English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
From popular dances to jazz born of servitude 0:00 The injuries of time. And the Art of Fugue remains unaltered. Well, all these works, when you look closely, and now I return to my point, not only do they not stand in opposition to popular music, but you find in them ingredients that are inherent to popular music. Either well-known dance rhythms of the time, the gigue, the bourrée, the gaillarde, the allemande, the courante—these are dances of the period. Just as familiar to the audience of the time, of course, the minuet too, just as familiar to the audience of the time, a gigue for example, was to them what a salsa or a rock'n'roll is to us today.
0:42 So you see the difference starts to blur; it's more that learned music doesn't make popular music disappear. It uses it, you see, and enriches it infinitely—I'll say infinitely, indefinitely, that's what I meant to say. And so Camille's question becomes: which popular music, in the plural?
1:15 Which popular music would deserve to be extended into learned music today? Well, in the twentieth century, in the contemporary era, there is one single musical genre that was able to meet this challenge, and that's jazz. So it's often said, at least in the circles concerned, that it's the most popular of the learned musics and the most learned of the popular musics. Jazz indeed developed on harmonies and frameworks provided by the music of African Americans, the descendants of slaves—even slaves outright, in fact, in its very beginnings—what's called the blues scale, which is one of the streams that will feed into the river of jazz.
2:06 We're not yet in jazz; the blues is still a separate genre. There would have been no jazz without the blues, but the blues exists independently of jazz. The work song, literally the work chant, you know, the things people said so as not to die of despair or exhaustion in the cotton fields at harvest time—hence the rhythmic obsession, the repetitive side of the labor. It's interesting to see that the music, the rhythm that now makes the whole planet dance, the rhythms born of jazz, originally came out of constraint and servitude.
2:45 A superb dialectic. The work song, of course, at church, the spiritual—I've already spoken about all this in the very fine short film that Alyosha Allard and Antilles devoted to the exposition of this theme, called "The Wrong Note," which you'll find on our site, of course, or on YouTube. "The Wrong Note," then, where I recall that the master would say to the slave: you're going to leave behind your savage rags, and you're going to dress, put on dresses like the Brontë sisters', going all the way down to the ankles—we're in a Puritan world—with lace, and you're going to go sing at the temple.
3:31 And sing what? The Lutheran chorale, because he wanted people to sing at the temple. You know there's a church musical tradition among Protestants incomparably richer than the others, because Luther, after all, the religious founder, had said that the most important divine service, after theology, was "Frau Musica," "Lady Music," and he himself composed chorales, you see, Luther. So there it is, the Lutheran chorale, squarely built like that, no question of having sinuous lines, refinements—that's the work of the devil and of libido.
4:07 So the African American was supposed to go to the temple, and there, of course, he sang out of tune—brilliantly out of tune—meaning that in his culture certain intervals of our scale didn't exist, and wanting to superimpose what came spontaneously to his throat with what he was being made to sing, this produced the harmonies of the blues, which is a miracle, that is, something unexpected, unforeseen either by the master's culture or by that of the African of origin, isn't that so?
Russian and Viennese roots, Mozart, the Balkans 4:37 It's this encounter, this magnificent impurity that makes for the incomparable richness of this sound scale. So I would begin by telling Camille that we must take a lesson from what jazz did, because it arose at the moment when contemporary learned music—there are two great sources of contemporary learned music, I'll go quickly because this is all preliminary to what I'm saying, so I shouldn't waste time for the rest of our discussion—the two great sources, to simplify, but with these two you already have practically three-quarters of what's important in contemporary music, are the Russian root and the Viennese root, to put it quickly.
5:23 Let me explain. The second half of the nineteenth century sees the awakening of what are called the national schools in music. Until then, there had been a single European music. Nietzsche saw this very well in a fine passage of Beyond Good and Evil. Mozart, for instance, who was Austrian, and thus German-speaking, wrote the most beautiful Italian operas of his time. You see? That is, he excelled in a genre that isn't Germanic at all—on the contrary, it's opera buffa. But that didn't stop him from also writing a typically German opera—we don't call it an opera, we call it a Singspiel—notably a sung play with winks to the audience, little tunes süddeutsch, as they say, from southern Germany and Austria, tyroleans, things like that, complicities with the audience, the audiences of Les Enfants du Paradis, you know, the one who doesn't have enough money for the expensive seats and goes up to the gallery—and Mozart, coughing up blood, would laugh as he went over the tunes of The Magic Flute.
6:24 With his final opera, he had the happiness of dying just as he learned it had a magnificent, belated, magnificent success, there you go. So there again, an example: Mozart, for many people, connotes great music, and yet what did Mozart write that was popular—German dances, The Magic Flute, which spends its whole time winking at the audience, I'm thinking of Papageno's aria, which plays on the German word Papagei meaning parrot, because he's very talkative, and Papageno, in the most famous aria, says of a little girl or a little wife: that would suit me well with a slice of ham and a glass of beer.
7:12 You see, those are down-to-earth words—we're not in the sublime register of the heroines of his other operas. I'm thinking of Fiordiligi, lily flower, in Così fan tutte, and of course Donna Anna in Don Giovanni. No, no, there you go. So it's not all cut with an axe, this. Today I'm thinking of things that exist. I'm thinking of the music Kusturica uses in his films. Now there's someone who speaks from the popular ground, because Yugoslavia, the former Yugoslavia, is a country where popular music hasn't yet been turned into folklore, as it has been for a long time in the old, unified nations, whether France, England, and so on.
7:54 You see? So popular music is still very much alive there—when there's a wedding celebration over there, they don't put on a sound system, they don't hire a DJ, they bring in real musicians who come from the neighboring village, and that's it. That's by far the best of remedies, living music. And that gives, you see, that musical drive characteristic of… Now, it's significant that jazz today, in Europe, is often inspired by these very sound scales.
8:27 In the United States, this has been well explored, well delved into. So now it's in the refrain, you see, in the harmonic intervals, the second chords of Bulgaria, in certain rhythms specific to Serbia or Croatia, that things bounce back. So I believe, there you go, that today's learned music must first plunge its roots into the opposite of the learned—into the popular. And even if the popular is increasingly extra-European, especially if I take western Europe, this Finistère, this extreme western tip of the enormous Eurasia.
9:06 And this movement, I'll stop here, because Camille has enough culture to carry on what I'm saying from this point, from this orientation, this fertilization, this renewal of European music by extra-European inspirations or ones at the edge of the European musical space, had already begun in the nineteenth century, with the crisis—in the fruitful sense of the term, not in the sense of a blockage.
9:38 The crisis goes back quite far. I was saying, I was talking about the Russian root, I'm saying that it's often said that Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, even though it premiered in Paris with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes—I've already told you this, at a time when Paris's musical life, the great music, was the Ballets Russes, people fought to get a seat at the Ballets Russes—all the great premieres of twentieth-century music, the Rite of Spring, Petrushka, the Firebird, are ballets—you know that the Russians are immense dancers, along with the Spanish.
10:16 So I'll come back to this precisely, you see—Russia, the border between Europe and Asia, Spain, the border between Europe and Africa—how strange that it's precisely the inspirations coming from these two countries that will renew and re-fertilize European music, somewhat exhausted by three centuries of uninterrupted masterpieces, running from the Baroque—what's called the Baroque, I don't much like this label, because at the time musicians didn't call themselves that at all, the music of the Ancien Régime—with its inflection toward the eighteenth century, which is a subset of the Baroque, namely the Rococo, which I also dislike, it's more a plastic-art notion than a musical one—then Romanticism, then the musical Impressionism of Debussy, Ravel, whom I spoke about last time, and then, suddenly it all breaks—there's what's called contemporary music, the kind that hurts the ears of those unaccustomed to it, the kind people call ugly, dissonant, not beautiful, there's no lovely melody, well, you see everything that's said by someone unaccustomed to having their comfort and their auditory habits disturbed.
The break between contemporary music and popular listening 11:22 Now, this contemporary music—and I come back to it, and this goes right to the heart of Camille's question. Even though I myself appreciate it a great deal in certain works, one must recognize this general flaw running through it: it has cut itself off from popular listening. I saw fishwives at the market in Bastia, in Corsica, scaling fish while singing arias from Tosca, from Puccini, from Verdi, sometimes without even knowing who the composer was, that's how popular opera is in Italy.
11:56 Whereas now, if there's a performance of Verdi at the Bastille or at Garnier, first of all, it's reserved for those who have enough money to get a seat. I'll grant, in its defense, that for some years now they've been setting aside a few seats for students, which is very good, but still, generally speaking, you see, it remains, from a strictly economic point of view, quite elitist—not the music itself, but, if I may say so, its commodification.
12:26 Whereas originally, you see, in Italy, you'd have a bar, a little neighborhood bar, with the owner pushing two or three people aside, climbing on a stepstool in his somewhat dubious t-shirt, sometimes with grease stains, and belting out an opera aria because he has a tenor voice, just like that. That's very popular. And you have the same thing with poetry among the Russians. In a workshop, in a factory, even in Siberia, someone can suddenly, during the break, improvise a series of poem recitations and everyone listens in an almost ecstatic way.
13:09 There are documents about this. There you go. So, Camille, I don't want to dodge the debate. For now, there is a total split between popular music and learned music. But this is because, in my opinion, capital has no interest whatsoever in the vast majority of the population gaining access to the heritage of fifteen centuries of music, so it's content to endlessly repeat the works released in the last ten years.
13:39 It's really extraordinary—apart from a few nostalgia radio stations that go back at most 30 to 40 years, it's lamentable. There you go. This flattening of the musical heritage that is yours. I'm speaking to young people here in speaking to Camille. Don't let yourselves be robbed of what rightfully belongs to you. Heredity, we can do nothing about it. Inheritance, we can. There you go.
Neo-classicism, counter-revolution, and anti-humanism 14:10 So I'll leave the question in parentheses. I hope we'll have the chance to come back to it. I return to our corpus, and so we need the text of "The Cracked Bell" now. You'll see why I've shifted my focus to this poem, still within Les Fleurs du Mal, of course, to pick up our discussion on modernity without starting from scratch. You'll see what new element we're going to bring in. Here I return to a problem that had come up through the question and my answer to it, from our Norwegian friends who had raised the classic and entirely legitimate opposition between Romanticism and Classicism.
15:02 That's generally what it's contrasted with. And I had told them—following on from my presentation—that he had drawn a parallel with the opposition between revolution and counter-revolution. Some might think, and it would be a bit simplistic, that Romanticism is revolution and Classicism is counter-revolution. I nuanced that last time by saying: careful, there's nothing counter-revolutionary about Bach's music. On the other hand, neo-classicism, that is, the return to classical forms after Romanticism—yes, there there is a counter-revolutionary side.
15:43 Once again, this is not an aesthetic value judgment—it can produce masterpieces. We must stop believing that the right, even the far right, is my thick-necked brother-in-law. No. The right has worked—I say it constantly. Since we started from Baudelaire, let me recall that Baudelaire somewhere makes this quip in one of his notations, he says there are only truly valid people in the city, in society: the poet, the priest, and the soldier. Even Marine Le Pen wouldn't dare repeat that today.
16:25 The poet, the priest, and the soldier. You see? Well, he owned his counter-revolutionary side; his intellectual master was Joseph de Maistre, who was himself an heir of the English tradition, the metropolis of counter-revolution—the ones most terrified by the events in Paris in '89 were of course the English. So there, he was an heir of Burke, you know, Burke, who, well before today's postmoderns, because we always think it's an avant-garde discourse, when it's actually the most old-fashioned thing in modern Europe, if I may say so, the counter-revolutionary discourse, which consists—you know—there's a negation of humanism, the postmodern thought of Althusser, who says that Marxism is anything but a humanism, right up to Lévi-Strauss, and Foucault, who says that man is a recent invention and, fortunately, is bound to disappear soon—that's in The Order of Things—and Lévi-Strauss, who is less radical, but still says
17:35 that he tried to examine, not how men think within myths, but how myths think themselves through men—myths, imaginary traditions, use man as a means—and even, why not, a nice formula, how myths think among themselves, how one can find, in a myth, say, like Tristan and Isolde, a Celtic myth from the Middle Ages, structural elements one can also find in an African tribe south of the Sahara or deep in the Amazon—well, let's leave that aside—the common point is that this sets itself against humanism. I don't even need to remind you, you're right in the middle of it, your generation, antispeciesism and all these movements that say that in fact nature would be so sublime were it not for this horror that is man, who ruins everything—contemporary anti-humanism, which to me is one of the calm forms of neo-Nazism, but calm, with a clear conscience, and mostly with people who think of themselves as being on the left.
18:36 That's the secret since '68: those who were, you know, to the right of De Gaulle, that is, the Atlanticist right, managed to pass themselves off as being to the left of the Communist Party. Well yes, the Trotskyists, etc., the other anarchists, types like Cohn-Bendit, you see, like Cohn-Bendit—everyone now knows what he supports, but at the time it could create an illusion, you see—when someone tells you they're to the left of the Communist Party, it means they're to the right of De Gaulle. Since De Gaulle never presented himself as a man of the left—he at least had that clarity—as a man of the right, if you're to the right of De Gaulle, you're on the far right.
19:07 Let's be clear. I'll salute Foucault—you see, I criticize him often, but he did say at least one intelligent sentence when he said: Mitterrand is Vichy. That's where one should dwell. So this counter-revolutionary, anti-humanist tradition—why did I make this long detour through anti-humanism? To illustrate the remark of the famous Burke, B-U-R-K-E, the Englishman, who is the master thinker and the original of all these photocopies that the French counter-revolutionaries will be right up to today—it's: I have met Hungarians in my life, I have met Russians, I have met Frenchmen, I have met Italians, but I have never met Man.
19:58 You see, it's understood: man in general, humanity, doesn't exist, there are only ethnic identities—you see, that's quite contemporary. You see what level of regression public opinion has reached since more universalist discourses were pushed back, thanks to the Cold War and its conclusion. There you go. This Classicism-Romanticism business takes us far afield.
Romanticism in the strict sense and romanticism in the broad sense 20:29 So precisely, as I now enter into the text of "The Cracked Bell," as I had made clear to our Norwegian friends who are among the founders of Algarbra, which I forgot to mention—let me take this small aside to recall that I believe one of our Norwegian friends, one of the two members who was present last time and whom I salute, is president—she's a woman—president of the association of visual artists of Norway.
21:12 There you go. And that's what she speaks about at that level. So, when I told them that it's not Classicism that would be reactionary and counter-revolutionary, it's neo-classicism—in this case, in Baudelaire's time, that of the Parnasse, with which I began, by way of the poem "Beauty." Afterward I nuanced this by showing that Baudelaire, alongside this plastic, mineral side—"I hate movement, which displaces lines"—fixist, haunted by the concern to deny time, temporality, becoming, change, revolution—that this Baudelaire was counterpointed by another, quite different, even opposite, one, who is well known, on the contrary, for expressing fluidity, evanescence, evaporation, and movement.
22:08 "Sounds and scents turn in the evening air"—what could be more evanescent than a sound and a scent? There you go, we've already seen that, so I won't go back over it. Well, this is the occasion, and this is where I'll enter into the text of "The Cracked Bell," to say there are two senses of Romanticism that I want to clarify in my remarks. It's up to us to decide the sense of these words—I'll say, we'll see afterward whether it works, but I'm warning you in advance out of honesty. There's Romanticism, and thus Classicism, in the strict sense. In France, it's generally agreed that it begins roughly in 1821 with the appearance of Lamartine's Poetic Meditations, and it ends in 1853 with the failure—as I mentioned to you—of a play by Hugo called Les Burgraves.
22:49 There, we can forget all that, except for those preparing the literature agrégation, for whom it was on the syllabus. But if I take Romanticism not in the strict, precise, historical sense, but in the broad sense, that is, in the sense of it being the first incarnation, up to our day, of modernity, then in that case I bring in a new determination. Once I've laid it out, I'll proceed to read "The Cracked Bell" and comment on it. This new determination, this new problematic, and I take responsibility for it, consists in saying: since the appearance of Romanticism—I repeat, the first expression of modernity—
23:30 all the aesthetic, literary, musical, poetic, plastic movements—it doesn't matter which—we'll see afterward that this is also ideological, but for now let's stay in the aesthetic domain, which is more familiar to a great many people—either have as their foundation an anti-Romantic reaction: the Parnasse, which I mentioned, art for art's sake, later, at the end of the nineteenth century, neo-classicism, whether in the prose of a Gide, in the novel, or of a Valéry, in poetry.
24:10 You see, as Valéry said that Classicism is a tamed Romanticism—meaning that Romanticism is nothing other than a Classicism that isn't yet fully mature, that hasn't yet tamed its horse, hasn't yet broken it in. There you go. One could also say that, relative to the Romantic vein present in Impressionism, in the melancholy of a Pissarro, you see, or a Monet, and in the deliquescence—not at all pejorative—the deliquescence of outlines, the Cubist reaction is a neo-classicism.
24:52 A geometrism, there, that cuts sharply. If you look at the path leading from Monet to Mondrian, passing through Cézanne, then Picasso, to Juan Gris, there's a logic there. Agreed? And of course, in music, the vogue for Baroque music, that is, the return to a very regular meter, whose kinship with rock and roll I've pointed out, and this isn't just in my head, since they arose at exactly the same moment, in the 1950s.
25:23 It's not that the return to the Baroque repertoire; the vogue for the Baroque repertoire came at the same time as the vogue for rock and roll. So, since the emergence of Romanticism, we've had movements that are either returns to Romanticism, even at the risk of intensifying it, deepening it, and making it more and more incandescent, if I may say so, or, on the contrary, ways of curbing it in a return to strict classical form. There you go. This is a hypothesis I'm putting forward; there will be so many occasions to illustrate it that I won't do so right now.
Reading La Cloche fêlée: the quatrains 25:58 But let's look at one illustration of this hypothesis already, in "The Cracked Bell." Why did I choose this poem? Because it contains both forms of Romanticism, in the strict and in the broad sense. Let's start with the quatrains. I'll read it. "Bittersweet it is, on winter nights, / to listen, by the fire that flickers and smokes, / to distant memories slowly rising / at the sound of chiming bells singing through the mist."
26:28 "Happy is the bell with the vigorous throat / which, despite its old age, alert and hale, / faithfully cries out its religious call / like an old soldier keeping watch under his tent. / As for me, my soul is cracked, and when, in its cares, / it seeks to fill the cold night air with its songs, / it often happens that its weakened voice / seems the thick death-rattle of a wounded man forgotten / by the edge of a lake of blood, beneath a great heap of the dead, / and who dies without moving, in immense struggles."
27:04 Not having reread it for many years, it's possible I've altered a word or half a word, but if you have the text, you'll set it right. I believe I'm restoring it fairly accurately. So, a singular poem. A sonnet. Now, nothing is more classical than the sonnet. In fact, it's typical—in the era of the Parnasse, there's a return to the sonnet, that is, a demanding, very short form, fourteen lines, so it's very dense. You can't allow yourself—it's not Hugo's Légende des siècles with thousands of lines where you could have some slack now and then, no big deal, since the lyrical breath generally redeems a few such slack passages.
27:42 There won't be any waste in a form so short and so dense. So, it's a sonnet, a sonnet, two quatrains, two tercets. Of tercets. Now, the contrast between the content of the quatrains and that of the tercets is staggering. In the two quatrains you have romanticism in the strict sense, that is, a certain small melancholy, but one that isn't unpleasant. The proof — I repeat this for those discovering my approach for the first time — is that I hate interpretation.
28:15 No, not yours, or so-and-so's, or such-and-such a critic's, or mine. No, no, interpretation in general as a chore. Yes, I'm using a pejorative word, like cooking something up. No, no. Here we're doing analysis, that is, I try to restore what the text says instead of speaking in its place. When I say the sweet melancholy of the quatrains — it's bitter and sweet, it's bitter and sweet. It's not me saying it's sweet too. Yes, I'm not inventing it. "And blessed, the bell with the vigorous throat."
28:45 It's not "wretched," it's "blessed." You see, that's not interpretation. So we have a good fire in the fireplace, we're in the countryside, we hear a bell in the distance, in the village. Everything is fine, the hours are counted, people are at home. It's not war, it's not famine, it's not an epidemic. Let's not talk about epidemics. And so one can be attentive to memories, distant memories, slowly rising to the sound of chimes singing in the mist.
29:17 "And blessed, the bell with the vigorous throat." Look closely at the image of the throat, I'm drawing your attention to it. You have to take poets literally. Poets aren't secretive, you mustn't read between the lines. There isn't some thought that needs to be interpreted and recovered. No, everything is said. A poet who can't manage to convey through words everything he has to say should have chosen another mode of expression. He should have become a cabinetmaker. We know nothing. So what is he saying?
29:47 "Blessed, the bell with the vigorous throat." Throat, throat — it's the organ of communication, of speech. The bell addresses itself to the whole community. And that's why it's religious. Originally, religious means "bound together." It's what creates a link, especially in traditional periods, among all the people who agree, disagree, whether they're customers, suppliers, blacksmiths or peasants, farmers or herders — I mean, they all more or less find themselves at church on Sunday.
30:18 So here you have the presence of the sacred right from the title, "The Cracked Bell." The bell is at the church. So watch out, the title puts us on guard. It's not "the bell with the vigorous throat," the subject is "the cracked bell." But now, if a bell is cracked, it no longer fulfills its function of carrying its voice far off thanks to a vigorous throat. You see how literal one must be. There's a tragedy of speech and communication here that is very modern in this text.
30:48 Right? There's already the fact that we're enclosed in what's called today a "bubble." It's not personal, but look. "Blessed, the bell with the vigorous throat" — that's in the traditional world which, despite its old age, alert and in good health, faithfully casts its religious cry, like an old soldier who keeps watch under his tent. There you have the church and the army. Sleep, good people! It's security, it's the opposite of misfortune.
31:18 I understand why the bell is blessed — there, everything is fine. You have the church protecting us against temptations and against the devil who wages spiritual war, and you have the army that wages real war, doesn't it, and watches over the safety of the Empire, at the borders, the kingdom, whatever you like. Everything is fine. Full stop. End of the quatrains. "As for me, my soul" — the tercets begin with "me." That was them, them, good society, good people.
The tercets: the cracked soul and the modern nightmare 31:51 not the cursed poets, not the marginal ones, no, no, no, no. It's the civil society of the time, if you will. And then, all of a sudden, "my soul is cracked." Ah! Then "cracked," you see, especially associated as an epithet with the noun "bell," then there's no more vigorous throat, and there begins a dreadful crescendo.
32:21 I mean, it began in a beatitude of late autumn — no, actually, he even says "during the winter nights." Besides, I don't see why I went looking for autumn. "It is bitter and sweet, during the winter nights, to listen by the fire that flickers and smokes, to the distant memories slowly rising." Yes, you have to pull "levées" to rhyme with "levées," that's called a Norman rhyme, it's a tolerance in poetry. We're not here to do a detailed literary study, but still, it's good to know. So, "my soul is cracked."
32:53 And there begins a crescendo that culminates in the opposite of this cozy melancholy, blessed in a way — the opposite, in a nightmare, a thriller. You know thrillers well, but even Night of the Living Dead is nothing compared to the image. Look at the final lines. Someone dying at the edge of a lake of blood, under a great heap of the dead, weighing on him, and who dies without moving, in immense efforts.
33:24 But it's dreadful. It's dreadful. But how, in 14 lines, did we go from romanticism to spleen, which is painful, where there's nothing pleasant in the melancholy? I'm thinking here of the clinical sense. It's severe depression in psychiatry. And moreover almost incurable, chronic — it's not a case of the blues, it's major depression. Just as we're entering economic depression, we're starting to admit we're in a recession.
33:56 You'll soon hear people talking about depression. Words are a bit behind things right now. So, I chose this poem for that reason. Because you already have the whole century here. The first half, under the sign of romanticism, is the first two quatrains, and the second, which announces the anxieties of the twentieth century, Kafka-style, Beckett-style, whatever you like, which belong to the order of the nightmare.
34:28 You see a painting as famous as Munch's The Scream, you know, that figure, that vaguely anthropoid form, holding its head, seeming to explode like that on a bridge. Munch's Scream, which expresses so well the anxiety of the years preceding the rise of Nazism and the war. I mean, it no longer has anything to do with... "It is bitter and sweet, during the winter nights, to listen, by the fire that flickers and smokes."
Obermann: "Even here, I love only the evening" 34:58 You see, you have here all the aspects of modernity in this poem. What happened? Well, that's a question that must be asked. Because we can now take it with a broader scope. You'll understand why, since afterward I'll move on to Senancour. That is, I'm not following chronological order, or I'm following it backwards. I'm starting from Baudelaire, mid-century, actually more the second half. The Flowers of Evil was published in 1857, you see.
35:30 And I go back, not even to the beginning of romanticism, but to what's called pre-romanticism. That is, before that famous publication of Lamartine's Poetic Meditations, which is officially supposed to mark the beginning of French literary romanticism, there were, since Rousseau, who is of course the great founder, a few reference figures like that, called pre-romanticism. I object to the word — you know I don't like the notion of precursor.
36:02 Because if it means those who did somewhat what their successors would do, only more and better, that's a misreading. There are indeed areas where the pre-romantics go further than what followed. So that's exactly what we're going to see, and I've chosen the least known of the three, between Rousseau, Chateaubriand, and Senancour. I'm choosing the least known one, not to seem snobbish, but because he's the one who analyzed the most, expressed with almost surgical precision what was later called the "mal du siècle."
36:36 So you see, I'm moving on — if I can get the text up here. I don't know if we can get Senancour's text. Thank you. So, I'll give it time to appear. The one that begins with "When the frosts move away," I believe. That's it, no? Even here, even here. "Even here, I love." But here, it's Fontainebleau, I should mention. "Even here I love only the evening." I don't see it on my screen, so maybe...
37:07 But... Ah, well, the audience can see it. Fine, so that's the main thing. I'll try to catch up on... There. So, one moment, I'll even take this. There it is. So, I'll take it here. There. So, I should specify, for those who'd like to look it up, that this is taken from the only novel published by Senancour, Senancour, written at the end of the eighteenth century, you see, and then afterward, at the very beginning of the nineteenth — we're really going back to the sources of the new sensibility — who wrote a single novel, Obermann, O-B-E-R-M-A-N-N.
37:52 You can find it in full on Wikisource if you look for it. Sainte-Beuve, one of the greatest critics of the nineteenth century, well, one of the most cited, said: "Monsieur de Senancour will have a discreet but faithful posterity." That means he's not very well known to the general public, but those who do know him will always remain faithful to him. There, I hope I'm part of that faithful and discreet posterity.
38:22 There, Nerval was a great admirer of Senancour, and as for Senancour, of course, his master was Rousseau, like his whole generation. So, I move on to the text. It's an epistolary novel, he writes to a friend, it's letters, like the New Héloïse, like... There. "Even here," so first of all, and I should say this, it takes place in autumn, so in the evening — he speaks of the evening, the end of the day, but it's also the evening of the year, namely autumn. "Even here I love only the evening."
38:53 You see the continuity with Baudelaire's Harmonie du soir. "Dawn pleases me for a moment. I believe I will feel its beauty. But the day that follows it must be so long." You see, you already feel a weariness coming on, the mal du siècle, a boredom. "I do have free land to roam." I remind you that Étienne Pivert de Senancour is a young gentleman. Not the greatest families, but a gentleman of means — an interesting coincidence, I inform you, is that he was at one time the owner of the Châalis-Ermenonville estate, where Rousseau's tomb now stands, and which Nerval immortalized in his prose work.
39:37 There, I mentioned it in passing. So, when he says "I do have free land to roam," material concerns are not his problem. "I do have free land to roam, but it is not wild enough, not imposing enough." You see, there's already a trait that will become common in modernity: as soon as I have a vacation, I take a charter flight and go to some island in Polynesia, to a lodge, or to the Amazon rainforest, or to Africa, or to the yurts of Mongolia, as long as it's anywhere, as long as it's as far as possible from my cultural, geographical, historical, climatic references, etc.
40:17 All that has a birth date, which is the period I'm talking about, the late eighteenth, the nineteenth century. So, "it is not wild enough, not imposing enough." I remind you that Rousseau had just created the tradition of the beauty of the mountain. Yes, it seems incredible to us, but it didn't exist. The mountain was horror. A bit like I told you Gothic art was considered ugly, barbaric, to people of the seventeenth century. In the same way, Madame de Sévigné, when she went to see her daughter in Grignan, in the Drôme — still in the Drôme today — passed right by the Alps, and she'd draw the curtain of her coach so as not to see that horror.
40:57 The Alps were misery, cretinism of the Alps. The expression existed not so long ago, with goiters. There, these poor people — there was no tourism yet, no ski lifts and ski resorts. So don't think of Megève here, but Rousseau launches the poetry of the mountain in the New Héloïse, of course — Rousseau is Swiss. So you see, the mountain has contrasts, abysses, waterfalls that fall from the sky and plunge into chasms. That's wild.
41:28 But no, here, Fontainebleau, "but it is not wild enough, not imposing enough, the forms are low, the rocks small" — the famous Fontainebleau sandstone, you know, where climbing enthusiasts go bouldering after equipping themselves at the old camper's shop. Equipped, sorry. "The vegetation, in general, does not have that force, that profusion which is necessary to me." You see, already, Nietzsche will say in a magnificent text on music — one always thinks I'm reducing Nietzsche, but still, in a text, Nietzsche writes at the end of the nineteenth century, a prophetic line, "I am looking for a music that is sister to the palm tree."
42:04 He's announcing what jazz will be, what exotic music will be, he announces all that when it didn't yet exist in his time. He's trying to exorcise his Wagnerian temptation. He died of his relationship with Wagner — that's me telling you that. You don't have to agree, but the more you check, the more you'll see the problem deserves to be raised. Well: "I am looking for a music that is sister to the palm tree, a music that would go prowling with the beautiful wild beasts under the golden sunsets of the desert or in the jungles." You see, you can see this whole vogue at its very birth, at its genesis, with Senancour.
42:40 Isn't that so? "The vegetation, in general, does not have that force, that profusion which is necessary to me." You already have the vitalism of an exhausted world. There's the key. Right? The modern world, that of absolute knowledge — I didn't get to it last time — the one who knows too much, the one that made Hölderlin, exactly contemporary with Senancour, say: "King Oedipus has one eye too many, perhaps." King Oedipus has one eye too many. Modern man has one eye too many. You know, I'm alluding to that detail which is no small detail in Sophocles, when Oedipus knows, recognizes, when he's forced to acknowledge, when he can no longer deny, deny the appalling truth.
43:26 Isn't that so? No detective novel has dared — has it? — achieve that perfection of the crime novel, namely that the one leading the investigation is the guilty one, and he doesn't even know it. But yes, you have to think of it — that's Sophocles. But when at the end he knows he has married his mother and killed his father — each time, of course, without knowing it, with all the necessary caveats, right? — he tears out his eyes. And he's quite right, mind you. I mean, it's rational, there are reasons for it, because his eyes served him for nothing.
44:00 Do you see this fine critique of a certain empiricism? It's not with my eyes that I will discover my truth. I should have listened to the oracle at Delphi, which says "know thyself." It's not with the eyes that one turns one's gaze inward. It's not with the eye of the body. It's with what Plato would have called the eye of the soul, right? There. Well, reflection. What mathematicians symbolize with an arrow that curves back on itself and lets you say A equals A and not only A equals B.
Enjoyment is not happiness; the need for infinitude 44:30 Reflection, the turning back on oneself. So, King Oedipus has one eye too many, perhaps. And so, there's a need. You see, you see how many roots of ecology, which believe themselves to be something of today that wouldn't have existed without today's industrial excesses, go back to a period when industry barely existed in embryo — it existed, but only just barely. There were people with this need. And how does he put it?
45:00 "The vegetation, in general, does not have that force, that profusion." That's not life. That's vitalism. It's the ideology of life. "One hears no torrent rustling in the inaccessible depths." There's the contrast of high and low, which, as you can imagine, doesn't fit Fontainebleau. There. "Despite a few piles of sandstone," right? There, the allusion to Rousseau, to the New Héloïse, is obvious. "One hears no torrent rustling in the inaccessible depths."
45:31 "It is a land of plains. Nothing oppresses me here. Nothing satisfies me." These are strange sentences. That didn't exist before modernity. Oppressed — when one is oppressed, one is in a bad state. Well, no — for him, "nothing oppresses me," therefore "nothing satisfies me." There's a side to it — you'd say he's masochistic. No, it's modernity that's like that. It's not this particular individual. "I even believe boredom increases. It's that I do not suffer enough. So I am happier."
46:02 Not at all. Here he reasons a little, plays the philosopher. To suffer or to be happy, or to be unhappy, is not the same thing. It's subtle, you see. And to enjoy [jouir] or to be happy is likewise not the same thing. A subtle reminder that pleasure [jouissance], which can be infinitely intense but over such a small span of time, is very far from happiness, which presupposes a long duration, repetition, which is conjugated in the imperfect tense, in stories, in memoirs, which covers a stretched-out period of time.
46:33 "Every day we would go," etc. That's happiness, which recalls itself to memory. "My situation" — look, because this passage is incredible — "my situation is sweet." Well, of course, I'm a gentleman, it's fine, I have no material worries, I'm still young, I don't yet have the afflictions of the body. If Rousseau, in the last sentence of the fifth walk, after having, Proust-like, brought back to life through the magic of the pen and of writing, the best moment of his life, his reverie by the lake on the island of Saint-Pierre many years before, says that he goes there in imagination — he has no other way of getting there — but that it's becoming more and more difficult with his physical sufferings, because he was afflicted with kidney stones, and ends with that magnificent fall that closes this admirable piece.
47:19 Alas, it is when one is about to leave one's mortal remains that one is most offended by it. So, "my situation is sweet" — we're dealing with a young man. "I lead a sad life. I am here, could not be better, free, tranquil, in good health, no illness" — at the time, one had to appreciate that — "without occupation, indifferent about the future, from which I expect nothing, and losing without pain the past, of which I did not enjoy." Says he then. "But there is in me" — listen, because no one expresses the mal du siècle like this — "a restlessness that will not leave me."
47:55 "It is a need that I do not know." So he feels it, but you see, he doesn't yet have the concept for it. "It is a need that I do not know." I think of Verlaine, you know, "It weeps in my heart as it rains on the town." Everyone knows that forgotten ariette, that beautiful song — when people told Verlaine, who was a great poet, he'd say, no, I've only written songs, with his characteristic self-effacement and humility. Well, this little song — "It weeps in my heart as it rains on the town, what is this languor that pierces my heart?" — there's suddenly this passage: "It is truly the worst pain not to know why."
48:26 You see, it's "a need that I do not know," as he says here. "It is truly the worst pain not to know why. Without love and without hatred, my heart has so much pain." If it were heartbreak, I'd understand, right? I'd have hatred for someone who ruined me, or who took my wife, or both. Fine, now if it's love, I understand. I'm a political exile. No, there's none of that. "It is truly the worst pain not to know why. Without love and without hatred, my heart has so much pain."
48:58 And that, that's two generations later — we catch it here at its birth, in the course. "But there is in me a restlessness that will not leave me. It is a need that I do not know, which commands me, which absorbs me, which carries me beyond perishable beings." There, he begins to have a new idea. Perishable, finite, ended, determinate — it's a call to infinitude. There's a need for infinitude. That's typical of romanticism.
49:28 And that will remain well beyond romanticism in the strict sense. What would surrealism be without infinitude? Right? Because romanticism, in the strict sense — coming back a bit to our French romantics — holds that the self must be expressed, which was absolutely out of place in classicism. I remind you that someone like Pascal, who in prose represents one of the summits of the great classical style, the grand siècle, wrote that most famous line: "The self is hateful."
50:05 And he resents Montaigne for exposing himself on every page, for talking about these colics, these magnificent mountains — this is to tell you that it wasn't to the taste and the values of the fifteenth century. One speaks of things that interest everyone, and not of oneself. The self is hateful. Here again, it's a neoclassicism, a reference to Greece, as Hegel says: in the Greek world, we will never know whether Achilles had a beauty mark on his left knee or whether he liked peas with bacon, we will never know any of that. Whereas in a Balzac novel, you know all that — within the first fifty pages you know everything that's on the mantelpiece, accounts, a wig, anything you like.
50:43 There you go. It's magnificent in both cases, that's not the question. But there it is, the individual as such is modern, Antiquity does not know it; it is what Hegel calls the ineffective shadow — what counts is the citizen, not the particular individual. Precisely because everyone at the time knows he has nothing particular about him, that's what everyone feels. So, once again, here we catch something at its birth, this infinitude that is beginning to appear, which commands me, which absorbs me, which carries me away, this feeling beyond perishable beings.
Love is not infinite: Greek measure and Cape Sounion 51:19 You're mistaken — he speaks to his friend, but he speaks to the reader. You're mistaken, and I was mistaken myself, because one says, well, what the guy needs is a good woman, a great love, and there you go, or it's a woman who needs a man, whatever, the sexes here don't matter — what he lacks is love, an adventure, a shared love. You're mistaken, I was mistaken myself, it's not the need to love. So, a concession — look, there is, implicitly, I admit, a very great distance from the emptiness of my heart now, implicitly, to the love he has so desired, there is a very great distance, but there is the infinite between what I am and what I need to be.
52:02 Love is immense, it is not infinite, you tell me. Take the words seriously — immense means it cannot be measured, that there's no measure, so it's already indeterminate, already infinite. And that's not enough for him — he says, love is immense, it is not infinite. You see, so what was forbidden for the Greeks — the Greek, the model for everyone, who will later become classical, or neoclassical, namely measure, the metron, the balance which I said last time is a perilous balance, it's not — I'm not going to start again my refrain about the extreme center in politics — it's quite the opposite, it's perilous.
52:38 If you want to keep it in mind with an image, a metaphor for what it's worth, it's a balance, it's a happy medium, but it's that of a tightrope walker who, if he moves a millimeter to the left and a millimeter to the right, dies. That's where you see the perilousness of this quest for measure among the Greeks — I don't take it lightly, it's a heroism too, isn't it? And as Hölderlin says, one can fall upward just as well as downward. So, the infinite is not for us, it's for the gods, let's leave that to them, they are immortal, we are mortal — and here comes the modern hero, who has this hubris, the greatest of sins, if we were to speak in Christian terms, but that's not the case among the Greeks, the greatest of faults, precisely, is to want to equal the god, to mix the human and the divine, to be hubris — that means, you see, you end up with a hybrid, there's something monstrous about coupling things that are not made to go together, that's what a hybrid is, biologically speaking — the human is not the divine.
53:43 I can't help but recall here, each time, this memory I have — it's rare that I go into anecdote, but personally — you see, it appeared to me with such clarity when I went to see, when I went to Cape Sounion, fifty kilometers from Athens, to a place where Greece is less — where the scenery of the Greek coast is less jagged than elsewhere, it's a very jagged coastline, a bit like often in the Mediterranean, you rarely see the infinite as in Brittany with the ocean — there's a peninsula, an island jutting out, three islands facing you, you see, it's a rather closed world in a way. But there at Cape Sounion, you have nothing but infinitude, the one without contour, apeiron, as Anaximander says, among the presocratics, without periphery, without contour, apeiron, that which has no perimeter — there are three like that, apeira, at Cape Sounion: the wind, the sea, the sky, the light — four, sorry — there is nothing but that, and that's where the Greeks chose the spot to erect the temple of Poseidon, there,
54:53 facing the ocean, but turning their back to it — let's leave that infinitude to the god, that's not for us; we're going to build a temple with right angles, columns, that's it, that's ours, that's the lesson of wisdom, of the metron, of measure. Here you have the antithesis — one must take seriously these oppositions I'm making between antiquity and modern times, between paganism and Christianity, because we've inherited both things. You cannot walk through Versailles without a neo-Hellenic reference, whether in the statues, in the columns, you see, and in the mythological allusions, at every step, and yet that's more than 25 centuries after Plato — well, I exaggerate a bit, one century after Plato, if I go back to Versailles — and this reference to antiquity begins as early as the Renaissance, in European culture, so one must take it seriously, why?
55:57 Because it's our inheritance, it's our neurosis — no, no, not the neurosis, because you'll say to me, but Baudelaire, he's a guy — he's sick, this guy, the cracked bell, at the edge of a lake of blood, under a great heap of the dead, this would be the hour, there — that's a neurotic, and in class, he's a neuropath, what's wrong with him — this person is gentle, he has everything, he has fortune, he's young, and then he's unhappy — he's a masochist, don't do psychology, that's a waste of time, psychologism, as if these were questions of individuals — him, he's like that, I'm not like that — no, it's us who express it, us as moderns, our inheritance, it's both — we have one leg that wants to go right, and another that wants to go left, and when you arrive at a crossroads, it hurts. And now you understand why I began with beauty — I am beautiful, O mortals, like a dream of stone — the most Greek of Baudelaire's poems, which I quoted, the most mineral, the most fixed, the most statuesque, the most plastic, the one with the least temporal development, there isn't any at all — I hate the movement that displaces lines — there, there's a contour there for eternity,
Enjoyment has nothing modern about it: libertinage 57:07 and it no longer moves — you understand why I began, and I began there, because there's nothing more opposed to what we're about to see, this kind of aspiration that nothing here can fill. So I go back to the text — you're mistaken — I pick up at the ellipsis — you're mistaken, and I was mistaken myself, it's not the need to love, there's a very great distance from the emptiness of my heart to the love he has so desired, but there is the infinite between what I am and what I need to be, love is immense, it is not infinite. I do not want to enjoy — well, that's the whole eighteenth century, you know, we didn't wait for the modern world to enjoy, because there are still people who believe that sexual liberation started in '68 — that's incredible, you really have to have never read Les Liaisons dangereuses, the Marquis de Sade, or simply Racine — in Racine you have Nero doing a sado-masochistic sequence in two lines, yes, yes, in Racine, studied in classrooms, when he has Junie abducted at night, in the dead of night, for political reasons, he was advised to do it that way — it's for political reasons that he had her abducted — and then he saw night arrive at his palace,
58:17 with lictors surrounding him, sweating profusely, rather rough guards, imagine, praetorian guards, and this half-naked girl torn from her bed, and Nero falls instantly in love, as often happens in Racine — Racine's heroes are poor devils, they can only have fallen in love with the person who is in their possession, they're possessed by their possession, you see, like Pyrrhus with Andromache, the captive — here it's Nero with Junie — so he says this: when I pass through my chamber, I think of her, I used sighs and even threats, he says, sometimes, but too late, I begged her for mercy — masochistic, in two lines, you see, we didn't wait for the modern world when it comes to pleasure, the libertine tradition, the libertines, the apogee, libertine literature, that's precisely the eighteenth century, and you'll notice that the great heroes of libertinism are all aristocrats, I say this in passing — when Philippe Sollers says one must screw, feelings are nonsense, careful, I'm oversimplifying a bit,
59:27 fine, I know that his dream is to have a sentimental affair with a France Culture journalist in Ireland — there's a time for that — but one shouldn't act clever, I mean, the great libertines are aristocrats, it's Don Giovanni, the Count, Almaviva, he's a count, isn't he, it's the Marquis de Sade, and it's Madame So-and-so, or in Les Liaisons dangereuses, Des Grieux, etc. So it's existed for a long time, sexual liberation, forever — if you know the life of the Roman emperors — but it wasn't widespread in civil society, that's what characterizes our era — it's not sexual liberation, you had the equivalent, I don't know, some erotic prints, you had that on every boulevard, in Baudelaire's time, they were postcards, roughly, drawings, engravings, risqué ones — that has always existed, but it was under the counter, it was reserved, because you had to be able to afford it — a painter like Boucher, in Louis XV's time,
1:00:37 you put Boucher like that, in painting, in images, you'll see, girls of sixteen — at the time there was no neo-moralism against pedophilia, I'm not talking about those who assault, I'm talking about what was common at the time — the marquis would commission, especially once he'd grown a bit old, paintings — a young virgin would be sent to him like that, in at least a light outfit, into his bedroom, into his alcove — that's all old, it's not that which is modern. Come now, let's leave pleasure and return to happiness — love is immense, I do not want to enjoy, that I already know, I don't need it, I want to hope, I would like to know, I need boundless illusions — we're back to the incommensurable, the boundless. Baudelaire said, in Le Voyage, one of his most beautiful poems, the one that closes all of Les Fleurs du Mal, the longest one, isn't it — should we leave, stay — what's the point of leaving,
1:01:47 because everywhere we find, I don't know, the same misfortune, and he says, our condition, an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom — I don't know, we must lull our infinite, says Baudelaire, that's the line I'm getting to — lull our infinite on the finiteness of the seas, the horror, infinite on the finiteness of the seas. Well then, what does it matter to me what can end? There, that's where I stopped that letter, which continues.
Autumn and the voluptuousness of melancholy 1:02:22 I refer you, of course, to Obermann. It's letter 18 or 28, I don't quite remember. I think it's 18, yes, that's it. 18, so you can find it, because it's divided into letters and there's a table of contents, you'll find it easily. And the following text, but still when he's at Fontainebleau — the previous one began, I remind you, with 'even here, I only like the evening.' This one begins by alluding to the evening, not of the day, but of the year — autumn.
1:02:53 When the frosts withdraw, that is, when spring comes back — that's our season, isn't it — when winter retreats, I barely notice it. It's the season of happiness for everyone else — not for him. Spring passes and has not attached me. Summer passes, I don't regret it at all. There, I hear all the women howling. I sound sexist, but you know, when you see a female tourist on a rock in Corsica, in Greece, wherever, offered up to the sun, but with a confidence that no man will ever have felt — if you read Freud, you might have some keys to understanding why this absolute confidence in the relationship with the sun.
1:03:32 You see? Come now, let's stop being so easily dismissed as old-fashioned. Summer passes, I don't regret it at all, but I like to walk on the fallen leaves. There, the only season that finds favor with him is the one of death. I like to walk on fallen leaves. Well, it's strange all the same, this period, on the last fine day, in the stripped forest. And that's where he takes up again the analysis of the mal du siècle — where does man get the most enduring of his heart's pleasures?
1:04:05 This voluptuousness of melancholy — there, that's what will distinguish it from Baudelaire's spleen, which no longer has anything pleasant about it, it's a nightmare. But here, at the moment of its emergence, there's still a voluptuousness of melancholy. You see the trap closing on the modern subject. He can be tempted — by what? By, in some way, images of his own destruction. You'll tell me, yes, but wait, you're taking neurotics there, you see, it's always the same misunderstanding. Let's do psychology. Yes — the Baudelaires, the Senancours.
1:04:36 I recommend that you read Baudelaire's draft letters to Jules Janin. It's on Wikisource too, to get rid of this idea. Jules Janin was a very well-known author at the time, even more well-known than Baudelaire and Nerval — quite forgotten today, though he does have a street named after him in the 16th arrondissement. And Jules Janin had written an article saying, we're fed up with these accursed poets, these moderns, always complaining, unhappy, the spleen, etc. And Baudelaire wrote him a draft of a letter, but was so angry that he never sent it. It's a draft of a letter.
1:05:06 In which he says: you are happy, sir. I pity you. He must have sunk very low to admit such a thing. Well. Now, one must admit that here it's not a matter of psychology. Take Balzac. Balzac is the opposite of Senancour, of Nerval. He's not melancholic, Balzac. He's someone who's far more attentive, isn't he, to a bailiff's report than to a landscape — even if he can render a landscape admirably when he wants to.
1:05:39 Well, precisely, in the one work of his where there truly are landscapes worthy of the summits of Romanticism — I'm thinking of Le Lys dans la vallée. He too, at one point, deals with autumn. He speaks of his region, Touraine. He says, don't ask me why I love Touraine. I love it as an artist loves art. I'll skip some lines. And then he says, in spring, love beats its wings across the whole sky. In autumn, one thinks of those who are no more. And there's this sentence to which I draw your attention.
1:06:11 The sick lung — that's very topical. The sick lung rests on tufts of beneficial coolness. But tell me, the sick lung — what does it good? What's beneficial? I take up Balzac's word — it's watching the vegetation as it dies. I come back to Senancour. Where does man get the most enduring of his heart's pleasures, this voluptuousness of melancholy, this charm full of secrets that makes him live off his sorrows and still love himself in the feeling of his own ruin.
1:06:46 I cling to the happy season. Do you remember Baudelaire? A tender heart that hates the vast black void, and so turns its back on the coming night. Gathers every trace of the luminous past. Well, I cling to the happy season which will soon be no more. I'm already Proustian. I'm already in search of time past. Because as Proust says, true paradise is formed only in memory. A belated interest, a pleasure that seems contradictory, brings me to it, the happy season, when it's about to end — a same moral law.
1:07:21 You see the rigor of his analysis, that's what makes him original compared to all the other pre-Romantics. I tell you, his approach to the mal du siècle is surgical. A same moral law makes the idea of destruction painful to me, when I think of it abstractly, and makes me love, here, concretely, here and now, the feeling in what must cease before I do. Yes indeed, nature is going to die, but it will live again in spring, and I will see the next spring, so that's fine. It is natural that we enjoy existence better, excuse me, I have a tickle, there, perishable existence, darn, what did I do?
1:07:55 What did I do? Excuse me, yes, all right, there. It is natural that we enjoy perishable existence better when, warned of all its fragility, we nonetheless feel it enduring within us. When death separates us from things, it survives without us, but when the leaves fall, vegetation stops, it dies, we remain for new generations. Autumn is delightful, you see, the season of death — the word 'delightful' — autumn, I've got some tickles that I'll clear, there, autumn is delightful because spring must still come for us — a very subtle analysis.
1:08:38 And here there's a sentence to which I draw your attention — I'll start by reading it: spring is more beautiful in nature. What could be more beautiful than spring as a season? But man has done so much that autumn is sweeter. So, careful, one must take the sentence literally — spring is what's most beautiful. Autumn is not more beautiful, but it is sweeter. Why? Because history has been restored, Senancour is a contemporary.
1:09:09 Why yes, of Hegel — absolute knowledge is understanding that one has a historical depth, whereas in all the centuries before, people lived in their century as though it were an eternity, as though there had never been different things before. There was no theory of evolution under the Ancien Régime. People thought that the animals as they were seen had always been like that since God's creation of the world. That takes us back quite far, doesn't it. It took, in the sixteenth century, seeing cannibals, well, what they called cannibals, savages as they called them.
1:09:40 They were quite right to flee — 'savages' from the Greek, when you see what the invader did to them. And so it raised the question — are they men? Because darn, if they love their children, if they have virtues, moral qualities, and yet they're not Christian, that posed a terrible problem, you see, at the time. That means people were always self-centered. Well, all that collapsed at the end of the eighteenth, beginning of the nineteenth century. There was mixing, ships coming and going. But it's not today that globalization was invented.
1:10:12 Think of Hölderlin in Bordeaux. So, I repeat, man has done so much that autumn is sweeter. There's a dimension of the past, of recollection — one might say Hegel here somewhere — of recollection. The greenery being born, the bird singing, the flower opening, all that is spring. And this fire that returns to strengthen life, these shades that protect obscure retreats, and these fertile grasses, fruits without cultivation, these easy nights that allow for independence.
1:10:44 In short, the season of happiness. I dread you too much in my ardent restlessness. I find more rest toward the evening of the year. And now the connection is made explicitly between the evening, the end of the day, and the evening, the end of the year. The season when everything seems to end is the only one in which I sleep in peace. Not happiness and pleasure yet, but at least peace. Where I sleep in peace on man's earth. There you go. Read this admirable book, Obermann, by Senancour.
Semper eadem: the need to lie to oneself 1:11:16 You'll find reflections on many other things besides that. There you go. And even very interesting political and scientific visions. But here, for now, what interested me was his expression of modernity. So, I also suggested another poem by Baudelaire called Semper Eadem.
1:11:46 I think you can see it. You'll see it. So here I'm going to worsen my sexist side. It's not me, it's Baudelaire. No, I'm being ironic for those who constantly make anachronisms. Of course, we wouldn't speak this way now to a woman. That could be shocking. That, I fully understand. I myself refrain from it. And not because I waited for feminism to do so. I was raised properly, after all. But at the time, it went without saying that one would say 'be beautiful and be silent.'
1:12:16 A woman's main quality was to please. In short, she's a good wife. Well, here it's not about a wife. It's about a mistress, clearly, to whom the author is speaking, as you'll see. And, you see, it opens with the air of having his mistress speak of him, doesn't it. And she says this, well, he has her say this: 'Whence comes to you,' you were saying — so Baudelaire is speaking to his mistress when he says 'you were saying.'
1:12:47 'Whence comes to you,' she said to him, 'Whence comes,' you were saying, 'this strange sadness' — Baudelaire is a man of spleen — 'Whence comes, you were saying, this strange sadness, rising like the sea upon the black bare rock?' Immediately, Baudelaire's answer: when our heart has done its harvest once, to live is an evil. It's a secret known to all. So, you see, this isn't the megalomaniac saying 'I have a secret nobody knows.' It's the opposite. It's a secret known to all, but which nobody wants to know.
1:13:18 You see how we find again, in the history of absolute knowledge, that when it appears, it engenders an absolute non-knowledge. I've rarely seen a text so clear on this point. 'A very simple pain, and not mysterious, and like your joy, plain for all to see. So stop searching, O beautiful curious one, and although your voice is sweet, be silent.' In fact, he's not forbidding her to speak. He's forbidding her to ask this kind of question about his melancholy. 'And although your voice is sweet, be silent. Be silent, ignorant one.' Now, this is the passage — dreadfully macho, I don't know.
1:13:50 'Be silent, ignorant one, soul forever enraptured, mouth with a child's laugh even more than life.' 'Death holds us often by subtle bonds.' 'Let, let my heart intoxicate itself with a lie.' It's stated in plain words. To be modern is to be able to live off the negation of not knowing what one knows. Good heavens! 'Plunge into your beautiful eyes as into a beautiful dream.' Ah, the dream — that's better than the lie. You see? Precisely because it's not the truth.
1:14:23 In another poem called La Voix, Baudelaire is consoled by a voice that tells him, 'Keep your dreams, the wise have none as beautiful as those of fools.' Well, you see, the same theme here. 'Let, let my heart intoxicate itself with a lie, plunge into your beautiful eyes as into a beautiful dream, and slumber long in the shade of your lashes.' One could not embody with such clarity, such frankness — for once, the mask falls — this need to lie to oneself.
1:14:56 So Baudelaire is here conscious — he's exceptional in that — but most people who do as he does are not conscious of it. They really believe, don't they, that they'll find salvation in the forest, in some permaculture, I don't know — I'm alluding to Chateaubriand, who was already more lucid than our present-day environmentalists, and yet God knows he's an enchanter when it comes to natural scenery, having depicted the forests of Louisiana at the time, the jungles, bordering the Mississippi, as he did.
1:15:27 Well, he has his hero René say, in his largely autobiographical account, René — he has him say, 'At one point, I believed the woods would be delightful to me.' You see? With a slight self-irony. It was the time when I still believed my mood depended on the setting I was going to enter. At one point I believed the woods would be delightful to me. It's interesting to compare that with what Baudelaire will say two generations later.
Collective subjectivity: the fusion of text and music 1:16:00 'Great woods, you frighten me like cathedrals, you howl like the organ.' There you go. In short. Yes, it's interesting. Organ pipes and tree trunks. Well, let's move on. There. I wouldn't want to run over the time allotted to us. I'd like to hear your questions. But I wanted to answer them. Simply, I'll extend my little extension a bit further because I've run about twenty minutes over the scheduled hour.
1:16:34 I'd just like to answer our friend, Gess, whom I apparently treated a bit off-handedly, saying 'I'll answer you tonight, out loud. I only saw his message in the afternoon.' And so I'm going to look over his message again very quickly. You'll see. Ah, right. That, those are today's questions. Wonderful. We're lucky to have interlocutors like that.
1:17:06 For now, I'm just looking at what it says here. It's coming. I need to put the name here. There. You leave me be for a few seconds, there. But then, I don't understand. There, I'll start again. Ah, there, all right.
1:17:40 He had asked me a question. I wouldn't want to betray the literal wording of his question. Ah, it's going to end. There. So. But I can't see it. So, actually, he must have asked me it on Facebook. I'd like him to be here to ask me it again so we don't waste time.
1:18:10 Sorry, I'm having some confusion between the questions. I'm going to deal with the questions that are piling up, and in the meantime, don't hesitate to send yours. Our webmaster will pass it on to me on another monitoring screen, with all my apologies, if you don't mind. I know the question was interesting, that's why it bothers me to skip it, as the kids say.
1:18:41 So, let's go back — there, to the questions. Where is it? There. Loïc Chantry. Good evening Loïc, that's nice to see. It's true, we don't see each other anymore with the lockdown. No, I say that because it seems to me that the time when we used to meet up in a café, in a little Asian restaurant, it seems to me that was before the year zero, before it goes back to a past that will never come back.
1:19:12 All right, come on, I won't dwell on it, especially since it's more and more uncertain when this period will end. Let's not add to it. My question is maybe stupid. What link should we make, or not, between collective subjectivity and popular musical tastes? Ah well there, how could it be stupid, how, how? If you read Nerval's admirable pages on popular songs — he talks mainly about those of the Valois, but then he generalizes to all the regions of France — but how, how could it be stupid?
1:19:42 A song is the union of two very different things. The text, with words — which have even sometimes been concepts, the words, the language, in short — and the music. Music doesn't speak, language speaks, but music says things, doesn't it? It's curious, all this, isn't it? I could tell you the opposite, that music speaks without our ever knowing what it's saying, if you prefer, but it amounts to the same thing anyway.
1:20:12 I challenge you to transcribe unambiguously and precisely, right, the tune of À la claire fontaine, the tune, without the words. Now, the fusion of these two utterly heterogeneous things — language, which speaks first to the mind, to clear consciousness, and music, which speaks to the soul rather than to the mind, you see, something a bit more primitive, more instinctive, less conceptual — since time immemorial there has been talk of their opposition, or on the contrary of their fusion.
1:20:45 Of course, in the history of music, the most grandiose embodiment of this fusion is opera. Not so much what it later became, a kind of vocal virtuosity — well, I like that too, mind you — but I'm thinking of the moment of its emergence under Monteverdi, in the Venice that bridges the 16th and 17th centuries, with works like Orfeo, staging the great mythological problems like the myth of Orpheus, or Ariadne — we've unfortunately lost the masterpiece that Ariadne must have been. How do I know it's a masterpiece? Because all that's left is the Lamento, when Ariadne, disheveled, abandoned, alone on the shore of Naxos, sees Theseus's sails departing in the distance, having forgotten her, even though she had saved him, saved him from the Minotaur's jaws, no less.
1:21:39 That gets noticed. In the suburbs, that gets noticed. Well, opera, fusion. From the very beginning, there were theorists in Italy who said 'prima le parole, dopo la musica' or 'prima la musica, dopo le parole' — should the music come first and the words after, or the other way around? You see? You see how much this troubled people. There's a very fine book on Wagner, one of the strangest and best-informed, written by an anthropologist called 'The Myth of the Androgyne.'
1:22:12 in Wagner, in which he goes so far as to say that music is the feminine element and the text the masculine element, and that their fusion in Wagner is androgynous. He's helped a great deal by the fact that strange things do happen in Wagner sometimes. I'm still answering because I'm getting to the popular question. For instance, when Siegfried, after having crossed through the flames, after having killed the dragon, then crossed the flames — a second ordeal — braving the wall of fire watching over the sleep of the Valkyrie, put to sleep by her father to punish her for having done what he himself, the king of the gods, could not do.
1:22:50 When he discovers the Valkyrie, he doesn't know it's a woman — he's never seen one. He was raised in the forest like a wild child. He's never seen women, he's seen female animals in the forest, he doesn't know what a woman is. And he sees an armored warrior sleeping, and he thinks it's a warrior. He approaches, he can't wake him, he sees he's sleeping deeply. So with his sword he cuts the laces of the breastplate and suddenly sees a breast spring forth, and he cries out, 'Das ist kein Mann' — a howl — 'this is not a man.' You see, Wagner is strange sometimes.
1:23:20 Then he plants a kiss on her, and that's what wakes the Valkyrie, like Sleeping Beauty. The scene that follows — even Nietzsche, even at the time when he detested Wagner, said of this scene that it surpasses the sphere of storms. Well, the Valkyrie's awakening, third act of Siegfried. Well, this fusion — I took the most developed, most grandiose form of it, but in miniature, the popular song. The best ones achieve a perfect fusion, right, of text and music.
Popular song, from Nerval to Les Feuilles mortes 1:23:52 Look at this refrain known to every Frenchman and beyond, since it became a jazz standard in the United States. Over there it's called Autumn Leaves, and for us, Les Feuilles Mortes. It's a song. You see? Well, why did it become a jazz standard, when very few French songs become jazz standards?
1:24:25 Because Miles Davis's great love was Juliette Gréco, at the time he was in Paris. Well, let's leave the anecdote there. How can one do better than that fusion? That melancholy of time passing — but the sea erases on the sand the footsteps of parted lovers — everything is said with a simplicity of words. A popular song shouldn't have overly complicated lyrics, wordplay like is sometimes done in French song, in the so-called 'song with a text.' No, Clouscard made some very fine reflections on this.
1:24:57 The words must be simple — even the great Billie Holiday was content to say 'it's cold and I'm alone.' That's what popular song is. And you have to find music that also has an apparent simplicity and fits perfectly. So there, I'll refer you — if you want a detailed answer to my question, because within the time we have, I can't develop this too much — read Gérard de Nerval, in his best-known work, Les Filles du Feu, the collection, which contains Sylvie — whereas I'm rather cast as Angélique in our serial workshops.
1:25:30 In Sylvie, Sylvie has a sequel called 'Chansons et légendes du Valois.' Then go to Nerval's complete works on Wikisource and look at 'Musique,' plural. Nerval, this is little known, was the lyricist for the great composers of his time, for Berlioz for example, for the Damnation of Faust or works like that. You see? He knows what he's talking about. Well, for him, nowhere does fusion go as far as between language — what comes out of the mouth — and what goes into the ear, and that's not only in popular song.
1:26:12 How did it go? 'Beneath the white rosebush, the fair maiden walks, white as snow, fair as day, in her father's garden, three horsemen took her' — and Nerval says it's almost a tragedy in miniature, in a few seconds. 'Beneath the white rosebush, the fair maiden walks, white as snow, fair as day, in her father's garden, three horsemen took her,' or else 'The fair maiden was sitting by the flowing stream,' etc. He gives plenty of examples.
1:26:42 So of course, but this collective subjectivity — I come back to your question — and popular musical tastes — but there's nothing more collective than... I'd like to go fetch the text, but I'm afraid of wasting time. Read it — it exists on wiki, it's rarer, it's more... you really have to know it. Read a musicological work by Wagner — I don't mean his musical works — a study, simply called Beethoven, a study on Beethoven, in which, in a few pages, you find Wagner at his best and his worst — but here, at his best.
1:27:15 So, in the best part, at one point Beethoven — Wagner — says he's in Venice, and recalls something that happened to him in Venice, Venice where he composed Tristan. Well, he goes out, and he says: 'I hear in the distance a gondolier's song, and then another that echoes it, in the dead of night, just like that. No composer has ever come close, has ever matched that popular music.' That's in Wagner! There, so I reassure you — what link to make?
1:27:47 The link that makes me often say, in reaction against the relativism that capitalism fosters — capitalism dreams that each of us be shut up in a bubble, in competition, with nothing in common between you and me, or between him and her. No. This capitalism — which made Proust, coming as he did from a rather moneyed milieu, even if he's not reducible to that, of course — say, in a moment of despair, 'Each person is quite alone.'
1:28:20 Even though he's talking about his grandmother, who sees in the doctor's gaze that he no longer gives a damn about her, that she's condemned, that she's old, as far as he's concerned — 'each person is quite alone.' Well, I tell you the opposite: we all love the same thing. That makes you jump every time, but not at all. I like little curly-haired brunettes, someone else likes tall redheads, I'm just making things up. I love the land of vineyards, to speak like a famous poem, and another loves the countries of the North and the flat country that is his own, with its mists. Why not?
1:28:50 But these aren't different individuals, they're different moments of the same subjectivity, to use your word. What matters is the journey that leads from one to the other. Life is neither circular nor linear. It's a spiral. It seems to go backward while progressing at the same time. So collective subjectivity — there's something there, and I come back to what I was saying earlier answering Camille, it's funny, your questions run in parallel.
1:29:23 It's that the greatest learned music, I come back to Bach, is made by sublimating popular roots. The gigue, the sarabande, the bourrée. There. We'll talk about it again, it's an inexhaustible subject. But read, read the passage about Venice at night in Wagner's Beethoven, and read what Nerval says about popular songs. There. If you'd like, and if you have trouble finding them, I'll send you the links on our Facebook page right after.
The logic of the subject: who kills? 1:29:59 Léo. Good evening Léo. It's been a while since we've seen each other. Are we going to continue the workshops on the logic of the subject? Yes, well Léo, as soon as it's not political, it doesn't interest him. No, I'm caricaturing you, Léo. Forgive me, because I can feel you thinking. You're going to tell me, 'but I never thought that.' No, but yes, I can feel you thinking it. There, all right. The militant. We are in full militancy. Sorry for the barbarism, I don't have another word. In full swing. You have to work through Baudelaire to understand Marx. Baudelaire quotes — Marx quotes Shakespeare, the Bible, on every page.
1:30:29 You have to do as Marx did. You have to listen to BFM Business. I know that will make Friot grumble when I say that. I'm very fond of Bernard, who has infinite kindness. But still, that'll get people saying... how can you listen to such obscene things? Yes, but you have to do as Marx did. Marx devoured the publications of bourgeois economists. You have to get out of the ABCs of abstraction. There. I'm being a bit harsh there. So what? Are you impatient?
1:30:59 We are right in the thick of the logic of the subject. Do you want me to take up the logic of the subject again? I'll give it to you in ten seconds. And with the current news, right in it. Who is killing right now? Who is causing the massacres that all the news flashes begin with? My German ex-wife used to say that at the end of the war in Germany, the newspapers looked like cemeteries — nothing but crosses for those who had fallen at the front. Now that's what the damn news is like. Right? But who is killing? There. I'm in the process of asking the question of the subject. We all learned this in elementary school.
1:31:29 The subject is what answers the question 'who is killing?' No, no. The answer precedes the question. It's the virus. No! You know that already. I know I'm preaching to the converted. It's not the virus. In Korea, in China, it's almost extinguished. There will be a few isolated cases, a few relapses like that. The sheer scale of what they had to manage — I think what we're calling the apocalypse, with 60 million inhabitants out of 1.4 billion, they've managed to have fewer deaths now than we have.
1:32:01 Now Italy has surpassed China in total number of deaths. Holy Europe, as Adamov used to say, a great communist. Arthur Adamov, look him up. That's the title of one of his plays, Sainte Europe. Already, back in the sixties. So, who is killing — the wretchedness of what public hospitals have become. Human wretchedness, material wretchedness. The fact that we now need countries that not so long ago were pointed at as being on the path of development.
1:32:36 Third World, emerging countries — we can't find the right expression to designate them anymore — and they're the ones now coming to bail us out. There's Putin phoning Trump to say, do you want a plane to equip yourselves? We have equipment for healthcare workers, because in the United States, if you don't have your insurance card, which costs a fortune, you can die on the spot, the ambulance leaves again without having treated you. Who is killing? There's the question of the subject, the logic of the subject. We're right in it.
1:33:07 And for that, we need to analyze the subject. We need to go through a Rimbaud who says 'I is another.' Because one could say 'it is I who kill.' Yes, but wait, the self is complicated. This self that was hateful — I take it up again, I'll stop myself, I'm going to do literature. Classicism, Romanticism, avant-garde modernity. Classicism: Pascal, the self is hateful. Romanticism: Hugo, when I speak to you of myself, I speak to you of yourselves. So I can talk about the self as much as I like, that's Romanticism, it displays its self.
1:33:38 I say this ironically, but it also produces masterpieces. Well, that's how it works. With Hugo, you get everything, you get some dross too because there are also fantastic peaks. So: thesis, never speak of the self, only of what is collective. That takes up Loïc's question. Antithesis, speak of the self, but 'when I speak to you of myself, I speak to you of yourselves.' Synthesis, Rimbaud, yes, one must speak of oneself, but beware, 'I is another.' The true I is not the self I'm conscious of. You see?
1:34:08 There. So I won't 'take up again' the logic of the subject, because I never left it. In fact, I don't recall ever having left a single subject. I keep saying the same thing over and over since the beginning. There. Bastien Castillo, I greet you. I don't think your name rings a bell, but if you're a newcomer, I'm all the more pleased. So, what does he say? I haven't seen his question. Castillo.
Absolute knowledge, scission, and escape 1:34:38 All right, thank you. So, in Critique du libéralisme libertaire, he speaks of Romanticism up to Clouscard, of course, as the moment of the split between the noumenon and the phenomenon, the negation of absolute knowledge. Good. For now, that's a paraphrase of what I allowed myself to develop last time, where I said — and I made clear it was a hypothesis I was putting forward, that I wasn't passing on as something we discussed with Clouscard, but well, we were quite alone in it —
1:35:09 Even now, judge this hypothesis for yourselves: at the moment when absolute knowledge — in the sense it obviously has in Hegel, which is the complete opposite of someone who knows everything, but which means that knowledge which modernity imprints, whether the subject wants it or not, logic of the subject, Léo — this knowledge which makes all these certainties collapse by replacing them with truth. And it's this loss of what I was before that knowledge of the false subject, which makes Hippolytus say in Racine's Phèdre — he who thought he would never fall in love, that it was for others —
1:35:51 'As for me, love doesn't interest me' — what interested him was hunting deer or boar in the woods with his confidant. And then when he falls in love for the first time, he utters that extraordinary line that only Racine's pen could express — because it is proper to the idea to externalize itself into speech — when he says: 'Enslaved now beneath the common law, by what turmoil do I see myself carried away from myself!' You see, you see, the dispossession — I am no longer who I was.
1:36:22 I obtain my truth at the expense of my certainty. I was certain that love was not made for me. I was a little fool, if you prefer to speak plain French. 'Enslaved now beneath the common law, by what turmoil I am carried away from myself.' Modernity will explode within this split. But yes, I was other than the one I believed myself to be, than the one I thought I was. So absolute knowledge is when the bulk of these certainties have collapsed, and I told you last time how formidable that is, how unpleasant, how much of a loss it is — above all the most delicate moment, where I suffer the loss of my substance, to speak in Hegelian terms, the loss of what I believed myself to be, before absolute knowledge strips me of it.
1:37:12 But I don't yet have what absolute knowledge is going to bring me — not, this time either, in theory, not in knowledge. And here, I'll remind Léo — I'll please him — it's in political action. Hegel, contemporary of the French Revolution: salvation is not in knowledge. It's in action, in the implementation of absolute knowledge. Which makes Marx say: up to now, philosophers have only interpreted the world, we want to transform it. But there is an intermediate period, which is our own, that of bourgeois civil society.
1:37:46 In the sense — excuse me — but in German, 'société civile' is a somewhat unreliable translation of the German expression 'bürgerliche Gesellschaft.' 'Gesellschaft' means society, 'bürger' is bourgeois, the inhabitant of the borough, the town-dweller, the city. 'Bürgerliche Gesellschaft' — you see why it's hard to translate, because it can lead to misreadings in French. If we said 'société bourgeoise,' one might think it means the society of the bourgeois, of the privileged. No, it means modern society, broadly, civil society. Right?
1:38:16 And it's opposed to the State. Let's set that aside for now. But bourgeois civil society, as long as it lasts, puts us in a situation where we bear all the miseries of absolute knowledge, to the point that we spend our time fleeing reality. And that's the theme of escape that I developed last time. We'll escape by every means available, geographically and historically. The whole European intelligentsia will escape into Zen, into Brahmanism, into Buddhism.
1:38:47 Look, there are pagodas in the West, and in California, don't even get me started. The richer people are, the more Buddhists there are. I'm not saying a word against the Buddha himself, who began preaching once he had had the revelation of poverty — he who was a prince's son. So there, but the last chapter is no longer of the order of knowledge. There is thus a most tragic moment, between the certainties that collapse and their not yet being made up for by the new society.
1:39:22 What does Hölderlin call for in his fondest wishes throughout all his poetry? A Greece, but one expanded to the whole of society and not just to a handful of free men as against a majority of slaves. Let me quote a disturbing fragment of Hölderlin. He wanted, they, the Greeks, they, in the plural, wanted to found an empire of art. You know that the Greeks never say "Greece"—there's no proper name in the Phenomenology that speaks of the aesthetic religion. He wanted to found an empire of art, but the national element among them was neglected, disregarded, one gathers, and Greece, lamentable beauty, sank into ruin.
1:39:55 The national, yes, the division between free men and slaves, that's also something, I don't know. The Orientals know that one alone is free; the Greeks know that a few are free; the moderns must know that all are free. But since we're not there yet, in the meantime, access to salvation, including political salvation, passes through a descent into hell. And there you understand everything that's going on. All the titles, like Rimbaud's, which is the most emblematic, A Season in Hell—but a bit before Rimbaud, a generation earlier, someone like Nerval, when he recounts his madness, the real one, the clinical one, at the time he was being treated, a book we owe to his doctor who said, if you can put your visions into writing, it might do you good, which was an excellent idea for the time.
1:40:40 Nerval says at the end, as the conclusion of Aurélia—I refer you to it—one can compare all the trials I have undergone by analogy with what the ancients called a descent into hell. You see. So it all holds together. So the question, I'll continue it, I hadn't even finished it, but the essential point is in this opening move, this stroke of the bow which is very interesting, from Bastien.
1:41:10 In Critique of Libertarian Liberalism, Clouscard speaks of Romanticism as the moment of the split between the noumenon and the phenomenon. Was the negation of absolute knowledge tied to this split? Yes, of course, because it's unbearable as a situation. And the negation of this split is expressed first in action, in behavior, through escape. "My child, my sister, think of the sweetness of going there"—not here and now. Of going there—it's always elsewhere that it happens. "To live together, to love at leisure, to love and die in the land that resembles you."
1:41:43 No need to give it a name or look for it on a map. "See on those canals the sleeping ships, whose mood is to wander." You see, it has to come from far away. "See on those canals"—some have said they wanted to take us to Holland. "The sleeping ships, whose mood is to wander—it is to satisfy your slightest desire that they come from the ends of the earth." Some believe it's their generation that inaugurated globalization, don't they? "It is to satisfy your slightest desire that they come from the ends of the earth."
1:42:15 "The setting suns clothe the fields, the canals, the whole town, in hyacinth and gold. The world falls asleep." Yet another dusk! We escape. Soon, into sleep and into reverie. Isn't that so? We escape. Another title, by Baudelaire, Anywhere Out of the World. It's in the prose poems, in Paris Spleen, that you'll find this poem titled, in fact translated from Edgar Poe, "Anywhere out of the world." Anywhere, as long as it's out of the world. But of course, this is the expression of what Hegel first defined, at the dawn of that whole era, as the unhappy consciousness.
The collective subject: reconciling civil society and the state 1:42:49 If one is never satisfied with what is there, it's because there is unhappiness. That's not the case with the Greeks. And another question I ask myself is: faced with the evil that Baudelaire expresses and the reconstitution of Nazism, isn't the only solution to pursue the revolutionary task through the action of a collective subject? Well, since Bastien offers the right answer at the same time as he poses the question, let me step aside for him—that is exactly my conclusion. All right? But for that, one has to realize that there is unhappiness.
1:43:21 We must not make alliances with certain social democrats, but also with the greens, the feminists—bourgeois feminists. The day women's wages equal men's, we'll talk about feminism again. That's not the same thing. Ah, but you can't reduce everything to economics. You know, when it starts like that, it's a shaky argument. People talk about African women, it's not clear, among Africans, who have been equal. So, there: faced with the evil Baudelaire expresses, the only solution was not to pursue the revolutionary task.
1:43:51 Yes it was, but that must not remain a mere "ought," Bastien—that's my only reservation. We mustn't say "it would be necessary." Why doesn't it happen? Is it a failure of the alliance, what is it? Lenin used to say one must use every means. The strike, the demonstration, but also the parliamentary path, the election. He didn't call the election a trap for fools, Lenin. He's no leftist.
1:44:22 But he knows very well that there are moments when it's the street that decides, like the October days of '17. There you go. So, of course. But I refer you to another question implicit in your answer, one that your answer doesn't settle. It's why there is no beginning of the revolutionary task to put the collective subject in place. When I say collective subject—and I don't think this is at all Bastien's idea—I want to guard against a misreading often made by anti-Marxists.
1:44:58 who consider that everyone would be the same. Certainly not. Even though when everyone has real differences, an inner richness—wearing the Mao collar for everyone, that's not what bothers me personally. What matters is real difference, not indifferent difference, as Hegel says so well. But the collective subject is the subject that, once again, grants freedom to the whole social body. So one that lets particularity develop to infinity.
1:45:32 Except when it compromises the general will. This is the difficult balance that is the political task of modernity: to reconcile civil society and the state. Traditional Ancien Régime society tries to reconcile civil society and the family. Look at the tragedy of Antigone. The interest of the city—Creon wants, in order to warn others never to do the same, [to punish] the greatest crime, which is to revolt against the city.
1:46:06 It's that we, so to speak—it's that we let Antigone's brother's corpse rot for the wild birds and beasts of prey, and she, in the name of the traditional community, more natural than the city—the family, not natural, but more natural, or less spiritual, less historical than the city—that of the family and of the blood tie—there is a conflict between the particular and the private, but it's one which—this is not, Sophocles is not Hannah Arendt—Sophocles is not some leftist talking about the misfortunes of poor Antigone the individual facing wicked society, no, that's an anachronism, that's a Robinsonade, as Marx would have said, projecting onto 2,500 years ago the conflicts of the Cold War, where one had to fight barbaric totalitarianism—no, it's one community in conflict with another community, not an individual against the community, it's the family community, Antigone, against the political community. She says it admirably: your Zeus forbade it, I buried my brother, but my Zeus, the Zeus below, of the world of the dead, there you are, so—
1:47:16 that was the task of antiquity: to resolve [the tension between] the family, which is attached to tradition, and civil society, which always comes to call it into question—with the Crusades, new customs arrive in Europe, etc., well, I won't wander off—but by contrast, the modern world is the relationship between civil society and the state. I refer you to these rich problems, with one last precision, because—we're almost at two hours—when I speak of the state, I mean the general will in Rousseau's sense, I take "collective" in the sense of the questions put to me by both Léo and Bastien, and not the state apparatus in the service of the private interests that have ruled over us for so long. The greatest swindle of capital is precisely that: when we're discontent, to make us believe we should resent the state, when what oppresses us is the state apparatus in the service of what?
1:48:13 Of the absence of the state, which is the private [sphere]. There you are, I leave you with this apparent enigma or paradox, as you like, and I thank you for being here, and I wish you a happy confinitude. Until next time. Thank you, Philippe.
