age?
39:48 23, 24, maximum, something like that, in a duel. And who, in his papers, the night before, feverishly, the night before the duel that would be fatal to him—over some love affair that had come along—he stayed up the night before his duel writing down all his research findings, the proof, and it became the source of set theory, the Bible of contemporary mathematics—Évariste Galois, the Rimbaud of mathematics, yes, to draw the parallel, that's what he was called, precocious.
40:20 Yes, indeed, the mathematician, already in relation to language—I'm going to press on this because we're picking up from last year, I can now dig deeper, whereas at the time it would have been a detour, we would have lost the thread. What happened with the appearance of mathematics? I don't mean the origin—at the origin, things get lost, because the origin of mathematics goes well beyond Euclid; the Babylonians were of capital importance, even more than the Egyptians; the Egyptians were more geometers, but in arithmetic the Babylonians went very far, the duodecimal system is excellent, we kept it for measuring time, didn't we?
40:59 It's the sexagesimal system. But what earns Euclid this historical role is that it's the first time someone set out to produce a purely mathematical discourse, that is, independent of any particular practical application, any material aim, and concerned solely with truth, with the validation of the statements put forward. That's what makes it a great epistemological first, one that would found the science we know today.
41:31 Let me remind you that mathematics doesn't need the other sciences in order to exist, whereas the other sciences wouldn't exist without recourse to mathematics. What I've said about the history of mathematics is a bit abstract. You notice there's a back-and-forth between mathematics, physics, all of that, of course. But I mean, theoretically, a mathematician needs his paper, his pencil, and even that's a stretch. Apparently at mathematics conferences you see guys wandering the hotel corridors, off in their own world, daydreaming about the fourteenth root of... It's extraordinary, the power of abstraction.
42:03 So make the most of it while you're young, because we have brilliant mathematicians in the room, since apparently it's the thing that fades fastest, that sharpness. You may have read things about this. You can still be a great physicist at 75, still productive, useful, etc. For a mathematician, maybe because of that abstraction—when you enter active life and have children, it's hard to keep the brain occupied. So what happens with Euclid? Where's the decisive turning point? There are several points.
42:37 I've mentioned a few already, but I'd like to systematize it tonight. First, that everything starts from statements. I said we'd talk about words and language at the beginning, and if not language, then speech—in any case, discourse. That is, in order to state the slightest truth, Euclid needs true statements already given as primitive. These first notions, as they were called at the time, are called sometimes postulate, sometimes axiom, and of course definition.
43:10 Often we start there. And it's from these first notions, taken as given, that one can begin to construct propositions, theorems, etc., whose demonstration will require these primitive statements taken as true from the start. Now, I mentioned the kinds—I stated the kinds of these primitive notions: axiom, postulate, definition.
43:41 Euclid unifies all three under one generic term, he calls them "demands" [requests]. I stressed this last year, and I stress it again tonight. "Demands," because that changes everything. If I say axiom, postulate, I have the subject, me, Euclid, and the object, which is the figure, the triangle on my paper there, or in my head, doesn't matter, or in the sand. So I'll have the slave trace it out, as was done. And, in short, it's the relation of a subject to an object.
44:14 of a subject who speaks to an object that says nothing, that lets itself be described however one likes. A triangle is this, is that—it's not the triangle that will contradict us afterward. It's man who speaks, not things. Whereas when you replace these notions with "demands," then, well, we're no longer addressing things, the notion of demand is addressed no longer to something, but to someone. There is a fundamental democratism in the emergence of mathematics.
44:48 It's no accident that all this appears at the same time: philosophy, mathematics, relative democracy. A quarter free men and three quarters slaves in Athens. But the fact that this society of free men be governed not by the arbitrary will of a chief, a clan, etc., but, curiously, by speech—that is, that the decision be made where speech happens, in Parliament, in the agora, where one is persuaded—of the importance of the clashing of swords between Socrates and the sophists.
45:21 You can clearly see there are stakes in these apparently wordplay-like matters, since it's words that will win out. Do you understand the importance of communication today? That what matters isn't only everything that happens but the way I'm going to twist it. Including me, perhaps without my knowing it—I'll pull it toward my own side, in that style, as I told you before. So the fact that one addresses a "demand" to someone means, for the first time in the history of thought, we definitively leave behind the café du commerce mentality that existed in Athens.
46:02 Believe me, it wasn't about the coffee shop. Though there was lamb, there was everything you could want. But what matters at the café du commerce is that you agree with me. Whereas for the first time what Euclid asks is that we agree with ourselves. Grant me that. After that, everything that follows will either be congruent with what we decided at the outset or will be in contradiction, and in that case we will declare together that it is false — not me arbitrarily.
46:40 Right? So it's important to see this immanence — I do mean the democratism, not just democracy, but the immanence of a truth, right? Since we start from truth. This is a domain where truth is least disputed — geometric, mathematical truth, after all. Isn't that so? That it could only arise through the friction of subjects with one another. What modern philosophy somewhat pompously calls intersubjectivity. Because a demand, once again, is addressed to someone.
Leisure, intellectual labor and the principle of non-contradiction 47:12 I need something, but I ask someone. First point. That's what's revolutionary in Euclid's initiative, beyond even what he himself might have thought of it. Second point. I said earlier that the great, admirable trajectory of pre-Euclidean mathematics, whether Mesopotamian arithmetic or Egyptian geometry, had nonetheless arrived at the number pi.
47:47 It was a bit crude compared to now — I don't mean thousands of decimal places, I mean it was 3.18 or something like that. Still, not bad. Clever. It was clever, because the problem with the number pi is that the phrase has stuck: when we want to express an insurmountable difficulty, we say "squaring the circle." We still say it today. What does that mean? It means it has always been a challenge to measure the curved by the straight.
48:18 Take a ruler and measure your perfectly round coin. You'll see what I mean. Difficult. It's not about measuring the curve. It's maddening. The curve and the straight are not congruent. The straight is ortho. Orthodoxy. The curve is feminine. That's not me — it's in the tradition. Women are sinuous. So man is all straight. Man votes on the agora in broad daylight. Whereas Antigone invokes the gods of the underworld.
48:48 That's obscure. It's an admirable passage. Sophocles. How did they do it? A column. It's round. So I wrap a string around the column. Then I unroll the string and all I have left to do is measure a straight line with a straight line.
49:19 And there it is. A segment with a segment. It's empirical. It's groping, trial and error. I say this not to belittle it — because there the temple had to be built. Time is short. The pharaoh is in a hurry. This isn't pure research. There's an aim. To the point that Aristotle declares, on this subject, regarding the emergence of mathematics in Egypt — he knows very well what he owes them — he says this sentence that Hegel greatly appreciated because it is pre-sociological.
49:50 Sociology didn't exist in Hegel's time. But still, you'll understand what I mean. Hegel does introduce history as constitutive of our thought. And Aristotle says this: it is no accident that mathematics began to develop in Egypt. He means in the East. Because there, the priestly caste enjoyed leisure. And yes, you have to be freed from everyday contingencies — from hunger, from having to catch fish in the Nile with nets, and so on — and from mere survival. You need the comfort of the intellectual.
50:21 That is, of a certain social milieu — of the scribe here. The scribe. You see at the Louvre the admirable image of the crouching scribe with his calm. The imperial official, if you like, in China. So a certain self-possession is already needed to develop research. That's important. The second thing that arises with Euclid: the fact that there is work, but that this work is not that of the cobbler who works the leather to make a sandal.
50:55 And the Greeks had two words for work. Economists know this distinction well. Between praxis — that of the cobbler who works leather and transforms matter, in the proper sense transformed, giving it a form other than the one it had — and chrematistics, for the work I'm doing with you now, and which Euclid did far more rigorously than I in his research, that is, intellectual work which does not transform matter.
51:31 Chrematistics is spelled C-H-R-E-M-A-T-I-S-T-I-C-S. This is the origin of what were called the liberal activities, in the sense of that era of course. Here you see the origin, because it was the privilege of free men, freed from urgent tasks. Aristotle even says somewhere, quite naturally, that after all, if shuttles wove on their own, we wouldn't need slaves.
52:05 The social problem must indeed be linked here to the state of the productive forces, as we'll say later with Marx — if shuttles wove on their own, we wouldn't need slaves. You see a great deal has happened with Euclid. First point: the demand, and the fact that what I ask of you is not to agree with me but to agree with yourself, that is, not to contradict yourself. Since this year I decided we would dig into what was somewhat rushed last year — I recall this goes without saying, you yourselves are the first to bristle when you see a contradiction in an investigation, and so on.
52:44 But it took a long time to make this a fundamental principle of scientific knowledge — to exclude contradiction, particularly in mathematics. It took a long time, it took — we had to wait for the fourth book of Aristotle's Metaphysics, so we had to wait for the fourth century BC, which is quite late when you consider the millennia of civilization that came before in the East, in the Far East — to reach this solemn passage where Aristotle beats around the bush, drags out the pleasure, because he's saying he's fed up with the sophists, the skeptics who make people believe that no true, absolute proposition can be stated. There is, all the same, something no one can deny — the first notion everyone must agree on. He goes on for four pages saying he's going to state it — so we wait for it, and here it is, he says it, and here it is — so I won't do as he does, I'll tell you right away: two contradictory attributes — old, young, cold, hot — two contradictory attributes cannot belong at the same time to the same subject in the same respect. Full stop. There is the so-called principle of identity or non-contradiction, which had been felt
53:54 for millennia but which is finally made explicit in all its rigor, because there are three occurrences of the word "same." Indeed, if I say Socrates is young, Socrates is old, that's not contradictory — he can be young at 8 and old at 60. So it has to be at the same time — two opposite attributes cannot belong at the same time — then, to the same subject — we do need to be talking about Socrates each time, otherwise there'd be opportunism — and in the same respect — because you could very well say Socrates is old in his arteries but young in temperament, just look at how he turned Alcibiades' head, that's what I mean, and how he stays up later than we do at the banquet, how he outlasts the ladies at the banquet — he's the one who puts everyone else to sleep in the end, and then leaves at dawn silently, on tiptoe, past his sleeping companions — he's not going to rest. It's in Plato — an artist of thought, Plato, the great stage director. So with Euclid we obtain this principle of identity, if you want to put it positively,
Galileo and the principle of inertia 55:04 or of non-contradiction, it comes to the same thing if you want to put it negatively. Good question: historically, the Euclidean revolution preceded the Socratic emergence of philosophy. It's interesting to see that in the history of thought — I'm now using a broader term, one that includes the history of physics and of economic thought as much as of metaphysics or religious reflection — in the history of thought it's interesting to see that the great moments, the fundamental articulations that punctuate the stages of philosophical history, for example, immediately follow a revolution that has just occurred in the scientific domain. I've just given the first example. There can't be one before, by definition, by hypothesis, since the first system that has come down to us is that of Plato, where Socrates is related — Socrates's speech is related in writing by Plato. It's true Socrates didn't write. So just before, there had just occurred
56:14 around the person of Euclid — is it one individual, is it a team, we're still wondering — there had just occurred, spreading like wildfire, a rather immediate bestseller success, we'd say today, the famous Elements of Euclid, which you can still find today in their original version, with an excellent critical apparatus, published by Éditions Hermann — Éditions Hermann, on rue de la Sorbonne, has an excellent epistemic catalogue. Second example: I'll take the science which — if I take the history of the sciences in order of their entrance on stage, so to speak, I've just spoken of the entrance of mathematics, first things first — we'll have to wait 15 centuries, which is quite long, for the next one after mathematics to emerge, namely physics. These are very broad notions — when I say mathematics I include all mathematical disciplines, I don't distinguish topology, arithmetic, number theory, etc., I know nothing about it,
57:24 I see it from a distance — and physics likewise, in a very broad sense that even includes two thirds of biology if you look closely, but it also includes chemistry, biochemistry, biomechanics — an interesting discipline. And this arises not with Euclid but with Galileo. There too there's a total revolution. What we now retain in popular imagery — it's odd, sometimes it seems that all one needs to understand of the history of science is very curious — we have the impression, for instance, that Newton didn't arrive at that prodigious extension of our thought that was the theory of universal gravitation through anything more than a sentence and a half. I sum up all the motions of the universe known at the time, and it still holds now except when you get too close to the speed of light: that all bodies attract each other in direct proportion to their mass and in inverse proportion to the square of their distance. Full stop. We have the impression that to arrive at this discovery all you need to do is nap in the shade of an apple tree and watch apples fall. That's how science gets told — I'm barely exaggerating this tale.
58:38 To my mind it's in Normandy — it's a Norman who supposedly figured out universal gravitation before anyone else — well, someone would tell me it was Normans who understood it, in England you never know, so it must be that. There were plenty of equations in Newton's head for a falling apple to inspire such reflections, you understand — you know the story of all the mathematical reasoning since Euclid, he was himself the greatest mathematician of his time, along with Leibniz all the same. So what happens with Galileo? It's not just the popular image that the earth is round rather than that it moves rather than being still — eppur si muove, and yet it turns — it's not just all that, it's everything about it that was scandalous compared to earlier thought: the fact of saying that in the heavenly bodies there are flaws — well, what were judged flaws, because they were supposed to be perfect, so the slightest thing in them, mountains, roughness on the moon, right, that was scandalous, they were gods, gods have no roughness, they have no zones of shadow, no hollows and valleys, no negative — not yet feminine, that, Mr. Galileo — and there were even those who, when he told them
59:48 look through your telescopes, look — said, yes but there's a trick in your telescope, that's how it is, there's a trick. Even at the Tower of Pisa — he took them to the Tower of Pisa, it's practical, the Tower of Pisa, because you could put observers, skeptics, on every floor, even though it's a bit tilted, and you see him climb all the way to the top, he drops the lead ball and the down-feather ball — no wait, taking care all the same to give the feather ball a little spherical shape, he's no fool — to show that they'll arrive at the bottom at the same time. Whereas they said, no, the lead will arrive first, lead falls faster — so, each floor at the same time, all the way down, at the same time. And well, no — they said he'd cheated. It's terrible, and yet it's terrible. So the heavens are not incorruptible. And above all Galileo, in famous passages — this has been studied, I refer you to those interested in the admirable Galilean Studies of Alexandre Koyré, one of our greatest epistemologists, right in the immediate pre-war period, and above all the developments given afterward by the postwar generation, Koyré, K-O-Y-R-E, Alexandre Koyré, Galilean Studies among other magnificent works, where he shows very well that there are all sorts of texts.
1:00:58 It's written in the form of a dialogue, somewhat inspired by Plato at the time — there's a very fine text, if you're interested, to read Galileo directly: La cena delle ceneri, The Ash Wednesday Supper, where he discusses with those who dispute his system. So for me, as long as there isn't a mathematical equation validating my observations, I'm not satisfied — that's what Galileo says. You see, he's very much a theorist in some sense, not merely an experimenter, even though he took care to put soap on his strings and his pendulums to eliminate friction — he had both qualities. Galileo's great revolution above all, and one that will de-religiosize — if I may coin a barbarism — the world, so to speak, or at least desacralize it, is his principle of inertia. Before him, people thought there were spontaneous forces — worms sprang up spontaneously from manure, there are all sorts of things about magic in the Grand Albert, the manual of magic of the time, these words of yesteryear — magic is always the same trick. If you leave manure lying around long enough, automatically worms will spring up.
1:02:08 There's no genesis — this is called spontaneous generation, if you know your history of mentalities, spontaneous generation, the opposite of scientific thought. He says there is no fact without a cause. So what does Galileo say? He says a body subject to no force is either at rest or animated by uniform motion, which for him amounts strictly to the same thing as rest — indeed, when it's a uniform motion, imagine a train without friction over a long distance, I'm thinking of the Trans-Siberian, if there were no gaps between the rails, no jolts, so to speak — it's like two good husbands who write to their wives every day on the Trans-Siberian saying "my darling, I write to you every day from the same place." The wives don't understand, because one time the letter arrives from Khabarovsk, another time from Sverdlovsk, another from Novosibirsk — what does "from the same place" mean? Well yes, on the Trans-Siberian, as in a plane at cruising speed, as they say, not at takeoff or landing, when it moves a bit — and when there's no turbulence, in fact that's the advertisement for airlines, a pencil stands upright on the little tray, etc. It means that when everything moves at the same speed, there's no difference at all from being at rest. That's what Galileo
1:03:18 discovers — go figure whether we're moving or at rest, it's the same thing when everything goes at the same speed. That's inertia. That's rest — it's not that nothing moves, but that everything moves at the same speed. You see, this forces us to completely rethink our everyday thinking. Scientific thought — most of us aren't even at Galileo's level, I'm not talking about Einstein or quantum theory, let's not dream — we're not even at Galileo's level, even science students, forgive me for saying so, they know very well that all that is nonsense, but spontaneously, in everyday life, they have the impression that a car is smiling at them — some cars, others scowl with their headlights, it's true, me too, me first. Children think a lizard is ugly and a little bear cub is cute. Reality is terribly different — a bear will rip your head off with one careless swipe of its claw, nonchalantly, whereas the poor lizard runs away. These are the things La Fontaine writes about — he wouldn't put it quite like that, but yes. So that's Galileo — it's enormous, this desacralization of the world, I'll say. Now, he doesn't formulate the principle of inertia — well, actually he does say it,
Descartes, Luther and the subject who founds certainty 1:04:28 that's what I mean, but it's Descartes who will formulate it exactly as I just stated it, that is, this scientific revolution forces philosophical thought to redeploy itself, to be in crisis. First there's the whole of scholasticism, the thought that reigned throughout the Middle Ages, that is, outside the Church, no salvation — which means that Luther's greatest political act was to translate the Bible into German. It's the greatest political act because, until then, to know what John, Luke, Jesus had said, you had to go through an intermediary, through a minister of God, an ambassador of God, a representative — a Botschafter — outside the church, no salvation. Whereas now everyday German, the little craftsman who knew how to read and write — there were quite a few by then, at the Renaissance it's starting a bit — you could directly say, wait a minute, is that really what it says in the Bible? That can't be, the priest never told us that it's harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven
1:05:38 than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle — it's in the Gospel, I didn't make it up. You know what the Jesuits said about it in the seventeenth century? The clever Jesuits, great intellectuals — they understood that against the Protestants, against the Reformation, they had to fight with intelligence, not like the old conservatives of the wars of religion. People understood you couldn't destroy ideas with bayonets, so they said, you have to know how to interpret, you have to be a linguist. If you look closely, at the Hebrew term — going from etymology to etymology — what's called the eye of a needle turned out to become as wide as a gateway through which three pharaonic chariots could pass abreast. And that's where the word "casuistry" comes from — the Jesuits were champions of case-by-case study, casuistry — you have to take things case by case. This is what made Pascal, who was a radical Christian, resent them so much all the same — hell for all those half-sinners, bold sinners will attain salvation, says Pascal, it's magnificent that — half-sinners in hell.
1:06:49 So, it's Descartes who finally forces, who imposes on philosophy an entirely new course, right, where it's the thought of the subject that's going to found all certainties — after all, this is true only insofar as I, you, he, she, we recognize it as such, it cannot be imposed from outside, neither by nature, nor by men, nor by God, nor by the Church. My thought has to validate it, consent to it, it has to pass through the sieve of my thought — cogito — oh, it's the first person singular, even if it's not François-René Descartes with a beauty mark, right there, the gentle Poitevin gentleman who at that moment stands for any man who follows this path, who takes up the position of the cogito. But still, you see how philosophy, each time — and I'll take a third example, right — when the historical sciences, that's perhaps the best term rather than social sciences, human sciences, an eternal debate, you know there's
The institution counters instinct 1:07:59 the EHESS, right — I won't decide, because in my view there can't be good answers to badly posed questions. But it's Marx who says somewhere that mystification lies not in the answers but in the way problems are posed. And the so-called historical sciences, that is, those whose object is things that did not exist before man initiated history and thereby introduced into being something that was not foreseen in purely natural programs — the natural program provides, as with Newton, who understood natural law well: when water comes down from the mountain it seeks the center of the earth, like everything that falls, right, it flows downward, that's what I'm saying, and then depending on the accidents of the terrain, it flows quickly like a torrent or it meanders if it's on a plain, forming marshes and so on, which is why everything ends up a bit muddy and marshy at estuaries. That's true for nature. But from the Neolithic on, humans saw that it was
1:09:09 good for fishing, a fish, it was good, building little dams with stones. That wasn't foreseen, building dams, doing all that. So I mean, history begins when suddenly the natural program is contradicted. The natural program says you must eat to live — yes, well no, I'm fasting for Lent or Ramadan — well, I don't care, I don't believe in God, what nonsense is this — well yes, but since everyone else is there, you're not going to wolf down the meal, you're going to say at the table, please, madam, help yourself first, even though you're starving and dying to dive in, you're going to say please, help yourself first, because you don't want to appear the boor that you're not — there, you see, there's my little struggle for recognition, as Hegel would say. You see, I'm not an animal either. So you see why I take this example, because here again I'm calling words into question — when we say technology extends nature, the tool extends the organ, I have my hand and the tool extends it — no, no, that's like Jospin earlier, it's a trap. To extend means to go in the same direction but further, yes or no? Whereas here we're going in the opposite direction.
1:10:19 We're not going in the same direction — there's an impulse telling me, eat, you're hungry, that's the animal. The animal will do everything it can to shorten the time, the portion of time that separates need from its satisfaction, and if that's delayed, it's because of obstacles external to it that irritate it. Whereas here, it's man who takes it upon himself to delay it: thus sexuality becomes marriage, instinct becomes institution. Those who think institution is an extension of instinct — that's a good one. The Bible says be fruitful and multiply — there's less chance of multiplying under monogamy, you see what I mean, than in the animal world. Put two rabbits in Australia — which is what actually happened historically — there were millions of them a few years later, all incestuous so to speak, coming from the same couple. Thank goodness myxomatosis wiped out a few million, otherwise we couldn't even move around,
1:11:29 it would be overrun with rabbits. So I mean, it's important to look at the most innocent, seemingly unnoticed words here — extend, no, the tool does not extend the organ, the tool counters the organ, often the institution counters the instinct — for stupid reasons, some will say, for excellent reasons, others will say, we're not there yet, we're not deciding, but factually, since we're in scientific discourse, we were looking at how the historical sciences began when they became attentive to this kind of constraint. Besides, the founder of sociology, Durkheim — not of the word, since Auguste Comte already used it, but of the discipline, I believe Durkheim, in what is probably the first text to develop a methodology for the discipline, the famous Rules of Sociological Method, indeed says that what distinguishes social facts among all others — what is it that makes everything that's specifically mine belong to psychology, but as soon as I'm in a stadium I do things I wouldn't do
1:12:39 if I weren't in society — that's something else again, it's properly social. We become more aggressive in a stadium or behind the wheel, like a jerk — whereas I'm normally rather decent and polite, right, and yet behind the wheel suddenly I play the macho and I actually am one. So he says what characterizes social facts among all the others is their coercive aspect — yes, he saw that well, a coercion exerted if only through laughter and mockery — the laughter that a remark or an accent of mine can provoke, judged to sound a bit too rural or wherever it comes from, etc.
1:13:16 So, I mean, it's a way for the group to exert pressure — so, once again, the institution runs counter to instinct. This also brings to mind, still to illustrate this, the first word — the inverse relation of culture to nature, of history to nature, of spirit in German idealism — we come back to all this if we look closely, it's a bit surprising for those who think spirit is a little wisp of smoke, as someone said in the Phaedo — I'll laugh, you'll see why — spirit is smoke. It's Socrates's last dialogue with his disciples, who is soon going to kick the bucket, and the disciples have the friendly cruelty to ask him for his demonstration of the immortality of the soul at the very moment he's about to die — can you imagine, if he fails, how painful that would be. Admirably done, Cyprès. And at one point one of the disciples says, listen, you should start the demonstration over, because I have the impression my soul, like a kind of smoke, will evaporate instead of being immortal. So I say,
1:14:26 we'll start over, says Socrates, but then let's pray to Aeolus that there be no wind that day. So much for spirit as smoke — no. Whereas what Hegel calls spirit in his Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of Spirit — well, what he calls spirit is the tool, look closely at his texts — it's the tool, the institutions, the law. He notes that the first written law, on the stele reproduced at the Louvre — well, visible at the Louvre — the stele showing us the Code of Hammurabi, the first written code that has come down to us historically, from Mesopotamia, right, which seems monstrous to us, Hegel rightly says, that you should cut off a thief's hand — he could have been hanged for it — and he says it was an enormous progress compared to the arbitrariness that had reigned until then, the whim of the prince, of the victor of the battle, etc. There was at least a single text for everyone, etc. Yes, these are stages. So, to show that spirit, unlike that little wisp of smoke, is what he calls the calvary of spirit, the patience and the labor of history, as he says — that's nature becoming culture, becoming spirit, that's how it is, call it what you like, I have no superstition
1:15:36 for the moment about these statements, since we're here to call them into question and to see a bit what they mean and what we make them say, especially — I see you attentive to the inversion they produce with respect to the properly natural order. I think this will be my last illustration, this text I often quote because it is decisive, in the Social Contract, right, at the point where Rousseau alludes to the passage from the state of nature to the civil state — there's yet another name for it — he could be an individual who manages on his own in the order of nature, or he could have a mediated, not immediate, relation to being, but mediated by the other, by society, which he calls the civil state, and outside of which he sees no anthropology. If we look closely at this text, he says this: this passage produced in man a very remarkable change, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving
1:16:46 his actions the morality they had previously lacked. Although in this new state he deprives himself of several advantages that he holds from nature — he's no fool, he sees clearly that here you win some and lose some — although he deprives himself in this new state, the civil state, of several advantages he holds from nature, he gains such great ones in return, colon — here they are: his faculties are exercised and developed, we're beginning to understand better what that means in light of what we've just gone through, his ideas are broadened, his feelings — sorry, excuse me — ennobled, we've just seen how sexuality becomes love, marriage, eros, whatever you like, yes — and his whole soul is elevated to such a point that one gets the impression everything has been gained by passing into the civil state and that all problems are solved — whereas Rousseau knows very well they're only beginning. He's not entirely idealistic, since he adds that if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below the condition he came from — how can one be below the animal, below the beast — if the abuses of this condition did not often degrade him below the one he came from,
Helen Keller and the symbolic order 1:17:57 he ought — see how the moods and tenses become strange, we're in the conditional — he ought to bless without ceasing the happy moment that tore him forever from the state of nature and turned him, from a stupid and limited animal, into an intelligent being and a man. That's Rousseau's version, which isn't widely circulated, and it's not taken from a letter to his grandmother but from a major text. I said this shows up at the level of words — you see everything I've been saying — already our relation to things is mediated by words, basically from the moment we're born, even though there's a stage between the moment we're born and the moment we speak, a stage called infancy, meaning that which has not yet arrived — the phase, sorry — infancy precisely means before the phase of speech. It's significant. I have no superstitious attachment to auditory speech, I know I'm passionate about music, I'm not the only one here, but there can be other modes of communication than through the ear. You all know the admirable, extraordinary case of Helen Keller, I don't know if you've heard of it,
1:19:07 maybe, maybe not, it's been a generation — she's a young girl who was born deaf, dumb, blind, poor kid, deaf, dumb, blind, badly off to a poor start — she ended her life well, she taught at university, and so on. Good grief, she was an animal at the start. Do you know what saved her? Does anyone know the story, perhaps? No?
1:19:37 Helen Keller — Keller like a cellar, no — it was the love, not motherly love, but the love of a servant. Every time she asked for water, like an animal, that's a need, there was no human being there yet, before giving it to her, the servant would take her finger and trace a circle in the sink basin, so that the need for water would be associated with a symbol, a convention, a relation to the other. It's extraordinary, and from there she was able to enter into communication, and afterward she recounted her life in books. It's truly extraordinary. So you look into Helen Keller — this is no longer, she's not a philosopher, not an artist, not a scholar, it's a testament in the etymological sense, that is, a testimony. So, to put it a bit more learnedly, I'd say what this servant sanctions is access to the symbolic order, as they say on the side
1:20:47 of the advanced psychoanalysts, access to the symbolic order — in Lacan it's the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic that comes to structure all this. And I insist a bit on the symbolic because it's the least well-known aspect for those familiar with the hard sciences, and which would never have gotten anywhere without the symbolic order — x, y, equals, all of that is a code. Hence the importance of the symbol in anthropology, right, and the important thing here — I take the example of Helen Keller to show that it's not just language in the auditory sense, with vibrations in the air, but every form, as I said earlier, of intersubjectivity — that I as a subject am not condemned to remain in relation only to objects, which the mole or the mosquito can do just as well — the mosquito senses a prey, senses sugar, senses your blood, senses thin skin — there, the animal has consciousness, it doesn't have self-consciousness but it has consciousness
1:21:57 look at a dog's nose — a prodigiously sharpened consciousness of everything around it, a mobility far superior to ours in many respects, at least on the olfactory point. So that's the relation to things, and then there's the relation to others, which presupposes the symbolic order. I say "a lion," there's no lion here, and immediately you have a representation in your head, whatever it may be, that is, through the word there's this prodigious power that I give presence to what is absent. And finally the word inscribes us in a triangle, that's why I dwell on it, this triangle without which there would be no human order, no cultural order, no historical order, namely: the word designates a thing, for another — we have the totality. Say I say "a glass" — there's me, one, the glass, two, and the person I'm speaking to about it, three — fill this glass for me. So I mean, when I speak, it's to someone, I'm not speaking to the glass, there really are three things, so
Merleau-Ponty: the self, the true, others 1:23:07 the word, language in general, always sits within a triangle where there is the other, the thing, and me — or me, the thing, and the other, in whatever order you like. I say this because in praises of philosophy you see how we find ourselves back — not in this or that particular moment of philosophy, but in the praise of the philosophical discipline itself — a work I like to cite because, when I said that those expecting me to have a brawl, choosing Spinoza against Kant and Kant against Descartes, etc., will be disappointed, since I try instead to make you passionate about the philosophical enterprise itself, embodied by each of these great moments, so to speak, which are constitutive of the philosophical journey, and each one is indispensable, such that you can't skip stages — from the flower to the fruit as from the seed, as it were. There's a case — a little poetic parenthesis — Rilke, the poet, who had noticed that the fig tree does not show its flowers, the fig tree goes straight through, as if all its patience, its sugar, were preparing for that perfection which is its fruit, the fig — it doesn't waste its time flowering like a god.
1:24:18 Entering into the swan, that's admirable — we'll find that among the leaps that couldn't have been taken, but otherwise, in general, there are no stages that can be skipped; you can't just jump like that, skip the seed. So each of these moments in the history of thought — Aristotle's empiricism, rationalism, Plato's idealism, Cartesian mechanism, or the teleology of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, to take a less well-known example — I mean, all necessary stones for the edifice, not just possible but I do say necessary, each one is necessary, exactly as in a well-constituted organism each organ has a function — not necessary, but still, among all this I was pointing out that this was the case with Merleau-Ponty. So there's a text of his, In Praise of Philosophy, which I recommend to you, not long, a lecture given at the Collège de France.
1:25:28 It was to celebrate a jubilee, Bergson's, and I'm telling you this quickly to introduce what this year's seminar was about, as far as the problematic goes — you'll see it brings us back to Socrates. I'm telling you this because not everyone knows it: Bergson was the most fashionable philosopher, let's say, a fetish figure in the most reactionary circles of France in the 1930s. That's not his fault — I have immense respect for anyone whose complexity and subtlety can't be settled just like that in three spoonfuls. I mean, since his thought went against the grain of crude materialism etc., which threatened, coming from the popular classes, he was much admired in the salons. There were ladies — I don't say women, I say ladies out of respect for women — but there were ladies who came saying: Monsieur Bergson, tell us finally today the bottom of things. Bergson says: but madame, why would you want things to have a bottom? So this Bergson, he's so much in line, in certain respects, with — as Merleau-Ponty says — a power ashamed of its own principles...
1:26:38 ...that under Pétain they wanted to award him honors — he's a Jew, Bergson — a power ashamed of its own principles. And Bergson was on the point of converting to Catholicism — I'm reminding you of the context, I'm not bringing anything new, nor precise points of history — he said: my whole trajectory logically led toward converting to Catholicism, but at the last moment I refused, so as not to abandon those who tomorrow will be persecuted. You see, he refuses the honors of a government ashamed of its own principles wanting to bestow them on him, and there he renews the Socratic gesture — a difficult relationship between the philosopher and the city, even when power recognizes him, the philosopher insists that this recognition flow from his own thought. There's no misunderstanding there, it's admirable. And so Merleau-Ponty, in this In Praise of Philosophy which begins with the praise of the philosopher Bergson, who steeps us again in the Socratic wake, gives us this triangle — that's why I'm bringing it up, because I was talking about...
1:27:48 ...the triangle of the word — I, the thing, and the other. They also say: Socrate, starting from Socrates, we understand the philosopher in general — understand, and this is what will distinguish him from the religious person, but also from the scientist. I'm taking very distant things from one another, namely: either it is with others that we go toward the true, or it is not toward the true that we go — there is no solitary truth. Whereas in religious terms, an ascetic alone on the mountain can very well have a relationship to the absolute — I respect that, but that is the religious, mystical moment, it is not the philosophical moment. Either we go toward the true with others, or it is not toward the true that we go, and here is the triangle, here are the three vertices of the triangle: the I, the true, the others. So it's not the I, the thing and the other as in language — it's not just any thing, it's the true. Here: the I, the true, the others. And he says: the problem, or the misfortune if you like, the difficulties begin right there, because it is not enough to be with others...
1:28:58 ...to be in the true — otherwise the true would be found at the corner café, which I don't despise, I quite like it, listen, you need a little of that, there are pleasant moments at the corner café when you discuss who's going to win the match, Marseille or whoever, or something else, or politics, women, same thing, fine — but that's not the place, the place where truth is hunted down, all the same, the place where — I just want to point out, it's good, big, I find, for some, a kind of place to go to the corner café. So: the I, the true, the others, there are the three vertices of the triangle. It's not enough to be with others to be in the true — the others are neither gods nor idols. So let's try a combinatorics: I with the true without the others — I said it, that's mysticism, that's the ascetic, that's the yogi on his mountain, and that I respect, we're not in philosophy, we're far from words moreover...
1:30:08 ...we're in contemplation, in meditation. Or else: I with the others but without the true — you see, each time I take two vertices of the triangle while suppressing a third one. Well, that's the corner café, that's opinion — go on, the corner café, that's it in general, it's opinion, doxa. I with the others but without the true, that's the sophist, that's PR — what matters isn't that it's true etc., it's that the others are convinced that it's true. I recommend a video that stages the sophist and the philosopher, that is, Séguéla facing Clouscard — it's a video that has become a cult classic, apparently, which pleases me somewhat. But there, search for it on Google, you'll certainly find it on YouTube — Clouscard, Séguéla should be enough — you'll see how Séguéla says he is one of the last great poets of today. And well yes — I'm not saying that Wonderbra washes whiter on a lie, I'm saying that Wonderbra washes more beautifully, I add to the act of consuming...
1:31:18 ...which is distressingly banal, I add this share of dream — that's when Clouscard says, it's not dream, with his Toulouse accent, it's cheap trinkets, dream is Tristan, you know, Mr. Séguéla. And there, an angel passes by, because Séguéla is not Tristan, the angel is not a stagehand with a napkin. So it's an old fight between speech that demonstrates — I have nothing against words, but to arrive at truth, the geometric demonstration for example is the opposite of dogmatism: I'm not imposing it on you, you're going to see with me that it's true, if you take the same starting point we'll arrive at the same result. That's demonstration, whose goal is to arrive at truth, that's not sophistry — that's no longer even philosophy, that's geometry. I'll take the opportunity to tell you perhaps the most important thing about the Euclidean revolution, which summarizes the three points but condenses them into one — this time, we are no longer in the order of language. I don't want to develop this too much today, even though I talk a lot about words, because I'll dig into it in several sessions...
Mathematical discourse is not a language; the poet 1:32:28 But y equals f of x is not language — it's discursive, undeniably, it's not intuitive, it's discursive, it separates subject and predicate etc., but it's not language. Algorithms are not words — x equals y etc. is not words. I say this because we abuse it a little, we say the language of advertising, the language of cinema, the language of mathematics — we're entitled to that as a metaphorical title, but otherwise, precisely because there is no metaphor in scientific discourse, it is not a language. I'm not the only one to say so, but linguists of the Prague Circle — I won't try to sound learned — noticed that one of the constitutive functions of language, in what is specific to it compared to the animal world, is the poetic function, not at all in the romantic sense only, but in the sense precisely that there isn't three words of an ordinary-language statement that isn't metaphorical. Take: the day rises — that's a metaphor, to rise...
1:33:38 ...to set — we have the impression that the sun yawns a bit and pulls apart the clouds like sheets, like little crêpes — literally, twilight, little crêpes, yes. Or: you're drilling my eardrum with your screams — that's a metaphor, I don't have a hole in my eardrum that an ENT doctor would find. We spend our time being in metaphor — and that is exactly what mathematics rightly seeks to avoid, mathematics which has no political or moral problem like philosophy, which doesn't ask what must I do, what is the path of wisdom, but seeks knowledge, universality is in things, it wants the objectivity of pure things independent of relations between subjects, and so it takes great care to exclude metaphor so that it's univocal — a bit like what would resemble it, if anything, in language: the driving test, you know, all of you, that when you deviate a bit from the exact wording you get flagged by the examiner, that it must be almost word for word — in short, to this signal must correspond one meaning and one only. So if I say to you 'democracy' I set the whole room...
1:34:48 ...the audience ablaze — if we dig a little into what each person means by democracy or by liberty, I could — well, so this polysemy, as it's called, which is characteristic of ordinary language, the philosopher has no choice, he can't just exclude metaphor like that and do as the mathematician does, because he has a concern for rigor, which is what makes him akin to the mathematician, but he wants this rigor with a tool that isn't made for it — everyday words. That's the strange challenge of philosophy. And I told you earlier that there was a kinship between the philosopher and the mathematician — I've developed that enough — I come back to that of the philosopher and the poet. Mallarmé, in his tomb for Edgar Poe — it's a poetic genre, the 'tomb,' very fashionable at the time, somewhat decadent and symbolist, which Mallarmé favored — it's a tribute, and here he pays tribute to Edgar Poe, this remembrance which begins with those words which have become so famous that even those who don't know Mallarmé don't realize they're his: 'As into himself...'
1:35:58 '...at last eternity changes him,' the poet arouses — yes, because he learned that in Baltimore, where there's this monument to the memory of Poe, who died in the gutter, from alcohol basically — it's a death that helps to understand what follows — there is a block of stone in a somewhat American taste of the period, 'calm block fallen down here from some dark disaster,' as Mallarmé says. And he says very well — since Mallarmé is a bit like the Chinese, I tell you before anything, this whole context — them, that's the other Americans, the crowd, well, I mean, they're not won over to poetry — 'they, like a vile leap of the hydra' — a hydra is a monster with many heads, that's the crowd — 'they, like a vile leap of the hydra, once hearing the angel give a purer sense to the words of the tribe' — that's it, that's the function of the poet, yes, for Mallarmé: to give a purer sense to the words of the tribe, to collective words, to recover their meaning which has been lost, which has been perverted — because pure there...
Analysis of texts, general philosophy and reading of the present 1:37:09 ...there is a moral function of sorts. You see, the philosopher goes back and forth between the need for rigor and univocity, which you find in mathematical discourse, which is not a language, and everyday language, which has a poetic function that shouldn't be left as is either — and the great poets are careful not to leave it as is either. So — what time is it, how much time do we have left? Between 15 and 20 minutes, I'd say. Yes, I'd like to devote those 15 to 20 minutes to asking you questions — I need your answers. I find that last year — this is the self-criticism I'm making — do you agree or not, it's your opinion that matters to me, I'll take your request into account — we didn't do enough textual analysis, that's my opinion. It seems to me that sometimes, faced with the problems we tackle, it would be good to dwell — even for a whole session — on a single text. There's no shortage of them; there are dense texts on which we could spend more than two hours, believe me, and it doesn't matter which moment...
1:38:19 ...of the history of thought is at stake. So I'd like to know what you think about this, if you feel the need — it pleases me to hear it, because, you know, all of you who've studied literature know that these are indeed rather different genres, the essay and the commentary, and the two call to each other reciprocally — I don't privilege one over the other, but what's serious is confusing the two genres. The advantage of commentary is that there's less chance of straying from the subject, because the text keeps bringing you back to it somehow; that's not the case with the essay, you don't notice you're straying — oh no, by the third page you're far from the subject, but far — you're so close to yourself, you're happy, you feel good, but you're far from the subject. So, yes, it's difficult, they're not the same difficulties. So, with your agreement, I've said — texts, not only texts to confirm what I say but also, as I analyzed...
1:39:31 ...earlier, the way of pointing out that Jospin had failed etc. — it could be press articles, it could be — you see, this would be about questioning the expression of reality, that's what matters to us here: why is such a word recurring, and why doesn't that contradict what they were saying the day before, etc. There's this first point. And then, besides, I'd like to share with you a worry I personally have, which is that I live a contradiction in trying to convey to you my passion for philosophical research — a contradiction in that sometimes I'd like to be in pure philosophy, that is — ah, you wanted to arrive discreetly, too late now, hello, it's nice of you to come — and so, in pure philosophy, that is, independently of the results I've reached elsewhere, ahistorically if you prefer, in terms of genre, what the university...
1:40:41 ...would call general philosophy. And sometimes it seems to me that this isn't very honest, because I know full well that the result is that, and so I'm torn between exposing to you the point I've reached — not to impose it, on the contrary, when you expose it you make it more vulnerable, you submit it to discussion. I often think here of the metaphor of deep-sea diving — I don't know if you've experienced this — when I was a kid, I was very disappointed that when you're underwater, bam, you catch a huge fish, and the others will be amazed when they see what I'm bringing back, and then when you bring it up to the surface, it's the mask that acted a bit like a magnifying glass. There are ideas that seem brilliant to us when we keep them to ourselves — I don't know what I'll say last, well, you guys lend it out on TV, but when there's the other in front of you it's never that simple. Well yes, there's the other, you have to get used to it. So I'm a bit torn between the two, and so I thought I'd alternate — no, seriously, I thought about it a lot, it troubled me — that is, I'm going to expose to you...
1:41:53 ...I'll be sometimes in general philosophy, so a bit in Socratic mode as I'm doing today, if you like, and sometimes I'll try to decode the most immediate current events, in historical terms this time, since we're talking about genre, since it happens that I've reached a point of view that's worth what it's worth but can be discussed — that's what we're here for — according to which, as I told you earlier at the start, indeed I hinted at it earlier when I quoted Hegel's famous aphorism from his youthful notebook where he says: you can never be more than your time, but at best you will be your time — that is, the historical present is an insurmountable horizon of our thought. I thought — it's important for the ten minutes we have left — that this inspired in Marx a famous passage, the one about the famous Robinsonades — some of you may be familiar with it, for some of you — let me remind you what it is, I don't know — when Marx sees the way liberals write history: the first men came together...
1:43:03 ...because they thought that together it would be simpler to chase the mammoth, and there they invented — they invented clothing to protect themselves from the cold, as if there weren't clothes in Tahiti, loincloths, well, in short — in short, when they project the free enterprise of the present into the past, the free producers who associate, I don't know — they say these are Robinsonades. That's typical, not of error, but of something much worse than error, illusion — that is, the inversion: we believe we're in the past, and we're in the present, it's the world of free enterprise instituting itself. That's why, when I said you can't be more than your time but at best you'll be your time, to resolve the aporia one must think that we are most of the time — to make this coherent — short of our own contemporaneity, because that is what's difficult to think, that you have every day in the efforts you make, which I salute, to try to find your bearings a little in everything we hear here and there, in everything we see — it's very difficult to think the present, it's so much easier to focus solely on the emergence of the baroque style...
1:44:13 ...in the 17th century, of course, I love that, that's not the point, but there it is — but the present is a bit like the fish from earlier, when you bring it up to the surface. So, I'm going to alternate the two: general philosophy on one hand, because we need to dig into problems that are inherent even to the history of thought and are unavoidable, and other times, in application, take a — I was going to say 'historial' viewpoint, if the word hadn't been misused elsewhere, you see, rather than say historical, because I'm not a historian either, but historial, that is, raise problematics, show that historical genesis resolves the aporias and difficulties we face — restoring the true historical genesis is a way of lifting the difficulties we face. So, I give you the floor — if I've left out some difficulties that came up last year — yes, I have two questions, first about the content, because right before you spoke about a triangle, I, the others, the true, you said we can do this exercise in... and there's a combinatorics you left one aside, which one, go on, go on — so, the others, the true...
Others and the true without the self: madness 1:45:24 ...without me. Ah, I'm delighted, because you'll see why I left it aside — it's because it's serious, all of a sudden. So, the I with the true without the others is mysticism, contemplation; the I with the others without the true is sophistry, PR; and now you're asking me: the others and the true without the I, what is that, which moment is that? Well, there you astonish me — I'm holding on this year — but yes, that's exactly why it's serious: it's madness. There, that doesn't condemn the one who is its object or subject, whichever you prefer. You know I'm fond of a madman named Gérard de Nerval — for me he's my favorite French prose writer, but that's personal, so it's not very important — but still, he says with great humor, he quotes Pascal who said men are mad — Pascal — so necessarily mad, watch out...
1:46:34 Pascal is a great mathematician, when he says 'necessarily' it means that madness is part of anthropology, the way the three angles equaling 180 degrees are part of the essence of the triangle: men are mad, so necessarily mad, that it would be another turn of madness not to be mad. And it's still Nerval who quotes another who says that a German proverb says that whoever wants to see no madmen must go home and break his mirror, and Nerval concludes: his maxims are consoling. So, you see, I take madness extremely seriously. 'I would gladly leave a world where action is not the sister of dream, may I use the sword and perish by the sword,' said Baudelaire, in an admirable poem called 'The Voice,' where he imagines that in his cradle when he was born — his cradle was leaning against the library, as it were — voices were fighting over his attention, it's a nice metaphor, 'I was tall as a folio,' and two voices were competing, the first said: the world is a cake full of sweetness, I can...
1:47:44 '...and your pleasure would then be endless, giving you an appetite of equal size.' The other said: come, come, travel in dreams, we're no longer in the cake, the cake is real, beyond the possible, beyond the known, and that one sang like the wind of the shores. Well, of course — I won't recite the whole poem, it's long — he subscribes to that latter voice, and there begins my remorse, my fate, my wound: since then I laugh at funerals and weep at feasts, and find a suave taste in the bitterest wine, but the voice consoles me and tells me — this is to tell you about your admirable prescience — keep your dreams, the wise have nothing as beautiful as the mad. Even so, yes, I've given a few pledges to madness. So — you did well, I set it aside on purpose, it's more complex — perhaps it is on the madman that the responsibility of the collective rests when the collective is unreasonable, is in crisis completely, when it's the collective that loses its reason. After all, I'll finish on this — after all, one should really meditate on what I'm about to say, because it's a historical fact, not a personal opinion — loudmouths like Hitler in a beer hall, at the Bürgerbräu in Munich...
1:48:54 ...go take a look there, at the beer festival, where he often went even before he was — well before he was chancellor — saying yeah, the Jews, the queers, the communists, all that needs to be liquidated, well, well, you find that in every café in France and Navarre, you don't need to go looking in Germany at two in the morning — I don't know, you find that pretty much everywhere, people not very dangerous because they make the gallery laugh a little, yes or no, nobody takes it seriously. Then suddenly, 80 million — 80%, sorry — of millions of Germans vote for him — that means there's something else going on, that there have been green lights, that there are people at the university saying this Mister Hitler has some common sense, but he brings order, he puts the unions in their place — you see, I'm saying serious things here. So there are moments sometimes, once again, where it's possible — one of the most beautiful texts in the history of all literatures, King Lear, the darkest play by Shakespeare — there are dark plays in Shakespeare, but King Lear, that's terrible, the madness scene on the heath, look closely — King Lear, written by someone who says in Hamlet that there is something...
1:50:04 ...rotten in the state of Denmark. So, Hamlet — me, I play the fool in order to be the only reasonable one in all this. So, this is a case to take into account, a difficult case. Pierre, I wanted less to discuss — I wanted to discuss at the Collège de philosophie a triangle of madness that would have grouped, in chronological order, Hölderlin, Nerval and Nietzsche — three very different forms of madness, but each of the three being a quasi-total expression of modernity, problems that are still ours. So there it is, that's why I'm setting your question aside as far as a solution goes, but it will need to be raised again.
