English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The Norns' opening credits and the session's program 4:54 It's working. Good evening everyone, good evening dear friends, good evening to all the comrades, good evening to all the... the... the eternally confined. I did it on purpose, asking our control room, Philippe, who made a very beautiful montage.
5:24 It's a musical generic style a bit longer than usual, in the hope that the three Norns would finally reach the end of this clairvoyance of the past, since that's our subject, this anamnesis. And then, as you saw, the threads got tangled, the cable broke. Well, what I'm telling you is a little overdetermined. I'm anticipating our second part. You noticed that I'll start first with a few examples of collective anamnesis, and then in a second part, I had spoken of overdetermined memory.
6:12 And there, I'm already talking about overdetermination, I'll introduce it, I'll develop the concept philosophically later, but it's a bit to reassure you. You know I like to reassure you at the moment when you think you're lost, that is, this image of the three Norns with the thread of destiny getting tangled, it's a bit the situation of quite a few of my listeners too who said 'but with Pagani we get confused, he gave us a program last time, he didn't do half of it.' There were two texts by Hölderlin for now. We were supposed to start with a text by Hölderlin, we were supposed to finish with another text that had the same title, Mnemosyne.
6:51 We were supposed to start with Mnemosyne 1 and finish with Mnemosyne 2. We were supposed to talk about a video that tells of a small revolution in the world of prehistoric archaeology, weren't we. And that would be with an essential discovery in Morocco of... of a fossil of the genus Homo, which upends the chronology, anyway, with a link pointing to an excellent documentary on Arte. I didn't talk about any of that. I get tangled up too.
7:34 So, sometimes it's due to circumstances, I lingered too long on one example and so I didn't have time to deal with the others. But here that's not the case at all. I thought about the Hölderlin texts, the complexity of their content, and I saw there were quite a few comments saying 'Oh la la, that's heavy stuff,' as if to say you have to hang on. Well, let me reassure you, they're not the only ones. The greatest specialists, including the Germanists of this literature, themselves offer several readings, as we say, several interpretations—you know I don't like the word interpret—several interpretations, several readings, to put it simply, of these texts I'm offering you. So there's no need to feel inadequate at all.
8:23 But in any case, I'm not doing a textual commentary, I'm doing philosophy. So it's possible I might use a one-page text to linger on three lines that condense the philosophical stakes of the text, the rest serving to contextualize the chosen example. Or on the contrary, there might be lines that were sent to you and I go back a page earlier that you don't have, to situate the passage we're studying. There you go. I don't want to confuse you.
9:02 But still, why? I started with the Norns and we'll also end with them, to stay in tune with the mythological resonance of the episode last year. Well, actually 15 days ago. I'll take this opportunity to reassure those who think I don't work enough and who now want me to resume the weekly rhythm of our live sessions.
9:35 So I drag my feet, but I comply. I'm delighted and very happy to note that by trying to do our lives once every two weeks, there's always someone frustrated, without fail. So after all, that requires effort, especially from the technical crew, whom I thank. So last time I lingered on Hellenic mythology, now I'm in Nordic mythology.
Wagner's Ring cycle and Siegfried as scherzo 10:07 Well, I'm not going to give an exegesis of Wagner. I remind you that the number of publications about Wagner sets the world record of all publications—there's a question about a proper name, after Jesus and before Napoleon. Second place, the number of writings on Wagner. It ranges from essays on Wagner's vegetarianism—yes, some people believe vegans started with their generation—to his antisemitism, or on the contrary, there's a very interesting text by one of the greatest Nazi hunters, Wiesenthal, who actually defends Wagner against the accusation of antisemitism, saying that he was clearly antisemitic, and there's even a rather crude trace of it, but not racist—well, you'll see all that.
11:06 I'm telling you, there are thousands of publications on this, there are even some about his music, that happens too. But among other things familiar to those who know this literature, don't think that Wagner is setting up a Nordic-Scandinavian mythology in opposition—he's not part of the contemporary New Right, with Thor's hammer and Atlantis and other neo-Nazi stuff. No, no.
11:42 It's an opera libretto, which he wrote himself, which is exceptional in the world of opera. He composed the music and wrote the texts. So, I repeat, these librettos are called, in Wagner's case, these poems. When he composed his poems for the Tetralogy, or the Ring, or the Ring of the Nibelung, these three titles designate the same gigantic work performed over four days.
12:18 In fact, it's three days with a prologue. The prologue is The Rhinegold. Everything begins with The Rhinegold. It's the cosmogony, the primordial soup. In the depths of the Rhine, we have the Big Bang, the theft of the gold from the Rhine, don't we—of origins. Then afterward, we have the sequel, The Valkyrie, which is generally agreed to be considered the most human of the four parts. Meaning the most human, not the most superhuman or the most divine. I notice that Wagner's female audience has always had a preference for The Valkyrie, which mainly tells the story of Siegfried's parents.
13:04 A brother and a twin sister—it's scandalous, that's how it is, that's mythology. And we saw that things weren't sad in Greek mythology last time either, when we saw the birth of Venus on an ocean of Uranus's semen. Then after The Valkyrie comes Siegfried, which is the third day, I say this for those who know a bit, even from a distance, the classical genres.
13:35 I'm thinking here of sonata form—forms and genres are similar—that sonata form is realized just as well in the symphony genre as in the concerto genre, in the sonata genre proper, instrumental. It is customary, between the second and the final movement, the third or last, to insert a sort of 'Zwischenspiel' as they say in German, 'intermezzo' if you want to speak Italian, interlude. We have a lovely word in French. So we have a kind of movement that doesn't really count, because in principle sonata form is a work made in three movements, two fast ones framing a central slow movement, but it's customary to insert something like this to refresh the atmosphere a bit after the slow movement, which is often a descent into the depths.
14:29 It's customary to insert a rather dance-like, rather rhythmic movement, where the rhythmic element is more important, which for a long time was the minuet, in the classical era in the musicological sense—that is, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, nothing to do with the French classicism of a century earlier—and which, starting with Beethoven, this minuet gets replaced by a scherzo. Scherzo, scherzare, in Italian, means to mock, to joke. There's always a slightly gay, humorous, rhythmic side to it. The scherzos in Russian music are often the high points of the works concerned. I say this in passing, when you have a bit of a lethargic moment, listen to something like an electric current running through you—the Scherzo of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, entirely in pizzicato, the first time in the history of symphonic music.
15:21 There's a whole movement done ploum ploum ploum ploum ploum ploum in pizzicato. Now, why did I make this digression? Because I was at the third day, after The Rhinegold and The Valkyrie, Siegfried, which has often been said to be a bit like the scherzo of this gigantic four-movement symphony that the Tetralogy would be. There you go, because Siegfried is youth, it's respect for nothing, not even for the gods, since with his sword he's going to shatter Wotan's spear, the king of the gods. There you go. So it ends with a superb love duet which is the inverted symmetrical counterpart of the one in Tristan.
16:02 A solar, sensual, solar love duet. Whereas the one in Tristan is deathly and nocturnal, and both are sublime. Even Nietzsche, so harsh toward Wagner, said that in the scene between Siegfried and Brünnhilde that closes this love duet of the Valkyrie's awakening that concludes Siegfried—which lasts three-quarters of an hour—one no longer even needs the sphere of the sublime and of storms, it's surpassed itself. And then, the grandiose finale, Twilight of the Gods. The scene of the Norns, with which we began our opening credits, serves as the prologue to Twilight of the Gods.
The thread breaks: the end of fatalism 16:46 You see, that's why I chose this scene, because this prologue plunges us into a time outside of time. That was indeed our subject. We are indeed in a strange place, supposedly near the rock where the Valkyrie sleeps surrounded by—Brünnhilde's rock, as it's called—where the Valkyrie slept for a very long time surrounded by flames before Siegfried arrived.
17:16 He wakes her by crossing through the flames and after having killed the dragon. Now, the Norns reveal to us all sorts of things we learn for the first time even though it's the end of the Tetralogy. And my son, whom I'll come back to, pointed out to me, since he's of your generation—there are several age groups, I'm glad of that among those listening to me, but anyway there are quite a few young people—that the three Norns are the answer for whom the Lord of the Rings and especially Star Wars are things even more familiar than they are to me, isn't that right?
17:51 Now, my son pointed out to me that in Star Wars it's the same thing, in the third one—I might be wrong—in Star Wars Episode 3, we learn things that happened before Star Wars Episode 1, you see, there's a cyclical time. There you go. And these three Norns are the counterpart—that's why I drew the parallel with Greek mythology. The three Norns who spin for each of us the cable of destinies are of course the Germanic counterpart of the three Fates of Greek mythology, who use the same metaphor—they are weaving the thread, the cable, the rope of our destinies.
18:36 And it's this rope that breaks. With a dramatic intensity I don't need to dwell on, it's spectacular, and even more so to hear than to see, especially with the German term 'es riss'—riss means it tears, it breaks, riss, R-I-S-S, you see, it rips and it 'riss,' and it rips literally, because in the stage direction, one of the Norns had attached one end of the rope to a rock, sharp, slippery, and it cut the rope, it ripped.
19:16 We're doing philosophy here. So what are the images now? What is breaking? Fatalism. The fact that one could predict destinies. And that's why, in this scene of the three Norns, the last words are: when the thread broke, that's the end of eternal wisdom. Wisdom in the sense of knowledge too—that's the end of eternal omniscience.
19:48 From the moment there was a place for everything in what it knew, that's over. We will no longer be able to predict the oracles. What's happening? What's happening is the opposite of fatalism, of determinism, of the predetermined, of the if-then. There is the opposite, there is the free act that sowed chaos, the 'Binz' as we say to speak more colloquial French, into the order of destinies.
20:22 It's Siegfried's act. Siegfried, by shattering Wotan's spear, the king of the gods', when he was at the foot of the Valkyrie's rock and Wotan wanted to prevent him from going to wake his daughter—incidentally, even though he was ready to bequeath him the whole universe—but when Siegfried is about to cross the flames to go wake and thus possess the warrior maiden, who until now has only been a warrior maiden—you see how Sleeping Beauty gets contaminated into this. We'll come back to overdetermination. Wotan, who apparently is possessive toward his daughter, just as Zeus is toward Athena, who is his favorite daughter. They're warrior maidens in both cases, if you look closely, who like battlefields. And also omniscience. So Wotan opposes Siegfried, who, with his sword, which he forged himself, with the fragments of his father's sword that had been shattered under Wotan's spear—what a revenge, isn't it? I'm not going to tell you the whole Ring, it lasts four days.
21:38 The act by which Siegfried killed the dragon, seized the ring, went to wake the Valkyrie. In short, this descent from the divine world toward the human world suddenly reveals the free act which, by definition, makes destinies unpredictable. A philosophical quotient. Now, memory plays a huge role because what are the three Norns doing?
22:09 From the beginning, you see, the text is quite telling actually. The text spends its time saying... sorry. There. Excuse me. There. I have a little tab to catch up on. There.
The Norns and the opening of In Search of Lost Time 22:46 The text of the Norns insists on the fact that—and we had begun to see this last time in Greek mythology, when we saw that the deceased had to drink from two sources, one that gives forgetting and one that gives memory. You see? And we had even noticed that in the effort of memory there is also a counter-effort by the subject who doesn't want to go back over certain things. I'll come back to that.
23:20 So let me read you a somewhat more extended version of the three Norns, but you'll recognize the same almost obsessive themes. It starts like this. Is it day? Right from the start, there's uncertainty. Is it day, or is it the glow of the flame? Perhaps it's night and the glow of the flame makes us believe day is breaking. I'm sure that those who have a novelistic culture, this reminds them of something. But yes, something. The most famous sentence of a novelistic work devoted to memory.
23:58 It's not that hard. It's of course In Search of Lost Time. What is its famous opening? For a long time, I used to go to bed early. Ah! Well, well, what a coincidence! Proust, who was a great connoisseur of Wagner's work by the way, but here, a fortunate encounter, the narrator's first sentence, who says 'I' and never gives his age precisely, but who says 'for a long time, throughout a whole period.'
24:28 Almost proto-historical. I used to go to bed early—you see childhood coming into view. And there follows a few pages devoted to that intermediate state we saw with Nerval, for those who've been following us for a while, intermediate between waking and sleep, and of which Rousseau was the first to understand that a literary genre needed to be established, in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. For reverie is neither waking nor sleep.
25:02 Is it day or is it... Now, Proust says exactly the same thing. He says that sometimes the patient in the hospital, after a night of agony—Proust suffered a great deal—tells himself, 'Ah, he sees daylight under the...' a strip of light under his room door. He says 'Finally daylight, the nurses will be arriving,' you know how it goes for him. Very sad, it wasn't daylight, it was electric light that an orderly had turned on in the corridor and which goes off.
25:33 You see? There, I'm doing this on purpose, drawing these connections. None of this is by chance. That the immense Search for Lost Time, comparable in scale—occupying an entire lifetime, for instance—to Wagner's Tetralogy, begins with an uncertainty about the moment, about, I don't know, what's happening. So, you see, it's worth lingering over the Norns. 'Dämmert der Tag'—is it day, or the glow of the flame, my gaze is troubled? So if the Norns, who are supposed to know the whole future, the past, the present, the future, who spin the cable, who know all our destinies, if even their own gaze is troubled, that means we are living in troubled times.
26:20 Third time I'm telling you about overdetermination. We are living in troubled times. By what? By Covid? By the throat-slittings? By the imminent war? By mass unemployment affecting millions, which is coming back and is hidden by the two previous things? Ah yes, I too am uncertain. We're going to talk a lot about collective memory today. That's why I'm not lingering too much on Proust, except to make this connection, to show that it's not as personal as that, since we find the same thing in the Norns, don't we?
Loge, the cunning fire, and the blurred networks 26:59 So, I'll read it like this without commenting on everything. I'm not here to do a literary textual commentary, you'd have to comment on every comma, but I'm continuing our philosophical pursuit on memory. Anamnesis and amnesia. 'My gaze is troubled'—that's a very poor translation, worse than the one you have, which dates from the 19th century and tries to sound archaic. Dimly, I see, well I don't see clearly, I see in a blurred way the august past where Loge—Loge is the god of fire in Germanic mythology. It's Loki, for those who know the Scandinavian myths, L-O-K-I, Loki, who becomes Loge, the god of fire, who is a bit both Hermes and Vulcan.
27:45 But also Hermes, who is the messenger of the gods. He's the fire that darts about the whole world at every instant and comes to tell Wotan, look, I saw this over there, look, this, look, I saw, there's one person who has renounced love, it's a dwarf, but because he got hold of the gold. Anyway, there you go, he's a sly one, he's the god of cunning, Loge, the fire. I remind those with a philosophical background, Heraclitus—you know that all the great pre-Socratics have a key phrase, one or several key phrases, but Heraclitus's most famous one is that you never step twice into the same river, or that all things flow, that's roughly the same thing.
28:25 And he likewise had a principle, or three or four, but it's always the same one, sometimes called becoming. Panta rhei, everything flows. Fire is mobility par excellence, that comes down to the same thing. Fire is not stone, not earth as an element. Fire and the Logos, the cunning one. And just as Hermes has wings on his heels, doesn't he, or on his helmet, Loge is always joining what's above and what's below. Well, I'll remind you that as god of fire, he takes part in both realms, the underground world, the one used by the blacksmith to melt metals, and the upper world, the fire of light up there, in Olympus, the antithesis of the dwarves who live in darkness.
29:25 So, I dimly see the August past where Loge came to shine in the ardor of the fire. Do you know what became of him? Each Norn asks her sister—there are three of them like the Fates—what became of the god of fire? What does she answer? What does she answer? The first Norn: night is dying, nothing is visible. The rope, in vain I search for its threads. So you see, uncertainty about what one sees, and as a result, the course of destiny is affected. The thread no longer has its straight, directional side. The threads get tangled. Muddled are all their networks. Good grief, but this is so topical! I keep seeing posts right now on Facebook following the events we're living through.
30:08 No, I'm speaking in the plural. So as not to rank anything hierarchically. Who say 'I don't understand anything anymore, everything's getting tangled, I'm throwing in the towel.' Still, you see, muddled are all their networks. Since we're talking about networks, let me take the opportunity. But yes, I'm going to talk about the web, the net, to recall that, before Siegfried crosses through the flames—I'm not telling the whole story, but in pieces, we'll eventually reconstruct it all, and anyway all of this is well documented.
30:44 When Siegfried, after having killed the dragon—in all tales and myths there is the decisive act by which the hero becomes a hero, thanks to the magic sword, to the laser sword in Star Wars, but it's the same thing, there's always a magic sword. I refer you to the admirable Morphology of the Folktale by the Russian Vladimir Propp who, at a time when the word 'structuralism' didn't even exist, is the ancestor of every intelligently structural approach. Let me say it quickly, in summary: it's someone who studied thousands of folktales.
31:18 Russia is very rich in folktales, as is often the case with peoples who still have a great rural and archaic tradition. And that's also why works made by Russian musicians or writers for children have worldwide success. I'm thinking of both Peter and the Wolf and The Nutcracker, an interesting mix. Russians know how to speak to childhood. So he noticed that all folktales follow the same diachronic structure, the same chronology, whether it's Snow White or a Nordic or Greek tale.
31:51 It always starts with the hero's lineage. Once upon a time there was a king, a queen, etc., and then a wicked stepmother. Then a prohibition, a box that must not be opened, a room that must not be entered, a diamond that must not be turned, a lock that must not be opened, and Pandora's box among the Greeks. And that gives you only one desire, of course, to open it, which is what Pandora does. Then the transgression of this prohibition "puts the hero in danger," and at that point the magic weapon that will allow him to overcome the dangers always appears, and so on, you see.
32:33 So that applies very well here, doesn't it? Siegfried has his own sword, which he forged with the fragments that the blacksmith who raised him gave him, which are supposedly from his father. I'm not so sure whether this is a counter-castration, well anyway. Otherwise I'm going to talk about overdetermination for a fourth time, but I'll come back to it.
33:03 And he killed the dragon, he's victorious over everything, and then suddenly it's noon, he's hot, he's deep in the forest, and he has a blues moment, as we'd say now. Because he finds himself alone, for the first time in his life—he was raised by a blacksmith who raised him only to make sure of him, so that one day he would kill the dragon and take the treasure, and then poison him afterward, poison young Siegfried. And in fact, thanks to a bird in the forest, Siegfried understands the wicked blacksmith's trick, so he has killed his adoptive father, he has killed the dragon, he's standing before two corpses, he's alone in the forest, it's hot, it's noon.
33:39 I'm telling you, it's not Tristan, it's not nocturnal, it's solar, Siegfried. We're in the forest at high noon and he has a heat stroke. But yes, he has the lack. And guided by the bird that reappears, which says "you're the only likable being I've seen since I've been here," the bird tells him: now that you've killed the dragon so that you'd be master of the world, and you are master of the world because you have the ring which the dragon was guarding, excuse me, all that's left for you is to conquer the most beautiful of things.
34:17 She sleeps atop a rock surrounded by flames, and that is how destiny is fulfilled and how Siegfried makes his way to Brünnhilde's rock. And all of that is my digression on the word "network." You see, I haven't lost my thread, so to speak. A network makes you think more of the weaver than of the blacksmith. Anthropologists know this very well in the study of African societies, for example. There's a dichotomy between the two. The figure of the blacksmith, always somewhat unsettling, and that of the weaver, always positive, who creates bonds.
Weaving one's song: the web and the face of horror 34:56 It brings to mind a bit the Freudian dichotomy between the death drive on one side and, on the contrary, Eros, which creates bonds. Bonds, if you prefer. Now, when the bird speaks to Siegfried, it says "where do you come from?" I sense only good in you. And the bird tells him, sing to yourself of love, "sing ich mein Lied," I sing my song. "Web' ich mein Lied," a plural of Lieder.
35:31 So, "Web' ich mein Lied," the first, first person singular present of the verb Weben, from which comes "web"—web with an English W, but in German it's pronounced V, Volkswagen, the cars, the people's car, there you have both, the VF and the VV, Volkswagen. "Web' ich mein Lied" means "I weave my song." The bird takes up the metaphor of weaving to say how its song flows from its throat. That's interesting. I already told you that in West Africa, in the Sahel, a griot—that is, the one who—the river that sings is called Djeli, and the river that flows is called Djoli, Djoliba, the Niger, Djoli.
36:29 You see, all of this is a matter of encounters. I'm doing it on purpose, sowing seeds here, not to confuse you, but on the contrary, to create connections. And it's not necessary that each of them germinate, but of all the ones I throw out a bit at random like this—I think of that line from Nerval: "I tell you all this at random, but based on reliable data." So I come back to network, network, the web, the horror appears to me. For me, everything merges together.
37:02 So, all of a sudden, there's something unsettling that will lead to the final dramatization you saw in the opening credits, that is, the thread that breaks. It's that... so... So, all the translations, I've looked at all of them, none of them translates the word that is there and that is precise, that says "Gesicht," which means "face." A face, a sinister face appears to me, as if in a crystal ball one saw an unbearable face appear. So why did the translators avoid this word? Is it because we don't really know who it is? Is it the face of the Nibelung who has been pursuing his curse since the ring was stolen from him? The dwarf? From the underground world, the blacksmith? Is it Siegfried's face, who will soon die? We don't really know. Anyway. So what's certain is that the horror appears to me.
37:56 I've told you that I keep repeating the same thing since the beginning of my talks. I began all these talks with a cycle called "Philosophizing Between Crisis and War." With the completely utopian aim—I'm well aware of it—that my discourse might, in whatever small way, contribute to delaying the return of the worst, of war.
38:27 The horror appears to me, for me everything merges together. I'll remind you again, I've already said it, but I keep repeating it because no one talks about it, that while people talk about Covid, while people talk about throat-slittings, and all that is not secondary. Or rather, yes, it is secondary in the strict sense, meaning it comes second, but to hide a primary matter. So it's not as secondary as that. We are in the world of masks right now, as you know. Now, what's under the mask? There's the fact that the greatest armada of all time is being assembled at the two ends of Eurasia, in the South China Sea.
39:14 — Well, I hope you can hear me despite this interruption. I should specify, following information from the control room, that this isn't, as can happen because of an overload or a bug on the Skype connection, but rather a Facebook outage, which is much rarer. Is this due to an election night? Election nights are numerous, from Côte d'Ivoire to the United States, of course, and through so many others right now.
39:44 But I hope you can hear me and that the connection is good. So I was telling you that each of us needs to realize just how much—I think the connection has come back—how much it would be, in the worst case, that we're entering what geopolitical specialists call a strategy, a logic of war.
40:19 That is, an event—I'm telling you, two planes that come too close to each other, that happens every day, an incident like that. If you look a bit at the relevant sites, every day there are two NATO planes escorting a Russian plane beyond a certain limit, or vice versa, two Russian planes telling an American spy plane "please go look elsewhere." So it shouldn't happen that one day an incident goes beyond the usual protocols and that a logic kicks in which even politicians can no longer stop. There you go. That's called a logic of war.
41:04 So when the Norns say "a terrible face appears to me," we must take that very seriously. I'll try to come back, there. Rémi Cardinal, I thank him for his loyalty in general and in particular because he's now letting us know that the connection is restored, which is very kind of him. And I greet a friend and a comrade and a great musician, a great pianist. I'll remind you that he founded—and I refer you to this site, I don't know if you remember it, especially those interested in music—this Facebook page. This page is called La Convergence des Luths [Convergence of Lutes], L-U-T-H-S. Musicians are on strike. In any case, those who are on strike, you'll find them on this page.
41:56 So, thank you, Rémi. There, don't think I'm going to dig into archaisms like this just to put a veneer of mythology, of mysticism, on things. It's the opposite, it's to arrive at the most immediate present-day reality. Things get tangled up. And as I showed with examples of individual memory, Proust, Nerval—this time, today, so that it's nicely complementary, I come back to the title of this whole cycle, the anamnesis and, respectively, amnesia and anamnesis. I haven't had an individual and/or collective anamnesis to point out distinctions that I want to insist on tonight.
Individual memory and collective amnesia 43:05 Personal memory, I won't go back to it, it belongs to the order of the psychological field, to use a very general term, psychological, psychoanalytic, whatever, everyone finds their own school there, right? On the other hand, collective memory—first difference, besides the fact that one is individual and the other collective—is that for there to be an anamnesis in the case of individual memory, I must have known, I must have been conscious of a memory, then forgotten it, then it comes back to me. Whereas in collective amnesia, it consists in sending into the depths of oblivion things that were never known by individuals in the first place. I'm thinking of the school curriculum.
Bruno Guigue's text and "the West" as an occluding concept 44:05 And that's why—I'll take two examples, I'll take them not quite in the order they were given to you—instead of starting with the example of Le Pen's knife, which is very interesting, I'll start with Bruno Guigue's text, which is very clear on this point. Here it is. So you see, it's excerpted from... the subtitle is "Western Whitewashing of Islamist Terrorism," following the title "The Bashar al-Assad Theorem," by Bruno Guigue, and it was published on Initiatives Communistes, a site you can easily find on the web, in red and white.
45:02 Now, when you read this text, you see, one cannot say it lacks relevance, because it's a text that opposes, very clearly, the discourse of our current leaders—essentially a French leader, but I mean, "Westerners" doesn't mean anything. I won't repeat it for the umpteenth time, since by definition, the world of the market economy, etc.
45:36 At that point, there's Japan, which isn't really "the West." Anyway, it's a term that means nothing, "the West." Actually, it does serve a purpose: to conceal. It's called a concealing concept. It doesn't serve to make known, it serves precisely to make forgotten. Forget what? That we're talking about capitalism. So there you can include Japan, the United States. Because sometimes people say "Westerners" meaning "Europeans." I thought the leader was the United States. Oh right, darn, that doesn't work. Well, let's say "the developed country," the industrially developed country. Oh really, and Japan then, is that a Western country? Oh no, no, no, you see, "Western" doesn't work, it means nothing. Come on, let's be clear, let's say the dirty word: capitalist. I remember, I once worked for a major private operator, as they say, right? Hachette, to hide nothing from you.
46:26 And I had had a boss—not too long ago, actually—who told me, you know, we don't really like it when that word is used in our meetings. So, how does Bruno Guigue's text take on those who single out, for public condemnation, the Muslim religion, Muslims? I am overwhelmed with terror by the throat-slittings that have—it's a list, there was already the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, on a different scale, and now what happened at Notre-Dame, what happened in Vienna, right?
47:17 Sometimes it's with a machine gun, as they say in slang, sometimes it's with a blade. It's not a matter of minimizing that; on the contrary, to protect against it, one must recall that those who armed Islamic fundamentalist movements the most are the very ones who would like to drag us into war, indeed to bring us back to the Crusades. So watch closely, I'll stop commenting, I'll simply read this, right?
47:54 "The war raging in Syria for ten years has acted as a chemical revealer." Nice metaphor. Thanks to, thanks to—alas, something good can come of misfortune—because of the appalling tragedies suffered by the Syrian people and the Syrian nation, at least it served to reveal things that until then had been rather tangled. We've gone from the tangled thread of the Norns to clarification now. "The war raging in Syria for ten years has acted as a chemical revealer."
48:26 First aside, you'll notice we no longer talk about it. Covid is wonderful, really. Now we only talk about Covid, or Islamic jihad, or occasionally a pig who pulled a Weinstein. Anyway, you see what I mean. But especially right now it's Covid that tops all the news. Yet the first priority for the very same people who want us to talk only about Covid should be to look at these Syrian refugees because of that butcher Bashar al-Assad, look at them in these camps in Turkey, the poor souls. The same people. Yet we no longer talk about it. And still, it hasn't calmed down.
49:13 "For ten years has acted as a chemical revealer." The hidden protagonist of this bloodbath? What? The bearded men? No! No, no! The American, British, French, Turkish governments—remind you that Turkey, which is pointed at, Macron puffing out his chest, Erdogan saying "I'm here," a showdown at the O.K. Corral, the two of them—both equally two-faced. I remind you that Turkey has the most powerful conventional, non-nuclear army in NATO, even more so than federal Germany in certain weapons systems, armored vehicles for example. I remind you of that, and in aviation too, by the way.
50:01 And so if the pillar of the Atlantic Alliance, which shot down the first Russian plane downed since the greatest bloodletting of all time—that is, the losses of the Soviet people during the Second World War—the first time a plane had been shot down since then was quite recently in Turkey, about three years ago I believe. There was such tension, and Russian diplomacy played its cards so well that not only was there no war between Turkey—which the West hoped for—but the West is never actually for war itself. It makes others do the fighting.
50:40 I remember that during the Vietnam War, when the Americans began to withdraw, since it was a fiasco domestically in the United States, since the coffins of GIs kept coming back in shipments, I remember they hastily built up the South Vietnamese army, the collaborators' army if you prefer, the torturers, the dictators of South Vietnam at the time. There was an... the journalistic expression at the time was that they were "yellowing the corpses." Yellowing the corpses, so that they were no longer corpses of our boys, but corpses with slanted eyes, so no one would talk about them.
51:18 There you go, it's not serious. So then they planned to do the same with the Turks. But wait, Pagani, you're going back—how am I going back? What was making headlines then? Just before the throat-slittings, the war involving Turkey, that is, Turkey against Armenia, yes or no? And yes, because if Turkey, a NATO power, starts not only not waging war against Russia but even buying S-400 missiles from them, very effective anti-aircraft missiles, where are we headed?
Conspiracy accusations and the whitewashing of the Al-Nusra front 51:52 So it's time, Pagani, once again, to find something that makes it so that understanding no longer works on any point between Russia and Turkey. I'm getting into conspiracy talk, so I'll stop. You know there are only two political theories left. That's my way of putting it. Every time you're accused of being a conspiracy theorist—I don't mean those who genuinely go on the internet with the Illuminati stuff, no, no. I'm only talking about things that are verifiable and measurable, and in well-known newspapers and media, without going hunting for blurry photos on untraceable sites. No, no. But when they tell you that you're a conspiracy theorist simply because you say something different from the official version, well, you answer: there are only two interpretations of politics left.
52:35 The official one, and as soon as you depart from it, you're a conspiracy theorist. In that case, yes, we are conspiracy theorists, of course. So, I go back to Bruno Guigue's piece. You see the list. The American, British, hidden—masked, as I was saying—French, Turkish, Saudi and Qatari governments, who are behind each of these bearded throat-cutters, will go down in history for what they are: the executioners of a people, the Syrian people, who had done nothing to them.
53:06 The Syrian tragedy—the French—has dispelled their pretenses. It has exposed in broad daylight their most twisted strategies. But the worst of all has consisted in whitewashing terrorism elsewhere. How can one resist—I repeat the sentence—the nausea in the face of the sliminess of these politicians who, at every attack on French soil, pour out indignant condemnations of a terrorist violence that they themselves nurtured and glorified elsewhere?
53:38 I've got you back for the third time. I've lost you three times. I'll let you know right away, before it risks happening again, that this is the last time we're restarting the Facebook feed, so to speak, and that if it cuts out again, rather than repeating everything, Philippe has kindly offered to record me. I'll continue.
54:09 My talk, alas without you live, but he'll record it and you'll have the edited version very soon. There, that's the best way to proceed. So I was on Bruno Guigue's text, saying that far from resembling conspiracy theory or fantasy, in saying that it is the Western powers who are behind the worst of the terrorism attributed to Islamism.
54:46 I condemn Salafism, I condemn Wahhabism, whatever you like, but "Islamism"—one never knows whether it's Islam itself being condemned. We must be careful with words. We recall that not so long ago—he says this to illustrate his point—not so long ago, the Western media sphere, you see, it's a broad term, media, press, writers, internet, television—the Western media sphere deployed its false dialectic to turn the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, that is, the al-Nusra Front—it has plenty of other names, but let's use the best-known one—into a respectable fighting organization.
55:31 We were told that—you'll see, he's not going to settle for just saying "oh, there will be names"—that the al-Nusra Front, as it called itself, would eventually normalize. It was necessary, argued François Burgat on a public channel, to negotiate in earnest with this organization destined to be part of Syria's future. I'll skip a paragraph—no, actually I won't. Mr. Fabius—the very caricature of our prime minister under Hollande—thus judged on a Wednesday that all Arabs were up in arms against the American decision to declare al-Nusra a terrorist organization, because on the ground, I quote Fabius, so anyone can check—here we are not in conspiracy territory.
56:25 In hidden photos or untraceable sites. Because on the ground, they're doing a good job. Al-Nusra—as everyone could see, though I hope you didn't show it to your children—the al-Nusra throat-cutters in the public square torturing a 14-year-old boy in a van in Aleppo. And you, when people talk to you about Aleppo... you talk about the crimes of the Syrian regime, not about those that, fortunately, the Syrian regime and its allies rid one of the oldest cities in human history of.
57:04 So Mr. Fabius thus judged on Wednesday that all Arabs were up in arms against the American position because on the ground, they're doing a good job. So France stood squarely behind them. I say "the bearded men" as a metonymy—it bothered no one. That was very clear, because I love how many people have beards. It was very clear, and the president of the coalition was also on that line, the minister added—the president of the coalition. So, al-Nusra's affiliation, claimed with al-Qaeda, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, its hateful and sectarian ideology, its repeated practice of indiscriminate attacks striking civilians—no one ever tells you this, it's time to remind people that Muslims are the main victims of Salafist or Wahhabi or fundamentalist terrorism, whatever you want to call it.
57:54 And I'll remind you that "fundamentalism" [intégrisme] comes from the word "integer," meaning "pure." And that Christian evangelists, those who go to Mass at Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, and who can't stand it if Mass isn't said in a cassock—I mean that fundamentalism isn't unique to Islam. There is Protestant fundamentalism, there is Catholic fundamentalism, which is not the majority of the faithful, far from it. There you go. But the main victims—there's almost every week an attack causing dozens or even hundreds of victims in Kabul, in Baghdad, and nobody cares.
58:34 Nobody cares. Whereas here, it serves to reinforce laws that curtail freedom for people who have nothing to do with any of it. Second aside, which I make to illustrate what Bruno says. Yes, there are religious fanatics, bearded men in the ordinary sense, who genuinely believe in it too, who are tools of all this and who end up picking up a knife. But there are also people who were worked on by Western intelligence services.
59:09 What could be easier than going into a prison in Brussels, in Paris, in London, wherever you like, and finding a guy who's there because he was caught dealing hash? You're bored, prison is unpleasant, don't you want to go take a little trip to Afghanistan? We'll pay for the training. Or else you go to Syria via Turkey, because over there in Turkey we have bases. Back to conspiracy theory, Pagani. Oh no, no, no. We've identified those who carried out the biggest terrorist massacres France experienced last year—I'm thinking of course of the events in the 18th arrondissement, the 19th, the 20th, the Bataclan, and that whole terrifying series.
59:54 These were people who weren't fundamentalist bearded types at all. They were people known by everyone around them for knocking back several beers a day, smoking joints one after another, with a blonde on each arm. Fine by me, I'm not moralizing, but I mean it wasn't exactly the rigorism of muftis. Let me point out in passing, we're not at all in delusion here, far from it, that it's time to do some anamnesis, because we all know this, but we don't want to know it, so I insist, we know it.
Nasser, Palmyra, and "moderate terrorists" 1:00:29 Merah was on first-name terms with the cop who came to shoot him. An old acquaintance. But yes, so all that, a regime of terror, the repeated practice of blind attacks, hitting civilians, all that, in short, a peccadillo. A sort of genetic mutation must have earned the organization of jihadists competing with Daesh a reward for these services rendered against Damascus.
1:01:00 Among the Arab states, there are ones you shouldn't miss, namely those that aren't Islamist. You know, the three that went through war, Syria, Iraq, Libya. Funny, isn't it, those are the three Arab leaders, and then Nasser back in the day. Nasser, with France and England landing because Nasser had dared to appropriate the only sector that brought in a bit of money in his country, which has no oil, the Suez Canal. So you see, they said, a new Hitler. Already those who weren't playing Hitler against the Soviet Union, rather Hitler than the Popular Front, now they designate as a new Hitler anyone who tyrannizes their people, as they say.
1:01:50 So, many of you have seen this extraordinary video, haven't you, where you see Nasser making his whole executive laugh, the whole army and police high command, his government, they're all gathered there, mocking the head of the Muslim Brotherhood who had proposed that he veil Egyptian women, and he says, "You can't even get your own daughter to wear a veil, and you want me to veil all Egyptian women?" It only lasts six minutes, I recommend that video. It almost makes you want to cry, it seems like such a different era, almost prehistoric compared to now.
1:02:25 It wasn't politically correct at the time, the era when Arab nations were anti-Islamist, anti-fundamentalist. So, a sort of genetic mutation must have earned Al-Julani's organization, a rival of Daesh, a reward for its services rendered against a secular Arab regime, Damascus. A veritable certificate of respectability. That's how Western diplomacy performed miracles. Out of its magician's hat, it pulled moderate terrorists. The throat-cutters, there are videos where you see them eating the entrails of their victims. I know several of you who've seen it.
1:03:06 Al-Nusra, about whom Fabius said, "They're doing a good job." That's how Western diplomacy performed miracles out of its magician's hat. Moderate terrorists, extreme democrats, humanist head-cutters, yes, every time these are entities, as we say around here, liver-eaters, I'm telling you they ate entrails, liver-eating philanthropists, don't think this is hyperbole, to use another figure of speech, these aren't exaggerations, alas.
1:03:37 So, a bit of collective anamnesis. I recommend you read the whole article, it's anamnesis from start to finish, but I want to stress a few passages. I'll skip three paragraphs. In its merciless fight against Syria, Al-Qaeda's killers, what our journalists call the regime — they never say the government of Damascus, the regime.
1:04:18 When they talk about Macron, they don't say the regime. In its merciless fight against Syria, Al-Qaeda's killers could count on their valuable friends. Turkey supplied them with weapons. Check it! Don't be like those who are the real conspiracy theorists. Check it! Turkey, we've lost count of the number of bases, was supplying them with weapons, Israel treated their wounded, Qatar sent them a check at the end of the month, the Gulf countries in general but especially Qatar in Syria's case, and Le Monde, the daily paper that's become Le Immonde, you know, passed them off as choir boys.
1:04:55 So, who re... Let me remind you that in 2014, anamnesis, when the Al-Nusra Front seized the Christian village of Maaloula, it was terrible. That daily paper, Le Monde, dared to deny that the extremists had killed a single civilian. While at the same time you could see on the BBC here the religious funerals of the victims of this attack, of what remained of the church. And there, the equals.
1:05:27 The Christian churches that went up in flames in the Middle East long before ours were attacked. It should have been dealt with back then. That was the time when the so-called international coalition, in fact NATO, during Daesh's offensive toward Palmyra, refrained from firing a single shot. You see Syria, you see Palmyra, a jewel. There's a poem by Hölderlin. A forest of columns across the stretch of deserts, lost city of Palmyra, wonders that the Islamic State blew up among the most beautiful archaeological remains of that miracle city.
1:06:10 It's in the middle of the desert. Ideal for aviation. If you wanted to stop it, you'd catch it between two fighter jets, that's all it would take. There wouldn't be any columns left. There were 400 km for Al-Nusra to travel from its base in Iraq to Palmyra. The coalition, which was all-powerful in the sky at that time, let it happen. Isn't that right? That was the time when the so-called international coalition, during Daesh's offensive toward Palmyra, refrained from firing a single shot.
1:06:44 This safe-conduct granted to the ferro-terrorist illustrates the perfect duplicity of the anti-terrorism proclaimed in Washington and Paris. Between the push of the pseudo-Islamic State on the Palmyra-Damascus axis and that of the Al-Nusra Front on the Aleppo-Damascus axis — Palmyra-Damascus comes via Iraq, from the east, Aleppo-Damascus comes from Turkey in the north. You always have to have several irons in the fire, but that was without counting on the resistance of the Syrian people and the loyalty of its army.
1:07:14 The general mobilization of the takfirist rank and file, Salafist if you prefer, fundamentalist, was said to cost the Gulf petro-monarchies a billion dollars a year. Well, look at that, there's money to be found to help the throat-cutters. Channeled to the terrorist organizations via the CIA, this manna nevertheless wasn't enough to bring about the fall of Damascus. Anamnesis. There you go. So, I really like... I'll skip two more paragraphs. This semantic clarification by Bruno Guigue. Faced with this observation, all the rest is mere literature. That's a quote from Verlaine, let me remind you.
1:07:58 The distinctions between democratic rebels, moderates, secularists, Islamists, jihadists are nameless stupidities whose sole effect is to cast a modest veil over a terrorist network whose intention is perfectly clear: to impose by force a sectarian power that collaborates with imperialism. What's nice, isn't it, about fundamentalists is that they never talk about nationalizing the means of production. It keeps a people in complete underdevelopment, firstly, and secondly, except for Iran.
1:08:36 Iran is one of the rare Islamist countries — well, an Islamic republic in the constitutional sense — but where there can be women nuclear engineers. Let me point that out in passing, since it's one of our designated enemies. So, the distinctions between rebels, democrats, moderates, secularists, Islamists — when you eat your enemies' entrails on camera, that makes you a moderate — are nameless stupidities whose sole effect is to cast a modest veil over a terrorist network whose intention is perfectly clear: to impose by force a sectarian power that collaborates with imperialism.
1:09:13 I repeat, I'm interrupting myself on purpose to hammer home the most important point of this anamnesis, in the episode I'm developing here: most of the victims of fundamentalist terrorism claiming to act in the name of Islam are Muslims. At a ratio of ten to one, at least. If the Western and regional powers that fueled this fire had believed in the so-called moderate rebels, they wouldn't have whitewashed the Al-Nusra Front, accredited around 2014 as a potential successor to the regime to be brought down.
1:09:50 Come on, a bit more anamnesis, I'm sure some of you will say, "Oh yes, that's true, I'd forgotten, good grief." Every day we were told Assad only had two or three days left, that we'd take a plane and find him in Russia, at best, if he wasn't shot down before then and lynched the way they did to Gaddafi. Remember? No? Well no, he's still there. But everyone has understood that the reality of the Syrian conflict for the past ten years is the struggle between a sponsored terrorist conglomerate — you have to buy the missiles — and a national army defending its country against foreign invasion.
1:10:26 This is a chance to point out that we have soldiers active on Syrian soil, and nobody invited them there. The Russians, who are there legitimately, are implementing an alliance treaty. The Americans, who actually occupy between a quarter and a third of Syrian territory in the east, in the most productive region in terms of oil, the Deir ez-Zor region, aren't withdrawing.
Lawrence of Arabia and the old complicity with fundamentalism 1:10:56 Armies of invasion. Since 2011, the successive avatars of the CIA's semi-clandestine subsidiary known as Al-Qaeda have welcomed into Syria an endless flood of lobotomized mercenaries. I'll stop there, because we could go on, I've focused the lens, thanks to Bruno Guigue's text, on the Syrian conflict, which serves as a revealer, as he says so well, which serves to unmask things, but the whole dossier of complicity — I'll step back now — between the so-called Western regimes, actually capitalist, Atlanticist regimes, that's the most precise term, because it avoids bashing Americans in general, the Americans who are perfectly fine and who fight against this. This tradition of complicity between the most conservative forces, the neoconservatives as they're called, the hawks of Atlanticism, and the most fundamentalist of the Salafists, goes back well before even the Second World War, and even before the First.
1:12:06 But yes, you've all heard of Lawrence of Arabia, great archaeologist, great connoisseur of the Orient, haven't you? Well, Lawrence of Arabia was a spy for His Majesty the King of Britain. Why not? It served him well in waging war against the Turks. There are jobs like that which are ideal for espionage. Archaeology is one of them. You do digs in the most contested places on the planet and you have a magnificent cover. So, Lawrence of Arabia created Saudi Arabia. It took him years, with England's money of course, to unify the Bedouin tribes to create that state from scratch.
1:12:51 And the files show that the British, well before the Americans counted at the international level, knew how to use Islamist-tinged fundamentalism, both in the Middle East, already with oil interests, but also on the Indian subcontinent. Those of you who are film buffs know the admirable film where Gary Cooper, barely 20 years old, in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, fights against Mohammed Khan, the leader of the fundamentalists in a country not yet called Pakistan, which was the Muslim part of India. You know it was the British who created Pakistan. Still, yes, plenty of anamnesis.
1:13:41 And after those dossiers, when England weakened and lost its empire, it handed the baby off to the Americans, who put in their own resources, which is no small thing. So there you have it, but we've seen anyway that the French government isn't just not lagging behind, it's at the forefront of this tactic. All right, so how much time have we used, Philippe? — Oh, I thought a quarter hour, okay. So now I'm going to launch my counter-offensive, and talk about those who would call my speech conspiracy theory. I'm not thinking of a paper like Libé, quite the contrary, there we're dealing with respectable opinion.
Le Pen's dagger and Joffrin's holidays 1:14:31 And here I refer you to the article published under the byline of Mr. Marciac, which was sent and shared with us — and I thank for it — by our comrade and friend Michel Clouscard, whom I greet here most affectionately, along with his whole family down there, in the lovely town of Beaumont-de-Lomagne.
1:15:01 The title of the article is "Le Pen's Dagger." Those who consulted it were able to see a photo of this dagger. If you click on the link you were given, you see this dagger displayed, a superb horizontal shot. It says on it "Jean-Marie Le Pen" and below, "First REP." I'm not adding "First REP." So, let's shed some light on all this. At 25, Laurent Joffrin went on vacation with Jean-Marie Le Pen. He defended himself rather poorly about it in L'Obs.
1:15:37 "Yes, I met Jean-Marie Le Pen two or three times in the 1970s, including once on vacation" — that's a bit too convenient, it's not by chance, since he was a neighboring tent at a campsite, while we're at it — "when he was a rather marginal figure," which we'll see about, "I was a young journalist, everything interested me. It's a profession where you meet all sorts of people. I've thus spoken in my career with terrorists, armed robbers, Stalinist apparatchiks in Poland" — you saw the amalgamations there — "or in China, a drug trafficker in Mexico."
1:16:12 "I also spoke with Jean-Marie Le Pen. That didn't imply any sympathy for his ideas, which I've always hated. And for good reason, I joined the Socialist Party in '71." Curious, isn't it, that this Socialist Party, the new PS refounded, as it's called, in '71, by a Mitterrand who comes from Vichy — curious that one should feel obliged to hate Le Pen out of loyalty to the PS.
1:16:42 "In short, to get to the point, when I became a journalist eight years later..." The problem, clever fellow, is that you didn't just meet Le Pen two or three times, you spent your vacation with him. Come on, anamnesis. Cool beers in the shade. You see the photo? You see the two bare chests there? The barbecue isn't far off. Casual, shirtless. Did you do that with terrorists too? Was that on your list? No, with armed robbers, drug traffickers, no, no, just with Le Pen, who founded the National Front and gathered around him a bunch of former Waffen-SS men, former members of the Charlemagne Division — I say this for the younger ones, there were divisions like that, the LVF, French volunteers who went to fight Bolshevism, communism, yes, you believe in the abject concept of totality, target of the... — He also had philosophers among his groupies, same contempt for me to give names, everyone knows them.
1:17:51 In fact, the real fascists went to exchange gunfire against the communists, especially since they were flanked by the SS and the Gestapo, who held the position of strength in Russia at that time, in Soviet Russia. So they weren't facing the bare-handed Red Army. Former members of the Charlemagne Division, former members of the LVF, the French Volunteer Legion I was telling you about, against Bolshevism, former members of the French Popular Party, Jacques Doriot, former collaborators of the Vichy government. And yes, this isn't Marine Le Pen. Marine did an aggiornamento. She understood she needed a social base. No, no, that was an aggiornamento.
1:18:33 Alas, Joffrin spent his vacation with him without having heard about what his host had done in Algeria. The young journalist everything interested — that's what he said three lines earlier, "everything interested me." And then, in the time of the Algerian War no less, if you don't stick with the Algerian War as a journalist, that's saying something. So he met Le Pen two or three times, spent vacations with him, and never asked about his dagger. How careless! So let's get to it now, Le Pen's dagger. Listen carefully, how we came to have this photo of the dagger.
1:19:08 Anamnesis: on the night of March 3, 1957, so in the midst of the — I don't know, I'm searching for a more violent word — ransacking of the Casbah of Algiers, with the atrocities that followed, on the night of March 3, 1957, a patrol of paratroopers commanded by — I quote the report — "a tall, strong, blond man" whom the men called "my lieutenant" and who turns out to be Jean-Marie Le Pen, burst into the home of the Moulay family in the Casbah of Algiers.
1:19:43 Moulay is a princely title in Morocco, but let's not confuse things. Ahmed Moulay is going to be subjected to questioning, to torture — electric shocks, water torture — until he dies before the eyes of his wife and six children. When the torturers leave, they forget a dagger. How careless. A German youth knife — no, he didn't buy it at a flea market! Made in the Ruhr in the 1930s, on the sheath you read "Jean-Marie Le Pen, First REP." One of the tortured man's children finds it and hides it. He'll stay silent when the executioners come back looking for it — "Haven't you seen a dagger?" He'll say nothing. The dagger will become evidence in a libel suit brought against Le Monde, which Le Pen lost.
1:20:36 So you see, here I'm turning the conspiracy narrative on its head — you have everything, you have the verified court records. Never take my word for it. Ah, youth. "Yes, but I was young," he pleads. Well, I'm waiting then for the wrongdoers, male and female, coming back to France after having gallivanted with Daesh in Syria, to plead not guilty, their age being sufficient excuse. Joffrin was about 25, according to Marine Le Pen, who one day, when Joffrin had annoyed her, revealed the secret, so long and so well kept, that he used to vacation with her father.
Audin, Alleg, Chomsky: anamnesis against Libération 1:21:10 25 years old. Joffrin vaguely confirms it, he barely remembers. 25 years old. That's the same age at which the mathematician Maurice Audin — whom many of our comrades know, and there's one who's the object of a scandalous amnesia, isn't he — was tortured to death by officers of the French army, something even admitted later by those who did it, so we're not in the realm of conspiracy or suspicion or intent. Members of the Algerian Communist Party were disappearing after being tortured, according to several witnesses including Henri Alleg, who writes about it in his book The Question.
1:21:49 I don't compare myself to all these people, I'm of the generation after, I slipped through the cracks, so I was too young, I was still in high school when they were mobilizing to go fight the war in Algeria. So I won't compare myself, but still I'm proud, I have one thing in common with Henri Alleg: we have the same publisher. I'm proud to have a publisher who published a book by the great Henri Alleg. May the earth rest lightly on him, as they say in Africa. He had been arrested by soldiers of the First Regiment of Colonial Parachute Hunters of Zeralda — you find that regiment everywhere.
1:22:27 So, you look it up on Wikipedia — we're not in conspiracy territory here, Wikipedia — made up mostly of former SS men and Hungarian fascists, well, well, recruited right after the Second World War, the 1st REP counted Jean-Marie Le Pen among its ranks. Let's call it a coincidence. Joffrin knew nothing. 25 years old. At that age, Georges Séguy was fighting against all forms of fascism — and for good reason, I'm adding this myself — after having survived the Nazi concentration camp to which his active patriotism had led him, from the age of 15 he was coughing up his lungs in the Mauthausen camp.
1:23:02 That's not specified here. At 25, Raymond Aubrac had fallen into the hands of the Gestapo. At 25, Colonel Fabien was dying, 8 years after fighting the Francoists in the International Brigades in Spain, and 3 years after shooting dead a Nazi officer in the metro — deported and murdered. So, Joffrin, who was at Libé and remains at Libé, is getting bored because the boss is now Drahi. So, in an article published in Le Monde Diplomatique in August 1998, Noam Chomsky — not a Bolshevik, first of all a scholar, a great linguist, one of the greatest of our time, I don't agree with all his positions, but as I was saying earlier, there is an America that resents Atlanticist America as much as I do.
1:23:49 Now there's a fine example, remarkable at that level. Noam Chomsky, citing the work of a Dutch researcher on the European press, was able to write that the worst of them all was the Paris daily Libération — dixit Chomsky. I'm not reading some far-right or red-brown conspiracy website here. Noam Chomsky, citing the work of a Dutch researcher on the European press, was able to write that the worst of them all was the Paris daily.
1:24:23 Libération, super-Reaganite. Reagan is the American far right — going beyond even the worst American newspapers in its adherence to American government propaganda. And whose driving force, as they say in Latin, vis motrix, was our dear Joffrin. In 2017, Libération, sorry, the newspaper Libération received — let's say 6 million, since I'm doing anamnesis, if I give too precise a figure, 5,913,419, we'll just forget it — 6 million euros in public subsidies.
1:25:00 Well yes, my friend, I'm speaking to one of you here. Well yes, my dear friend, my dear faithful listener, they're tapping your money to subsidize Joffrin's newspaper. And not just a little, mind you. 6 million euros, imagine that, that's the sum that voter-taxpayers paid so that Joffrin's political opinions could be broadcast under the supervision of his boss, Drahi, a billionaire who is one of the three richest Frenchmen in Switzerland, where he enjoys the privileged status of tax resident. We're staying among the beautiful people. There you have it. And so, if you want to know who's going to save the Left in 2022, it's Joffrin.
Definitions of overdetermination 1:25:51 I don't want to overdo it, I don't want to exceed the reasonably allotted time, we must be at 1 hour 40, no? I'd rather leave room for questions. Still, I'd like to make a small conclusion on the concept, I had promised it, of overdetermination. I'll take just one example drawn from Proust's text, I'll go over it again next time, I'll put it in context, but right now I don't have time, I'll just give you the key moment, so to speak, of what was meant to be the highlight of reading this excerpt from Proust, which will illustrate what it means for memory to be overdetermined.
1:26:40 Let me give you, in passing, two little definitions such as you find in glossaries. In the Larousse: a process of multiple determination according to a certain number of factors that have structural links between them. Doesn't seem very clear to you? I find the same. In any case, if opening the illustrated Larousse were enough to know what freedom is, that would have saved millennia of reflection. So in the Centre national des ressources textuelles et lexicales, an excellent site: a determination brought about by a cause of a higher level than the immediate, apparent causes.
Proust: the evening kiss and the sobs that never ceased 1:27:19 All right, that's enough for me. So, very quickly, it was always a drama for little Proust as a child that his mother didn't come to give him a last kiss before he fell asleep. It's an illness, it's a pathology. There were palpitations, these were real illnesses. Because we've all had that kind of sorrow, we've all thrown tantrums. Here it's not about that, it was a real illness. And I'll skip the ten preceding pages where he tells how his mother receives guests downstairs on the ground floor, he's in his room, he's desperate because there are people there and she won't come to say goodnight to him, he has the maid, who is wary, slip words to his mother in the middle of the meal.
1:27:53 He takes terrible risks doing all this. And then at the last moment, I mean, when she finally comes, she climbs the stairs, the guests have left, to go unhook her bodice, as she says, he appears. She's surprised at first, then angry. But what are you doing there? Like a madman! If your father saw you—and at the moment she says that, we see the shadow of the candle, the father's candle, climbing the stairs, and the narrator himself says, doesn't he, I am lost. She says a phrase that no one heard except me: I am lost. And then the father says, I'll go quickly, he says to the mother, but go to bed with him, you two are keeping watch, you're both nervous types, you can see the boy is upset, we're not executioners. A moment of grace. Whereas the father is usually very strict about his son's moods, which he judges to be a bad thing. And this time, it's grace in the religious sense. And now I'll continue.
1:28:52 Go figure why the relation to memory is overdetermined. We couldn't thank my father. It would have annoyed him—what he called sentimentalities. I remained without daring to make a move. He was still standing there, tall, in his white nightgown, under the pink and purple Indian cashmere shawl. Proust writes this as he is dying, that is, a whole lifetime after the scene he describes. Look, the details are precise. The pink and violet Indian shawl that he tied around his head ever since he'd had neuralgia, with the gesture of Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli that Monsieur Swann had given me, telling Sarah that she must part with Isaac.
1:29:28 And here, look closely, this is the key moment: it was many years ago now. The wall of the staircase up which I watched the light of his candle climb no longer exists. In me too—and I think you can all take on this 'me,' identify with this 'me'—in me too, many things have been destroyed that I thought would last forever. And new ones have been built up, giving rise to new sorrows and new joys that I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones became difficult for me to understand—and here we come back to the Norns.
1:30:09 It has also been a long time since my father stopped being able to say to Mama, 'go with the boy.' The possibility of such hours will never be reborn for me. Of course, when he says all that, his parents are gone. But recently, listen closely, because it's fitting to say it here, since it's a sound—I have begun once more to hear very clearly, if I listen closely, the sobs I had the strength to hold back in front of my father and which only broke out when I found myself alone with Mama.
1:30:41 In reality, they never stopped. You see, each of our memories—since always, memories of love, memories of trauma at work, literary ones, whatever the landscape—has behind it another matrix memory, an original one. That's what overdetermination is. You have to go beyond the immediate determinations. It already envelops you. I have begun once more to hear very clearly, if I listen closely, the sobs I had the strength to hold back in front of my father and which only broke out when I found myself alone with Mama.
1:31:21 You know, we all know those moments when we cry, not because we're unhappy, but on the contrary because we've just escaped a misfortune and suddenly find ourselves safe. The sobs I had the strength to hold back in front of my father and which only broke out when I found myself alone with Mama—in reality, they never stopped. And it is only because life falls silent—that's aging, isn't it?—life falls silent more around me now that I hear them again, like those convent bells so well covered by the noises of the city during the day that one would think they had stopped, but which start ringing again in the silence of the evening. I'm listening to your questions.
1:32:13 — No question first, I'll postpone this thrilling serial to next time. I hope it was thrilling. In any case, it was thrilling here for reasons that somewhat escape us. We had palpitations, both the technical crew and myself. And I'll take this opportunity to thank you, very, very warmly, for having stayed, for having come back. I see, out of about forty, more than 35 came back to their posts, held on, even though they would have had every right to lose patience and throw in the towel.
1:32:49 Thank you from the bottom of my heart, and until next time. And don't forget to be amnesiac about everything we've just said—let's leave it there, until next time.
