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 proper use of rote learning and Descartes's sentence 1:32 Hearing is more inclusive than sight, if you look at it closely, by saying "Good evening, dear friends" — that's for both sexes or both genders, as you prefer. I hope our session this evening will be less chaotic and less subject to Facebook's intermittent glitches — since this time it really wasn't our fault — than last time. Apparently, according to what Philippe tells us, the Facebook connection seems to be rather good this evening.
2:04 So, I'm resuming our exploration. We try to make it as philosophical as possible, of these two contradictory, complementary and inseparable notions, as we increasingly see, of memory and anamnesis, of anamnesis and amnesia — it alternates.
2:43 And with texts — since this is the several time now that I haven't fulfilled my contract, that is, we send you a series of texts that we hope you'll immerse yourselves in before the session, that would really be ideal, to remove certain difficulties or obscurities on first reading, so that the analysis or commentary afterward is clearer.
3:20 I'll take the opportunity to make a small pedagogical reminder — pedagogical in the strict sense, meaning it's mainly addressed to teachers. You know it's fashionable in teaching, in so-called modern theories, to be, as they say, non-directive, isn't it? So people call themselves modern, and in fact it goes back three centuries, since Montaigne already said very well, and he was right, that a well-made head is better than a well-filled head, to quote one of his most popular sayings.
4:00 He was already attacking a certain deadening use of rote learning that took place in the memorization of sacred texts in particular. I had mentioned that the word "kyrielle" [litany, string] actually comes from "Kyrie eleison" — from repeating "Kyrie eleison" at Mass so much without even understanding what it meant, people invented the word "kyrielle," right? So why am I bringing this up…
4:34 You see we're not far already from the problems of memory, I'm talking about rote learning. Because on the contrary, I recommend to those who teach a good use of learning by heart. Having a stock of texts in one's head is extraordinarily formative, most of the time even without the person learning them realizing it. Sometimes it's only years later that they notice how much more supple, more nuanced their thinking has become.
5:08 Better able to express complexity, when they had been used to sentences which, unlike text-message communication — which has its use in a few situations, I'm not here picking the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns — but still, human communication shouldn't be reduced, should it, to grunts such as we too often see on tiny screens. I mean that a sentence like the one…
5:38 I'll continue my digression on learning by heart. We're already there. A sentence like Descartes's, which I used to quote quite a bit when I was presenting the theory of knowledge, particularly the rationalist point of view — when Descartes alludes to what philosophy should borrow from the mathematical approach, there's this sentence: "Those long chains of very simple and easy reasonings which geometers habitually use to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations had given me occasion to imagine that all things which fall within human knowledge follow on from one another in the same way, and that, provided only that one abstains from accepting any as true which is not, and always retains the order needed to deduce one from the other, there is nothing so remote that one cannot reach it, nor so hidden that one cannot discover it."
6:39 I always laugh because I can't help imagining someone who is, isn't it, undressing a sleeping woman — when it comes to "nothing so hidden that one cannot discover it" — pulling off the sheets and blanket with the heroic and efficient gesture of that musketeer that Descartes was. You see, this kind of sentence has become very hard today to master, with its main clauses, relative clauses, subordinate clauses like that.
7:12 In short, I'm not against oral culture, especially not having lived in Africa, believe me. I think I've talked enough about the importance of the griot for no one to suspect me of such a misreading. But alongside what is irreplaceable in orality, and all the connections orality has with the auditory, with musicality, rhythm, etc., we mustn't forget — we must forget it all the less, since there's also a rhythm to the written sentence — we mustn't forget the importance of written formulation for the agility of thought.
Djebel Irhoud and the logic of naming 7:57 There, that's a recommendation I make to the teacher, closing my parenthesis. So, I'm very grateful to Philippe for having done an edit that lets us dive, right from the opening credits, into the video we didn't have time to comment on when I presented it to you, at the time of the second episode of our inquiry into memory and forgetting, into anamnesis and amnesia — that nearly two-hour Arte film, of which I'll only comment, I reassure you, on a tiny part, right at the end, which we'll show again in a moment; it's very short, I think it's not even quite three minutes at most.
8:46 In fact, the bulk of the video, the longest part, which I won't come back to first, because it's not my field, and there it's me who's learning all sorts of things — well, it's the viewer who's learning all sorts of things — revolves around a discovery that somewhat upended, I speak here in unison with the world of specialists on the question, when you consult them, that upended the world of paleoanthropology, so to speak, the specialists of our ancestors, to put it quickly.
9:23 So how was it an upheaval? I'll go straight to the essentials, and besides I don't see how I could do otherwise, it's not my field, I'd have trouble going into the technical details, but you'll find them in this admirable video, which is very well made for the laypeople that we are, and which popularizes with great intelligence techniques we're rarely informed about, dating techniques in particular. So the upheaval comes from the fact that the discovery was made in an area where one wouldn't have expected to find one of our ancestors so ancient.
10:03 And when I say ancestor here, I'm insisting not on ancestors in general, but on our ancestors. Here we have to come back to philosophy, that is, a bit to logic too — the logic of everyday words, the logic of natural language, not formal mathematical logic. Let's leave the Vienna Circle aside, let's come back to serious things. I won't say to rigorous things — the Vienna Circle is very rigorous — but I don't know if it's serious to ask that logic to settle problems debated in the language we actually speak.
10:36 Namely, I'll make a small detour. When I say the molecule is the smallest component of a given body, for example. I do say "of a given body," but wait, wait, wait. If I take the water molecule, that is, strictly speaking, I isolate two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.
11:08 There, no more, no less. There, I'm still within water. That doesn't mean I've reached the limit of what I can divide, because I can still distinguish — since there are two hydrogen atoms, I can put one on the left and the other on the right. Or call one little a and the other little b. All it takes is naming and classifying to subject things to ourselves, you know. That's how God gave Adam the power to name the creatures, hence power over the world altogether.
11:38 To give them either names or numbers. Now, one can go on dividing, set the oxygen apart and the hydrogen apart, but then one is no longer within water. A hydrogen atom is no longer water. So what we've left behind is the naming. You see, we're within the logos. We still have something. The physicist always has something under his microscope, but it must no longer be called water.
12:12 That's not a physics problem. It's a matter of knowing what we're talking about and being clear among ourselves. Well, it's the same way. You can go a long way back among our ancestors. Right? But some go back so far that we've long since ceased to be within man. You can also go back to the amoeba.
12:42 Now, you know, I say this because often, hesitation, ignorance — the ignorance I defend, which I understand when dealing with complex scientific matters — when we try to fill a gap in knowledge with a plenitude of words. I'm alluding to a paleoanthropological term like "pithecanthropus," for instance. You know, Java Man, for example. We have the name right here: pithecanthropus. Now, "pithēkos" means ape, and "anthropos" means man.
13:15 So, since we're not sure whether it's an ape or a man, well, we've made everyone agree. We said it's the ape-man. Long before, people spoke of Tarzan as the ape-man, didn't they? There, it's a bit of a play on words. It's a bit the same way as when we say, "Oh, my poor friend, I believe your trouble is psychosomatic." Well, "psyche" is the soul, "soma" is the body. You have an illness that can be attributed just as much to psychological problems as to physiological and biological ones.
13:47 There you go. That's what you might call the magical use of speech. We don't really know how it's all unified, but we unify it in a single word. There. So, careful. In what way, to get back to my thread, does this extraordinary discovery made in Morocco mark an important date in the discipline occupying us this evening, or rather at the start of this talk?
A 300,000-year-old Homo sapiens in Morocco 14:21 It's that until now, when I say "our ancestors," meaning us, meaning the first ones, since the first Homo sapiens — one can go back further. But I no longer know whether we should say "us," I'll let you be the judge. Isn't it — a monkey swinging on its tail, with a prehensile tail — there are mostly some in South America, I mention in passing, that have prehensile tails much more than in Africa.
14:54 There. Besides, here again we'll find a somewhat magical use of language. Zoologists speak of anthropoid apes, for the chimpanzee, the orangutan, the gorilla, and sometimes even the gibbon. The anthropoid ape — you find the idea again, yes, the Platonic idea, that is, the old meaning, the ordinary meaning of "eidos" for the Greek man in the street who wasn't doing philosophy — it means the look, the form, the appearance. It means apes that have the look of man, that from a distance one could mistake for men.
15:29 I have a digression — I was in Ouagadougou, the first time I arrived in Ouagadougou, in Burkina, I was very young, I was with my friends, my parents, they had been kind enough to take me by car from Côte d'Ivoire all the way to what is now Burkina. And so, from the balcony of my little hotel in Ouagadougou, I said, but I've never heard that there were pygmies in Upper Volta — it was still called Upper Volta before Sankara solemnly renamed the country the land of upright men, Burkina Faso.
16:01 I didn't know there were pygmies; when I saw pygmies in the distance in the street, I actually went closer — they were vultures. You know, walking with a waddle near the market like that; from a distance it was striking, you'd have thought it was a kid, wandering, hopping a bit on its legs. You see, apes that have the shape of man. So, all right, let's put some order into all this. The discovery made near the Moroccan coast is formally identified as belonging to the genus Homo, to the point that a new term has appeared in paleoanthropology.
16:47 We no longer just say hominids — if we still say it — but a further term has been added: hominids, where you notice "-id" again, meaning all those with the shape of man. The gorilla is a hominid. To stay within the genus Homo, we now say hominins. It's a new notion. Now, up until then, the very first Homo sapiens appeared — you know, you've heard of Lucy, of Yves Coppens, who did admirable work — appeared in an area that was more or less always the same, and which broadly has two centers: East Africa, particularly Ethiopia and Kenya, and a few cases in Southern Africa.
17:37 It's roughly the same circuit, isn't it? Pretty much all along what's called the Rift, the great East African fault. The rest being much more recent — thus the first Homo sapiens in Europe, the oldest are on the order of 50,000 years, to put it simply, and perhaps a bit more in Spain, though most of the time rather less, isn't it? But anyway, generally speaking, except in that region of East Africa and Southern Africa, where we already found fossils of our ancestors, with toolmaking work etc., more than 200,000 years old, between 200 and 400,000, sometimes, for the oldest ones.
18:34 And here we find in Morocco a Homo sapiens fossil 300,000 years old, which completely upends the scenario we had until then, which said everything began in East Africa, and then afterward… So you can imagine I don't claim to intrude into these discussions, the discussions are still ongoing, but what interests me — and here I'll let the scientist speak — is the moment when the scientist shows he has great intelligence.
Continuous, discontinuous, and threshold; excerpt from the film 19:12 He doesn't only have great knowledge in his discipline, he has a great transversal intelligence, because it's a somewhat collective film, there are several of them, it's a team, but you'll see, there's a project leader, a Frenchman, between 50 and 60 years old — I hope I'm not aging him — who, at a certain point, speaks precisely of this problem, of the passage from a being still to be classed as pre-human, as not yet human, to man.
19:47 And you know, you often hear me say, the cursor — you mustn't think it stopped at midnight on some December 31st, that all of a sudden that year we passed from animality to humanity. Isn't it. And he adds — and this is what I'd like you to hear, in these words — and he directed the whole excavation team — he adds: evolution continues to take place.
20:20 That is to say, we continue to hominize ourselves. I'm telling you the stakes before the game. Isn't it. I… so as not to lose the stakes within the game. So as not to lose the essence within the example. It's an old Hegelian play on words between "Spiel," to play, isn't it, and "Beispiel," the example — the example is particular, the stake is general and universal. What am I in the process of saying?
20:52 To recall that there is here a dialectic of the continuous and the discontinuous. This dialectic of the continuous and the discontinuous was developed in a particularly fine way by the founding fathers — sorry for this religious metaphor — of Marxism. I'm thinking of Marx and Engels when they spoke of the notion of threshold. You know, you cool water down, you cool the water continuously.
21:25 It gets colder and colder. That's soon what's going to happen. Soon we shall plunge into the cold darkness. Farewell, bright light of our too-short summers. And up to a certain threshold — ah, there we're no longer within the continuous. You know, when you cross a threshold, you pass from one order to another. From an outside to an inside, for example. There, there's discontinuity. There's a change of order. And you pass from liquid to solid, for example.
21:57 From flowing water to ice. Ah, it's still H2O. But careful, is it water? Or a stone? Who's to say. We are sovereign when it comes to naming. Never forget that. We don't have to ask the object how it should be named. It will never answer. And here, this threshold is the one between animality and humanity. We'll play this clip. I'm going to ask Philippe to start it in a few seconds. But I ask you to pay close attention to the moment, precisely, that I'll comment on afterward, I'll come back to it, do a little recap, where he says clearly, speaking of his colleagues, of all those who discuss this problem.
22:43 He says clearly, there's a desire — that's not a scientific term — there's a desire to want that at a certain moment, there we go, this time, now we're dealing with man, it's definitive. He says no, it's a permanent evolution that continues with us. We'll launch the clip and it'll be clearer afterward. "These mutations, we now think probably appeared independently in different parts of Africa, and that basically it's the coalescence of all these changes that gradually gave rise to what we call modern man."
23:22 "In June 2017, the team published in Nature the first two articles presenting the results of all their work. Their impact was worldwide. And the whole world discovered the existence of Jebel Irhoud. This site of Jebel Irhoud is classified as national heritage. And we hope that this site, for its future, will become a World Heritage site."
23:57 "The site and the remains at Irhoud are today a new essential reference point for reconstructing the complex history of our origins. North Africa did not enter into these debates about the origin of Homo sapiens. Now, with these discoveries at Irhoud, North Africa regains a — I'd even say — prime place in the debates about the origin of Homo sapiens. 300,000 years after his death, Irhoud Man opens a wide field for research."
24:34 "And the evolutionary history he reveals to us confronts us with a troubling observation. This brain — I find it striking to see that it kept evolving the whole time. There was never a moment where it stopped, where, that's it, we had the right brain and it was finished. It never stopped. We, modern Homo sapiens, are only one moment in a long evolutionary process still under way. And this simple fact prompts us to question the limits we set on our species."
25:06 "In the evolution of man, there has been a constant search to identify a point that would let us say, there, after this they are men, and before it's something else. There's this secret desire to find a boundary that would let us draw the line between the human and the non-human, the infra-human or something like that. I think that boundary doesn't exist."
25:36 So, you see, he himself says — prudently taking shelter behind that impersonal "one," which I find admirable in him — he says "there is always the desire to have crossed a threshold and to be certain" — this time I chose the example of water on purpose.
26:06 There can be no good answer to a bad question. Marx says somewhere — I would have to find where exactly, since I've been quoting it — I'm quite sure it's in the notes to Capital, where he says that what is most mystifying in ideology lies less in the answers it provides than in the way it poses the problems. So, the notion of threshold, I come back to it, and that's why I wanted this reference.
The Mediterranean as link, the Sahara as boundary; the image of the river 26:52 What does it teach us? You saw, when we looked at the map of Africa, that the two zones we said didn't communicate at all — East Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa, and the Maghreb — you only need to take a plane, from Paris say, to go to, I don't know, Cotonou on the shore of the South Atlantic in West Africa, or to Nigeria or Togo, it doesn't matter, or to Ivory Coast, to realize that the Mediterranean is not at all the border separating us from Africa. No, it's a hyphen. The Mediterranean is what makes us a family — the Greeks, the Algerians, the Spaniards, the Corsicans, the Provençals, the Italians, the Sicilians — it's goats, it's sheep, it's grapes, it's shepherds, it's pretty dark curly-haired girls, and then with
28:04 fairly patriarchal and sexist customs — well, that's not much more than in Black Africa, where women are far less, much less subjugated than in the Mediterranean world, isn't that so? No, it's not the Mediterranean that separates us from Africa, it rather connects us. It separated us for political reasons, when the Mediterranean became a Turkish sea, right?
28:35 Ottoman, and when we redeployed toward the Americas at that point. The real border — but you fly over it in a plane doing between 900 and 1000 kilometers an hour, that's the average for intercontinental jets — you count the hours — it's the Sahara, that's the border. For hours you fly over nothingness, a magnificent nothingness. There you go.
29:05 Now, at the time of the map they showed you in the film, in the video, it wasn't like that at all. The Sahara — no offense to the environmentalists who believe the Earth has only been warming since man's Industrial Revolution, no. The Sahara — because at that time in Europe there was the glacial period, the glaciers were advancing, yes, it was colder than today, unfortunately, we have to accept it, the glaciers were prowling not far from Marseille, from the Mediterranean.
29:40 And the Sahara was a humid zone, marshy, we might say. Traces of it can still be found — memory, the silent memory of stones, right? Over thousands of square kilometers, the Sahara is literally strewn with engravings — not paintings, but rock carvings, Neolithic, made by the hunter-gatherers of the time — often scenes of gazelle hunting, like that, and the most frequently depicted animals are cattle, herds of cattle. You know that takes grass to feed a herd of cattle, and tall grass at that — not the goats and sheep that graze short grass among three stones like where I'm from in Corsica, no, tall grass.
30:45 We've seen depictions of hippopotamuses, elephants, giraffes — animals that need a considerable quantity of vegetation each day. So all of that was quite humid, and thus communication between the peoples of East Africa and those of North Africa was much easier than we believe today. And as the speaker in the sequence you just watched puts it so well — the one who speaks French — he uses the word coalescence: it's the coalescence of several hearths that appeared independently of one another which, at a given moment, produces a threshold effect.
31:32 There isn't a single one that would be the origin. In short, what we call in philosophy — what's decisive here — is the appearance of, I quote, an always-already complex. I often use the image of a river to convey this. It's futile to seek the origin of a river in some absolute sense. Is it the Rhône, the Rhine — I deliberately choose two rivers starting with RH, which comes from the Greek root rhei, 'to flow.'
32:03 Leibniz produced some beautiful developments on this — yes, in the New Essays on Human Understanding, since he was also an immense linguist for his time. The Rhône, the Rhine even, I would say, and just as much the Danube, the Amazon, whatever you like, as well as a little stream only 20 kilometers long before it throws itself between two Normandy cliffs — at its source. And they don't have a single, univocal source.
32:35 When you go back up to the source, to what physical geography calls a receiving cone high in the mountains, you see that it flows a bit from every direction. It flows between your legs. Is it this little trickle here or the one 40 centimeters over, or 3 meters further on? It's when they gather together and start to converge, thanks to the slope, that what we call a watercourse begins.
33:06 An always-already complex. There is no pure origin, you see. So I always come back to our Mnemosyne — our memory loses itself in an indeterminacy that is not a weakness of our knowledge but, on the contrary, a weakness of the object to be known, which by itself is not capable of having a determinate name: 'you are this and not that.' So I am very grateful for what he says at the end of this film, where there's a real philosophical depth of great value — and philosophers say plenty of nonsense when they speak in the place of scientists, but scientists say at least as much nonsense when they play at being philosophers. Well, here we have the opposite example: we see someone doing real philosophy with great humility and great simplicity and clarity.
34:00 He says we always have this desire, don't we, to want there to have been a moment when a threshold was crossed making us pass from animal to man — he doesn't say animal, he says from what is pre-human, pre-hominid. There, that's a reference I hadn't gone back to, so I recommend it to you — when you have a bit of time, and with the lockdown I'm sure you will — it's a document of excellent technical quality, showing beautiful images too, not just of the landscape but of where the digs took place and continue to take place, but also technical mock-ups, models, reconstructions that are truly remarkable, exceptional. Another sacrificed one, among the texts I was sending you and didn't have time to deal with, is poor Hölderlin.
Reading of the first Mnemosyne by Hölderlin 35:10 I laugh because our friend and comrade Thomas, thanks to whom you're informed on our Facebook page that such-and-such a workshop resumes on such-and-such a date and time, tells me: 'I hope next time you'll be able to announce that poor Hölderlin, passed over in silence last time, will finally be dealt with.' So I'll be very clear: I'm not going to deal with all of it, not even today. I'm going to stay on this theme of anamnesis and amnesia for roughly the rest of today, to be clear, and after that I'll change the problematic and come back precisely to the relation between science and philosophy — I'm announcing this to you well in advance, but chronologically it's actually not far off. So I'll come back once more to the texts in question, but before addressing them I'd like — the two texts by Hölderlin titled Mnemosyne — we are here
36:21 at the center of our reflection with this figure, as you spoke of it so well last time. I'd like one thing to be clear: I am not doing a textual commentary, because this is of such richness that each line would require an exegesis taking several hours — each line. I'll try, one day, to do a session on a short text by Hölderlin to show just how far things go when you seriously try to dive into it — but here we're not doing textual commentary in the literary sense, but rather what interests us most given our theme, namely memory, amnesia, anamnesis. So there are two Mnemosyne texts. I'll tell you, the first is not the clearest — I saw that one of my listeners said 'oh my, this is heavy stuff.' Well, let me reassure him, I reassure him, I am not the only one who sometimes finds Hölderlin's passages rather enigmatic. But as one of his translators said, admirably, about another poem I won't quote today, called In Lovely Blueness
37:31 probably one of the most beautiful poems of all time and in all literatures — he said the unsurpassed beauty of this poem is such that its clarity discourages any desire for elucidation. That means: even if you don't understand everything, it's so beautiful. So, Mnemosyne, the first one — it begins like this, pardon, here it is: Ripe, dipped in fire, cooked, the fruits lie on the ground, and it is a law that all return there, like the prophetic serpent dreaming on the hills of heaven; and much, as a burden of logs on the shoulders, must be kept. But the paths are bad, and, wayward like nags, the elements go captive, and the ancient
38:41 laws of the earth; and always into the boundless goes the longing. But much is to be kept, and fidelity is necessary. But it is a falling forward and backward — we do not wish to look, but let ourselves be rocked, as on the swaying boat of the sea. As I've had quite a few remarks on the beauty of these poems, in the comments or in the letters kindly sent to me personally, I'll note there are other translations of this admirable passage, saying instead: 'but forward and backward we do not wish to look, but let ourselves be rocked like a swaying skiff on the sea' — it's all much the same, swaying, wavering. Right, I'll go back to the beginning now. Good, yes, once you look at it a bit closely, I don't know if everything is clear, but at least one can't say there's no logic. Ripe, dipped in fire, cooked — here we are in autumn, here we are, we finish the fruit season, you know it well, we wait for September, October,
39:51 November for the grapes to flood the produce aisle of the supermarkets, big or small. Ripe, dipped in fire, because it needs sunlight, it needs rays of sun to produce the sugar from which, through distillation, you can turn grape juice into wine. Ripe, dipped in fire, cooked — curious, this German, you'd think he'd spent a good part of his life in the Mediterranean, wouldn't you, when you see the figs on the ground, given over to the scorching August sun in Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, Spain, Portugal — you understand they're cooked by these rays that killed the children of Niobe, those who know the mythology understand me. Ripe, dipped in fire, cooked, the fruits lie like corpses on the ground, and it is a law that all return there, into the earth, like the prophetic serpent dreaming on the hills of heaven — again there's a logic here.
41:01 yes indeed, don't think it's just the poet's imagination saying whatever to throw us off, no. Look, the most emblematic place of prophecy in the whole Greek world, everyone knows it, is Delphi — of all Greece, despite everything that divided them, the Spartans, the Athenians, the Thebans, etc., and their quarrels and internal wars, there were three things uniting them: the language, the religion, the mythology, which is the same for all — Heracles is a hero for Sparta, Thebes, and Athens alike, right — and the Olympic Games. But here I'll stick to the mythology. Now, Delphi, the temple of Apollo, the prophet-god par excellence, the Pythian god — why Pythian?
41:50 because originally it's a python — you see, snakes — indeed, if you've visited Delphi you'll say, well now, here's an old African speaking, I'm an old African who lived a long time in Africa — straight away, when I saw the stream arriving, flowing down, because there's the whole Parnassus massif behind Delphi, you see, behind Apollo there's Parnassus, the mountain of the Muses, it all holds together — when I saw there, in those rocks under that scorching Greek summer sun, the coolness of the spring, I said: this is the ideal spot for snakes to come and shelter from the excesses of temperature, and that's how they seek coolness. You often see them in garages or laundry rooms, that's why they're often found in houses, which frightens the inhabitants in hot countries; but conversely, in winter, snakes retreat into the rocks and hide for several months until the return of the good season. So it should be understood — it's not complicated — all return there, into the earth, like the prophetic serpents dreaming on the hills
43:00 of heaven; much — the fruits, so apparently everything is destroyed, everything decomposes, everything falls apart — and yet, and much, as a burden of logs on the shoulders, is to be kept — and here's something that doesn't disappear, doesn't pass away, doesn't crumble, it's something one keeps, like Saint Christopher, you know, he carries Christ — I say this because I was talking with a driver the other day, Cari, when I compared Socrates, our patron saint of philosophers, he said 'it's like Saint Christopher for drivers' — and much, as a burden of logs on the shoulders — a very beautiful image — is to be kept. Good grief, memory compared to a burden of logs on the shoulders, because there's a word here concerning memory: to keep — much is to be kept. But notice how often 'but' appears — you're starting to get used to his rhythm — but the paths are bad. If there's a 'but,' it means we're about to hear the opposite. There, we were in the mnemonic instant, we hold firmly, we make the effort
To retain, a burden of logs; the cursor of decadence 44:11 to hold it — but what opposes our effort is that one leg goes left and the other goes right. But the paths are bad, and, wayward like nags — a somewhat precious translation, why not just say 'like horses'? That's what it is, because the word 'horse' in German is Ross, r-o-s-s — I understand a preference for German in translations, but still, it's a bit silly, sorry to the translator — and, wayward like nags, go captive — you see, like horses bolting.
44:44 what is it that goes off captive? The elements, the ancient laws of the earth. Remember when I spoke of chaos before Olympus, of the Titanic divinities before the Olympian gods, of the disorder that preceded order, of the irrational that preceded the rational, of the indeterminate — that is, what one has trouble naming because there isn't enough distinction yet. You see, I come back to this: is it an animal or a man, is it a monkey, is it a tool or an instrument — because good grief, there are monkeys that take a stone and crack a nut, birds — we say 'birdbrain' to mean there's nothing in the head — but birds who, with their beak, they don't even have hands — with their beak they pull out a thorn on a branch, and with this thorn, you see, like you at the aperitif when you skewer a sausage, they plunge the thorn into a hole — it's a complex gesture — to draw out a larva, from a hole in a tree, right, the hole drilled by an insect
45:54 to lay its larvae there, in order to extract a larva from it. So we'd say, ah well, there — and you see, I'd like to make you understand several things right now: that the discourse that presents itself as popularizing the hard sciences, like the one we just heard, is extremely easy to trip up, without the speaker himself even realizing it. That's why I took this one as an example, because he is exceptionally lucid and intelligent — intelligent in the sense that he doesn't fall into the usual traps of the scientist who suddenly leaves aside the equations, leaves aside the precise measurements by which he is far more competent than you and I — well, than most of you and me certainly, because I have excellent followers who are scientists — and who suddenly say, 'no, but you mustn't think Neanderthal was a brute, it's very fashionable to say we were completely wrong about Neanderthal' — in fact it's very fashionable, isn't it, to blacken the man we are, modern man.
47:05 You know, all misfortune comes from modern man, apparently. So there the cursor drifts around — some say all misfortune began with the Industrial Revolution, others say no, much earlier already, the Neolithic already, that's terrible, that's the start of the massacres and the carnage, you see. And look at the other Nobel-worthy figure, an immense physicist and cosmologist — that's his field, not mine — Barrau, Aurélien Barrau, he says misfortune began, hold on to your seats, with hunting and gathering — there isn't even sedentarization yet, there isn't even agriculture yet, and already we're in decadence, you see how far the delirium goes, it has no limit because it belongs to the order of the imaginary, the cursor slides and slides and slides, it has no more limit, so we'd have to climb back into the trees and, as was said earlier, chase our own tail, in order suddenly — it's not being short of original sin, because we're in the religious register here — you see, I make this long parenthesis to make you understand why I insist on these notions of threshold, and yes, through a poem
Date your memories: Freud and Suddenly, Last Summer 48:15 by Hölderlin, isn't it, which reminds us of the ancient elements, of the laws of the earth going in every direction and opposing our effort of memory, of saying, let's see, it was the 15th of January when I received the summons — wait, wait, when I went to Etienne's wedding with Nicole, it was indeed at — Freud used to say on this subject, date your memories, date them, otherwise you tell yourself stories. How many times do we say, well, I had it all wrong, I thought it was before I took my baccalaureate, but in fact I had known for a long while already, and so on. If you don't fix a date, you think you're dealing with your past through your subjective memory, and in fact you've completely reconstructed and recomposed a legend out of your memories, you see. So when I say putting things in order, there's much to keep — I return to Hölderlin's words — like a burden of logs on the shoulders,
49:25 because it takes an effort. I told you last time that in that admirable film I recommend, Suddenly, Last Summer, Mankiewicz's film — not with Montgomery Clift and Liz Taylor and Katharine Hepburn — there's a traumatic memory that is the key to the whole drama the film unfolds. Every time Liz Taylor tries to remember the shock from which her troubles began, she is suddenly covered in sweat, like all those who have had an accident and try to remember the last moments before the catastrophe of the shock. So yes, it takes effort, for much is to be kept on the shoulders, like a burden of chopped wood — wood is not so obscure after all, good grief, what opposes it, once again, is the irrational, the pre-Olympian, chaotic, Titanic irrational, isn't it, and yet —
50:35 there is a hesitation, you see, between the need for memory, to classify, here is what comes before, here is what comes after, and suddenly the roads that go every which way — I quote: 'but the paths are bad, and, wayward like horses, go captive the elements and the ancient laws of the earth.' Today, through this poem, I'm going to dig a little into this opposition — you see how I go about it — from the pre-Olympian to the Olympian, I come back to the last one, called Mnemosyne, we return to our central subject. Don't forget that Mnemosyne is the daughter of Uranus and Gaia, the two most ancient divinities, who are far from being gods, far from being Olympians — they're monsters, remember that Uranus devours his children or buries them under the earth as soon as they're born, these children with a hundred arms, it's a dreadful world, and he spends his time raping — there's no other word for it —
Ouranos, Gaia, Rhea: an order born of a ruse 51:45 violating his wife Gaia, the earth, to the point that she castrates him, has him castrated in a dreadful way by Cronus, one of the sons — so this is a world without, as we say in Africa, in African French, a world with no pardon. Now I fear you might say, in fact Pagani, we can see him fighting against the irrational, and we're going to find his references again, and he's praising the Olympian world as a metaphor for reason, and why not for logic, for the logos, blah blah blah — let's pose the problem: it's not certain that the passage from the informal to the formal, from the indeterminate to the determinate, happens in a just way. Let's not forget it's done through a lie, a trick, a deception — Rhea, the one who flows, I told you earlier, Rhine,
52:55 Rh, Panta rhei, everything flows, and rapidly, isn't it, rhythm, Rh, the same root — remember that Rhea, the wife of Time, well deserves her name, she is what flows — she was so fed up giving birth for nothing, since her husband devoured her children as soon as she gave birth — I refer you to the dreadful painting by Goya, right, Spanish painting, which is not stingy with dreadful, nocturnal, infernal things, reaches one of its heights there, in the abyss and in horror, the painting is a marvel. I remind you that it is through Rhea's trick that the gods were able to appear, through a lie — first one might say, after all, it's a beneficial lie because it thereby allowed her children to survive — yes, but what appears there is the cities, it's not a classless society, be careful not to idealize order either, it is not a value
Prometheus: man as specialist of the general 54:06 in itself — see how Hölderlin shows us so many things with his 'buts,' his 'buts' irritate us, good grief, we were starting to understand, we were there, in memory, a burden of logs, and suddenly, oh no, everything flows again, the logs are going to fall because the paths aren't safe — wait, wait, he's right to hesitate about what we're getting into. And here I'm talking to you about someone I haven't spoken about since — I'm speaking to you about Mnemosyne, another Titan, perhaps the one who ought to be the most famous, in any case the one Marx prefers — you guess I mean Prometheus. Prometheus, who committed hubris against Zeus's law, against the order of the city, by going to steal fire from Olympus, from the gods, to bring it to man, who was quite ill-equipped — because the animal is equipped from birth, a polar bear is equipped to be invisible in the ice of the pole, a badger is well equipped with its claws to dig burrows and find security there, and to store
55:17 its food — a shark, even a shark, there's nothing dumber than a shark in terms of brain, but it is very well equipped when it comes to detecting electrical signals — but in any case, I think it's a — man has invented nothing, you see, the firefly invented the LED lamp, right, and the badger invented excavators — but that's nonsense, one doesn't see the difference, which is so enormous that one doesn't see it: it's that the badger is condemned to remain in one topos, to be confined — there, you see, to be confined, not to move, not to travel, not to go see friends, no, in cafés and bars, no, no, stay there in its burrow. And the polar bear had better not find itself in the Amazon, it would be finished off within hours, quickly spotted by the jaguar lurking in a tree — but yes. So you see, of course the animal does many things better than us, precisely because it can only do that — hyper-specialization. For example, the visual system
56:27 most developed in the animal world is that of birds of prey — this has been measured, the visual acuity of a falcon, an eagle or a raptor, you can't imagine at what distance, at height, gliding in the sky, barely visible to us, it spots a mouse we'd have trouble seeing while standing right there. And it's even been measured that this visual acuity — listen carefully — varies according to the satiety of the bird of prey: when it's hungry, its visual acuity increases, you see, it's well made — but it can only do that. What is proper to man is to be a specialist only of the general — I'm playing on the word deliberately — the species is the opposite of the genus, isn't it, the proper — but this is important, what we're seeing here is everything that is being forgotten in the dominant ideology, not only forgotten but fought against, and that's what's serious. What is properly human is not to have a determined object of desire, but to keep changing, to produce the object of one's desire. I'll pause my voice-over,
Fidelity and matricial memory in Proust 57:43 suspend it, pardon, you're not going to finish with me — and I resume, I resume, I give the floor back to Hölderlin: 'But much is to be kept, and fidelity is necessary.' Here too I have to comment: fidelity, fides in Latin, that's the root — it's not fides, it's the same word as fides which gives us fidelity and religious faith. Now fidelity is a crucial notion, for the most faithful is the one whose memory reaches back the furthest, and we return to Proust's text, remember, where he says all my isolated memories, the memories we all have, all the landscapes I lived in three years ago — I'm making this up so it's an autumn landscape or a childhood thing or a love memory or a professional or travel one, doesn't matter — all these memories, for him — I told you when I introduced the word overdetermined last time — each of these memories
58:54 is overdetermined by a memory that envelops them all and which does not itself refer to a past event but which continues — and here I must read you again how it concludes — I reassure you, I won't reread the whole thing — the scene, the tragedy of his bedtime, when he was a boy and his mother didn't come to give him a last kiss before he fell asleep — it was a pathology, an illness, you know — for 20 pages he's explained to us all the tricks he used while his mother is already receiving guests at the table downstairs, so that she'd come kiss him — of course it's out of the question for her to leave the table — so he sends messages via the maid saying it's very urgent, that he has — anyway, briefly, and when he finally hears her coming up, the guests having just left, on the stairs, he rushes forward and she is surprised to see him there, like a madman, I quote: 'what are you doing there like a madman, what will your father say?' — his father, who is always irritated by this neurotic boy who's a weakling and always has psychosomatic troubles, psychological illnesses — and so I read you
1:00:08 I read you just this: 'Come say goodnight to me,' terrified at seeing that the reflection of my father's candle was already rising on the wall, but also using his approach as a means of blackmail — you see his lucidity — 'give me a kiss, otherwise Papa will see I'm up and he'll be cross with both of us,' — come say goodnight to me, terrified at seeing that the reflection of my father's candle was already rising on the wall, but also using his approach as a means of blackmail, and hoping that Mama, to prevent my father from finding me there still, if she went on refusing, would say 'go back to your room, I'll come' — it was too late, my father was standing before us. And here comes what I keep coming back to — there's a moment of grace, in an almost religious sense of the word, since the father, that day, says 'come along,' instead of saying 'go up to bed' as usual, without explanation — he says to the mother, 'go with him then, since you said you weren't sleepy, stay a bit in his room, I need nothing.' 'But my dear,' my mother answered timidly, 'whether I feel like sleeping'
1:01:18 or not doesn't change anything, we can't get this child used to it — I'm reading fast on purpose — 'but it's not a question of getting him used to it,' said my father, shrugging his shoulders, 'you can see the child is unhappy.' Grace: suddenly he exists as a subject before his father — normally one couldn't thank his father for this, it would have irritated him, he'd have called it sentimentality, etc. — and now I come to the passage I want to reread to you to illustrate the overdetermination whereby each of his memories is enveloped by another memory which itself does not disappear, which has been kept on the shoulders like a burden of chopped wood, in fidelity, right up to the moment when Proust — already with one foot in the grave — writes what we're now reading: 'It is a long time now, alas, since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago itself destroyed. And in me too many things have been destroyed that I imagined would last forever, and new ones have been built up, giving birth to new sorrows and joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old ones
1:02:29 have become hard for me to understand' — beautiful reflections on the past, which each of us could make. 'It is a long time, too, since my father was able to say to Mamma: Go with the child.' The possibility of such hours will never return for me. But — and here's the turn — 'of late I have been beginning to be more conscious once again, if I listen' — you see, here it's the ear — 'of the sobs which I had the strength to control in front of my father, and which broke out only when I was alone again with Mamma' — and here's the most important thing — in reality they have never ceased; and it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I can hear them anew, like those convent bells so effectively drowned during the day by the sounds of the town that one would think they had ceased altogether, but which begin sounding again in the silence
Conclusion of the first poem; reading of the second Mnemosyne 1:03:39 of evening. End of quotation. I return to Hölderlin, I conclude the first Mnemosyne — agreed, in this hesitation between remembering, keeping the past, and at the same time remaining in the present, to fight against what opposes an effort of memory, the roads going every which way like bolting horses. Between the two, what solution? A sort of intermediate solution, worth what it's worth: but forward, backward, we do not wish to look, but let ourselves be rocked, as on a swaying skiff on the sea. Now the second Mnemosyne, I'll go straight on — the translation is better, and I never miss a chance to pay tribute to Armel Guerne, the one who put together this anthology of German Romantics that you can find on Google Books, just type 'the German Romantics' and make sure it's Armel — like the first name — Guerne — great Swiss Resistance fighter by origin,
1:04:49 an immense translator, and not only of Musil, of Mörike — well, I'll skip over others — of Rilke, etc. So, the second, the second is a bit longer but has an irreplaceable philosophical interest. It begins with a kind of explosion, almost, almost a philosophical statement: 'A sign, we are, and of no meaning' — all the discussions, weren't there, buzzing during the sixties, during the era of structuralism, on semiology, semantics, the relation of the sign to meaning, linguistics at the center of the human sciences — and suddenly, there, in a single line, the last one places himself, almost two centuries earlier, at the very center of the matter. 'A sign, we are, and of no meaning; we are, and have almost lost our language in a foreign land. When it is above men,'
1:06:00 like the other, I'll read it first straight through without stopping: 'When it is above men, a conflict in the sky, and mightier the stars proceed blind. So faithfulness is; but he who leans over the earth, more perfect. All that lives seeks its way and finds a homeland of the spirit; someone, each day, having the power to change it — this hardly needs laws. And, as it must, expressly among men — there should be many men. The celestials cannot do everything themselves; for mortals have long since reached the abyss with this. So it changes; long is the time, but the true comes to pass. But what we love — a gleam of sun that we see on the ground, and the arid dust, and the shadows of our forests, and over the roofs the smoke spreads peacefully, close by the ancient crown of the high towers — for they are beneficent — the soul, in contrast, has wounded a celestial sign of everyday life, for the snow, like the flowers of May,'
1:07:10 it's a nobility of heart wherever it may be, its meaning shines, with the green meadows of the Alps up there, speaking of this cross planted in memory of a dead man, once on the way, on this high road, and a traveler advances, angered by his distant foreboding of the other, or what is there? I stop because there's a gap in the text, at the line, under the fig tree, decidedly the figs this evening under the fig tree, my Achilles is dead—a gap—and Ajax lies in the sea caves, by the banks of his streams, close to the Scamander, beneath the breath of winds made for the genius of daring proper to unshakeable Salamis, in a foreign land, great Ajax is dead, and Patroclus
1:08:21 in his royal soul, and so many others too are dead—we are on November 11th, I insist on this passage—but on the edge of Cithaeron, Eleutherae, city of Mnemosyne, so someone remembers the dead, well I won't comment before the end, it's soon the end—but on the banks of Cithaeron, it's a mountain, Eleutherae, city of Mnemosyne, who too, like the god of evening, had taken off her cloak, lost her curls soon after, for the heavenly ones are indignant when someone, without preserving their soul, gives themselves entirely—which however he had to do—for that one, mourning likewise is lacking. Written in 1802, surrealist poetry
"We are a sign": poetry and the language of the tribe 1:09:35 seems quite academic next to this modernity—and yet, 1802, it's a very beautiful thing, especially among those who got themselves excommunicated by the popes of surrealism—I'm thinking of Aragon, also excommunicated by Breton, even though Breton is a great writer, more in his prose than in his poetry. Well, let's get back to higher things—so a sign are we, and without meaning, here we are again at the level of words and language, which we don't really know—we just saw it, is it an animal, is it a man, is it this, is it that—suffering are we, and we have almost lost our language in a foreign land, when there is a conflict in the sky above men—then it can be a clearing, a rainbow, a clearing after the rain, a conflict between the dark sky and the light, between the elements as they say, isn't it—which is what makes Rimbaud say, in that poem I often quote, doesn't it, the one that ends with 'the ancient savagery which one forgives'
1:10:45 which makes the most surprising atmospheric accidents say, doesn't it, when there is a conflict in the sky above men, and the stars, more powerful, walk on blindly—so blind is fidelity—but when a more perfect being leans down over the earth, everything that lives seeks its way and discovers a homeland for itself. The spirit, someone, every day has the power to change that—so each one of us can change the order of things by being attentive to these moments of grace. All of a sudden we have almost, I repeat, lost our language in a foreign land. Let's not forget that according to Mallarmé, the poet is the one who gives a purer meaning to the words of the tribe—which means that if there were no poetry, the highest poetry—I'm not talking about those who recite things and put thought into rhymes to make verses, that's not poetry—great poetry, and I'm thinking as much of prose texts, is not just rhetorical virtuosity, but the highest poetry takes everyday language
1:11:56 you see, that seems obscure to us, contrary to what you'd expect, when these are everyday words, but combined in a way that seems strange to us—and we have almost lost our language in a foreign land, as if as soon as one is in poetry one is a bit in a foreign world compared to ordinary language, which is the language of lying. Giving a purer meaning to the words of the tribe implies that the tribe has wallowed in an impure language, what one might call ideology—for example, if there is a dominant ideology, it's because there are many dominated people. Someone every day has the power to change that—it hardly needs law, as is proper among humans—that means even he can change it even at the cost of transgressing the law, like Prometheus who had the audacity and the hubris—it's not excess—to cross the forbidden line, to go steal fire from the god and bring it to man, who through fire begins to become a potential rival. So I chose the character of Prometheus earlier
Aeschylus, Marx, Wagner: titans and Olympians 1:13:06 to say that if you read Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound carefully—the first and oldest of the great Greek dramatists in chronological order, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and his most famous play, Prometheus, along with the Eumenides no doubt—you'll notice that people always stop at the story of stealing fire, but Prometheus prophesies and says: one day men will revolt thanks to the strength I brought them, they will become powerful and will overthrow the throne of Zeus, just as he himself dethroned his father, just as Zeus himself became king of the gods on Olympus only through a coup, by exiling his father Cronus. In the same way man will be able to dethrone the gods. Aeschylus prophesies the moment when man will subjugate the Olympians—roughly speaking, you know, Marx reflected on this in his doctoral thesis when he was still a young student
1:14:16 and he shows clearly why—that's why I said we shouldn't idealize this order and this law either—the Olympians are the free men and the Titans are the slaves, who are cruder, clumsier, more monstrous, dirtier, more irrational, more chaotic, and who are in struggle with the gods—the gigantomachy, the titanomachy—but at the same time in their service, since they make weapons for the gods, like the blacksmith god. You find exactly the same thing in Wagner's tetralogy, where they're not called Titans but giants—it's they who build the palace of the gods, the German Olympus called Valhalla—Val, that's the happy hall, that's where it comes from, power, glory—Hall, you know, that's the room, and Hall is also said in English, these are all Germanic languages—and the giants built it, and they were promised the goddess of beauty, the German Venus, Freya, which means 'the beloved'—Frey, I don't know—and at the last moment there's the refusal
1:15:26 because this symbol of beauty, of femininity, isn't going to fall into the hands of these brutes, you see—very Clouscardian, all this interweaving of praxis—building the palace of the gods but refusing to give them the promised wage. I'm not distorting anything, the word 'wage' is in the text of The Rhinegold, there are the giants complaining about having calloused hands while the gods walk about in the light—so there should be many men there, and here I draw your attention to a sentence I had pointed out, because such important things I don't say all at once—three years ago—but which I'm dwelling on more now, because they cannot do everything themselves, the heavenly ones, the gods are not everything—for mortals, that's you and me, we're being talked about every time—mortals have, long before, long before the gods, won the abyss—the flaw of the gods, the flaw, the lack in the sense of lack, I'm making no moral judgment, the flaw, what they lack, and what we are superior to them in
Mortals have won the abyss: hominization continues 1:16:36 in matters of knowledge, is that we know we're going to die—the gods are immortal, they know that we will die, they know what death is, they know that mortals die, but they don't know what it is to have the anguish of death, and to what extent it rhythms all the rest of life, to what extent precariousness gives value to everything, that the walls of a house, the walls of a home, are precious in contrast to precariousness, to destitution—for they cannot do everything themselves, the heavenly ones—we will never repeat this passage enough—mortals have long before won the abyss with these, so with you and me, with this, then that changes—the eternal laws of the gods, there is already the twilight of the gods announcing itself with us, with men, with this then that changes—long is the time, but the true comes—well, that's what the scholar was saying earlier, that evolution continues to happen, that we didn't pass from animal to man one fine day at year's end
1:17:47 at midnight on New Year's Eve—no, there's an indefinite process of hominization, each time we pass from a more determined, more conditioned situation to a freer situation, there is in fact progress in hominization, but beware of the illusion of believing that this was already in germ from the start—that's what the Anglo-Saxons call intelligent design, a kind of providence—no, no, no, the dice are not loaded in advance. The scholar earlier was talking about mutations, so we're back to discontinuity—it's not a continuous evolution, there are mutations—bipedalism for example, you see, that freed the hands, and with an opposable thumb that freed up the ability to make tools with a dexterity we wouldn't have had if both hands were busy running—because it's all very well to show us a chimpanzee or even a bear that occasionally stands up on two legs like that, but that lasts a few seconds
1:18:58 as soon as it's a matter of a flight strategy, you see them on all fours dashing off at full speed—so much so that one of the criteria anthropologists retain when they look for that famous criterion—I don't know, is it work, the shaping of tools, some say it's constant chronic bipedalism if you prefer—the enormous migrations of the first humans who left the African continent over several generations to go populate the rest of the earth presuppose a persistently bipedal animal. So with this, so with men, that changes—that is, it's no longer nature that dictates its laws and tells the polar bear 'you're condemned for your whole life to stay at the pole' and the badger 'never to leave where there's loose earth where you can dig burrows'—in short, a place for everything, everything in its place, absolute conservatism, since when there's a catastrophe, everyone goes down with it—I'm thinking of the disappearance of the dinosaurs at the time
1:20:08 when man didn't yet exist—with this, so that changes, long is the time but the true comes—that changes, meaning that man produces his own conditions of existence. When there's a hurricane, it's called a cyclone, a typhoon, depending on the place on the planetary map—a typhoon in Asia, a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, isn't that right? When it hits Florida it's terrible, it causes damage, you see, you know the images, everyone nails boards, plywood, over their windows—it doesn't cause many deaths, that's a high standard of living, it's concrete. When it's in Bangladesh it causes a million deaths, right?
1:20:57 because those are tin and brick houses, at best brick, often wood, I don't know, and they collapse like dead leaves in the wind, don't they, autumn—so what changes is that man increasingly expands the domain that he himself produced—the environment, I'm no longer talking about nature, I'm saying the opposite, right—a secondary nature, an environment he produced, of course thanks to the natural given, but which he produced himself, and he is only at ease in this environment, to the point where even our most distant ancestors could no longer consume anything but what is produced, what bears his mark—a bit like the raccoon can't eat unless it's been dipped in water, that's a metaphor—man, from the moment he cooks his food, consumes something he has produced—cooked meat isn't found in the wild just like that—for mortals have long before won the abyss with this, so that changes
Achilles, the Muses and hubris 1:22:07 long is the time but the true comes—there you go. Then there's a passage that seems obscure, where he speaks finally of what we love, doesn't he—what is the object of poetry? A flash of sunlight—so we're back to the immediate, the immediate of what we see, the surface—a flash of sunlight that we see on the ground and the arid dust and the shadows of our forests—so you'll say, you see, that's nature—no—and on the rooftops peacefully the smoke blooms—that's the natural environment centered around human existence—close by, the ancient crown of the high towers—there's a human world with historical depth, the ancient crown of the high towers—and then a crescendo begins, which I repeat but won't dwell on, it's not like someone walking, climbing a road that rises into the mountains, for the snow, like the flowers of May, and nobility of heart wherever it may be, its meaning shines, with the green meadows of the Alps, you see the white patches on the green meadows of the Alps up there, speaking of this cross planted in memory
1:23:17 of a dead man, once on the way, on this high tower—you see the crescendo as the road climbs—a traveler advances, angered by his distant foreboding of the other, or what is there? And that's where there's a gap—we were on our way as if something up ahead, toward the future, were drawing us on, and then suddenly, under the fig tree, my Achilles is dead—and there's a past that suddenly catches up with us, and there's a history, a historical depth that suddenly catches up with us, and there there are only corpses—and Ajax lies in the sea caves, by the banks of his streams, close to the Scamander—Scamander is the river that flows through Troy—beneath the breath of winds made for the genius of daring proper to unshakeable Salamis—you know it's at Salamis that the Greeks defeated the Persians—made for the genius of daring proper to unshakeable Salamis, in a foreign land, that is, great Ajax is dead, and Patroclus—you know, the one who was Achilles's friend
1:24:27 and Patroclus in his royal armor, and so many others—you see it keeps multiplying—are dead. But the names are there, you see, we remember, out of fidelity, the names are there, even now there are those who slog away doing Greek translations or watch sword-and-sandal films at the cinema where they talk about Ulysses, Achilles—not Hercules—and so many others too are dead. But still, another one—but on the edge of Cithaeron—Cithaeron isn't far from Thebes—but on the banks of Cithaeron lay Eleutherae, city of Mnemosyne, who too, like the god of evening—there's a whole play on words here if I may say, it's about Zeus—a Zeus united with Mnemosyne and, impregnating her, she gave birth to the nine Muses, isn't that right, the Muses who have consoled us humans for millennia from the vicissitudes of life—they are the daughters of the god of evening because he's the god of the West, the West, the evening mass, that's Vespers, vesper, hesper, hesperus
1:25:37 that's the Greek root which gives, in Latin, 'Occident'—to the point that in the labors of Hercules, what are called the golden apples of the garden of the Hesperides, people long thought, still think, that these were the oranges from what is furthest west, most occidental, in Spain, in Morocco, isn't that right, where Heracles went to pick, isn't it, the golden apples of the garden of the Hesperides—we do call tomatoes 'pomodoro' after all, don't we—so, but on the edge of Cithaeron is Eleutherae, city of Mnemosyne, who too, like the god of evening, had taken off her cloak—he's speaking of the moment when the god settled down—Mnemosyne lost her curls—now I don't know what happened with Mnemosyne's hair, but in all the traces we have of ancient texts speaking of Mnemosyne, there's always an allusion to the beauty of her hair—the garden, isn't it, is well instructed in all that—lost her curls soon after, and the end
1:26:47 seems obscure but look, anyway—for the heavenly ones, the gods, are indignant when someone—that's you and me—without preserving their soul, gives themselves entirely—in other words, when someone experiences what the Greeks called hubris, when someone goes too far one way or the other, going too high like Icarus, or wanting to know too much like Oedipus, which will prove fatal to him, isn't it, eating too much or not enough—it's complicated, Greek measure—but here it's the daughter, and Mnemosyne had given themselves entirely to Zeus, isn't that right—for the gods are indignant when someone, without preserving their soul, without shame, gives themselves entirely—which however he had to do—you see, it's a bit clearer now—for that one, or that woman, mourning likewise is lacking—it's not obscure, it means he doesn't even have the right to mourning, it's lacking, meaning mourning is missing for him. There, how much time does that make for us—that makes an hour and a quarter, doesn't it?
Deleuze: the more urgent urgency in Dostoevsky 1:27:51 well, if there are no questions, I'd like to continue my exploration of the concept of overdetermination, that one memory hides another, by reading quickly, even if I have to come back to it next time, as I did with Proust today, digging more deeply—for once it's not the usual thing—into a text by someone I often criticize but who gives us here an admirable text, it's Gilles Deleuze. You'll find it, type 'Deleuze philosophical conference,' and anyway you have the reference on our Facebook page, and here I need to take my mouse again, there we go—he's in the middle of talking precisely about something, a symptom, as we'd say today, that occurs in various authors, various creators, because it speaks
1:29:01 the title of this whole talk is 'What is the act of creation'—it's very cross-disciplinary, it can be in painting, literature, cinema—they knew cinema much better than I do, that's not hard—and at one point he draws a parallel between Dostoevsky and Kurosawa—I had gone all the way to the great Japanese filmmaker, we only know him for Ran—thanks, thank you Philippe—and so he draws a parallel, but I'm not going to go over that text since, whatever's left, it's off topic anyway. What interests me is what he says, because it concerns memory, you'll see—I'll read the text without further commentary, where he talks about something curious that happens in several of Dostoevsky's novels—if you've read The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, you'll recognize this symptom in the characters
1:30:11 of Dostoevsky's, something quite curious happens very often—generally they're very agitated, you know the transcript tries to render the oral quality of Deleuze's talk, he's speaking to an audience—they're very agitated, a character goes off, goes down into the street—we're among Russians, let me make a little musical, musicological parenthesis—I recommend an orchestra rehearsal, it's interesting to watch an orchestra rehearsal when it's a very great conductor, to see the musicians in cardigans, in costume—no, they're not in concert dress, they're in cardigans—it's Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1, the so-called Classical Symphony, which won't last long, I reassure those who aren't used to it, or who are only used to pieces that last 3 minutes and that YouTube calls 'tracks,' or iTunes 'tracks'—well, in short, they really are 'tracks'—a delightful symphony, the Classical Symphony, more accessible than the others insofar as Prokofiev said 'I wrote it as if Haydn'—the father of the symphony in the 18th century
1:31:21 just before Mozart, the father of the symphony, the one who wrote the most and who also created the quartet, roughly speaking, like the sonata—roughly, 'I wrote it as if, as Haydn would have written it today,' with the harmonies of course, the chords, the rhythms of today—and the one making them rehearse, I don't want to draw out my parenthesis excessively, is Sergiu Celibidache, a conductor of Romanian origin who was the darling—he's dead now—who was for a long time the darling of orchestra musicians, who was the youngest conductor ever appointed—you know the Berlin Philharmonic is the only orchestra in the world where a conductor isn't imposed on them, it's the musicians of the orchestra who elect him, isn't that right?
1:32:12 it's not just anyone who gets to conduct the Berlin orchestra—there you go—and at 27 he inherits the mastery, Romanian, not even German, he succeeds the immense Furtwängler, isn't that right? And there he rehearses—he's old, he rehearses like all conductors who speak several languages, used to working with an Italian orchestra, French, German, English, Russian, etc.—and then at one point he's dealing with the Munich Symphony Orchestra, these are outstanding musicians technically, they can sight-read anything you like—to get into those orchestras it's worse than the agrégation to be recruited, well anyway, auditions and all that—and suddenly he tells them, 'No, you're not getting it at all, this is Russian music,' there you go, my boy, he was saying, agitated, Deleuze—'it's Russian music, it's not music for German pensioners, get moving a bit, it's music of a Russian rogue,' all right, showing off in the street there and annoying passersby—look at this rehearsal, it's extraordinary—so they're very agitated, a character goes off, goes down into the street
1:33:22 all that like this, and says, so-and-so—'the woman I love, Tania, is calling me for help, I'm going, I'm running—yes, Tania will die if I don't go'—it's often said that Russians, Slavs, the Slavic temperament, I don't know if it exists, but roughly speaking, when we make generalizations, the main characteristic of the Slavic temperament is its instability, that mood swings rapidly from ecstasy to dejection, from depression to euphoria—so, 'the woman I love, Tania, is calling me for help, I'm going, I'm running, yes, Tania will die if I don't go'—and he goes down his stairs and meets a friend, or sees a run-over dog, and he completely forgets—you see, forgetting, there it is—he forgets completely that Tania is waiting for him, dying, he starts talking like that, he starts, and he runs into another friend, he goes to have tea at his friend's place, you see, one memory chases away another, and then suddenly he says, 'Oh, Tania is waiting for me, I have to go'—laughter in the room—but what does that mean—there you go, that's Dostoevsky, sorry, in Dostoevsky's characters, and at the same time they themselves
1:34:32 are perpetually caught up in emergencies that are matters of life or death—but you know, when there's an emergency, there's an emergency, there, bringing this wounded man to the infirmary, there we know what it is, it's precise, it's shrapnel, it's an emergency all the time, constantly—but we don't quite know what's most urgent, isn't that right—an emergency that's a matter of life or death—they know there's an even more urgent question, you see the overdetermination, they don't know which one, and that's what stops them, thinking, 'what am I in the process of forgetting'—everything happens as if—a very beautiful text—in the direst emergency, there's a fire, I have to leave, I can't stay with you having tea, I told myself no, no, there's something more urgent, something more urgent, I won't move until I know what it is—it's absurd, that's the Idiot, Dostoevsky's most famous novel is The Idiot, that's the formula of the idiot—ah but you know, no, no, there's a deeper problem—what problem—I don't quite see, but let me, let me, let everything burn if need be, when we arrive we'll have to find this problem
1:35:43 more urgent, and there we are jumping constantly from one emergency to another—a striking example, I'll stop my reading of Deleuze here because afterward he moves on to cinema, I'll stop my reading of Deleuze here, he has perfectly identified a symptom—I'll add also, and this is a bit off topic, that this isn't the first time I've quoted Deleuze, I quote him rarely, but when I quote him it's very positively—I say there's an excellent phrase in Deleuze, for those who have a bit of memory of my workshops may remember, for those who aren't quite amnesiac—where I had said, quoting this formula of Deleuze's: 'there is nothing more dangerous than being the prey of someone else's dream'—being the prey of someone else's dream, I won't comment, that would take us too far afield, and as it happens, I want to point out that the text I just excerpted, what I just read to you, ends with that very formula, in the same text—so this talk is exceptionally interesting. Another example of overdetermination, this time I'll take the text
Gracq, The Opposing Shore: an overdetermined war 1:36:54 by Julien Gracq—now I don't know if I'll find it, unless Philippe—but I think I'll find it anyway—so, is it here—so it's not in that one, I'll take it in—oh yes, give me just one second—the text, mind you, I can pull it up, I don't know if you have it—so there's the link I think, but it's not the session from October 15th, I don't think—it's from November 4th, I think—yes, that's it—so I'll move to November 4th—there we go, so now we move on
1:38:04 I'll go rather quickly because our time is limited now, we're approaching the end—to one of the ten novels, isn't that right, that one could select, from postwar French literature, isn't that right—it's The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq—I'm not taking much of a risk, everyone recognizes it as a masterpiece. For the little anecdote, he had offered it to Gallimard, who refused it—I say this because it can always reassure those who get their manuscripts back and get depressed going home—don't blame yourselves—Gallimard did the same thing with Proust, I don't know, now they're making a fortune in Folio with In Search of Lost Time. So Gracq went to see a small publisher, José Corti, who died, alas, not that long ago, generationally speaking—in any case, when I was already an adult—and who had his bookshop across from the Luxembourg Gardens, you'd often see him working under his lamp in his big, dim bookshop
1:39:14 and it's a treasure, this publishing house, José Corti—look at his catalog, I won't say more—things that are both rare and decisive, essential, and that you can only find there—and Gracq remained faithful to this small publisher until his death, and he won the Goncourt Prize, even though he'd been rejected by Gallimard, with The Opposing Shore. Now, The Opposing Shore—some of you may have seen at the cinema The Desert of the Tartars, it's often been compared, isn't it, it's often been said that Gracq's novels are like—someone said each Gracq novel is like the Wagnerian prelude to an opera that will never be performed, a prelude that stops right when the war is about to break out, when the action is about to begin, isn't that right, when the curtain is about to rise—it's a state of waiting, moreover Gracq often said everything is in the waiting. Well, this one is about a scion of a family, speaking in the first person, the narrator, who's a somewhat decadent scion of an Italian republic—now we're back to current events, but yes, I'm doing it on purpose because there are Italian names in this imaginary principality he's talking about
1:40:24 it could be Malta, it could be the island of Lampedusa, you know, where refugees coming from Africa, from Eritrea, from everywhere, isn't that right, are penned in camps now, or when they're a bit lucky, they land there having not been devoured by the shark, you see, by the insatiable Mediterranean, the taciturn sea—and so, in short, remember this—an island on the edge between the two worlds now opposed to each other, Christendom and Islam, well well, isn't that right—The Opposing Shore—and I point out that Julien Gracq, in his active, real life, not as a novelist, was simply a geography teacher at the Lycée Jean-Baptiste Say—so here's someone who knows this geography well—there does exist, geographically, a Gulf of Sirte between Tunisia and Libya, I mentioned it in passing—for example Djerba is currently located in the Gulf of Sirte area—there you go, but let's not be too literal-minded—roughly, everything on the boundary between the part of the Mediterranean
1:41:34 that's in the north and the Mediterranean that's to the south, the southern shore of the Mediterranean—and since he's a bit bored in the capital, being a young decadent from a well-off but not wealthy family, he asks for a posting a bit far from the capital, and they send him to the Syrtes front—so that makes him laugh because he says, it's true that three centuries ago there was a short war with the country across the way—so the country across the way, he calls it—don't look on maps, but the way he names it will make you think of plenty of countries much talked about these days—Farghestan, Farghestan, Turkestan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, good grief, all those places are turbulent—but I didn't choose that at random—and as he arrives, as he sets off like that, he talks about having a small envelope he was given by his administration, which he sends there—the high authorities of the principality, imagine something the size of Monaco, and it convenes—these were secret orders, I straightened up imperceptibly, sweeping the horizon
1:42:44 with a determined gaze—because he's in the car, this happens at the start, in the automobile taking him south toward the Syrtes—'a memory tinged with both absurdity and mystery slowly rose up within me'—and there's memory—a memory tinged with both absurdity and mystery slowly rose up within me, which had been dully goading me ever since I was assigned to this lost post in the Syrtes, on the border I was going to join. Orsenna—that's the name of his principality—Orsenna was at war—which took some of the gravity out of the matter is that it had been at war for 300 years—all right, fine, it's a war in the history books, isn't it, little is known in the seigneury about Farghestan, which faces the territory of Orsenna across the Sea of Syrtes—think today, the situation closest to what we're going to read is probably Libya at present, and the troubles that stir it—exactly moreover on the other side of the Gulf of Sirte, the invasions that have swept over it almost continuously
1:43:55 since ancient times, the old Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, most recently the Mongol invasion—that is, Turkish—make of its population shifting sands, a desert country where each wave, barely formed, found itself covered and erased by another, of its civilization, a barbaric mosaic where the extreme refinement of the Orient rubs shoulders with the savagery of the nomads—it really is Libya. On this basis, sometimes the country is prey to internal strife, seems ready to crumble into feudal clans opposed by deadly racial hatreds—I point out that since Gaddafi was eliminated—when he was there, there wasn't this appalling death toll of refugees in the Mediterranean like this. He put some comrades of mine into vats of acid—I'm not defending anyone, I'm saying that the few faults he had were far, far less bad than the horror Libya is living through today, today—that's why I think of what Gracq says: in the city itself, even in the capital, in Tripoli, from one neighborhood to another
1:45:05 they're fighting each other—you see the state the country is in since Bernard-Henri Lévy and Sarkozy and his whole team, isn't that right, decided, under orders from the CIA of course, because the French planes that intervened in Libya couldn't fly more than 20 minutes without American refueling planes. Sometimes a mystical wave born in the hollow of these deserts—well there you go, like at Ouagbar—sometimes a mystical wave born in the hollow of these deserts fuses all the passions together to make, for a moment, to make for a moment, of Farghestan a torch in the hands of an ambitious conqueror—that could be the Mahdi, you know, for those who know a bit about the history of ancient Sudan—little more is known in Orsenna about Farghestan, and little more do they wish to know—you see, that's a memory that doesn't want to remember. So they're separated, of course, from Farghestan by a sea—I'm skipping passages—a true dead sea, one of the three that no one thinks of crossing anymore, there was a little war, very short, it stopped very quickly, isn't that right, but the treaty was never signed—that's what keeps the authority of peace in play
1:46:15 it's a peace of fact, not of law—these silted-up ports no longer welcomed anything but small coastal vessels of the smallest tonnage. Orsenna today was said to maintain nothing but a ruined base, a few avisos—that means small patrol boats, small warships—a few avisos of the least aggressive character, whose sole function is, in fine weather, to police the sponge fishing on the sandbanks—we're far from war, fighting sponge traffickers—but in this general numbness, the desire to legally end the conflict was lacking, just as much as the desire to prolong it by arms—neither the desire to conclude a properly signed peace, nor the desire to continue the war, isn't that right—tranquility settles over these dunes of sand by the sea. Only, there, overdetermination—that's reality—when one read the poets of Orsenna, the literature of the principality, the one that children, and so the narrator, learned in school—when one read the poets of Orsenna, one was struck to see how this failed war, all things considered extremely banal, and where no picturesque episode seemed apt to fire the imagination, held in their writings
1:47:26 a disproportionate place compared to the one it held in the history textbooks—depth of the poetry, as if a popular foreboding sensed a stake that the facts alone are not sufficient to circumscribe, and even more perhaps than the persistence they, the poets, brought to raising the question in their lyrical flights—a bit like from Homer to today we keep making variations on the Trojan War—and even more perhaps than the persistence—one need only look at Anouilh's Antigone—and even more perhaps than the persistence they brought to raising the question in their lyrical flights, was striking in the excessive freedom they took here to add, without measure, to the known facts, scientifically established by historians, piling addition upon giant addition, you see, theme and variation, of episodes onto this three-century war, as if they had found there, for their genius, an inexhaustible source of rejuvenation, as if they were fascinated by a hearth, a hearth of inspiration
1:48:36 but what then, in these learned, erudite poets, one found moreover a powerful echo in popular traditions—what a good anthropologist I'm becoming—first among the poets, you'll say, well that's a bit of an elite, but no, in the traditions, the tales, the legends, the myths told to children, in popular traditions, the scholars had been able to compile quite an impressive catalog of folklore tales alone relating to Farghestan, the distant Farghestan, revived thus subtly in the poets' verses—it was significant to note that even the dead language of official documents, the dust of everyday life, applied itself for its part to keeping intact the ashes of this historical corpse—kept on its shoulders a load of chopped wood, good grief—thus one had never consented, on the precious pretext of logic, to change a single word in the vocabulary of true wartime—the Syrtes coast remained, for the bureau, the Syrtes front—the wretched hulks
1:49:48 that I had the function of overseeing—the small boats that do the sponge-fisher patrol—the wretched hulks that I had the function of overseeing—the Syrtes station—the little towns that marked out, from place to place, the southern road—not one sheet had flown off the file compiled three centuries ago at the chancellery, I had been able to verify it myself—there. I'd like to leave us today on this exhortation, during which I urge you to read—read The Opposing Shore, you won't be disappointed. You'll say, ah no, it's a novel where you wait for the action to begin right up to the end, and the action begins exactly when the book ends, that's the whole point—you've started, all right, I'll finish on this—there's an extra scene, a chapter—each chapter has a very short title—called 'The Envoy'—and one day the narrator is in his room at the far-off Admiralty, there we go, so I'm placing this in the south with young people also from the capital, who are bored, who hunt birds that no longer even have wings because they have no predators
1:50:58 so they no longer need to fly—it's a bit boring, apart from inspecting a few farming estates, the routine—there's a town not far away where you can go out a few evenings, a decadent town that looks a bit like a little dying Venice on the lagoons across from the Syrtes—in short, he's in his room writing a report when suddenly a voice says in his room, at the Admiralty, in the—it's quite late, Mr. Observer—and there's a hallucinatory chapter where there's an emissary from across the way, from Farghestan—it's been three centuries since there's been any contact—who comes to give him an ultimatum, I won't say more, read The Opposing Shore, and I tell you, listen, it's a bit less thrilling than last time because Facebook left us in peace, and I hope the content was a bit more thrilling than the connection—that would be ideal—and if you want to know what happens next
1:52:08 don't miss our serial in two weeks, it will no doubt be a Wednesday when we continue—oh dear, you see I still stick to our old system—yes, yes, yes, I tried to shirk a bit, I'm getting told off, someone's keeping an eye on me—no, no, I'm delighted to see you again, I confess, in two weeks I'd have missed you, in a week—the continuation, isn't it, of the adventures of memory and forgetting, and so it will be, I hope, until, God willing, we're still alive. There you go.
