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 three Clouscards: sociologist, moralist, historian 0:20 I'm all the more happy to answer your question because L'Être et le code is always a somewhat sacrificed work in discussions about Clouscard. Generally, comments on Clouscard revolve around references like Le capitalisme de la séduction, which is probably his most successful work, and I might as well point out, taking a parenthesis here on the subject of genres — don't get me started on that, because when it comes to genres it interests me so much that I forget the subject, but I'll try not to let that happen — but I'm speaking of genres here in the sense of being in comedy, satire, or tragedy, not in the biological delirium of our Anglo-Saxon friends about men and women. So there are three Clouscards in terms of academic genre: there's Clouscard the sociologist — that was his official role — there's the philosopher, there's the study of manners, what in a tradition specific to France is called the French moralists, the La Bruyères, the Pascals, etc.
1:25 who are neither really philosophers nor writers, who are in between the two, or beyond, however you want to put it, these divisions — we shouldn't forget that Nietzsche's dream was to write like a French moralist; he never managed it. He has a very supple style, Nietzsche, compared to the average German writer, but in a way, I mean, he never has the ease of La Rochefoucauld — anyway, those people. And then there's Clouscard the historian, who does Marxist work in the sense I proposed earlier, that is, it's already revolutionary to restore a hidden historical sequence. Simply, I myself, having had a colonial childhood, took a long time to become aware of the determinations that made my childhood possible — being born in Vietnam in 1945, since Corsican poverty meant Corsicans emigrated into the colonial empire, just as the Basques went off to raise sheep in Chile and the Irish did a bit of mafia work in the United States early on — including poverty in all three cases, which is important.
Error and illusion 2:37 Spinoza said that freedom is the intellection of necessity. That's what Lordon and the school of thought that claims Deleuze, etc., always try to hide — that Spinoza defends human freedom. He attacks, of course, all the illusory conceptions of freedom, but like all thinkers of his time — Leibniz too says somewhere that if the compass needle were conscious of itself, it would have the illusion of believing it desired to point north — that will go very well without illusion. And the point I want to make, because it's essential, not as a mere exercise, is not to confuse illusion and error. First, the common point — because we never ask the difference between an elephant and a cherry, we ask about differences between things that resemble each other and could trap us, between the death cap mushroom and the green russula, there can be serious issues. So between error and illusion, in both cases we must start by naming what is common when we make a distinction, so that it's meaningful. In both cases we are in the false, but whereas in the case of simple error the false is simply different from the true...
3:48 for example, 4 plus 5 equals 11 — well, I'm in the false, meaning V equals barred F, the true statement is different from the false statement. In the case of illusion, the true is not merely different from the false, it is exactly its opposite — which is troubling. We had an infinity of choices, 360 degrees, why did we choose exactly the true statement but reversed? Thus we are at the center of the world before Galileo and Copernicus — it's not just false, it's not just an error, it's that it's the opposite. We are on the periphery, it's not us at the center, we're the ones turning — it's terrible, it's unbearable. How, I thought I was at the center of Paris, and now I'm told I'm a suburbanite of the universe — that's not okay, that's not possible, I paid dearly to be at the center! I'm making these allusions on purpose, precisely to show that at the root of error there are things that have nothing to do with knowledge — there are stakes, stakes that are not of the order of knowing, stakes that Freud, Marx, all the philosophies of suspicion have taught us to begin to glimpse. Otherwise we wouldn't think that for millennia, because the more you widened your eyes...
4:58 because there are naive people — it's not their fault, that's how they were told the history of science — who believe science appeared because men started looking, as if there were a hunter three million years ago, a Neolithic hunter with admirable eyesight — that's not the issue. And I knew Tuareg in Niger who can smell water from a well three kilometers away in the desert — it's so vital to them that they've developed a hyper-sensitive sense of smell, which has atrophied in us for reasons that Freud — and whoever saw the role of smell in sexuality, museums, not what... and which is sublimated into perfume, cosmetics. So let's not stray, it's important to see the difference here: in the case of illusion, the true is not simply different from the false, it is exactly its opposite. The paranoid is aggressive because he thinks he's being attacked — that's a typical inversion. And so that's the second difference: if it's the opposite, it can't be due to chance, so there is a necessity of error — in the case of illusion there is a necessity of the false, sorry — which isn't there in the case of simple error, because 4 plus 7 equals 22, well, I'll have a cup of coffee, I won't make the mistake again, fine, I'm tired, I'm doing my accounts a bit too late.
The thesis with Henri Lefebvre and the Cold War context 6:08 that's all, it's not serious, to err is human, but that's why it's much easier to correct an error than to dispel an illusion — I mean even to root out an illusion — because the main reason for illusion, I say within myself, is that it's pleasant for me to be in the false, that's what I mean. So, after this little detour, which is still vaguely epistemic, I take this example to recall that when he writes L'Être et le code, he does his doctoral thesis with Henri Lefebvre, who founded this branch of French sociological studies, much more concrete than the somewhat generalizing abstract Marxisms, with monographs — for example, Henri Lefebvre published La Vallée de Campan in the Pyrenees, an example following a community in the same place over several generations. Now there are plenty of studies like that; at the time it was relatively new. And Clouscard began his thesis by placing himself in that wake. Lefebvre used to say — like a stork, I hatched a duck's egg...
7:18 ...with you, and he had affection for him and at the same time was quite perplexed by Clouscard's discourse. So, it's about the process of production of a pre-capitalist ensemble — that ensemble is France, the kingdom of France in the so-called Dark Ages, that is, the moments when the Roman Empire hands over to feudalism, so from the very beginning of the Middle Ages up to the French Revolution — practically all of Ancien Régime France studied with thoroughly Marxist categories by Clouscard, but with a sense of the concrete, and in particular an approach to the novelistic that absolutely needs to be reread — and it's urgent, when you see how so-called societal problems are treated today. I hate that word, because 'societal' was invented so as to no longer talk about 'the social,' and then they tell me we need both — but if we need both, how is it that when we talk about the first, we never talk about the second again? It's strange. I'm the first to think they go together, it's not contradictory, but it's strange that 'societal' is always used to execute 'social.'
8:28 okay, well, fine, you get half a point, but what matters is not quantity but quality of life, isn't it, that's well known. And that, quality of life, we started talking about it at the Club of Rome, that is, all those who were part of the P2 lodge conspiracy, as it happens, the role of the guy, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — that's where this discourse started, as it happens, at the very moment capital understood it had to take back control. Your generation can't imagine what the Soviet advances were like — I mean, this is an era when the West is on the defensive everywhere, right, whereas before the war here people would rather say 'Hitler than the Popular Front,' thanks to Hitler we'll get the communists, the unions, etc. Meanwhile, 2 million dead piled up on the other side. But once they'd arrived, once the Soviets had won, it's no longer counted — so all the wars of liberation, the Indochina war, Vietnam, the Soviets who supported them shot down 3,200 planes — the Vietnamese, that's not slingshots and SAM-6 missiles. So it's important, it's one of the causes of the fall of the Soviet Union, which was disproportionate relative to its economy.
9:38 it was a gigantic effort internationally, and Cuba — that was one of the most serious crises of the postwar period, I mean, the Soviet Union bought up the entire sugar production of Cuba, even though it was itself the world's leading sugar producer — well, beet sugar, that's all there was, beet — it was poor, clayey land. So we must remember this: I'm giving you an image — one fine morning in '45, we Westerners, the masters of the world, wake up with the moujiks — moujiks, that's what I know, Bolshevik moujiks, knives between their teeth on top of it, and they're on the Elbe, they're firing on the Germans, it's just not possible, Russia was so far away before, you didn't need to go looking for them there. So, in that Cold War perspective, everything alluding to class struggle had to be banished — you know this better, your generation, because it grew up with this enormous impasse. And because I'm the first to say it should all go together, it's clear that relations between parents and children, men and women, are not lightly determined.
Praxis and psyche: Clouscard and Rousseau 10:49 by the historical context — I mean, La Princesse de Clèves in the Neanderthal era, that's just not possible, right? I mean, it's true — the carte du Tendre, which has Roxane say to Cyrano, unravel your feelings to my friend — that's not how it was settled, differently, in a couple back then there was the master and the maid, well yes. So the psyche, to speak in Clouscard's terms — I'll get there — because that's really at the heart of the problem, and that's where we see the deep kinship Clouscard has with Rousseau, we'll come back to it — he holds the same position relative to the rest of the intelligentsia. If I had to sum up Clouscard's effort in a single formula, it would be the reconciliation of praxis, in the Marxist sense, and the psyche. If you read his work, it's a fundamental category for him, the psyche. So, what is it? It's not the psyche of the psychologist or the psychoanalyst — he fought hard enough against those movements — but it's what belongs to the order of feeling, to put it simply. I remember a philosophy teacher in Toulouse, a year from retirement, a lady who had tried to contact Clouscard, telling him, listen, allow me to write to you because since I've been teaching your work...
11:59 ...to my little crybabies — she had quite a few Maghrebi girls in her class — she said, they've found again the right to be sentimental. Extraordinary, because until then there were 'solar' girls, that's beautiful spirit, and stuff — all nonsense, you had to sleep around as a rule, one thing being to have a romantic fling in Ireland with a journalist, never mind, whatever. So Rousseau had understood this well, his relation to the salons — that's the point, he doesn't denounce, he doesn't moralize, he doesn't say 'you live in debauchery, you live in lies' — that's not the same. He himself would ask for nothing better than to do the same, but he states it as such: my lies won't serve to give me illusions about myself. That's interesting, because when you read La Nouvelle Héloïse, which had the largest print run of the 18th century, the greatest success alongside Voltaire's Candide, you have to understand that this century was parched — reason and all that, fine, those are important categories, but I mean for feeling, for fun as we'd say today, it wasn't very sexy, you're right, etc. So after that century, La Nouvelle Héloïse suddenly hit — you have to understand the success of seeing this kind of spontaneity, this young couple lost in Switzerland, it's so opposite to libertine tales.
13:09 right, and in a way Clouscard kept saying that Rousseau goes much further in pleasure than all the libertines — that's also important to understand. And for that you have to understand what he calls the psyche, and he analyzes an entire novelistic tradition — he's not thinking of Stendhal and Balzac, that's already late relative to his chronological breakdown, but he's thinking above all of what precedes the Revolution in terms of the novel. We shouldn't forget that people of Rousseau's generation, people like that — what did they read at fifteen? They devoured what were then called 'the novels,' authors nobody reads anymore, novels where there's some character who dies three times and turns up alive in a river with mud on him — those are novels, but always with lots of love, lots of adventure, lots of disguise, the romances — and if we've kept a bit of Crébillon fils or things like that, or Voiture and Furetière, but you don't need to be a specialist. And what he wants to show is the link between praxis and the psyche, for example...
14:20 if, for the knight to win his lady, he has to go on the crusade to Jerusalem — you'll deserve my hand upon your return from the crusades — that's a rather simplistic example I'm taking, I mean, but there's a deep link between praxis and the psyche, and there we clearly see the Hegelian-Marxist current, because the two great sacrificed things in the aftermath of May '68 — I respect June, as I said earlier, but not that May, not the counter-revolution of the Madeleine — yes, that's where I'm getting to. I said earlier, capital takes things back in hand — you can't imagine the setbacks it had suffered following the Soviet Union's victory over Nazism, quite simply, namely the wars: we lose Indochina, we lose Algeria, because — you don't know this, but in the newspapers of the time they said there are communists behind all this, which wasn't entirely false — there's a retreat, and firstly, and secondly — the first concrete achievement in space is Soviet, right, and the Americans, they launch their rockets, they crash, the Vanguards and so on, the first ones were failures, etc., it took time before they caught up with the 'Popovs.'
15:31 so it was nothing like the image we have now — now it's seen as a somewhat underdeveloped country, almost, whereas at the time it was the cutting edge of technology — the beep-beep of the first Sputnik in space, they were the first to reach — oh, curious paradox, a whim of language — what's called in astrophysics escape velocity, get out of Earth's gravitational pull, eleven kilometers per second I believe. So in such a context, to dare, as Clouscard does, go right to the heart of intimacy, which seems to be the furthest thing from Marxism, from economics, and all of feeling in this, the most delicate, the most profound, the most excessive, the most ambivalent case — that's what makes his work original, and in a way he was finding his audience there. So, it starts with the grain circuit in roughly the 9th century, from the village, and ends at the factory — but he shows that these different modes of production produced courtly love at a certain time. I'll take a very simple sequence: when the kingdom is at war...
From the Song of Roland to Racine: the psyche produced 16:44 there's no Louis XIV yet, there's no absolute monarchy that has come — it's not Louis XIV, it's Mazarin-Richelieu, there's not yet the monarchy holding everything in hand, there's not yet the nation-state, there are still individual fiefdoms, guys warring against each other, including the superintendent of the navy who reigned over a province that didn't even touch the sea. And at that time, even before courtly love, let's say in the High Middle Ages, there's the Song of Roland, for example — in the literature there, love is barely spoken of, there's the fair Aude who's supposed to be waiting for him when he returns, but mostly it's about blows dealt to each other from one end to the other — I mean, I'm not exaggerating much, it's admirably written, that's not the point — but as for the psyche, you'll wait a long time; it's rather the epos, as they say, epic poetry. And then when you move to Lancelot du Lac, Tristan, Perceval the Welshman, everything changes completely, it's the opposite, exactly the reverse — the main sequences are either amorous sentimentality, human love, or the 'Oulia' like Perceval who will surpass all the others, mystical love, the Grail. What happened in between?
17:48 the kingdom had been pacified — same as between Corneille and Racine. Corneille, that's the warrior hero, Le Cid, feeling is for Racine the story of the petticoat, it's honor that counts, I will go avenge my father, my homeland, etc., these are serious guys, the heroes — whereas Racinian heroes, right, first of all, they all fall in love with a woman who's in their possession, they're possessed by their possession — Andromache, who's a captive of Pyrrhus; Aricie, whom Theseus condemned to be walled up in her home because she's from a clan, and the moment a man approaches her there's no descendant, well as it happens Hippolytus falls in love with the only woman his father has forbidden anyone in the whole city to love, and so on. Anyway, I don't want to put value judgments on it, I love both, but it's not the same setup at all — roughly, it's the warrior who still defends honor, that's still what speaks to you — I know it's honor that gives him the honor of his clan, his father, and the state when he goes to fight the Moors, so micro-social and macro-social. And in Racine it's the opposite, it's a guy who's going to throw away all his interests as king, as sovereign, for the story of the petticoat — there's no actual petticoat at that time, but still, there's a lot of Racine, and...
18:58 when he proposes to Andromache to turn everything completely around — I've betrayed the Greeks, I'll go away with you, I'll raise your son, whatever — 'Amid these perils that I run to please you, will you refuse me a less severe glance?' — that doesn't sound serious anymore, suddenly. But so what does Clouscard say? He says that once Louis XIV had settled everything — the state, that's me — we no longer see it, you're at the château listening to Molière under my eyes, you're not waging war behind my back. But when you're not waging war, what's left to do? You internalize the problem — it's love that you make at court, you're not going to make war at court, it's love; or Pascal, who's going to succeed Descartes, it's the religious, the mystical, what is interior, and no longer, as with Descartes, making man master and possessor of nature. It only takes one generation, bam, political and economic changes, and you go from one interior world to another. That's L'Être et le code, it's the narration of all these sequences, and if that's not fascinating — but it's a question that cannot be resolved...
Old-style capitalism, the Marshall Plan and overproduction 20:09 once again, except by the restitution of the corresponding historical sequence. First I was speaking synthetically, a bit dogmatically — I'll flesh it out afterward, but so it's clear, we mustn't muddy the waters, that's important, we're not doing this for nothing, my stake here is so important. Clouscard broadly distinguishes two capitalisms historically, as moments — not as parts of a whole, moments of a process, which isn't spatial, we're in time, it's more fluid. So, two moments: there's the capitalism of 'papa,' let's say roughly up to, but not including, the Marshall Plan, roughly up to the crisis of '29, the 1930s, not included, namely everything you know about it, but with the induced superstructures of values that are those of effort, of thrift, of looking to the long term — that goes together, thrift means already looking to the long term — and of precariousness and scarcity.
21:15 These are contexts of scarcity. You all have aunts or grandmothers who kept corks, rubber bands, things like that. And that holds as long as the national market hasn't been conquered. That's why I say I'm being dogmatic, I'm reciting the logic of the thing. Once the national market has been conquered, things reverse when it becomes necessary to export. And so, overproducing in order to export — which is the rage of today, and has been especially since the 1960s — this discourse becomes a brake on consumption.
21:51 So capital no longer has an interest in being the capitalism of 'papa.' Because otherwise, people stop buying anything. If we start drinking a little glass of sugar water and saving, etc., we won't chase after the latest iPhone. So it's the Marshall Plan that will be the great turning point for him, in particular. Capital buys souls, not just bodies. We've talked about the abduction of souls. He says it's a gift they've given us, but all psychoanalysts know, he says — after having heavily criticized psychoanalysis, but I'm doing it on purpose — that a gift is never innocent.
22:25 A gift demands something in return. It's well known — gift for gift, anthropology and so on. A poisoned gift, as the saying goes, a candy laced with pepper. Children know that every gift comes with a counterpart. So if you're good, you'll get toys at Christmas. And if you work well at school. So, what's the counterpart? It's the shattering of all that. It's going to blow apart. Giscard is the turning point. Giscard is known for having, in his propaganda — for his campaign, I mean, to become president — we saw him score a goal, play the accordion.
22:59 That's no small thing, this Mr. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, selling the teacup with the pinky finger raised. Playing the accordion in front of the cameras in a matter of seconds. There you go. And so this side of things, the opposite of the Commander, of de Gaulle, the statue of the Commander — that is, a guy, it's over, throw him in the trash, he's had his time. And I should remind you that the two forces that begin — this isn't an opinion, it can be measured — the two political forces that begin to decline on the French political chessboard from '68 onward are, on the right, Gaullism, and on the left, communism — that is, the only two forces bothering the Americans in Europe.
23:32 That's still a troubling coincidence. There needed to be a revolt, as they say, a generous youth revolt, right, to rid us of everything standing in the way of the revenge — and here I'm getting to it — of Atlanticism over the setbacks suffered relative to the Soviet Union. The turning point happens in the 1960s. It's crucial, you look at the economic figures, it's the same, that's when financial economics starts to take over. All those who know nothing at all of what I'm saying, who study neither Clouscard nor Marx, arrive at the same chronological breakdown. When he talks about the birth of financial economics, it's still a curious coincidence.
24:02 It's roughly the 1970s, starting in '68, which is really almost the beginning of the '70s. So there's a real turning point of an era, with not just a change but an inversion of traditional values. I don't regret them either, I'm not defending the bourgeois of 1880. I'm trying to make it understood that one train can hide another. There you go. It's not in the discourse of the '68ers that you must look for the truth of '68.
24:34 As Marx says in the famous 1859 preface, just as we don't judge an individual by the idea he has of himself, we don't judge an era by its self-consciousness. Otherwise trials would be easy — 'Defendant, rise. What do you think?' 'I'm innocent, your honor.' 'Well then, acquitted.' Yes, if I'm judged by my own self-conception, and you tell your partner, 'but what I did to you, I did nothing, it's always you' in couples... I say, well yes, we've never done anything. And when it blows up, we always think it's the other one. But no, no — 'know thyself,' as Socrates' patron said, that is, the oracle at Delphi. So it's important to note this as a chronological breakdown.
25:07 '68 isn't very long after the Marshall Plan. Let me explain. Marshall, that's the 1950s. But the mass diffusion of the Marshall Plan, deep enough to shake French society, that goes on until the 1970s. Well, yes. In the countryside, we were still far from the Marshall Plan for a long time. I mean, it took time to reach the depths. And rural France was much larger in numbers than it is today — that hasn't been forgotten, France was exceptional for its proportion of workers still in the primary sector, as they say in economics.
25:37 I mean, the exceptional diversity and richness of its agricultural heritage. So, first, there's this first period. This morality of thrift — I won't say more, because that's another generation that you know well through the medium of novels. There you go. Whereas here, it's going to reverse. What must be avoided now, above all, is overproduction. Never again like before 1929, that is, as an economist of the time put it in a striking phrase, 'the absurd spectacle of crowds starving in front of overflowing granaries.'
26:12 That's the crisis of 1929. Milk was being poured into the gutters in New York so as not to bring down the price. Coffee thrown into locomotives instead of coal. There you go, classic moves in a crisis of overproduction. And here we can't help but intervene in the semantics. Otherwise we're not serious Marxists. Marx was a formidable reader — let's not forget, that's how he began, as a journalist — of what it means, overproduction. It means I'm producing too much. Literally — I won't try to finance it, literally.
26:42 From what point do I decide that we're producing too much? Do you have too many subscriptions? Do you have the best ones? The most expensive ones? I'm asking you, I mean — no, do you have the clothes you dream of? Do you travel to the countries you want? I'm not sure. Personally, in my life, I was a teacher, well, that's not a huge salary, but then I was a senior executive after — when I sold my soul, at Hachette, school licenses, and then project manager for the European Commission — I earned a good living at one time before, fortunately, unknowingly committing social suicide.
27:13 Well, I've never bought a car cash. I'll note that. It's always been on credit. Still, you shouldn't flaunt it — people tell you I earn a lot, but you have to really look at the pay slips and how many zeros there are. I mean, at some point, on what basis do you decide, in my place, that I consume too much? There's already a strange problem there. I know I'm attacking contemporary anti-consumerism, but it's a bit like the notion of degrowth.
27:43 These are gimmicky concepts, degrowth no more than growth. Growth is just as gimmicky as degrowth. I mean by that they're vague concepts because we never talk about the content. It's clear that there are things we produce ten times too much of, in my opinion. There are things we produce ten times not enough of. So that's not how the terms should be framed. So, once again, the fact that, suddenly, right with the 1970s, this discourse — what I'll now call '68-arts,' to distinguish it from the great advance that was the workers' June and the Grenelle accords of June '68, which I salute.
May '68 as counter-revolution: "under the paving stones, Le Pen" 28:22 Don't mix them up, but there was also a struggle between the two. Well, I mean, I found youthful texts by Mussolini — because Mussolini comes from the PSI, he originates from the Italian Socialist Party. As the historian said, the worst on the right can be found in the trash bins of the left. But Mussolini says at one point, revolution is not the satisfaction of basely material demands — a program with a bomb in one hand and a flower in the mouth. That's a program like Cohn-Bendit's.
28:53 And that's why, on '68, I'll give you one of Clouscard's finest formulas, which unfortunately has become relevant again since his death: if only he had known — under the paving stones, Le Pen. Isn't that a beautiful formula? Under the paving stones, Le Pen. You can trace the genesis of the rise of the far right in Europe back to that sequence. That is, when everything reverses, when the enemy is the generic enemy of beings, on the right the Gaullists, that is, the nation-state, but with the SNCF, Airbus, Ariane all the same — I mean, these are projects that required cooperation between European states, but sovereign states.
29:29 It's not Brussels directives that decided this, quite the opposite, in fact. And firstly, so on the right — I myself voted against de Gaulle my whole life, so I can speak well of him, I'm well placed to. Besides, at the time the Communist Party said, and I quote the exact phrase, the commitment, we recognize the positive aspects of the general's foreign policy. Well yes — what wasn't said to the Americans who went to Vietnam, they had no business there. There wasn't a single Western head of state who spoke like that. He's a traitor. A traitor to holy Occident.
29:59 To Sainte-Europe, to borrow the title of a play by Arthur Adamov, which really ought to be put on theater programs. Sainte-Europe, that was already the title in the 1960s. And there you go, so this reversal — we'd be the only ones to see it at the time. Because what was being said among the leftists at the time? I'm not choosing my words at random, they're not even banners, still less insults — it's very precisely the union, in the mathematical sense, of the anarchist tradition, the Trotskyist tradition, and the Maoist tradition. There you go, it wasn't one tradition but those three, roughly, so as not to duplicate — I don't think I'm leaving one out at random.
30:32 The anarchist one, the oldest, which splits between an anarchism that is broadly a companion of the working-class struggles, which I salute, at the Paris Commune, there were quite a few, etc. — even if I don't agree with everything, I salute it — and, on the other hand, an anarchism like the American libertarians who wait for the tax man with a shotgun at the door of their ranch, saying, I'm not part of some collective, I owe nothing to anyone, in short, who exploits all the labor of several dozen centuries of the collectivity but owes nothing back.
31:02 Who understood it very well. There you go, exactly. And it's interesting, because I forget which anarchist wrote a little book against Onfray. I call him the philosopher of the beaches, because on France Culture they dump these lectures on us every July. Ignorant on top of it. But ignorant, the poor old man, it's terrible. Once, someone said, why do you never talk about Hegel? I jumped, they're talking about Hegel on his show, that's new — it was a listener — and Onfray answers, because we don't at all agree with that kind of thinking here. Full stop!
31:32 You see, the richness of the argument, I mean, it has no place here. Fine, very well. That way, they'll all be experts on Hegel. So, the guy who wrote the book on Onfray clearly distinguishes this anarchist tradition, and there's another one, hedonist anarchism, which I also respect — why not, Oscar Wilde, why are you interested in the poor, in wealth, youth is the most beautiful thing in life, enjoy your beauty, your youth, etc., and don't go wasting yourself on lost causes. There's a hedonist tradition of the right, of right-wing anarchism, quite simply, which I salute — I'm not demonizing anyone.
32:08 There you go. So, in '68, it wasn't the anarchism of... For it to work, for the eviction — I repeat the essential point — of the Gaullist right and the communist left, it had to go through a discourse that positioned itself further left than the PCF. That was the stroke of genius. The PCF, the embourgeoisés, they just want cars, apartments — you know the discourse, it's more familiar to your generation than to mine, if anything. Always more, as the right-winger de Closets used to say, always more.
32:39 We want always more. Me, yes. Whereas those who called themselves to the left of the PCF — we've learned since, because now, Clouscard used to fight to make this understood, but now he no longer needs to fight because we have the example right in front of our eyes. It's the former Trotskyist Jospin who ends up saying my program isn't even socialist. It's the Maoist, what's his name, the number two at MEDEF? Kessler. Kessler, who says, in the middle of the referendum battle over Europe, we must be done with the CNR's laws.
33:09 Of the CNR - that is, pay-as-you-go pensions, social security, the gains of the Resistance. There, the mask falls. And of course, Cohn-Bendit, who in the middle of the referendum campaign said we have to be done with Gaullo-communism, he'd said it very precisely. There, the mask falls. Goldmann, he was a bit more guarded about it, I'm being a bit flippant here. He was craftier in party politics. Don't forget, Danny, you need to pass for a red. And so there, the mask falls.
33:39 What is he saying? Anti-Gaullist, I don't revolt against that - I myself was anti-Gaullist. Anticommunist, I respect the fact that there are excellent reasons to be anticommunist. Argue with mystics, whatever you like, why not, that's not the question. But when you're against both, something doesn't add up for me. There were posters - Vichy, wanted. There were two things on it: the PC, the Gaullists. Well yes, curious coincidence. At the very moment when the Americans were recruiting all the former heads of the Nazi secret services, including the famous Gehlen, known as the Grey General, who would run West German counter-espionage until his death - a man who'd been eating communists for breakfast throughout Nazism.
34:17 They'd found the right guy for the Cold War. There you go. For me, that's the scandal. I'm not, once again, trying to - I'd have been the first shot under Stalin. I'm not defending any regime whatsoever. But, on the other hand, for me, the betrayal that was at the origin of my philosophical awakening - forgive the parallel, which is fairly presumptuous, but I can't help it - it's a bit like the death of Socrates for Plato: some scandal that made this little aristocrat's grandson, Plato, suddenly set off on another path. The most just man in the city is condemned by the city.
34:47 That's not possible. Well, for me, that's the founding betrayal of my generation. I was born in 1945. You'd have thought that in the face of the atrocities of this unprecedented conflict, humanity's slogan should have been "never again." The political leaders of humanity, and especially of Europe, which was right in the front row after all - it should have been never again. But that's not at all what we saw. Yes, they said never again, but it was the Cold War beginning. It was the fight against the red plague, not against the brown plague, that had to be rooted out. So we shouldn't be too surprised - if we liquidate the Marxist tradition, there's nothing left but Le Pens here, in Denmark, xenophobes and Nazis leading in the European elections. We shouldn't be too surprised.
35:23 The only thing that really scared fascism was the Red Army. You have to know that. It's the only thing that ever impressed them in history. We need to rebuild a democratic Red Army, and an artistic one, at the university. That's the conclusion. All the more simply - I don't say easily, because it was a huge piece of work he did - but all the more simply because I was there, practically, when the two questions link up, if I can put it that way, insofar as I've insisted on this: for the operation of '68, May '68, to work, you absolutely needed the operation which, for Clouscard, remember, is a counter-revolution.
Néofascisme et idéologie du désir: Vichy takes its revenge 36:07 You never see - well, you can agree or disagree, but it's clear in his work. After a succession of revolutionary advances, of which the Liberation is one of the main ones, because the creation of pay-as-you-go pensions and all that, just as there were paid holidays in '36 - those are the real silent revolutions. I mean, they're not just about storming barricades, they're effects that transform a society in depth, I mean. We reach their limits at the start of the sixties, and that's when capital starts to regain the upper hand. That is, at that point the Soviet Union starts to run out of steam too, by the way.
36:37 And so, with Reagan's Star Wars, it collapses outright because it just can't keep up. What's the connection with... That's the moment when Clouscard - I believe in '72, the first edition - publishes Neofascism and the Ideology of Desire. That's the exact title, which has just been reissued, by the way, by Éditions Delga. And in it he shows that those who claim to be to the left of the Communist Party at that time are actually to the right of De Gaulle.
37:08 That it's Vichy taking its revenge, aided by - I don't like to say "the Americans," don't think I'm America-bashing, anti-Americanism is actually an old right-wing theme, contrary to what people think, it's a rather vulgar, thuggish thing. I'm anti-Atlanticist. It's true that the United States is the flagship of the Atlantic fleet, but you can be Atlanticist and be Chadian or Taiwanese too. I mean, I'm so far from being an ethnicist that I want to be clear, I'm not America-bashing. On the other hand, what is certain is that the NATO forces, and mainly the United States, which has most of the financial and military means, did everything in that direction.
37:47 Did everything. It even seems that some of Kennedy's advisers - I won't name them, because I'm being very cautious, I don't have confirmation on this - wanted to have De Gaulle shot, physically, I mean, made to look like an accident, etc. You should know that the US ambassador in Paris at the time, this is official, spoke well of the OAS people in his reports to Washington. The OAS, the Secret Army Organization, you know what that is - the OAS that wanted to keep Algeria for the pieds-noirs, or for France, as they put it. And De Gaulle never came closer to death, he who'd been through the Second World War and all that, than at Petit-Clamart, where a bullet passed within, I mean, a millimeter of him, fired by the killers of French Algeria.
38:31 And there, we've barely begun to get our finger caught in the gears, because if that were all - but in fact, the number of reversals that occur from that break onward, roughly the start of the seventies, that's exactly when the social reference point of class struggle starts to recede in favor of societal struggles, and then it's everyone against everyone, or everyone against every other one. It's region against nation, it's "Free Occitania," and I'll give you a small example a young ex-colleague of mine told me about, a Breton, very attached to Brittany but who votes for the Left Front - he told me there were two businesses in Carhaix, at the center of Brittany, two businesses that alone accounted for three-quarters of local employment: the hospital and the train station.
39:24 Both have been shut down as I speak to you, I'll tell you right away. And there were huge struggles over it. Now, the mayor of Carhaix - affiliated with the Socialist Party, mind you, to give you the picture, "affiliated moderate," as they used to say - the mayor of Carhaix writes in a furious article: "Paris is plundering Brittany." That dates from '68. As if hospitals were only being shut down and factories only being closed in Brittany, instead of saying, look, capital is torpedoing labor - no, straight away they go looking for identity-based explanations.
39:54 That's poison, that. I seem to be serious about this because in Iraq, as I speak, it's causing tens of thousands of deaths - this story of Shiites and Sunnis, with, you understand, on one side supposedly Aryans, Iranians and Turks, on the other Arabs, there's always been a problem, they'd have you believe. When actually these people can live in peace, and then suddenly - that's the real heart of the problem. Or that there's a war between Russians and Ukrainians. You've heard about it, but I've also heard about something between Russians and Ukrainians. Otherwise, the Ukrainians of the East don't exist. The miners, the unglamorous, unsexy guys, who aren't out there lighting little colored candles on the ground, paid for by some CIA-funded PR firm - I'll say it, paid for on the CIA's dime.
40:28 It's not that - those from the East, and the miners who kept the country going for a long time and who are now practically stripped bare, who are among the poorest, poorer than the Russians even, I don't know if I can even say that. And on top of it, they're going to get some great news now that they're joining Europe: the IMF has already decided that the price of gas for them will jump by 50% for households starting in July, and 45% for businesses. That's why Putin plays this so well. He's let time work for him. He has no reason to intervene. They'll rise up on their own. Over time. Because given the economic state they're in, if on top of that the IMF puts the European Union under its thumb, it's going to be something else.
From exploitation to ecologism 41:04 So, '68 is when that force appears. To muddy the waters, people start setting each other against one another. Which makes - well, I'm going to do a bit of a caricature here, maybe you'll say it's a bit much, but I swear it corresponds to millions of voters who went from the far left to the National Front, over forty years. Say I'm a miner - I'll take the example of a miner, you'll see why - from the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, not because it's a stock image of the working class, there are others. So, someone from the North. You've heard of silicosis, this disease that meant people died pretty young, especially in the mines, because silica is an awful thing.
41:39 Breathing in the mineral particles at the bottom of the mine that lodged in the lungs. There were huge struggles over protective gear, masks - sorry, protections, etc. At the time, this is historical, late 19th, early 20th century, it's old - the word "ecology" didn't exist. People said "exploitation." People fought against exploitation. You might say to me, well, different word systems. Yes, but the only difference is that the term before '68 - sorry, before '68 - people spoke of exploitation, so the problem is directed at man. You protect the man who is exploited by man.
42:09 Whereas from these new terms onward, it's nature that's in danger, in a sense. It's not at all the same thing. The solidarities aren't the same. It's a typical example of how newspeak gets instilled bit by bit. So now, I never know, when there's a struggle, whether it's to protect the marshes, for instance. Because marshes, as you know better than me, are an extremely complex ecosystem.
42:39 It's that if you touch one frog, basically, it's the apocalypse in the universe, because everything is connected, and so on. There's a name for that. We didn't used to call it that. Here, I'm denouncing "ecologism," not ecology, but this is traditionally called providence, in theology. It means that nature has arranged everything in such a way that every species is indispensable and nothing must be changed. It's really extraordinary. As soon as man moves, he ruins this superb divine order. That's what a certain "deep ecology," as they say in the United States, amounts to.
43:09 There you go. I'm not at all sure that the planet's biggest killer, the biggest killer of humans - I'm thinking of the anopheles mosquito, which I got to know well in my life, since I've had bouts of malaria - is the leading cause of death worldwide, more than suicide, more than road accidents, and more than AIDS, even though AIDS has killed a great deal in Africa. This scourge is injected by a mosquito that's guaranteed organic, as I said earlier. I mean, these things aren't values in themselves. I mean, it depends. There you go. I'm more of an ecologist than anyone, but selfishly, "nature" only exists in the minds of those who are privileged.
43:47 The Earth is no more out of balance now than when it was covered in volcanoes and nobody could breathe, not even a blade of grass - that existed back then too. Now, "balance" doesn't mean anything. Is it moral? How could nature be moral? Nonsense. In short, "balance" doesn't mean anything except balance measured on a scale, on the pans of a Roberval balance. So it's in relation to a measure that comes from us that there's balance or not. On the other hand, I fully agree that it's absolutely necessary for life, for all that - that's already more relative, which is quite different.
44:18 Not because it's natural, but because it's indispensable to living things. I'd remind you that living things are actually marginal in the universe. Try to find me a year - I mean a place - where there are living beings, we'd be quite pleased. There certainly are some, statistically, in probability theory, in the law of large numbers. But it's apparently not the rule. Most of what we see as nebulae and so on is still inert matter, and life - because increasingly, in biological discourse, the living and nature get conflated. Nature equals green equals organic. But no, the biological is exceptional within the natural order.
44:50 I remember - it's first and foremost physico-chemical, nature is. And above all, nature is the first nuclear power plant in the world - don't let me forget this. The sun is a gigantic nuclear plant that never stops, like every star, fusing heavy tritium or whatever, I'm not a specialist. So I just note that. Now, it's in '68, right at the moment we've stopped at, that all these reversals take place. Man against woman, young against old, the forty-something who takes jobs meant for the young. Because in a time of scarcity, everyone fights against everyone.
45:24 Inevitably, people are pitted against one another. It reminds me of those watering holes in Africa, as the dry season approaches, where you end up with ten crocodiles in a pond the size of this room. Obviously that causes fights in the pond. So this is intentional. And above all, people start going after everything that's a target for NATO. That's what strikes me. A consensus starts to emerge. What I mean is, it's not as though people suddenly got the idea of cutting production because of nuisances and pollution.
45:58 It's the opposite. It's because production had already started to decline that the ecological discourse came in, right on cue, to justify it. "We're not hiring anymore, guys. We've got overproduction, we're not interested in hiring." So it suits us to have an anti-productivist discourse. And here I'm revealing one of the great secrets of today, because most environmentalists fight against productivism - that's consistent - and I've told them, the first anti-productivist today is capital itself. Not the capital that built the railways, but financial capital - it's on strike, the only strike I've always condemned, and violently: the investment strike.
46:34 Capital hasn't invested in thirty years. That's one of the great secrets. It's never said. It's not a great secret, I don't want conspiracy theories - it's measurable, it's documented, there are plenty of files on this. But there's no more investment. And indeed, because what would investing mean? Rebuilding factories, hiring guys who'll go and form CGT unions and become communists, bringing back that nightmare - no, we've shipped the factories off to Czechia, to China. Good, we're safe now. Now all we have is green spaces. I'm exaggerating a bit. And production will be elsewhere. Here, all we'll have is consumption.
47:04 That's the whole game. We mustn't be complicit in that. It's monstrous, in a way. First of all, because the people on the other side don't agree either. Because the Chinese too - there was a 40% wage increase in Romania, at the factory that makes Dacia cars, the Renaults - they got a 40% raise after a single strike. So their scheme doesn't always work. So then they have to look for an even cheaper country. Now it's Vietnam, which is the biggest producer of blank CDs on the entire planet, subcontracting for Chinese or Japanese factories. It's Vietnam.
47:35 There you go. So, I mean, putting people in competition - I who spent my life in what used to be called the Third World, as if there were two before it and this was a third one, somehow - it's frightening, in a way, saying "as long as you're not paid like Bangladeshis, it means you cost too much, and that you're dirty, parasitic, cynical consumers who don't care about your children's future or the planet." Well, fine, that's some terrible guilt-tripping. And all this because of what? Because I consume?
Clouscard's solitude, Deleuze and the miner who votes Le Pen 48:06 There you go. So this is Clouscard, in enormous solitude. Now, it's starting to become - well, what I'm saying is not so obvious yet, but it's starting to be visible, with the crisis, unemployment - people are starting to see, oh, give me a job, we'll deal with other problems afterward. We're coming back to the real emergencies. Back when he was writing, he was in total solitude. The process was only just beginning. And so he suffered a great deal, indeed, because he came from a very working-class background, and just getting to university was already, for him, a triumph. Poor man, he used to say - he was born in '25, so he was much older than me - he used to say, "On my grave, I want them to write, quite simply: Michel Clouscard, university professor."
48:42 In a way, for him, this journey that took "the little nobody," as he called himself, all the way to teaching at the university in Poitiers, was, despite all the obstacles he'd faced, something heroic. He had a bit of a picaresque side to him. A bit like in Don Quixote - I rather like that side of him, those outbursts. But the seriousness of the publication that matters to me, Neofascism and the Ideology of Desire, is aimed very specifically at Deleuze's discourse. Yes. I'm not dogmatic.
49:12 There's a line of Deleuze's that I love and that I quote often: "There is nothing more terrible than to be the prey of someone else's dream." He really saw something there. But otherwise, on the whole, Deleuze is one of the pillars of this counter-revolution being set up at the time. We must be done with Marxism, we must be done with psychoanalysis. It starts with Anti-Oedipus. That's how it begins. That is, all forms of thought - Jewish thought too, by the way - about determination. Because they say: "My relationship to myself isn't as transparent as all that. I'm determined by my sexual, class determinations, whatever it may be, according to the Marxists, etc."
49:44 But no, no, no - it's a revolt against all that. "I am myself." Well, that's a tautology. And so we go in the opposite direction from the outcome Rimbaud had reached, after such great difficulty, at the end of A Season in Hell: "One must be absolutely modern" and hold the ground gained. And - forgive this digression, not a sentimental one exactly, but a human one, about Clouscard's solitude. That's why now, when I see the print runs - he's no longer here to see it.
50:16 But in a way, of course, sometimes in a murky fashion, because there are people who don't know whether they're going to vote Le Pen, or who hang around Soral, and who've only heard of Clouscard through a blog of Soral's. So, I'll just note in passing, all the same, that when Soral first got in touch with Clouscard - who already had Parkinson's and was worn out - Clouscard was still on the far left.
50:46 Soral hadn't published any of the identitarian obsessions we've since seen from him. And Clouscard, already too tired, told him: "Go see Pagani." That's how I ended up in contact with Soral. "Go see Pagani, he knows my work, he'll explain it to you, I'm too tired." There you go. But what a journey, I mean - taking up the pen in the sixties, completely against the grain of the direction things were heading at the time, to write this book that says: watch out, one fascism is hiding another.
51:19 And that's very timely. I'm not saying - I'm not saying that Le Pen number one wasn't dangerous, or that she isn't dangerous. But I'm simply saying that, by the way, it's interesting, the conflict, simulated or real, whichever it may be for now, that's currently going on - the father has always been hyper-Atlanticist, pro-American, berating De Gaulle for the Phnom Penh speech, calling it a betrayal over the Vietnam war. He was pro-Brussels. "De Gaulle, by what right does he pursue the empty-chair policy and refuse to let Britain, the whites, into the Common Market, etc." It needs to be recalled - it was the other way around. It's quite something, this political reversal.
51:53 Now Marine, she even proposed partially nationalizing Alstom. "Talk about nationalization and you're finished" used to be the line - whereas her father went to war against nationalization. He'd have put people up against a wall for it, old Le Pen. He was very much the man of private enterprise. So what he saw there is one of the great secrets of our era, Clouscard. That's why I'm glad you mentioned this particular title, Neofascism and the Ideology of Desire, because it shows very clearly that it's starting from this false presentation of desire, according to Deleuze, that desire is creative.
52:27 And what else, like the others, who use that word so much? It's incredible. The guy who consumes - he's the creative one. You have to hear it. Meanwhile, the guy who breaks his back in a factory is a parasite, no doubt, or Stalinist and outdated. So let me go back to my image. I'm a miner in the North, Pas-de-Calais. I have a wife, let's say, fifteen years younger than me - you'll see why later, this suits my point. It happens. Yes, it happens. And this guy, over the course of forty years, he's lost everything. They closed the mines in the North fairly early. The coalfields of the North, first, they were privatized.
52:59 Then they were shut down outright. People were told steel is finished, or if you want it, you have to go to Fos-sur-Mer. So you tell some Lorrainer who's spent his whole life there, who was born there, in Lorraine: well, you have to be flexible, you have to adapt, you have to move - like the Americans, who aren't tied to a homeland the way we are. Go to Fos-sur-Mer. Now there's neither Fos-sur-Mer nor Charbonnages de France left. That way, everyone agrees. And there's no more cold-rolling either, as they say. So, I put myself in this guy's shoes. On top of it, my wife leaves me, because she's started hanging out with friends, one of whom, a girl at university, told her, "But your husband's a macho, that's not okay."
53:35 "He tells you to do the dishes. No, that's really not okay." You know, mocking his so-called marketplace value - so I told Claudine, he packs his bags, you see, my allusions aren't random, etc. In short: I'm useless, I'm counter-productive, I no longer have a job, my wife dumps me for some youth-center activity leader, or, I don't know, for a film producer - sorry, a director. So, in a way, I mean, this is where Clouscard resonates. The guy who'd voted Communist his whole life ends up voting Le Pen.
54:07 Because he hasn't - he hasn't read Clouscard, he hasn't gone to university, he doesn't have the intellectual defenses, he's fed up, cracking under the pressure. I've simplified and caricatured this a bit, but you have to admit there are many stories of provincial France that have gone through exactly this pattern. They took everything from the guy. That's why we absolutely must fight the National Front, and absolutely must not alienate the National Front's electorate. A recent poll I saw showed that 51% of that electorate couldn't care less about immigration issues. That's not their problem. Their problem is unemployment, for instance.
54:39 So there you go, it's a complicated period we're living through. Marine understood this very well. That's why she tells her father, "Now's not the time, keep quiet." "It's taken us a while to make ourselves credible as being more left-wing than the ones who cry 'talk of nationalization and you're finished.'" The blue, white, red flag of the cats there - that's not far-right at all. I remember the Tixier-Vignancour rallies, which you probably don't know about - he was the lawyer for the OAS people, he was the far-right establishment figure that Jean-Marie Le Pen later took over from. It was the fleur-de-lis flag with the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
55:09 You've maybe seen that among the traditionalists who still do it, at Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet. That was the blue-white-red. What about it? "La gueuse"? The Republic, democracy - that's what's called "la gueuse" in right-wing circles. What's that got to do with red? "La gueuse rouge," Robespierre, the guillotine. And now, blue-white-red, people call that Le Pen-ist. That's quite something. On top of it, there's France-bashing in all the most reactionary countries - England, Germany, the United States. All the misfortune, all our problems, apparently comes from the French model.
55:39 It's extraordinary. I think the biggest crisis we're currently going through came from the subprime crisis of the American system, from a lack of control, from financial laxity. But no, that's not what we'll say. It's the fault of EDF and SNCF, all that. It's monstrous, we've inherited this from the Liberation, we need to liquidate all that. In short, as Cohn-Bendit used to say, we must put an end to Gaullo-communism.
