English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The Nerval cycle and the untraceable book 0:00 So this is the outline of sequence 2-6. Let me remind you that the first digit designates the cycle from repetition to liberation, or from Ulysses to Daedalus, if you prefer the proper names. And that this is the second year on this cycle, hence the 2, and the 6th, this is the 6th workshop we're doing in this second year. And what's original this year, compared to previous approaches, is that instead of doing it in the mode—I'm in the genres, the academic genres—instead of doing it in the form of a general essay, or a chat, however you want to call it, a lecture, I'm doing it in the form of textual commentary, commenting on a single text by Nerval, all the way to the end of the cycle, next June.
0:52 We began this Nerval cycle with the reading of Angélique, the first of the short stories opening the collection Les Filles du Feu. A story that always goes unnoticed, that is somewhat sacrificed to the little marvel that follows it, Sylvie, which is extremely famous, and which Proust made so much of. Rightly so—Proust felt discouraged at reaching such perfection. There are the great narratives by Nerval about madness, Aurélia, etc., which are documents that were commented on by the surrealists.
1:23 You've used all of it, you don't need me for that. And Nerval didn't much appreciate being reduced to a pathological case. And then there's this rather unnoticed story, but which Nerval nonetheless placed at the head of the collection—that must not be entirely without intention. It bears a feminine first name like the whole of Les Filles du Feu: Angélique, Sylvie, Émilie. And it long had a bad reputation because it's a bit tedious, because it's disjointed, because it keeps changing plot, because you never know what it's talking about, or it keeps changing subject.
1:56 Well, I'm not going to go back over that, we've covered enough of it already elsewhere. I always think a little about newcomers, if you will, but I can only advise them to read this story, which isn't very long. Well, it's fairly long for a short story, short for a novel—about 80 pages. And that's where we are; last time we did a fairly continuous reading of the tenth letter, where something important happens, since for the first time, we take off, on foot, from Senlis—we had trouble, because he was quite enjoying himself in Senlis. We already had trouble getting out of Paris, but that was somewhat forced, since we were in the Borgesian universe of libraries, of labyrinths, in the search for this unfindable book, this unmakeable novel—these are Nervalian expressions.
2:39 This unfindable book, so let me remind you again, for the umpteenth time, which he came across while wandering as a spectator at the Frankfurt book fair. This nth journey—and he doesn't tell us what he was doing in Frankfurt, but we know he's on his way back, since he says in two days I'll be in Paris. And there he stumbles on this book; the title interests him somewhat from a bibliophile's standpoint—it's not... The memoirs of an abbot from the 18th century, who was defrocked, who escaped from the Bastille, who did interesting things.
3:09 Who wanted to found a republic, how shall we say, 18th-century France, like that... Don't forget that Nerval wrote a collection called Les Illuminés, in which the Abbé de Bucquoy is part of the series. This was written in the 1840s, all the same. So, that's all context, I won't dwell on it too much. And he wants to buy the book, he doesn't have the money, he never has money while traveling, because Dumas swiped it from him.
3:40 You just need to look into the file. Nerval was often Dumas's ghostwriter. And this same Dumas was himself a bit of a "negro" on the side—he had curly hair, it's true, he was mixed-race. All right, I'll drop the figurative for the literal, that's not nice. And there's this story of a louis d'or, always, between Nerval—look in the correspondence between Nerval and Dumas. Dumas wrote by the mile, he was successful, and poor Nerval scraped together the scraps. And so he can't buy it, he says, never mind, in two days I'll be in Paris, in Paris you can find all the books—then he doesn't find it, we realize fairly quickly that he's struggling, he can't find it, so it becomes an anti-novel, since I can't find the book.
4:19 I need to talk about something else, and this something else is what we're reading. It's a strange structure. And why is it very important that he find it—let me remind you one last time, for the last time today—it's that an amendment had just been passed, right as he returned from Germany. This was under Guizot, and then afterwards under the prince-president Louis Napoleon, who had further tightened the screws and abolished the few freedoms that had managed to find a way through under the Restoration—an amendment that forbade authors from doing what was then called the serialized-novel, that is, mixing fiction and history.
5:05 Alexandre Dumas, you see, The Three Musketeers, etc. The censor said, either you write novels or you write fiction—so we'd say today, either you write history. You can't always be in between, never knowing where you stand. Let me remind you that the main reason for the ban was that the public who were fond of these serials, which was the bread and butter of Eugène Sue, Dumas, and Nerval, in the newspapers—that public was also the public of the barricades. So, that's the historical context of the exposition.
5:36 So Nerval says, I absolutely must find the book I saw in Germany to show that my character really exists, that he is truly historical, that this isn't fiction. And from this detective-story pretext, he introduces us to a problem unresolved to this day: where does fiction begin? Where does history begin? History. The longest day. Is there a cinema buff here? A cinephile. The longest day.
6:06 Oh yes! We were under the Nazi boot until Uncle Sam came to deliver us. Uncle Tom. What is all this business? That's not history. In 1944, the Soviets are at the gates of Berlin. Now, there was a poll. I'm telling you because you don't know it. That's history. First poll. First poll, IFOP. Late 1944. That's early, isn't it, even so. Where the public was asked, throughout Europe, but here I'm telling you about the French response, which powers contributed most to the defeat of Nazism?
6:39 77% answer the Soviet Union. 25% answer England, then scraps for everything else. Sorry, the United States, then scraps for the rest. The same question is asked again. 30 years later, it's the reverse. 80% say it's the United States. I mean, what is history, then? The United States intervened so that Europe wouldn't become Soviet. I pay tribute to the 50,000 kids who died on the beaches of Normandy—I would even have preferred that they arrive earlier.
7:13 Which is what the Soviet government was begging for. So, no, this is just to tell you: where does history begin, where does fiction end? Do you know where? You're lucky. Come on, we're not here to tell stories, but to think about history. So, Nerval, you see, this is serious. When he says, well, I'm writing the history of the novel here. If I can't manage to find the book, I'll publish it as it is. I won't invent anything. There, those are the preliminaries to what we're reading.
From Paris to the Valois: Longueval, Mortefontaine and the day of the dead 7:43 So, that's the Parisian part, the libraries, they don't find it. The book is unfindable. It was there two weeks ago, but it's not there anymore, because loans are handled rather laxly. There's a library. And there it is, but rodents have arrived in the crates from Russia and Athens. There's the mouse of Athens and the rat of Russia, the Cossack rat, gnawing at the manuscripts. I'm not joking, it's right there in the streets. You see? The erasable trace. When you want to make history for yourself, it's rats—it's Marx who said in The German Ideology that he had abandoned his youthful works, ecological, Feuerbachian, and libertarian, to the gnawing criticism of the mice.
8:20 There you go. So this is quite something, all this. We had trouble leaving Paris. I told you to pay close attention to what Aristotle calls local displacement. We're in Frankfurt, then we're in Paris. In Paris, we go through practically all the libraries, the Arsenal, the Bibliothèque Nationale, etc. Without success. Until this famous fourth letter—the big turning point of local displacement, where finally we're going to head out into the countryside, since this letter begins like this: I had the idea of going to the archives of France, where I was given the authentic genealogy of the Bucquoys, the name of the abbot the memoirs in the book concern.
8:54 Their family name is Longueval. While going through the numerous files relating to this family, I made a most fortunate discovery. A host of other archives referred me to other documents which, I quote, word for word, must exist in the library of Compiègne. There's our Nerval, known for his stunning precision, who used chemical processes to decipher manuscripts in libraries. Suddenly, out of the blue, so that there'd be a valid reason to leave Paris and head toward Compiègne—and I gave you the map last time so we'd have the route clearly, the local displacement.
9:31 Between Paris and Compiègne, you pass through Ermenonville, where Rousseau's tomb is, and where Nerval's childhood was, at Mortefontaine. So I'm forced to dwell on the signifier Mortefontaine. A fountain is meant to give drink, to nourish, to nurse. How can there be death at the source? Mortefontaine—Dead Fountain. It's his mother's village. That's not something you can invent, you know. The thirteenth comes back, it is still the first, and is still the only one, or it's the only moment—it's death or the dead woman.
10:05 O delight, O torment. So we're forced to pass through the Valois, which was already indicated, symbolically, by the last syllable of the Bucquoys' family name, namely Longueval. Longueval, Gérard de Nerval—never forget that this is a borrowed name, I've already said it, I repeat it, his real name is Gérard Labrunie, like anyone else. It was fashionable at the time—Balzac decked himself out with a particule, it's very fashionable. He, however, doesn't take just any surname, he takes a surname that ties him to his mother, doesn't he?
10:39 Because it's the country of the mother. The mother is from Mortefontaine, 3 km from La Chapelle-en-Serval, whereas his father is from Agen, prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie. On the father's side, it's the castration of the abolished tower. And here he doesn't tell us all this, because he does better than say it, he expresses it—he tells us, a host of archives referred me to other documents that must exist in the library of Compiègne; the next day being the very feast of All Saints, I did not miss this opportunity for distraction and study. Well yes, it's a day off, a holiday, it's the day of the dead.
11:14 There are journeys that are pilgrimages; pilgrimages always go to a tomb. Is he going to the mother's tomb or to Rousseau's tomb? There, I've summed up more or less the whole stake. Are we in the personal novel, in the psychological field? Or are we heading toward the social contract? It's a strange text. And it's called disjointed. I find it one of the most homogeneous texts in French literature. And that's why I place it in the line between Ulysses and Daedalus, isn't it?
11:45 Between repetition, which is the fatal lot of the hero of the Odyssey, which begins with a horrifying massacre, the sack of Troy, of which he is the cold instigator with the horse—I'm not inventing anything—and which ends with the happy ending par excellence, happy, like Ulysses, but no, not at all, which ends with another horrifying massacre. Lie upon lie that it's a happy ending, perpetuated by poets in admirable texts—I'm thinking of Du Bellay. But really, when you look at the massacre of the suitors around Ulysses, my goodness, there are brains on the wall, arrows going into eyes, it's appalling!
12:26 And each time, it's Ulysses who is the cold instigator of it. As if perhaps the entire rest of the journey, the great loop he makes, the odyssey, were nothing but a vast detour to elude this fundamental aggressiveness within him, which reiterates the massacre. Don't forget that this cycle of talks on repetition and liberation comes to take over from our first cycle, without interrupting it, which was called Between Crisis and War, philosophically.
12:57 You are the children of the two... We are, as moderns, contemporaries, the children of the two greatest massacres in the history of humanity. In the 19th century, the century of the mal du siècle, was followed by the century of evil. I can't help it. That's how it is. So we do need to think about it a little. And to give a bit of grief to postmoderns who find all this rather sad. So we set off from... We managed to tear ourselves away from Paris with all these archival pretexts, etc.
The generation of disenchantment: a reading from Sylvie 13:29 We didn't stay very long in Compiègne, because it's a bit to the north relative to Ermenonville. Look at the map. And starting with the tenth letter, last time, we finally decided to leave Senlis, where Nerval had been enjoying himself rather a lot, despite the melancholy overtaking him because it's the day of the dead. It's the day of the dead when I write to you, forgive these melancholy thoughts. Again, I'm forced to repeat it. It's still rather strange that one needs to apologize for being melancholy on the day of the dead.
13:59 I did remind you that if they apologize, it's because they know very well that Romanticism is going out of fashion. We're not yet in Baudelaire, we're no longer in Romanticism, we're in the void. In what has been very well studied, among others, by Bénichou, the generation of disenchantment, the generation that succeeds, after 1848, the failures of the revolution. If you take a quick look at a text much better known than the one we're working on, Sylvie, you find an extraordinary summary of this era, to which Musset devoted one of the most intelligent books of Romanticism, Confession of a Child of the Century, where Musset rather well analyzes a historical term, the mal du siècle—except he devotes a whole volume to it, whereas Nerval, in two pages, concentrates the essential. You see, when he says this in Sylvie—now Sylvie has nothing to do with this, it's autobiographical, it begins somewhat in the Flaubertian manner, a self-mockery of the Romantic hero—I appeared every evening in the front boxes of a theater, in full suitor's attire. Fine, and then very quickly he contextualizes his era, the narrator's era, the era from which he is supposed to be speaking.
15:09 from which he's supposed to speak—and he says this, sorry, the paper is crumpled—here it is: we then lived in a strange era, the years of the 1840s, like the one that ordinarily follows revolutions or the decline of great reigns. It was no longer heroic gallantry as under the Fronde—the elegant, adorned vice as under the Regency—that's Montesquieu—the skepticism and the mad orgies of the Directoire—it was—ah, now you'll recognize yourselves—a mixture of activity, hesitation, and idleness—ah yes, you're recognized—of brilliant utopia, of philosophical or religious aspiration, of vague enthusiasm mixed with certain instincts of renewal, of boredom with past discords, of uncertain hopes—something like the era of Peregrinus and Apuleius—material man aspiring to the bouquet of roses that was to regenerate him through the hands of the beautiful Isis, the eternally young and pure goddess—appeared to us in our nights and made us ashamed
16:19 of our wasted daytime hours. Ambition, however, was not of our age, and the fierce scramble then underway for positions and honors kept us away from the spheres of possible activity; we had no refuge left but that ivory tower of the poets, which we climbed ever higher to isolate ourselves from the crowd; at these high points where our masters guided us, we finally breathed the pure air of solitude; we drank oblivion from the golden cup of legends; we were free with poetry and with love—love, alas, of vague shapes, of pink and blue tints, of metaphysical phantoms; seen up close, the real woman offended our naivety; she had to appear as queen or goddess, and above all not to be approached—one of you asked me a question about this, saying, why is there this fear, like that, of the real woman—one shouldn't read only halfway, the rest follows: nevertheless, some of us cared little for these Platonic paradoxes, and through our dreams renewed from Alexandria—well now, change of scene, Alexandria means generalized orgy—the torch of the underground gods sometimes stirred, lighting the darkness for an instant with its trails of sparks. Thus it was that, coming out of the theater with the bitter sadness left by a vanished dream, I would willingly go join the company of a circle where a large number would sup, and where all melancholy would give way before the inexhaustible wit of a few brilliant minds
17:29 lively, stormy, sublime at times, such as are always found in eras of renewal or decadence. There you go—the era, the ebb of revolutions, the failure of '48. So, as I told you, Bénichou devoted a very fine book, called The Generation of Disenchantment—sorry, excuse me, The School of Disenchantment—that corresponds to this generation. So Nerval belongs to this in-between era; there's not only the psychological in his madness, it's also rather alienating not yet to be in modernity, as it would assert itself starting with Baudelaire, then Verlaine, then Rimbaud, then Mallarmé, where he might have had brothers, and he no longer has the right to the outpouring and ejaculation of the previous generation. What solitude—forgive this dated style, that's how he speaks, he keeps apologizing for his own tone. And so, we're heading toward Ermenonville, Rousseau's tomb, which inaugurates the new Romantic sensibility—none of this is invented, it's all structured. So we had gotten to Senlis, and upon leaving Senlis
The walk on foot, the Schubertian rhythm and the autumn mist 18:39 there is finally this affirmation full of freshness, the walk on foot, à la Schubert, this hushed rhythm of wandering that you find in the admirable passage of Barry Lyndon, isn't it, or Kubrick, who had the very good idea of using the second movement of Schubert's sublime E-flat trio—but you find it even better in his final great symphony—little shy Schubert made a gigantic symphony that was found among his papers well after his death—and you find Nerval's pace: I arrived yesterday in Compiègne, pursuing the Bucquoys in every form, with that slow obstinacy natural to me—that's Schubert's rhythm, the rhythm of what in Germany is called the Wanderer—wander in English, wandering—I arrived yesterday in Compiègne, pursuing the Bucquoys in every form, with that slow obstinacy natural to me. So we set off from Senlis on foot through the woods, joyfully breathing in the autumn mist—we covered that last time. Finally we set off, and that's good, it's positive—joyfully breathing in the autumn mist, the freshness, the mushrooms, it's no longer the heat wave
19:50 it's not winter yet, fine, granted, it's death, autumn, but yes, breathing in joyfully—breathing in what? Death. It's strange, this new sensibility—we're so used to it, you know—ah yes, autumn melancholy—but listen, this had never before been seen in literature, before Romanticism, it had never been seen that one would praise decay like this. Those were counter-values—that's the bad season, whereas after Rousseau, we could say, with Chateaubriand, I entered with delight into the season of storms—you see, in René—I entered with delight into the season of bad weather. It's Nietzsche who said, to take a jab at Wagner, voting for places of bad weather, I preferred Nice—of course, a good postmodern like our bourgeois-bohemians goes to Croatia—I've had enough sun, myself, for those in favor of the unhappy consciousness—so I'm not talking about Corsica—well, listen, when you've had enough of the sea, you refresh yourself in a cool mountain stream—you bring your car back—I'm not advertising, there you go
21:01 so we set off from Senlis on foot through the woods, joyfully breathing in the autumn mist—we did set off from Senlis, and we're heading toward Ermenonville, so the northwest-southeast axis, roughly. What's left to do on foot? Let me remind you that nowhere does Nerval say his goal is to go to Rousseau's tomb; his goal is to find the ruins of the ancestral castle of the Abbé de Bucquoy and of the beautiful Angélique de Longueval, whose manuscript he happened upon by chance while researching his ancestor—that's quite a lot of different pretexts already—and the ruins of these castles, since there are several, are supposed to be near Soissons, so we're heading toward Soissons, northwest-southeast, very good. I pointed out to you that Nerval always goes east, to Germany, or to the Valois—that is, contrary to the movement of the sun and the movement of time. Well, and it's not just that he thinks it, he does better than think it, he expresses it, and I repeat this sentence, I sound a bit obsessive—we set off from Senlis on foot through the woods, joyfully breathing in the autumn mist—it's annoying
The suppressed passage: the drowning and verticality 22:11 because you want to move on, and I'm going to redo the first step—well yes, but do you remember, last time, what we saw is that the text continues: we had followed a road that leads to the woods, to the château de Mont-l'Évêque—that's real, for now—Mont-l'Évêque, right after Senlis, on the way to Ermenonville, we're not out of order here. On the other hand, I pointed out to you that you don't have the critical edition, that is, the Pléiade, and that in the Pléiade there's a footnote about the fact that here Nerval cut a page and a half. Let me remind you he's not alone: I never travel in these parts without having a friend accompany me, whom I will call by his nickname Sylvain—it's a very common first name in that province, the feminine being the graceful name Sylvie—not to mention that in another chapter he'll speak of the tribe of the Silvanectes, who once inhabited and lived, in the Middle Ages, around there—Silvanectes, Sylvie—we're in the land of forests here, we're in the symbolic order. It's likely that his little sweetheart was never actually named Sylvie, and that Sylvain is the name of the dreaded half-brother, the milk-brother—well, in any case, these are emanations of the woods, the forests. Be that as it may
23:21 there's an interruption—he's with Sylvie, we, meaning Sylvie and I; Sylvain only appears at the moment we're about to enter the woods, and, as you'll see in a moment, disappears when we leave the woods beyond Ermenonville—but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Now, if I restore the text that Nerval cut, we get this extraordinary passage where we move—and I pointed this out to you—from the horizontality that had carried us up to that point, the firm ground that carries us, we set off from Senlis, breathing in through the woods the autumn mist, to a disturbing verticality, which makes it understandable that Nerval didn't want to leave it in the final text. Here's the missing text, isn't it: looking at the tall trees which still kept at their tops a bouquet of yellowed leaves—and there, look, we lift our heads, from the very first sentence of the cut text, we're in the vertical axis, we have an orthogonal break compared to where we were in the sentence I won't repeat for the umpteenth time about the autumn mists
24:32 looking at the tall trees which no longer kept at their tops more than a bouquet of yellowed leaves, Sylvain says to me, do you remember the time when you used to come spend vacations in the village, they used to call you "little Parisian"—I'm not quoting entirely from memory here—we used to go gather crayfish—yes, says Nerval, I remember you let me nearly drown in an eddy of the Oise—you told me we could cross, and I dove into six feet of water—the green foam floating near our rivers treacherously made me believe we could cross, then I dove into six feet of water—you ran off saying that the little Parisian had gone wherever he wanted and had "neyé"—drowned in dialect—well, my friends, Sylvain blushed and didn't answer—but it's a strange passage—and then, cut too: but your sister, your sister who was following us, tearing her hands on the sharp leaves of the irises, pulled me by the hair and got me out of the water—that makes for an admirable childhood scene, the drowning saved by Sylvain's sister, which was cut, as if Nerval were taking pains to erase, in this text where I place myself above everything—including this major text, this text they call marginal
25:43 as if he took pains to erase—and that's what pleases me in this text—the personal novel, so as not to be distracted from the direction—the direction he has affirmed since the outset, since Frankfurt. Indeed, Ermenonville is 3 km from Mortefontaine—Ermenonville, where Rousseau's tomb is, is 3 km from Mortefontaine, where there's now nothing left but the memory of a dead woman whose grave is far from there, since she had the misfortune to follow her husband on Napoleon's campaigns, so much in love was she—she left the newborn with the aunts and cousins of the Valois, and she died of the fevers she caught crossing bridges laden with corpses—that's the family legend, anyway—she's still buried, even now, in Poland, at Glogau. So that's why I ask the question again: is Nerval making a pilgrimage to his mother's tomb, or to Rousseau's tomb? For now, he has set aside the personal novel, and nowhere in this narrative is there mention of Mortefontaine, which comes up so often in Nerval's other narratives—this maleficent place-name is nowhere named here
Delacroix's colors, nature and landscape, Chaalis 26:53 so we had gotten to that point, this time I continue: we had followed a road that leads to the woods and the château de Mont-l'Évêque, ponds gleamed here and there through the red leaves set off by the somber green of the pines—on the colors of Delacroix—Delacroix, lake of blood haunted by evil angels, shaded by a forest of pines always green, says Baudelaire in a famous poem about Delacroix—lake of red blood shaded by a forest of pines always green—ponds gleamed here and there through the red leaves set off by the somber green of the pines—I'm telling you this in case we're in naive realism and period colors—in the preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel, to mock the mania for identity found in Schelling—you know, Schelling: man is mineral, woman is vegetal, man is plus, woman is minus—those are the very fashionable tricks—and Hegel says it's as if a painter had only two colors on his palette, green for landscapes of nature and red for historical landscapes—you see
28:03 how we find these two colors again—well, Sylvain sang me this old song from the region—there, we move to the little marching song—courage my friend, courage, we're near the village now—at the first house we refreshed ourselves, we drank in the village a little wine that wasn't unpleasant for travelers—well, yes, you can't understand—no, sorry, I'm speaking like an old man—no, no, I mean you can't understand what that means when you've lived in Africa—there, after a few kilometers, you stop in a village, you have a little dry white, and you go on—three hundred kilometers of nothing between Niamey and Agadez, nothing—if you have money, you're white or you're a minister, you have jerrycans on the roof of the car, you have water; when you stop, shadows come out of the rocks, children with cans asking for water. I'm telling you this because you mustn't confuse nature and landscape—it takes millennia of effort to turn nature into habitable landscape. So we drank in the village a little wine that wasn't unpleasant for travelers—the hostess said to us, seeing our beards, you're artists, so you've come
29:13 to see Chaalis—I don't know if some of you are familiar with the Abbey of Chaalis; well, I recommend it, because frankly, 39 km as the crow flies from Notre-Dame, it's not much trouble—the longest part is getting out of Paris—so go on a Sunday, traffic flows well, it's stunningly beautiful, that whole area, the triangle Senlis-Chaalis-Ermenonville—there's Rousseau's tomb, it's a small town, a few thousand inhabitants, with a magnificent English-style park—let me remind you that the term "Romantic" originally designated the English manner of designing gardens—that's the first meaning, later it gets more complicated, but the first occurrence of the word in our language, in our literature, is in Rousseau's Fifth Walk: the shores of Lake Bienne are wilder and more romantic than those of Lake Geneva; if you see fewer vineyards and fields there, you see more forests—it's very precise. Let me digress again—so Chaalis isn't a town, it's written large on the map, but there's nothing there—there's a castle where Henri IV sheltered his love affair with Gabrielle d'Estrées, there you go, for Closer magazine—there's a wildly extravagant chapel, a flamboyant Gothic chapel with gargoyles, snails, various things—in short, there are
30:23 the ruins of an abbey reminiscent of Walter Scott—Nerval indeed alludes to it, that's all—and it's a place for walking, I recommend it for a picnic, especially since there's a little café right in the park, worth it. So Chaalis, he says, does it still exist? You see, it's a bit of a journey through time too, and it's here that he says: just as it is good, in a symphony—even a pastoral one—to bring back from time to time the principal motif, graceful, tender, or terrible, in order finally to make it turn, in the finale, with the graduated storm of every instrument—what a Beethovenian crescendo!—I repeat: just as it is good, in a symphony—even a pastoral one—to bring back from time to time the principal motif—there, he gives us the secret of the genre in which he writes—the Abbé de Bucquoy, whom we've somewhat forgotten—graceful, tender, or terrible—that's the terrible part—and then suddenly, a few measures later, Beethoven, suddenly, it's graceful—that's the sonata form—let's move on, we could spend hours on it—I think it useful to speak to you further of the Abbé de Bucquoy, without interrupting the course I am now running toward the castle of his forefathers
31:33 with this intention of exact and descriptive staging—listen carefully—without which his adventures would have but little interest—well now, that means, I've been messing with you from the start—the story of the Abbé de Bucquoy has no interest in itself; what's of interest is my staging of it. So let's take advantage of the digressions—that doesn't mean there isn't another story, but it's not the Abbé de Bucquoy's that's the most important. The finale recedes—no, sorry—the finale recedes still further, and you'll see that it's, again, in spite of myself. Well, I'll skip a small digression on the state of libraries, and we arrive, precisely, at Chaalis—it was the gamekeeper's son who was showing us the castle, long abandoned—so a local peasant boy who shows them around—he's a man who, without being learned, understands the respect owed to antiquities—he showed us, in one of the rooms, a monk—the term is underlined—that he had discovered among the ruins—seeing this skeleton lying in a stone trough, I imagined it wasn't a monk but a Celtic or Frankish warrior, laid out, as was customary, with his face turned toward the east—in this locality where the names Hermann, Armen, are common
32:43 In the vicinity, not to mention Ermenonville, Nerval loves to go on wild trips with toponyms located nearby, which are called locally Arme Nonval or Nonval, Armenonville, excuse me, or Nonval, which is the old term - well, so you see the historical density of this place we're arriving at is becoming more and more apparent, and why I'm talking about this - it's part of my plan when I told you: we're approaching Rousseau's tomb - since there are great physicists here watching me in case I say something stupid - it seems to me to be the barycenter of the space we're entering, the center of gravity, and you know that in modern, post-Einsteinian, relativistic physics, space is not a frame into which you simply place objects; no, objects deform space through their mass - not their weight, their mass - they deform space, and sometimes they deform it terribly, as near black holes. I'll stop there because I'll start saying stupid things. So Rousseau's tomb plays this role of hyper-dense space, which means that as we approach
33:53 Rousseau's tomb, space becomes the space of distortions to which I ask you to pay close attention - that's why he lingers in the periphery of this tomb, in particular at the Abbey of Chaalis, three kilometers before arriving at Ermenonville. We come back down to see the chapel - I'm skipping passages for you, I told you there's only a château, a chapel, and the ruins of an abbey. It's a marvel of architecture, the soaring of the pillars, the ribs - we find again the somewhat journalistic Nerval who takes us on a tour: the sober, fine ornamentation of the details revealed the period between flamboyant Gothic and the Renaissance. I want to point out that Nerval loves borderlands, to encourage us to go into the Valois - remember what he said in the famous fourth letter, where there's the break from Paris: old provincial France is barely known on these sides, even though they are part of the immediate surroundings of Paris, at the point - P-O-I-N-T - where the Île de France, Picardy, and the Valois meet. It's neither in Picardy, nor in the Valois, nor in the Île de France, but at the point where they meet. It's often been said that for Nerval, borders were spaces
The décolleté saints: we are pagan Christians 35:03 and not lines, isn't it - which holds true for space also holds true for time. This chapel is intermediate - look, among so many intermediaries - it revealed the period between flamboyant Gothic and the Renaissance. Already flamboyant Gothic is the decadence of Gothic. But once inside, we admired the paintings which seemed to me to be from this latter period - you're going to see some rather low-cut saints, the keeper's son tells us - indeed, one could make out a sort of glory painted in fresco - fresca, as in Italian, in water - by the door, perfectly preserved despite its faded colors, except for the lower part covered in tempera paint, which won't be difficult to restore. The good monks of Chaalis apparently wanted to remove some overly showy nudities in the Medici style - well yes, we're lingering, as I told you, on the approach to Rousseau's tomb - we take our time - we should rush to Rousseau's tomb, but instead we stay on the periphery at Chaalis and linger over what - now that you understand that in digressions lies the essential - Nerval's messages about the struggle between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, between Christianity and paganism, between the sighs of the saint and the cries of the fairy - we always find the same themes - what continuity nonetheless
36:13 'Twice victorious, I crossed the Acheron' - he's alluding to those two crises of madness and internment - 'twice victorious I crossed the Acheron, tuning in turn on Orpheus's lyre the sighs of the saint' - there's Christianity - 'and the cries of the fairy' - well, you're going to see some rather low-cut saints - wait, that doesn't quite go with saints, does it - indeed all these angels and all these saints gave the effect of cupids and nymphs with bare throats and thighs. The apse of the chapel offers, in the intervals between its ribs, other better-preserved figures, still in the allegorical style used after Louis XII. There, I wanted to include this little digression about Chaalis - there are plenty of others at Chaalis - we linger, we take our time, but just to tell you that each time the digression is the occasion for a message, and it's always the same one: this struggle between the two sides of our modernity. We are pagan Christians - that's what it means to be modern, what do you want me to say, it's not my fault, we have one leg that wants to go left and another leg that wants to go right - that's not good for identity
37:23 it's not good for psychic balance - and at the same time it's what constitutes our greatness. Three madmen - I'm not the one who decides, I'm not a doctor - well, three emblematic cases of madness, in chronological order: Hölderlin, Nerval, Nietzsche, all three obsessed with the relationship between Greece and Christianity. There must be a link - no one has exhausted themselves thinking about the difference between the two, the opposition and the synthesis of the two, like Hölderlin for example. There's a magnificent letter written at the end of his life, just before the collapse, as they say, upon returning from the fatal journey to Bordeaux - fatal because it was the first time he had direct contact with the Mediterranean world he had dreamed of so much. Bordeaux is Atlantic for us of course, but for a German there are olive trees, there are dark-haired women - it's he who says the dark-haired women who tread soil as soft as silk in the season of March when the days and nights are equal - a magnificent poem called Andenken
38:34 which means, is usually translated as 'memory,' but it would be better translated as 'evocation.' And in this poem, which ends with a closing line that reaches the heights of poetry - 'the sea takes away and gives back memory, and the ebb and flow, love fixes its gaze attentively upon what is never there, but it is the poets who found what remains' - and in this poem, precisely - well, actually in that letter where he alludes to his trip to Bordeaux, that famous letter where he says to his friend - one of the keys to his madness, I can say it plainly - 'like the heroes of old, Apollo has struck me' - he writes in it: my dear, I think that the mode of singing is going to take another turn, for since the Greeks, we are the first - we, that's you, that's me, that's the moderns - since the Greeks we are the first to sing originally according to nature and according to the homeland, in twenty-five centuries. So I'm telling you this position - it may seem like I'm joking, 'you're going to see some rather low-cut saints'
39:44 and indeed all these saints gave the effect of cupids and nymphs with bare throats and thighs - he seems to be mocking, but that's Nerval, not Baudelaire - he doesn't pound the table, it's not Rimbaud, it's discreet. 'A year ago, to the day,' says Baudelaire, 'a man with a discretion resembling contempt went to seek out the darkest street in Paris to unbind his soul there, and he remained lucid throughout' - a magnificent homage from Baudelaire to Nerval, isn't it. So this opposition, I tell you, we have a leg going left - we have a neo-pagan leg, very fashionable these days, neo-Nietzschean, neo-pagan, anti-totalitarian, anti-monotheistic, you know this better than I do - and a Christian leg, I didn't say Catholic, and Christian meaning Cartesian - no, no, I'm not at all into pious platitudes, quite the opposite - it took a Christian civilization to arrive at the principle of inertia, for a Descartes to say: no, no, there are no nymphs in the water there, there's H2O, there's no more immanence, there's nothing divine left, nothing divine around us
40:54 there is matter and motion. There is God, but God is not there, He is beyond - that's Christian, that's transcendent, no longer immanent - it's practical, because we never encounter God, so here we can do what we want, here we are masters and possessors of nature - that's the Christian world. And then there's the pagan world, where we tremble before the divine, where we must be careful not to cross the sacred grove, because in the Greek world you can't say 'I didn't mean to' - that doesn't count with the Greeks - you crossed the sacred grove, you are guilty, because we suffer, we acknowledge that we have erred, says a magnificent chorus in Sophocles. There, I'm dwelling a bit on these oppositions because they are still ours. Hyppolite, the great translator of Hegel, says in the afterword to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel's political testament, that one can debate Hegel's solutions, but the problems he raises - those of the contradiction between the ancient ideal, for which the city is the goal of the world, of citizens, the here-below, the city, not transcendence, not the unhappy consciousness which is ours, the ecological consciousness, in short a consciousness that finds its fulfillment in the city, that escapes nature into the city
The desert, Girardin's Swiss nature and the illuminati 42:04 we couldn't be further from our dominant ideology - between that world and the Christian world, which is no longer the world of being but of vanished being, that is, of essence, of the beyond. He says: one can debate these solutions but these problems are still ours. Let's return to Chaalis - or rather let's leave Chaalis, since we've lingered there a bit - as we leave Chaalis we must indeed get there, well, we're going to get there, off to the black hole. There are still a few clumps of woods to cross, then we enter the desert - it's still called that today, I remind you there were enormous tree-cutting operations at the end of the 18th century, wars with England, boats had to be built, then the Napoleonic wars, and since it's sandy - which is what we owe these admirable forest landscapes to, because our ancestors weren't stupid; if they left the forests there, it's because there was nothing to scrape off, it was sand underneath. So sometimes so many trees were cut down that the sand didn't regrow, and that gives you the 'sea of sand' - for those with children who've gone to spend the weekend at the Mer de Sable near Chaalis, they'll understand what I mean - go there, kids, there are tons of activities, cowboys, Indians in the dunes
43:14 there are even camels. So there's enough desert that from the center you can't see other horizons, but not so much that in half an hour's walk you arrive at the calmest, most charming landscape in the world. That's the second time he takes this approach - right at the beginning, in the fourth letter, still trying to get us to leave Paris, he'd said the passage I began quoting: old provincial France is barely known on these sides, even though they are part of the immediate surroundings of Paris, at the point where the Île de France, Picardy, and the Valois meet. Now I continue: one is permitted to dream of the most beautiful pastoral scenes in the world - there's suddenly an amplification at these liminal spots - but here it's the same, at the moment we're about to arrive at what I call the goal of the journey - though he hasn't told us that; he said - I say he said it was necessary to make a small detour through Ermenonville, through a pilgrimage on All Souls' Day to Rousseau's tomb, that's all - but in fact we're heading toward the châteaux of Bucquoy. So we arrive at the calmest, most charming landscape in the world, a Swiss landscape - how Swiss, in the Île-de-France? - a Swiss landscape carved out in the middle of the woods, as a result of René de Girardin's idea of transplanting there the image of the country
44:24 his family originally came from - the aristocrat, whose real name was Gherardini, of Piedmontese origin, who invited Rousseau to come die there, so to speak - the fact that Rousseau died six weeks after accepting the invitation, unhappily, moreover, had already transformed - had already done what Edgar Poe, in an extraordinary short story, calls the landscape garden. Let me make a little transition to recommend a delicious reading to you - delicious in the Rousseauian sense, meaning oral libido - it's a great opium piece, you know. Edgar Poe, yes, Edgar Poe - it's macabre, it's horrible generally, Poe's stories - Berenice, whose teeth are pulled out in her tomb, it's dreadful, Poe's stories - there are two delicious stories, there are two of them: 'The Domain of Arnheim' - a town that exists in Holland - and 'Landor's Cottage,' L-A-N-D-O-R - both are in the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, you know there are three big volumes
45:34 I'm not talking about the poems, I'm talking about the short stories, translated by Baudelaire as 'Extraordinary Tales' each time, of course - 'New Extraordinary Tales' - with an introduction by Baudelaire that is perhaps his greatest theoretical and aesthetic text, the famous 'New Notes on Edgar Poe' - and then 'Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque,' in which you find - I'll give you the quick pitch - Poe imagines - he's got nothing else to do, he's drowning in alcohol, he's just lost his 14-year-old young wife to illness, he borrowed a sheet from a neighbor to bury her and went back to drinking - and so in this opium-smoker's dream he imagines a young aristocrat who inherits a fortune you shouldn't even try to imagine, because it's accumulated over ancestors, organized in the will so that the will can't be seen until several generations have passed - anyway - who can therefore realize his dream. This man had pragmatic theories, like many Anglo-Saxons - he had a theory of happiness, very 18th century - he said there are conditions for happiness, even for everyone: you need free exercise in the open air - very Anglo-Saxon too, he's a great sportsman, a great swimmer - you need to be in good health, basically you shouldn't have
46:44 a toothache; second, you need a minimum of material means; and third, an indefinite aspiration. Now his indefinite aspiration was to realize an art that hadn't been cultivated enough - the art of the landscape garden - and here I get to it, but on a scale possible only because of the fortune he was going to inherit. Edgar Poe delights in imagining a setting where every blade of grass has been thought out, but when you're there you have the impression it's nature - that's exactly it. You go there, it's not far - there are places where you think there are real hills, mountains, ponds - well, all of that has been arranged, they're originally marshland and forest areas - you just need to shift the water a bit and you have everything you need. I saw an otter tear a pike in two right in front of me, once - there are no more otters now, it was my final year of high school - so, a Swiss landscape carved out in the middle of the woods as a result of René de Girardin's idea of transplanting there the image of the country his family originally came from. I'm making a rather long aside to tell you
47:54 about a setting where you believe you're in nature and there's nothing more artificial - we're right in the middle of a synthesis of contradictory things - and now we can head straight for Rousseau's tomb, which is, I remind you, on an island, the famous Île des Peupliers, in the middle of the domain's main pond, which we're arriving at - but no, he first heads toward the château. A few years before the Revolution, the château of Ermenonville was the meeting place of the illuminati who were silently preparing the future - and there, this château - good thing we made a detour there - suddenly takes on importance in the history of thought and even of politics. At the famous suppers of Ermenonville, one saw successively - you don't know all these names but they're the illuminati, let's just say his little group - the Comte de Saint-Germain, who is known to have lived several lives; for those familiar with Mesmer, mesmerism, magnetism; Cagliostro, developing in inspired conversations ideas and paradoxes that the so-called Geneva school later inherited - I believe Monsieur de Robespierre, the son of the founder of the Scottish Lodge of Arras, still quite young - perhaps also, even later, Senancour
49:04 you know he's one of my favorite writers - Saint-Martin, Dupont de Nemours, and Cazotte came to expound, either in this château or in that of Le Peletier, their strange ideas - for those who have the book it's page 123 - the strange ideas that proposed reforms of a society aged by the old regime, which even in its fashions - in the literal sense, fashion, with that powder which gave even the youngest brow a false appearance of old age - indicated the need for a complete transformation. Nerval hesitates in his historical memories, he's no longer at all in personal narrative - Saint-Germain belongs to an earlier era - it's he who made Louis XV see in a steel mirror his headless grandson, as Nostradamus had shown Marie de Medici the kings of her line, of whom the fourth was likewise beheaded. This is childishness - Nerval tries to resist superstition. What reveals the mystics is the detail reported by Beaumarchais that the Prussians, having advanced as far as Verdun, suddenly withdrew in an unexpected manner, following an apparition that startled their king, who reportedly said 'let us go no further,' as knights used to say in certain cases. The French and German illuminati
50:16 communicated with each other through affiliation ties - all this is historically quite well documented - the doctrines of Weishaupt, we'll come back to him, and of Jacob Böhme, who had such a great influence on Hegel - the great medieval German mystic - had penetrated among us, into the old Frankish and Burgundian lands, through ancient sympathy and secular relations among peoples of the same origin. The nephew of Frederick II's first minister was himself an illuminatus. Beaumarchais suggests that at Verdun, under the guise of a magnetism session, they made appear before Frederick William his uncle, who supposedly told him 'go back,' just as a ghost did to Charles VI. These bizarre accounts confound the imagination - only Beaumarchais, who was a skeptic - you see Nerval returns to lucidity through Beaumarchais - claimed that for this phantasmagoria scene they brought from Paris the actor Fleury, who had previously played the role of Frederick II at the Comédie-Française, and who allegedly made allusion to the King of Prussia, who since then, as we know, withdrew from the confederation of kings allied against France. And there's this sentence - I had to make this whole detour so as not to skip it - the memory of the places where I am oppresses me myself, so that I'm sending you all this at random, but based on reliable data, a more important detail to gather
From Watteau's mists to impressionism 51:26 is that the Prussian general who, during our disasters of the Restoration - we had barely emerged from the disasters of the Empire - took possession of the region, having learned that Jean-Jacques Rousseau's tomb was located at Ermenonville, exempted the entire district from Compiègne onward from the burdens of occupation. I believe it was the Prince of Anhalt - let's remember this trait if need be. We finally get there. Rousseau only stayed briefly at Ermenonville; if he accepted refuge there, it's because, during walks he had taken starting from the hermitage of Montmorency, he had long recognized that this region presented the herb-gatherer with remarkable plant families, owing to the variety of terrains. Rising in the morning, we're going to walk through the woods still wrapped in autumn mist. Each time he talks about the woods - 'we set out from Senlis on foot through the woods, breathing in with happiness the autumn mist' - and there's always a mixture of mist and fog, we're in Watteau, we're in Corot, who was in fact his exact contemporary - Corot's most famous painting is probably 'Souvenir of Mortefontaine.' If you look closely, that is - when Nerval says 'Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera' - you talk to us about mist, and Cythera is Greece, it's Apollo, it's clear colors. You know that the Impressionist painters, when they got fed up
52:36 with the blurriness of the Île-de-France and the mist, went off to the South - to Arles for Van Gogh, to Aix for Cézanne - that's post-Impressionist, so it's not blurry at all anymore, it's red on green, luminous, and sometimes even as far as Tahiti - even though, as I've already told you, Gauguin's final painting, in Tahiti, as he was dying, is of a Breton village under snow, for as the Drunken Boat says, 'I miss Europe with its ancient parapets' - and the circle closes, the circle of eccentricity - 'the memories of the place where I am oppress me myself, so that I'm sending you all this at random, but based on reliable data' - 'rising in the morning we're going to walk through the woods still wrapped in autumn mist' - I continue on this fog business because, as I told you, Nerval is intermediate between Romanticism and the literary modernity that will begin with Baudelaire and which is called Impressionism as soon as you leave literature and enter the plastic arts, where sensation, impression, the body, as we say today, will be more important than 18th-century ideas or the sentiment of the Romantic era. These distinctions matter, they're precise
53:46 I recommend for those who teach - especially for those who teach literature - when you have students, have them read a text, do a commentary, simply ask them to note the words that express feelings - joy, sorrow, jealousy - the words that express impressions - rough, smooth, luminous, dark - sensations - we're far from it, it's not the same thing even if it's the same root, it's 'to feel' in both cases - and those that express ideas. This lets you classify literary movements immediately, you see, and you'll be surprised to find that in Rousseau, who is said to be a precursor of Romanticism - I don't much like that expression because it implies he's doing a bit of what others will do even more of later - no, no, no, it will take modernity to pick back up what Rousseau had already discovered. In Rousseau there are sensations more than feelings - 'the ebb and flow of that water, its continuous sound but swelling at intervals, striking' - there, that's what struck my ear and my eyes - that's not feeling - 'made up for the internal movement that reverie was extinguishing in me' - you see that clearly. And so I come back to this fog, at the end of that admirable poem
54:56 about exile, which is Baudelaire's 'The Swan' - a dark poem, a poem about exile, one of the rare pieces dedicated to Victor Hugo, whom he detested but to whom he pays homage because he is, after all, the man of exile - he's on Guernsey at that point, and Baudelaire has a moved thought for him - 'I think of all those who have lost what they will never find again, never, never' - 'I have too much memory' - 'the emaciated, consumptive negress, trudging through the mud, and, with haggard eye, searching for the absent coconut palms of splendid Africa behind the immense wall of fog' - well, he reviews several figures of exile, starting with the swan that inspired him, a swan that had escaped from a menagerie near the Louvre and dragged its webbed feet on the dry pavement - and at the end there's this closing line, also - 'in the forest where my spirit is exiled, an old memory sounds at full blast on the horn' - you see, there's a note of hope at the end, in the forest and in the fog - the fog is also full of sound, it's the sound of the horn, which isn't clear like a cymbal crash - the sound of the horn is always both near and far, it's a chest sound, if you notice
56:06 we have pirate films, corsair films, when you suddenly see a great sailing ship on the waves, there's always a horn call - notice how film composers have this instinct, this ear - 'thus in the forest where my spirit is exiled' - you see the interiorization, Nerval is the first to do this - I'm in the process of saying that Romanticism is already an interiorization compared to classicism, it's already a musicalization of the plastic arts, and with Impressionism starting from Baudelaire, we have an interiorization of Romanticism - it's in literature textbooks, I won't dwell too much, you should know this - that landscape starting from Baudelaire is an interior landscape, it's not a description, it's an allusion, an evocation - look at 'L'Invitation au voyage,' it's a landscape that exists nowhere - some people look for whether it's Holland or Portugal - there's no such place in 'L'Invitation au voyage' - whereas the answer is right there in the text that people still search for on an atlas anyway - the answer is in the text - 'there everything would speak to the soul in secret' - go on - 'the rich ceilings, the deep mirrors, the oriental splendor, there everything would speak to the soul in secret'
57:16 'its sweet native tongue' - it's the paradise lost that underlies all this poetry, that's it, it's rooted in birth, it's a metaphysical memory, not a psychological memory - so there's no point looking on a map - that's why Baudelaire doesn't travel - knowing the bitterness one draws from travel, he's content to invite us to travel - that's why he loves ports so much, because at the port you stay put, you have impressions anyway, you see the boats swaying on their keels like that - well, all of that begins with Nerval, that's why I insist, he's the first to create this kind of landscape when he says 'Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera' - so, I resume - 'was conceived in the transparent and colored mists of this country' - speaking of the Valois - 'transparent and colored mists,' that's Monet, not Ingres. There: 'rising in the morning we're going to walk through the woods still wrapped in autumn mist which little by little' - look at that - 'we saw dissolve, letting reappear the azure mirror of the lakes' - I saw in Paris an effect of perspective on snuffboxes of the period - 'I saw again the Île des Peupliers' - there we go, we're arriving - 'beyond the pools that surmount an artificial grotto onto which water falls' - when it falls, its description
The inscriptions and the Island of Poplars 58:27 could be read in Gessner's idylls. The rocks one encounters while walking through the woods are covered with poetic inscriptions - still today, you go there, and on the rocks there are inscriptions, these are places where even the rock speaks - 'its indestructible mass has worn down time' - there's a rock somewhere that says 'its indestructible mass has worn down time.' Elsewhere, 'this place serves as a theater for the valorous races that mark the stag's amorous fury,' or again, with a bas-relief representing druids cutting mistletoe, 'such were our ancestors in their solitary wood' - this booming verse seems to me to be by Roucher; Delille would have made them less solid, I presume. You know Delille and Roucher, all of you - well I'm joking, nobody knows Delille and Roucher except specialists - it's the weakest century of our literature in poetry, the 18th century, it's well known - it's very rich in ideas, in philosophers etc, and in prose - I'm thinking of Rousseau - but in poetry strictly speaking, with the exception of Chénier - even he still remains in the classical style, but does have a few new thoughts, and says about new thoughts, let's make ancient verses - aside from that, I mean it's very weak in poetry. The greatest poem
59:37 of the era is Rousseau, but it's poetry in prose - the great poems of the period are the Confessions, are the Reveries - and of course admirable pages from La Nouvelle Héloïse. So he knows this very well, Nerval - I won't stop here - 'severe in bearing, Monsieur René Girardin also wrote verses - he was moreover a good man - I believe we owe him the following lines, carved on a fountain' - the inscription is still there when you pass through Mortefontaine, look to the right, it's a bit tricky because there's a bend, look to the right and there's this written - it's the fountain speaking - on a fountain nearby, surmounted by a Neptune and an Amphitrite, slightly less than décolleté, wait, slightly décolleté, like the angels and saints of Chaalis - and the fountain says this: 'From the flowering banks where I loved to spread the purest crystal of my waters' - it's not great poetry, 'the purest crystal of my waters' - 'passerby, I come here to render the social contract to the desire, to the need of man and of flocks, drawing from the treasures of my fertile urn, remember that you owe them to benevolent care'
1:00:48 'may I water with the tribute of my waves only peaceful and contented mortals.' Nerval never lingers on anything without reason - the walls speak in this entirely symbolic region, since every square centimeter has been thought through, hasn't it - I won't dwell on the form of the verses, it's the thought of an honest man that I admire, the influence of his stay is deeply felt in the region - there are dance halls, so everything that's an interest for the popular classes, where one still notices the elders' bench, over there archery ranges - archery being the favorite sport in these forest regions, Robin Hood if you prefer, and the Silvanectes - by the water's edge, round temples with marble columns, dedicated either to Venus the Genetrix or to Hermes the Consoler - all this mythology then had - and it's not that old, it's the end of the 18th century - a profound philosophical meaning. Rousseau's tomb, we're getting there, has remained as it was, with its ancient, simple form, and the leafless poplars still picturesquely accompany the monument, which is reflected in the still waters
1:01:58 of the pond - ah, darn, the goal of the journey which was supposed to be the logic of our whole route - or rather, there's water, we're not going to walk on water, are we - you see, we're going to run into our problem of the vertical and the horizontal again. Only, the boat that used to carry visitors is now submerged; the swans, I don't know why, instead of gracefully swimming around the island - we'd love the ideal scenario of swans gracefully swimming around Rousseau's tomb - the swans, instead of gracefully swimming, I don't know why, instead of swimming gracefully around the island, prefer to bathe in a muddy stream that flows along a bank between willows with reddish branches and ends up at the washhouse located along the road. We returned to the château - we didn't linger long. Rousseau is inaccessible, Rousseau is finally at peace, Rousseau is in an 'isola' - isolated, 'isola' in Italian means an island - I'll make a little aside, a bit Corsican, I'm sorry, but it's Rousseau who demands it. You know that the Social Contract isn't a constitution, it's a work of political philosophy, there are principles, there's no law, it's not a law
Rousseau and Corsica: Rousseau's islands 1:03:08 on the other hand, Rousseau was called upon as a consultant, we'd say today, to propose draft constitutions for two peoples who had just gained an ephemeral independence that didn't last long: Poland and Corsica. Corsica was the Vietnam of its time - the whole European intelligentsia was thrilled by the heroic struggle of the Corsican people against the Genoese - even Voltaire said 'Europe is Corsican' - yes, and we must never forget that the first Corsican republic, founded by Pascal Paoli, was the first implementation of a good part of the ideas of the Enlightenment - not all of them - before the United States and before France. There, I'm saying this just to show how fed up I am with Corsican identity and other nonsense - those who write 'French out' on walls and underneath 'Arabs out' - only the Corsicans are good, that's well known, with their mania for saying that all faults come from foreigners, we ourselves have virtues - the same thing is said everywhere, among Occitans, among Bretons, it's always the same. So I'm saying something good because it's just - this story of the ephemeral Corsican republic is a great adventure
1:04:19 now, Rousseau was solicited to draft a constitution. Rousseau responds - I recommend, I'm sorry to recommend myself, since I wrote the preface to a rather unusual edition made by the Corsicans, a bilingual Corsican-French edition of this constitutional draft, but I mention it because the publisher, Materia Scritta, had the excellent idea of putting in the postface the correspondence between Rousseau and Paoli's emissary who commissioned the constitution from him, Monsieur Buttafoco - you couldn't make it up, 'butte-a-feu,' fire-starter. And Rousseau begins - there are four letters, it's not long - so I recommend this extraordinary correspondence - Rousseau begins by saying: I'm very honored, truly, you're an extraordinary people, you're freeing yourselves from the yoke, bravo, you have your freedom, but well, I'm at the end of my rope, I'm old, I'm depressed, I have kidney stone disease, I can barely move, I have the police of three great European nations on my trail, I have no fixed address since - you know his house had just been stoned at Môtiers by the Genevan puritans - I mean, I'm a hunted man, I tell you this because people say Rousseau was paranoid, it's strange
1:05:29 he had a persecution complex, how strange - they burn all his works in the public square, I mean Rousseau - Voltaire, I pay homage to Voltaire who is nevertheless the prophet of tolerance, crushing the infamous thing, fanatical intolerance demands Rousseau's head on the block in terms of incredible violence, because Rousseau dared to criticize the idea of establishing a theater in Geneva - he said it should be replaced with popular festivals, that that's the true theater. And so Rousseau starts saying: forget it, I already have my urethral catheters and everything, thank you very much, it's a great honor - and the other insists. Rousseau gives somewhat dilatory responses, he inquires like a good consultant, he asks for information on the relationship between the people and the clergy in Corsica, he builds a file, he tries to compile documentation, he asks for information about Paoli's customs, about this, about that, and then suddenly there's an extraordinary turn at the third letter - he says: listen, forget the constitutional draft, I'm tired, let me come die at your place - no, no, no, I'm not Bernard-Henri Lévy, I don't want to be the official philosopher, no, no, no
1:06:39 that's not it, I just want to go and bury myself in some small canton - he doesn't say, not close to power - my wife and I have never asked anyone for money, we know how to provide for our own needs, let me live free on free soil. I'm telling you this because it's not very well known, this report of Rousseau's - we almost got Rousseau's tomb in Corsica. No, but there's a destiny of the island in Rousseau, that's what I wanted to show. There's a first island in Rousseau - it's the maternal womb, I won't dwell on it, you just have to read the Confessions, there's nothing but that in Rousseau - when he's on Saint Peter's Island he says sometimes 'short and feeble reflections arose on the instability of things in this world, of which the surface of the waters offered me the image; but soon these light impressions' - even those impressions, that's already too much - 'faded away in the uniformity of the continuous movement that rocked me.' There's an invisible, immense figure who is the mother - not his mother, the mother, ever since Isis - that's what she's called, the mother, the Virgin Mary, she who carries, carries - that's why we like being on the water so much - on the water, we float, she carries
1:07:49 not to mention that the luminous feet of husbands might push their muzzle toward panting oceans, as Rimbaud would say - but yes - 'but soon these light impressions themselves faded away in the uniformity of the continuous movement that rocked me and which, without any active involvement of my soul, never failed to attach me to it, to the point that, called by the hour and the agreed signal' - by which he was called because it was time to go to dinner - 'I could not tear myself away from it without effort.' You see, there's first the island, the original island from which we all emerge, for better or worse, and then there's Saint Peter's Island, of which he himself says he spent the best moments of his life there, thinking he was condemned to live there until the end of his days, whereas he only spent a few weeks there, and then there's the island of Corsica, where he almost went to die, for which he nevertheless did this work of political philosophy. There, I'm closing the insular parenthesis, and you see there, the hunted man is safe - even the boat that would allow one to go right up close, to touch the tomb
The triangle Henri IV, Gabrielle, Rousseau 1:08:59 no, you can't - it's still there but now it's underwater, completely rotted among the floating wood. So, we returned to the château - I won't dwell too much - it's still a building from the era of Henri IV - I'll resume a bit of his travel-guide chronicle - and the caretaker did not allow us to visit the apartments because the masters were in residence - artists have more luck in princely châteaux whose owners feel that, after all, they owe something to the nation. We were only allowed to walk along the banks of the great lake, whose view to the left is dominated by the tower called Gabrielle's Tower - so I remind you that Henri IV sheltered his love affairs in this château with Gabrielle d'Estrées - you'll say, are you going back to Closerie, what's the point? We're getting to the essential, we're getting to what I called in my outline the triangle of Rousseau, as Nerval unfolds it, excuse me, so we were only allowed
1:10:10 to walk along the banks of the great lake, whose view to the left is dominated by the tower called Gabrielle's Tower, the remains of an old château. A peasant who accompanied us - listen carefully - a peasant tells us: 'Here is the tower where the beautiful Gabrielle was locked up; every evening Rousseau would come and pluck his guitar beneath her window, and the king, who was jealous, often watched him and eventually had him put to death.' Look at the triangle - the absolute triangle, that of Lacan's 'Purloined Letter' - the king, the gaze that sees nothing, the king of cards, you know - the queen, who, seeing that the king sees nothing, sees her lover. The lover is who?
1:10:59 Rousseau, the man of the people, who comes to pluck his guitar like a Casanova beneath the window of Henri IV's favorite - no, but listen, you'll tell me this is delirium, Henri IV is the 16th century, he died in 1610, Rousseau is the 18th - I'm not being serious, the peasant is an ignoramus - and yes, but Nerval doesn't agree with this conclusion, look closely, this is an important moment - 'yet this is how legends are formed,' he begins by joking with us - 'in a few hundred years, people will believe this: Henri IV, Gabrielle, and Rousseau are the great memories of the region - already, across a 200-year gap, the two memories have become confused, and Rousseau gradually becomes a contemporary of Henri IV.' As the population loves him - so the peasant has a sympathy for him - 'as the population loves him, they suppose the king was jealous of him and betrayed by his mistress in favor of the man beloved of the suffering races' - here 'race' means class - an extraordinary triangle, where Nerval corrects the snobbishness we would have had
1:12:09 of saying this peasant is an ignoramus and knows nothing about history compared to historians' history - we saw earlier that with historians' history, you have to be careful what forces contributed to crushing Nazism - and there's this incredible sentence where Nerval commits himself: 'the sentiment that dictated this thought' - that of the peasant - 'is perhaps truer than one believes.' There, he takes up the defense, you see, outright - he, the cultivated man - colon: 'Rousseau, who refused a hundred louis from Madame de Pompadour, has profoundly ruined the royal edifice founded by Henri; everything has collapsed, his immortal image stands upright upon the ruins.' And yes, when Rousseau had a success that we'd call today showbiz success, when he wrote 'Le Devin du village,' a hit opera, a huge success, he could have made a career of it - his wife Thérèse said to him - but he continued, like Wagner's wife when Wagner did Rienzi, he had a monster success, she said, 'there, do historical drama, it's fashionable, damn it' - he wanted to do myth. Madame de Pompadour, as they often said
1:13:19 proposed a hundred louis - Rousseau refused. You know his motto, 'vitam impendere vero,' to devote one's life to truth, just like that, and he even removed his wig, didn't he, his hair - he refused. Nerval sees in it, beyond the ethical act, a profound political significance: 'Rousseau, who refused a hundred louis from Madame de Pompadour, has profoundly ruined the royal edifice founded by Henri' - in the fact that I no longer let myself be bought, I ruin an edifice - that goes far, you know, that goes far - there are plenty of journalists who can't say the same. And when I say 'bought,' it's symbolic, it doesn't have to be money - there are promises - about this trip to Ireland, I mention this because Sollers, even as he ironized always about sentiment, saying 'to hell with sentiment, it's stupid' - his dream was to have a romantic affair in Ireland with a France Culture journalist - there, I mention this because libertines always end up like that, libertines aren't Rousseau. So Rousseau, who refused a hundred louis from Madame de Pompadour
1:14:29 'profoundly ruined the royal edifice founded by Henri; everything has collapsed, his immortal image stands upright upon the ruins' - and we see a sort of titanic image of Rousseau rising up almost phallically upon the ruins of the Ancien Régime - it's an astonishing passage, all these ideas come up near Rousseau's tomb. You see it's not simply a little pilgrimage like that because it's a local curiosity - there's Rousseau's tomb, we all think an ancestor of Romanticism, so we want to give it a quick nod, but it's not that - it's inseparably the man of praxis, of the Social Contract, and of the psyche and of La Nouvelle Héloïse - it's inseparably both, and the fact that the central figure of Gabrielle, of the woman, is there to embody what I'm saying - what am I saying?
1:15:18 I'm making a leap here, a Hegelian-Marxist leap if you prefer - we're standing at the edge of Rousseau's tomb, we can say it - why is this triangle so important? Because Gabrielle symbolically concentrates millennia of extraction of surplus value - what's the interest of power if not enjoyment? And what better embodies enjoyment than the sovereign's favorite? I say this because - don't think I hate interpretation - not mine or yours, but interpretation in general - I'm doing analysis here. Why am I saying this?
1:16:00 because if it were only this text - but when you look at my Voyage en Orient, when he tells the story of Solomon, of the Queen of Sheba, and of the little blacksmith who builds the temple for Solomon's glory - but it's he, the blacksmith, with whom the queen is in love - it's exactly the same triangle. Solomon has the little blacksmith killed, who built the temple - read 'Adoniram,' the story of Soliman, prince of the genies, and the Queen of Sheba, at the heart of the Voyage en Orient, in the nights of Ramadan - read it, it's extraordinary, it's published separately by small publishers - I don't remember the name of the small publishers, I'm afraid I'll say something wrong - anyway they're small editions, 2 euros, worth it - it's the same triangle - Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, 'when she advanced toward him in the purple splendors of morning, the queen of the south' - and the little blacksmith who is supposedly the interloper, the challenger, like Rousseau who comes to pluck the guitar beneath Gabrielle's window - it's exactly the same structure. That certainly means there's a symbolic effect, and that woman, here femininity, is symbolic
1:17:10 of course, not a real woman, and meant to embody - not just any woman, not woman in general - it's the king's favorite, and what's the point of having power if I didn't have a Gabrielle? You know who Henri IV was, he was originally a Protestant, when he was a Huguenot in Béarn, and when they told him, 'Majesty, you cannot reign over Paris, you're not Catholic, you cannot reign over Paris,' and he answered - you all know this - the phrase - bravo, thank you, it's the strongest one, this makes for good stories, this makes people happy - sorry, it's true your throat is a bit sore - bravo, thank you - 'Paris is well worth a Mass,' you fool - well yes, the girls, Paris, curls and rear ends, all that nonsense about religious history because I don't give a damn - so Paris is well worth a Mass, I'll convert, no problem at all - well yes, Henri IV, that's enjoyment for you, the chicken in every pot, you know all that, I'm not joking - when you go to the tip of the Île de la Cité, there's that point extending out, called the Vert-Galant point, which is supposed to be
1:18:21 The phallus of Henri IV — it's not me who decides, that's just how it was at the time, because the sovereign has always had a longer, more fertile one, since the pharaohs — it's always been this way, the sovereign must couple with the body, with the mother of the cosmos, it's utterly banal, it's always the same thing, Freud said what is distressing in the symbolic order is repetitiveness, you think it's me who says the same things each time? No, it's not me, it's monotonous, anyway — among those who say there's the imaginary, we're going to celebrate it in May, we're going to celebrate imagination in power, I hope we won't celebrate it too much because I have seen imagination in power, like you, not live fortunately for me, you know, in the reproductions, in the films, Nuremberg in 1936, imagination in power, the torches at night, the swastikas, the Roman eagles, it's not exactly cheerful, imagination in power — you're not going to tell me that's reason, all the same. So, I tell you in passing, on leaving the park — yes, sorry, excuse me — 'everything has crumbled, its immortal image remains standing amid the ruins.'
The Ermenonville cemetery and the tomb as sema 1:19:31 As for her songs, and we return to Rousseau the musician, whose last ones we saw at Compiègne, she celebrated others besides Gabrielle, but is not the type of beauty eternal, like genius — which is precisely proof that Gabrielle is here a pretext. On leaving the park we headed toward the church situated on the height — we move away again from Rousseau's tomb, and in my plan we get closer to Rousseau's tomb, we keep getting closer and moving away — because the church, we are indeed on the height, we have a view — a bit, when you're at the church you have a view over the space of the village, you can see Rousseau's tomb a little in the distance — so it is very old but less remarkable than most of those in the region; the cemetery was open. At Chaalis, you'll have noticed, they showed him the tomb of a Frankish monk; he imagined a Celtic warrior — it's the ground, vertical, horizontal, to walk you need ground that holds; but this ground is riddled, all the time, there are tombs everywhere in this maternal ground which is supposed to be life-giving, where one regains one's strength — you remember when he made us leave Paris.
1:20:41 He told us: I regain my strength on this land, so fertile, which is such a change from the sterility of the agitations of Paris — fertile land, sterile agitations of Paris. And here is this fertile land where, like Antaeus — you know, the hero of antiquity whose mother was Gaia the earth, so that Heracles had great trouble killing him, he had to smother him in the air because every time he touched the ground, that is his mother, he regained his strength; Heracles says in a poem, 'I am descended from the race of Antaeus, I turn the darts back against the victorious god, I am one of those who inspires the avenger' — you see, no, I'm not joking — well here is the proof that it is a failure, and all the better, this quest for the personal romance, it's the illusion of finding a living mother again when it is a dead fountain, it's a vain quest, which warns us that we must not look for life where it no longer is — the ground is strewn with corpses in that country, and there are many passages, I won't bore you with them, but I'm dwelling on this one because it's worth its weight in gold: 'it is very old but less remarkable than most of those in the region; the cemetery was open; we saw there mainly the tomb of De Vic.'
1:21:51 Former companion in arms of Henri IV, who had granted him the domain of Ermenonville — it is a family tomb whose legend stops at an abbot; there remain then daughters who marry bourgeois — so, more tombs, daughters who marry bourgeois, that's called gilding the coat of arms, historically speaking; the nobility, waging war and not working, can only grow poor, so it marries its daughters to bourgeois, it regilds the coat of arms, and it does so well that the bourgeois will become all-powerful, and after that there will be nothing left but to behead the king — anyway, such was the fate of most of the old houses. 'Two flat tombs of abbots, very old' — look at the progression, the tombs become more and more indecipherable — 'two flat tombs of abbots, very old, whose inscriptions are difficult to decipher' — you see, in Paris the manuscripts were gnawed by the mouse of Athens and the rat of Russia, and now the tombs are hard to decipher — 'closer to a path,' and this is the end of the progression, 'a simple stone on which one finds inscribed' — indeed — 'Here lies Almazor,' A-L-M-A-Z-O-R.
1:23:02 'Here lies Almazor' — up to that point there was De Vic, known families, and abbots, daughters marrying bourgeois — 'Here lies Almazor, is he a lackey, a dog, a madman' — it's a madman who speaks, who writes; the stone says no more, and this passage, this review of the tombs, is extraordinary: 'From the top of the cemetery terrace the view stretches over the loveliest part of the countryside; the glistening waters through the tall russet trees, the pines and the holm oaks; the sandstone rocks of the desert take on, to the left, a druidic aspect' — Rousseau's tomb, we come back to it, but from afar, he can't help himself, he comes back to it — 'appears to the right, and further on, at the edge, a marble temple of an absent goddess,' who must be Truth — 'It was a fine day, that on which a deputation sent by the National Assembly came to fetch the ashes of the philosopher to transport them to the Panthéon' — for I remind you that this tomb we are approaching is a pure sign, that's rare, a tomb where there are no ashes — no need to be a fetishist or morbid, there is nothing less morbid than this tomb, which is a marvel, with the poplars that tremble constantly.
1:24:12 In the sun and in the air, in the wind and in the sky — so we don't go there for the presence of the philosopher's ashes, which are in the Panthéon, so it's a pure sign, SEMA, tomb, a play on words going back to Plato — Plato in the Gorgias, it's already there, the pun that the body is the first tomb, the body, the SEMA — 'It was a fine day, that on which a deputation sent by the National Assembly came to fetch the ashes of the philosopher to transport them to the Panthéon.' 'When one goes through the village, one is struck by the freshness and grace of the little girls with their big straw hats; they look like little Swiss girls; the ideas on education of the author of Émile seem to have been followed' — he keeps returning to the traces that still exist, the social traces, I mean, in the local population, of Rousseau's legacy — 'the exercises of strength and skill, dancing, precision work encouraged by various foundations have doubtless given this youth health, vigor, and a sense of useful things.' I'll have to conclude because time is passing, but still I can't leave the text without telling you — look, we're no longer obliged.
The departure: washerwomen, rain and thistles 1:25:22 To leave Ermenonville, since we're now supposed to continue toward Soissons, and in my view the text is finished, since we leave Rousseau's tomb — you'll see how the landscape tells us it's over, what Rousseau cannot tell us, what Nerval cannot tell us. 'Sylvain says to me' — it's always Sylvain who speaks up when it's a matter of changing direction and continuing the local movement — you'll have noticed — 'we have seen Rousseau's tomb; we should now make for Dammartin, where we shall find carriages to take us to Soissons, and from there to Longueval; we are going to ask our way from the washerwomen working in front of the château' — be wary of washerwomen working in front of a château, I tell you — you know a bit of mythology, it's always strange, the world of washerwomen, laundresses, the daughters of the Rhine, feminine beings who are by the water like that, chattering, and even more dangerous still than these girls, the ferryman, the boatman, who are always fearsome beings who can leave you stranded in the middle — 'we are going to ask our way from the washerwomen working in front of the château' — you'll see, the washerwomen — 'go straight on by the road.
1:26:32 'to the left, she told us, or else by the right; you will reach either Ver or Ève' — these are toponyms that exist, Ver, Ver, Ève, E-V-E, like Eve of Adam — two hamlets near Ermenonville, I'm telling you what is symbolic, I'm telling you what is real — 'you will reach either Ver or Ève' — Ève means O — 'you will pass through Othis and in two hours' walk you will reach Dammartin.' These deceitful young girls made us take a very strange road; it must be added that it was raining — pfff, the weather turned bad, the outing ended, the joy of the journey — 'we set off, leaving the fir trees through the woods, breathing in with delight the autumn mist' — no, no, no, it's raining — 'the road was very much deteriorated' — I told you the ground had to hold — a road deteriorated and rain-soaked, it's heavy ground, hard to walk on, 'with ruts full of water which had to be avoided by walking on the grass verges, huge thistles which came up to our chests, thistles half-frozen but still vigorous.'
1:27:42 'which sometimes stopped us' — stopped by thistles, let's not exaggerate either — even nature opposes our leaving Ermenonville, it's extraordinary, it's exactly what Clouscard and I together called immanent symbolism — there is suddenly an immanence of symbolism in the setting which comes to tell the travelers here: you should stay a little longer, waiting for it to clear up — 'having covered a good stretch, we realized that we could see neither Ver nor Ève nor Othis, nor even the plain; we might have gone astray' — the young girls led them astray — 'a clearing suddenly appears to our right, some of those bright breaks that singularly lighten the forests; we saw a sturdily built hut of branches plastered with earth, with a thatched roof, quite primitive; a woodcutter was smoking his pipe at the door' — one might say a bit like those magical figures haunting children's tales in the middle of the forest, in the clearing — 'you know, to go to Ver you are still quite far, following the road you will reach Montabine' — we ask for Ver or Ève — 'well, you'll have to turn back' — there, we're going to hear.
1:28:53 'You will turn back, you will walk half a league' — Nerval adds, one can translate that into meters if you like, because of the law — 'then arrive at the place where they shoot with the bow' — we find again suddenly the Rousseau universe, the popular sport, arriving at the place where archery is practiced — 'you will come out of the wood, you will take to the right, you will find the plain, and then everyone will point you to Ver.' 'We found again the archery ground with its stand and its hemicycle intended for the elderly' — there, and then indeed one has to leave and go into the plains, and if it doesn't disappear — I have lingered over this resistance of the setting to the fact that walking pushes on, you see, but at the same time we're obliged — well he gave us a program, we have to go as far as Soissons — but then why am I taking you all the way there if it's not to stay? I'll tell you the answer, it's in the Quest for the Grail of Chrétien de Troyes, I'm quite serious, which Nerval knew very well — there's even an allusion to Perceforest which I skipped in the account of Angélique — an Arthurian romance.
Conclusion: Perceval and the question to be asked 1:30:04 'The finest story ever told at a royal court' is the Quest for the Grail, that's how the prologue begins, isn't it, of Chrétien de Troyes's Story of the Grail — now very quickly, Perceval, a young wild boy raised in the forest by his mother, who above all does not want him to consort with chivalry, whom she raises the way the Buddha was raised, away from all ugliness, from all the world's dangers, kept in a prolongation of the maternal womb if you like, because she lost her husband in the crusades and absolutely does not want her son to go near chivalry, because that's all that's left to her as a pledge of her husband's love — this Perceval, this wild young boy, whereas of course his one dream, like everything forbidden, is to know the life of chivalry, and of course what had to happen happened: he hears clanking in the forest, he sees helmets, lances, he wants to follow the knights, he hears a sigh behind him, he sees his mother collapse, he goes on regardless — we learn afterward that she died of grief on seeing him leave. I'll go quickly through his wanderings as a knight, a young wild boy, wild because he knows nothing at all.
1:31:14 of the customs, the manners of chivalry — he has base weapons, not noble ones, he has a bow, he shoots down whatever flies, and he comes within sight of a castle — it's the famous Grail castle, but he doesn't know it's the Grail castle — he enters, he suddenly sees a king, the famous Fisher King with his wound — I imagine you know it, if you don't, read Chrétien de Troyes, Folio edition, there's a very fine modern French translation — and he sees the light of the Grail pass by, he sees the maidens as they're called who follow the king, who is served with the Grail, for the Grail is above all a food, a food that makes the monk-knights invincible in battle against the infidels — and he is mute, he is stunned by the Fisher King's suffering, and so he says nothing, and that is the curse of the whole romance, that he did not ask the question — I want to tell you, but what connection is there — not with the near-failure, but with the fact that we arrive.
1:32:24 at Rousseau's tomb, which is a bit like the Grail, the center of gravity, and then suddenly we move away — but that's because you have the role of Perceval, you, as reader — that's where one must arrive, and this will be my conclusion: Nerval could not do much more than bring you to the place; after that it's up to us to ask the questions, the questions Perceval did not ask, which make the Grail messenger, when she bursts in at the height of the banquet, when Perceval is celebrated by King Arthur as a valiant knight because he has defeated three ruffians and it's his day of glory — that's it, his glory, but not for long, because the Grail messenger appears, with a diabolical face, teeth yellow as egg yolk, eyes like an ape's or a cat's, she points at Perceval in the midst of the feast and says: oh Perceval, you saw the Fisher King, you saw the bleeding lance, you did not ask the question — 'and if you had asked, you would have had it; the rich king who is so afraid of it would have been healed of his wound, and he would have kept his land in peace.' Don't do as Perceval did, ask the question — why did Nerval bring us all the way there and then make us understand, once we move away from it, well.
Analysis and interpretation 1:33:34 afterward it rains, there are young girls who point us to the wrong road, there are half-frozen but still vigorous thistles that hinder our progress — there, that's my conclusion, I don't want to steal your time, there's a bit of time left, twenty minutes for your questions, but for me the journey is over. — Yes, Thomas. — Thank you very much for this session, my question — you brought up earlier something you've said several times during this seminar, that you distrusted interpretation, that you preferred analysis; I wanted to know if you could perhaps define the difference between interpretation and analysis, and perhaps what this difference lets us understand regarding the relation between sign and meaning — how can we understand the relation between sign and meaning in light of this distinction between interpretation and analysis, and to dig a bit further, from what I understand it's as if you were saying that interpretation should be mistrusted, not because a meaning had to be sought beyond the sign, but that, as—
1:34:44 Rimbaud says, in the phrase you quote from time to time — 'I said what it says' — as if there were a kind of solidarity, ultimately, between the sign and the meaning, and to finish the quote, 'I said what it says literally and in every sense' — and at the same time I'm thinking of another phrase too, which I believe you quote in your book, about the deceptiveness of the sign, that the sign is also deceptive — so, regarding this question about the difference between interpretation and analysis and this relation between signs — I have redoubtable listener-readers here, it was demanding, for a body — over to your questions. — No, no, it's true, a good question, analysis/interpretation, I start with the simple, I'll simplify first, one must always start with the simple, one will rise as if by degrees toward the more composite — analysis, subjective, interpretation, I'm wary of it because there's a dose of subjectivism — there's no problem with subjectivity, all that, but subjectivism, that's 'my interpretation, yours, his,' and objectivity evaporates, we no longer have anything in common — the dream of capitalism, to shut us all up in our respective bubbles, each one a Robinson Crusoe.
1:35:55 on our own islands — which made Marx say, those are Robinsonades, those stories projected onto the origin, 'the first men associated' — no, they were individuals who then associated to form society, a Robinsonade, Marx says, we have never seen non-social men — if they had been individual, they would not have been men. Rousseau says admirably that in the state of nature there is a stupid and limited animal which becomes an intelligent being and a man only in the civil state. So why this little detour, to recall that — careful, I'm not against subjectivism only for philosophical reasons, it's because it's the dream of a power that shares nothing today, since the Berlin Wall fell — I might have been shot under Stalin, probably, with my big mouth, but never mind — since it fell, we've been dealing with the unshared reign of subjectivist horror: be each in your bubble and don't come out, be Shiite, be Sunni, be Corsican, be French, be men, be women, be young, be old, be gay, be straight.
1:37:05 and tear each other apart — but that's today's world, there, there's no social contract in any of that, agreed? So I answer your question, very seriously now — there's already, first, the war I'm waging in Hegel's wake, also against subjectivism, not against subjectivity, we're agreed, on the contrary — Hegel says everything depends on this essential point of view — it's very rare for Hegel to sum up the essential, he hates that, but for once he does it in the preface to the Phenomenology, that famous phrase, to apprehend and express the true not merely as substance but equally as subject — there's an elevation of the subject there, but subjectivism is not the subject, it's the particular, we're still very far from the individual — I'm going a bit fast — whereas analysis, in its complicity with scientificity, always has a relation with signifiance in the material sense of the term — I'm not into the structuralist delusions of the era, the sixties and all that nonsense, Kristeva and language and delirium, no, no, no, signifiance.
1:38:16 When in music, to be a little less passionate about it — I know you're increasingly interested in this, I'm glad — when in music, for instance, if I tell you that in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony I think of the verse in the Gospel where Jesus says 'today you shall be with me in paradise' — that has been said, that's interpretation, why not — but I'm not sure Beethoven thought of all that. Whereas if I tell you that from measure 59 we move from major to minor, there's nothing subjective there — well, one has to agree a bit on major/minor, we know that in five minutes, it's not complicated — but that's objective. Or if I tell you one of the finest lines of Racine, in Mithridate, 'And from the foot of the altar you may ascend, sovereign of the seas which must bear you' — he's speaking to a woman, to a queen who is going to rise; he doesn't tell her 'you shall reign over seas full of salt water of which you are sovereign,' no — 'sovereign of the seas which must bear you' — and we say, that's magic, no, it's not magic, there's 'sovereign of the seas which must bear you.'
1:39:27 I analyze — there is the alliteration, three times the V, that's the difference — repetition, analysis, I'm going quickly, but it's to show that it's feasible, that it's good news, because this signifier is valid for everyone, it's not for me, Pagani, that there are three V's in Racine's line, the text is there for all of us. Since I'm on Racine, I had pointed it out when we worked on Phèdre, from the very first scene, Hippolyte's first words, the first, deceitful reasons he gives — well yes, I'm a good son, I'm going to look for my father, we have no news, it really isn't normal, gone for more than six months — 'far from my father, I know nothing of the fate of a head so dear, I do not even know the place that hides him' — well, it's been six months, he's disappeared, I'm a good son, I'm going to set off looking, until his confidant tells him — but I don't stop looking, I'm your servant, I've been looking, don't worry, I've searched everywhere, we haven't found him — maybe he doesn't want you to find him, given who your father's wife is — ah, all right, all right. Racine, so, three acts later, when he makes his confession to Aricie, the little fool.
1:40:37 Hippolyte, the one who believed he was set apart from women, that love was for others, not for him — 'now enslaved beneath the common law' — that sort of acknowledgment of his own inner collapse, the crumbling of his narcissism — 'now enslaved beneath the common law' — well yes, I'm under the common law — 'by what trouble do I find myself carried away from myself' — he says to Aricie, for more than six months, ashamed, desperate, carrying everywhere the wound that pierces me, 'against you, against myself, vainly I strive; present, I flee you; absent, I find you' — I stop, since one feels like living to the very end, there are still a few thousand lines — six months, arithmetical precision, that's analysis: it's been six months since his father disappeared, it's been six months since he's been in love with Aricie, how curious, the only woman his father forbade him to approach in the whole city. After that, one would say, small-scale analysis, that's nonsense left over from theorizing — that was fine when it was time to bring down Marxism, that's over, the war, the battle of Paris was won by NATO, that's fine, it's over, be serious now. There, that's how I answer your question about analysis and interpretation, and then you said—
1:41:47 that there's a contradiction — it's a bit more complicated, how can I bring us back to the sign through the rigor of analysis, and at the same time say, watch out, betrayal of the sign, and mistrust of spirit — I believe that's the title of my chapter if I remember rightly — it's that the sign has a limit. We've seen it here with Nerval: Nerval leads us through a whole series of symbolic edifications up to Rousseau's tomb, which, I told you, is the ultimate sema, the ultimate sign — but after that one must speak, one must go beyond mere symbolic signifiance, because there is nothing more to the sign than language, that's not the question, but there is the concept within language, and that's where I say one must go beyond aesthesis — and that's exactly what is held against Hegel, though it's never said that this is what's held against him: he is reproached for having ruined the hope of making art the absolute, of making aesthesis, aesthetics, the unsurpassable horizon of thought, just as at a certain time, in the sixties, the signifier was the unsurpassable horizon of thought — I'm answering a bit better.
The particular, the individual and the universal 1:42:58 to your question — meaning must be rehabilitated. Yes, sorry, we would need a clarification on the difference between particularity and individual. Very topical — I am against the particular because I am for the individual, that's how I'll start answering. You know I'm against ecology because I oppose the environment to nature — all this should be taught in primary school, it's such an obvious distinction, and yet it's incomprehensible to an ecologist — try explaining to Jadot that one must defend the environment against nature, to that arrogant, moralizing idiot and NATO supporter in Syria — anyway, calm me down — yes, that's it, ecology, sixth section of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel's political testament, where he answers your question.
1:44:10 more precisely than ever before — he brings in the individual as the synthesis of two opposite extremes, it's the syllogistic method he loves, the particular and the universal — what is the individual? It's the particular that we all are at the start; we do not begin in universality, we begin only in wailing singularities, we all begin like Oedipus, like Siegfried, like Moses, thrown into the forest, into the river, into nothingness — we are not viable, there wouldn't be ten thousand years of praxis to sustain us, with prams, central heating, we are not viable — animals, yes, there are plenty of animals that are viable from birth, that trot about the savanna after a few hours, but not us; we are zoon politikon, because a social relay is needed to be viable — it's a minus that created the plus, just as Marx shows very well that it's unpaid labor that makes surplus value, it's a minus.
1:45:21 that makes the plus — but to get back to your question, we are a particular at the outset, so this particular can entrench itself in its particularity: I am Corsican, I am a woman, I am a man, I'm being an idiot when I think of it as identity, as a condemnation. Whereas when I reflect on this particularity — it's the determination, Hegel adds — when the particular reflects on itself, that is, when it becomes conscious of the determinations it has brought about, it rises progressively to the universal, and this particularity, reflected upon itself and thereby, I quote, raised to universality, is exactly what must be called individuality — it's the particularity conscious of its determinations, which brings it back to the universal, but no longer at all the abstract universal, it's not the genus, the genus over which the counter-revolutionary English and French were ironic — Burke, what's his name, the other one, de Maistre, you know, who said, 'I have met Poles in my life, Hungarians, Germans, but men, I have never seen' — you only know the abstract universal, its power ends up confusing the universal.
1:46:33 and the genus — like all those who confused the Platonic idea with the generic, they understood nothing. Mallarmé, who is much closer to Plato, knew that when he said, 'I say a flower! and, out of the oblivion where my voice consigns any contour, ...musically rises, idea itself and sweet, the one absent from all bouquets' — the idea of the flower is much more concrete, it's not the abstract universal — do you know many ideas that have sweetness? But yes, 'musically rises, idea itself and sweet, the one absent from all bouquets.' There — so what is the individual, and how does it stand opposed to the particular? It's the particular, the particular reflecting on itself and thereby raised to universality — in other words, one is not an individual just by wanting to, and especially not immediately — no one, neither me nor anyone, is an individual immediately, that requires an effort, requires work, requires a journey, a process. We have just seen a moment of this journey with Nerval, it can be the game of the goose, it can be the quest for the Grail, or the Odyssey of Ulysses, no matter, but it's the journey that progressively makes individuality. Rivers are never individualized at their source.
1:47:43 There is nothing that resembles another river as much as a river does at its source, that is, a little trickle running between your legs — have you ever seen alluvial cones in the mountains? It starts as the Amazon here — there, there, there, two meters over, or over there — there are little streams running every which way, we don't know, it isn't yet a river. The river is always already complex, that presupposes that things have already come together, that suddenly something begins to take shape, begins to individualize itself, you see — there are foreign contributions, I said this about jazz, didn't I — if you go back to the origin you lose it, jazz, the way you lose the river when you go back up to its source — you'll find magnificent gospel, that's not jazz; you'll find very fine ragtime, not jazz yet; you'll find blues in the South, very good, work songs — but all that has to meet in a magnificent impurity to suddenly work the miracle of jazz, as with everything that is rich, which is therefore always already complex — but the individual is that, which the particularity is not at the outset, which I repeat at the outset is a Corsican, an African, I don't know, doesn't matter, it's a purity.
1:48:54 it's lacking a bit of impurity at the start, lacking a bit of outside input — there, so I insist a great deal on this: the particularity reflects on itself and thereby it becomes individuality. In other words, to return to my image of the river, I speak of it a bit through Hölderlin, because it's in his last great texts, they're all fascinated by the figures of great rivers — at the origin there is nothing that resembles a source as much as another source, I mean the source of the Var resembles that of the Amazon, the mouth — apart from the scale perhaps, well, there are 200 km of width at the mouth of the Amazon — it's always the same, river mouths, that's marshes, deltas, marshy, spreading out every which way, estuaries of death. Whereas what is individual is the entire course of the river itself, down to its slightest meanders, that is unique for each one, it's the journey we make that is individual, it's the time we've spent on it, it's not the goal we were pursuing, it's all the means we picked up along the way to get there which made us forget the original goals — all the better in a way — and that's what makes Hegel say, in the preface
1:50:04 to the Phenomenology, that the thing is never exhausted in its purpose but in its actualization — when the field reaches its limit, it reaches the forest, it's at its limit. There, I answer your question a bit. Yes, five more minutes. — Five minutes, no, but at least five minutes, sorry. You said that one characteristic of modernity was the communication between the pagan leg and the Christian one, and in the previous sessions it seemed to me that modernity was the tendential passage from substantial community toward a society giving more room to subjectivity, so that I may die in peace, and that you're paying attention — well I heard it also as a tendential passage from paganism to Christianity, of which the appearance of the philosophy of Christianity, the French Revolution, all these are stages — so is it that you're saying that the reaction—
Must the pagan leg be amputated? 1:51:14 for the conclusion — is it, for you, that the resolution of this problem of modernity, the progressive resolution one might say, is the amputation of the pagan leg? There — yes, good question, I cannot answer yes in a univocal and immediate way. There, currently I am fighting against the pagan leg, because it's within — well, against dominant naturalism, to put it quickly — sometimes people aren't even aware that it's neo-pagan, there are plenty of Christians who are ecologists, go try explaining to them, we tell them 'my kingdom is not of this world,' and there they are worshipping the planet — anyway — and putting frogs above the posterity of Adam. I can't say that, I can't skip it, because both are necessary moments in dialectical terms — there will always be the necessity that is a pagan drive, I'll say why, and there will always be the necessity of a recall to the logic of essence, to speak in Christian terms.
1:52:24 I recall that the essence of German metaphysics — I'm not Heidegger, I'm not going to say 'in German' for every single thing, I mean I'm not a French Heideggerian, I mean rather, because it's normal for Heidegger to speak German, but it's true there's a distinction to make between being, Sein, the infinitive of the verb 'to be,' the logic of being, Hegel's logic, that's Sein, and the logic of essence, that's Wesen — now any German schoolchild knows that Wesen is the past participle of the verb 'to be,' quite simply — that avoids metaphysical delusions — essence is being-past, it's being disappeared, it's being evaporated, it's being flown away. Among the Greeks, being has not disappeared, you have to see, they're protected, it's almost too present — Apollo struck me, he's almost too present, the sacred grove we saw earlier, one enters it without being on guard, because the places, they're everywhere — look at Icarus, hardly does he rise a little, boom.
1:53:34 whereas we — Sputnik too, yes — the skyscrapers like in New York, the conquest of space, that's not the Greek world, that's the spires of cathedrals, the minarets of mosques, that's transcendence — we agree, I'm always making the same opposition. So if being is being-disappeared, that's progress compared to being, it's progress that being should have become absent, that the Father should have withdrawn his face from men, as Hölderlin says, and that God should have become the Deus Absconditus — Goldmann's masterpiece, the Hidden God, God who manifests himself through his absence, not through his presence, precisely as we saw earlier, that is the very essence of Christianity — but still that leaves us, and that's where I now rehabilitate the pagan side, that if God — 'my kingdom is not of this world' — that means there's always a split between presence and truth: either we're dealing with a truth that lacks presence, or we're condemned
1:54:44 to a presence without truth — Kafka's world, doubtless the greatest artist of twentieth-century literature, who expressed this negative theology so well, especially in The Castle, his ultimate masterpiece, where the hero, the narrator K, who isn't even Joseph K anymore, just K, manages to settle neither in the village nor in the castle, neither in immanence nor in transcendence, poor fellow, but in the shuttling between the two, and in the snow, and in the destitution — the weakness of the religions of transcendence, in this case Christianity of course, is precisely this split that Hegel criticizes and calls unhappy consciousness — there's always a link in Hegel between the logic of essence and unhappy consciousness — essence, that is, being flown away, being disappeared, that's good, it's progress, it's good that we've seen there are no nymphs in springs, it's good, Descartes was right to say, it's over, the divine is not there, it's beyond — but then one must recover it, the divine, one must not leave it in the beyond, it must find again
1:55:54 its true topos, and its true topos is human society, it was not nature, it was not the nymphs in the springs. And Clouscard — I'll always remember when Clouscard was writing The Paths of Praxis, his final work, his testament, look at it carefully, he was fighting Parkinson's while writing it, he would phone me, I was in Africa unfortunately quite far away, and he'd tell me, I rub my hands together at 7 in the morning, I run to the manuscript — he had an intoxication about finishing it — and he'd ask me, because he hadn't had a Catholic upbringing, coming from a working-class background, he'd ask me to repeat to him constantly the passage from Revelation where John says, 'and behold, the heavenly Jerusalem descending' — that means even Christianity doesn't leave the absolute in the beyond, but expresses salvation by the fact that Jerusalem becomes earthly, here and now, and it's even added — that's what Clouscard loved most — the bridegroom says to the bride, 'come, bride' — it's the Jerusalem of the bride, we come back a bit to Gabrielle and Henri IV, if you look closely. So there, I mean, you understand why.
1:57:04 I mean I cannot answer yes on one side or the other, there are irreversibles, it's not that the pagan world has disappeared — let me correct a bit what you said earlier, it's very good, very good to remember that being modern means leaving the substantial society for the society of subjects, indeed that's roughly what happens with the French Revolution, slowly, progressively, not for everyone, more slowly in the countryside, and of course the countryside is fairly substantial and often remains in substantiality, like the old aunts kissing a crucifix or begging Saint Anthony to find their ring again — we're not in Christianity there, that's fine, we're not going to burn them for that, we're not in Christianity, we're in old archaic substantial thought, where God, one needs him to be there, in the crucifix, in herbis et lapidibus, in herbs and in stones, one cannot get used to it. Same among Orientals, Buddhism was a political failure because it demanded an abstraction compared to Brahmanism — Brahmanism goes hand in hand constantly with rituals, with sacrifice, that's all there is, all day, all year — whereas Buddhism is a total nihilism compared to all that.
1:58:14 Well, it disappeared, it survived a little in Ceylon, Sri Lanka — excuse me, I'm a bit old-fashioned, Sri Lanka — but from India it disappeared, because the people need to kiss crucifixes — well, the people, the archaic, substantial people, those still in necessity — well yes, I lived for a long time among some of the poorest countries in the world, one understands their superstition very well, there's never a natural death among traditional Africans, one is inconsolable at the notion of natural death, it's unassumable — if someone dies, if someone cast a spell on them, there's a reason, it's not possible that one dies for nothing, for what we'd call contingent reasons, in archaic society — that's what substantial society is, it's not geographical, it's not that of Africans, and then us — no, no, we all started from the substantial and we still have quite a bit of it in us, one need only look at the archaisms of dreams for instance — but there, I'll say, I'm answering your question, I'm not going to amputate one leg in favor of the other, one must learn to limp along and make one's way with legs that don't always go in the same direction, is that all right?
1:59:30 We can eat now — thank you all.
