English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Self-criticism: pride, vanity, modesty and humility 0:00 Good evening everyone, good evening first of all to those who were here last time and who are already on the starting blocks, because I can see the control room telling me there are more than a dozen waiting. And I have to begin with a self-criticism. No, no, I'm not being coy. You know I always say I am not proud, but I am vain. Usually people flatter themselves for the opposite.
0:38 I actually think that pride, on the contrary, is a high regard for oneself which, alas, I probably lack. And I am vain. And the vain man is the one who is always flattered to see a positive judgment about himself coming from the outside, because from the inside, self-esteem is lacking. That's it. That is the difference between modesty, which is almost always false modesty, and humility. Humility can appear in a braggart and a vain man.
1:19 Because the person concerned knows perfectly well that, apart from himself, he is nothing. That's what matters, isn't it? If I were a believer like my great-aunts and grandmothers, I would say that to God alone, as scripture says, belong wisdom, power and glory. Well, let's get back to us, poor sinners. I am all the happier to be with you again since I was practically overwhelmed by a little flood of mail following the first of the videos we devoted to the Harnessed Ones of Confinitude, which you are, with us.
2:05 Whereas, for my part, I was rather unhappy with my opening, so to speak, insofar as I wanted to cram in too much material, as is often the case with first times, and it could seem a bit confused, and there was material that needed to settle. And now I'm being told, not at all, we want more poems, we want more pieces of music and poems.
2:35 Well, listen, if you go looking for me, you'll find me. There, I would be very happy for you to find me on that front. For now I'll stay in the vicinity, but I'm still going to try, because I stand by my self-criticism, to give tonight's conversation... I'm asking the control room and Philippe, in this case, to give me a nasty signal if I stray from that good resolution. I'm going to force myself to be more, as I promised you last time, though without actually keeping that promise, in the genre of a fireside chat rather than a public proclamation, urbi et orbi, from the balcony of some square in Rome or elsewhere.
3:24 I'm talking about St. Peter's Square, of course. So I'm going to stay, yes, with poems, knowing that this doesn't stop us from going wherever we want, especially when they are very beautiful, that is to say very profound, that is to say expressing, most often without the author's knowledge, dizzying truths and therefore dizzying realities, and quite topical ones, at least among those I select.
Transmitting rather than creating; Vedic cosmogony 3:54 And I'll even stay, I'll stay with Baudelaire for my first examples, but before that, I'll go back a little to give some context to last time's texts and the ones I'll try to tackle today. And I'll build this contextualization from elements I've already put out in the workshops I do monthly, which most of you kindly follow regularly, and some of you even faithfully.
4:25 I'm developing a theme that recurs often in what I say. I always take care to warn you when I raise a theme that comes from your servant here. I keep repeating, and once again, I'm not being coy, that I am not a creative person. It seems to me that the essential part of my effort bears on transmitting the creations of others, with whom I've had the good fortune, the luck, insofar as one can speak of chance.
4:56 Especially since my education began, as is often the case, in elementary school, and my first teachers were French-speaking Africans, for whom French wasn't even their mother tongue. So you see the journey is a long one to get to Hegel, to Baudelaire, to Lenin and to Hölderlin. So there is, all the same, a constant in my transmission, or a theme that recurs more than others.
5:28 Sometimes there's something that comes from my own stock. And I tell you, I warn you, because since it comes from my own stock, I can't give you the same guarantees as when I cite eminent references, right, from Plato to Clouscard, I'd have plenty to choose from, I won't cite them, but there you go, and we can even go further back, the Heraclituses, the Upanishads and the Vedas, that doesn't bother me. Let me make a first little digression.
6:01 There is one, among the Vedic texts—the Vedas are the oldest texts of the Brahmanic religion that have come down to us. They are dated, roughly, between the 10th and 7th centuries BCE. So, for some, they are contemporary with certain pre-Socratics, I mean, all that. Let's not get sidetracked, let's not waste time. But there's one—these are poems. So we could say philosophical poems, they're speculative poems, where there's still a mix of proper names, Indra, Shiva, etc.
6:33 It's not yet abstract principles, as the pre-Socratics would bring with the one, the multiple, being, etc. But still, I mean, there's more than a mere sketch of speculative thought, there are flashes of dizzying depth. That's why I often say, it's not philosophy yet, we're not yet at Socrates, there is no reflection, there is no distance from the words of the city that we all use every day. There isn't yet the 'what do you call courage, you there, the general, who distinguished yourself in the war against the Persians.' But it is a thought of often dizzying depth.
7:07 There you go. Philosophy is a species within the genus thought, but not all thought has the precision of philosophical determination. So I'll cite one, titled 'Cosmogony,' which says that at the origin of everything there was water, as in the prelude to The Rhinegold, which opens Wagner's tetralogy like a cosmogony, doesn't it? The curtain rises, we are in the depths of the Rhine, where we see the Rhine maidens frolicking, but they haven't yet come up to the surface.
7:40 And this poem has this magnificent quality, that it proceeds by questioning: what was there at the origin? Where does the principle come from? What was stirring in the unfathomably deep water? Desire preforms, you see? And then there is this flash, as I say, which is still stunning today. There is Time, who speaks and says: at the origin of the world, it is I who begot the Father.
8:12 Time says, it is I who begot the Father. Usually it's the father who begets everything, right? The universal begetter. There, I close the parenthesis to tell you that these are profound thoughts. So, there you have it, I'm warning you about all these references. When I cite them, I am partisan. You see, I don't know, Spinoza argues against Descartes. But when I quote Descartes, I'm for Descartes. When I quote Spinoza, I'm for Spinoza. That's my teacher side, I'm sorry.
8:44 But I don't like those who delight in referring to one author only to attack another, you know? I often say, at the start of an introduction to philosophy, not to count on me to add to the brawl that pits some against others. It's already good if one understands the necessity of philosophizing, whether from the point of view of Aristotle, Spinoza, Foucault, Plotinus, or Clouscard.
Modernity, born of two revolutions 9:16 That's something else again. Now, you see, since I have such trouble with all these detours, it's because I'm protecting myself against bringing you a personal idea. My personal idea, I've told you, is that we mustn't waste time—without shoring it up too much, without demonstrating it too much, that wouldn't take us as far as that, but let's say the demonstration is something I could get into next time. But in any case I'd like to be clear first, not muddy the waters, and let us see the forest clearly before getting lost in the detail of branches and leaves.
9:46 I spoke about modernity last time. I located it in an eruption whose genesis is two historical phenomena, two phenomena that history confirms, validates: the English Industrial Revolution, the French political revolution, the two crammed into the same handkerchief called the 18th century. And I say that, as is often the case, there is an abyss, that's why I insist on the modernity it inaugurates, because it is still ours.
10:18 There is an abyss between the universe opened up by these two ruptures, in which we still are, which coincides with the appearance of industrial, urban society, bourgeois civil society, and there is an abyss between this world it gave birth to and the earlier worlds, which we often rightly classify under the heading of the Ancien Régime, while warning you against the anachronistic temptations we are prone to.
10:51 We do not imagine how far we are from thinking, from feeling, and even from being moved, in the same way as the people of the Ancien Régime. I gave you a very quick example last time, with, for instance, we are delighted to visit cathedrals or Romanesque chapels. I think that in my home region, Corsica, there isn't enough wealth in Corsican history. A people of shepherds, farmers, and vaguely, in Cap Corse, sailors—there wasn't enough wealth to produce the magnificent cathedrals of the mainland.
11:29 But, on the other hand, the island is dotted with little jewels, little chapels overwhelming in their simplicity and often decorated with mysterious animal and plant motifs. Well, for us, these are treasures, testimonies of a past we call the Middle Ages, over a very long period, since I could stretch it across Gothic Europe. But I told you last time that in the classical era, under Racine, under Boileau, they were considered testimonies of an ugly barbarism, and 'Gothic' meant made by Goths, that is, by barbarians whom it's best to forget are our ancestors.
12:07 There you go. Well, I'm speaking for the French of the mainland. So that's what I brought in—modernity, our modernity, which I illustrated last time with a theme that recurs often in Baudelaire, but which begins before him with Romanticism and becomes exasperated in him, not to mention in Rimbaud, in his successors—a theme I built around the theme of escape, which can be filed under the heading of what's called escapism.
12:38 Escape in English, scappare too, if you like, in Italian, to escape, right? Something has become unbearable upon entering modernity. And that something, I'll say dogmatically today, is what Hegel names in the last chapter of his work, of his enigmatic masterpiece, right, still today, the Phenomenology of Spirit—that history of all the alienations that consciousness must pass through in order finally to rid itself of all the illusions this entails, in favor of the truth that comes to dispel all these prior certainties.
13:31 The book unfolds all these certainties, a bit like a serial, right? And we see them disappear one by one, well, disappear, right? Collapse and return in a deeper form, under a deeper form—I won't develop here the famous Aufheben, or Aufhebung, as you like, which means both to suppress and to preserve, except to say roughly, and everyone understands it quite well this way, that the fruit fulfills the flower, so in that sense it preserves, right, the essential part of what was being prepared in the flower, but at the cost of suppressing it.
La Bruyère and the perilous equilibrium of classicism 14:07 The petal of the flower must have fallen, it must have withered, for that perfection which is the fruit to arise. Here I don't feel like quoting La Bruyère to you, who says this, about—you'll see why I'm thinking about it—about fruits and their ripeness. There is, in art, a point of perfection, as of goodness or ripeness, you see, ripe fruit, as of goodness or ripeness, in nature.
14:40 There is, in art—so the opposite of nature, the artificial—there is in art a point, mind you, a point of perfection, hard to reach, that point, before or after, is not perfection. There is, in art, I repeat on purpose, a point of perfection, as of goodness or of ripeness, in nature, which is on this side or beyond, whoever senses—sorry—this point of perfection has the perfect taste; whoever is on this side or beyond has a defective taste.
15:14 There is therefore a good and a bad taste, and one can dispute about tastes with good grounds. There, I set aside this quotation from La Bruyère to remind you, all the same, in contrast, you see, to modernity, to Romanticism, all the more so to what would later be called Symbolism when one passes from Romantic melancholy to the anguish of Baudelairean spleen, for example. There, we are at the opposite pole, we are in classicism, in balance, in unity, in clarity.
15:47 And, like every classicism, the almost inaccessible model that one can always try to approach without ever reaching it is the model of a Greek model. Now, La Bruyère's sentence shows us a point: if you are on this side or beyond, you've missed your mark. That means that the famous, the famous Greek balance, all these words that lend themselves to confusion, the famous golden mean, the aurea mediocritas, which we translate into French as 'médiocrité dorée,' with the risk of a mistranslation, since médiocrité is pejorative in French.
16:22 But here, it's taken in its proper sense, medium, the middle. What is most precious is trying to stay at that point in the middle between the too-little and the too-much, which have this in common: they are both defective. So one must perch atop a parabola and cling to it, at risk of slipping at every instant. You see? Well, that's how we must view the Greek balance—as a perilous balance. It is certainly not the balance of centrist parties in politics.
17:00 It's a bunch of things I call the extreme center, for they are anything but moderate, even if they try to appear under the guise of, without a label, various moderates, center-left, center-right. It's in that soft underbelly that all those took refuge who had collaborated, right, who kept a low profile in 1945 and who reappeared under that kind of label. And if I mention it, it's because that is what has governed us ever since the communists disappeared on the right, and—excuse me, slip of the tongue—ever since the Gaullists disappeared on the right and the communists on the left, the two forces of the Resistance having disappeared, more worrying tendencies of course return, which have been governing us for a long time now.
Mallarmé: man writes black on white 17:47 Whether it's center-left or center-right changes nothing about the matter. I close this parenthesis. So, I made an allusion to classicism because just as red is seen better on green, right, and blue on yellow better than on turquoise, with which one can confuse it without ever knowing whether it's green or blue. So there you have it, it's by contrast that we see a figure better against a background that provides contrast to it. Black on white, as the language puts it.
18:21 And as if I were dreaming by the fireside instead of rushing on to other themes, I'm lingering on this one, black on white and contrast. Because I'm thinking of a magnificent passage of Mallarmé that you'll find under the chapter 'Restricted Action.' Restricted Action, which is the chapter of a long prose piece called 'Variations on a Subject.'
18:54 You'll find it on Wikisource. 'Variations on a Subject,' Mallarmé, and go straight to 'Restricted Action.' It neither adds to nor takes away—it neither adds nor takes away anything from Mallarmé, but still, this is what I prefer in Mallarmé, though there are magnificent poems, but a bit icy, a bit marmoreal, whereas here in his prose he pushed, probably further than anyone, the mastery of modern prose, a kind of indefinite melody.
19:26 A notion I borrow from Wagner, whom Mallarmé and Proust admired so much. So, in this passage of Restricted Action, Mallarmé sets out to answer a young man who had written to him, as one writes to a writer. Visibly, through what Mallarmé says of it, we can guess that the young man expresses his anguish as an adolescent wondering whether it's worth it, what use is literature, what is one to do, wouldn't it be better to act—hence the title Restricted Action—and evidently the young man must have expressed anguished thoughts, since Mallarmé urgently begs him to understand that suicide is not a solution.
20:10 But why am I talking about this? I was talking about black on white because he said, at a certain point, after dissuading him from suicide, above all do nothing, for lack of the crowd declaring itself, for lack of money, for lack of everything, there is no present, Mallarmé says—you see, there's an almost desperate, despairing passage—there is no present, but what is one to do in the absence, and Mallarmé tells him: write. Full stop, new line. And there begins the passage I'm going to quote to you about black on white: you noticed, and speak to the young, man does not write luminous on a dark field, only the alphabet of the stars is thus inscribed, man, he continues, pursues black on white—you see, the reverse of the constellations, the constellations are luminous on a dark field, whereas man
Philosophy speaks natural language 21:20 pursues black on white, and if I quote it, it's not a detour, on the contrary it's what will let me take the step forward I wanted to reach from the beginning of this talk. I come back to that portion of darkness there is in every expression. You might say to me, wait, wait, we'd like to see clearly, to express is to bring to the outside, it's to stop being in the mush of interiority, of feeling, of what is felt—very well, I agree, and Hegel would have validated it. Hegel says the Idea itself, the Idea with a capital I, its most manifest characteristic is precisely to manifest itself, to externalize itself, to become incarnate, you see, so on that we agree, the fact that expressing oneself doesn't mean putting everything on the table. And if I come back to a theme that is also fairly recurrent in what I transmit, it's that philosophy does not use equations, I mean
22:30 going deeper, to stick with the mode of expression—the mode of expression of philosophy is ordinary language, of course it bends it to its own purposes, and sometimes with ordinary language it says quite complicated things, but with everyday words. The philosophers who multiply technical language are not the greatest, and the passages where they do so are perhaps not the most profound. When Hegel speaks of the pure porosity of matters, there is not a single word that isn't ordinary—pure, porosity, porous, matter—of course the sentence seems incomprehensible as it stands, we'd need to put it back in its context, we'll do that another time, but there you have it, that is what linguists call natural language, everyday language which has not been formalized the way mathematicians or logicians do with 'P implies Q'—there we're in formal logic. Now what I'm saying is that formal logic is entirely luminous, it hides nothing, and mathematics likewise; we need to think hard about what's at stake here, because there are plenty who believe
23:40 they're speaking scientifically, right, and they throw arguments of scientificity in your face while using ordinary language, which is never scientific, which can never attain scientific univocity, because when I say 'day is breaking,' I'm not saying something stupid, I'm not saying just anything, but I'm not in the scientific register, I'm in poetry—day doesn't go to bed, it doesn't have a bed, it doesn't have sheets, it doesn't rub its eyes, it's we who move, it's not the sun—the sun rises, it doesn't rise, you see. Why am I saying all this about poetry? I'm saying that we are poets every day without realizing it, by using ordinary language, and yes, we do like Monsieur Jourdain, but in reverse: he is quite astonished at the revelation his rhetoric teacher gives him, that he's been speaking prose without knowing it when he calls his maid, and I'm saying you're making poetry without knowing it when you say, oh look, day is breaking, or you're breaking my ears
24:50 with Pagani's digressions—'breaking my ears' is figurative speech, I didn't take a hammer and hit you on the eardrum, there you go, so we're in figuration, you see, we have to get used to it: poetry, natural language, and philosophy—you see what they have in common? They have natural language in common. That's why we say philosophy limps: it would like to have the rigor of mathematics, that's what makes it not poetry, nor literature, nor aesthetics, nor religion—it wants to have the exactness of mathematics but with a language that isn't at all made for that, because everyday language was never made to determine whether the earth was at the center, or how much sand there is in the Sahara, or how long light takes to reach us from Betelgeuse or Antares—it was never made for that. Language was made—it wasn't that we didn't know
26:00 anything about all that, but from the very origin it's there for, at the hunt, communicating where the mammoth is, for acting, for seducing, for deceiving, for lying, for prophesying, for testifying to a vision of God, for courting, for condemning, for absolving, but not for knowing—for that whole series of attitudes I've just listed, in which natural language has been invested since the dawn of time, none of that has a purely cognitive aim. One is not trying to know when one absolves, condemns, courts, or prophesies; that is not trying to know. Well, that is what makes it impossible for philosophy to leave natural language, because the stakes contained in those attitudes—which the mathematician rightly sets aside, because it's not his business to seduce or to absolve—
Knowing and ought: against neopositivism 27:10 to condemn is not his business as a mathematician, as a man he can be a saint or a scoundrel, that's his problem, but it's not mathematics, physics or biology that will confirm whether that absolution or condemnation is well-founded. Yes, that's where you see the abyss separating the two questions that Kant distinguishes so well in the whole program of philosophy: one that brings it close to science, the question "what can I know" which is also asked at the CNRS, philosophers aren't the only ones who ask it, and the question "what must I do" which no scientist asks in the language of science. So watch out for the humbug of today's invasive neo-positivism—that's why I'm dwelling on this a bit. Cognitive science and any demonstration that wants to reduce everything to a system of equations in a field that's not made for that—mathematics is just as unqualified to know whether I should finish off a parent who is suffering from an illness that makes them suffer terribly, isn't it, when on odd days I tell myself yes, on even days I tell myself no, all the same I don't have the right
Absolute knowledge, the collapse of certainties 28:20 I have no idea; I hope that in a thousand years I will still be asking the question—an impersonal "I" that humanity will still be asking the question, isn't it—and that's not the object of science. So back to my modernity. When modernity emerges, it produces what Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit—I pick up my thread again—calls absolute knowledge. But what is he talking about, is he megalomaniac, Hegel? No, but it doesn't mean a knowledge where we know everything. Hegel is indifferent to knowing how many drops of water there are in the Pacific Ocean, how many grains of sand there are in the Sahara, and how many ice crystals in Antarctica—there's indifferent difference, as he says so well, there's indifferent difference, there's the particular, the universal, but you see this window pane I see from here with the night behind it, I do this and it's already a different angle. The particular is there all the time, I mean it's not there to oppose you and me, because each of us of course—each individual is a focal point unto themselves that casts one plane and only one
29:30 onto the universe, but inside ourselves there's the same differentiation—I move my head and I have a different angle on the world. So let's leave aside this indifferent difference and this derisory business of idle differences that make us miss the real distinctions and real cuts we need, which I'll come back to. I say it dogmatically for now: that man, modern man, is modern to the extent that he can no longer believe—that's roughly what absolute knowledge means, I won't dig into it technically, you have to feel it—can no longer believe that the earth is cubic or that it rains because a god decided to make it rain, which is why we still find the pronoun "it"—the personal pronoun—as if it were a person deciding the rain, because language comes from the dawn of time. Being modern is knowing, as I often say, that in springs there is H2O and not nymphs. I'm the first friend of nymphs, that's not the question, and as is said so well
30:41 at the very beginning of Mallarmé's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun—it's right at the start, it's the stroke of the bow, and you know that fauns adore nymphs—these nymphs, I want to perpetuate them, isn't it, it's the very beginning of the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, "their light flesh-tint," etc., "these nymphs, I want to perpetuate them." But still, I mean from the point of view of strict reality, I can build a dam on the river without fearing that nature will take revenge, that the nymphs will take revenge. And so the world of technology, the world that has pushed back the nothingness that threatened man from outside—this barely viable animal, this animal born immature, this animal born prematurely, I'm speaking of man here of course, you can see it with the newborn's fontanelle, isn't it, which is unfinished for reasons going back to anthropology, to bipedal posture—in short, I'm saving time, I'm dealing with the consequences and not the origin here
31:51 this animal which, because it is unfinished in terms of what is given to it at birth—natal, to be born, natural—is forced to recover what grants it viability of existing through relation to the other and not only to the thing, because in relation to the thing it is actually less gifted than the young gazelle that trots a few hours after its birth in the face of danger, or a few days—so this animal that knows less how to dig the earth with its hands than a badger because it doesn't have the equipment of claws for that, that knows less how to camouflage its body in its surroundings than the polar bear in the Antarctic, isn't it, that can walk less silently than a feline, than a great predator, isn't it, to catch its food—in short, that is characterized only by deficiencies compared to all animal perfections. "Perfect" means finished, in grammar you know, the perfect is what is finished, what is past in grammar
33:01 the animal is perfect, it is past, it is not in the future that our present perpetuates since the origin of humanity. Precisely because man is imperfect, has no specific perfection—digging, hiding—but as a result he is a specialist in generalities, as Auguste Comte said about the philosopher. So that's absolute knowledge in that sense—that is to say, the sum of disillusionments, the collapse of the certainties that were mine before the worst enemy of certainty, which is truth, imposed itself on me. That's a distinction one often sees in Hegel that I insist on because there are many people for whom it's the same: I am certain, therefore it's true. Thousands of years ago it was certain that the ground under our feet was the very symbol of stillness, we spoke of "the cows' flat floor"—while all of this is in a staggering, or delightful, mobility, it doesn't matter after all
34:11 so 30 km per second around the sun—that's how we're moving right now, but since we're all moving, all objects, at the same speed, we have the impression it's still. That's the principle of inertia. Modern man is one on whom a whole series of collapsing certainties has been imposed, I repeat myself because the essential deserves repeating, and as these certainties collapse, his truth begins to take shape. There's a tragic moment in modernity, and so last time I dwelt on certain poetic forms of beauty—I'm thinking especially of Baudelaire here—which try to escape this knowledge, to escape this present, to take refuge for example in a past. In Max Ophüls's very beautiful film called La Ronde, which is a series of sketches, we see a character at the beginning whom we'll see again linking each of the sketches together, who embodies time, he says he is time
35:21 a circular time, moreover, since the film is called La Ronde, set to very beautiful music, and in which the character says: I like the past, it's less boring than the present and so much more reassuring than the future. Yes, well, so this habit of escaping dates from the time when reality and truth became unbearable. And so, here's the thesis that I—after this long detour—I'm trying to state clearly now, thank you, so I was no longer framed—sorry, I can now state this truth, but no longer as an abstract result cut off from its becoming, but with the sketch of the becoming I've just tried to outline: that access to this absolute knowledge, precisely because of how perilous it is for consciousness, because it comes at a cost, is doubled
Absolute knowledge and absolute non-knowledge 36:31 watch out, because now I'll come back to current events—is doubled by a tendency to maintain an absolute non-knowledge, if you prefer terms borrowed from psychoanalysis: an absolute repression, an "I don't want to know," a denial, a negation, a negative, a negativity—call it what you want, the last categories are philosophical, repression is analytic and comes from the Freudian field. I'm borrowing the Freudian form here of repression, the form I try to sum up with what we do when we play with our young child in the bath, in the little bathtub, when there are often things floating, usually balls or balloons—you push the balloon down into the water, that's repression, and as soon as you let go it springs back up and hits you right in the face. Goethe used to say
37:43 truth, when you push it away, you end up embracing it. And so I continue my thesis, I'd say with great presumption, that with absolute knowledge begins an enormous conflict between absolute knowledge and absolute non-knowledge, or if you prefer, between revolution and counter-revolution. That's the history of the 19th century that I'm tracing, up to today, up to our modernity. How long did we live in revolution, from the storming of the Bastille to Thermidor? Not very long, a few blazing, very brief years, from which we've kept secular compulsory schooling, the marshal's baton as they say, the fact that a private soldier of low birth, as they said at the time, could become a general, why not a marshal—a marshal's baton in his knapsack, as they said—and why not consul and emperor, the grandes écoles
38:54 the metric system, and so on—there are moments like that with no equivalent in history, like advances, and then very quickly there's Thermidor, then there are the coups of the Corsican who re-establishes a form of monarchical, imperial—not royal—rule, then the Restoration, even more regressive, and then bang, there's 1830, which makes the ball bounce back in our face—you try to push it under the water, it comes back up in your face—well, there's a new king, a king a bit more Giscardian, a bit more centre-left centre-right, Louis-Philippe, the "bourgeois king" as he was called, you see, they were clever already, you understand, damn it, this cursed rabble of a people, we have to deal with them, so we have to try to con them, to pump them, but we mustn't go against them—it's not Monsieur Thiers, you know, the butcher of the Commune, the one who caused more deaths in one week, the Bloody Week, isn't it, than the entire French Revolution over several years—Monsieur Thiers said
Questions from the audience; perversion according to Freud 40:05 after this carnage and after the dreadful siege of Paris, he said: we won't always be able to manage it like this with dragoons and cuirassiers, now what we need to learn is to learn how to win elections. You see how quickly we get to our own era. So I need to change screens now. Camille: "Must one go beyond romanticism to be modern?" Excellent question, I'm right in the middle of it, Camille, so let me continue and I know you will. Camille is an excellent young man, I allow myself to speak of him a bit paternally because he looks very young, and I speak of him with affection because he knows music well and I know he'd love nothing more than for me to come back to it—it'll come. Algarhythm—so Algarhythm, these are our Norwegian friends who were kind enough to invite me to give this talk in Bergen, who do extraordinary work in a country where revolutionary considerations, a fortiori Marxist ones, etc.
41:02 are just as incongruous, I don't know, as a polar bear in the middle of the Ténéré in the Sahara—and who caught my attention, I mention it in passing, I'm passing on one of their transmissions that I was privileged to receive: that this country, which is one of the founding countries of NATO, of the Atlantic organization, which has a northern border with the former USSR and with present-day Russia, with tensions you can imagine, and for a long time, for several generations now—this country, which is part of the so-called Scandinavian countries, the majority of which currently, from Denmark to Finland by way of Sweden, would have no legitimate political power if there weren't a neo-Nazi party lending itself to the governing coalition—I say this because it's often held up as a model of extraordinary democracy, it's good to live there, mind you, I mean for those—Norway has the highest standard of living in the world, higher than Switzerland per capita
42:12 I'm spelling all this out to make it clear: they told me about a region in the north, in the north-central part of Norway, not far from the Russian border, where the population fiercely resists the unleashed Russophobia of Atlanticism, threatened by its economic decline for many, many years now, to the point that anything goes, including the virus, to try to strengthen its economic, social and military positions—and in this region, why do they exempt themselves from this Russophobia? Because they saw the Popovs land in '44 and liberate them from the Nazi occupation, and I refer you to an immense militant woman who took extraordinary risks at the time, broadcasting from the Norwegian resistance to the resistance fighters on the Russian side, with very serious risks of being caught by the Gestapo's direction-finding vans—and we'll talk about that another time, I say we'll devote
43:22 a special session to it. So I salute—but let me look at his question—"we see classicism and romanticism as structuring forces of history that go well beyond art"—very well—"can you tell us how you see these forces?" Well, that's what I was in the process of doing, wonderful, so I can continue. And Paul-Éric Langevin, whom I salute, I allow myself to say—I know it will embarrass his modesty—that he's an heir of the great Langevin family, which was the glory of French physics and of French communism as well, not only that but also, less well-known than the physicist, a great musicologist bearing the same name—and Paul-Éric tells me: repression equals neurosis, and denial equals perversion for psychoanalysts—I—no, I'm looking at the cursor below, that's all, there's no continuation. Yes, well I'll come back to it, I'll maybe start with the third question very quickly because there's a small misunderstanding, not serious, because Paul-Éric is cultured and intelligent enough, but I want to say first
44:32 granting that there is a perversion, perversion doesn't at all have only the little narrow sense of everyday language, "man is a perverted animal"—vertere means "turned," roughly, isn't it, you find it in inversion, conversion and subversion, turned from below, to subvert, so vertere—the pervert is the one who turns—turns what? Turns natural instinct. So having an erotic relationship with a human being when it's not mating season and the goal pursued is not the reproduction of the species is a perversion, isn't it—that's what Beaumarchais says so superbly in The Marriage of Figaro when he has Figaro say: making love at all times, that's what indeed distinguishes us from beasts, and not only during mating season, driven by an instinct that doesn't at all concern itself with those who are copulating—you see, it's no longer making love, it's coupling—but that concerns itself with the survival of the species, which is quite different. You can well imagine
45:45 that Tristan and Iseult, when they escape into the forest, far from King Mark's court, couldn't care less about the reproduction of the species. So there you have it, if we take perversion in this general sense, that it's proper to man not to be content with eating but to eat cooked food—that's a perversion; at certain hours, even when he's hungry, he waits, it's not mealtime—I tried myself to corrupt Clouscard, to get him to eat outside meal hours, he put up a fierce peasant resistance he'd kept from the Occupation era: "not for anyone, and it's not the time, it's not the time," there, "after that you won't eat anything until mealtime," he'd tell me, and he was right. You see, all of that is perversions, and he felt fine about it, but there's absolutely no moral judgment in Freud, agreed, and of course he shows well the misfortunes that repression exposes us to, but he understands very well the absolute necessity of repression—mind you, Freud is no naive fool—but repression produces a pathology when the subject no longer knows that he is repressing, when he has no
46:55 no awareness of it at all, when he's even certain of the opposite. So that's just this little correction, this little corrective, sorry, I come back to Camille's question, who just asked a question about music, I expected it, I'll state his question: "There's also a question I've been asking myself for a long time: how to prolong the heritage of classical music today, what path to take?" There, I've noted it, I won't answer you right away, Camille, because out of courtesy for our Norwegian friends who are far away and were kind enough to tune in to our live broadcast, our stream, I'm starting to answer them, and to do that I'll continue my talk, because their question bears directly on what I was developing—if access to absolute knowledge, which characterizes the fact of being modern, being conscious of the principle of inertia and not that there are souls and animation everywhere, including in this book, this stone, this mug—so if access to modernity and the losses
Force of progress and classless society 48:05 that it entails—losses that aren't so serious in themselves, even if they were able to drive the first generations who suffered them to madness or suicide, I'm thinking here of Nordic romanticism, German romanticism, English romanticism especially, but also, look at the reflections on anxiety in Kierkegaard, the Dane Kierkegaard, for example, among the most profound ever produced—so these losses, losses of certainty for the benefit of truth, I repeat myself, I've paralleled them with the struggle between revolution and counter-revolution, but I'll say right away that these aren't very serious losses if these certainties were nonsense, errors, illusions—it's not such a great loss to lose them. It's not a big deal if I learn I've lost 200 million euros in a day but it was counterfeit money, if I'm suddenly told it was fake bills, I hadn't noticed—that's never happened to me, don't worry—but you see, if I'm told it's fake money, I'd say to myself: thankfully I lost it
49:15 otherwise I would have made all sorts of plans, isn't it, and at the moment of paying I would have been in trouble. So can you give me back the first question from our Norwegian friends, so that I don't betray the letter, the literality of their questions, thank you—yes, classicism and romanticism. So here again a little corrective: I contrast romanticism, of course, like everyone, with classicism, but not only that—I say the ancien régime, in which there can be baroque, which is often contrasted with the classical—so let's say the old world, the one in which there is a place for everything and everything in its place, whereas the distinctive feature of modernity is never being in its place, that is, being in mobility—which we started seeing last time as "structuring forces of history that go well beyond art"—no, well, there's a reflection from a Norwegian friend that anticipates—and this gives me great joy—that anticipates the message
50:25 that I'm trying to deliver to you—but of course if I talk to you about it, it's not—if I do aesthetics, since I comment on the productions of art, poetry or music—if I do aesthetics it's certainly not to do aestheticism, but it's not to stay within art either, nor to leave it either, in the sense that I would inject interpretations arbitrarily into the work of art without paying attention to the details—the marvel of the details it offers us. Not at all, we saw last time with the masculine and feminine rhymes in Harmonie du soir just how much it's in the detail that we see, on the contrary, the vertiginous depth of a great creator. You could say that the whole immense depth of a philosophy like Leibniz's—I don't share all his views, but still there's one thing you can't deny him—is that for him detail has decisive importance; he even went so far as to say that a cannon shot fired somewhere in China, we hear it—that's what he calls the petites perceptions—without being aware of it. Yes, yes, the sense of detail
51:35 we're almost in the silence that was required to appreciate the slightest tremors of Debussy's Preludes last time. Yes, so what are these forces? I'll sum them up as follows: a force of progress—I'll use an extensive term on purpose, not out of caution but so as to leave nothing to chance—a force of progress, of course, which reached a peak with the goal of a society that overcomes the curse of class division, of course, of a classless society—there is progress toward that goal, and that progress is sanctioned in expression, in the manner of expressing oneself, in interiority, for the first time, by romanticism—but there can be a very reactionary romanticism, that's what I tried to show with Baudelaire last time, who had both tendencies. So, and here, thanks to our Norwegian friends' question, I pick up my thread again, they appear almost at the same time as the revolution, at the beginning
52:47 right from the beginning of the 19th century—this century that Rousseau announced in Émile when he says to the mother of his pupil: "we are approaching the state of crisis and the century of revolutions"—there, back to today—"we are approaching the state of crisis," not "of revolution"—Rousseau, if ever anyone was a precise prophet—"the century of revolutions," as if he already knew what I indicated earlier, that starting from the storming of the Bastille, this is not a revolution like the many we've seen in history that replaces the Greek city-state with Alexander's empire, or the Roman republic, isn't it, with Augustus—no, no, this is a revolution that never stops, every time we try to choke it off—and 1830, and 1848, and the Commune, and 1917, and the Popular Front, and the Liberation, which brings us pay-as-you-go pensions and social security, about which our president has just discovered that after all it has its good points, this system of social protection, after having done everything to tear it to shreds, so that
53:57 is the force that structures us, isn't it, but toward a classless society, so toward freedom—but freedom for all. I recall here the phrase, for me the most important one from Hegel, the most synthetic: the Orientals knew that only one is free—that's the Orientals of history, not the Orientals of today, who are far more modern than I am, you know, the ones working on 5G in China, they're far more modern than your servant here, 5G let alone the quantum computer. The Orientals knew, in the past tense, that only one is free—the Emperor of China, the Negus of Ethiopia, the king of kings, if you'll allow, the Pharaoh. The Greeks, second stage, knew—we move from the imperfect of the long duration to the simple past, a miracle, it never lasts long—the Greeks knew that a few are free; there's progress, there's a society, a community of free men within which there is freedom and a quasi-equality of rights—the vote, the Pnyx, the agora, all that where it's speech that decides power
55:07 and not just force—that's good, but only for a few, let's not fool ourselves, it was about one-fifth of society that was made up of free men; the rest, of course, daily life was based on the productive force that is the pillar of all antiquity for millennia, and it's called the slave—when it's not animal traction, it's outright the slave, human traction. And the Orientals knew that only one is free—I can't cut up this formula—the Greeks knew that a few are free, the moderns know that all are free, period, in potential of course. And the whole stake of the upheavals we've been living through since the French Revolution is to make it so that either the counter-revolution crushes the revolution, or the revolution manages to free itself from the lock the counter-revolution wants to strangle it with—that's it, we are not in a revolutionary period, we are not in a counter-revolutionary period, we are in the conflict between the two, that's what being dialectical means
56:17 and we find again my position on this, but not as a point of perfection like with the classical writer La Bruyère of the ancien régime, where there was a place for everything and everything nicely in its place, but as something that is always in motion, isn't it. So, first force that structures our modernity and produces what there is of progressivism in romanticism, and the second force—which is not classicism, classicism expresses its own era, no, but neo-classicism, which I alluded to, that's why I'm very glad of Algorhythm's question, which brings us back—brings our comrades back—to the opening of these Ateliers de la Confinitude. If I dwelt on the Parnassian side, on the Parnassian vein of Baudelaire, even specifying that it's not the aspect of him I prefer, but not for political reasons—because it produces poems that happen to be not quite as profound, as beautiful, or as successful as when both are present, when there is perfection
Neoclassicism, the antonym of romanticism 57:27 formal perfection in him united with the tremor of music and scent—it's not the opposite of mineral stability. Let me quote at random a poem where he expresses a perfume, to show the other vein, the opposite of the beauty with stone breasts who says she hates the movement that shifts the lines. Good reader, it's in a poem called "Le Fantôme," a sub-chapter of the poem that has several chapters, "Le Parfum": "Reader, have you sometimes breathed with rapture and slow greediness that grain of incense which fills a church, or the ingrained musk of a sachet, deep and magic charm, by which we're intoxicated in the present with the restored past"—you have all of Proust right there, with "a scent by which we're intoxicated in the present with the restored past." "Thus the lover on an adored body gathers the exquisite flower of memory"—you see how everything there is evanescent, fluid and mobile, whereas it was impassive and marble-like, the mineral
58:39 incarnation of beauty that I gave voice to last time. So it's not classicism that is counter-revolutionary—it precedes the revolution, it can't be counter-revolutionary, it's conservative, classicism is not reactionary, conservative wants to maintain the status quo, the reactionary is far more dangerous because he has been afraid, and so he is malicious, he has a revenge to take and a threat, isn't it, to ward off. Put yourselves in the place of the governments of capitalist countries in '45—I don't say Western, because since the earth is round, tell me where west is, I'd gladly go, I'd move my chair like the Little Prince if you like every five minutes to try to stay in the west, but well, we're in the west wherever we want—in Poland we're east of Germany and we're west of Russia, we're east or west as you like—so I prefer to say, isn't it, what these words hide, the occulting concepts, "the West," let me extend my digression
59:49 on the study of this word, isn't it—but I'll be told, come on, let's not quibble, it means the industrialized countries. Oh really? The Soviet Union and China are part of the West? Oh no, that doesn't work. No but it's the European countries. Oh really? I thought the leader was the United States of America. Oh darn, that doesn't work either, ouch ouch ouch, it's not the industrialized countries, it's not the European countries, so what—what do Japan, Europe and the United States have in common? Yes, it's capitalism—and even with a whole production sector in China, were it not for, isn't it, the omnipresence of the state governed by a communist party that says now there's overheating, so I'm going to raise
1:00:59 interest rates, and now I'm lowering them to restart the dynamic—and that suddenly builds two hospitals of several thousand beds each in 48 hours, isn't it, and that's in the process of delivering us a billion—no, no, it's not a hyperbole, the news is certain, we learned it today—France has just ordered a billion masks—France, a very developed country, isn't it, very developed, we can make the Ariane rocket, but to make masks we have to borrow a billion from China, which also makes rockets. So that's it, it's not classicism that is my antonym here—starting from modernity a conflict appears between revolution and counter-revolution, back to poetry, between romanticism—but in the extensive sense in which Baudelaire is part of it at that time, I'll come back to this small nuance later, which is more relevant to literary history classes, so for now I set it aside—but the antonym here is neo-classicism—moreover as soon as there's "neo," there's a little fascistic side taking shape, neo-capitalism
Parnassus, Rousseau's reverie, baroque and rock 1:02:10 neo-liberalism, that's another matter entirely, I mean when it comes back like that, when there's already a kind of rehash, it means something is happening. So I showed that Baudelaire's Parnassian vein—what is the Parnasse? It's been said, it's in every textbook—the Parnasse or "art for art's sake" are neo-classical schools; when Théophile Gautier writes Émaux, the plural of enamel, Émaux, that's hard, that's hard like marble, it's enamel, it's not perfumes, no evanescent stuff, it's not "a grain of incense which fills a church, or the ingrained musk of a sachet"—and yet Baudelaire started from there, you know that Les Fleurs du Mal are dedicated to Théophile Gautier, "the impeccable poet, magician of letters," etc., because that's where he learned to discipline the form of the verse. Very good, but it lacked the vibration—the perfect form, but on top of it the vibration, and Baudelaire is that miracle of having both, of having the Racinian form—and I get there, I come back
1:03:20 to our Norwegian friends—and interiority, note what is irreversible in the interiorization brought by romanticism, the depth of feelings and/or of sensation. Look at Rousseau, who is at the origin, at the first emergence of pre-romanticism, when he's on the Île Saint-Pierre, when he says: "the flux and reflux of this water, its continuous sound but swelling at intervals, striking my ear and my eyes ceaselessly, made up for the internal movement that reverie extinguished in me, and was enough to make me feel my existence with pleasure, without taking the trouble to think." There isn't a single feeling, there are only sensations—striking my eyes and ears, making me feel my existence, not reflecting on melancholy, joy, etc. Yes, de Almeida—so I get there, I specify this then: it's rather neo-classicism that is illustrated today by the vogue for baroque music, in line
1:04:30 with what I just said—I'm not saying the shadow of one letter or one single word or one single sentence against the baroque repertoire—I would say it against Telemann, Vivaldi, a fortiori Bach, or the immense Monteverdi who manages to achieve practically the whole Wagnerian ideal of the total work of art, of spectacle, of dance, of gesture, of music and of text, but with an economy of means, isn't it, enough to make the author of Twilight of the Gods turn pale—with a harpsichord and a string quartet he brought back to life what the Greeks called "music," that is, the conspiracy of all the arts, isn't it, on stage. No, I have nothing to say against this repertoire, but the fact that this repertoire comes back into fashion at the same moment that the baroque, or rock and roll, emerges in the fifties, is no coincidence—I'm not making a value judgment here for now, I'm saying it's no coincidence that modernity needed that regular tempo, because that's what's common to baroque music and rock—that's why I sometimes say, to introduce baroque, B-A-R-O-Q-U-E, it's that it swings, it's good, it's steady
Poetry, mathematics and the spiral 1:05:40 that reassures me, this segment of time that begins—it doesn't drag me toward death, it comes back, it's cyclical, it's always the same, it's regular, it does me good, me, modern man, who is constantly swept along. All right, I'll get there, to the incarnation of man, and here I'm looking at the question because I'm going to bring in a thesis—but I'd like first, I'm sure it will answer the questions coming in: "philosophy and poetry are made with everyday language"—yes, what one calls natural language, we agree—"but do philosophy and poetry take everyday language with as much rigor, and in seeking a precision similar to what science, mathematics, claims?" There—so philosophy and poetry depart from everyday language and go, in their own way, to meet mathematics. Do you agree?
1:06:27 yes and no. I fully agree with the fact that poetry and philosophy both seek, using ordinary language, to attain a rigor that is not that of the ordinary use of everyday language—that's where I don't disagree—there's an ordinary use, and there Fabio is perfectly right, that scoffs at rigor. Now, to please him, I often say—I quoted it last time—to our friend Thomas La Rochefoucauld, who is a pillar of our association and a brilliant mathematician who teaches at advanced classes and, despite his young age, I sometimes tell him, half seriously, half in jest, that the only difference between poetry and mathematics is that poetry is an exact science. Fabio, I hope I'm pleasing you—in any case that's what I sincerely think, in some sense it's true—but that's not at all, that's my difference with what it seems to me I'm gathering
1:07:37 from what you're saying, though I wouldn't want to make you say what you're not saying—I think there's a small critique of mathematics there—not me, when they stay within their own field I have absolutely nothing against them, on the contrary, I would say like Rimbaud, "one must be absolutely modern," go toward science and forward—that's Rimbaud saying that, no doubt the one who went furthest in poetry, he says nothing against modernity, against science, by the way. But I mean mathematics is right not to try to bring rigor where the philosopher and the poet bring it, because when you're trying to know the sun, you're not trying to know yourself—so there's no struggle, and I come back to my quotation from Mallarmé: to the young man, you remarked, man does not write luminous on dark fields, only the alphabet of the stars thus inscribes itself, the constellations upon the blackness of the sky, man pursues black on white, a fold of dark lace, that part of mystery, isn't it, and of the unformulated that remains within this very formulation which is poetry
1:08:48 and philosophy, of this attempt at formulation, is the part of sin, if I were to use a religious metaphor, that we carry within us of insufficiency or finitude, of "con-finitude" as I'd say today, isn't it, and here I make a detour—that's why I made an allusion to religion—I make a detour through the Book of Genesis. Even those who have never read it, the Bible, we've heard it said, isn't it, because it's been repeated a thousand times, that it is written, in Scripture, that God created man in his image—agreed, so what does that mean? Most of the time people really believe it's the plastic image of man—that God looks like this, that God has hair on his calves, that he has hair in his nostrils, isn't it, and that he blows his nose when he has a cold, no doubt. So I don't want to give away too much of the time, shorter than our workshops, that's been allotted to me, but I insist here on the fact that this part
1:09:59 of mystery, it's a precision—but one that leaves things in imprecision, that's where I disagree—what, the negative, the repressed on which we keep bouncing back endlessly to go still further, to draw closer again to the true, then to move away from it again—and that's why, I thank in passing our webmaster whom I salute once again here for the enormous referencing work he does on our videos, Stéphane Ligoza, who is in Bordeaux and who no doubt is listening to us—he had the very good idea of putting as a logo, I leave him complete latitude, for the site where he brings together my talks over the past few years—he put a spiral, because that's it, a spiral, it goes—and here I answer at the same time our Norwegian friends, Camille and Fabio—it goes forward, it comes back, it goes forward, it comes back, but it's not to return to zero, it progresses while going backward—there's both recurrence and advance, that's the spiral, it's the synthesis of the reactionary circle and of the straight line that claims to be, isn't it
1:11:09 progressive but that doesn't accumulate much, a bit like the landscape, isn't it, that scrolls by in the rearview mirror, never coming back. There, I hope we have—you see, I preferred to stay within the references from last time to show that there's still a lot to say before I overwhelm you with a whole other series of references. Thank you very much for your attention, your patience and your questions, thank you
