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 antepenultimate session and local displacement 0:00 Well, we're inaugurating this evening. Thank you for being here, first of all, because I thought that with the nice weather no one would come. It's all the nicer that you're here. I say that for the veterans who, for 4 years now, have shown exemplary faithfulness. And I greet the newcomers. There are always some, that's good. And who don't know what they're getting into.
0:33 And here we are beginning where this evening, the antepenultimate—we have to show off a bit—I remind you that the penultimate is the second-to-last, and the antepenultimate is the one before the second-to-last. It's used mainly in linguistics to define the place of the tonic accent. So in Italian, popolo, you see the tonic accent is on the antepenultimate. That's it. I say this because French is a very rare language that is equally stressed—there's no accent.
1:04 The Principality of Monaco, one must say, it's a language like that. It makes up for it through rhyme in poetry because there's nothing left but sonority, but rhythm, there is none in French. Whereas popolo bounces like a ball for little kittens. I'm obsessed, because of the little kitten someone gave me, excuse me. So, the antepenultimate session, that means there are only two left until June. And we could even stop here, since we've practically reached the end, last time.
1:34 If there weren't thousands of pages to draw from every half-page of Angélique, right? No digressions that are at the heart of our subject, but anyway. You've glanced at the outline. It's not to make a pun on the last pages. Again, I couldn't resist the pleasure of an assonance on the A, but anyway. But you'll see it doesn't end with the walk on foot. The very last page is reflections on the journey we made.
2:08 And I'll be more precise in a moment. On the other hand, the steps are in the literal sense, that is, what I asked you to keep an eye on, what Aristotle already called, 2500 years ago, local displacement. The only one that today's physicists kept, right? It's the form of motion they kept out of the four kinds of motion Aristotle distinguished. Because Aristotle distinguished dynamis, metabole, dynamis, mechane—
2:41 And then local displacement. In short, to see exactly Nerval's displacement on the ground. Why he goes to Compiègne, to Paris, to Germany, etc. Why we go left, right, why we turn back, why we press onward. Why we sometimes go fast and why sometimes we're slowed down. We ended there last time. Our walk was slowed as soon as we moved away from Rousseau's tomb. The weather turned bad. Because of the young girls, well, because of the washerwomen. I told you to be wary of washerwomen.
3:12 Yes, I'd like to clarify something. I mustn't come across as a dreadful sexist. I mean, I told you at once, be wary of women who wash laundry and of those who gossip along riverbanks, the undines and the nixes. I'm talking about mythological figures, of course. Our poor ancestor washerwomen who, all through winter, would chap their hands red. No, I have nothing against them. We owe them that much. And that one, she can thank the washing machine, believe me. Well, let's not mix up the issues.
3:43 Be that as it may, when they want to move away from Rousseau's tomb to continue their walk—they, meaning the narrator, we always say Nerval, but it's really the narrator, and Sylvain, the man of the woods, going by his name. Immediately, you saw that the setting, in what Clouscard and I used to file under the heading of immanent symbolism, the setting suddenly seems to want to oppose the forward progress, unlike the previous time, when they'd set off from Senlis—I recall the sentence: we left Senlis on foot through the woods, joyfully breathing in the autumn mist, it's the narrator who is carried away, of course, by the enthusiasm of the walk.
4:33 Whereas here, it's the opposite. These deceitful young girls, I quote, made us take a very strange route. First, fallacious means false, someone not to be trusted, like sirens—you trust their song and you're wrecked on the rocks. Whether they're saltwater sirens, I'm thinking of Homer here, of course, and Ulysses, or freshwater sirens, I'm thinking of course of the Lorelei—all little German schoolchildren know Heinrich Heine's very beautiful poem, a great friend of Nerval's, the most French of German poets, just as Nerval is the most German of French poets at the time.
5:10 And I believe Nerval had a bit of a soft spot for Heine's wife, but timidly. So there, I don't know why, I have a Clouscardian tropism when I talk about Nerval. And Heine had a great deal of affection for him. Nerval is a great translator—don't forget he became known in literary circles at age 19 through his translation of Faust. A translation of such quality that Goethe—and it's rare for an author to pay such tribute to a translator—Goethe, coming upon the translation, said, 'Well, now I can no longer even read it in German, it's so beautiful this way.'
5:41 Really, though. There you have it. So afterward, he was a conduit for Romanticism. I've talked enough about that, haven't I? A Romanticism that's much misunderstood in terms of vocabulary, much closer to what we call, in our tradition, the Symbolists, then the Surrealists, than to our French Romantics, who are a bit, as Rimbaud said in a famous letter, the letter of the seer, strangled by the old form. There are magnificent things in the Romantics. Rimbaud knows that very well. So, I mentioned Heine because of his poem on the Lorelei—that's also a title used by Nerval.
Nerval the freelance writer and Rousseau's tomb as center of gravity 6:21 There are a few prose texts—he took a long time to write, even longer to say 'I.' It's in the last seven or eight years of his life that he writes prose narratives. Up until then, he was a freelance writer, I remind the newcomers too, because some have already heard this repeated several times—but at the start, Nerval was writing reviews, we'd say today, of TV series, that is, of melodramas, of the boulevard theaters of his time, which he did conscientiously.
6:58 And yet, even though he had a great reputation in that genre—ah, what a pen, it's a delight to hear his reviews and all that—but still, he took a long time to come clean, so to speak, even longer to speak of himself, and when he was found hanged, he still had in his coat the unfinished manuscript of Aurélia, and the pages of a little gem I recommend to you, it's not long, it's all on Wikisource, Promenades et souvenirs. You see, where he says 'I' for the first time, where he makes a few allusions to his family, but very, very brief ones.
7:37 So I make these reminders to put back into context a little the page where we left off last time—the pages where they try to leave the place which I said was the goal of the whole text, the goal of the local displacement the text stages, namely Rousseau's tomb, which I compared, under the watchful eye of our physicist friends, to what physicists call a barycenter, a center of gravity, a little bit of all the space unfolding here, in the Valois.
8:09 And with—I own it, I own the metaphorical, annexed, even relativistic field there is in the notion of a center of gravity. I mean that this tomb of Rousseau is so dense in the Nervalian imagination that space undergoes deformations depending on whether one moves away from it or approaches it. Of course, all the more so when one approaches it. We saw last time how much time he took—he who is prone to digressions—as soon as they arrive, let's say, at Chaalis, if you recall that toponym, with two A's, for those who've read the text.
8:45 I hope everyone has read it, well, all those who had it to begin with. Two A's—why do I stress the two A's? Because there are Flemish connotations in this region. Double vowel, that's Flemish. You see? De Groot, you know, all those names. Besides, Nerval says in Angélique, when he's looking for the book in libraries, that there's a paleographer whom nobody asked, but who chimes in, saying, when he searches everywhere in the libraries of Paris and can't find it in any of them, there's a paleographer who says that throughout the whole northeast quarter of France, the 'de' isn't a title of nobility at all, it's the Germanic article 'der,' found among the Ch'tis, right?
9:30 Among the Dutch. And 'De Muller' simply means 'the Miller,' that's all. You see? So that's interesting. And here, Chaalis means that 38 km northeast of Paris, you already have Flemish toponyms. I'm telling you this because here, it's not in the imagination, it's real. You go to the Porte de la Villette and there's the Rue de Flandre, you know that. And beyond the Rue de Flandre—because I knew the era when there was no A1 motorway yet—to continue toward London and/or Brussels, I'm sure that afterward, the northern road began at the Porte de la Villette, and there began what was called, and what Nerval also calls it, again in his novella, and in Sylvie too, the route de Flandre, which passes through Senlis, Compiègne, etc.
10:19 I'm telling you this because Nerval often spoke of landscapes reminiscent of the backgrounds in Flemish paintings, and in his family imagination, in his constellation in the analytical sense, the Freudian sense, in his family constellation, he often invokes this maternal uncle, this benevolent figure of the maternal uncle, whom we know, in anthropology—Lévi-Strauss, for instance—the maternal uncle is always a benevolent figure in tales and stories.
10:51 You know that in alliances, there are brothers-in-law, and the expression brother-in-law can designate either a receiver of women or a giver of women, and these are not at all the same relations—much more aggressive relations, right, with the receiver of women than with the giver, in anthropology generally—I saw this clearly in Africa, where the dowry payments never stop until the end of one's life. If someone has had a child with his wife, the wife's father comes and says, 'You see, she's not barren, my daughter, so now you're going to give me two more loincloths and a sheep?'
11:28 And it never stops, it's interesting. You see, that clearly shows that kinship ties also regulate the exchange of goods, from the symbolic to the economic. The maternal uncle, in Nerval, is a very important figure who initiated him culturally. We could even say that his reference to Rousseau—Rousseau is somewhat an emblematic figure of what the ideal maternal uncle would have been for him. I say this because Nerval says it was in his maternal uncle's attic that he discovered all his first readings.
The successive goals of the journey and the detour through Ermenonville 12:01 You see, it's interesting. Those who've read Sylvie, the novella that follows Angélique, remember that when he is... Sylvie begins—I'll read it to you in a moment—very... You couldn't get more different from the text we're reading. Sylvie doesn't have that somewhat journalistic side. On the contrary, it's almost autobiographical. And it begins with a staging in a mode of self-mockery of the Romantic hero he once was, right?
12:31 The first sentence: I appeared every evening in the front boxes of a theater, dressed to the nines as a suitor. Well, nothing is more banal than truly the spectator in the theater in love with an actress. I don't know, in the Romantic era. There you go. And he immediately says, not forgetting the uncle, that I cared little for the woman, I was only interested in the actress. My uncle having told me that actresses weren't women like other women and that nature had forgotten to give them a heart.
13:02 And Nerval adds, he was speaking of those of that time, no doubt. That is, of the time before the Revolution, of the Ancien Régime and of libertinage. There you go. You see everything there is to say about apparently marginal details. We've already seen together that there's no marginal work in Nerval. That dichotomy—essential work, secondary work—doesn't apply to him. Since for a long time, this novella we've been working on since the start of the school year was long considered a minor work.
13:32 First, Nerval's work in general, which I remind you has only been truly exhaustively collected in the Pléiade since 1991. That's very recent in historical terms. All the more so for this particular novella. So, we had noticed that as soon as one moves away from Rousseau's tomb—because Nerval nowhere says that's the goal, he takes the opportunity, passing by, to go pay homage, to make a pilgrimage to Rousseau's tomb, it's All Souls' Day, so that's called for.
14:03 But the goal—it kept changing all the time, I remind you one last time, which won't be the last—at the outset, was to find the book he'd come across by chance at the Frankfurt book fair. Not finding it, he makes inquiries because he's nonetheless promised his readers, the readers of the newspaper for which he has a serial that was commissioned from him, that he'd deliver the story of the Abbé de Bucquoy—that was the title of the book he couldn't buy for lack of money while traveling in Frankfurt.
14:41 Back in Paris, he doesn't find the book, and not finding it, he's obliged to entertain his readers with other things—that gives us the text we're working on, hence the notion of anti-narrative, anti-novel, quite a modern device. And, first goal, second goal, while researching the ancestors of the Abbé de Bucquoy, in order to have something to say while waiting to stumble upon the book, he comes across the confession of an ancestor of the Abbé at the Compiègne library—this ancestor is called Angélique de Longueval; Longueval is the family surname of the whole Bucquoy line.
15:17 And, believe me if you will—first real digression—I was at, was it the book stand at the Fête de l'Huma or at the book fair? No, no, it was at the book stand at the Fête de l'Huma four years ago. And I see the Abbé de Bucquoy arriving. I swear, with Nerval, it's terrible, the Nervalitis. A guy comes up and says to me, 'I hear you like the work of Gérard de Nerval, my name is de Bucquoy.'
15:52 I say, 'Sure, and I'm the Emperor of China.' 'No, no, no,' he says, 'I'm serious.' And indeed he was a descendant of the Longueval de Bucquoy family, a comic-book artist, as there are many in Belgium. It's extraordinary. I'll bring you his book next time, you'll see quite a bit of what he does too. Closing the parenthesis. Nerval is never finished. So, he comes across the account that pleases him so much, this confession of a young 17th-century aristocrat—I quote Nerval—'more audacious for its time than even the confessions of Rousseau or even of Saint Augustine'—you see—and while waiting to tell us in detail the story of the Abbé, since his memoirs still haven't been found, we have the memoirs of his ancestor.
16:41 So, I even advised those who get a bit tangled up with this text, which breaks off—we go from the account of the search for the book to the narration of Angélique, which after all gave... she enters the scene when we've already read a good third of the novella—and I advised leaving aside Angélique's story so as not to confuse the linear reading too much, and coming back afterward to read it all, of course. There you go. Because it's very interesting. Especially since we noticed that Angélique curiously resembles Nerval's mother.
17:13 Angélique too fled the family to follow the man she loved to war. Even if it's in Italy rather than in Germany. And she too... except that unlike Nerval's mother, she comes back to die. Sick and weary, she comes back. There you go. Whereas Nerval's mother's grave remains somewhere in the cold Silesia, as Nerval says, that is, in the east of Poland which used to be the west of Germany, Schlesien.
17:43 There you go. I'm not making that up. And so, we're told the story of Angélique, interspersed with many digressions, which Nerval enjoys teasing us with. And then he says, while consulting the family papers, 'So I happened to come across, apart from what concerns the Bucquoy family, some manuscripts in a library, you know, in the provinces.' If ever one happens upon—we're still at Compiègne, which isn't very far from the Valois.
18:16 And so, moreover, even a desire for Rousseau's tomb—I'm getting to it. 'I happened upon 18th-century manuscripts, an unpublished correspondence of Voltaire'—you know, stumbling upon things like that isn't bad, at auctions, you know, some used to steal, now it's monitored with cameras, but before, some would tear a page out of a library book and then, at auctions, it's a fortune, an autograph of Rimbaud, whatever. And songs, sheet music in Rousseau's own hand, whose beautiful and clean execution—this is Nerval speaking—I could not view without emotion.
18:48 And he quotes one of them: 'I am no longer what I once was, I shall never know how to be it again, my sweet spring and my summer have leapt out the window.' 'Which gave me the idea of returning to Paris by way of Ermenonville.' And bam, there's how suddenly Nerval slips in the detour by Ermenonville to Rousseau's tomb. In the mode of total contingency and chance. It wasn't planned at all at the outset. So, to return to my relativistic metaphor, Rousseau's tomb is like, isn't it, a huge mass that weighs and attracts. Wherever one was supposed to go, it attracts, a bit like Mercury's trajectory—the light by which we identify Mercury is deflected because Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun.
19:30 You know, that was the first empirical confirmation, I believe, of relativity. It was the first, chronologically I believe, since until then it had only been a theoretical model by Einstein. Yes, if Mercury's light takes longer than expected to reach us, it's because the Sun made it take a little detour, a little turn. That's exactly what we're doing with Rousseau's tomb. 'Which gave me the idea of returning to Paris by way of Ermenonville,' and he adds, as if to provoke us, you see, to provoke the reader, 'this being the shortest route in terms of distance, so be it.'
The inaccessible tomb and the vertical dimension of tombs 20:00 And he adds, 'and the longest in terms of time.' You see? This tomb of Rousseau weighs, and there, we were there, and now we're moving away from it, but we're not going to stay that way. Look, especially since he said, you see, there's no one there, we'll come back to it, there's no one. Even the swans, I'll say, cygnes, even the swans desert Rousseau's tomb. I don't know why, I quote you, 'the swans, instead of gracefully swimming around the island'—around the Île des Peupliers where the monument to Rousseau's tomb stands—'prefer to bathe in a muddy washing pool by the roadside.'
20:39 Yes, so we've moved away from it, and as soon as we did, here—I'll go back to my text, for those who have the text, feel free to show it to your neighbors—for those who have the text, we're at, sorry, it's in the eleventh letter, there, at page, let's say, around page 127 or so, we don't need to read along at the same time because I'm going back a bit here, but anyway, I mean, let me read you the paragraph: Rousseau's tomb has remained as it was—here we really arrive at what, for me, is the goal, but you're not at all obliged to take this into account, because this reading we're doing is a phenomenological reading, we only take into account what is written, it's a scientific approach, I mean, I'm not going to make assumptions about intentions—there you go: Rousseau's tomb has remained as it was, with its ancient and simple form, and the leafless poplars, since we're in autumn, still accompany it in a picturesque manner, here 'picturesque' should be taken literally, pittore, painting in Italian—
21:49 it's not like a painting, that's what 'picturesque' means—the monument reflected in the still waters of the pond, only the boat that used to carry visitors is now submerged. I had made a small comment saying it's surely no accident that the goal of what, for me, centralizes our whole local displacement, the ultimate goal, Rousseau's tomb, is in fact inaccessible since it's still an island, one can't walk on water, there was indeed a boat that led there but now it's submerged.
22:26 There isn't much chance involved in all that; it still is today. The swans, 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 that ends in a washing spot located along the road. I'll skip ahead—after that we saw he went, to sum up, climbed, because it's on a little hill, he climbs up to the church of Ermenonville to visit it, all while saying that it's less remarkable than most of those in the village, 'for in this philosophical place'—since at Rousseau's tomb the church has indeed been neglected, an allusion to the Age of Enlightenment, right?
23:02 And that there was a clash we've seen only in France, of such importance, between philosophy and religion—it's important. Don't forget that the only place in France where there's no separation of church and state in education is Alsace. You see? Because we're still there at the edge of the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire, which a Corsican put an end to with a signature, right? I'm thinking of Napoleon, because he entered Germany.
23:35 So I'll skip ahead a bit, but still noting that at the church he can't help telling us he visited some tombs. In the cemetery near the church there are tombs. And there's a progression there. Do you remember? It starts with the tombs of the de Vic family, a great family of the time, then afterward it's still identifiable, there's a proper name, it's identified, then afterward, young girls marrying bourgeois men—young girls from an aristocratic family marrying bourgeois men—that was called 'gilding the coat of arms,' I pointed that out to you at the time: the aristocracy, waging war and not working, could only grow poorer, and so tended to have its daughters, its sons, marry the daughters of rich bourgeois. There you have the expression 'gilding the coat of arms.' But then there's not even a name anymore, then there are tombs hard to decipher because the inscriptions are worn away, so we'd already seen a loss of traces on the tombs, and finally we come to a tomb where there's only marked—remember, if anyone recalls—Almazor, bravo, that pleases me.
24:45 C.J. Almazor — there isn't even the title, the name, the date of birth, nothing. Here lies Almazor, A.L.M.A.Z.O.R — can you imagine — and Nerval says, you ask yourself the question too, what kind of name is that? It sounds like the wizard of Oz. Is it a madman? He says: is it a madman who writes, is it a madman, is it a lackey, is it a dog? Almazor — the tomb says nothing more. This fascination for what I've called, and here I'm serious, the vertical dimension of this journey — for us to be able to progress we have to stay on a horizontal plane. But we saw with the drowning episode — I won't go back over it, the episode he censored from the body of this text — that as soon as, barely had he said, the first steps taken outside Senlis, the start of the long walk from Senlis to Ermenonville, 'we set off from Senlis on foot through the woods, breathing in with pleasure the autumn mist' — that's it, this time we can walk without stopping. But no, because at that moment there's the episode where he remembers Sylvain telling him — we can go through there — when they were children, that they were rascals playing truant, and that he fell into six feet of water where he nearly drowned.
25:55 had it not been for Sylvain's sister, Sylvie, who pulled him by the hair and saved him from drowning — an episode he carefully removed from the text we have, but which we find again in Les Faux Saulniers, volume 2 of the Pléiade edition. That means the vertical dimension, in the literal sense — the ground no longer holds — and so the journey is interrupted. I wanted to draw your attention to this because we're going to find it again in the pages that follow, so I don't want to waste too much time on what we've already read, but you see there is this vertical dimension of the tombs, it's what is underfoot after all, and we do have to leave Ermenonville since the official goal — the one that isn't stated, it isn't Rousseau's tomb — is to go and see, since we came upon the manuscript about Angélique, we're interested in the person of Angélique and no longer in her descendant the Abbé de Bucquoy — so we're going to visit the castle of their common ancestors, the castles of the Longueval, because there are several, somewhere near Soissons, so even beyond the Valois, further east. And of course Nerval has trouble leaving Ermenonville, which confirms what I think — that it's there, where Rousseau's tomb is — and he gives Sylvain the thankless role of saying, well, that's not all.
27:05 we may have to go on to Soissons as planned. And so here we come, on page 129, excuse me, yes that's it, Sylvain tells me, page 129, third paragraph: Sylvain tells me, we have seen Rousseau's tomb, now we must reach Dammartin where we'll find carriages to take us to Soissons, and from there to Longueval — Longueval, not far from Soissons. We go to ask the way from the washerwomen working in front of the castle — so I did specify today, ladies, that these are washerwomen in the symbolic order of sirens, naiads and other deceitful figures. Go straight on by the road, they tell us, or also to the right — no, excuse me, go straight on by the road, to the left, they tell us, or also to the right — that's already a bit strange — you will arrive either at Ver, V-E-R, or at Ève, these are, as I told you, place-names that really exist, tiny little villages. You'll pass through Othis and in two hours' walking you'll reach Dammartin. That's when he says: 'these deceitful girls made us take a very strange road.'
The deceptive washerwomen and the road that stretches on like the devil 28:15 I should add that it was raining, and immediately what I called earlier the immanent symbolism — the setting suddenly seems to turn against the enthusiasm of the walk. The weather has changed, a change of scenery, 'the road was very much degraded' — you see the vertical dimension starting to invade the horizontality of the ground — 'with ruts full of water that had to be avoided by walking on the grass, enormous thistles that came up to our chests, half-frozen but still lively thistles, sometimes stopped us outright' — it's almost as if we're prevented from walking by thistles, you see what happens to us when we move away from Rousseau's tomb. There you go — but nowhere does Nerval say, I put that in on purpose — no, no, it's just as unconscious for him as it is on a first reading — 'but having gone about a league, 4 km, we understood that we were seeing neither Ver, nor Ève, nor Othis' — I'm going a bit fast, we've already seen this — 'nor even the plain,' because we're already at the border there, you know that's someone from Elysée en Erval, the border of the forests — what they call the plain, we're always in the plain even in the forest, it's flat except for a few hills, but the plain is where there isn't even a forest anymore, where there are the fields, and there's mud when it rains.
29:25 'nor even the plain, we might have gone astray. A clearing suddenly appeared on our right, one of those bright clearings that light up forests so singularly, we saw a hut solidly built of branches plastered with earth, with a thoroughly primitive thatched roof' — there I made a little comment to say this resembles a bit, in children's tales, deep in the forest there are little old women by a house — in fact they're benevolent witches or good fairies or bad fairies, but anyway supernatural figures. But here apparently it's a good man — 'we saw a woodcutter smoking his pipe in front of the door.' 'To get to Ver you're a long way off, following the road you'll reach Montagny' — so he gives the right road. We ask for Ver or Ève. 'Well, you'll have to go back' — which means mathematically that we're heading back toward Rousseau's tomb — you'll have to go back, we're having trouble getting out of it, it's like black holes, light can no longer escape — 'you'll have to go back, you'll walk half a league.' Nerval adds — we can translate that into metres if we like, because of the law—
30:35 2 km, which is exactly what we'd just done — 'then arrive at the place where the bow is shot, you'll take the right' — I remind you, the place where the bow is shot, that's the estate that the Marquis de Girardin built, modeled on La Nouvelle Héloïse and the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire — so it's rather rare that the readings of a contemporary author give the broad outlines that shape the landscape you're moving through. The park of Ermenonville, I remind you, which Nerval describes as a lost political paradise — the place where the bow is shot: the Marquis Girardin, taking his lessons from Rousseau, took great care to make sure there were entertainments for the common people, and not just blind man's buff at the Petit Trianon, or Marie-Antoinette's farm at Versailles — it's very different. There's the old men's bench, there's the famous fountain whose inscription I read to you, which still exists at Mortefontaine, the fountain itself says: 'from flowery banks'—
31:47 'where I loved to pour forth the purest crystal of my waters' — we've seen that this eighteenth century was at its weakest in poetry — 'passer-by, I come here to serve the desire, the needs, of man and of the herds' — this is for the farmers — 'may I water with my waves only peaceful and contented mortals thanks to my fertile urn' — you see, it's a lost political paradise. So we come back to the old men's bench, there really is a border there between the forest in the strict sense and this nature shaped by man that makes up the landscape. And you'll see we're not going to stop at the old men's bench: 'arrive at the place where the bow is shot, you'll take the right, you'll leave the woods, you'll find the plain, and after that everyone will point out Ver to you.' We found the archery ground again, since archery is the popular sport of the region — a region of woods, Robin Hood's is not the bow, with its stand and its semicircle for the seven old men. 'Then we set off on a path' — well, we do have to keep going now — 'which must be quite lovely'—
32:58 'when the trees are green.' We were still singing — let's not forget it's raining — 'to help our walking and to populate the solitude, a few songs of the region.' From here on we hadn't read — look at this sentence that follows: 'the road stretched out' — that's underlined for those who have the text — 'the road stretched out like the devil' — it's a French expression, a rather odd one, but yes, it's fine to laugh, because it can be taken in various senses, some of them a bit licentious — 'the road stretched out like the devil,' and Nerval adds under his breath, 'I don't know quite how far the devil stretches' — extraordinary, this reflection on language. You see, in this walk, in the rain, the mood has changed, and there he is saying 'I don't know quite how far the devil stretches,' and he hastens to add — this is the reflection of a Parisian — come now, let's not be libertines — no, I say that because if you read Le Voyage en Orient you'll see the development on the Karagöz puppet — yes, Nerval — it's a kind of Punch figure very popular in the streets of Cairo, still popular now, a popular character like Guignol in Lyon — there's Karagöz, he's a Punch.
34:09 well known in the Arab world but especially in Cairo, and with a — of two metres if you take — well, a phallus — 'the road stretched out like the devil, I don't know quite how far the devil stretches, this is the reflection of a Parisian.' 'Sylvain, before leaving the woods, sang this round' — Sylvain, the man of the woods, before leaving the woods sang this round from the time of Louis XIV — 'it was a cavalryman coming back from Flanders' — the rest is hard to tell — 'the refrain addresses the drum and tells it: beat the general call until daybreak.' When Sylvain, a taciturn man, starts singing, you're not let off easily — notice the relationship, which is common in French, between the fact of singing in an unprofessional way and the fact that it's raining. 'He sang me some song or other about the red monks who originally lived at Chaalis' — you see, the memories of the place we've just left keep haunting him. 'What monks? They were Templars, the king and the pope agreed to burn them' — we'll see, you'll look at the plan, toward the end I speak of the mists of history at the end of part 1 — 'the king and the pope agreed to burn them, let's not speak any more'—
35:19 of these red monks — but anyway, we've just spoken of them. 'On leaving the forest we found ourselves on ploughed land' — you see, that's a change of scenery, it means we now have mud on our shoes — 'we were carrying away a good deal of our homeland on the soles of our shoes' — that's almost literal, we've got mud in our shoes. It's an allusion to Danton's famous sentence aimed at the émigrés, those who had fled — the aristocrats who had fled the Revolution and gone to London. Danton had said: you don't carry away the soil of your homeland on the soles of your shoes. These are all political allusions — 'we were carrying away a good deal of our homeland on the soles of our shoes' — as if the homeland were truly that small space where Rousseau's tomb is, and the old men's bench, and the archery ground, and so on, this sort of political Arcadia that we've just left — 'we gave it back,' we ended up giving back the earth, of course. 'Further on, in the meadows, at last we arrived at Ver, it's a large market town, the hostess was pleasant, her daughter strong and attractive' — so an inn — 'having lovely chestnut hair, regular and gentle features, and that so charming way of speaking of misty countries which gives the youngest girls contralto tones at times.'
The voice of the girls from the misty countries and the inn at Ver 36:29 Here I'll make a break — I'll make another one — on the voice, on Nerval's relationship to the female voice. I've touched on it a few times, I've never given an exhaustive treatment of it — it would need to be much longer — but I recommend once again, to those who have a bit of time, to watch a lecture such as I would like to give myself. This is really someone I admire enormously — I'm trying to recall his name — Illouz, Jean-Nicolas Illouz, I-L-L-O-U-Z, you can find that online, just type in 'the literary genres in Sylvie by Gérard de Nerval,' Jean-Nicolas Illouz — it's a lecture given by someone who seems to be truly unassuming, as simple as can be, with a clarity such that you'd think he'd stay on the surface of things, and he manages to bring in everything, especially Nerval's relationship to the voice and to popular songs. So I'm subcontracting a bit for now — go and consult, go and look at this extraordinary document, and it's a text—
37:40 it's a lecture he gave for the young women preparing for the entrance exam to the École Normale Supérieure — Nerval was on the syllabus for the agrégation at that time, yes indeed, and not only in the hard sciences, even though we've seen there is a hard-science side to the determinability of Nerval's text. So there you have it, Jean-Nicolas Illouz, 'The Literary Genres in Sylvie.' And even so, you see, a little serving girl at the inn coming to say 'here's what we have for these gentlemen' — well, that's enough for them to be marked by it. How does he put it? 'She is lovely,' his sentence with this business about contralto — and that way of speaking, underlined, 'so charming, of misty countries, which gives the youngest girls contralto tones at times' — there is here a linkage, sorry for the anglicism, a structural link between the voice of the young women of this region and the mist and the fog. I say that because it's recurrent — you know I don't like interpretation, I content myself with doing intertextuality.
38:50 I turn to the most famous passage of his best-known novella, that is, the passage on Adrienne's singing in Sylvie, the novella that follows this one. The beauty had to sing in order to earn the right to join the dance — it's a sort of scene where children form rounds on the grass in front of the château. 'I was the only boy in that round, where I had brought my companion, still very young, Sylvie, a little girl from the neighbouring hamlet, so lively and so fresh, with her black eyes, her regular profile, her slightly tanned complexion' — well yes, if a little peasant girl has tanned skin it's because she's not an aristocrat — there's already the blonde and the brunette in this extraordinary scene, Sylvie the emanation of the forests, the little village girl who is his crush, and Adrienne, whom he discovers that day. 'I had scarcely noticed, in the round in which we were dancing, a tall and lovely blonde girl called Adrienne' — we'll learn later that Valois blood flows in her veins. Anyway, the beauty had to sing in order to earn the right to join the dance. 'We sat down around her' — we, that's the children — 'and at once, in a fresh and penetrating voice, slightly veiled like those of the girls'—
40:00 'of her misty homeland, she sang one of her old ballads,' etc. You see already the voice which is faintly timbred — sorry, well-timbred but low in volume — and which Nerval, every time he comments on a female voice that intercepts him, with the apostrophe, every time — as if he were the prey of the signifier, as they say in psychoanalysis — every time he takes great care to say that the charm of this voice is due essentially to the fact that this voice has not yet been spoiled by the lessons of the conservatory, that it's still a fresh voice that hasn't yet been calibrated by the art of singing. For example, I go on, one has to when one has started a bit with Adrienne's song — 'each verse ended with those quavering trills that young voices bring out so well when they imitate, through a modulated tremor, the trembling voice of the elders' — look at the extraordinary going into detail from someone who isn't a professional musician, Nerval — each verse—
41:10 'ended with those quavering trills that young voices bring out so well when they imitate, through a modulated tremor' — look at the choice of vocabulary — 'the trembling voice of the elders. As she sang, the shadow descended over the tall trees' — well, here this isn't an aristocrat's daughter, it's an inn servant, and so of course Nerval is going to shift the burden onto Sylvain, isn't he: 'Here you are, my children,' says the hostess — well, let's put a log on the fire, this smells like the end of the game, it smells like the end of the day, we've done a long walk and evening is falling — you see, I'm still within the symbolism of the mound. 'We ask you for supper, if it's not indiscreet' — 'would you,' says the hostess, 'like an onion soup made for you first?' — you know, these aren't places with a six-page menu at that time, you take what there is that evening. I used to love that, it can't do any harm, and then, and then there's also — it's underlined — some game, meaning there's a bit of poaching going on there. I remember myself the inn that's closed now, but that was called — the Croix Blanche, because now there's the Croix d'Or which is open, but the Croix Blanche which, for reasons I can explain, for 12 years
42:20 has been closed — it's a chain that took over the centre and used to be very popular; I knew the former owner well and, in short, I remember him discussing with poachers there — you know, do you have any roe deer around at the moment, you see, there's hunting going on in the area, well, I won't tell the ecologists — well then there's also game. 'We saw that we had landed well there' — there's the aspect, don't forget that this novella was originally titled Les Faux Saulniers, the salt smugglers, the poachers, the salt smugglers, that slightly crafty side you find in these forest regions. I lived in the Marais Poitevin for a while, not long, because I was running the Carrefour Média Jeunesse in Niort, that was my first general management post, but I lived in the marsh, along the conches, you know, and the people of Niort, of the town, said the people of the marsh were crafty, were cunning, had kept the Gaulish smuggling habits — funny, isn't it, you see. So there — I'll skip two paragraphs — 'the somewhat isolated but solidly built inn where we were able to find shelter' — shelter, meaning what?
43:29 it means that the weather had really turned bad, whereas a few pages earlier there had been the pleasure of the outing. 'We found shelter — it offers inside a courtyard with a gallery entirely in the Wallachian style. Sylvain has kissed the girl, who is quite well built, and we take pleasure in warming our feet while petting two hunting dogs, attentive to the spit turning, which promises a supper to come.' There, that's it, the outing is over for now. It nearly ended badly, but in the end it's redeemed by the girl and the dishes she's preparing — what are you doing, Aminata?
44:00 'I'm preparing.' I lived a long time in sub-Saharan Africa, as you might guess, and when you see a girl doing the cooking outside — because outside, there's nothing in the house, not much anyway, everything's done outside — the braiding, they do it outside too. When a boy sees a girl having her hair braided by her sister, the girl tells him: 25 centimes, he has to pay — it's a nice custom, yes, because it's a bit intimate after all, doing one's hair, all that; it's not because it's happening in the street that you should stare. It's cute, so the boy pays up very kindly, a girl who does someone's hair the same way. So we do the cooking outside too. So I'd say — I knew the answer but I love hearing it — Aminata, what are you doing?
44:36 'I'm preparing' — intransitive, you see, that's African French — 'I'm preparing for my husband, for my uncle, for my fiancé, for my brother, for my uncle' — I don't know — 'I'm preparing' — well yes, there's more to life than nutrition, as they say — 'faux guinée,' in Hausa, I forget how to say it in French — the seasonings, there you go, all the same, 'I'm preparing.' So there's the hope of a supper to come, and here we begin — you see, for those who have the text — the twelfth letter. You'll say, your plan, have you already forgotten your plan? Well no, as soon as there's a plan, I feel like getting out of it — not at all, I'm right in the middle of it, I started by saying: the thirteenth letter comes back, it's the first one again — I'm paraphrasing one of Nerval's most famous lines, isn't it, in the sonnet — you have Les Chimères, after — after Les Filles du feu, in the same volume, the famous sonnet — 'the thirteenth comes back, it's the first one again' — they say it's the ball of the hours, you know that among the hours, thirteen is — we're agreed — one o'clock, the thirteenth comes back, it's the first one again, and it's always the only one, or he's the only one, that moment — 'for art thou queen'
"The thirteenth returns": from Château-Thierry to the Odyssey 45:47 'O thou, the first or the last, art thou king, thou the only one or the last lover' — yes, an extraordinary poem, dense, and there you have the twelfth letter, which is the last — that's not fortuitous, that number: the novella that follows, Sylvie, has thirteen chapters. Look — don't just take my word for it, because you'll say I'm obsessed with eliminating chance, Pagani, and that's what they give people they treat in asylums, in the end everything has a meaning — no, no, it's not me, it's him. So, thirteen chapters in Sylvie, and some even say that Sylvie is immediately followed by Chansons et légendes du Valois, which I told you I'd come back to, which was a sort of little ethnomusicological survey, such as we have today, of the songs of the province, and some say — since that's part of Sylvie, according to Nerval's arrangement — that it would be the fourteenth chapter of Sylvie, and that thus Sylvie would be like a great sonnet — fourteen lines, in sonnets — where each novella would be a line.
46:57 There you are, I told you in passing, these are formal investigations, but interesting in their own right. So we're hearing the twelfth letter — I'm not going to give a linear reading, on the contrary I'm skipping all the beginning, I'm going to the end, I ask you to go to the end, that is, the last page of this text, which really doesn't resemble any other — you see, there — after that, Sylvie begins, Souvenirs du Valois. The last page, that's it, the walk is over, the local journey is finished — how so?
47:28 It's on page 140, the last lines of the walk on foot end at Château-Thierry — I don't know if you can see the map, but we're almost halfway between Paris and Germany. Now, how did it begin? With which word? Yes? No, no, it doesn't matter — textually: 'in 1851 I am going to pass through Frankfurt' — that's how this novella begins, and I told you, don't forget that Frankfurt is the middle — as now it's the European Central Bank, the centre, the middle — you think I'm joking?
48:08 There's a poem by Hölderlin — Hölderlin says that Frankfurt is the navel of the world — after that you'll say I'm joking — the Greeks said Delphi was the navel of the world; there's always, like Madame Merkel and Tsipras, always one who says the centre of the world is Delphi and the other who says the centre of the world is Frankfurt — that's interesting, it goes on like that — I'm not making this up. Well, come on, the last few metres, as they should be heading back to Paris — an eastward tropism, in the reverse direction, it's the reverse of the sun's course, it's the reverse of the course of time, so it's the road of memory, it's the search for lost time, isn't it, and it's also the quest for the maternal tomb, which lies far beyond, even further east than Germany, in Poland. But still, the very last words of the local journey — that's not the last page — the last page is what follows: 'borrowing enough of these local memories to be able to give some appeal to a novelistic composition' — he takes liberties with us — 'and which are not useless from the positive point of view of history, I reached Château-Thierry where one likes to salute the dreamy statue of good La Fontaine, placed on the banks of the Marne and within sight of the Strasbourg railway.'
49:18 And the loop is closed — when I told you that the thirteenth comes back, it's the first again, we're back at the beginning, we're back almost to the Germanic domain — you know Nerval is a man of borders, he goes to Strasbourg, there's nothing left but to cross what they call over there the Pont du Rhin, the bus terminus, and you're in Germany, agreed. And to show you it's really the loop, in the sense that illustrates my seminar for the past three years, that is, from Ulysses to Daedalus — but Nerval has nowhere spoken of Ulysses — well, here it comes, look, reflection, page 140: 'and that's how Diderot used to begin a tale, I'll be told' — always curiously — we go on to the line, there's a dash, there's a voice saying 'go on, go on' — and who's speaking there?
50:07 You, me, the reader, we're fed up, we're tired, we've been walking for 80 pages and we still don't know why, we still haven't found the book. All right, we started with Germany, we went on to Paris, we rushed through the libraries at an allegro-giocoso rhythm — that's Mozart, Don Giovanni, dramma giocoso, there's an acceleration in Don Giovanni, that matters, people — and frenetic, Don Giovanni — then it slowed down, our disconnected walk in the Valois, 'tired of the vain and sterile quarrels, agitations of Paris, I rest in these maternal countrysides, so fertile' — sterile, fertile, as if once again, Einstein, as if this space were forcing us to slow our pace. You know that in relativistic physics, the intelligibility of the trajectories of moving bodies has to be sought in the nature of the space it passes through — it's a bit crude, but roughly that's it — for the same amount of time, it has to amplify. That's roughly true. So up to now the reader was—
51:20 putting up with it, and now suddenly he rebels: 'go on, go on' — you have imitated Diderot himself, we're fed up with yet another reference, that's all there is in this text, one digression that had imitated Sterne, the English humorist very fashionable at the time, who had himself imitated Swift, the Swift of Gulliver's Travels, who had imitated Rabelais — it's almost only comic authors, if you look closely — who had imitated Rabelais, who had imitated Merlin Coccaie, who had imitated Petronius — it's true that Petronius is the author of the famous Satyricon which inspired a well-known film by Fellini, one of the most modern novels of antiquity, the Satyricon — who had imitated Lucian, and Lucian had imitated many others, if only the author of the Odyssey. It's the first time — you know, in psychoanalysis, the guy says nothing, he's there, he can't, he cries, there are tissues, he says nothing, the guy, or the woman, doesn't matter, in psychoanalysis, he says nothing for a long time and suddenly the guy comes out with it, he says everything, he wants to say everything in one second — that's what happens here, it's the final page, and Nerval spits out the word: it was the Odyssey, my story — it's not Pagani
52:30 injecting meaning into this, it's written, look anyway — 'and who had imitated Lucian, and Lucian had himself imitated many others' — well yes, if you trace back through all the illustrious authors of travel writing, you'll arrive at the primitive canvas, the first text of literary Western civilisation, that's Homer, you can't go any further back — beyond that there are admirable things, the Epic of Gilgamesh and so on, but our West begins with the Homeric epic. It's extraordinary all the same, this text — I told you it was a long journey made 35 km from Paris — so, 'if only the author of the Odyssey, who makes this hero wander for ten years' — we should count ourselves lucky, for ten years around the Mediterranean, to bring him at last to that fabled Ithaca, where the queen at the end, for there really was a queen surrounded by some fifty suitors, undid each night what she had woven by day' — 'yes, but Phyllis' — 'Ulysses ended up finding Ithaca again,' says the fed-up reader, 'and I found the Abbé de Bucquoy again' — in mathematics that's called an equivalence relation, that's it, it's stated clearly.
53:41 that the Abbé de Bucquoy plays the role of Ithaca — I set out from Ithaca, I came back to Ithaca, that's the Odyssey. I set out on the quest for the Abbé de Bucquoy and I found him again — 'let's talk about it, I've done nothing else for a month, readers must already be tired' — that's Nerval speaking — 'let's speak of the madman of the Comte de Bucquoy, the leaguer, later generalissimo of the Austrian armies, of Monsieur de Longueval de Bucquoy, and of his daughter Angélique, abducted by La Corbinière, of the castle of that family whose ruins I have just trodden' — I skipped ahead to the end, we'll come back to the ruins — 'and finally of the Abbé Comte de Bucquoy himself, of whom I have given a brief biography, and whom Monsieur d'Argenson' — a correspondent — 'calls the so-called Abbé de Bucquoy, the book I've just bought' — well at last, we now have it — 'at the Motteley sale would have fetched much more than 66 francs 20 centimes if it had not been cruelly trimmed, the book, with all the titles already cited' — I'm skipping a few lines — 'which is found listed in Brunet, in Quérard' — those are booksellers' catalogues for those looking for rare books, the 5th arrondissement even today in Paris remains specialised in the search for rare books, the bibliophiles then — 'and the book with all the titles'—
The hell of the living and an ending that does not end 54:52 'already cited, which are found listed in Brunet, in Quérard, and in Michaud's biography. Facing the title there is an engraving representing the Bastille' — over the book, he writes it physically, with this title above it — 'The Hell of the Living' — not only is it the Odyssey we've just gone through, but it's also a descent into hell, look, it's in the last lines that we get all this — 'and there follows a famous quotation from Virgil, Facilis descensus Averno, it is easy to descend into hell.' For those interested in Nerval's work and who want to go on to Les Nuits d'Octobre, which is his nocturnal masterpiece, taking place entirely in Les Halles, the only place in Paris that at the time was still the market of Les Halles — I've seen what's now the 'trou des Halles' today, it wasn't clothes shops and dealers yet, it was the great market, the biggest market in Paris, the biggest in Europe, the great construction site — I remember that time, there was onion soup with the women, there was the smell of Cavaillon melons at 2 in the morning, it was extraordinary — when you have insomnia, you go and see, it's a place where everything is awake — well, that has a Christian side, you're going to mix me up here — we have a great analyst here, I mean, there is one side, a fine metaphor—
56:02 for the unconscious, this part of Paris that doesn't sleep — there's something transgressive about going there while everyone else sleeps, the good people, the decent folk, in Brassens's sense, those who wouldn't open their door to me, the Auvergnat — those, they're asleep, and for a moment you can go and have an onion soup, a gratinée, even at 4 in the morning — that's how it was. Well, so Les Nuits d'Octobre unfolds entirely within this nocturnal universe. It's only at dawn, exhausted, that Nerval remembers he'd been invited to an otter hunt at Meaux, in the Valois — there you go — and we find ourselves back in the countryside, but in the last pages. Now, in it, he says that Les Halles is the hell of Paris, it was already the Cour des Miracles in the Middle Ages, that's where the beggars were, the court of the Beggars etc., which Victor Hugo admirably depicted in Notre-Dame de Paris, isn't it, so there's a symbolic homogeneity here. Now, we didn't know we had just made a descent into hell — we might have suspected it, with all those cellars I'll come back to, those tombs. So I'll read this last paragraph — 'the book with all the titles already cited'
57:12 'which are found listed in Brunet, in Quérard and in Michaud's biography. Facing the title there is an engraving representing the Bastille with this title above: The Hell of the Living, and this quotation, Facilis descensus Averni, it is easy to descend to Avernus' — the proper name for the underworld in Latin. 'One can read the story of the Abbé de Bucquoy in my book entitled' — he refers us to another book, for those who still believe that's what's interesting — 'the story of the Abbé de Bucquoy you will find in my collection called Les Illuminés, Paris, Victor Lecou, the publisher. One can also consult the work indicated, which I have donated to the Imperial Library' — what he calls the Imperial Library is the house I dream of having in Paris — no, actually I have modest tastes — it's the Bibliothèque Mazarine, you know, where the Institut is, you know, the Pont des Arts, you know, on one side the Louvre, which is a bit overwhelming, I couldn't sleep in it, it's a bit too grandiose, it scares me, but on the other side you have this admirable building — no, I have modest tastes, it's smaller than the Louvre, you see, and there's a little belfry to listen to music while looking out over Paris — there — and it was Mazarin who had it built, he's caught up in the corn trade, all the same — no, but he was right—
58:22 because he still did a great deal for France, Mazarin, he's the balanced one — 'the onion makes the strength,' it's not the onion, the onion in Italian — they used to mock him, 'the onion makes the strength' — fine, so Nerval could indeed consult the work — I went there myself, I mean the work that Nerval held in his own hands, he donated it to the Bibliothèque Mazarine, at the Institut, there, that's it. The book is finished, well, the novella is finished — 'which I have given to the Imperial Library' — you see, I'm forced to show you this because you have to be as material-minded as Nerval was in the libraries — that's a trait, like the whole novella, and there, in very small type, it goes on — I told you it's a novella without an ending, look carefully, in small type — 'I may have made a mistake in examining the coat of arms of the founder of the chapel at Chaalis' — and hop, we find ourselves back at Chaalis, which is only 3 km from Ermenonville, upstream of Ermenonville. So I go on — 'I have been given notes on the abbots of Chaalis, thus Robert de la Tourette, notably, who was abbot from 1501 to 1522, carried out major restorations, one can still see his tomb' — another tomb, there are never enough of them — 'in front of the high altar. Here come the Medici, Hippolyte d'Este, cardinal of Ferrara'—
59:32 the Italians, Louis d'Este, then Louis, Cardinal de Guise, Charles Louis de Lorraine, 1630 — 'it should be noted that the d'Este only have one allerion' — these are heraldic terms, don't try to understand it, or look it up online — 'it should be noted that the d'Este only have one allerion in the 2nd and 3rd quarters, and that I have seen three, in the 1st and 4th, on the quartered shield.' Charles II, Cardinal de Bourbon, since Charles X, the former lieutenant general of the Île-de-France since 1551, had a son called Poulain — these are the last lines I wanted to read, the last paragraphs — 'I am quite willing to believe that this cardinal-king had a natural son, but I do not understand the three allerions placed 2 and 1; those of Lorraine are on a bend' — last sentence — 'forgive me these details, but knowledge of heraldry is the key to the history of France; the poor authors can't help it.' There you have the ending of this text that doesn't end, since we go back to Chaalis on heraldic considerations — that's what it was called, the science of coats of arms — an incredible text, it's over, our text is finished. We still have May-June to cover, and you'll see
Rival factions, Franks and Celts, Perceval the Welshman 1:00:43 that there is plenty of material — yes, that's good, so we're on schedule, I still have a quarter of an hour to go back a bit. First of all I wanted to prove to you, by way of the ending, that the reference to the Odyssey is now explicit — it is indeed Ulysses's journey that we have here, and so this sheds light — well, at least as confirmation, we already half-suspected it, but still it's more comforting when it's confirmed — on all these tombs, all this carnage, since there may be some we've forgotten, but when he walks between Senlis and Ermenonville he says that when there was the struggle between the rival factions, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, then between the Catholics and the Protestants, because each era renews a dichotomy, the Romans had brought in Frankish tribes to populate the region — so already there's the clash between the Franks, who came from Germania, and the natives, who are Celts. You find this again, it's exactly the subject of the novels of the English author of Ivanhoe and Robin Hood, if you look closely, it's the same problematic.
1:01:53 the descendants of the Vikings, so Germanics, isn't it, subjugate, and those who were there before, they're the poor little Welsh — I say that because when you read in Chrétien de Troyes, at a time when all this was still fresh, in the thirteenth century no doubt — the first, you see my slip, he's one of our greatest poets — when you read, right at the beginning, that the young wild boy is raised by his mother — it's not like the Buddha, far from — I quote the translation Wagner gives in his Parsifal, the Germanisation of Perceval — 'far from the clashes of wars and hatreds' — you know that the Buddha was raised by his father in such a way that he never saw — he's the son of a maharaja, a prince, so he was never to see ugliness, poverty, decay, everything negative in life, and as one day what had to happen happened — the return of the repressed — climbing over a wall of the palace, he saw an old beggar, he saw at once old age, decay, illness, misery, death — all at once he dropped everything, he started to preach. Perceval was raised
1:03:04 like that by his mother, for different reasons — she had lost her husband in the crusades, her great love — you find a triangle here too — and she raises her son in the forest so that he'll never encounter knighthood, so that he too won't perish in battle, because he's the only pledge she has left of her dead and much-loved husband. Now, of course, here too, the return of the repressed: as soon as he hears the clatter of arms in the forest, Perceval goes to see — with his crude weapons, he has peasant weapons, that is, a bow, and he says moreover 'I shoot down whatever they steal on the wing' — killing game — and when he meets the first knights, he's fascinated, he wants to follow them, he follows them, he turns round, he sees his mother collapsing in a faint, and we'll learn later that she died of grief that her son had left. You see, though — why, why am I talking about this? Because Perceval is Welsh; the knights he sees are Germanics, what we call the Normans since the conquest, since the Battle of Hastings, the conquest of England by the Normans.
1:04:15 I'm doing a bit of politics, of ancient geopolitics, but it's one of the most successful moves by the French executive in the whole history of France, when the kings of France, in those obscure eras — I believe that's what he was called, that king, France was tiny, the royal kingdom, terrorised by the Viking invasions, said to the Vikings: listen, take Normandy — well, it wasn't called Normandy yet, it means the country of the men of the North — take this region, there are pretty girls, there's calvados, there's camembert, there's Pont-l'Évêque butter, it's a fantastic region, isn't it — but the trade-off is, you protect us against your cousins the next time they come — and it's worked right up to now, the deal, because they're hard workers after all, the 'boches' — no, seriously, this dichotomy, why do I insist on it?
1:05:06 because it's in the symbolic order, you find it in the place-names — you go to Switzerland, right before French-speaking Switzerland — no, sorry, before German-speaking Switzerland — you have the Pays de Vaud, the canton of Vaud, which is the plural of Val — there where the Valois is, Nerval's homeland, isn't far from there where the Franks were; there where the Walloons are, in Belgium, right before the Flemish, who are Germanics; and there where the Welsh are, to distinguish them, the Normans who subjugated Great Britain afterward — you see, it's interesting, the country of Wales, you know that G and V permute in European languages — there, that parenthesis on the symbolic order, to show you that here too there's precious little chance involved. So I was saying that there are indeed connotations of devastation and carnage that bring us back to Ulysses — don't forget that Ulysses is the man of the initial carnage, the sack of Troy, thanks to the ruse of the horse he's the instigator of, and at the end the massacre of the suitors, of which we have details on the horror, isn't it, that characterises him, even if it's justified, he's a warrior, and I don't blame him
Ulysses, man of carnage, and the anecdote of the bibliophiles 1:06:18 for having sought to make his side win — I merely note that it's he who is, every time, the instigator of the carnage, and especially of his own return, despite all the detours he made to avoid that return — as if there were no recourse against the return, despite the detour — no, but that's the structure of the Odyssey, and well, that's exactly what we've just done. So, to confirm what I've just said about the carnage, I now go back to the passage we skipped, weren't we, we were at the twelfth letter, on page 132, so I go back a bit, I skipped this passage — 'to Boudin-Rvaldi' — 'I have no reproach to make myself for having suspended for ten days the course of the historical narrative you asked of me' — he's still writing to the editor of the newspaper — 'the work that was to be, that was to be the basis of it, that is, the official history' — underlined — 'of the Abbé de Bucquoy was to be sold on the 20th of November and was not sold until the 30th' — we've gained another ten days — 'whether it was withdrawn at first, as I was told, or whether the very order of the sale, stated in the catalogue, did not allow it to be presented sooner at auction' — well, on that he continues
1:07:29 with stories about rare books — I'll skip a bit, excuse me — yes, you'll tell me I could have had the story of the Abbé de Bucquoy communicated to me, page 133, at the end — 'you will tell me, Mister editor of the newspaper, that I could have had communicated to me' — in order to go faster for the readers — 'the story of the Abbé de Bucquoy by some of those bibliophiles who still remain, such as Monsieur de Monmerqué and others; to which I would reply that a serious bibliophile does not lend out his books' — there's always a reason not to let it go — 'he himself does not read them, for fear of wearing them out' — a bibliophile is not someone who loves the content of the book, who loves the object 'book,' that's what a well-known bibliophile is — and there, an anecdote, a digression, look, I'm not losing my thread, this digression is going to bring us back to violence — a well-known bibliophile had a friend, this friend had fallen in love with an Anacreon, a poet, tic-tic, a 16mo, a sixteenth-century Lyon edition, augmented with the poems of Bion, of Moschus and of Sappho — Sappho, the Greek poetess — the owner of the book—
1:08:39 had not defended his wife as fiercely as his 16mo volume — almost always his friend would come to have lunch at his place, would walk indifferently through the library, but he would cast a furtive glance at the Anacreon; one day his friend said, "What are you doing with that badly bound and uncut 16mo? I'd gladly give the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in Italian, the Aldine princeps edition with Bellini's engravings, for that 16mo." "Frankly, it's to complete my collection of Greek poets." The owner merely smiled. "What more do you need?"
1:09:11 "Nothing, I don't like exchanging my books." "I'd even throw in my Roman de la Rose, wide margin, with annotations by Marguerite de Valois." "No, let's not talk about it any more." "As for money, I'm poor, you know that" — the tone rises — "but I'd offer you a good 1,000 francs." "Let's not talk about it." "Come now, 1,500 livres." "I don't like money matters between friends." The resistance only increased the desires of the bibliophile's friend; after several more rejected offers, having reached the last extremity of passion, he said to him: "Well, I'll have the book at your sale, that is, once you're dead, as part of the inheritance." "You're giving yourself half a page there — but I'm younger than you." "Yes, but you have a bad cough." "And you're asthmatic — one can live eighty years with that." I'll stop there, Mr. Director — this discussion could be a scene by Molière, or one of those sad analyses of human folly that only Erasmus ever treated with any gaiety. As a result, the bibliophile died a few months later, and his friend got the book for 600 francs. "And he refused to let me have it for 1,500 francs," he would say later, every time he showed it off. Yet whenever there was no longer any question of that volume, which had cast a single cloud over a fifty-year friendship, his eyes would well up
Demolished towers and the vase of Soissons 1:10:21 at the memory of the excellent man he had loved. This anecdote is worth recalling in an age — well, you see, it's not carnage here, but it's violent. I'm continuing, to show you that we don't stop there, we don't stop there. When we take up the walk again, page 136 — that's it, the bibliophiles' anecdote is over, it's finished — we take up the local movement again before arriving in front of the Strasbourg railway, and I'm doing a crayfish-style reading, going from Ver to Dammartin, for those who know the area a little. Dammartin is the hill, one of the highest around; when you come from Paris, it's the first hill you see from the Porte de la Villette, and that's what explains why this area remains pleasant to visit, touristically preserved, and remains, as Nerval says, a place where one can dream the most beautiful dreams in the world, because this series of hills very quickly discouraged the engineers building roads and railways, which simply go around them. So it stayed outside of development; there are lots of stud farms, châteaux, woods, ponds, you see — there aren't many towers and tower blocks, which aren't far off though. From Ver to Dammartin, which is on the boundary, it's barely an hour and a half's walk. I had the pleasure of admiring
1:11:31 on a beautiful morning the horizon ten leagues off — 40 km — stretching out; it's flat country where, if you climb up just a little, 150 meters, you get a view almost like from Mont Blanc — I'm exaggerating a bit — the horizon of ten leagues stretching around the old castle, once so formidable, dominating the whole countryside. The high towers are demolished — the theme comes back each time: "Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie" — I had evoked castration because Aquitaine is Nerval's father's domain, he was from Agen, whereas his mother was from Valois, I recall that here — there's a whole logic to it, but every time he gets there, so close to his goal, to the cradle of the châteaux, of the Longueval family, we won't see any château, there are only ruins, but we will see, vertically, that there are underground levels — so I have the pleasure of admiring, sorry, the high towers are demolished — the high towers are demolished, but there's a vertical dimension there, it's in my outline, all this, you see, when I talk about the horizontal being invaded by the vertical — up to now we've been walking along on the level, but the high towers are demolished, yet the outline can still be made out on this elevated spot where lime-tree avenues have been planted, serving as a promenade, at the very point where the entrances and the courtyards, hedged with hornbeam, once stood
1:12:41 and barberry bushes and hedges if you prefer, and belladonna prevent any fall into the abyss — you see the vertical dimension with the danger, "any fall into the abyss" — formed still by the moats. Archery — a still popular local sport — has been set up for the archers in one of the moats near the town. Sylvain has gone back to his own country — exit Sylvain — we arrive at Dammartin, the boundary of the land of the forests of Ermenonville, and so the man of the woods disappears, the narrator finds himself alone. "I continued my way toward Soissons through the forest of Villers-Cotterêts, entirely stripped of leaves" — we are indeed in November — "but greened here and there by plantations of pine which today occupy the vast spaces of the heavy cuttings made in former times" — I'll skip a bit — "in the evening I arrive at Soissons, the old Augusta Suessionum, where the fate of the French nation was decided in the sixth century" — what are you alluding to?
1:13:32 "It's your history after all, but if the French nation begins at Soissons, what are you alluding to?" "The vase — but yes, of course, the vase, the vase of Soissons." "Was it you who broke the vase of Soissons?" Don't forget, all this is politically important — up to that point there were Frankish tribes, France didn't exist, there were different tribes; the Franks were one of the most powerful Germanic tribes — it's quite funny when people set French mentality against German mentality: the Franks, the heart of Germany — for the Germans it's the green heart of Germany, what they call Franconia — you say Franconia rather than "France," it's the region of Nuremberg, they prefer Franconia — Franconia in German, "land of the Franks" — that's where the Franks come from. Afterward, they saw that in Burgundy there were pretty girls, good wines, they settled there, the Burgundians — nice deal, makes for a fine country. As for the Visigoths, remember the Vandals, they conquered the south of Spain, Andalusia — it's Vandal-usia, let's not forget — well yes, it was the great Germanic invasion. So up to then it was Frankish tribes
1:14:45 that is to say, politically based on a certain equality — the tribes, it's important, because we find the same thing with the Trojan War, we find Ulysses. How does the Trojan War start? Over a dispute about the spoils, we agree on that. Achilles withdraws to his tent because his captive is taken from him, because Agamemnon, who is nothing more than a minor war chief appointed chief of war for that expedition alone — otherwise each of the petty kings, all the Achilleses, the Nestors, are masters in their own domain, and Ulysses is the king of Ithaca — when you look at his palace at the end, you see there's a pile of manure in the courtyard, you mustn't imagine it was like the Château de Chambord either — I mean, these were fortified farms. But there you have it, there was a certain egalitarianism among the Frankish tribes, and then Clovis put an end to that equality by smashing the skull of the man who had broken the vase of Soissons, which Clovis had claimed for himself out of envy, out of jealousy, since he hadn't gotten it — the man had broken it with his francisca. So the following year Clovis said, "Remember the vase of Soissons," the resentful man, and he smashed his skull
1:15:56 and what is Nerval alluding to? Everyone knew this by heart, especially since there was a revival of medieval studies at the time, with historians like Augustin Thierry and, later, Michelet especially. So I mean, he shatters a skull there — it's no longer just a dispute between bibliophiles dying of sciatica, no, I mean it's the skull of the Frankish warrior that flies into pieces and puts an end to primitive egalitarianism, and inaugurates the absolute monarchy that will produce the most prestigious monarchy in Europe. I'm not doing history for its own sake here, though — but I'm still on the chapter of these connotations of violence and carnage found in the last digressions. That's Soissons: "the golden vase was broken, and later the head of the egalitarian Frank met the same fate under the francisca of his chief; such was the origin of the monarchy" — imagine writing that at the very moment of being censored under Napoleon III's coup d'état, we mustn't forget that. Alright, I'll skip over a little description of Soissons, let me check there aren't too many tombs
Abelard's tower and the Carolingian Pompeii 1:17:08 I haven't skipped, it's fine — the companions, the workers — Nerval loved talking with people nobody in his circle talked to; they talk with tramps in Montmartre, with those digging in the quarries, because they were beginning to find fossils in Montmartre, and Buffon, at the end of the 18th century, had already begun making hypotheses that came close to the theory of evolution. Nerval, Nerval chats with policemen when he's penniless and is lodged in Saint-Germain, Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris — thanks to that he's lodged by policemen because he'd been to Africa, to the Orient, on his travels, and so there he is, talking with them on a hammock — and here he talks with the stonemasons' guild. "I conversed with the stone-cutters, who seemed to me very knowledgeable about the history of art; they regretted, as I did, that they were not restoring the old cathedral of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes instead of the heavy church where they were employed; but the latter is, they say, more suitable for our times, in these eras of restrained faith one attracts the faithful only with elegance and comfort. The guild members pointed out to me, as something worth seeing, a curiosity: Saint-Médard, located a gunshot's distance from the town, beyond the bridge and the Aisne railway station; the most modern buildings
1:18:18 form the institution for the deaf-mute. A surprise awaited me there — it was, first, the tower, partly demolished" — another demolished tower, no, because you might think he's doing realist reportage — "where Abelard was imprisoned for some time." You know Abelard? "Where the very wise Héloïse..." — for whom Pierre Abélard was castrated, and then became a monk at Saint-Denis, for his love he suffered this misfortune — there was one man with his skull smashed three lines earlier, here it's someone flat-out castrated, blood flows — I'm not joking, these are the references Nerval strolls through while joking along the way. There you go: "A surprise awaited me there, it was first the tower, partly demolished, where Abélard was imprisoned for some time; Latin inscriptions in his own hand are still shown on the walls, then vast vaults" — ah, it's been a while — that's not the vertical dimension — "cleared out only recently, where the tomb of Louis the Pious was found, formed of a vast stone basin that reminded me of Egyptian tombs" — oh, you see, all of a sudden the underground world expands, Egyptian tombs, right there in the middle of the Île-de-France, no less! — near these vaults
1:19:28 composed of underground cells, with — we're two pages from the end — with niches here and there as in Roman tombs, one can see the very prison where that emperor was kept by his own children, the recess where he slept on a mat, and other perfectly preserved details." I'll skip a passage — and Nerval says it's "a Carolingian Pompeii" — in these Pompeiis, yes, there you go, I wanted to show you to what extent, and with what precision, Nerval's immanent symbolism unfolds, and so that gives a bit of flesh and blood to what seemed a bit sibylline in my outline. Alright, the thirteenth returns — it's still the first, you understood — his thirteenth letter, so we come back to the starting point, the Strasbourg railway takes us back to Germany at the start — the horizontal invaded by the vertical, we've just seen it, the surface by the underground world — the surface, but the advantage is that one can walk on the surface — the underground world, one stops and visits — the living through the dead, recurrences and tombs, and we've just seen it — the tragic background of the anecdotes and digressions — and I'll stop at the mists of history, and there I'll hand the floor to you, because the rest, on Nervalian intertextuality, I'll fit into my answer to your questions, which I anticipate
Determinability and determination; the maternal function 1:20:38 In everything you said, if I understood correctly, roughly, you wanted to show the necessity running through the Nerval text throughout, going through the preceding causes, to show that nothing is left to chance, to contingency, etc. But you perhaps haven't explained the universality — you insist on what lies behind, and the question is whether it's just a necessity particular to Nerval, to his states of mind, a determination particular to his family, the fact that he read a few texts by Rousseau when he was young and so had the figure of Rousseau in his head, or whether everything that's there is just a kind of particular neurosis, or whether there's something universal — it wasn't clear in what you said. In any case the question is clear. That's good, I'm glad — yes, but no, I'm glad this question came up, because it's exactly what comes next for me
1:21:50 If I finished — if we had finished today — that would express well the frustration hidden behind your question. Right, we'd like to know a bit more, and we didn't make this whole trip just for the fantasies of Mr. Gérard Labrunie, known as Nerval. That's it, that's what you mean — but we haven't finished yet, there are two more sessions in which I'll come back to the philosophical problems, as my outline says, that were raised in the course of this text, including this one: the incredible determinability that this text expresses, its predictability down to the smallest detail — whether it's the weather (I should add it was raining), the weather, the young girls' song, the half-demolished towers, in short, when you look closely there's practically no area in which this — I repeat — determinability does not operate. I recall, philosophically, that we distinguished last time but one — the German root this time, because it helps — Bestimmtheit
1:23:00 and Bestimmung. It happens in a detective novel, someone enters a room and says, "Someone has moved things around" — you see, we don't know who, we don't have the determination, but there's determinability — we can see that there's no chance in the displacement of objects, that's determinability. We don't have the exact cause, we haven't identified a determinate cause — that's determination — but we already sense that what's excluded is chance. So that's what I call determinability; other translators say "determinateness" to translate Bestimmtheit. So we've seen determinability at work — I use this cautious term, I'm not going as far as determination — is it sexual (Freudian field, to simplify — Freud is of course more complicated than that), or is it, on the contrary, class struggle and reference to history (Marxian field) — I'm doing it on purpose, I mean through simplistic reductions, but to show that it's not because we've highlighted a determinability — because we agree that chance is excluded — given the extraordinary rigor
1:24:11 and predictability of the text, that we thereby know the determinations at work in this text. Right, I'm answering your question — but in your question, precisely, it goes beyond this gap, since you're asking me: are these determinations valid only for the single individual — that's what I understood well — namely Nerval, in other words: well yes, not everyone had a mother who left me, while I was still nursing, to go follow her beloved husband on Napoleon's campaigns, and who ended up having me raised by cousins and grandmothers and by my maternal uncle, and that produced Gérard de Nerval, and I end up hanging at the end of a rope with not madness or suicide but both — psychic death and physical death. Very good question — we had partly answered it, if you recall, for those who were there, the last two or three times, when there is a text that will answer your question, I'll read it afterward, when I had recalled that there is
1:25:21 Nerval's mother — that's anecdotal, that concerns him — and then there's the maternal function in general, that concerns all of us. I'll quote Racine's line, "Du pied de l'autel vous y pouvez monter, Madame" — meaning, sovereign of the mothers/seas who must bear you — three verses — "sovereign of the mothers who must bear you" — here we're playing on the words "mères"/"mers" [mothers/seas], we're going to sail, we're going to Rome by boat like that — sovereign of the seas that must bear you — yes, but if one is borne, it's like a child by its mother, look at all the statues of the Virgin carrying the infant Jesus, the portraits, the paintings — sorry, or the statues, I'm thinking of statues because I'm thinking of the Burgundian Virgins that are 1m10 tall, wooden, with braids down to their knees, marvels, treading on a crescent moon — you know a bit, for those who know a bit of art history, as very often the Virgins in the Middle Ages — look in painting — tread on a crescent moon — what is this mixture of paganism and Christianity? Because the mother goddess is much older than the Virgin Mary herself, who comes very late in history with Christianity — the historical reference
1:26:31 I won't even go back to prehistory — the oldest historical reference here is Isis, which is the title of one of the tales in the Filles du Feu — Nerval used a text, translated a guidebook, etc., but he added a commentary — I'll tell you an extraordinary part — but Isis, who plays an immense role in Aurélia, in the account of his madness. Isis, let me remind you, outside of Nerval, in Egyptian mythology — so now I move to the universal, I'm answering your question — have we all been borne, yes or no? It's not particular, it's not the anecdote — I do mean borne, the pleasure of floating on water, on the sea, sailing — well yes, that's still better than what we've been doing since we were torn from the maternal womb — we immediately had to, apart from the light and all that, fight against gravity. I'm serious: being borne is the opposite of making an effort to stand upright — "cadaver" means to fall, it comes from cadere, meaning to fall, cascade — so your question is important, here is the text I wanted to read to you
Reading of the end of Isis: the immolated god 1:27:41 because it's timely — timely in the calendar sense, I mean, since I started reading this text by recalling that it was an autumn field, it's the Day of the Dead that I'm writing to you about — sorry, about these melancholy ideas, and between us, it's the ideal season to see this region — and then, of course, spring is always beautiful everywhere. Remember that sentence I like so much, by Senancour, whom Nerval loved a lot: "Spring is more beautiful in nature, but man has done so much that autumn is sweeter." So this time we'll consecrate spring — I'm alluding of course to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, which apparently inaugurates 20th-century music. So here is the text in question, which is at the end of the tale called Isis — I'll skip over the body of the tale, which is a visit to Pompeii, that was new at the time, people came to discover, to unearth this incredible patrimonial treasure that Herculaneum and — sorry, Pompeii — are, and so let me remind you, all this is in the area of Naples, on the slopes of Vesuvius, and there are two tales set in the region of Vesuvius in Filles du Feu: it's Isis and Octavie, which take place in Naples
1:28:51 that is, the volcano — that's the Daughters of Fire, there you go — I continue — nothing is to be excluded from chance, so Nerval gave a description — you know that Pompeii was Roman decadence, it was the Beverly Hills of the rich Romans, it was the Cocody for those who know Abidjan, the residential district, the Neuilly, I don't know how to put it, the Luberon — because now Lacan is treated with tea in the Luberon, you can't make this up — which Parisian with a bit of money didn't have his country property in the Luberon? To learn more, read in Michel Clouscard that masterpiece called La maison de campagne, an excerpt from Le Capitalisme de la séduction, in the last part, La maison de campagne — a gem. Alright, back to our subject: here, this was for rich Romans, it's actually — that's where the word "campagne" [countryside] comes from, it comes from Campania, which is the region of Naples, you see — and so he took us for a walk, and at the time there was a religious syncretism that's already pre-Nervalian, you know, it's the period when Christianity is going to win out, but before Christianity there was the cult of Mithra, well, historians know this well, at the end of an era
1:30:03 like that, all religions competed a bit, didn't they, for public favor — the cult of Mithras was very popular, it's the cult of the bull, it's the cult of the sun, it's the solar cult, all that — historians have noted there's a transition between polytheism and monotheism, and that transition is the solar cult; we remain in immanence since here the sun is something that is there, that isn't beyond, we see it with our eyes, but there is now only one principle unifying the sky — that's why the solar cult, Heliogabalus in Roman antiquity, Mithras — there are others, in Egypt there was the episode of Tutankhamun — Akhenaten, sorry — who tried to replace the old cult of Amun, of the old Egyptian animal gods, with solar centralization. That's it, and by the way the most centralizing king we ever had was called the Sun King, let's not forget, of course, that's all that — and here's the ending of this tale, and I told you you'll see why it's calendar-timely, since we've just celebrated Easter, and so we're going to finish by consecrating spring. And now, why these cries of drunkenness and joy, these songs of the sky, these palms that are waved, these sacred cakes shared on certain days of the year? It's because the child savior
1:31:13 was born long ago at this same time; why these other days of tears and mournful songs, when one seeks the body of a wounded and bloody god — I'm coming back to Isis, before the Mater Dolorosa, the Mother of Sorrows, whose sorrow is immense because she sees the wounded body of the crucified — before that there is Isis trying to revive the body of Osiris, whose phallus — that's the Egyptian version — has been broken into fourteen pieces that fell into the Nile; the water of the Nile is Isis's water, trying to reconstitute poor dismembered Osiris, the beloved child of Hermes and Osiris, as a line in the Chimères says. So that's what Nerval is alluding to: "Why these other days of tears and mournful songs, when one seeks the body of a wounded and bloody god" — I'm telling you this because we think of course of Christ, but this is well before — "where the moans resound from the banks of the Nile to the shores of Phoenicia" — present-day Lebanon — "from the heights of Lebanon to the plains where Troy once stood" — you see this syncretism, all of a sudden — why the one who is sought and mourned
1:32:23 is called here Osiris, further on Adonis — you find again the Adonai of the Bible, the eternal Adonai of the Old Testament — further on Attis — there's a line in the Chimères where he says "this handsome wounded Attis whom Cybele revives" — and why another cry, coming from deep in Asia, also seeks in mysterious caves the remains of a slain god — here it's Dionysus, who is said to come from Thrace, from Asia; you know that in imagery, in the proper sense, among painters and sculptors, Dionysus is always depicted on a chariot pulled by tigers or panthers, depending on the version, to show how much he comes from extra-European regions. That's the subject of The Bacchae — I won't go back into it, this incredible play by Euripides, for those who've heard of it, I hope, this play too — I'll tell it another time, because I should get back to your questions, which are quite rich after all — so, still, "and why another cry, coming from deep in Asia, also sought in mysterious caves the remains of an immolated god, a woman deified — mother, wife, or lover"
1:33:33 you see, "Nerval bathes with her tears this bleeding and disfigured body, victim of a hostile principle that triumphs through his death but will one day be vanquished" — ah, so one might say we're in Christianity — but no, we're in paganism, Nerval is telling us that the so-called Christian revelation is only a variation on a theme as old as human civilizations — that's roughly what's being said here — except that here he says it won't repeat forever, one day this hostile principle will be vanquished. Now, we already find this in which myth?
Prometheus, the truth of illusion, and the limit of art 1:34:05 that the god who wins for now will one day be vanquished by man — Prometheus, re-read Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus — it's odd that it isn't publicized more, there's nothing more anti-topical today than Prometheus — nowadays we're anti-productivist, etc., we agree on that, we have the cult of nature, whereas Prometheus is the one who brought — not forging metals and intelligence — so he's at once the ancestor of Daedalus, of engineers, all of that — Prometheus is the one who enabled man to make his way despite his initial handicap in creation, or in this absence of providence that we call creation, that's it. Now Prometheus says in so many words in Aeschylus: yes, Zeus prevails for now, but one day the men to whom I brought fire will avenge the martyrdom I suffer and will seize Zeus's throne and take from him the power that he himself usurped. You see what I'm doing?
1:35:10 I'm closing my own loop, I'm moving from Ulysses to Daedalus, from repetition — Ulysses, there we have the impression, like Nerval, that was a bit your question, we're repeating ourselves again, we end on the Strasbourg railway going in circles, that's not very interesting, we don't get out of it, literally, out of the loop — and yet there is, after all, "and who will one day be vanquished," and so I come back to my omega, I insist — sorry, it's a bit obsessive, my thing — but if you look closely at the letter omega, there's still a little gap that means it's not necessary that it repeat itself completely, there's a way of escape, including in the very first letter of the Odyssey, isn't there?
1:35:50 There, I say this to memorize it — I'm not sure the gap was made for that originally — so I continue: "a woman deified, mother, wife, or lover" — all of a sudden it's a grand slam — "bathes with her tears this bleeding and disfigured body, victim of a hostile principle that triumphs through his death but will one day be vanquished. The celestial victim is represented in marble or wax with her bleeding flesh, with her open wounds that the faithful come to touch" — Saint Thomas — "and kiss piously; but on the third day everything changes, the body has disappeared, the immortal one has been revealed, joy follows tears, hope is reborn on earth, it's the renewed feast of youth and of spring. Such is the primitive oriental cult, earlier and later than the faith in the fables of Greece." There, that answers your question exactly — we've moved to the universal, which means it's necessary that a cult be paid to what has borne us, so here the maternal is no longer at all an empirical matter — it could even be a man, at the limit — you mean it's Saint Christopher who carries Christ, the patron saint of drivers, yes or no — it's in Der Erlkönig where the father carries his son
1:37:00 on horseback, even if he arrives with a little corpse, because the son listened too much — not to the voice of the sirens, of the Lorelei on the Rhine, but to the voice of the Erlking — I'll go listen to Schubert's extraordinary lied. He read Goethe's poem in a tavern, amid noise, the smells of beer, and turning over the little beer receipt, he wrote the score for that staggering lied, the Erlking. So there's the essential point: that we are borne — that's the function, I'd like to draw your attention to that, because now we're getting closer to what's called the symbolic order — what matters is meaning, it's the function — I say function to give it a bit of scientific gloss, but simply meaning, I mean the finality — I say that because there's a ban on teleology now, we hesitate, but still, there is a mechanical order in nature, there is a finalist order in the historical, cultural, human, spiritual order, however you want to put it — whether it's an illusion or not changes nothing about the matter, it's the difference between the cause-effect pair and the meaning-sign pair, which is the human order par excellence, the order of language
1:38:10 for example, so I'm being very precise and serious at once — the universal is that, being borne — so it's a pity that it becomes the object of a cult; there is a truth of error, in this case religious illusion expresses a truth, exactly as the geocentric illusion expressed a truth — but one that had nothing astronomical about it, it was moral: it's better to be at the center than at the periphery, it's more comfortable and reassuring after all. That's what I call — you see it in point 2 of my outline — illusion and truth of the aesthetic, that's the limit of any aesthetic enterprise, the richness of art, and that's why Hegel is the first to devote several volumes to it, even though since Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium philosophy has been circling around the question of the beautiful — isn't that the title, "On Love" — and immediately one speaks of the beautiful, as if by chance, and then there's the Phaedrus, and then there's what Hegel himself said, the first time art was spoken of
1:39:20 philosophically, with seriousness — it's Kant's Critique of Judgment, which I alluded to two sessions ago, or Critique of the Faculty of Judging, depending on the translation, where there's this brilliant analogy Kant draws between aesthetic judgment and organicity in the living world, and if he devotes those last, equal forces to this theory of art, it's at the same time to show its limit — but at the same time that limit is tied to its power of truth. He even says art is "a divine service to the glory of truth," an almost hyperbolic homage, isn't it — but it's a symbolic homage, meaning art doesn't know what it's doing, it expresses this truth without its own knowledge, and this truth is fatal to it because it belongs to the order of representation — but truth is not a representation, truth is in presence, it is not in re-presenting. That's the second part
The question not asked: Perceval and Rousseau's tomb 1:40:31 of my answer to your question — that's why I'm obliged both to take detours through Nerval, because it's an exceptionally rich work in symbolic content, but not in order to stay in the symbolic order — and that's why I told you last time, I too come back to Rousseau's tomb — if we've moved past it, it's because we haven't asked the question — remember I said that, I even referred to the flaw that haunts the whole novel — it's the reference I forgot to mention, on the Conte du Graal — it's not by Chrétien de Troyes, the title — it's Perceval le Gallois, or the Conte du Graal, that's the title, you can find it in Folio, a good, very accessible translation, because in Old French you'd really need to be a specialist — so Perceval, throughout the romance — it's a romance, it's a romance in verse, it's a poem, a romance, whatever — is going to atone for not having asked the question, when he, who wasn't even looking for it — there are all those who seek the Grail and can't find it, he doesn't seek it, he walks right into it, he sees the Fisher King, he sees the Grail, he sees the maidens carrying the Grail and that dazzling light — but he is so
1:41:41 struck, so addressed by the Fisher King's suffering, that it renders him mute, and so he forgets to ask the question: what is this Grail, what food does the king find in it, etc. I had even quoted for you the incredible passage where the Grail's messenger arrives right in the middle of a banquet, when Perceval finally has his fifteen minutes in society — he, the wild boy, raised in the forest by his mother, far from the clashes of wars and hatreds — now he's the prince of the feast, because they've realized he's a powerful knight, and so he's now part of King Arthur's court — and there, at the very moment he's the prince of the feast, the Grail's messenger arrives, a monster such as one sees — a benevolent monster, but such as one only sees in Bosch's paintings, you know, at the end of the Middle Ages, or in certain Bruegels — with monkey or cat eyes, teeth like egg yolk — the description is terrible — and she addresses Perceval, who is at the banquet, and says to him: "Oh you, Perceval, you did not ask the question; had you asked it, the rich king who is so afraid would have been healed of his wound and would have kept his land in peace." And it's from this intervention that Perceval leaves the banquet
1:42:51 and decides to find the Grail castle again, and that will be the quest. You see, Nerval couldn't do more, like a little Tom Thumb with his pebbles in the forest, than lead us to Rousseau's tomb — after that it's up to us to play. And there I'll take up your question: it's the tomb that encloses the Social Contract, we're no longer in personal anecdote, he hasn't taken us to Mortefontaine, the maternal village, which is the case in Sylvie. I have thirty seconds left, I'll still go, in Sylvie — which, let me remind you, is a tale at the opposite pole from Angélique, very autobiographical — where he finds himself, as it were, making a final attempt at marriage with the little peasant girl Sylvie, whom he'd known as a child and had the misfortune of leaving for a few hours for the beautiful Adrienne, who sang so well — and now, past thirty, the desire comes back to him to return; she hasn't waited, she's engaged — I'll go through this quickly — to the apprentice baker who comes from the village, who is his foster brother, the one because of whom he nearly drowned in the Oise
Reading Sylvie: the temple of philosophy 1:44:01 and as he arrives on the day of Saint Bartholomew's, which is the feast of the archery guild, when no one sleeps all night, when they dance all night, Sylvie is tired, so she sleeps — so while waiting, there's always some delay, some time to kill, he decides to go see Rousseau's tomb at Ermenonville — it's the reverse of our tale — it's to fill a gap while waiting for her to wake up, and so we have this, at that moment — and it's in the middle of the afternoon — "everyone was asleep, tired from the festival; the idea came to me to amuse myself with a walk to Ermenonville, one league away, four km, through the forest path; it was fine summer weather, I first enjoyed the coolness of this road, which seems like a park avenue" — I'll skip a bit — "at one point I risk getting lost, for the posts whose signs point to various roads no longer show, in places, more than faded lettering" — always this loss of traces — "finally, leaving the desert to my left, arriving at the dance clearing," and there we find again our political Arcadia, where the elders' bench still remains, all the memories of ancient philosophy resurrected by the former
1:45:11 owner of the estate came flooding back to me before this picturesque realization of the Anacharsis and of the Émile, Émile turned into landscape — when I saw the waters of the lake shining" — the lake with the island and Rousseau's tomb — it's a pond — "when I saw the waters of the lake shining through the branches of the willows and hazel trees, I fully recognized a place where my uncle" — there's the benevolent genius who appears at the right moment — "had led me on his walks many times, the initiating uncle — it's the Temple of Philosophy, it exists, I mean, look it up on the internet, Temple of Philosophy Ermenonville, you'll see a very beautiful photo — "which its founder did not have the happiness to finish" — it has the form of the Temple of the Tiburtine Sibyl — that's in Naples, the domain of fire echoing itself — "and still standing under the shelter of a clump of pines, it displays all these great names of thought, on each column there's the name of a philosopher, it starts with Montaigne and remains unfinished at Rousseau" — it begins with Montaigne and Descartes and stops at Rousseau — "this unfinished edifice is already nothing but a ruin, ivy gracefully festoons it, brambles invade the disjointed steps; there, as a child, I saw festivals"
1:46:21 where young girls dressed in white came to receive prizes for study and wisdom — where are the rose bushes that surrounded the hill, the eglantine, the raspberry bush hide the last remaining plants, which are reverting to a wild state — in short, another abandoned place. As for the laurels, have they been cut? You know, "they won't go to the woods anymore" — as for the laurels, have they been cut, as the song says, of the young girls who no longer want to go to the woods — "no, these shrubs of sweet Italy" — laurel is Mediterranean — "have perished under our misty sky; fortunately Virgil's privet still flowers, as if to support the master's word inscribed above the door" — you can still read it today — Rerum cognoscere causas — that's transgressive, "to know the reason of things" — that's the Renaissance, Greek antiquity, it's not the ban on knowledge that Christianity will bring — "yes, this temple will fall like so many others, men, forgotten or weary, will turn away from its surroundings, indifferent nature will reclaim the ground that art disputed with it, but the thirst to know" — this Nerval, all of a sudden bold and transgressive — "but the thirst to know will remain the eternal motive of all force and all activity" — we're no longer in personal anecdote — and here are the poplars
1:47:32 of the island, and the tomb of Rousseau, empty of his ashes — we're not here for fetishism — "O sage, you had given us the milk of the strong" — one would think he's speaking of prehistory, it's the generation just before, almost — "and we were too weak for it to profit us; we have forgotten your lessons, which our fathers knew, and we have lost the meaning of your word, last echo of the wisdoms of antiquity" — this text couldn't answer your question better — "yet let us not despair, and as you did at your supreme moment, let us turn our eyes toward the sun" — last echo of the wisdoms of antiquity — you've already noted that Nerval traces, as it were, a brilliant hyphen between Plato's Republic and Rousseau's Social Contract. Does that answer your question, yes or no?
Question about Daedalus and technology 1:48:16 It's a vast question, yes — but he can't talk much more, it's up to us to continue, right? Reading this — but it'll be even more apparent when we come back in the two remaining sessions. Yes, of course, yes of course — it's the last ones — because it's time to eat. Isn't Daedalus, who defeated Zeus's principle, going to be threatened by hubris? Are you talking about Prometheus or Daedalus? Well, I was talking about Daedalus as engineer — yes, it amounts to the same thing, but it's not Zeus, it's Minos — he escaped from Minos's temple, he was Minos's slave, that's right — no, but it's the same, it's the same, the function of the master, Zeus, Minos, etc., we agree on that — how will he manage the risk?
1:49:03 No, but that's a very good question — hubris — no, it's exactly the opposite: thanks to science, because he's an engineer, Daedalus finds the middle way, that is, what allows one to go neither into the servitude of the low nor into the excess, the hubris, of the high, where his son Icarus will go astray — he finds the right path. And that's why — check for yourselves, I did check, because mythology never ends, there are endless variants — there's not a single one where he meets a tragic end; Daedalus has a happy ending, he knew how to find the middle way. To transpose that to our era: don't science and technology put us in a situation where we no longer know how to find the limit, which might lead us to a form of self-destruction?
1:49:46 That's the most Nazi of philosophers' favorite theme — I'm thinking of Heidegger — I think it's an old reactionary thematic to put technology on trial. If I kill someone with a knife, we don't send the knife to jail — let's leave aside the trial of techné, we need to send the murderer to jail. Yes, but he could have sent an atomic bomb instead of the knife — it's true that the more the means increase — that's technology — the more the possibility of doing evil increases, but also the more one is able to do good, because with the same knife I can remove your appendix in an emergency and save your life. So that's why this issue is very badly framed — there's no trial to be made of techné — no, no, I'm giving a philosophical and Marxian, Marxist answer, I'm not ashamed to say Marxist — namely, one must not put the productive forces on trial but rather the relations of production; within what relations of production are these productive forces inscribed, whom, what do these techniques serve — that's the real question. Because I remember you explained that ancient Greece was also the domain of the line, well, that there was the importance of limits, and it was —
1:50:56 but doesn't that come down to the slave-holding relations of production? I'm asking the question, that is, somewhere there's a limit not to be transgressed, because it's a precarious equilibrium, it didn't last long — Greece, like every miracle, isn't it — Alexander's father first, Philip of Macedon, then Alexander quickly made short work of it, and the Empire soon replaced the city-state, and as for Rome, that settled everyone's account afterward. I mean, there's a very beautiful poem by Hölderlin on this, I won't stray too far since we don't have much time, but he says of the Greeks, he wants — a mysterious fragment — he wanted to found an empire of art, but the national, for him — meaning what lies at the origin of this historical figure, which is Greece — but the national among them was neglected, was disregarded, and Greece, supreme beauty, sank pitifully. That's interesting, right? So, as if the emancipation of Prometheus, so of the slave, in a way of the Titan — for the gods reduced the Titans to slavery, that's the mythology — it's interesting to see Marx analyze it, moreover, in reference to Greek mythology, how the Titans have a strange, ambivalent relationship to the gods, they serve them since they make
1:52:06 weapons for the gods, like the blacksmiths, and at the same time they rebel, hence the gigantomachy — so that's the answer to the question, as if the emancipation of the Titans, that is of the slaves, was at the same time the end of a certain model. Greece showed the path a democratic collectivity could follow within itself, to the exclusion of everyone else — there were roughly 20% free men and the rest were slaves. So this miracle has to be extended to the whole of the social body — that's basically Rousseau's social contract, roughly speaking. That takes time — it took more than 2000 years. That's what Hegel calls the patience of the concept. There you go. Thank you. Thank you all.
