English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Tribute to Jean Salem 0:00 Yes, I was exceptionally asking you for a bit of silence. I'm not talking about formally holding a minute of silence, but still. I didn't put it in the outline because it's quite independent of the rhythm of our workshops, but we have suffered a great loss. Philosophy in general and materialist philosophy in particular, and within materialist philosophy, historical materialism has lost, with Jean Salem, one of its representatives who will be hardest to replace.
0:40 I'm not saying this because he was a close friend—he was a friend, though I saw him too little, unfortunately. I will never forget that he came in person, which didn't happen often, to the Tropiques bookshop, when I... when I was presenting the series that the bookseller called "Hegel Plage" during the summer, and I was very, very honored by his visit. He was above all an extraordinary go-between, and he had managed the incredible feat of establishing a Marxist beachhead right in the middle of the Sorbonne, at a time when the Sorbonne was especially...
1:25 Because there were glorious periods at the Sorbonne, it was carrying out its ideological counter-revolution like everyone else at the time. But I mean, in a lecture hall, every Saturday for years, there was a seminar that wasn't at all reserved for Marxists—far from it—where they hosted what was surely the best that progressive European philosophy, and indeed philosophy from around the whole world, had to offer.
1:55 And so I was... We knew he had been ill for a long time, but... well, I mean, you always find yourself hoping for a miracle, and it's a loss that will be hard to replace. So, I just wanted to have a small thought for Jean Salem, and even a big one, and especially to urge those who perhaps don't know him well enough not to hesitate to look him up. We had the same publisher, Éditions Delga, at least for certain publications; he also published with Vrin, he published...
2:30 With many other publishers too, but you'll find that—you're a better web navigator than I am—you'll find that online, of course. I didn't want to carry on with our workshop without mourning this loss, and above all without urging you to pay attention to his publications. I'll end this preamble on this note: his extraordinary openness of mind.
3:03 At the end of his life, I mean, he decided to take a science degree, he was learning new languages—I mean, it was a range of skills rarely matched. And even if... if the connecting thread that ensured the continuity of his thought and his publications was a passion for ancient materialism—that of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius—and well beyond. And there you have it.
3:38 It survives thanks to his books. I think of a very beautiful passage in Proust, after the death of Bergotte, where we see Bergotte's books displayed open in a bookseller's window, described like the outspread wings of an angel, ensuring the survival of the one who had disappeared. I hope Jean Salem's books will do the same for him. And in any case for his readers, among whom I hope you will count yourselves. So, I hope most of you have seen the outline for today's session.
Organic totality, map and serial novel 4:15 It's an indicative outline, I remind you, as I said last time—it may happen that I deal with the third line before the second. I say this not out of some immoderate love of chaos, don't worry, but because the different points mutually imply one another; it isn't a linear progression. You don't study someone exhaustively by starting with the soles of their shoes and ending with their hair, I mean. Or the other way around. We're dealing with an organic totality, not a mechanical one.
4:48 With a text. And on top of that, I handed out this map—we're going to need it, you'll see why. Because there's going to be quite a bit about chance today, and I had already alerted you to Nerval's itinerary, anything but a matter of chance, in this novella. When I talk about a journey, it's not a metaphor, it's really meant in a rather more literal sense. That is, his local displacement, as they say in Aristotle, his movement in space.
5:18 Why does it start in Frankfurt am Main? Why does it continue in Paris? Why, in Paris, does he go round all the libraries without finding the book he's looking for? Why does he leave Paris for Compiègne? There's an order to it. We could, if you like—it's fashionable now—for food, speak of traceability. And even in non-food domains now, the word has flourished. There is a traceability to the Nervalian journey in general, and to Angélique in particular.
5:53 So, for this particular occasion, I had recourse to the map. Because, I tell you straight away, while chance is going to come up—before it comes up in a somewhat more abstract and philosophical way in a moment—I'm still going to continue the reading of the text we had begun. When I say reading, you'll tell me that's all we ever do. But here, I mean reading in the analytical sense, that is, really scrutinizing the detail of the text, including details that seem to be there in a totally contingent or random way, in order to show that this is precisely not the case at all, and that there is just as much rigor in the unfolding of the detail of this text as there is in the lines of a great painter or in the musical notes of a Bach or a Schoenberg.
6:45 So, I would ask you... I'm not particularly a cop, but could those who have the book raise their finger? It's for practical reasons. Ah, that's not bad, so you can show it to your neighbors. Good. Because it would be nice if we read it at the same time. Whether we conclude there is chance or not, you see, we have to decide it together.
7:17 I can't decide all by myself that there's no chance. So, let's start with the tenth letter. You know this text is divided into chapters, but Nerval calls these chapters "letters." I remind you that this text was first sent to the editor of the Journal National, where Nerval had a contract to write a serial. It was very fashionable at the time, along with his pal Alexandre Dumas and that whole generation. Eugène Sue, who had great success with The Mysteries of Paris.
7:47 This was the era when authors were cutting their teeth on the serial novel, which had enormous popular success. In fact, it had so much success, it had become so popular—the people here being those of the barricades—that, you remember, this is even what triggers the logic Nerval invokes in the novella. The search for the book. It's that he absolutely must find it, that book he had found by chance in Germany, which he hadn't been able to buy at the time because he didn't have enough money while traveling.
8:17 And he tells himself, I'll be in Paris in two days, Paris, the capital of books, I'll find it there. In fact, you've noticed well enough how much he managed not to find it, and at the same time, the necessity of finding it. Why? Because, I'll sum it up with this line, this quotation from the author himself: "On my return to Paris, I found the world of letters in a state of inexpressible terror."
8:47 We're talking about chance today. I wouldn't want you to think there are just words like that, that it's humor, of course. I'm not saying that on arriving in Paris he got beheaded. No, no. But still, using the word "terror" is a strong word. There can be no chance in this. That's what we'll try to see confirmed today. "I found the world of letters in a state of inexpressible terror." Generally speaking, historically—since this is neither literary nor philosophical, for now it's historical, I'll go quickly—this is the era of the crackdown carried out by Guizot, first financially, economically, and above all with Prince Napoleon, Napoleon III.
The Riancey amendment and the "terror" of letters 9:23 Napoleon known as "the Little" by Victor Hugo, where much of the little freedom that had, despite the Restoration, managed to become part of the mores, was being called into question again. And very precisely, this had just gotten worse, hence Nerval's allusion to it being "inexpressible," with the famous Riancey amendment—I remind you, because there are some newcomers here, and also to refresh other people's memories—Riancey, named after the man who had cooked up the amendment, if I may say so, which told serial-novel authors, you see, we're getting to it, which said: either you write history, or you write novels.
10:05 You don't do what Mr. Dumas does, you see, The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo—you never know if you're in fiction or in history, you see. It's extraordinary to see the State concerning itself with the distinction of literary genres, really. It's almost comforting, for once the State takes an interest. You know, for those of you interested in cinema, where does reality end, where does fiction begin?
10:39 Have you ever seen a documentary with absolutely no fiction, no concern for staging at all, or conversely, a fiction that draws on nothing materially attested? I don't know, I'm asking you, you know cinema better than I do. You'd agree, it's hard to separate, really, in the end, I mean. So there you have it, the Riancey amendment, that's what it was. You choose: either you write novels, or you write fiction, as we'd say today, or you write history.
11:12 So, he has to find the book to prove it's an 18th-century document, that the abbé really did exist, etc., so that people won't think it's the author's fertile imagination that produced it. And terror, because, first of all financially, if the newspaper to which he regularly sends his serial is found guilty of mixing genres, of doing serial-fiction as Nerval put it at the time, there's a fine per seized copy, which can reach exorbitant sums, and thus put the whole newspaper and its staff out of business.
Three places: Frankfurt, Paris, the Valois 11:53 So, that's where we were. We saw that, very quickly, there are three main parts, broadly speaking from a spatial point of view—I'm coming back now to Nerval's itinerary—there's very quickly the beginning, which is in Germany. We don't know what he's doing there, we know he's on his way back, since he says I'll be in Paris in two days. And in Frankfurt, at the time of the Frankfurt Fair, which remains to this day one of the main, if not the main, commercial fairs in Europe, and thus among the most important in the world—of course at the book stand, still today the Frankfurt Book Fair is the most important, every publisher in the world knows it, don't they?
12:34 The only time I ever met Angolan publishers, in the middle of the Angolan civil war, was at the Frankfurt Fair. This happened because President Agostinho Neto, who fought against the fascist Salazar regime in Portugal to liberate Angola, was a great poet. I was able to get a copy of his collection of poems at the Portugal stand—the small, Portuguese-speaking Angola stand—at the Frankfurt Fair.
13:05 It so happens that at the Frankfurt Fair, he stumbles—Gérard loves to play the idle stroller—and he comes across this book that interests him for all sorts of reasons. Nerval had always been passionate about the book as object, about the world of books, almost independently of their content sometimes, what's called bibliophilia, rare copies, things like that. And here, it was interesting on top of that: an abbé who had renounced the cloth, what's called a defrocked priest, you see, who had renounced holy orders, and who had been imprisoned several times, who had escaped, who had almost founded a republic, who wanted to turn France, the kingdom, into a republic—in the middle of the 18th century, early 18th century, no small feat—who wanted to get hold of the book, didn't have the means; so there's a part set in Germany, three pages.
13:58 Three pages later, we're in Paris, and there's the state of terror—I'll explain why—it's much longer, because he goes round pretty much all the libraries, and each time with digressions—I won't go back over it, we've already seen several examples—there's a series of digressions accompanied by a series of apologies from the author for repeating these digressions. I insist a lot on this, because it's not obvious to notice: not only does the digression interrupt the flow of the narrative, but on top of that, the author keeps saying, I wouldn't want here to abuse the device which consists of... well, you see, that's called preterition, you know, when someone says, it's not that I'm racist, but... it starts like that. And there's Pascal, the thinker, who saw this very well in a magnificent aphorism, where he quotes a tiresome person, as they said in his time, who overdid the apology a bit, saying, forgive me, sir, please, and Pascal comments, without this apology, I would not have noticed
15:08 that there was any offense—you see, there are people who make what they've done worse by apologizing, again, no, but forgive me, I'm not saying this to hurt you, you see, fourteen times, it's like people who step on your foot fourteen times on the bus and each time say, oh, sorry—well, Nerval does that all the time, as if he wanted to make sure the reader really notices there's a digression, all the same, to make his point, as they say. So the second part, Paris, is one of the longest, with a lot of humor, but a humor always surrounded by anxieties—for example, he doesn't find the book, but meanwhile he digs through police archives from the time of Louis XIV, with people being arrested, with bloody domestic disputes, things like that, police archives, you see, human-interest stories; happy endings are rare in the news items whose archives reach us, it's well known that the blank pages of history, the ones where nothing happens, nothing serious, are the blank pages precisely, and that we only remember what could be dramatized—and then the third part, the long one, takes place in the country
16:18 where he spent his childhood, but he's careful, at the outset, not to say that's why he's going there. At the start, if you remember well, it's in the fourth letter, so I come back to the fact that he calls these chapters letters—as early as the fourth letter, there's a break from the Paris stay, when he says, I had the idea of going to the Archives of France, where I was given the authentic genealogy of the Bucquoys; not finding the book, he inquires a bit about the family, the ancestors, why not—their family name is Longueval. We had noted that as soon as this surname, Longueval, is uttered, we already had one foot in the Valois, a foot or a tail, however you like, since Longueval ends the name of the Counts of Longueval—so Longueval, Gérard de Nerval—if you go to the region, moreover, you can see it on the map, it may be too small, but there's a little village, you see, between—yes, Paris, Paris is where it says Saint-Denis roughly, you see, at the bottom left, there's Saint-Denis,
17:28 south of Saint-Denis, where it says "Discover the bars and restaurants," that's roughly the location of Paris—well suited for bars and restaurants—so we're roughly to the northeast, you see, if you move toward Ermenonville, a regional nature park, Oise, Pays de France, there you go. So you'll notice it says "Pays de France"—let me give a little geographical aside, but it's important, you'll tell me, of course, we know well enough we're in France there anyway, we're at the gates of Paris—no, but this is the origin, this is the true micro-region, a subdivision of the Île-de-France, a small part of the Île-de-France that gave its name to the whole country, to our whole country, because originally this was the first stopping point of the migrating Franks from Germania, quite simply, the first stop, the first stage where they stayed a bit longer than elsewhere—yes, the Franks of Clovis, that's what I mean. So, I knew a time before there was the Roissy airport, there was a little hamlet still called, still called Roissy-en-France, if you know the region a bit; it's odd that they specify you're in France, but yes, it's not obvious, it is France—now, France has rich soil, this particular France, these are the last patches
18:38 of loess that come from China, in short, and from Ukraine, very fertile, so no interest in the landscape as far as the eye can see, it's sugar beet, extensive farming right to the horizon—and by contrast, you can see it on the map, the slightly darker patch, where it says regional nature park, that's the forest; you can't tell because it's in black and white, normally it's green, that's the forest. As soon as the fertile soil, the limestone and the loess, gives way to sand, our ancestors weren't stupid, they weren't going to cut down trees just so there would be sand—it's sterile, in fact those of you who've had young children have maybe gone for a walk to the "mer de sable" [sand sea], Achille—do you know it?
19:22 Are there some of you who know it? Go for it, it's very beautiful, as Nerval says, moreover we'll see it in a moment—there's enough sand that from the center you can't see any other horizon, you could think you were in the Ténéré—not with the temperature we're having right now, but if you go there on August 15th, you might have the illusion of being right in the Sahara. There you go—but not enough that after a 5-minute walk you don't arrive at the most charming spot in the world, etc. Yes, because so many trees were cut down at the time of the wars with England—ships had to be built, especially at the end of the 18th century and above all in Napoleon's time—that on sand it doesn't grow back so easily, and so there are still patches there called Chaalis, the "mer de sable."
19:59 So there, that's the forests—it's very contrasted, I tell you, because Nerval plays on all these dichotomies, everything that allows one to eliminate chance and create a logic, that is, dichotomies: up, down, right, left, and here, France, the Valois—there you go, the Valois, that's where the patch starts to appear, you see? So, let's turn to page 110, if you will, that is, to the tenth letter.
Change of tone and determinability 20:30 We've already come a long way, we've left Paris, with this passage—I had stopped, I'll repeat it from memory—their family name is Longueval; by going through the files relating to this family, I made a most fortunate discovery, and a mass of archives referred me to other archives which must exist at the library of Compiègne. So, look at the map, do you see where Compiègne is? Roughly in the middle, at the top, do you see?
21:00 To go from Paris to Compiègne, you're bound to pass through Ermenonville, Senlis. He doesn't tell us that at the outset. My thesis, to eliminate chance, is that the whole point of this is to get to Ermenonville, where Rousseau's tomb is. For now, nothing guarantees this to us. There isn't even any mention of Rousseau at all. But already, so to speak, by shooting his arrow toward Compiègne, that's already a way of heading in the right direction.
21:31 He sets himself in the right direction, orienting himself well. What's more, he who had been so precise up until now—a mass of archives which must exist at the library of Compiègne. So, we went there, I won't dwell on it, that was the fourth letter, and there he begins to seduce us. There's a change of tone which I want to draw your attention to. It's not just a change of plot, it's not just a digression, it's a change of tone. You can feel it in the voice, in the tonality of the text, of Nerval's speech. Up until then, it was the tone of the journalist, of teasing banter, a bit rebellious, a bit anti-absolute-power.
22:08 Well, there you have it, it's common enough, a somewhat rebellious writer of the period. A "Young France," as they said—Nerval was part of the Hernani battle. It's said he hung from the great chandelier like a vine, right in the middle of the Hernani battle. And there, a change of tone: those who are not hunters do not fully understand the beauty of autumn landscapes. At this moment, despite the persistent mist, we perceive scenes worthy of the great Flemish masters.
22:38 Always those transparent, colored mists that bring to mind Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera. These lyrical observations must not surprise you—"you," that's you and me, the reader—suddenly he switches to the imperative. That's what lyricism is: I must not surprise you. Tired of the vain and sterile agitations of Paris, I rest before these countrysides, so green and so fertile. Sterile agitations of Paris, green and fertile countryside—you see, speaking of dichotomy. The more well-matched dichotomies there are like that, the less chance there is.
23:13 We don't yet know what's at stake. One can eliminate chance without yet knowing why there is no chance. This is the distinction Hegel makes between determination—there I know what's at work, I don't know, myself, gravity, the heat that expands a body, jealousy, the libido, whatever—a determination, and determinability, or determinateness. It depends a bit on the translation. That is, the fact that one senses there's no chance, that there really is a determination at work in the air, without having yet determined which one.
23:48 This is the distinction—I say this for those who really want to work on the text—between determination, "Bestimmung," and determinateness, "Bestimmtheit." Right now, I'm playing with you at the level of "Bestimmtheit." We're increasingly eliminating chance, it's more and more probable that there is no chance, even if we don't yet know where he's headed, as we say in French. What is the determination governing his movement? So, we were there, there's this change of tone, in particular this passage where he says, "It's All Souls' Day that I'm writing to you, forgive these melancholy thoughts."
24:29 You see? There, he apologizes again—"forgive these melancholy thoughts"—and he's no longer apologizing for breaking off, for straying from the plot; he's apologizing for being melancholic, he's apologizing for changing tone, which is even more troubling, as if the voice were growing hoarse, no? As if it were no longer the time for banter, at which he excels wonderfully on other occasions. That's where we were. And then his spirits return as soon as he arrives at Senlis, a town that always makes him happy.
25:00 Do you see where Senlis is? It's right at the heart of the arrangement, at the heart of this set of forests, of this dark patch, isn't it? For those interested, there's the Forest of Chantilly, not to leave it out, behind there's the Forest of Halatte, there's the Forest of Pontarmé, never mind. And the Forest of Ermenonville at the bottom right, if you look carefully. There you go. You'll see why these toponymic details are important. Topographic—we're not going to talk about topology, that's for Thomas. That's really topology.
Sylvain, Sylvie, Sylvanectes 25:30 Well, topology was very much of interest in the days of the structuralists. I don't know if I understood much of it, but in any case, they talked about it a lot. So, tenth letter, you're there, page 110. Now I'll carry on, and I needed this preamble to refresh our memory a bit. Let's dive a little into the detail of the text, before you decide whether it's chance or not. "I never travel through these lands without having a friend accompany me whom I would call by his first name, Sylvain."
26:00 Are there already some among you who think the first name is due to chance? I'm asking you the question. And if not, why? A little exercise in determin'... Yes? Sorry? Yes? It's Sylvestre, yes, well done. It has to be someone of French-speaking origin to tell us that. Well, gentlemen, and ladies too, of course. It smells of the forest.
26:32 Just as we enter the forests, Sylvain appears. From the pen of whom? The author whose best-known text is - the author of Sylvie. And who is going to tell us about Angélique - we're not there yet - about the tribes who lived there, the ancestors of Robin Hood, the Sylvanectes. Sylvain, Sylvie, Sylvanectes. No coincidence. I never travel in those regions without having a friend accompany me, whom I'll call by his first name, Sylvain. It's a very common name in that province.
27:03 Look closely. The feminine, the graceful name Sylvie, just like that, without even trying, illustrated by a bouquet of chantilly woods in which the poet Théophile de Viau so often went to dream. All that existed. There's even, when you arrive in Senlis, still now, a rather mediocre restaurant, by the way. I hope no one can hear me. That was when it had changed management. Now it's good. It's called the Chalet de Sylvie. After that, I'm talking nonsense, I've never been there. I avoided it. There are very good restaurants in Senlis, though.
27:33 No, no, it's true. It's true. Since Roissy, there are all the Air France executives. There are the pilots. There's money. There are subscriptions. And Senlis is a marvelous town. It's splendid. Really. So, I said to Sylvain - watch, a dialogue begins - I said to Sylvain, shall we go to Chantilly. Look at the map. If we say yes, do we get closer to or further from Ermenonville? So, from Rousseau's tomb.
28:03 Yes, we move away. I don't just mean we move away, we go in the opposite direction. If we're in Senlis, Chantilly is to the west and Ermenonville is to the east. Right? And it's Nerval who wants to go to Chantilly. Isn't it? And so Sylvain, I answer, replied no. You yourself said yesterday that we had to go to Ermenonville. And so Sylvain is going to serve Nerval as a way of expressing his will without seeming to do so at all.
28:33 I wanted to go to Chantilly, but you see, Sylvain, well, all right, fine, to Ermenonville then. So let's look at the reasons Sylvain gives. He answered me no. You yourself said yesterday that we had to go to Ermenonville in order to reach - and the author who said, and what if we went to Soissons, to Ermenonville. Then visit the ruins of the château of Longueval in the Soissonnais. That's the only connection with the beginning of the text. Let's not forget that Longueval is the family name of the Bucquoys, so the famous Abbé de Bucquoy we've been looking for since the start. The only continuity is that we're going to try to identify the ruins of one of those châteaux near Soissons.
29:07 You see? There. On the border of Champagne. Yes, I replied last night, I had gotten carried away about that beautiful Angélique de Longueval. That is, after all, the title of the novella. And I wanted to see the château from which she was abducted by La Corbinière, the man she followed against her parents' wishes and whom she followed all across Europe, which was very daring for the time, for a young woman of the seventeenth century, all the same, in men's clothes on horseback. Is it even certain, replies Sylvain, that this is the real Longueval, since there are Longuevals and Longuevilles everywhere, just as there are Bucquoys.
29:41 Ooh, that's a bit worrying for us. We thought we finally had the Bucquoy, and now it turns out there are Longuevals, Longuevilles and Bucquoys everywhere in the region. So, I'll skip a little of the passage that follows, and instead, before, where it says 'correspondence,' I'll read the last paragraph, and here I want to draw your attention. It would therefore seem to prove, Sylvain tells me, that the château of Longuevals was located in the vicinity of Soissons. So, quite far to the east, if you look carefully.
30:12 In any case, it's far to the east on the map. It would therefore seem to prove, Sylvain tells me, that the château of Longuevals - let me open a parenthesis - even now, and perhaps even more so than ever, it's a magnificent region to visit because, due to rural depopulation and poverty and the number of farms that have closed, I mean, there's nothing left but forests and second homes for Parisians. It would therefore seem to prove, Sylvain tells me, that the château of Longuevals was located in the vicinity of Soissons, so this wouldn't be the moment to turn back toward Chantilly. This change of direction already nearly got you arrested once.
The arrest at the café in Senlis 30:47 On my return to Paris, I found literature in a state of inexpressible terror. I told you I was taking the word terror fairly seriously, and now we learn that they got themselves arrested. Arrested for what? Just for wandering around the French countryside. So we're going to go back. We're going to go back, and you'll see, here, on page 74, if you would.
31:26 74. Keep that page - 210, I had noted at the bottom - we're forced to do this page gymnastics, that's how it was. And I'm not taking into account Angélique's story, which runs parallel to all this. All right. If you look at the top of page 74, there's the end of a narrative of Angélique's adventures, at the moment when her lover, a young soldier of the time - I mean, we're in the seventeenth century - slips away furtively; at the time, this was serious, if you were caught, the father would shoot you with a musket or slit your throat, I mean it was serious, the father or the husband, the brother, all three now, even without being in Corsica.
32:13 So he approached, he - up there, that's Angélique's father - he suddenly approached the lover, snatched the sword from his baldric by surprise - we're in the middle of the forest, I'll spare you the details - and putting the pistol to his throat, said to the footman, take off this traitor's spurs, and you go on ahead, because he had seen him coming out of his daughter's room, that's all. Well, it's not Angélique's story that interests me. Interruption. I would not want to imitate here the method of the storytellers of Constantinople - look closely at the text - or the tale-tellers of Cairo. Nerval never misses an occasion to remind us, in this little journey to the gates of Paris, that he is in the process of writing the huge Voyage en Orient.
32:53 The common point is that it all leans eastward, whether it's Frankfurt in relation to Paris. That is, contrary to the passage of time - or rather the passage of the sun, since it's not that which marks time. So, I mean, we've already seen, I don't know if you remember, when he complained about how badly the Bibliothèque Nationale was managed, because books were too easily lost, because they were loaned out too easily, he gives as a counter-example the excellent management of the Library of Alexandria in antiquity, where those who came to consult works were lodged for the whole duration of their stay, etc., etc., you see - and believe a visitor who has trodden its ruins, you see, he never misses an occasion - and he even rehabilitates the Arabs, unjustly accused of having burned the Library of Alexandria, whereas historians know well that it was Christians who, moreover, massacred in the streets the famous Hypatia, the Pythagorean philosopher.
33:49 There, it's normal that they tell us all that in the preceding chapters. Here, likewise, I would not want to imitate the method of the Constantinople storytellers or the Cairo tale-tellers who, by an artifice as old as the world, suspend a narrative at the most interesting point, so that the crowd comes back the next day to the same café. That's a bit what we're doing this year. The story of the Abbé de Bucquoy exists, I'll end up finding it. You'd think that as soon as he's in the Valois, he's mocking us a bit. The story - we have time to find it, it exists, I'll end up finding it.
34:20 In the meantime, shall we talk about something else? So what do we talk about? I'll skip what comes after, and I'll go to the bottom of page 74, if you look closely. I learned that the Senlis post office took 17 hours - so he's in Senlis, he sends the pages he's writing, that is, what we're reading, to the newspaper's editor in Paris - took 17 hours to deliver you a letter that could have reached Paris in 3 hours. I don't think this is because I am poorly regarded in this region where I was raised. It's the first time he explicitly says he has a personal tie to the region.
34:53 And we're on page 74. And we've already covered Frankfurt, Paris, 'in this region where I was raised.' But here's a curious detail. Remember why I went back. It's about the arrest. So now, I'll slow down. A few weeks ago, I was already starting to plan the piece you kindly agreed to publish, and I was doing some preliminary research on the Bucquoys, whose name has always resonated in my mind like a childhood memory.
35:24 But he should have told us that at the time. I was in Senlis with a friend. A Breton friend. It's not Sylvain, it's a Breton friend. It's in Senlis. With a friend - so, you see, right in the heart of the Valois - with a Breton friend, very tall, with a black beard. Doesn't that ring a bell, that beard business. Yes, three of you here already have beards, I know.
35:54 But Catherine knows it. Historically, this detail is important. At the time, why? Sorry? No, I'm thinking. Weren't there court rulings about wearing a beard? Ah, that was someone. A bit later. It was banned. You couldn't be a teacher with a beard because it meant you were a revolutionary. I mention it in passing, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. I was in Senlis with a friend, the Breton friend, very tall, with a black beard.
36:25 Having arrived early by the railway that stops at Saint-Maxence and then by an omnibus that crosses the woods following the old Flanders road, we had the imprudence of going into the most conspicuous café in town to refresh ourselves. Journeys took a long time back then, all the same. There's an omnibus to get there. So we have a little drink, all the same. This café was full of gendarmes. I'm drawing a parallel between Nerval and Kafka. In Kafka, there's always a trial and an arrest lurking somewhere. It's not with anguish.
36:55 Here it's done with humor, so we don't pay attention. But the result is exactly the same. Look closely. This café was full of gendarmes in their graceful state, that is, off duty, which after their shift allows them some entertainment. Some were playing dominoes, others billiards. These soldiers no doubt were surprised at our manner and our Parisian beards. You see? For gendarmes, having Parisian beards 35 km from Paris is suspicious. But they showed nothing of it that evening.
37:25 The next day, we had lunch at the excellent Hôtel de la Truite qui File. That makes you laugh, 'the trout that flees.' You're right. Try catching a fleeing trout. It's as hard as catching the Abbé de Bucquoy, wouldn't you say. This elusive book, as they say, this elusive gnat, as they say - we'll get to that a few pages further on. And he adds, in parenthesis, please believe I'm inventing nothing - because he anticipates the reader thinking he's exaggerating with this Hôtel de la Truite qui File. What's extraordinary is - you don't have the critical edition, the Pléiade.
37:59 It's a bit heavy. You'll see it will be very useful to look at in a moment, much more than what I'm saying right now. But in the original text, it says not 'the fleeing trout' but 'the Hôtel de la Truite' - the trout, but the trout, the female of the port, of the fleeing trout. You see? The fleeing trout, when a brigadier is going to ask us very politely for our passports. Sorry for these minor details, another excuse, but this may interest everyone. Here we shift from the personal narrative to the collective concern, to the freedoms that were shrinking in France.
38:34 We answered him - let's drop the voice-over - in the manner in which a certain soldier replied to the constabulary. Nerval keeps up his mockery. According to a song from that very region. I was raised on that song. He was asked, 'Where is your leave papers?' 'The leave I took is under my shoes.' That is, I made a run for it. The reply is clever, but the refrain is grim. Spiritus sanctus - that's what's sung at funerals, at burials. Quoniam bonus. Which sufficiently indicates that the soldier did not come to a good end. Our own affair had a less serious outcome. But you see, he's joking, yet there's a danger lurking.
39:10 Our affair had a less serious outcome. So we had answered quite honestly that one didn't usually carry a passport to visit the greater Paris suburbs. The brigadier saluted without further comment. At the hotel we had spoken of one of the Saint-Vals going to Ermenonville. Then, the weather having turned bad, the plan changed and we went to book our seats on the coach to Chantilly, which would bring us closer to Paris. So we understand why Nerval suddenly wants to go to Chantilly. He changes his mind because of the weather, the weather having changed.
39:42 What could be more changeable than the weather. Just as we were about to leave, we saw a police commissioner arrive, flanked by two gendarmes. There you go, the hierarchy is escalating. 'Your papers,' he said. We answered as we had already said. 'Well, gentlemen,' said this official, 'you are under arrest.' My friend, the Breton, frowned, which made our situation worse. Bretons are a bit like Corsicans, you shouldn't push them too far. I told him, calm down, I'm almost a diplomat, I've seen up close, abroad, kings, pashas and even padishahs.
40:14 And I know how to speak to authorities. 'Mr. Commissioner,' I said then - because one must always give people their title - 'I have made three trips to England and I was never asked for a passport except to grant me the right to leave France. I am returning from Germany, where I crossed ten sovereign states' - Germany wasn't unified yet - 'including Hesse' - a capital port, still today, Frankfurt. 'I wasn't even asked for my passport in Prussia. And now you're asking me for it in France.'
40:44 'You know that wrongdoers always have their papers in order.' Not always. I bowed. 'I have lived seven years in this country. I even have some remaining property.' 'But you have no papers.' 'That's true.' I add a small detail that Nerval doesn't mention, and which is even more disturbing. If he shows his papers, we'll see that his name is not Gérard de Nerval. You know that's a borrowed name, just as Balzac never actually was 'de' Balzac. It was fashionable at the time to have a noble particle.
41:15 And to seem a bit old-regime, he was really named Gérard Labrunie - like Pagani, like everyone. I mean, Labrunie. Fine. And his father was from Agen, in the southwest, 'prince of Aquitaine with the ruined tower.' And so the gendarmes would have had every right to say, 'But hold on, you don't have papers in your own name, you're usurping a name.' Yes, all that is there. His identity is not clear - remember, in his most famous poem, isn't it: 'I am the dark one, the widower' - that is, we know what he is, but as for his identity: 'Am I Love or Phoebus, Lusignan or Biron?'
41:50 You see, there's a hesitation about identity that's typical, and which of course, in the case of someone whose madness is emblematic - this isn't an insignificant detail in the history of French letters, this hesitation about identity. Schizophrenia is often called by psychiatry 'depersonalization syndrome.' I say this in passing, I'm not a specialist, but I'm telling you what little I know. So, it's understandable. 'Do you believe,' Nerval continues, 'that suspicious people would go and have a bowl of punch in a café where the gendarmes play their games in the evening?'
42:25 'That could be a way of disguising oneself better.' 'I saw that I was dealing with a man of wit.' 'Well, Mr. Commissioner' - it's not very heavy-handed humor from Nerval, but once you're used to it, you end up laughing your head off - 'Well, Mr. Commissioner,' he added, 'I am simply a writer, I am doing research on the Bucquoy de Longueval family, and I want to determine' - so we're going to learn the purpose here, he hadn't told us, but 'I want to determine the location of the ruins of the châteaux they owned in the province.'
42:58 It's neither about finding the book - you see, all the goals we've gone over since the beginning of the text are now forgotten. It's a new objective: to determine, to identify, and even to take a little tour of the ruins - since they've long since ceased to exist - of the châteaux he owned in the province, in the plural, the châteaux. The commissioner's brow suddenly cleared. 'Ah, you're involved in literature? Me too, sir, I wrote some verses in my youth, a tragedy.' One danger followed by another. The commissioner seemed to want to invite us to dinner to read us his tragedy; we had to make excuses about business in Paris.
Leaving Senlis: superego, historical depth, Rousseau 43:32 Well, I'll skip ahead. Let's go back to page 110. There's the arrest. I read it to you in order to increasingly rule out chance. Danger looms, broadly speaking, the moment Nerval gets closer to his goal, as though there were, you see, every time he was about to fulfil his wish, there was a superego in the Freudian sense, if I may put it that way to make it easier to understand, without the specific content Freud would want to give it, but at least formally, a superego - that is, a force within him that says you shouldn't satisfy your desire, a self-censorship, if you will - in any case, you see, he arrives on his maternal land and suddenly the dangers multiply.
44:16 So that's what Sylvain reminds him of - I go back to page 111, at the end of the paragraph before the correspondence: 'This change of direction already nearly got you arrested once' because, says Sylvain, 'a countryman of good sense' - a peasant, supposedly a forester - 'because people who suddenly change their mind always seem suspicious.' Well, tell us, Gérard de Nerval, he's a real champion at this. There, I'll skip ahead, because after that there's a digression where he answers one of his readers; I'll skip it and go to page 115.
44:50 So as not to interrupt the local movement - remember that's my thread, geographic - I skipped a digression, we're back in Paris, talking about copies, bookshops, and we were in Senlis, and now we have to leave Senlis to go to Ermenonville - you saw the map - then to Soissons; we're not going to stay in Senlis, even though he seems to enjoy it there. 'I leave Senlis reluctantly, but my friend wants it' - you see, it's always, 'it's not my fault, it's my friend who wants it,' to make me obey a thought I had expressed a little earlier.
45:21 'I am even quite pleased with this town' - we'll see why, look closely - 'where the Renaissance, the Middle Ages' - different eras - 'the Roman period, can be found here and there around a street corner, in a stable, in a cellar.' What pleases Nerval, what he's going to discover there - not, as one might think, that he's happy to leave the town for the countryside. It's not concrete at the time, it's brick, stone, for nature. No, it's for history, for historical depth.
45:53 There will be so many examples that I don't have one right now, I won't go on, I don't know. It's as if it were a journey through time, and not just a movement through space. 'Around a street corner, in a stable, or in a cellar.' I told you about those Roman towers covered in ivy, the famous passage we did in comparative reading. I won't go back over it, we've dwelt on it enough. 'The eternal greenery they are clothed in shames the fickle nature of our cold countries. In the Orient, the woods are always green.' There, memories of the Orient return to him in the midst of the misty Île-de-France.
46:25 'Every tree has its molting season, but that season varies according to the nature of the tree.' Those who have lived in Africa see very well what he means. 'Thus I saw in Cairo sycamores lose their leaves in summer. On the other hand, they were green in the month of January.' All right. I'll skip, regretfully, because it's very beautiful, the chapter that follows, where he plays a lot on place names, the woods of Pontarmé, of Chaalis. I'll skip it. And we still haven't talked about Rousseau. And now, turning the page, page 116, second paragraph.
46:58 He's making a list of what must be given up to leave Senlis. Come on, let's not dwell on it too long. 'The sharp steeples bristling with regular projections, called in this region 'ossements' - I don't know why - still resound with that bell sound that carried a sweet melancholy into Rousseau's soul.' It's the first time Rousseau appears. Isn't it? And so, of course, look at the chain of connection. The effect the surname Rousseau has on the local movement that follows: 'Let us make the pilgrimage we promised ourselves, not near his ashes, which rest in the Panthéon' - we've just come from Paris - 'but near his tomb, located at Ermenonville, on the so-called Island of Poplars.'
47:40 And here's a new objective, very clearly defined - extremely well defined in space this time, because if you know the place a little, it's a small pond with an island that's about twice the size of this room, and even that, in the middle of the pond - it's an admirable spot. Well, the Senlis cathedral, which he has trouble leaving, 'the church of Saint-Pierre, which today serves as barracks for the cuirassiers, the château of Henri IV backed against the old fortifications of the town, the Byzantine cloisters' - another era - 'of Charles the Fat and his successors, have nothing that should detain us.'
48:11 Yeah, that's just a manner of speaking, he's still dragging his feet a bit. 'It's still a good time to walk through the woods despite the morning's stubborn mist.' There, now we can finally set off on a walking journey, à la Schubert. It took us a while, didn't it. And now begins the main part of what I have to say. Yes, I'm sorry, all of that was just a preamble. 'We set out from Senlis on foot, through the woods, breathing in the autumn mist with pleasure.'
The walk through the forest and the removed drowning scene 48:42 So there, thank you, excuse me, right. We continue, you see, you have the page, page 116, we had covered a road that leads to the woods and to the château of Mont-l'Évêque, there it is, that's the magic of traveling on foot, there are no more digressions. This is going to be, in fact, the longest walking sequence without digression in the whole novella, and on the map, look carefully, it corresponds to the route that goes from Senlis to Ermenonville.
49:12 If you look carefully, we're right in the forest, these are forest paths at the time, there's no tarmac, sometimes it's very vaguely paved with stones, no more, it mustn't be too muddy, and there are about fifteen kilometers to cover roughly. That reminds me, I'll come back to it, you don't have the critical edition in hand. We left Senlis on foot through the woods, happily breathing in the autumn mist. You get the feeling you could walk like that, the autumn mist along with happiness, the freshness, the pleasure of walking, the ground that holds you, gathering mushrooms, we're in autumn after all.
49:52 Only, if you take the Pléiade edition where all the variants are, it turns out that in Les Faux Saulniers — you remember that Angélique is a reworking of a novella already written called Les Faux Saulniers, of which he censored certain passages, mostly for political reasons because times had changed by the time he wrote Angélique. Now, I want to restore for you the passage that existed there, right after 'happily breathing in the autumn mist' and before moving on to 'we had covered [the road] that leads to Mont-l'Évêque' — we had covered before, you see, between the two sentences you have a note there moreover, don't all speak at once to look at it at home if you like, note number 3, where they say that's where the famous drowning passage is inserted.
50:38 You'll see and judge whether it's a coincidence that Nerval didn't keep this passage. So here it is as you find it in the Pléiade. My friend Sylvain says to me, 'Do you remember the time when we used to roam these woods when your parents let you come to our place, or you had other relatives?' Nerval was a little Parisian who lived on rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin, where he was born by the way, which was called rue Saint-Martin at the time, and from time to time he'd go to the region with his mother — he followed his father into the Napoleonic campaigns, whom he never knew, and so he was raised by cousins and aunts; when the uncle was away in Paris, he was sent to aunts and cousins in the countryside. And so we see, in other little Parisians, a hidden little class struggle — I won't say more — with young Sylvain, isn't that so?
51:34 'Do you remember the time when we used to roam these woods when your parents let you come to our place, or you had other relatives? I remember, I told him, that you abandoned me once in danger.' Now here, you see, you don't have the text — it was an eddy of the Oise near Neufmoulin, I absolutely wanted to cross — these were kids, 10-12 years old — to get back by a shorter path to my nurse's house. You said, we can cross, the peasant is supposed to know the spots well, we can cross. The tall grass and that green scum floating in the bends of our rivers gave me the idea that this spot wasn't deep. I went down first, then I take a plunge into seven feet of water — that is, there's still a meter fifty of water above him. So you fled, afraid of being accused of having let 'nailler' — in dialect, drown — the little Parisian, I quote, it's underlined, and resolved to say, if asked about it, that he'd gone wherever he wanted. There, friend Sylvain blushed, didn't answer — already this is more than dramatic as an episode, he narrowly escapes drowning — in fact, does he escape it?
52:39 That's what we're going to see — yes, what he tells us — so how does he escape it? Next line: 'but your sister, your sister who was following us, poor little girl' — it's strange, it's he who's in the [dangerous] situation, one would think we should say 'poor' about him, and yet he says 'poor little girl' — 'while I was tearing my hands trying to hold on' — even after his plunge — 'to the cutting leaves of the irises' — it's magnificent, sorry, excuse me, yes — 'that's it — pulled me by the hair with all her strength to pull me out of the water' — you see, I owe you nothing. And so there's an incredible scene, isn't there, where there's the ghost of drowning and Sylvain's sister who pulls him by the hair to pull him from the depths and bring him, bring him back to the surface. Now, if some of you, in the same Folio collection, had the very good idea of reading the other stories in Les Filles du feu, in particular—
The same drowning in Sylvie 53:49 Sylvie, which is the most widely read, you'll see that this drowning scene repeats itself, but this time with someone who isn't called Sylvain but is called 'the curly-haired big one,' who is also someone from the village, also a peasant, and who is supposed, in Sylvie, to have been Nerval's milk-brother — so a rival with respect to the nurse, I'm speaking in analytic terms here of course. So you see, there's danger again, and we'll learn in Sylvie that this milk-brother is engaged to Sylvie, whom he's coming back from Paris to marry, after having dropped her for 15 years, telling himself, a little peasant girl, I'll arrive from Paris, I'll win her over — she'll see a broke bohemian arrive, and she's seen this little peasant boy who's made an effort, who's become a pastry-cook — she's going to marry him. That's a Flaubert-like story, superb, and the end of Sylvie is terrible, with both a great deal of self-irony and bitterness, Nerval going so far as to say it was quite my luck to have a milk-brother in the country of Rousseau, who had banned wet-nurses in Émile. Good, so you see why I wanted to restore the passage omitted by Nerval from Angélique. So there—
54:59 —we're forced to blame chance — it's terrible, isn't it, to remember, to recall, which reminds him both that he nearly drowned — and if you know a bit about the analytic field, the Freudian field, you'll know that the phantasm of drowning is very widespread and truly linked to what is completely unconscious, since we can't have memory of what is prenatal, that is, of the time when we were all drowned in prenatal fluid — birth being, after all, a wrenching away from that pocket of water, that liquid pocket. First point. And second, to show that Nerval doesn't think at all what I'm saying in terms of logic — and above all what interests me more, in terms of rigor, because I wouldn't want you to think I'm doing interpretation — look at the very start of this digression — well, you don't have it before your eyes — 'looking at the tall trees which at their tops kept only a bunch of yellowed leaves, Sylvain says to me, do you remember' — to note that we were at the sentence 'we left Senlis on foot through the woods, happily breathing in the autumn mist' — we're fully in the horizontal dimension, with ground that holds firm underfoot.
56:10 —firm there, we're on the contrary in ground that entirely gives way, since it's water — you can't have a more opposed pairing, as Tomineau [sic] would say — and above all the sentence begins by going upward: 'do you remember, looking at the tall trees' — you see, all of a sudden there's the up-down dimension taking over from the north-south dimension we'd been accomplishing, or west-south-east — I'm doing this deliberately to show you to what extent chance is eliminated, down to the smallest detail — the author himself doesn't even notice to what extent he is being rigorous, isn't that so. So, there, I'll tell you very quickly about the same episode in Sylvie, which I've set aside here — I'll skip past it because we're not going to recount the whole story of Sylvie — moreover he's at a little country meal, he's just come from Paris, he comes up against failure, he thought he'd marry little Sylvie, his former little girlfriend, that little village girl so lively and so fresh, with her dark eyes and her slightly tanned complexion — well yes, she's a peasant girl — and then there he finds her almost engaged, though he doesn't yet know she's engaged, he did see—
57:20 —that she had a lover at the dance yesterday, that's all he sees, and they're going to have a little country meal at which Père Dodu is present, a sturdy peasant from the village who likes to sing bawdy songs, you'll see, and who knew Rousseau. 'There you are, little Parisian,' Père Dodu tells him, 'you come to seduce our girls.' 'Me, Père Dodu, you take them into the woods when the wolf isn't there.' 'Père Dodu, you're the wolf!' 'Ah, I was, as long as I found ewes; now I only find goats, and they know how to defend themselves well. But you Parisians, you're the crafty ones.' Yes, there's this dichotomy now, the Parisian who comes to chase after peasant girls — a new dichotomy. You're too young now, all that's mixed now — no, not too young, one is never too young enough — but I remember there was a time when it was enough to have a little English car — no, no, I'm talking about cars, the Triumphs, the Morgans, you know, the little sports cars — it wasn't worth much but still, it made noise, went a bit fast, it was lively — I remind you, Dominique, you knew it too, with '75' written on the back, there wasn't a girl who could resist, all along the country roads, I mean, I'm off to the Côte d'Azur, I'm off to Corsica — does that interest you? So that's what Nerval makes us understand, it's as old as the world.
58:30 You'll say all this is ancient history, it's over now, thankfully — that's what people say. So, Père Dodu, he's a good one, Père Dodu — 'but you Parisians, you're the crafty ones, Jean-Jacques was right to say that man is corrupted in the poisoned air of cities.' 'Père Dodu, you know very well that man is corrupted everywhere' — Nerval more lucid than Père Dodu's rather simplistic dichotomy. Père Dodu started belting out a drinking song, which people tried in vain to stop at a certain risqué verse that everyone knew by heart. Sylvie didn't want to sing despite our pleas, saying one didn't sing at the table anymore. I had already noticed that yesterday's suitor was seated to her left; there was something about his round face, his tousled hair, that wasn't unfamiliar to me. He got up and came behind my chair, saying, 'Don't you recognize [me], Parisian?' A good woman who'd just come back in for dessert after serving said in my ear, 'Don't you recognize your milk-brother? It's been a long time since he's been here.' Without that warning I'd have looked ridiculous. 'It's you, the curly-haired big one, it's you who pulled me out of the water!' Sylvie was laughing her head off—
59:40 —at this recognition, not to mention, said this boy, kissing me, that you had a nice silver watch, and that when you came back you were much more worried about your watch than about yourself, because it had stopped working, and you said 'the beast is drowned, it doesn't go tick-tock anymore, what will my uncle say!' 'A beast in a watch,' said Père Dodu, 'that's what they make children believe in Paris!' You see that in different texts, with different narrative structures and different plots — I'm speaking of a new topography that has nothing to do with the reportage of Angélique — there are episodes that recur in an almost obsessive manner, like that of the drowning. So if I insisted on all these dichotomies, in particular I want to highlight the one that seems the most abstract and is perhaps the most interesting: the ground that holds — for in order to be able to make the journey and arrive at Rousseau's tomb, one must be able to walk, and for that there must be solid ground; policemen mustn't stop us, the ground mustn't give way beneath us, one mustn't cross the Oise carelessly. And when I do intertextual work, when I have a doubt, I look—
Bearing ground and verticality: Aurélia, the Chimères, Hölderlin 1:00:50 I determine Nerval through Nerval — in Aurélia, the account of his madness, there's a dream — some of you may have read Aurélia — a dream, now, no connection with the context we're in here, these are visions that terrify him or enthrall him, depending on the occasion; it's the overflow of dream into real life, as he put it. He was at the clinic when he had these dreams, and there's a dream in which he visits an ideal society living in the mountains, somewhat like the Caucasus or Tibet, far from the world — a kind of perfect society, politically, scientifically, that manages to have technical progress while keeping the purity of its original customs — in short, a sort of ideal world. And what's interesting is that this world is entirely described in terms of height. I quote an excerpt from this dream: 'Everything was changing shape around me' — that's very dreamlike — 'the spirit with whom I was conversing no longer had the same appearance, he was quite different, he was a young man who now received ideas from me rather than communicating them to me. Had I gone too far into these heights that make one dizzy?' We find the dimension
1:02:00 —vertical again in the dream. 'It seemed to me I understood that these questions were obscure or even dangerous for the spirits of the world I was then perceiving; perhaps also some higher power was forbidding me these researches. I saw myself wandering through the streets of a very populous and unknown city; I noticed it was bumpy with hills and dominated by a mount' — a mount that dominates hills, the vertical notion is well affirmed — 'entirely covered with dwellings. Among the people of this capital I made out certain men who seemed to belong to a particular nation; their lively air, the energetic accent of their features, made me think of the independent and warlike races of mountain countries or of certain islands little frequented by foreigners; yet it was in the midst of a large city and a mixed, ordinary population that they managed to maintain thus their fierce individuality. Who then were these men? My guide made me climb steep, noisy streets where the various sounds of industry resounded; we climbed still further' — we never stop climbing — 'by long series of stairs, beyond which the view opened up here and there onto terraces covered with trellis-work' — and give me back the trellis where the vine mingles with the rose — 'with trellised little gardens.'
1:03:10 '—arranged over some flattened spaces on the roofs, lightly built pavilions, painted and carved with capricious patience, perspectives linked by long trails of climbing greenery, delighted the eye and pleased the mind, like the sight of a delicious oasis, an unknown solitude above the tumult and the noise from below, which there was no more than a murmur.' I've already told you that Nerval's prose is somewhat his attempt at healing, especially Angélique, which is his most prolonged attempt at healing, whereas the poems of Les Chimères, which you have at the end of the volume you're holding, are all written in a state he even calls one of 'supernaturalist reverie' — a century before people spoke of surrealism, the word is fairly telling — these are visions he had at the clinic, in the full grip of madness, and that's why the poems are much stranger and more mysterious than his prose, which appears to be very transparent. 'The thirteenth returns, she is again the first, and she is always the only one, or is it the only moment' — 'for are you queen, you the first or the last, are you king, you the only one or the last lover' — all this is a bit like magic formulas, mysteries, riddles.
1:04:20 A bit like oracular formulas, formulas of a magician, of a fairy, of blessing and of curse. Now if you look carefully, the vertical dimension is omnipresent in the poems, that is, it's a marker of madness — that's why he did well to banish the chapter I restored for you, because this time he needed to resist the temptation of the personal novel and head toward Rousseau's tomb, where there is a collective interest — you can guess the ending of my plan, can't you, where I show that there's a dialectic of the particular and the universal at play in this text. So, there, I quote this short passage from Aurélia to show you the vertical dimension in Aurélia, which is explicitly the account of his fits of madness, but in Les Chimères you find it too, for instance in Myrtho, which is one of the best known along with El Desdichado: 'I think of you, Myrtho, divine enchantress, of the lofty Posilipo bright with a thousand fires' — the Posilipo is the hill overlooking Naples, for all of you who've spent vacations in Naples — right away it's the start of the poem—
1:05:30 —there is a dimension in 'lofty Posilipo' — lofty, altitude — 'bright with a thousand fires' — 'to your brow flooded with the brightness of the Orient, with black grapes mingled with the gold of your tresses' — all this happens up above, doesn't it, whether it's the brow — in the following poem, 'he marked my forehead with his irritated lip' — and in Le Desdichado you have 'my forehead is still red from the kiss of the queen' — the forehead is omnipresent. There's a poem where another madman, Hölderlin, expresses a break in the clouds, all of a sudden, after a stormy night, when a festive morning goes out to see its field, and all night the storms have rumbled, and there, suddenly, there's a clearing, a moment of illumination, one might say, as in Rimbaud, both literally and figuratively — he describes a bit everything that's happening, the thunder still rumbling in the distance, and the contrast — 'but standing in the peace and the sun are the trees of the grove' — amid this meteorological agitation there's the tranquility of the trees looking at the sun — 'but standing in the peace and the sun are the trees of the grove' — why do I quote them?
1:06:37 Because he says of them — of themselves — and he's speaking of poets, for the poem is called 'To the Poet,' dedicated to the poet: it's up to us to do as those trees, says Hölderlin in the poem — I'm summarizing it very quickly, unfortunately — he says it's up to us to stand bare-headed, like the vulnerable forehead, bare-headed, to bear the divine ray, the beauty of the moment — it's not in nature lit up by the storm and the clearing but for us to stand bare-headed to capture the divine ray and hold it out to men so that, for them, it may be softened — in short, so that men don't risk going mad as we have. It's the sacrifice we make to the divine. You know that to explain his own madness, in a famous letter written when he came back from Bordeaux, he said — and I can say it — that Apollo struck me. Yes, these are things that must be taken seriously when he speaks of the forehead. I multiply these examples not to bore you but to eliminate chance more and more, since here I'm moving from one text to another and from one author to another. There, so, all right, I think we now have enough material to draw up a little assessment of—
Chance as the meeting of two necessities 1:07:47 —and reflect on this word I've been repeating since the beginning of the session, that of chance. I went by the Opera the day before yesterday to book tickets, and, well, what a coincidence, I run into Romain — no, I'm not making that up, I say it just like that — it happens to us often, to use the word 'chance,' 'coincidence.' In that, one must always start by, sorry, by reflecting: what is chance, what do we call chance? We have flagrant examples, we use the word every day, don't we — guess what happened to me this morning, I ran into a tax collector by chance, me who owes nothing — well, yes — what does that mean in this case, chance? Can someone say it? Does that mean that I went there completely at random and that he was there completely by chance? Is that what it means? Does that mean that there's a lot — yes, there.
1:08:59 What wasn't planned was that we'd meet, but there was indeed a whole logic — the opposite of chance — that explains why I was there: it was to buy the tickets for the show, and he was there because he wanted to attend a motorcycle club meeting near the Bastille, whatever it was, he's passionate about motorbikes. So, these two necessities, the opposite of chance — I've already mentioned once the book by a notorious anti-Marxist, an immense scholar, a Nobel laureate in biology — it's not — oh my goodness, it escapes me — thank you — Monod, co-written with François Jacob, at the time they'd both won the Nobel Prize together — the title was Chance and Necessity. It's a classic dichotomy since antiquity in philosophy: do things happen according to necessity — either materialist, Democritus's atoms, or fatum ordained by the gods, isn't it, the vengeance of the gods — in short, necessity in both cases — or is it that things wander at random? You see, we're making distinctions here — chance doesn't mean one thing but different things, even contradictory ones — I'll get there.
1:10:09 For now, in the most common case, the one we use — 'I ran into so-and-so by chance' — means: I didn't intend that day, I had no intention of meeting Romain, I didn't even think he was in Paris, you see — to that extent, then, chance is welcome here, it means there's my own necessity, there's his, and at the crossing of the two necessities there's a chance that makes them collide. Chance — let's take stock of what we've just said — here means the absence of an end, as you were saying earlier after some reflection — neither of us had, as a purpose, the meeting. On the other hand, when we ask whether the emission of energy in atoms happens according to a rigorous, predictable, determinable law, or by chance — there, the meaning of the word changes; it no longer just means there's no purpose, but that there's no law, which is very different. It's as if there were no more law at all — you see the great difference there is between finality, which doesn't at all mean—
Quantum mechanics, predictability and the prestige of science 1:11:19 —that there's no law. There are laws — I went to the Bastille to book my ticket, I took the metro, there are all sorts of necessities, material constraints, that I respect and that continue to operate throughout my journey, just as in Romain's journey — whereas the second meaning, which is far more radical still, chance doesn't only mean negation, sorry, excuse me, privation of an end, but negation of a law — that is, one asserts that there is chance at the very heart of being, which is very different. Now, I don't want to do epistemology here, especially since I have very pure scientists among you — I don't want, well, what a ridiculous thing to say — I'm joking, because epistemology isn't science, it's a reflection on science — but it still needs to be a reflection on actual science, and not on what has been supposedly said to be scientific. I say this because one often hears people say, 'thanks to quantum theory, chance has erupted into being' — you read that, you must have read it like me, it happens — you read it, not among the great physicists, but among those—
1:12:29 —who speak in their place — that's ideology. Whereas when you look closely — I say this under your watchful censorship, which I hope for — not only has determinism not been contradicted by quantum mechanics, but on the contrary it has been extended into unsuspected spheres. I mean that measurement, determination, and quantum predictability are altogether far more precise than anything that preceded it, including Newtonian mechanics. I recall in passing that there can remain margins of indetermination, and even Heisenberg's uncertainty, isn't it — that's how one says it, isn't it?
1:13:10 The uncertainty relations — you're not sure? — it depends on people, on translations — is that it? One day — good — and you know that for Heisenberg one cannot determine simultaneously the position and the velocity of a particle — it's not 'for Heisenberg,' it's a law, the uncertainty relation — either one manages to determine the velocity but is then condemned not to know its position exactly, or one determines its position and thereby alters its velocity, and so on, in short — but that doesn't mean that chance has triumphed. No, it has receded even further with quantum theory. So there, I wanted to clearly distinguish these two kinds of chance: there's one that isn't at all incompatible with necessity but arises when two necessities meet, two necessities not heading in the same direction — my example of running into Romain earlier. There, so these are important matters, because where does the prestige of science come from — the prestige that science had—
1:14:20 —at a certain time, at least in our societies, and which it still has for the most part — it varies according to the era. When Galileo was founding physics, a mathematician or a physicist was paid very poorly; what paid best was a theologian, or a lawyer, a jurist — it depends on the values of each society at each period, it's very important to know that. Science did not yet have its prestige; it was theology, and even philosophy existed only as ancilla theologiae, isn't it, handmaiden of theology, as it was called then. It so happens that once, thanks to the theoretical detour of the sciences, the technology relying on these theoretical detours produced spectacular effects on the masses, especially from the end of the 18th century into the 19th, well, that's when science acquires enormous prestige, especially thanks to the effectiveness of its predictive power. It's a very old — one of the oldest human purposes — to try, faced with a danger—
1:15:31 —to contain it as much as possible, whether that danger is disease, or an accident by car — one can never entirely avoid an accident; by definition an accident is the triumph of the contingent, of the non-necessary, precisely, isn't it — the accident has a logical meaning too, doesn't it — and the tooth of chance, as Parmenides put it, the tooth of chance that comes to bite into all our efforts to try to contain it — which is all the more reason to contain it as much as possible, isn't it. So, since time immemorial, since man exists, human cunning and intelligence have been devoted, whether to agriculture, to trying to predict — and for that, in order for nature to let itself be predicted, in order for being, if you prefer, for what is given to let itself be predicted, for that, if it lets itself be predicted, it's because it is subject to laws — that's what we call determinism, these are reminders I'm giving along the way. One of the first triumphs was Thales in antiquity, when he began to be able to predict eclipses with his calculations, solar eclipses in particular, to the point that—
1:16:42 —history — we don't have direct texts, it's a mixture of anecdotes, but if they've come down to us 1500 years later, it's because there's a kernel of truth in them — it seems they were strolling one day at the foot of the pyramids in Egypt, and the Egyptians, a bit irritated by this Greek's prestige, said to him, 'Say, you, the Greek is so strong, measure the great pyramid a bit' — that means, at 60 degrees in the shade, talk about a vertical dimension — 'I'd stop before halfway.' And Thales replied — Thales's shadow measures the pyramid — what, am I going to tire myself out up there measuring? I'll measure my shadow and measure myself — and they even had a ratio with the shadow of the pyramid down below — he had found homothety, similarity, as we say in mathematics, similar triangles. There you go — but the most impressive thing is that it works, it's extraordinary — as he said, in nature, in 3 years, 24 hours, and 12 minutes, there will be an eclipse — and that in fact the little wizards and sorcerers, they didn't do that — they took quite a hit, the sorcerers, especially since Thales was only a beginning, an embryo — after that, things progressed.
Ermenonville and the illuminati: from the personal narrative to a collective concern 1:17:52 —especially from the time of Galilean physics onward. These are important reminders to make because there are stakes behind these problems of chance — was the world governed by chance or not? If it wasn't governed by some necessity, nothing would be predictable, the world would be — what Kant called — a rhapsody without connection, with this note from the 17th century which is truly his own, isn't it — a rhapsody without connection. So what collides in the text of Angélique that we've seen — not just one necessity but two necessities, I'll summarize a bit what we saw last time, but this time I'll dig deeper, we didn't have time then. There's an individual necessity — that's his personal story, I won't dwell on it too much, and neither does he — that's why I wanted to read you, to restore for you, the digression that he himself censored in writing Angélique, the part about the drowning, his personal story, which recalls his relationship to his maternal complex, as one would say in depth psychology — he sets it aside so as not to be distracted from the horizontal dimension—
1:19:02 —which will lead him to what? But look, look at the chapter that follows — well, I'll tell you exactly — there, try to turn to page 123, we've made some progress since leaving Senlis, and we arrive — now he speaks of Chaalis, it's not marked on the map, it's very small, but it's, what, 3 km north of Ermenonville, I tell you, there's only an abbey, there isn't even a town, there's an abbey, a château where Henri IV sheltered his love affairs with Gabrielle — I mention this not to please Closer, but because it will matter later on. 'Leaving Chaalis, there are still — we're almost arrived at Ermenonville — a few clumps of woods to cross, then we enter the desert' — that's the Mer de Sable I was telling you about earlier — 'there is enough desert that from the center one sees no other horizon, not enough that within half an hour's walk one arrives at the—
1:20:12 —calmest, most charming landscape in the world.' Ah, this reminds us of something — that's called a hyperbole — the most charming landscape in the world — there are thousands of 'most charming landscapes in the world' — but this is the second time he's used this expression. The first time, remember, was when, for the first time, he was urging us to leave Paris — I remind you of that passage where he seduces us, after having said, 'Well, the Bucquoys are related to the Longuevals, we're going to go to Compiègne,' and to persuade us that we must go there and that it's not a chore: 'Old provincial France is scarcely known in these parts, which nevertheless form part of the immediate surroundings of Paris, at the point where the Île-de-France, the Valois, and Picardy meet' — we spoke about limits and borders — 'divided by the Oise and the Aisne, rivers so slow and peaceful in summer, comma, one is permitted to dream of the loveliest pastoral scenes in the world' — and I told you, that's where he wants to go, it's not a specific place, it's where there's a boundary, at the point where the Île-de-France, Picardy, and the Valois meet — it's neither in the Valois nor in Picardy nor in the Île-de-France, but where they meet.
1:21:22 Well, there, the expression returns at the moment we arrive at Rousseau's tomb — look carefully, finally, Ermenonville, I'm getting there, look carefully: 'we arrive at the calmest, most charming landscape in the world, a Swiss nature' — now we're doing the Swiss Alps in the middle of the Île-de-France — 'in the middle of the woods, as a result of the idea that René de Girardin had' — he was the master of the place, the one who invited Rousseau, I was going to say, to come die at his home — Rousseau stayed 6 weeks, he died at the end of 6 weeks, enchanted by his stay, too short, at Ermenonville — 'René Girardin transplanted there the image of the country his family originally came from' — he was originally from Switzerland, Monsieur de Girardin — and there you have this note: 'a few years before the Revolution, the château of Ermenonville was the meeting place of the illuminati who were silently preparing the future' — and all of a sudden Nerval links his fondness for the initiatory world and illuminism to the preparation of the French Revolution. It's historically established that there is a link between revolutionary ideas, isn't there, and illuminism — you know that Mozart was a Freemason at the time, it wasn't at all the Freemasonry of today, it wasn't co-optation among friends, it was a way to escape from misery and to have solidarity — still, at the time—
1:22:32 —all of European intelligence — Goethe, Beethoven, after all, everyone was a Freemason. So there, very quickly, just this one paragraph anyway, you'll see there are names that some of you will find familiar. 'At the famous suppers of Ermenonville' — so there were dinners at the château before the Revolution — 'we saw in succession' — it's a succession of the most famous illuminati — 'the comte de Saint-Germain, Mesmer' — it's he who almost invented magnetism — 'Cagliostro, developing in inspired conversations ideas and paradoxes which the so-called school of Geneva later inherited — I do believe that Monsieur de Robespierre' — this is where things get complicated for us — 'the son of the founder of the Scottish lodge of Arras' — you know that Robespierre was from Arras, still very young then, perhaps even later — 'Saint-Martin, Dupont de Nemours, and Cazotte came to expound,' either in this château or in that of Le Peletier de Mortefontaine, 3 km away, to expound—
1:23:36 —strange ideas that proposed the reform of an aging society, which even in its very fashions — fashions in the glamour sense, with that powder which gave the youngest of foreheads a false air of old age — indicated the need for a complete transformation.' It's all there, my friend, we're no longer in the personal novel here, we're no longer in the personal novel. And there, I wouldn't want to go on, because I've calculated that we have 4 more sessions between now and June, at the end of this cycle, and I wouldn't want to spoil what awaits us — that is, the way the weather is going to turn bad, the way the ground will no longer hold Nerval's feet — I told you in advance — but as soon as we leave Ermenonville, as soon as we move away from Rousseau's tomb, he's going to complain about the thistles, isn't he, half-frozen but still hardy, to quote him, 'which reached our chest and slowed our walk' — yes, I'm quite serious, but I think you've understood well that there isn't an ounce of chance, down to the very comma, in this text. But I wouldn't want, either — we've started the half-hour for questions — you want the floor? It can be about chance—
Scientific rationality and literary rationality 1:24:46 —necessity, on the scene of the arrest by the policemen in the café in Senlis, whatever you like. Yes, Jean. It's about rationality — we've talked a lot about chance, so you've shown well that there was indeed, in the process, as one advances through the work, unbeknownst to the writer, well, to Nerval, an element of chance which is set aside by a sort of rationality — so my question is about that: is there, in your view, a difference between the scientific rationality you were speaking of earlier and this form of poetic rationality here, well, poetic-literary. The question is all the better since — you know that respondents always like to say the question is a good one, but the proof is that it's the one Tristan asked me — the whole lecture today—
1:25:58 —is only developing — I presume, Tristan, you understand what I mean — Tristan sent me an email, apologizing for sending it a bit at the last minute, but no, that's fine, saying: couldn't we come back to this business of natural science, human science, social science — is that right, I'm not betraying your question — according to Kant there's an unbridgeable gulf between the two, and you're asking me the same question — is it the same? There are two questions: there's the rational versus the irrational — is it total chaos, chance, with total absence of law, absence of rationality, nothing predictable, nothing determinable, and therefore no science possible either — and then, if there is a rationality, is it that of the so-called hard sciences today, of the natural sciences — and I prefer myself to call them sciences that someone interested in the way I speak — normative — sorry, normative? no, no, no, because one can say morality is even more normative, or aesthetics — historical? sorry, historical—
1:27:08 —no, no, no, I'm not talking precisely about the human side, I'm speaking of physics, chemistry, biology, or mathematics — apart perhaps from mathematics — no, sciences of what? Of matter. Well, that's not incompatible, on the contrary, matter is what is more determined. Yes, sciences of matter, and there I go back, because some of you are a bit confused — science of matter, science of nature, what is that, why are we splitting hairs over this? Come on, let's go up to the fourth floor with my two pots, you know my story of the two pots — well go on, tell it, louder — the pot of natural flowers, yes, and next to it the pot of artificial flowers — say now, there are our listeners, that's nice, I can die happy — yes, sorry, no, I'm not stopping — artificial flowers made of plastic — yes, that's it — we drop them from a window — yes, that's it — fourth floor at least, so it's serious — and they're going to fall at the same speed, and land at the bottom at the same speed — I don't know, but in any case they're going to fall according to the same law, the good old law of Galileo, Newton, the fall of bodies, universal attraction — so it's not only a law of nature, otherwise there would only be—
1:28:18 —the pot of natural flowers — and even the pot itself isn't natural. Come on, we pull them out of the pot, we throw the natural flowers and the plastic ones like that, the artificial ones and the natural ones, they all fall according to the same law — so these are laws that apply just as much to natural matter, the roses in my garden, as to plastic flowers, to the artificial, non-natural world. They are, then, indeed, laws of matter, if one wants to speak rigorously — one isn't obliged to speak rigorously — if you tell me 'the law of falling bodies, you see, nature' — I'm not going to tell you what nonsense — no, it's not nonsense, but it can be a trap when one develops other problems. Matter is a notion — let's be, now, in the logic that embraces all of this, I mean the discipline of logic that is common to philosophy and to the sciences — the notion of matter is more extensive than that of nature, quite simply. So you take a big overall set, which is matter, in which you make what set theorists call a partition, into two large subsets: there is a matter in which man plays no part — it's not man who is at the origin of the Big Bang, it's not man—
1:29:28 —who makes it so that I'll be hungry tomorrow, it's not man who decided that — that comes from nature. And then there are things like: I must respect the red light, say, or: I must remain monogamous, or I must be polygamous, it depends — I remember, because I had a servant when I was a child, whom I scolded because — a nice little racist petit blanc, when you're a child you're merciless — I told him, it's not right, you have several wives, what is that? And he told me, it's because it's not right for women to walk the streets — if you leave single women, they'll end up walking the streets — that was the argument he gave for polygamy, it was cute. Well, I must say that moralities can be, as Pascal said, truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other. So, there, I'm going to start answering your question — well, the question common to Tristan and to you, I'm not going to have just the two of you ask it here — this is the big issue: are they the same legislations? I answer very clearly, no — not only because they're different, but because I'm all the more sure that they're not the same in that they're the reverse of each other — that is, they're incompatible. I mean that the law — and I go back to my example of hunger, which commands me to eat when I'm hungry—
Natural law and social rule 1:30:38 —comes to be caught off guard by courtesy, another legislation which makes me say: 'madam, please, you first' — I was raised that way, this would be an impersonal game, I hope you all do the same, all the same, you're not a bunch of logs — although I've had some big eaters just now. There you go — there are all sorts of sanctions, you know, Durkheim, who founded sociology — so there I answer both your questions again — who is at the origin of the social sciences practically, chronologically, well, with Auguste Comte the first to do so methodically — Durkheim said that what all properly social laws have in common — that is, coming from society and not from nature — is that they are coercive, whether in a harsh way or a mild way. Laughter, ridicule, which comes along like that to penalize a ridiculous remark, precisely, is a form of mild coercion — you see what I mean — to show that someone isn't with it, isn't part of the group, doesn't have the code of the society in which they find themselves, whether it's a football team or a group of—
1:31:49 —I don't know why I'm sticking to sports — of beach volleyball players. So, there, why do I insist on this statement of Durkheim's, that there's a point common to all human laws, namely that they have a coercive aspect — because no human law prescribes withdrawing one's hand when it's left on a lit gas burner. You agree? Why? Why is there no need for that?
1:32:22 because it's quickly withdrawn ah well yes that proves indeed that natural law doesn't need to be prescribed we don't need to legislate that tomorrow you must be hungry no the very nature of natural law is that it dispenses with any institution — new dichotomy: institution is not instinct, it does the opposite of it; the sexual instinct is there to reproduce the species as much as possible, to make it last as long as possible with the greatest number of individuals possible, for all animal species from bacteria up to whereas the law says you shall have only one wife, depending on the era and the place, I mean, that's what they say — so that doesn't go with the indefinite reproduction of the species, it restricts it rather, in the end it codifies it. This doesn't seem like much to you because you're in Paris, you can flirt with anyone anywhere, but in a society like deep in the Amazon — no, I'm serious — where I assume there are 100 inhabitants, let's say, living there, 100 inhabitants, let's say 50 men 50 women, 53 women 47 men, statistically, fine, I'll leave out the prepubescent girls, the very old.
1:33:33 the women who are already married, my mother, my sister, with all the prohibition there isn't much choice left — no but this is serious, you don't care but it's a drama, while I'm speaking to you right now there are Papuans who are waging war on the neighboring village to snatch two women, sometimes that makes one and a half deaths with arrows, it's not going to cause millions of deaths, it's not like the wars for oil, I'm not moralizing but still I mean Roman history begins with the abduction of the Sabine women, the rape of the Sabine women — the Sabines, they were what, 15 km from Rome, those were small village conflicts at the time, not far — that's it, that's important, what we're saying here, why? Because you have a law that has nothing to do with nature, which says take all the women you want except your mother, your sister — after that it varies a bit by society, whether the first cousin to such a degree, and so on, but there are rules, there are laws in nature: the fall of bodies, or heat which dilates bodies, the law of conservation of energy — laws mean valid everywhere and always, even in galaxies we'll never reach, we know they operate there, that's powerful.
1:34:43 heat dilates bodies, currently in the star Betelgeuse — sorry, you're spoiling me — that's why I'm introducing the distinction between law and rule, that's it, one is descriptive and the other is prescriptive, that's not me, that's Lévi-Strauss who proposes 'rule' for human things, it's a bit less strong than 'law,' and law because there's no exception — the rule of incest for example, the prohibition of incest, of course — well then we mustn't fall back into wordplay, of course, yes, Gregorio, it's also in Saint Augustine, it's in Saint Augustine, in the difference between eternal law, which is God's law, and natural law — that one, wait — natural law insofar as it's the law we must follow as animals who are part of a community, that depends on the perspective from which one approaches the law, whether one sees the law as something
1:35:53 prescribed, something that depends on God and is immutable, or something that depends on behavior — well I see it that way — well between Anne and you, you confirm that different words need to be used, so I fully agree with you, when we're in the examination, in everyday life, that's why what you're saying — I love what you're saying about the fact that we come back to two different planes with Nerval, horizontality and verticality — I think that confirms, and confirms your theory, I owe it to him, it's so obvious in the text, and the more you read the text the more it's true — but let me go back to the general view, to Saint Augustine, in any case the genealogy of this problem, you find it in the history of philosophical systems, haven't they gone back to it since Plato's Gorgias, when Callicles appears — what does he say?
1:36:50 Callicles is the little would-be tyrant, if you remember, the one who says that it's force that must rule in cities, and indeed he says there are two legislations: that of nature and that of law. Nature wills that the strong command the weak, and that he who has more should prevail over he who has less — who has property; when you look at the text it's very clear, Socrates even mocks him by saying so the strongest man should have 40 hats on his head — we have to get, there'll be a lot of gloves — and Callicles opposes it very well: for him the law — well here it's the reverse of what we're saying because he's not in the scientific world, in the pre-Galilean world — for him law is typical of the world of men, law is what forbids us, us exceptional individuals — he's pre-Nietzschean if you look closely — us exceptional individuals, law represses us, represses our instincts, but the law is made for the herd, for the sheep, for weak souls — afterward, these are things that pleased you, yes Pierre, I am free.
Desire and freedom: Kant and Rousseau 1:38:00 a bit more within us there would be a part of animality, need, desire, and ultimately freedom would be the capacity to tame all that in order to obey the rule instead, the will — but then does that mean we're only free from the moment we do what doesn't please us? To take up again something you told us once — what an avalanche of good questions — isn't there something a bit paradoxical — no but you put it very well, 'I'm free when I do what doesn't please me' — isn't there a mediation to think through, in the end, between desire and freedom, that is, at a given moment can one be free while doing what pleases us, provided there is a mediation between the moment of desire and the moment of obtaining the object of desire? Yes, I hear Kant's voice through what you're saying, because it's often said that Kant's morality is that — Kant pushes it a bit far, for Kant we're free when we do what doesn't please us, roughly — Kant even goes so far as to say, when he defines the categorical imperative as opposed to the hypothetical imperative — Kant is a great democrat, he speaks precisely, he grabs you by the collar, he defines notions clearly — I say this because you think these notions are abstract, they have the advantage of being clear, for example a shopkeeper gives you correct change, so you say
1:39:10 without cheating he gives you the change you're owed, so you say, well at least he's honest — Kant says not necessarily, not from a strictly moral point of view — he is objectively, but maybe he does it so you'll come back the next day, and not out of respect for the moral law, in other words it's not in the name of a categorical imperative that he does that but of a hypothetical imperative: if I want to have customers, I must give correct change — right, he distinguishes, as you say, he's harsh, he comes from a Protestant country — if I take pleasure in something, then I'm not free — those who founded France, they are Franks, Franks means free, 'frei' means one can slit throats as one pleases, that's the origin — beware of that kind of freedom — yes sorry, I hadn't finished answering but go ahead — because the question, Tristan's initial question if I understood correctly, was whether rationality is the same — so indeed there's law on one side and rule on the other, so it's whichever indeed exercises organization over the same territory — I think you've got the thread, yes.
1:40:20 and so in both cases, before we emancipate ourselves from one or the other of these legislations, we're not aware of it, we've undergone it, and rationality is what allows us to state, to name the rule or the law, and so possibly to be able to say the opposite, and then to oppose another legislation to that legislation which we might have named thanks to that rationality — but so the question, it seems to me, was: is it the same rationality — is it indeed the case that there are two legislations, if I understood correctly — is it the same one at work in the laws of nature and in the rules of society? Have I lost the thread — is it in the name of the same rationality, is one a specialization of the other, or is there, as Kant would say, an unbridgeable abyss and a break between the two? It seems to me that's perhaps the question: is the method that allows us to give an account of these laws that we undergo
1:41:30 and so possibly to free ourselves from them — is the method the same for these laws of nature and for human laws? If it's not the same rationality it can't be the same method, so let me finish, that answers both of your questions at once, let me finish answering Pierre — Pierre had started by saying it's as if there were two legislations within us — that's exactly what you started saying, that's exactly what Kant says: there is in each of us an empirical self and a transcendental I — it's precise indeed — at the time when good old Hyppolite, the translator of Hegel, was a 'caïman' as they say, when he was the director of the École normale supérieure — he didn't like it but he had to deal with a student who had partied a bit late, who had made nocturnal disturbances, so he summoned him to his office, as he had to do — it went ahead, and the student told him — this made good old Hyppolite melt — 'Sir Director, I had a problem with my empirical self' — there you go, you know very well what that means — I never said the opposite, I said earlier that I am a man insofar as I am human, I get hungry, it happens that I'm hungry, in any case I can't live without eating, it's not just that I must eat in order to live as if it were up to me to decide — no no, I cannot live without eating.
1:42:41 and that, well, that's not attributable to any properly human action, to any properly human initiative, on the contrary there's nothing more natural than that necessity, agreed — which leads Rousseau to say that the impulse of mere appetite — since we're talking about eating, even if by appetite Rousseau means instinct in general — is slavery, the impulse — he didn't say that when we eat because we're hungry, I mean, we're not free — and obedience to the law one has prescribed to oneself is freedom, and there I insist, I underline twelve times — I'm making that S' twelve times, which is the most important word in the sentence — provided that it is the law one has prescribed to oneself, that's it, that's what matters — but I don't want to go as far as Kant in saying I am free only when I do what does not please me, I could very well have pleasures that are absolutely not incompatible with my freedom, I'd even say they're perhaps the most interesting ones — but I don't want to cut off the questions — Dominique, I'm wondering about rationality because it's simply that we're always prisoners of our time
Knowing the laws in order to free oneself from them 1:43:54 whether it's moral law or the law of the self, or whether it's scientific law, it has evolved extraordinarily, and even the rationality that indeed allows us to discover scientific laws has also evolved, not to mention that there are interactions between the two and confusions, cross-contaminations between the two — so the very notion of rationality is not very simple to pin down — but the reason we're here to talk about it is precisely that none of this is simple, we agree, we're here to break with the simple, it's only in everyday language that things are simple, when you're not paying attention; as soon as you dig a little it's not simple — of course, but wait, let me just make a correction to what you just said — you say science evolves — yes, but in a very determinate direction, always in the same direction, that is, Einstein is more extensive than Newton, Newton more extensive than Galileo, and Galileo, in an altogether different way, more extensive than Aristotle.
1:45:04 so it always goes in the same direction, so it doesn't change — science at that level doesn't change direction — it's contaminated all the same by the worldview — Newton had a contaminated view — yes, I don't understand your word there — that is, the representation of the rationality of the world was not strictly scientific, it's always at a given moment — yes but more or less — Newton's is more limited than Einstein's, and Newton's is far more extensive than Galileo's, that is, Galileo only saw it in falling bodies, and Newton saw that it held for all bodies in the universe, which is a considerable extension — excuse me, let me finish — the law Y equals one half MV2 is not merely one half GT2, G being the Earth — that's only a particular case of a much more universal law — so he's limited relative to what comes after, not relative to what comes before — Newton, so there's a direction, and we well know that what he rightly calls 'contaminating,' what contaminates
1:46:14 is the prejudices of each era — not the self, no, prejudices which are collective — yes yes, because the ether — ah yes, that's not the same thing — because the ether — he wasn't the only one who believed the ether was something substantial, spatial and objective — Newton, everyone in his time truly believed there was a real and objective space around us, I mean relative to which the law of composition of velocities operated — yes, I see two hands raised, yes, I'll give priority to Wilfried since he hasn't spoken yet — no, I just had a question because in this kind of dialectic of opposition between what would be determined, over which we would have no power to act, and freedom, it seems to me a bit — so the first one linked to laws in the sense of the laws of matter etc. — I'm sorry, I'm interrupting you — I never said that because something is determined we can't act on it, it's actually the opposite, agreed, ok, when I know
1:47:25 the laws that produce tooth decay, I can act on them, I leave behind magic and superstition since I know what the mechanisms are, the laws — and indeed mirror-image on the other side, on social laws we also have a form of determination, since when we say the laws we've given ourselves, we don't actually give them to ourselves, we undergo them, we arrive in a world that has its laws, its rules, and they impose themselves on us, and it does take a work of knowledge — of course — but it's impossible to escape the laws of natural matter, you have to eat to live for example, whereas it's perfectly possible to deviate from the laws we're subjected to in society — that's what makes Rousseau say, and the great turning point is there, everything men have made, men can unmake; nothing is ineffaceable except what nature imprints, and nature makes neither rich man, nor prince, nor great lord — that's not a law of matter, that there be rich men, princes and great lords — one can arrive, I'm a very bad scientist but one can arrive, under certain conditions, even at correcting — if I may say — even at calling into question
1:48:35 well, in any case, at suppressing gravity or reducing it — so there could be, I don't know, one can arrive scientifically anyway, one can fight against it, for instance when you take off in a rocket that frees us from Earth's gravitational pull, you have overcome Earth's gravity — yes but that doesn't abolish the law, it still operates, of course — and this means, I insist only on this, passes through knowledge, this time the theoretical detour of laws, in this case the law of gravitation, that is, in order to free oneself from natural determinism one must begin by knowing it, and so the history of mathematics, then of that applied mathematics which is physics, and so on, being within physics, its sub-disciplines whether chemistry, biology, and so forth — I mean we extend the field of freedom, that's what led Engels to say that we push back the empire of necessity in order to extend the kingdom of freedom — you'll notice the precision of the vocabulary, the kingdom is not the empire, we're
1:49:47 signaling to me that it's 9:02 — right, you're about to ask a question — I don't interrupt a woman's question, I'm French, I'm old-fashioned — but we free ourselves from the constraint they exerted on our aims — if a toothache is ruining my day, I can free myself from it, we go see the dentist, who can cure it because he knows the laws, he knows that your Nutella isn't good for your teeth — I'm doing this on purpose to stay topical — this necessity of knowing the laws we're subject to, it's true for the laws of nature and for the rules that impose themselves on us, that's what we'll develop next time — for now, social rules, even if we don't respect them, they exist all the same — yes, absolutely, absolutely, but still, if you want to get rid of them you have to know the mechanisms by which they operate, there you go, that's why Marx
1:50:57 he doesn't moralize, he doesn't say capitalism is bad, it's not good, it must be changed — he doesn't say that, he looks at how it functions; if we don't know how it functions, there's no point in wanting to get rid of it — especially when it's doing everything to get rid of itself all on its own, as is happening right now on the stock markets — no, that's a bit too recent, let's stop there.
