English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Summary of the season: the specificity of philosophical discourse 0:00 Thank you very much first of all to the most faithful of the faithful who have been here from the very first hour, and to those who kindly join us, who don't know what they're getting into. I thank them all the more because this is the last season, as they say in TV series, of this series of talks entitled, as you know, "Between crises and wars, philosophizing?".
0:31 Last time I gave a rough summary, which is available in the video that came out since then, I believe it was May 6th, something like that. And it's number 2-7 to put it in the usual terms, 2 being the second year and 7 the seventh episode.
1:01 where I had begun—where they will find the main divisions, the principal divisions of that summary, the nature and origin of philosophy by way of introduction, of course, in which I'm not going to re-summarize the summary, but in which I mainly insisted on what is specific to philosophy and not on the internal disputes between philosophers, which matter less here than highlighting—not the originality, that's a worldly concern—but the specificity of philosophical discourse. Not as a value judgment, not that it's more important, that it's better, that it's higher or lower, but in relation to all the discourses with which it can sometimes be confused, across a broad spectrum ranging from scientific discourse to religious discourse, passing through poetic, aesthetic discourse—you see, philosophy touches on a bit of everything. Auguste Comte used to say that the philosopher was the specialist in generalities. It was important to show what makes it so that, despite their internal differences, Plato and Aristotle, Spinoza and Leibniz, I mean,
2:11 Hegel and Kant, etc., and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, have something in common that makes us call them philosophers, rightly or wrongly—there it is—and this since Socrates. That was important. I recalled, in any case, that I centered this specificity around the figure of the patron saint, patron in the sense that Saint Christopher is the patron saint of drivers, as I said last time, that is, Socrates, right? It's odd that this discipline, which has produced more ink spilled than many others—you see, in 2000 years of philosophy, everything that has been written—this discipline was initiated by someone of whom we have no writings, who did not write, who did not teach in state chairs, and who addressed the citizen in the agora, or in the forum, in the street—a metonymy, it could be at the café, there was no café,
3:04 You see the metonymies—neither the drink nor the place where it's drunk, right, but anyway, in public places, sometimes even private ones—see the banquet, and yet the banquet gathers privately at someone's house, at a private individual's, at Agathon's house, but in a public capacity, since it was after all to celebrate the winner of the theatrical Olympic Games. Just a little reminder. So I began with this introduction. Afterward, this introduction showed us that we were going to limp along for a long time, since philosophy has one leg that goes to the left, and another that goes to the right—it's a bit hard to walk like that, you see?
Knowledge and wisdom: what can I know, what must I do? 3:45 Especially when you reach a crossroads, you have to choose. So, namely, it goes toward the side of the scholar, because it wants to know. Like at the CNRS—what does CNRS mean? We seek to know, scientific research, yes or no? That's exactly what it means. Then physicists, chemists, mathematicians, they have knowledge, they possess knowledge, and moreover they still seek to know—that's good. So we have a stretch of road to travel together. As long as philosophia loved sophia—for now I'm not translating it, but everyone knows, well everyone knows, since it's been said, that it has at least two meanings, and these two main ones are knowledge, sophia, and wisdom.
4:24 And in the French language, as in others too—we'll see for the Germanic languages, in which I include English in this case, since "wise" comes from the German "weise"—when we say, oh, he's an old man with great wisdom, that means he knows: the traditional designation of the sage means that he knows plants, he knows stones, he knows animals, he knows mushrooms, he has great wisdom. In everyday language too, we find the fusion of two things that nevertheless have nothing to do with each other in a way. There's the aim of having a discourse that corresponds to what is objective and external—that's the scientific side, if you will, that's knowledge in the strict sense—and wisdom, which has nothing to do with pure knowledge, but which moreover turns toward action: am I doing well or badly, and not true or false—you see the difference right away.
5:11 That's not the physicist's problem, good and evil, all the same. As a man, yes, but not as a physicist. One can hold a physics degree and be a thoroughgoing bastard. A thoroughgoing one too. So, but still, the pursuit of good and evil, in short, of wisdom in the strict sense—life is short, we won't have time to know everything, we won't have time to know how many leaves are on that tree over there, that's annoying, I'm going to die before knowing it. Right? There are priorities to set, you see.
5:42 Knowledge, that's it. I often ask how many grains of sand there are in the Sahara. Maybe it's because I lived in Niger, but wait, as soon as there's a little gust of wind, there's nothing left in our living room, like a grain of sand already. There are tons of useless bits of knowledge, I mean. But still, to know what is useful and useless, you have to ask another question than knowledge—that's wisdom. You see, there we clearly see the difference. It's not just "what can I know," that's Kant, whom we thank for this great service, the two great roads of philosophy: the one that walks toward answering the question "what can I know," and there we share the road with the scientist, and the one that answers the question "what must I do?"
6:28 Do I die before having known everything, but in the meantime, is it my duty to end my grandmother's life, who has an incurable illness? You see, that's not a question of knowledge. And there, it's not the literature scholar or the erudite, the most learned person, who is going to have the best judgment. How to know? There you have it. So, but before moving on to the rest of the introduction, I still recall that what we took away from the introduction is that the philosopher seeks first and foremost to answer the question "what must I do," in which he distinguishes himself from everything scientific, but—and here he draws closer to it—he wants to answer it in the mode of a knowledge, not, as at the corner café, in the mode of opinion.
7:15 There you have it. I've summarized and recalled the essential. That is, with a statement that is valid everywhere and always, and not one that is true on Monday and false on Tuesday, or true in Paris and false in London. After that, the first major part was the philosophy of knowledge. There, we talked a lot about philosophy of science, which is quite normal, since science remains a model in the domain of knowledge strictly speaking, that is, in the search not for what ought to be—that's wisdom, as I just said—but for knowledge, for what is.
7:53 Asking a monkey and a botanist to go toward a banana is not the same relationship. The monkey has a relationship of "ought to be" to the banana. What ought the banana to be? It ought to be swallowed into my stomach, or along the way, give me pleasure on the palate. He's entitled to that, the monkey. Yes, that has nothing to do with knowledge, it's not a cognitive aim, the monkey's. Whereas the botanist—it's carbon, anhydride, I don't know, some chemistry there. The banana is a great chemist. Here, we have a great physicist.
The dogmatist and the skeptic, enemies of the philosopher 8:25 There you have it. But anyway, there must have been CHO in there, it's all organic, I presume, a little bit. There you go. So there, we're no longer in interest, we're no longer... The botanist isn't the one who's interested in the banana for himself. But who wants to say things about the banana that are valid always and everywhere, and not just for himself. So, we walked that stretch with the scientists, answering the question "what can I know," and we tried to see how they got there. Science matters. It matters because, facing our two great enemies—the philosopher always has two great enemies escorting him, from the beginning, who existed before him and escort him, I mean, who were there before Socrates.
9:05 Come on, I'll tell you: it's the dogmatist and his enemy, the skeptic. They can't stand each other, but they're allied against the philosopher, who sends them both packing together. You see. The dogmatist, you know, is the one who, when asked what is beauty, says the Parthenon. He's never left Athens. The skeptic is the one who says, no, look at Hottentot women, who have callipygian buttocks, you see, that has nothing to do with the Venus de Milo. So, your beauty doesn't exist, it's all in your head, everything is relative.
9:35 That's the skeptic. You see. So, there's one who hasn't asked the question of whether we can know, since he already knows. Beauty is the Parthenon. And the other hasn't asked it either, since there is no beauty. Well, you see, both are lazy. And that's essential for the philosopher: research. Both answer the question before asking it. For one, the inquiry is over, he knows beauty. Ah, the Parthenon. Oh, the Venus de Milo. And for the other, it's useless, the inquiry.
10:06 Right? Because there's no truth, there's no such thing. You know them too, they're the ones who act clever. Well, we've seen that the only difference between the two is that one stayed home and the other traveled a bit. But whether you stay home or travel, if you rely only on your eyes, if you use only your eyes to know, you remain in error. One sees only the Parthenon, and the other has seen a bit more, right, of forms of beauty. Until a Socrates comes along, right, who reminds them that when we say "it's beautiful," whether it's the Hottentot saying that of the callipygian woman or the admirer of the Venus de Milo, it means "it pleases me," and if it pleases me, that's because it satisfies a desire.
10:43 If it satisfies a desire, we shouldn't look for the key to beauty outside, with the eyes. And so, no matter the difference in forms, seasons, countries, climates and cultures, what matters is knowing what this desire is that makes me feel a pleasure I call beautiful, which is quite different from the pleasure I get either from eating, or from being satisfied with a tool with which I was able to make a piece of furniture—there you go. A specifically aesthetic pleasure, but one that, insofar as "it pleases me, it's beautiful," pleases me.
11:13 She's beautiful, she pleases me. He's handsome, he pleases me. That's called an implication, mathematically speaking. And if it pleases me, another implication, it's because it satisfies a desire—whether I'm aware of it or not changes nothing about the matter. There you go. So you see the two enemies that precede—hello—that are prior to philosophy, because my dogmatist and my skeptic, you know them, you meet them at the corner café every day—well, maybe you don't go to the corner café, I like it myself, don't think I'm being anti-populist.
11:44 The fashion is for anti-populism, so I take up the defense of the corner café, there's no reason not to, against the wretches who rail against populism and who are threatened—they call populist anything that threatens the status quo, that's the new fashion. Besides, you know, there are now only two theories, the official theory and everything else is conspiracy theory. If you contest the official theory, you're into conspiracy theory. There's nothing left in between, agreed? Except here, you have the right to hold a third opinion, one that is neither that of France 24 and France Culture or Canal Plus, it's the same thing, or TF1, nor either, right, that of...
12:24 those who see the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Jews and all that on the Internet, responsible for all our ills. So, let's insist on this point, you know them, the dogmatist and the skeptic, they were there before philosophy, that's what's called doxa in Greek, to sound clever, opinion. It's a discourse that can be interesting sometimes and can even be very interesting when it... to show off, to seduce, or to complain, whatever, I mean, it has no aim of truth from the start, right, it's rather a truth of power, of exerting influence over an audience, that's opinion.
Science as a model and the limits of empiricism 13:05 On the other hand, we are committed, as I said ten minutes ago, to answering the question "what must I do" in the mode of knowledge. There. And we began by asking how... yes, science is thus privileged, it arrived at knowledge, how did it manage that. You see why the philosopher takes an interest in science, it's not to do the same thing, it's to see... First, it's to prove to the skeptics that there is such a thing as knowledge: if A equals B, then B equals A, that's knowledge, it's not subjective, it's not this or that, it's not relative, that's interesting.
13:42 And then, everything that follows from that is called equivalence relations in mathematics. If Pierre is Paul's brother, if Pierre is Paul's brother, then Paul is Pierre's brother, and so on. And parallel lines to each other, same thing. There are plenty of things like that which belong to the order not merely of certainty, but of truth. You're starting to see the difference—certainty is dogmatic. I'm certain I'm standing on solid ground, you see it's not moving—it's moving at 30 km/second around the sun.
14:12 You see, that's truth. It took millennia to move from certainty to a few truths. You have to be humble. It's the heroic, patient and laborious path of the sciences. They mustn't be despised. And this—because we were very poor—it was fashionable to despise them. Already Goethe was worried about the romantic movements, an excellent romantic sense but also a dangerous sense. The one Goethe saw clearly, like his friend Hegel, when Goethe—he has him say this in the prologue of Faust—has him say to Mephistopheles: if you despise reason and science, humanity's highest gifts, you're giving yourself to the devil and you're lost.
14:56 he knew his Germany. Goethe. France has problems, Germany is a problem. Me who says that, I'm a great historian of Germany. I can't help saying "problem," excuse me. So, the second part—the first part of philosophy, knowledge—the first part of the first part, empiricism. We tried—it's the rumor going around—the sciences got there because, unlike philosophers or dreamers or opinion-mongers who say whatever, they, science, base themselves on experience.
15:31 We saw that this was false. If we based ourselves only on what we see, what we touch and what we feel, we'd keep saying the Earth—I look closely, but it doesn't move. I look at it, but it doesn't move. That's not how they got there. Imagine the tons of equations, pages and pages of equations for geocentrism. It was a mess. It didn't match observations at all. Yes. And Galileo spends his time saying—there have been studies on this, I refer you to the references, the admirable Galilean Studies by Koyré, Alexandre Koyré, a great epistemologist of the 1950s.
16:07 K-O-Y-R-E. He wrote From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. That's a famous title, for example. And the Galilean Studies. And Galileo insists, almost every three pages, he says, I'm not content to prove it with my telescope—they used to call it Galileo's spyglass. I must find the mathematical law that accounts for it. You see? Otherwise he wasn't satisfied. He was a real scientist. Not by sheer luck like that.
16:37 I would even say, let me give you an example that shows the limits of empiricism. I'm thinking of the case of Neptune. Everyone with some interest in the philosophy of science knows the particular case of Neptune, which was discovered quite late by astronomers, by Le Verrier in particular at the beginning of the 19th century. In the 18th, early 19th century, Le Verrier. Now, it's not that he had sharper eyesight. He wasn't nicknamed Eagle Eye, he wasn't an Apache chief, Le Verrier.
17:07 He didn't have the most powerful telescope of his time. I'll even tell you, it has since been proven that Neptune had been seen before him. Only, since according to the theories of the time there wasn't supposed to be anything in that part of the sky, they acted as if nothing had been seen, as if it were an error in the telescope. It's extraordinary. Whereas he knew it existed before seeing it. Knowing before going to look. Because there were deviations—you know the story a bit—in the other neighboring bodies, Mercury, the lag—one had to do slightly more complicated equations, but still, quite within reach of Newtonian, Leibnizian mathematics, that is, that so-called barbarism of the time.
17:53 The period, to know that given the lag, one needs a body of such a mass at such a distance to produce such a deviation. And so this planet was deduced before being seen. A fine example of conceiving preceding seeing. Don't make me say what I haven't said. I haven't said that I despise experience and that the sciences don't need experience. I'm saying that scientific experimentation is a magnificent and very complicated thing. It presupposes an enormous amount of prior theory. Otherwise, it's experience in the ordinary sense.
18:24 My grandfather, who has experience, knows full well that Jews and Corsicans are worthless. Well, there are plenty of people who talk like that. Arabs, Blacks. There, that's "experience." Language is rich. Let's take the opportunity to clearly distinguish experience in the ordinary sense—in which people want to reduce science, in a very simplistic, even tendentious and ideological way—from experimentation. There, you see, there's a construct that presupposes an act, the act of the mind, which doesn't merely passively receive sensations like a mirror, the way a dog wiggles its nose to be in contact with the universe.
From rationalism to determinism 19:03 No, but it's cute, the dog wiggling its nose, that's not the point. But you know very well its snout isn't made for knowledge. It's made for food and for the female. It's made for action, for values. There you go. So we abandoned empiricism fairly quickly, while keeping what it brought us and what it alone brings: reality, contact with the real. And we turned to its antithesis—I'll go quickly—rationalism, where this time we don't start from things but from words.
19:34 Not from sensations, from impressions, but from statements. Science begins with mathematics. Mathematics begins with statements. First, it doesn't begin by showing us colors, shapes, smells. We don't proceed that way, no? We begin by saying—I don't know—the whole is greater than the part, through axioms, definitions, postulates, what are called first notions from which we're going to be able to derive a maximum of demonstrated notions. So it's always discourse. Either derived discourse, hence demonstrated, or first discourse, which isn't demonstrated but serves to demonstrate all the rest.
20:10 The goal of the game being to have as few undemonstrated statements at the outset as possible, and as many demonstrated notions as possible. In that case, we say the theory is efficient, powerful. You see how symmetrical it is. With empiricism, we start from things; here, we start from words. The empiricist—we saw it with the astrologer who looked in ancient oriental antiquity, who tried to see the stars from a 30-meter tower thinking he'd see them better—is someone trying to know a something, who questions a something.
20:45 We've never seen a something answer a someone. I quite believe the table won't answer me if I don't know what a table is. And we saw that at the foot of the ziggurat there was a little potbellied bearded fellow named Socrates who said, not to the star or the planet, but to the astrologer: what do you call the sun? What do you call the star? What do you call a planet? And there, it's a someone addressing a someone who can answer him. One can correct oneself. You see, these are enormous differences. I developed the rest quite a bit last time, so I'll go much faster now.
21:16 And so, we moved from empiricism to rationalism. In doing so, we obtained what we hadn't had with empiricism: at last, statements of truth, whereas in that ever-flowing river, that of sensations—that's Heraclitus, you never bathe twice in the same river—the world of sensations, the world of empiricism, the world of ordinary experience, is the world of permanent becoming.
21:54 Because Heraclitus had already seen very clearly, with the figure of the river, that all empirical reality is like a river, a flux—we'd say today, a flux of sensations. I can't even say that Socrates is young, he's already grown older by the time I've said it. So the Greeks, watch out for tricks like that, they trained the mind well. So we moved to rationalism and we obtained truths. Let me give you examples: if A equals B, then B equals A. There, we're satisfied. That's certain. It holds everywhere. But we've lost reality.
22:24 What are we going to put in place of A and B? As for the mathematician, he passes that off to the physicists, the chemists. Not his problem. That's a bit how mathematicians are. A bit, no. We need them. I'm not speaking ill of anyone. There you go. But it's true. And even in mathematics, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell—Russell, no less, author of Principia Mathematica, that's solid—a friend of Wittgenstein's, said that mathematics is a discourse in which one never knows what one is talking about, nor whether what one says is true.
23:00 You see? He didn't believe he was criticizing mathematics, that wasn't his style. On the contrary, it was to show their strength. So there you have it, we were quite stuck in our philosophical journey. With one, we have reality, but we can't say anything true about it. With the other, we have truth, but we never know what it corresponds to in reality—pure theory. And then we were delivered by the third moment of the philosophy of knowledge, still within the great heading I, the answer to the question "what can I know," great I, small c.
23:31 Small a, empiricism, small b, rationalism, small c, synthesis, determinism. I won't write it on the board again, I did it last time, it's simple: determinism. Ah, the brilliant idea that, quite simply, things link together in reality, outside my head—the planets, the stars—following exactly the same order as the propositions of scrupulous mathematicians or a scrupulous logician. You see, it's Spinoza who said that the order and connection of ideas is the same as that of things.
24:02 And that the implacable necessity by which the Moon orbits the Earth, according to Newton's law, because in fact the Earth has a greater mass, we have no choice. We're not in the world of freedom—let the environmentalists talk about nature and nonsense like that—but nature is the implacable world, right? Freedom has no place there, that would be the last straw, it's a relation of force. Besides, when you're in physics, we have a physicist here—the first notion one learns is always force in physics school. When you start in physics, we agree on that. It's the invariant. Me, I learned that, it's old-fashioned now.
24:35 Yes, an invariant. We start with force. Then, we look at force over certain distances, and we make the concept of work. And then, how much time did it take to do this work? That's the concept of power. Because moving that in three seconds or three hours isn't quite the same thing. But we started from force. That's the fundamental notion of what? Of phusis. Phusis means nature in Greek. That's what I wanted to recall in passing. Heidegger will say yes, yes, yes, but the Romans, we understood nothing by translating physis as natura.
25:06 That's the translation of nature. Phusis is nature. And so we have a scientific approach, and not a delirious, fantastical, poetic one — which can be very pretty — of nature, ever since we introduced into it the concept of force — not the sensation of force, the sensation of force. I sometimes have it, I'm a funny fellow. There we go. No, the concept of force, or concepts like that of acceleration. You, you know, take an interest in that. It's interesting, the concept of acceleration.
25:43 I'm telling you this because, you see, here we have the impression that everything is motionless. In fact, because — well, I said that all this moves at 30 km per second. Yes, but since it moves at the same speed, we have the impression that it's motionless. You see, in physics, we don't care whether something is at rest or in motion, it's the same thing. The problem is acceleration. They all have the same acceleration, that of the Earth carrying them along. That's all. But if one of them changes speed, either less or more — that's what acceleration is — either positive.
Thales, moments, and the universal against relativism 26:14 For us, in our crudely empirical language, the man in the street, myself first of all, to accelerate is to go faster. No, in physics it can mean slowing down. Negative acceleration, an interesting concept. So there we have determinism, that's it, we've answered the question 'what can I know?', haven't we? And that's not bad, we made a great journey, it took centuries, millennia, didn't it, to bring about — I gave you the example of Thales last time, didn't I — to whom, it's perhaps a legend, it's surely a legend, there are always rivalries between cultures, you know, Egyptians, Greeks, Orientals, even now the Greeks and the Turks can't stand each other.
26:53 So, it seems that Thales, having traveled to Egypt, like all those who were educated in Greece — they knew well that there was nevertheless a 3000-year lead, so one had to listen a bit, look a bit to the priests of Egypt. And the Egyptians had said, let's say, you, the Greek who is so clever, already preceded by his theoretical feats, go then and measure the pyramid, the great pyramid — implying, at 50 degrees in the shade, you see, with a little ruler, that's quite a challenge. And Thales answered: the shadow of Thales measures the pyramid.
27:25 There's no need to climb up. He had already discovered similar triangles, homotheties, I think that's what it's called. Correct me when I say nonsense. It's scientific. It happens to me. I'll do a special episode one day on my errata. When I review the footage, I see all sorts of... by the way, that's a drop in the ocean compared to all the nonsense I say sometimes, but... I repeated, repeated to satiety last time that the brother-in-law — that the Minotaur, like the Morholt, Iseult's former lover, so Ariadne's, Iseult's — had the same brother-in-law relationship.
28:05 Do you remember? No, it's half-brother I meant to say. They have the same mother, they don't have the same father. I got confused between brother-in-law and half-brother. I'm saying this before the anthropologists jump on me, the historians jump on me. The mythologists. So, there we have determinism. Thales, you see, knowing before going to see. And you know that any astronomer nowadays can predict the eclipses that will occur thousands, even millions of years from now.
28:36 Just as he knows those that have already happened — it's fantastic, the mind's power of anticipation. Reality obeys a well-ordered thought, a non-contradictory thought. That's it, that's the discovery of determinism. We made enormous efforts, like an insect bashing itself against a windowpane trying to get out, for millennia, trying experiments, tricks — the alchemists, you know, the poor old fellows. Every time they strove to find gold, or above all how to make the lord, the king who was paying them, cure his impotence and sleep with young girls. That's it, those are the two great secrets.
29:07 You'll find that with all the marabouts in Africa, it always comes back to that. How to regain vigor — and the potion in Tristan. It's the potion, it's for the old king Mark, so that he can manage it. Well, you see, these weren't theoretical aims to begin with. Those things were too urgent. Whereas through the long and patient detour of cold theory, man has appropriated reality for himself. There, that's a great... I'm serious. Empiricism, rationalism, determinism are steps forward. Each one was necessary. It's not that one is wrong and the other right.
29:38 That's what's called moments in philosophy. Especially in Hegel, who is very fond of this concept, which he borrowed from physics. It's a Newtonian term to begin with, moment. I'll remind you that a moment of momentum is two forces of equal intensity but opposite direction. A door handle is a moment. That's very dialectical, you see. There's a moment. This is falling toward the center of the Earth, and then there's the table opposing it in the reverse direction. That's a moment.
30:10 Last time, I told you something we'll come back to shortly. If every time truth is put to the test — I'm thinking of the skeptics here — insidiously and ideologically, by comparing it to cultural relativism, 'oh, that's valid in our culture, but among the Bantu it's exactly the opposite,' etc., as if there were no human value. Over the last 60-80 years, progressive humanism has been dissolved into culturalist relativism.
30:41 What I'm saying is serious. Because barbarism is rising everywhere, you know that well. It's rising so much now that everyone knows it. Electorally. What forces are advancing? It's not the most reassuring one. I'm not saying only in France, but it was said to be only in France. We tried to make people believe it was only in France. Now we're waking up, it's hard. In Austria, we came close to a Nazi president. In Austria, Hitler's homeland. It's not all that old.
31:12 Oh yes, it's not like the Germans. The Germans are somewhat guilty. The Austrians, not at all. You talk with them, they say they were victims. It's terrible. Yet you watch Hitler entering Austria, it's joy, it's jubilation. When he enters Prague, everyone weeps. Compare that. Well, I'm not going to be racist and say the Austrians are good, the Czechs are good, etc. That's not at all what I mean. But still, one shouldn't exaggerate either. So there are serious forces rising, and they rely heavily on this kind of cultural relativism, etc.
31:47 And so it has become almost improper to defend the notion of universal man. Burke, for those who know him, was an English counter-revolutionary thinker from the very first years of the 19th century, the end of the 18th, wasn't he. He was terrified by the spread of French ideas, as they said at the time. I'm not for France or against France, everyone changes.
32:17 There's the France of de Gaulle, there's the France of Pétain, we always have a choice. I say that because some people believe the debate is 'for France or against France.' That's really crazy, without specifying which France. That's really the political problem — which France. Well. So this Burke, who was flatly against French ideas, as they said at the time, without mincing words, said: I have met Hindus, I have met Greeks, I have met Turks, I have never met Man. The clever little devils.
32:47 And I told you, in the same vein, I always go on my anti-identity diatribe, because that's the priority right now. When I was... I lived a few years in sub-Saharan Africa, and so when businessmen showed up there, they often said, go ask Pagani, he knows Africa well. As if, through immersion, since I'd lived there for years, I had a more lucid and objective judgment. Whereas there are some who stayed 50 years in Africa, white people, who still understood nothing, even less than ever. That's another problem. In any case, I do my part, since I'm asked questions, I answer.
33:19 And they all had the same questions. So, what should I say there? How are they... with their wives, what do I do? Should I leave a tip? In short, they asked me questions as if we were dealing with Martians. Understand what I'm saying here. And I would tell them I was going to reveal a great secret to them, but above all they mustn't repeat it: Africans want their children to be healthy, to go to school, to have a good job, and to bring their parents a bit of money now and then.
33:50 They'd fall back, arms dangling, disappointed. In short, Africans were, according to me, human beings. You see? They were expecting an identity and I was giving them the universal. So maddening, it's frustrating. So, I'd like to rehabilitate a bit a triangle cursed since May '68. I love June '68, the joint union-management negotiations, all that. No, no, I'm talking about May '68, it's a kind of filth we haven't yet gotten out of, despite the crisis trying to get us out — that's the stake. Which saddled us with neoliberalism, which saw the inauguration of financial capitalism, because capitalism is capitalism, I mean.
"Know thyself": a mediated relation to the world 34:26 So, this cursed triangle — I haven't stated it yet, but you can guess — its three vertices are Man, which I've already mentioned, the universal, which I've just sketched, and progress. And you can well imagine that these three notions are linked. Remove one, the other two collapse. So we'll certainly have occasion to come back to this, I won't insist on it now, I'm still at the summary stage. So there we were, that's it, we've finished answering the question 'what can I know' — don't put words in my mouth, we still have everything to learn, philosophically.
34:59 But anyway, you see, we've made this stretch of the journey with science there. And now we're forced to part ways. Because with determinism, it's not just that we've reached a kind of perfection. It goes on, we haven't determined everything, thankfully, but we know the method. Now there's a statistical determinism too, not just mechanical — I don't want to get too refined — quanta, that's roughly it. There's more probability, but I mean, that doesn't mean it's less precise than before, on the contrary, it's actually much more precise.
35:30 And so we will always move toward less and less margin of error, more and more not just of certainty, in the subjective sense, but of objective truth in things. And there — our patron Socrates, he had recalled that at the entrance to the oracle of Delphi, one of the rare sanctuary sites where all the Greeks, who quarreled worse than the French, all the time, were united. There weren't that many things uniting them — the Olympic Games, the language, the religion, the mythology.
36:03 And so Delphi, which the Greeks said was the navel of the world. At the entrance of the place of the oracle it is written: 'Know thyself.' And that's not what we're doing when we study the satellites of Jupiter. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done. I wouldn't be here if all that hadn't happened. If there hadn't been science. Neither would you. But I'm saying that philosophical inquiry cannot stop there. 'Know thyself' is to remind yourself that there aren't only objects around us. There aren't only somethings. There are also someones.
36:36 And that I am more often in relation with someones than with somethings. And even that my relation to things is always mediated by someones. That's even what's specific to man. Even when I eat, I need to eat at a table, among fellow diners. As soon as I'm alone, I have less appetite. I don't think this is a personal case. You'd agree. Roughly speaking. That's how we used to talk when we were young. They're always ravenous. But like that. Statistically, you'll see, it comes. There. I'll say the cigarette, the peace pipe, the joint passed around.
37:10 I don't know. The aperitif drink. In every society, it's like that. In Africa, it's the old women who smoke the pipe. It's interesting. They have long pipes like this, long stems that they dip into the same stone hearth, stone pipes. To chat together. So there's always a magnificently human triangle. Me, the thing, the other. Me, the other, the thing. In the image of language. Because I've just summed up the schema of language.
37:41 I talked so much about language last time that I won't insist too much on it here. But what is a word? It's what serves me to designate something to someone. Same triangle. That's our typically human relation to things, that is, a mediated relation, not an immediate one. I spoke earlier about the dog's nose, that's an immediate relation to the world that the dog needs and which suffices for it in its — how do you say — its biotope. In its somewhat closed, somewhat restricted universe, that suffices for it. I'm not pitying it, far from it. But our relation to the world is mediated.
38:16 I say to you: panther. You don't smell any odor of panther, there is none. That's the difference with the animal. It's not a signal I'm conveying to you. Because animals have the signal. You know, when animals smell fire in the brush, when they smell the odor of smoke, they know it's the signal of fire. You don't worry about that. But there's a long way from the signal to the sign, like when I said 'panther.' There's none there, and yet you already have a representation. It's not there and it is there. That's the world of the sign. That's the world of language.
38:46 To the point that Hegel went so far as to say — I quoted this last time, I'll repeat it — that man is the concept itself existing. The concept, that's Logos. Man is the concept itself existing. Not in the world of essences, but in the world of existence. And twice Hegel said this, this definition, for man and for time. Time is the concept itself existing. There. Just to touch on it briefly, I say this for researchers, that Hegel has the same predicate for man and for time.
39:16 The animal is in eternity. It endures time. As a magnificent poet named Rilke says, whom some of you know a little, we are always anxious because we have death before us, the animal always has its future behind it. It advances into the open. That's a very beautiful poem by Rilke. There. That's why in French we say 'a happy imbecile.' We say 'he's an animal' [bête] to mean someone who's stupid. That means he's animal-like. Well, both are valid. So there, we've made this turn.
39:47 We've finished with knowledge, the determinism of the outer world. But as for oneself, we've seen that it's no longer purely a matter of knowledge, self-knowledge. We move into the domain of action. Because knowing oneself doesn't mean I stop looking at the sun, I stop doing equations, I hold my head like Rodin's Thinker. As Auguste Comte said, one cannot be on the balcony and watch oneself walk by in the street at the same time. That's not what knowing oneself is. Man has existed for a long time. It's been some tens of thousands of years that he has existed as man, and even as Homo sapiens.
40:17 So, it took us time to understand that we had to do as the scientists do. Judge on the evidence, judge on things that can be tested. Testable, I didn't say sensible, immediate. Testable, that is, transform our approach in such a way that we can have objective material. So we had to do anthropology in the act, as I like to say. And that's how we started doing textual commentary and stopped giving the traditional lecture. Because man expresses himself.
40:48 Human action is materialized. Look, this is human action. This too, this too. Do you agree? Crystallized, as Marx says. Value, for Marx, is crystallized labor. And so, today, I've only brought readings. Because, you know, it's the last class, even in middle school, I don't know about you, my generation, it's like that: on the last class of the term, the teacher would say, today everyone recites the poem they want, or things like that, it's a bit relaxed.
Presentation of the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 41:19 So, I've brought several texts, but ones that will rub against each other, that have nothing to do with one another. You'll see. And since I'm on Marx, I'm often reproached for never quoting Marx, even though I seem to be Marxian. I don't just seem to be. But well, I'm going to quote you the text with the most Marx in the fewest lines. Because, since I know you won't often get the chance to hear Marx, I'm taking the opportunity to give you a maximum dose. A maximum. So, it's the famous 1859 introduction to the...
41:51 Listen carefully. Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. That's the title of Marx's work. Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. First, modesty: 'contribution.' There. That was the original title of Capital. That's why I insist on this. Before it was called Capital, it was supposed to be called Critique of Political Economy. And this is supposed to be its sketch. So this is the Marx who really has his whole battery of concepts. This isn't the Marx of the early gropings, the time when he was somewhat ecological, Feuerbachian. That's not it.
42:21 He's come a long way since. No, no, but listen, there are moments, as I said earlier. If you knew what I was like, myself, at 15, politically, you wouldn't even believe it. Well, anyway. And it's fine, I don't regret it, I went through all that. 'I have eaten of the drum and drunk of the cymbal.' Strange sentence, isn't it. I have eaten of the drum and drunk of the cymbal. That's from the Eleusinian Mysteries, this phrase appears there, meant for the initiated. Quoted by Gérard de Nerval in Sylvie. Closer to us.
42:51 So, there is a common point, there are many, between Marx and Hegel. It's the opposite of Althusser. Althusser separates them completely, doesn't he. We saw what that gave. The Communist Party is at how much? Less than how many percent? It's not entirely Althusser's fault. Althusser is an effect of that, he's not the cause, the poor old fellow. Anyway, when he strangled his wife, as Clouscard said, well yes, he strangled his wife. Everyone knows it. I remember Clouscard saying that if a worker did that, he'd get the guillotine.
43:22 And then, a whole Parisian outrage saying she committed suicide, they disguised it as a suicide. Well, yes, yes. Fine. May the earth rest lightly on her, as they say in Africa. They don't say 'God rest her soul,' they say 'may the earth be light upon her.' It's beautiful, that African expression. May the earth be light upon her. So, one of the common points Marx shares with Hegel is that he never sums up his thought in a fundamental principle, a sentence that explains everything. You know, that's fashionable too these days. Nietzsche, the fragments, a fragment that's more brilliant in three lines than all of Hegel's Logic in 80 volumes, that's how it goes.
43:54 Well, I'm not saying this against Nietzsche, but against the wretched little Cold War Nietzscheans we're suffering through, whom Nietzsche himself would have found vomit-inducing had he known, the poor old fellow. So, as an exception, the text I'm going to read you, as it was written, you see, for a translator, and since he also thought of the French translator of Capital, he said, careful, I'm a bit at the crossroads of English political economy, a fine declaration, of French political action, and of German theoretical tradition.
44:27 Now, I know that the French, their weak point, is theoretical rigor. So, be careful with your translation. You see, Marx was concerned that in French there shouldn't be too much simplification and distortion of the complexity of his approach. So, it's very rare for him to sum things up, so let's make the most of it, I'm telling you, the most Marx in the fewest lines. Besides, you'll see, he introduces it like this. So, Critique of Political Economy, 1859 preface, solemnly: my research leads to this result. I'm not showing anything of it yet.
Base, superstructure and the era of social revolution 45:03 The result, second time: the general result at which I arrived and which, once obtained, served as a guiding thread, a thread of Theseus, of Ariadne, for my studies, can be briefly formulated as follows. Colon. Let's hold on tight. That's my own addition. In the social production of their existence, men enter into necessary relations, determined, independent of their will. There's already the word 'determined,' there's also, there's everything determined.
45:35 Relations of production — so he takes up the word 'relation,' precisely a relation of production which corresponds to a determined degree of development of their material productive forces. I want to come back to this. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the concrete basis upon which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond determined forms of social consciousness.
46:07 You've seen that there are quite a few recurring words. The mode of production of material life conditions the process of social, political and intellectual life in general. Full stop. I'm pausing here, it's not something that happens to me often, to read to you, but this is the last session and I would never have read these texts at the start of the workshop. But now, with everything we've discussed, for example, the parallels we've drawn, it's a bit less abstract than it seems. The first reading is very condensed. Almost every word would require pages. The mode of production of material life conditions the process of social, political and intellectual life in general.
46:44 It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, it is, conversely, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development — I'll interrupt myself here to say to those who know the text, here we should make a division. The first part is the false one. No, I'm not being sacrilegious. It's an idealized Marxist relation that never actually exists. That's what Marx shows further on, in another part. There is a base that determines a summit.
47:15 That's roughly what we've just read: an economic base that determines what's in our heads, to put it simply. And now he's going to say that's not how it actually works. You'll see, it's more complicated. Movement arrives, Heraclitus arrives. At a certain stage of their development — because up to now we were static — the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing relations of production. When the industrial revolution occurs, a new class appears, the industrial bourgeoisie, which comes into conflict with the feudal relations of production, for example, which were based on agriculture and land rent.
47:55 For example. So, at a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing relations of production, or with what is merely their legal expression — of what? Of the existing relations of production, that is, of the politico-economic — we'll come back to that. What is their legal expression, together with the property relations within which they had moved until then — the productive forces — of the forms of development of the productive forces that they were, these relations. So these relations are forms, not content.
48:33 The bourgeois, feudal, Asiatic relations of production — we'll see this later — much older ones. So, of forms of development of the productive forces that they were, these relations become fetters on them. You see, depending on the era, a certain political model can either express the economic situation of a state, a society, or, on the contrary, be in conflict with it. You see how dangerous it is to have only the relation of expression, the relation of identity, or only the relation of contradiction.
49:05 We need to historicize the matter. And in doing history, not historicism — that's where it gets complicated. We're not there yet. So I'll repeat this rather inverted sentence. Of forms of development of the productive forces that they were — through advance and upheaval — these relations become fetters on them. Then an era of social revolution opens up. But there you go, why is this exactly my seminar's business? It's a conjuncture of crisis that he's expressing here.
49:35 So, it's an era of social revolution. That doesn't mean revolution is at the door, it means the situation is objectively revolutionary. That can last a long time. Men are not satisfied by an approximation, an imposture, as Merleau-Ponty said. You'll see, Marx is going to make us patient in a few lines. Change — he's always commenting on these periods when things crack, when we move on, you know, he said a famous phrase: the hand-mill gives feudalism, the steam-mill gives the bourgeoisie.
50:05 That's roughly what he's saying, even though he's just shown that it's not that simple. So, it's an era of social revolution. The change in the economic base upsets, more or less rapidly, the whole enormous superstructure. Consider that at the level of the legal superstructure, the world of law, we still use a large part of Roman law, 2000 years later, for example. 2000 years after Greco-Roman society disappeared, for example. That's an extreme example, but all the more so, you see, for more recent things, historically.
The measurable and ideology as inversion 50:36 When we consider such upheavals, we must always distinguish between the material upheaval that can be established in a scientifically rigorous way — yes, this table, it used to take so much time to make by hand, purely manually, then it takes so many minutes with a machine. We must always distinguish between the material upheaval that can be established in a scientifically rigorous way, epistemologically I would say, in a measurable mode — I didn't say measured, we haven't measured everything, but measurable. Yes, when I make a parenthesis like this, it's because there's a stake at play, which sits above another stake.
51:08 You see? When Foucault desires all men — what explains the key to their whole thing is power. You see? For Foucault, it's power, it's everywhere. You have a power, she is a power, I am a power, I'm in the process of seducing you. Fathers with respect to their children, men with respect to women, gays with respect to straights, the warder with respect to the prisoners, and the prisoner with respect to the prisoners. You see? It's convenient, because that way, everything gets diluted, there's no more political power. Anyway.
51:38 For my part, I'm not asking, I'm not making a moral critique, I'm asking: what's the unit of power? Is it the kilogram-mass? Is it the becquerel? What is it? So when I said measurable, that was to insist on this — there's something democratic in science. Newton: all bodies attract each other in direct proportion to their mass and in inverse proportion to the square of their distance. Mass, distance, all of that is measurable. It's measurable. These aren't fuzzy notions.
52:10 So I say this for those who now talk about affect, that's the Lordon side of things. Ask for the unit of measurement every time. So, Marx, who is nonetheless more rigorous at this level: the change in the economic base upsets, more or less rapidly, all the norms of the superstructures. When we consider such upheavals, we must always distinguish between the material upheaval that can be established in a scientifically rigorous way. So we must distinguish it from what? From the economic conditions of production and the forms. Listen carefully.
52:40 Listen carefully now. Legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophical. In short — good grief — in short. So there's a word running through all of this, you can guess it. Yes. Ah, you had the look of someone who guessed it. You were pretending. No, some of you know it. When we consider such upheavals, there's the economic world. There, that we can measure, the economic upheaval, we can measure it.
53:11 My example of the table, how long it took to make it, how long... We must carefully distinguish this change from the change that occurs, roughly speaking, in mentalities, to put it quickly. But he doesn't say that, he says: distinguish it from the economic conditions of production and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophical forms. In short, the forms... Sorry? Good. You've understood what Marx calls ideology. It's what runs through all of that.
53:41 So when people say there's a conflict between bourgeois ideology and Marxist ideology, they've never read Marx. There is no Marxist ideology. Marx shows that ideology is always on the side of hot air. He says that this hot air can be brilliant — careful, it can be brilliant, it can express a profound truth, but a truth that doesn't know, itself, that it's speaking the truth. Like a paranoiac's delusion. But that doesn't mean he's talking nonsense. He's sure he's under threat, but it's not at all the threat he thinks it is. Yes, he himself is the threat. That's it. He must have been sincere, Hitler, he must have been anxious.
54:13 He was thinking about the Jews. He thought they were really a threat to the German people. He himself was the threat. It's terrible, this inversion. Typical of psychosis. Stand in front of a mirror, you'll understand right away what I mean. Have you looked in a mirror? The mirror plays a big role in paranoia. The mirror stage. You know, in a mirror, it's not quite right, it's reversed. Bastard, you doubled me. Yes, my image doubles me.
54:44 There's an extraordinary dream in Nerval's Aurélia: he dreams that a wedding is being celebrated in a palace, of course with the woman he loves, in a palace. Poor Nerval, you know he'll be found hanged in a sordid Parisian street because there was a night shelter and he refused to go to the asylum. On a night when it was freezing solid. And you're following me, so I'm opening a parenthesis within the parenthesis, you know, your minds are agile — but his last note, to his aunt, that night, who had housed him a few days.
55:15 'My dear aunt, tell your son that you are the best of mothers and aunts. When I have finished with all my enemies, you will have my place in my Olympus as I had my place in your house. That's it. Don't wait for me tonight, for the night will be black and white.' There. So Nerval, in this dream, dreams that the woman he loves is going to marry the prince, a king, in a palace, and he sees him from behind advancing to the throne in a red robe, and when he turns around, it's him. Oh! You see? Right? But his double is him, only entirely reversed.
55:46 He is in misery, the other is dressed in gold. He is the outcast of joy, the Desdichado as his most famous poem puts it. You know, 'I am the shadowy one, the widower, the unconsoled' — you know that one. It means the disinherited one, while the other has the power. Anyway, that's typical, it plays out in paranoia. So it's not just anything, we shouldn't say delusion means nonsense. Spinoza has a magnificent theory of error, and even more of illusion, which is far more serious than error, because error is like a cup of coffee and then it corrects itself.
56:19 Simple error. But the illusion that we are at the center of the universe and that everything revolves around us — that lasted a long time. You'd agree that it's not just anything, it's true that a center and a periphery, that's not stupid at all, but it's inverted. It's the mirror, you see? Illusion is always like that. The aggressor lives constantly in the state of feeling threatened. You know the Germans — I'm probably the most Germanophile person in France, likely among the thousand most Germanophile — I said that in advance because it seems all I do is bash the Germans otherwise.
56:50 Well, they have their virtues, their flaws. In the end I said it's Pétain, it's disgusting. But it happens that the good Germany died in the camps. I can't say anything else. But Bach, I adore Bach — there's no music more anxious than Bach. Yet his most famous chorale, on words by Luther, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, 'A mighty fortress is our God' — right away, the besieged citadel, the panzer divisions, the armor plating, that's paranoia.
57:23 I attack and I live constantly under threat. Who's threatening me? The subhumans. The subhumans are the Jews, the Slavs — Slavs, the slaves, the Poles, the Russians. When a German said 'Polak' in the 19th century, it's like a Frenchman saying a racial slur for North Africans. It's the same thing. You have to know this, it's in history, it weighs. And it comes back. That's why I won't dwell on it. There's always someone poorer than the poor.
Consciousness is not the site of science 57:53 What a Pole is for a German, a 'Polak,' is what a Russian is for a Pole. You see? There's always someone poorer. 'Bastard of a poor man' — that's how a famous film ends, called La traversée de Paris, as you know. So, what's common to all these fantasized, illusory, inverted forms of the real? Ideology. That's what runs through law, politics, religion — in short, consciousness. What Marx has in common with science, with scientists, is that consciousness is not the seat of science.
58:27 Consciousness can gain access to science, but against its own will, so to speak. Consciousness lost feathers when we moved from Aristotle's closed world to Galileo's infinite world. Consciousness lost feathers there. So much so that a Pascal — who was nonetheless an immense scholar, as you know, one of the greatest mathematicians of his time, and also a great mystic — Pascal said the eternal silence of infinite spaces terrifies me. He took on the Galilean scientific revolution. He wasn't like today's ecologists who say, 'No, everything is wonderfully ordered, it's only man who messes things up, but otherwise even the smallest frog — you mustn't run over frogs on the road because they're necessary.'
59:03 You see, if they're necessary, that implies a providence, that implies an intelligent design, as the Anglo-Saxons say, right? In short, that in the universe there is not only something, but a someone who orders it all. Well yes, you have to be consistent. You shouldn't rely on science to say things that are the opposite. Science began when we freed ourselves from those kinds of thoughts, when we resigned ourselves to say, well no, in the universe, we're a bit orphaned. Even life — look for it in the universe. There's a lot of ammonia and methane, there's not much green.
59:33 If you look closely, ask the astronomers. There must be habitable places other than ours, that's satisfying, there must be some, but that's still not the rule. So, you see, I'm insisting on what ideology is. I'm also insisting on the root Eidos. Eidos, Plato's concept, what we often call Platonism, the philosophy of ideas, of Eidē. So we translate it as 'ideas' with Plato, but Aristotle, who stayed 30 years at Plato's school, we translate Eidos as 'form.'
1:00:08 The world of forms in Aristotle, the world of ideas in Plato. An anthropoid ape means an ape that has the form of man. You see, we find it again in the French language. So it's curious, this word 'idea.' Sometimes it has a very intellectual sense, à la Plato, but here it's for nothing. It's the most interiorized, the most profound concept, which sits at the summit of an effort of abstraction. Sometimes, on the contrary, it's the most visual, the most empirical, as in 'anthropoid kind.' That's interesting.
1:00:38 So, I'll continue, I'll take up this sentence again and carry it further. When we consider such an upheaval, we must always distinguish between the material upheaval that can be established in a scientifically rigorous way — the working time that has changed, right, for the same object — from the conditions of production and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophical forms, in short, the ideological forms under which men become conscious of this conflict, of this change in the relations of production, and carry it through to the end.
1:01:12 It's not over, the crisis. Just as we cannot judge an individual by the idea he has of himself, we cannot judge such an era of upheaval by its self-consciousness. We'll see later in history how our era, right, how to judge our era. People will say: at that time, men said the great danger was the pollution of the planet, global warming, etc. That's what they'll say. They'll say what was in consciousness, and not what was actually happening in reality. Just as we don't judge an individual by the idea he has of himself, we don't judge an era by its self-consciousness.
1:01:46 Otherwise, it would be simple, wouldn't it? Defendant, rise. What do you have to say for yourself? I'm innocent, I'm innocent. I'll defend myself. Look, if we judge by the idea I have of myself, I'll defend myself. I know how to talk about myself, when I need to. I know how to sell. I work in order to buy, I've apparently brought them fortunes. Well, yes. So, on the contrary, we must — sorry — we must explain this consciousness through the contradictions of material life, through the conflict that exists between the social productive forces and the relations of production.
1:02:25 You see, here he's repeating himself, Marx, circling around the decisive point. The essential conflict, the right way to break it down, is the one between the productive forces and the relations of production. So don't get frustrated, I'll come back to these recurring notions afterward. It's for those who need repetition that they necessarily become clearer. A social formation — there, that's for the impatient ones. Listen carefully, I'm impatient too, we've had enough. Me too. A social formation never disappears before all the productive forces it is broad enough to contain have been developed.
1:02:56 Never do new and higher relations of production replace the old ones before the material conditions of existence for these relations have hatched within the very womb of the old society. As long as it hasn't given itself the new means, technological and otherwise, to move into a new era. That's why, famous phrase, humanity only ever poses problems it can solve. If we pose the problem, it's because somewhere, historically, we've already just acquired the means to find a solution for it.
1:03:32 That is to say, we have the solution, but that we have the means for it. For, on closer inspection, it will always be found that the problem itself only arises where the material conditions for solving it already exist, or at least are in the process of coming into being. I'm not going to have a breakdown or go march in the street because I can't manage to get my second home on planet Mars. You see? No, we're not there yet. You see? That's not today's problem. That's not what's going to make headlines.
Modes of production and the end of prehistory 1:04:02 For, on closer inspection, it will always be found that the problem itself only arises where the material conditions for solving it already exist, or at least are in the process of coming into being. In broad strokes, then, Marx himself says, in broad strokes, he's making a historical breakdown here. Remember this well because I'm going to read you a text that echoes this and is not at all an economic or political text, nor even properly a philosophical one. In broad strokes, the modes of production, in chronological order — Asiatic, ancient, Greco-Roman, feudal, and modern bourgeois — can be described as progressive epochs of the social and economic formation.
1:04:32 The bourgeois relations of production are the last, the most recent, contradictory form of the process of social production. Contradictory not in the sense of an individual contradiction, but of a contradiction that arises from the conditions of social existence of individuals. Yet, as the productive forces — you see again — which develop within bourgeois society, create at the same time the material conditions for resolving these contradictions. Marx says that the bourgeoisie creates, unwittingly moreover, the means of resolving the problems that it itself brings about.
1:05:06 Even if these means will end up turning against it. With this social formation, then, the bourgeoisie, there ends — interesting phrase — what? Who can guess the end of the sentence? With the bourgeoisie, there ends, sorry? Critique. We started from Asiatic, ancient, feudal, bourgeois relations of production. What ends? History. What is Pagani telling us here? Marx says that history is over.
1:05:37 But no, he doesn't say that. No, but you'll see. Who is it? Who says that? Who says that history is over? Which philosopher? Yes, yes, he's borrowing that from whom? Supposedly. From Hegel, of course. It's Hegel who says there will always be plenty of events, that's not the question. But that they'll unfold within the form of freedom, and that modern humanity has reached its definitive figure. Ah no, Marx makes a small nuance in relation to Hegel. Listen carefully, does anyone know the text perhaps? It's the end of, not history, but of the...
1:06:07 Sorry? No, but it's not far off. Because if there's no more class struggle, there will still be men and events. But it's the end of... With this social formation, there ends, then, the prehistory of human society. What Hegel believed to be the end of history is, for Marx, the beginning and the end of prehistory. Since I'm not often on the side of the disputes between Hegel and Marx, make the most of it.
Productive forces, relations of production, mode of production 1:06:37 Because if... When we don't yet know what they have in common, it's better to start by welcoming that first. There. Remarkable text. So I'll say, in passing, that the two concepts that come up most often, concepts specifically Marxist, of productive force and relation of production — he's not the only one to talk about production. He's the only one to see, in the clash between these two categories, the motor of history. At every moment of history. Now, we need to look at this more closely. If you look carefully, philosophically now, I'm giving a philosophical reading — the productive forces, that's material, they keep saying it over and over.
1:07:09 It's the hand-mill, then afterward it's the steam-mill, the electric mill, I don't know, I mean, the laser mills, how do you say it? There, there, exactly. It's technique. Now we say 'technology' to sound grand, yes, that's it, of course. So, sure, it's true that technique — the chipped flint — is already a technique. Technologies are perhaps when there's a theory embodied within it, a little mathematical detour, why not. Never mind all that, all of that is the world of material means. With the relations of production, we change category entirely.
1:07:39 It's no longer the material and technical and economic world at all, it's the political world. Relations of production, whether feudal, bourgeois, or Asiatic, in Marx. And he insists, he says it's the relations of property. Because depending on whether the tractor belongs only to the lord — I'm saying whatever comes to mind — if there are tractors, that means the lords have already disappeared, which moreover confirms Marx, if you look closely — belongs to the local lord, to the owner of the latifundia, if you prefer, that is, of great landed estates, in the south of Italy or the north of Germany, the two countries where fascism arose.
1:08:12 It's interesting, there are logics in history. It seems that Wilhelm II — that's the apogee of the latifundia, the great Prussian landowners, in the regions now called Pomerania, Mecklenburg, you see, the great plains of northern Germany. It's beautiful, it's very beautiful. Poor Wilhelm II, who isn't reputed to be the sharpest sovereign Europe has had — that's what surprises me, this sentence is magnificent — is said to have said: if one day the end of the world is announced, I will withdraw to Mecklenburg because there everything happens later than elsewhere.
1:08:48 That's lovely, isn't it? You see, it's the land of the great ones, the Junkers, as they say there. Sorry? If one day the end of the world is announced — he was a fervent believer, and emperor of Germany, which is still less — I will withdraw to Mecklenburg because there everything happens later than elsewhere. I'll get my last quarter hour. That's a lovely sentence. There you go, it was the land of the great agrarian, landed proprietors, extensive farming if you will, what in Germany are called the Junkers.
1:09:19 Junker, the young masters, the young lords — it's slaveholding, watch out. When I was in the old East Germany, I saw two East Germans teasing each other under the new communist regime, the same communism as back then. They weren't quite in agreement about the old regime. That's normal, because back then your father was the master and mine was his slave. Someone who was from Rostock up there, in Mecklenburg. So, depending on whether the tractor belongs to the local lord or to the collective, like a cooperative, that doesn't give the same society at all.
1:09:52 That's what Marx is saying. The tractor is the productive force. The property relation in which it is inscribed is the relations of production. Now you see the nuance, it's not a small nuance. Everything is there. And there's a third term. I won't reread the whole text, I don't have time. There are the productive forces which determine relations of production. The hand-mill gives feudalism, the steam-mill gives the bourgeoisie, tendentially. It's not that on December 31st, 1624, at midnight, one passes from one to the other.
1:10:23 Tendentially. The hand-mill gives feudalism, the hand-mill gives the bourgeoisie — sorry, the steam-mill. So material productive forces, that's where you have to start. You see, it's like a building-block set, a Lego set, it gives a certain relation of production, and the relation of the two, the relation of the productive forces to the relation of production, gives a world that Marx calls the mode of production. The word production appears three times. Productive force in order, relation of production according to the ownership by which the productive forces are distributed, and finally the mode of production.
1:10:55 There we arrive at history, because history is not going to be either pure economics or pure politics separated from one another. The mode of production is a political world determined by a certain economic structure. Well, these are notions familiar to everyone, but I've tried to put them in order this time. All this because people make out that Marxism is an economism. Althusser didn't make that mistake — I owe him that honesty. He even wrote that Marxism was not an economism. It's not an economism. Look at the title.
1:11:26 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. It's not a revolutionary political economy that would come and add itself to the bourgeois political economies, fairly reactionary ones. No! It's a critique of political economy. And that is very much of our time. A critique of the pretension of economics to constitute itself as an autonomous science. Yes? Yes, of course. It's very important. It has to be repeated often. At the start, in the order of causal determination, if I may say so, in the logical order, but which roughly corresponds to chronological order, there is first the material productive force.
1:11:59 That's where it's a materialism. Agreed? You can't make split stones where there are no stones. You can't build dams where there's no water. And Marx said one day — because you see, I'm even defending a somewhat ecological side of Marx, take advantage of it, I don't often talk like this — Marx said that so far, no one has ever managed to fish for fish in waters where there weren't any. Nature is, for Marx, part of the process of production. Yes. That includes the tools of production. Everything material such that we can measure — whether we make this table with a laser or by hand, I mean, I mean...
1:12:35 The revolution in our relations to matter. There you go. Very good. To matter. That suits me very well. Right? To matter, which is always natural at the outset, especially when it's raw material, isn't it? And which, around us, is most often never natural matter but artificial matter, worked matter, derived matter, produced, a finished product. So, secondly, the relations of production, that is, the conjunction of the productive forces I've just spoken of, which are quite material, with the political systems in which they're exercised.
1:13:05 Once again, a tractor doesn't give the same society at all depending on whether it belongs to a cooperative or, as in the Middle Ages, whether the Lord taxed everyone who used his mill. Because the productive forces belonged to him. Starting with the land. The main productive force of all feudalism, of all traditional society, is the land. The main productive force, mustn't forget that. Agreed? Once I'm a landowner, I have nothing to do. I don't have to work. Right? I already have enough work waging war to defend my fief against the neighboring fief, against the local Lord.
1:13:39 No, I say that to justify — you see, I'm being honest, like Marx, that is. We don't always rail against bosses, even against lords. There's a moment when the Lord is necessary. It's when he defends the peasant against the neighboring Lord. Someone has to protect them, the boss. Padre e padrone, you know, as they still say in southern Italy. The father, the boss, is the father. Not that he protects us like a father protects his children. Well yes, there's a time of hardship. Then as soon as there's peacetime, the Lord adds more. He keeps collecting the taxes and all that. You see, that's where it starts.
1:14:10 So: productive force. Relation of production according to the political system, above all of property. That's what we insist on when we're Marxists. That is, the legal system of property in which collective things are inscribed, or private things, roughly speaking, with all the nuances in between. Cooperative, communal, regime. Thirdly, the conjunction of the two, the productive forces and the relations of production, now constitute a historical reality that we call a mode of production.
1:14:43 And he illustrates the Asiatic mode of production with the problem of water. I'll tell you right away. What he calls the Asiatic mode of production, you can apply it to sub-Saharan Africa. That is, everything depends on the circulation of water. Ask people from the Sahel, you'll quickly understand what I mean. Of course, you see the importance of rice, of food, of paddy fields, and therefore the circulation of water. That's the Asiatic mode of production, the distribution of landed property. I'm getting there. Then the ancient mode of production, essentially slave-based in Mediterranean antiquity, whether Egyptian, Roman, Greek, etc.
1:15:19 It's not ethnic, these aren't Orientals or whatnot, that's fantasy. And finally, the feudal-Christian mode of production, and then the bourgeois mode. These are modes of production, not productive forces, nor relations of production either — they're outright modes of production. So each time, we start from the bricks and arrive at increasingly concrete things. With bricks we make walls, with walls we make a house. There's the Chinese house, the Asiatic mode of production — there's the house, it's a Chinese metonymy — there's the Oriental house, in the historical sense, Egypto-Chaldean, not in today's sense, there are Iraqis who are more modern than me, who are nuclear engineers, and so on, and the feudal mode of production, etc., and bourgeois.
Question from the audience: productive forces and social classes 1:16:06 Yes? I've seen this before, but I haven't understood why the first productive force necessarily refers directly to matter, to the way we're able to work it. Why don't productive forces just serve the whole set of classes, each of which at a given moment represents a productive force within... Ask the physicist next to you. He'll tell you a force doesn't exist unless it's moving some matter. It's even rather ambiguous at the start of physics courses.
1:16:38 We define force by the mass it can move, and mass itself we define by the force it would take to move it — I'm not mistaken. That would be idealist in the philosophical sense, that is, being in the immaterial, but illegitimately so. Because there is a legitimate immaterial — the point or the circle of mathematicians, that's the legitimate immaterial. We know that it exists in the mind. But the illegitimate immaterial is the illusion of believing that forces could exist without matter.
1:17:11 Once again, I'll give the example of the ashtray from last time — I take the cup, the glass, with the same clay that was used for this one, I could have made an ashtray, I could have made something with a completely different shape and therefore a different name, a different essence, to speak in philosophical terms. So we all agree, there is indeed a distinction between the matter that makes up this glass and its form. It's not the matter that defined the glass, it's the form given to it by the potter.
1:17:41 No, the matter is supplied to the potter, the form is supplied by the potter. Ah, no wait, the worker's muscular force, that's a productive force, of course, if that's what you mean. No, no, you're talking about labor power. No, no, but there's nothing more material than that. No, I agree. Just put me next to a Les Halles porter to move a house.
1:18:13 As for me, I'm not the one who's going to carry the piano, that's obvious. I say that because I've seen poor unfortunate souls hauling my pianos. One of them told me once: there are those who move pianos, and there are those who play them. Well, he didn't know either that there's a huge expenditure of muscle involved in learning to play the piano well — 8 hours a day for 20 years. When they asked Mozart, are you gifted? He said, well, I've been slaving away at it since I was 4. I'll close that parenthesis. No, no, but you're right. No, no, I misunderstood. Of course. No, but for me, it can't be just that — it's more the techniques we have for working things.
1:18:46 As long as these techniques are embodied by this or that class, then I would take the productive forces as being precisely such-and-such a group or class that possesses these techniques. But you're going too fast. When you talk about class, you're already talking about relations of production. You're no longer in the realm of productive forces. If there are classes, it's because there are divisions of property. There are already distributions, there are owners and non-owners if there are classes. The division of society into classes comes from the social division of labor. And even Marx goes so far as to say — the Marx of 1844, the famous manuscripts — that the first social division of labor, which will be at the origin of the differentiation of society into classes — you're quite right to bring that up because it's what's most concealed today — that's not what I'm correcting in what you're saying.
1:19:32 The first division is man and woman. Marx. Not the feminist — not the other idiot, what's her name — the one who argues with Tariq Ramadan on the TV set. Caroline Fourest — no, this isn't about Fourest, this is serious. This is serious. Because when it was necessary to chase down the mammoth, the woman eight months pregnant had to stay behind. So there was an objective division, and not because there were guys dominating, with dominated... no, it was all just poor wretches, men and women of the time, doing what they could.
1:20:04 When you've lived in poor countries, you understand what I mean. When you see the men of Niger, Mali, the whole Sahelian belt, of Chad, when the dry season arrives, migrating 400 kilometers, abandoning wives and children to go sell themselves as agricultural laborers in the better-watered lands to the south, in Ghana, in wealthy Côte d'Ivoire and Guinea, etc. — you see clearly that the problems as posed by feminism à la Caroline Fourest, I mean, are set against poor women.
1:20:35 It's the struggle of rich women against poor women. So that's not at all what I'm criticizing. But if there is a social class, it means there's already a mixing of active properties within this enterprise. Social classes are not a given. Otherwise there would be no Marxism. If it were a given, like eye color or heredity, that would be unfortunate — as I thought I understood the question you were formulating. Tell me if I'm wrong, it's very good to answer cooperatively. What you're calling into question is the univocal link of determination between productive force and relation of production.
1:21:07 That is, it's not that the productive forces are some materiality just sitting there, so to speak, that wouldn't be transformed by social labor and therefore by the relations of production. There's an interaction between the two. Is that what you mean? If so, you're perfectly right. Well then... That's why we're forced to abstract. We distinguish moments which, and here you're right, in reality are not separate.
Technology, digital technology and crisis; matter and form 1:21:37 And that's why they have to be distinguished. Otherwise we tie ourselves in knots. You see what I mean? Otherwise we mix up the economic and the political when talking about a society. That happens all the time. So, if I may just finish — but does that mean the evolution of techniques is necessary in order to make a revolution? Of course. Otherwise there's no revolution. Because the evolution of techniques always goes in the same direction. It's whatever lets me do the same thing while slaving less — that suits everyone, starting with me. If I look, for example, at a piece where you can find the links — if I look, for example, at what you say about Bernard Pouche's talk, you can read them.
1:22:07 Yes, yes. But who told you that advances production? Sorry? But that's not productive forces. But of course, Bernard's right. But that's not productive forces. Since when has information technology been seen to produce anything? It doesn't produce. No, it's a form. It's not matter. Today's finance takes wealth from here and transfers it there. It doesn't create more wealth.
1:22:37 That's why I took the example of the railways under Napoleon III. That was the creation of wealth. Since the 1970s, capitalism no longer creates wealth. That's actually the cause of the crisis. They're starting to read for themselves that productivity is no longer increasing, that there's no more investment. Capitalism has been on an investment strike for two generations now. That is the cause of the crisis. It no longer invests in production — whatever the environmentalists may think. It's like the environmentalists. Capitalism is anti-productivist. It prefers doing business in finance rather than in industry. That is indeed the cause of unemployment. That's indeed why soon we'll see more traders than workers.
1:23:09 I'm exaggerating a bit. That's why capitalism holds back the productive possibilities of, say, digital technology. But digital technology, since digital... Ah, it can be an auxiliary to production, of course. ...to production properly speaking. So we could say there's already ground prepared for revolution, since a revolutionary class could seize hold of these material means of production. Absolutely. Of course. Digital technology can prodigiously accelerate real production. Agreed? It can, but it doesn't. But it doesn't do the producing. No, no, because...
1:23:39 Because technique is a pharmakon. Yes, yes, of course, of course. What matter says is different. Of course. But that's not the problem, it's just that, precisely, we understand each other. Of course. Yes, but there... I deliberately read this text so that we could free ourselves from these ideological images now circulating in the heat of the crisis. We need to step back. I'm distinguishing instances that are mixed together in what we're saying. It's urgent to distinguish them. There's a material aspect — I'm not saying that's the only one.
1:24:11 And there's a purely political aspect — I'm not saying that's the only one either. Yes. We've never seen relations of production without productive force, and we've never seen, in any society — and here you're right — productive forces act magically like that without relations of production ordering them. Of course we agree on that. And that's precisely why they must be distinguished. Because — and I come back to this — that's the key. Aristotle had already seen this. Except for him it's a mystery. That is, I do distinguish matter from form, since with the same matter I could make something else.
1:24:41 We all agree on that. But I can't put the form in my right hand and the matter in my left. The form of this, I can't. Aristotle wrestled a great deal with this. Because then there would have to be a matter that has absolutely no form. That's not possible. Because even if there's a form like that, it's still a form. And then, I can't have the form of forms either. That's what he says — the form of forms. That's what he calls God. The form of forms. It doesn't exist. I'd just like to say, what could you say to someone starting out, to a trio. Since you can occupy the forms there — read the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
1:25:13 Seriously. And afterward, read Lenin's Notebooks on Dialectics, where Lenin says: 'If you want to understand Marx, you have to reread the whole of Hegel's Logic.' That's a lot of work. And one day Bernard said to me, 'Dominique, you need to fill me in on dialectics.' Yes. He'd forgotten I was Corsican, I'm lazy. No, no, I say that, I have great admiration for Bernard, who is a fierce worker and has real merit. And who is a man of such goodness, it's astounding.
1:25:43 I have nothing against him. Thank you. He is sometimes a bit of a prisoner of his own goodness. Just, just to continue — isn't it precisely the fact that technique is a pharmakon, and it's precisely the reappropriation, because there is a productive force, the one assigned to be the one who's in the shit within the system as it's set up, when it's a matter of reclaiming the knowledge of technique in order to say no, this is how we organize ourselves.
1:26:23 That's what's called trade unionism. Hence the struggle of liberal circles against a common core in national education, for example. There have to be humanities people and science people, there have to be intellectuals and manual workers. There you go. And even a certain Cartesianism. You know I defend Descartes against the wave of irrationalism. But still, Descartes does tend somewhat to separate thought from extension. Matter from form again. You see, being a bit stuck in the pure cogito — it's a bit the intellectualism of the rising bourgeoisie of the 17th century. Which has agricultural laborers meanwhile taking care of things.
Hölderlin and the symbolism of rivers 1:26:57 There you go. I wouldn't want to skip the other texts I wanted to read. We can revisit the discussions, but through the reading of another text. That's what I mean. You're free to jump in whenever. So the second text is by a poet. And afterward I'll read you a text that justifies why I'm moving from politics to poetry. So here it is, a hymn by Hölderlin, since I've been going on and on about him. I'm sure you haven't read it, so I'll continue. Well, he's never been so much translated.
1:27:28 You find unreadable translations on the internet. Now the translator wants to show off. The less readable he is, the less comprehensible. He complicates further what's already complicated doctors. I already illustrated this in my book on Hegel, I won't go back over it, or I read it for those who saw it: three translations of the first sentence of the first chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit by three different translators, in Hyppolite's chronology, in the '50s — sorry, the '40s — up to now, and you'll see it goes more and more toward the unreadable.
1:28:00 As if it were dangerous for the truth to be known. But here, the poet I'm talking about has a quotation — you'll never find it, it's this one, so I've told you, if you look hard enough you find everything — it's in his translations of others, of Pindar, where he says he's afraid of the truth, but not because it exposes me, etc., in the Freudian or even Marxian sense. He says fear of the truth — it's a mysterious fragment — fear of the truth because of the pleasure at its touch. Understand, at bottom, fear of the truth because of the pleasure at its touch. I've said it. Well, we're not there yet. This is a hymn — before going mad he wrote great hymns, then fragments like that, great hymns, and increasingly toward the end of his life these hymns bore the names of rivers. A river, a destiny — it's a metaphor, this river of Heraclitus. He knew the Greeks by heart. It's true that when he wrote, when he was mad in his room at the carpenter's house, he wrote with his left hand and with his right hand he beat out the short and long syllables, because German poetry, you know, is rhythmic, it's scanned like Greek poetry, the hymns, the trochees. Well, this hymn is called 'At the Source of the Danube,' there's another one
1:29:10 called 'The Rhine' — this one is called 'At the Source of the Danube' because the Danube has its source at someone with that name, that's how it is in Germany, we say in French — it's a little man with a mustache who doesn't know his geography, that's how they say it in Germany, they're just images, we say worse, 'kraut,' where is it exactly? Well anyway, no one knows, it's terrible — in the Black Forest, 20 km from Strasbourg, on the other side of the Rhine, where Hölderlin spent his childhood, so he's a bit marked by that, that's all. So it rises there, and then what does it do, which way does it go?
1:29:52 Toward the east, yes, it's the only one of the great European rivers to do so — that struck Hölderlin symbolically. The Rhine runs north, it's the only one — the Rhine, the Rhône have their source a stone's throw from each other in the Swiss Alps, both have 'Rh' — Rhine, have you noticed? It's the same 'rh' as in Heraclitus's panta rhei, everything flows — no, I'm serious. You know there's a fruit juice called Rhéa that tried to cash in on that, on the flow — no, but seriously, and the wife of Cronos, of Time, is called Rhea. The Rhine, the Rhône, is what flows, rhinitis, R-H, yes or no, the rhinoceros is the one with the horn on its nose that flows — and Plato used to call Heraclitus, as I told you last time — what did he call him?
1:30:41 the Snot-nosed kid, since he said everything flows — they didn't spare each other, among the Greeks. Bravo, I knew I was forgetting something, I was trying to think what it was, that's it, for musicians, the RH of rhythm is flux, rheology, fluids, mechanics — so, we're dealing with rivers, and the Rhône, which rises very close to the Rhine, flows south, while the Rhine flows north, and as he says in another poem, they never flow to no purpose in the arid land, the rivers, they must be signs — that's what he's in the process of elucidating with the Danube. We're not — we are in history. I'm moving from Marx to Hölderlin: Dich, Mutter Asia, grüß ich — no, let me translate — you, our mother Asia, I greet you. And yes, like Marx, he started with the Asiatic mode of production — yes, it's curious, apparently nothing could be further removed than the poor, the last idealist poet, dead, his mind fixated on Greece, antiquity, measure, poetry, etc., and then Marx, productive forces, the two classes, nothing to do with each other — and yet Hölderlin, Hegel and Schelling — it's written up in the little museum where they went to university.
Reading of the hymn: the word coming from the East 1:31:51 the three of them shared the same digs — the three of them, can you imagine? I would have loved to be a little mouse listening to the discussions of the two greatest philosophers of their time and the greatest poet of all time, almost together in the same room, discussing the figure of Antigone — can you imagine? So, they had been in prison — why? Because they had planted a liberty tree on the anniversary of the 14th of July, the first anniversary — he really was a contemporary, though I don't agree with Marx on this. So, ah, I don't have the same Hölderlin as Heidegger's, that's clear. So: you, our mother Asia, I greet you, and far beneath the shade of the old forests you stretch out and dream — Asia is a little German who never traveled; later he'll go to Bordeaux, he'll go mad in fact on the way back from a journey, but he never went to Asia — people didn't travel much back then, especially not in those small circles, they had barely emerged from the peasantry, they were going to become pastors or philosophy teachers — that didn't exist yet — or pastors, to try to get a job, that's what their mother wished for all of them, and afterward they'd try to get out of being pastors to become tutors in some rich household — that was their destiny, it wasn't much, so no question of traveling.
1:33:01 and far beneath the shade of the old forests you stretch out and dream, Asia, of your great deeds — and no, not that, it's all one explosion, this sentence — and not your own strength alone, but drunk with strength when you begin, you, millennial one — that's China, India, not the great civilizations through which all history — not man, man is Africa, but history took hold — history, you, millennial one, together with the celestial fire, the endless cry of your jubilation, and with such a voice — you see, the sentence doesn't end, it rebounds. I insist because this tradition doesn't exist in our poetry in France — it's the small form, I don't say that pejoratively, it has the sonnet, the finely crafted goldsmith's piece — there, it's the great lyrical breath — but drunk with strength and with such a voice, O millennial one, that today our ears still resound with it. You see the vision — today we still have the ears, a bit like physicists, we hear the Big Bang, we hear it, there are echoes — no, it's true, we hear — what's it called — the background noise of the universe, sorry — which people thought was an error, thought it was dust on the radio telescope, and no, it was the last echoes, 7 billion years later.
1:34:11 of something that must have made quite a noise all the same — that today our ears still resound with it, for it was so that homage might be paid to you that I was called, I, by the song — I, the poet in general — and here he takes a comparison — just as from up above, by the song — he's talking about the Orient, we're not at home in Europe — just as from up above — where is that, up above? Look closely — the rich and powerful harmonies of the organ in the sacred hall, in pure streaming from the inexhaustible pipes, the awakening prelude begins in the morning and grows louder from gallery to gallery — he always begins with the subordinate clause, that's why it's a bit hard to follow, we're waiting for the main clause — just as from up above, the rich and powerful harmonies of the organ in the sacred hall, in pure streaming from the inexhaustible pipes, the awakening prelude begins in the morning and grows louder from gallery to gallery, and as, giving life, the melodic river now flows down to the icy shadows, and fervor fills the whole house everywhere, and then, awakened, now it rises, now it answers the sun of the feast, the heart of the assembly — human society, the heart of the assembly, we're no longer in the individual — thus goes the word of the Orient, thus goes the Word — you took the translation.
1:35:21 the word of the Orient. The same development, the same division as we found in Hegel — the Orientals, you remember, I quoted you this sentence of Hegel's, which gives a meaning to history without that meaning being totalitarian, and which is even the most anti-totalitarian of meanings, since it is freedom — the meaning of history: the Orientals knew that only one is free — this isn't about today's Orientals, these are historical, not geographical Orientals, let's not sink straight away into geographical and naturalist, and therefore racial, and therefore racist, empiricism — the Orientals means the great empires with which history began, the Emperor of China, the King of Kings of Persia, the Pharaoh of Egypt — the Orientals knew that only one is free, the Greeks knew that some are free, the moderns know that all are free — that's the development: Orient, the sun rises in the East, the empire of the sun culminates at noon over Delphi, I'm not saying it's nothing, and then it declines with us, we are the Occident — I killed it, that's profound too — he'll spend his whole life coming to understand that we are deeper than the Greeks, less beautiful but deeper — by the time he understood it—
1:36:32 he would go mad — so try to understand before going mad. And behold, thus came the word of the Orient to us — it's not finished, it's a fact begun, because we finally have the contact — and on the rocks of Parnassus and on Cithaeron — you see, always the same trajectory — I hear it, O Asia, the echo come from you, and it breaks against the Capitols in Rome — poetically, mathematically, it's nothing, there's something else, Roman grandeur, Greek beauty, Roman grandeur, and it breaks against the Capitols — and behold, suddenly — well yes, a stage is missing, it's us, we the barbarians, for now we're in poorly heated, smoky huts, while great civilizations exist nearby — and behold, suddenly, plunging down from the Alps, it comes, foreign, to us, the voice that shapes men, the one that comes from the Orient, from Asia — a stupor then seized the souls of all those it reached, and night fell upon the eyes of the best — you remember I told you that German Romanticism was a hecatomb, they all died mad or by suicide, but not from misfortunes, from an excess of happiness, an excess of poetic illumination — the last one, it's typical—
1:37:42 he says it in the Hymn to the Rhine — not the Hymn to the Danube, the Hymn to the Rhine — he says, for it is heavy to bear, misfortune, but even heavier, happiness — and here, before the splendor of the word come from the Orient, you see, a stupor then seized the souls of all those it reached, and night fell upon the eyes of the best, for great is the power of man — man in general there, and we're dealing with productive forces, look closely — and his art, his art is technique, technique — and his art, where was I — and he masters man, the flood and the rock and the power of fire and the sword, this bearer of very noble thoughts, he does not fear it, but before the divine, the strong man is struck down, niedergeschlagen, and — he takes an almost magnificent comparison — even he, the strongest, resembles the game driven by sweet youth — those are the great forests, of Bavaria and the Black Forest, where the roe deer and stags go — driven by sweet youth, runs tirelessly across the mountains, and who feels his own strength in the high heat of midday — that's noon, Greece, we are the Occident, look closely — but when it declines in the playful evening breezes, in the sacred light, and when, with the cool ray, the spirit of joy comes down to touch the blessed earth, then he succumbs and collapses.
1:38:52 it's symbolic, the roe deer don't collapse because the weather is fine, because the crystalline sky is splendid — he knows it well, Hölderlin, it's profound — then he succumbs and collapses, so much beauty disconcerts him, and he falls into a waking sleep even before the stars draw near, before nightfall. Likewise we, many are indeed those in whom the light of the eyes has gone out before the gifts and divine presents. That's what interests me, that it's the same progression — I spend my time telling you it's the same thing, not only among philosophers but even among the poets and Marx, you see. And one last example — I'm now moving on to a novel, now I'm moving to whatever I want, under the patronage of Kant — you'll say, well, that's normal, we're in philosophy, Kant — but you've bored us a bit with Kant, can't he talk about someone else? No, but it's not Immanuel Kant — you don't know this one — it's Hermann Kant. Who knows him?
Hermann Kant's Die Aula and Brecht's poem 1:39:45 ah, I was sure I'd get that reaction — no, he's a novelist, a novelist from East Germany, so from a country that no longer exists, so I can't go there for my holidays anymore — no, but it's a rare situation, someone stole a country from me, can I file a complaint for that? I can't win, I can't go there for my holidays anymore, that no longer applies. So, seriously, he's one of the rare novelists whose novel was so good it got translated into French, even published by Gallimard, you see, and it's called The Auditorium — try to find it online — Hermann Kant, The Auditorium, called 'Aula' in German, because he uses the Latin name, the Germans — I'll pitch you this novel very quickly because I have very little time. The narrator — it takes place in our era, a bit after the war, the narrator, so at the beginning of the construction, in East Germany, a bit after the end of the beginning, so to speak — is assigned by his university's administration to give the closing speech of the ABF — we don't know what the ABF is, so I'll tell you — it's a university created in '49 in East Germany, so in communist Germany, to give a chance to those who, given their social origin, had never had the chance to access higher education.
1:40:56 or even to any studies at all, let alone higher education — it was a university, if we translate it, for workers and peasants, so people of 30 were there for the first time in a classroom, you see, in a classroom, learning history, geography, geology, mineralogy — it's quite an exceptional adventure. And he is assigned to give the closing speech — it's going to close its doors, because now, those were heroic, pioneering times, now everyone goes to university, to general education, you see, and that's the pretext for the novel — the pen falls from his hand because he remembers the heroic period, there wasn't even string to tie up parcels, there was nothing, people washed with what they called soap — anyway, Germany after the war wasn't much, seen from the German side. And there they tell about their first history class — there are 30-year-old guys there, then there's a guy who comes, who's just out of a concentration camp, a communist. When the list was finished, Riebenlamm — that's the teacher — he says, well, you're called Working Group A1, you number 32, your class is too large, but I hope it will never be smaller. Young men, don't get up to any mischief; young women, don't have too many children. You're going to study history, and for that you must first learn what history is. Schlouk, post-office employee—
1:42:06 what is history? Schlouk stood up — Schlouk, you know, taking a 'schlouk' means taking a swig — and Riebenlamm looks at him — Riebenlamm, wait — well, Schlouk says: history is what has been able to happen in the world, a war, when the war is over, changes of government, what's been newly discovered, America, why things fall. Bravo, said Riebenlamm, that was a good start. And since when, Miss Bilfert, seamstress, since when in your opinion has history been known to us? When the young woman stood up — Trullesand, he's a hero of the novel, a young man whispers, I bet her name is Juliette — wrong, said Riebenlamm, her name is Vera, and you — you're called — for a moment — you're called Gert, not Romeo — as long as we're in class, no one here will be called Romeo, understood?
1:42:47 well, we're in Germany — well, Miss Bilfert, history — the young woman, all red, says timidly, I think it's been since forever, since the beginning. Riebenlamm sits on his desk and says, well, that's what you think — now if I ask you when you'd place that beginning, you'll be quite embarrassed, you won't want to say Adam and Eve, and you won't see anything else either, moreover, we're all more or less in the same boat — that's why for now we'll set the beginning aside, and we'll simply go back until we meet the first men, who certainly weren't called Adam and Eve, because before you can give a name to someone else, you have to know how to speak — all that is rather tangled, that's why we'll simply set this question aside and go back to what Schluck, postman, proposed to us: history, he said, is the sequence of important events in which humanity took part — that's not bad at all, Schluck, if he keeps this up he'll get good marks, that's not too bad. He got up, walked around the classroom, asking questions and immediately giving encouraging comments to the answers. What awaits you here, he said, is more than you think. You think you simply have to learn more — in that case, you're quite mistaken. What is he trying
1:43:57 to say there, in your opinion? You think you're here to learn more, and I say no — first you have to get rid of ideology, you also have to remove things, you must not only acquire something new, you must remove prejudices — we're in Germany after the war, prejudices about the Jew, about the Pole, about the Russian, about the Frenchman, about the boss, about the worker — you have to learn to think, to un-spend, and to learn to un-learn, that's what he's going to say — you must do it, yes, here we want to get thinking back on its feet. If you think I'm going to do it alone, you're deluding yourselves, you must do it with me, I have no recipe for you, just a few rules, but they can be trusted. So we come to rule number one, and regarding this rule I'm going to read you a poem — yes, I'll justify myself, the fact that I make detours through poems, isn't that so — if a teacher in communist Germany starts his history class with a poem, I certainly have the right to do the same in philosophy. Does that surprise you? Well then, be surprised — surprising one's students is what a teacher likes best, astonishment is the foundation on which real pyramids can be built. Here's the poem, listen carefully, his first history class: 'Who built Thebes of the seven gates?' — this is about the Greek Thebes—
1:45:10 here, not the Egyptian Thebes, the Thebes of Oedipus — who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books one sees the names of kings. Did the kings haul the blocks of stone? And Babylon, so many times destroyed, who rebuilt it each time? In which houses of gold-gleaming Lima did the builders live? On the evening the Great Wall of China was finished, where did the masons go? First history class. Riebenlamm read slowly, soberly, in a tone as heartfelt as if it were he, not the poet, asking the questions. When he finished, he looked attentively at the students, then said: we're making progress, you're making exactly the right faces, horizons are being opened for you, the poet has won — what's his name, by the way? Does anyone know him? Robert Iswall, the novel — Iswall said the poet's name was Brecht, and that he had allowed himself — he meant that the poet was wonderful — that's allowed, he added, but perhaps someone thinks otherwise. Let me read you just this continuation: what's his name? Robert Iswall, electrician, then, after checking the list of other students, he said, Miss Paal, farmer, I see, and peasant—
1:46:20 I see from your eyebrows that you disagree, tell us, we're curious to know — she dared to speak up, you see, a peasant girl wouldn't normally speak up in a lecture hall, but still, she frowns. The young woman stood up and said hastily, after a long silence: is that a poem? It sounds like a poem — she'll be so frightened she'll hide behind her neighbor. Miss Rose, said Riebenlamm solemnly, leafing through a notebook, was the first to distinguish herself in the history class of the workers' and peasants' faculty. Why?
1:46:56 because she said — but she thought, but she said — but look at her and follow her example, so I note: Miss Rose, farmer and student, distinguished herself by her exemplary attitude during class. There, that makes you want to read it, doesn't it? The Auditorium is superb. I'll finish with a poem then — I'll say it from memory, since I'm not going to hand it out, I'll look for it — you know, I read you Rimbaud's text 'The Tale' earlier, if you remember, and I'd like to end with my last text, a quotation from Rimbaud — since the holidays are coming, it sums up well what I told you, that the most philosophy can achieve is to become conscious of the historical present we're living in, which is very difficult and takes a long time. There's a poem where Rimbaud makes this extraordinary effort — he lives, you see, in the 1870s, he foresees the first — the first settings of the world we live in, industrial, modern, in a way — and he writes a poem called 'Movement.' You'll find it in the Illuminations, they're all online, on Wiki, Rimbaud, Illuminations, no problem finding them. Remember this: the title, 'Movement,' singular — everything moves in it. So I'm telling you this because Rimbaud isn't always clear on a first reading — it becomes very clear once you've read it—
Rimbaud's "Mouvement": consciousness of the historical present 1:48:06 several times — clearly it was inspired, during those wanderings on foot, by — he lived in the Ardennes, often traveling around Germany and those parts back then — by a hydroelectric plant, they had, to move quickly, the first dams. Movement: the whirlpool at the sternpost — the sternpost is the lock — the whirlpool at the sternpost, the enormous swirl of the current, the terrifying speed of the incline carry the travelers through an unheard-of novelty, and amid the whirlwinds of the Valley and the Strom — it starts off fantastic, there's movement in the sentence, the whirlwinds, the river — there are only dams where there's current — the whirlwinds of the Valley and the Strom, there are German words in there, a bit like in 'Aube,' with 'Wasserfall,' the waterfall in German — he's from the Ardennes, so there are a few words like that — the whirlwinds of the Valley and the Strom — in short, he's in a vision of a scientific, avant-garde setting, a kind of scientific féerie — those are — he talks about men who are there, new men, they're the productive forces—
1:49:16 of the avant-garde, they are the conquerors of the world seeking personal chemical fortune, sport and comfort travel with them — that was new — they carry along the education of races, of classes, and of animals — doesn't that remind you of something, bringing along animals — yes, no, no, no, as a famous reference — animals being loaded aboard — yes, Noah's Ark, they see the world of the future a bit like Noah's Ark, they carry along the education — there's water everywhere in this poem — they carry along the education of races, of classes, and of animals, on this vessel — that confirms it, you see — rest and dizziness in the diluvian light — I never interpret, that's why if I allow myself to say Noah it's because he's just said diluvian light, the flood — it's not — so I'm corroborating one beautiful thing with another beautiful thing — in the diluvian light, in the terrible evening of study — because there's science behind all this, it's not me, the vagabond who can understand, I'm amazed but after all I'm not an engineer — I'll tell you a word.
1:50:26 for from the chatter among the machines, the fire, the flowers, the blood, the jewels, one sees — you see the suspense of the sentence — rolling on toward the hydraulic, motive road, monstrous, endlessly lighting up their stock of studies — them, this new world — him, he comes too late, it's a kind of estrangement — them, driven onward in the heroism and ecstasy of discovery, in short a kind of illumination, it's the right word to use, it's an illumination within the Illuminations, created in this vagabond by a vision of what he calls, in another poem, the phantoms of the future — nocturnal luxury — and then suddenly, the drop: a young couple isolates itself on the ark, as though there were a bridge over the canal — a young couple, well now, that's not avant-garde science, that has existed forever, you know, that young couple of whom people say lovers are alone in the world, in whatever country, whatever place — a young couple isolates itself on the ark — is it ancient savagery that is forgiven?
1:51:23 question mark — and sings and takes its place — full stop. Magnificent, because there you have all the terms of the reflection, from the origins of man right up to now — it's not even us, we're at technology, and we still have to come to terms with ancient savagery. There, I'll conclude with a text that's a bit mysterious but of such beauty, such richness — especially since this kid wrote it in another temporality, because writing that at 19 is not bad at all. So, I'm open to whatever questions you have — thank you.
