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Question on the pedagogical movement from the Renaissance to Rousseau 0:00 Hello Dominique. Hello Philippe. So here we are for the two questions that were asked during the last workshop. So first I'll read the question that was asked by Sainte Lucille.
0:38 Yes. So I would be interested to know Mr. Pagani's opinion on the importance of the pedagogical movement that developed from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, and from which Rousseau seems to have inherited — in parentheses, Emile. Well, I welcome this question. Actually I congratulate Sainte Lucille. I mean, it always sounds a bit conventional, but it's really not the case here, it always sounds a bit conventional to say I'm very pleased with the question.
1:13 But it's been, my goodness, more than a quarter of a century that I've been teaching precisely this segment which Sainte Lucille defines very well in chronological terms, so to speak. That is, the sequence running from the 16th century to Rousseau, or rather to the second half, the latter part of the 18th century, let's say. So why do I often talk about it as a single block?
1:45 This gives me the chance to clarify right away, mainly for Sainte Lucille, and also for those following us, who are also kind enough to follow us live, that I'm going to give two answers, philosophically speaking. First a chronological answer, taking up the sequence contained in Sainte Lucille's question, from the 16th to the 18th century, and a logical answer. Of course, these are not quite the same thing — I mean, by digging into the concept of pedagogy, transmission, teaching, etc.
Pedagogy, a species of the genus transmission 2:28 I'll start with the logical element. Why? To recall that transmission is a considerably more extensive concept than that of pedagogy. Pedagogy — forgive me, I'm going to be a bit abstract, not to be pedantic, but to be precise. Pedagogy is a species of the genus transmission.
3:00 There you go, it's not that complicated. Because within the genus transmission, there's also things like 'will arrive tomorrow on the 5:02 train.' By telegram, by email, by text message, whatever you like. I mean, that's also a transmission. But what do they have in common? And that's where the concept comes in. It's the concept of the middle term. Like the speech happening right now between us. And I'm not even talking about the other channels connecting us, starting with the light, since we see an image, or the air that carries the sound linking us.
3:39 Isn't that so? All of that happens in between, hence the middle term. Middle, hub, like the center of a wheel. A middle term between the two extremes that are the sender and the recipient. It being understood that the roles can be exchanged. In a dialogue, each person is in turn sender and recipient. That's exactly what's at stake here. So why do I recall all this? Because, since the question was asked within the framework of the workshop opening this season — I'm speaking as in a TV series — namely, Revolutionary Thought from Rousseau to Lenin.
4:26 I pointed out in the teaser — I believe that's what it's called — that you kindly recorded for our audience, I made clear that Hegel would occupy a somewhat larger place in this sequence than the others. Not at all because of any subjective preference. I don't prefer him to Rousseau, or to Marx, or to Lenin. That's not the point. It's because he himself is the middle term of this sequence.
5:00 I'm not forgetting the 16th-18th century sequence. But here I'm talking about the Rousseau-to-Lenin sequence. Hegel is simply in the middle. That is, first there's Rousseau and Kant. Then there's Marx and Lenin at the end. And it's Hegel who makes the transition from the first two to the last two. That's the first reason he occupies the position of middle term. The second reason I give him priority is because I have a thought for the agrégation candidates who are going to have to tackle the Hegelian corpus this year, insofar as Hegel is on the syllabus for the philosophy agrégation exam.
5:40 There you go. And so this will be an opportunity to provide a bit of complementary insight to the excellent courses they're otherwise given. I don't claim to be exhaustive, especially at the level of a competitive exam like the agrégation, within such a limited timeframe. Let me come back to the concept of the middle term.
Hegel: dialectic as syllogistics, form as essential 6:11 It occupies a central place in Hegel's thought. Hegel often said that his dialectic is a syllogistic. This is important to understand because in the latter half of his work, Hegel increasingly uses the term dialectic less; he speaks of speculative philosophy, to refer to his own standpoint, as opposed to critical philosophy when he speaks of Kant, or to abstract universality, when he speaks of what we would today call positivism, or something less abstract.
6:55 He speaks less and less of the word dialectic, not that he disowns the notion, but it's contained within speculative philosophy. So what is the speculative? It's the dialectical syllogism. Let me start with somewhat abstract things, in contrast to Aristotle's syllogistic. There aren't 36 developed syllogistics in the history of thought. There's Aristotle's and Hegel's — that's interesting. Except that this one is the inverse of that one.
7:27 Namely that in Hegel — I don't want to develop this point too much, but I'll come back to it in our monthly workshops — in Hegel, there is a split carried into the very subject of a syllogism. In other words, into the premise itself, and not only into the predicate. So why do I insist on this middle term? Because — and this isn't just true for Hegel — modern thought in general, take a current one couldn't be more opposed to Hegel.
8:05 That of structuralism, for instance. I'll say, one couldn't seem more opposed. Personally, I don't oppose them; I find Hegel is structuralist at certain moments. For example, when he says, against the Romantics — whom he tended to look down on a bit for the elements of form, of presentation — that what matters is the substance, the essence. He has that fine statement in the preface to the Phenomenology. It's precisely because form is as essential to essence as essence is to itself, that essence cannot be conceived simply as essence, but also as form, gestalt, structure — as form in all the richness of developed form.
8:45 There you go — we weren't yet talking, of course, about the movement of the signifier, but still, to borrow Hegel's own wording, 'in all the richness of developed form.' So modern thought, in general, takes far less lightly than a good deal of past thought the notion of the middle term. We often tend to jump right over the middle. What matters — because the words I'm using right now to speak to you, or to the audience — what matters is the content of my thought that I want to convey.
9:16 That's the misunderstanding that existed before Hegel. Right? As if my thought were deeper than my words. And yes, my genius is certainly diminished by the poverty of language — these are themes we often hear — and words that fail to live up to my thought. And no. Language is not simply a means, as we believe in a telegraphic use of it. I don't know — 'will arrive tomorrow on the 2pm train,' as before. That's not the deepest use of language.
9:47 The medium turns out to be the essential thing, even though it seems to take a back seat compared to the two extremes that appear — to me — the sender and the recipient, the two essential moments. Between the two, the medium is nothing but a back-and-forth, a valet, a messenger. And here the messenger, according to the reversal I'm commenting on, and which he insists on heavily, here the messenger appears more important than the one who sends him and the one to whom he addresses the message.
10:22 He brings the message. I'm thinking here, of course, of an admirable text by Kafka called 'An Imperial Message.' It's less than a page long, so I can only recommend rereading it. It's available online, as far as I know. 'An Imperial Message,' Kafka. And Hegel — one shouldn't dwell too much, as I'm doing, on the essential, not secondary, role of the messenger. There's a political dimension in everything I've just said which wasn't apparent, so I'll spell it out now.
10:52 It's that the messenger appears somewhat like the servant. And the sender and the recipient are the masters. Between the two, one sends a courier, a messenger, a slave. That's why, in rehabilitating the messenger's role, I'm also introducing a dimension of political emancipation. There you go. So, transmission, pedagogy — these are not secondary instances. The essential thing is not the body of knowledge to be transmitted.
Renaissance and Enlightenment, two parallel critical movements 11:24 And afterward, we go find some way, some pedagogical trick, to transmit it. No. Transmission itself appears essential. Now, this essential side of transmission — Sainte Lucille, I come back to it — is very rightly placed within a chronological sequence running from the 16th to the 18th century. Why? Because, starting in the 16th century, there is a questioning not just of the preceding century, but of nearly ten preceding centuries, corresponding to what we call the Middle Ages.
12:09 The Middle Ages is immense as a chronological era. From the end of the Roman Empire up to, well, generally we end it at the great discoveries, however you like — one doesn't pass from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, that is to the 16th century, on some December 31st at midnight, of course. But anyway, I mean, roughly, there are markers like, I don't know, 1492, the discovery of America, or the invention of printing, roughly around the same time. There you go, what matters is that the Renaissance is a questioning that occurs over a brief period, and therefore incredibly rich, teeming, often even almost excessive, in the best sense of the term.
12:52 I'm thinking of Ronsard, when he says he wants to read Homer's Iliad in three days. I'm thinking of the abundance of vocabulary in a Montaigne, a du Bellay, a Ronsard — a vocabulary that later had to be pruned to make our beautiful classical language, but which impoverished it too, didn't it? There you go. From Rabelais to Racine, the vocabulary became somewhat impoverished. I'm not the only one to have noticed this, I'm not giving a literature class, I won't dwell on it too much, but still, this century vibrates entirely with the questioning I'm speaking of.
13:30 Now, this questioning is halted starting in the 17th century by the sheer power of the absolute monarchy that establishes itself from the 17th century onward. And in particular — and here I'll draw a distinction between the Louis XIII period and the Louis XIV period — in particular, under the reign of Louis XIV, let's not forget that this is supposedly the longest reign in the history of France, an exceptionally stable period. And so I proceed as if — it's often said, moreover, it's a title by Voltaire the historian, 'The Age of Louis XIV,' to refer to the 17th century.
14:09 Now, there, 'the State, that is me.' That's a quote attributed to the man himself, Louis XIV. There's no question of tolerating dissent for the master and monarch of Versailles. So from the end — from the death of Louis XIV, after the rather dark period when he was, forgive the familiar term, 'shacked up' with Madame de Maintenon in a kind of authoritarian bigotry — from his death, from the period called the Regency, at the start of the 18th century, tongues loosen and the Age of Enlightenment begins.
14:51 What I'm saying is that there's a parallel to be drawn between the Age of Enlightenment as an eminently critical century — everyone knows that, critical of the Old Regime, of religion, of feudalism — and the 16th century, critical of the Middle Ages. There's a parallel I can try — I don't know if it shows on screen — but that I can try to demonstrate with this diagram where I've deliberately drawn two parallel lines, I don't know if it's visible, Philippe, where the 16th century is shown as a slope, as a way of depicting the questioning metaphorically — there's movement, a slope with an arrow, it's not a segment, it's a vector.
15:27 The 18th century, then — skipping the 17th for now — is also on a slope, a parallel slope, as if these were the two sides of a splayed-out parallelogram. And between the two, I deliberately made the 17th century flat, stable, level, to show that the critical movement, the movement of subversion, is put on hold here during the reign of Louis XIV. There you go. Now, what becomes of the pedagogical element in all this?
Rabelais, Montaigne, the Encyclopédie 16:03 If we look at the 16th century, pedagogy plays an essential role in the work of Rabelais, whom I mentioned in passing earlier. The strong moments of Pantagruel, of Gargantua, are the passage from medieval education, where rote learning, mnemonics, plays a central role, isn't that so, to intelligence, critique, discussion. That's the whole program of humanism, of course, the return to the sources, the examination of manuscripts, verification.
16:41 That's what constitutes the essence of the new education assigned to break with centuries where, as was so aptly said, 'outside the Church, no salvation.' It sufficed to repeat — let me take, to take a metonymy and stop dwelling on the old education — the French term 'kyrielle' [litany], as when we say 'sending kyrielles of emails,' for example — where does that come from?
17:14 It comes from 'Kyrie eleison.' It was repeated so much in Latin — a language that nine-tenths of the illiterate, because printing hadn't been invented, the rural masses didn't even understand the language of the Mass — and so they repeated 'Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison,' and in the end it became 'kyrielle.' There you go, to show just how much the previous education disregarded the learner's qualities of intelligence and critique.
17:46 So much for Rabelais. As for Montaigne — I'm taking the two extremes of the 16th century, the beginning and the end — Montaigne's best-known formula, even for those who read him little or never, is still: 'better a well-made head than a well-filled one.' The pedagogical plays a very great role. In the 18th century, you'll tell me — and of course everyone will agree — the monument is Rousseau's Emile, which wants to produce good offspring afterward.
18:17 Yes, yes, yes, but be careful, before arriving at Emile, which is the perfection of the genre — I'm speaking of the 18th century, it's not a value judgment, I mean 'perfection' in the sense of completion, that's the grammatical meaning, let's remember it well. Completion of what? Of the immense didactic edifice of the entire 18th century, including the other Enlightenment philosophers with whom Rousseau had disputes. Still, the main structure of that 18th century is, after all, the Encyclopédie — the philosophical Encyclopédie, let's never forget, the reasoned dictionary of the sciences, arts, and trades — which is the most extraordinary undertaking of popularization on the scale of an entire population that had ever been seen up to that point.
19:08 You need to look closely at the plates, the illustrations, where every machine is detailed down to its smallest parts, with admirable care in reproduction. I might add that Diderot, at the time — he wasn't yet completely on bad terms with Rousseau — had asked Rousseau to write the entry on music for the Encyclopédie, and Rousseau discharges the task by writing developments on Persian, Chinese, and Arabic music. Because there are still people who talk about ethnocentrism, as if we had waited, I don't know, for the 1980s, or postmodernism, or postcolonial studies, to become interested in other cultures.
19:42 Still, go dig up the article 'Music' in the Encyclopédie written by Rousseau, and you'll see that one learns a great deal about scales and modes, isn't that so, Oriental, Far Eastern ones, etc., from Rousseau's pen. Well, let me close that little parenthesis. But so, there you have it — the whole 18th century, the whole Enlightenment movement — and that's one of the senses of the word 'lumière' [light], which is a metaphor I'm unfolding across its whole spectrum, starting from the literal, non-metaphorical sense, which is the light that lets me see the screen, see the page of the book I'm reading, see the face of the person I'm speaking to or, above all, who is speaking to me, and to see through their expression and the movements of their lips, to understand even better what they're saying.
The Enlightenment, Prometheus, and the transmission of knowledge 20:30 That's light in that sense, of course, in the literal sense, but it's also the century of fire — sorry, it's also light in the sense of heat, hence fire, and we find the movement of Prometheus who steals fire from Olympus to bring it to men. An eminently subversive undertaking, since in Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound he predicts in so many words that one day man will come to deliver him from the punishment to which Zeus condemned him for having made man a rival of the gods.
21:05 You see that, instead of opposing, as postmodern, neo-pagan, sub-Nietzschean thought does — in short, the dominant thought of recent years, which absolutely wants to oppose Judeo-Christianity, I'm thinking of, like Onfray, for example, championing a Nietzsche reduced to that single aspect, poor old thing, against paganism, and for whom, as Nietzsche says on several occasions, Judeo-Christianity would be nothing but a discourse that can only emanate from inferior beings, from slaves, who terrorize free men with incantations and spells and threats of hell, etc.
21:55 In short, I note here that, contrary to this dichotomy, the myth of Prometheus — I was there — says roughly the same thing as the Tower of Babel. Instead of opposing the two, I bring them together for the benefit of a humanism that must not be amputated or mutilated of such large chunks as the Greek, and thus pagan, moment, and the Judeo-Christian moment. The Tower of Babel, where humanity is punished for wanting to equal God, and the myth of Prometheus, where Prometheus is punished for wanting to make man equal to the gods, convey roughly the same message.
22:31 Well. Now, fire, light, the Age of Enlightenment — it's the century of visual light, a century of empiricists, above all under English influence, of Anglo-Saxon thought, and it's empiricism, the glorious sequence of Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, etc. And one must be careful not to disdain it. I say this because Nietzsche says 'I despise Locke.' And he's not the only one — it's a great tradition in German thought to somewhat overlook the experimental demands of English thought.
23:10 This effort of popularization, in the best sense of the term — 'vulgum' means people in Latin, the same root as 'folk,' 'vulgus' — that is, of making available to the greatest number knowledge that had been reserved, that had been the privilege of the few. There you go. Not simply out of charity or to do good for those who benefit from this broadening, but simply for the sake of knowledge itself.
23:45 For all researchers, especially in our era, know very well that if communication between scholars were limited — I recall that during the Cold War, at its worst, the Russians and Soviets and the Americans never stopped exchanging their fundamental research. I'm not talking, of course, about the formulas needed to build a missile or a lethal chemical substance.
24:16 No, no, but at the fundamental level, advances in the concepts of mass, energy, particles, astrophysics, the living world — all of that was exchanged, because it would be an enormous limitation of knowledge if we limited — and I come back to it — communication, the transmission of knowledge. The transmission of knowledge is the essential element of knowledge. It's not that knowledge exists first and then afterward we go looking for how to transmit it. Transmission is an essential moment of knowledge.
24:46 Let's try to see what mathematics would have amounted to if we had been condemned to use only Roman numerals to transmit magnitudes. We wouldn't have gotten very far. It's so empirical, but this time in the indefensible sense, which is not the scientific sense, moreover — there's the crude sense of someone who says, 'I have experience, I've had Africans, I worked with them for years, I know them,' but in fact the guy who says that has seen nothing at all in Africa. So it's the site foremen who talk like that. I want to make clear that there isn't knowledge on one side and a means of transmitting it on the other.
25:25 I always come back to my story of the middle term. So, I insisted on the logical aspect in order to arrive at the chronology I just sketched out, where there's indeed the 16th century, from Rabelais to Montaigne, which never stops insisting on this transmission and critical movement, which is momentarily stopped, put in parentheses by the establishment of the absolute monarchy under Louis XIV — there are other qualities under Louis XIV, things that appear, but anyway that disappears — and this critical movement, this movement of subversion and questioning, is taken up again right from the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, from the period that corresponds roughly to that of Montesquieu.
The pedagogical as antechamber of the political; Plato's dialogue 26:10 historically to what is called the Regency. Now, what is common at the conceptual level? I'm coming back now from the chronological in any case — what is subversive and progressive and positive in this emphasis placed on pedagogy is the conviction that forming the child means forming the future citizen. The pedagogical is the antechamber of the political.
26:42 That's how I sum up all the answers I can give to Sainte-Cécile's question. Sainte-Lucille, sorry, excuse me. It's my investment in music that makes me think of the patron saint of music, Saint Cecilia. But Lucille is quite fitting too, because I'm in the middle of talking about light, and that's exactly what that beautiful name means. So, the pedagogical is the antechamber of the political. In case we get lost in the twists and turns of my answer — I might get lost in it myself, I hope not — I'll concentrate my answer in that formula.
27:24 And with that, I'll conclude, I'll allow myself to refer Sainte-Lucille to an ancient tradition from which both the Renaissance movement and the 18th century proceed on this point, with regard to pedagogy — it's the role that Plato assigned to pedagogy. It's surely no accident that the whole of Plato's work, at least his exoteric work, since we've lost his esoteric work—
27:54 Esoteric refers to the body of lectures he gave to his disciples. And we know practically nothing about them, apart from one crucial half-page in Aristotle's De Anima and a few very fleeting bits of testimony here and there in compilers like Diogenes Laërtius. We know nothing. So let's not talk about what isn't documented. On the other hand, we do have — they were a great success as soon as they appeared, so to speak, so there were many copies made. Fortunately for us, we have the dialogues. Now, Plato chose a literarily, artistically, highly developed form: the dialogue.
28:30 That's no accident, because there's an artifice here, in the least reductive sense of course — a superb staging of the content of what he has to say. And to apply what I said earlier about the 16th and 18th centuries to Plato — namely that there isn't the content of knowledge on one side, and then afterward the pedagogical, which would only deal with the means of transmitting this knowledge that would already be there — but rather that it's in the very effort of the act of transmitting, in the very effort of teaching, that true knowledge is constituted, provided it isn't one-sided but is, as with Plato, precisely dialogical, and that we don't say it's artificial, that we don't say there's a Socrates leading all the discussions while the interlocutor is condemned to say 'yes, yes, certainly, why not,' etc.
29:23 No, no, no, no. When you see, in the Gorgias for example, the incredible intervention of Callicles, who cuts off Socrates and everyone else for several pages, even threatening Socrates with the rod, saying he'd deserve it if he weren't so old — a threat of violence — this shows that the dialogue in Plato is serious business. What does that mean? It means — and this might please certain psychoanalytic circles too, what I'm about to say, I don't know — that there is no analysis except in relation to the analysand.
29:59 It isn't a corpus that sits in the analyst's head and that would need to be transmitted; it isn't a matter of translating from the head of the teacher into the head of the taught. Otherwise we'd always be repeating what Adam and Eve were supposed to say to Abel and Cain — I mean, if there weren't, precisely on the side of the generations being taught to children, some resistance or some loss, whatever you want to call it, but a modification of what was originally intended by those who were teaching, which is what makes things evolve.
30:34 So, I come back to Plato — of course, the dialogue most emblematically designated, to speak like a journalist, to show Plato's pedagogical concern, is the well-known Meno, in which, to illustrate his thesis that all knowledge is recollection — since I'm speaking today I won't dwell on it, or to know is to remember, it's the same thesis in a different translation — Plato, before his bewildered interlocutor, to support this fundamental thesis, brings in a slave and is going to demonstrate to his interlocutor that this slave, who is illiterate in mathematics — a field reserved for the master, for the liberal knowledge as it will later be called — will demonstrate that if questioned properly, this slave, who has no notion of the theorem of the diagonal, will formulate it himself — he won't repeat it, he won't repeat a theorem that Socrates tells him.
31:36 Socrates, through questions, is going to help him give birth — that's the primary meaning, as everyone knows, of Socrates's method, maieutics; maia means midwife, which was actually his mother's profession — so that the slave will himself formulate the geometric and arithmetic content of the relation of the diagonal to the side of the square. So here again, I'm insisting on the political dimension, often unnoticed, of the pedagogical problem.
32:12 When I say the pedagogical as a political field — there, Plato brings in a slave. We're a long way from an Aristotle who says — and Rousseau criticizes him for it in The Social Contract — that there are men born to command and men born to obey, as if they were different ontologies that one could not move from one to the other. It's a bit like the relation between what is noble and what is base under the Ancien Régime, at least until the Edict of the Paulette, which Clouscard commented on extensively in L'Être et le code, rightly so, because until the Edict of the Paulette — Mr. Paulet is the one who, in 1610, established this edict — it establishes what is called the venality of offices.
32:56 Up until then, you had to be born noble to be noble, and then, starting with the Edict of the Paulette, you could become noble even if you were a commoner — you could pass from one ontology to the other. So these are no longer separate ontologies, if you have the substance — that is, the money needed to buy a title of nobility. There. I remain open, of course, in case Sainte-Lucille finds her question decorated, but I think I've answered the essential — the essential never being, of course, as important as the deployment of form, as I said at the start quoting 'all the flesh of developed form' — but that, I trust her, given the intelligence of her question, to find the flesh and blood to put on the rather abstract remarks I'm forced to make in so little time.
Question on the dissolution of the separation of genres 33:52 And so, I'm ready to answer the second question if you are. So, the second question was posted online by Sunbro. 'What does Mr. Pagani mean by the dissolution of the separation between genres, notably the stakes involved?' Ah, I'm struck by the way he posed the question — the dialectical sense of Sunbro.
34:25 Why dialectical? Because instead of, most of the time, this question being asked as 'what does Dominique Pagani think of the separation of genres or, on the contrary, of the fusion of genres' — here he says the... Repeat it exactly for me, I don't want to distort the literal wording of his question. 'What does Mr. Pagani mean by the dissolution of the separation between genres, notably the genres?' There. Dissolution of the separation. Think dialectically — it's good that he formulated it that way.
34:55 Because generally we oppose the two. So I'll start with a literary entry point, simply to make clear what I'm talking about. My subject isn't literature at all, my subject is philosophical. But I recall — it's taught in every course on literary history — that when we make the entirely academic and well-worn opposition — I'm not saying it's unjustified, and we'll have all the documentation we want on it — between romanticism and classicism—
35:30 Here again, earlier I said that the Renaissance of the 16th century was characterized by the questioning of ten centuries of the Middle Ages. The 18th century is characterized by the questioning of feudal privileges and the fanaticism of religious discourse. So I note in passing — and this won't surprise those who are steeped in the left — you see I'm mixing the two questions a bit on purpose — that we only define ourselves by opposing ourselves.
36:08 You see green better against red than green against blue, otherwise it makes turquoise and you can no longer distinguish it well. There. So, to properly grasp a determination, the best way is to oppose it to its contrary. This is what makes Spinoza say, in one of the meanings of his inexhaustibly profound formula, which Hegel appreciated enormously and explicitly, that every determination is negation.
36:38 Now, when romanticism appears, it necessarily opposes what came before it. That's what I'm illustrating right now. And before it, there is classicism in terms of literary norms. Now, I'm not going to, of course, recall everything that distinguishes and opposes these two movements — that would make for a very interesting or tedious literature course, depending on how you handle it — but in any case it would take much more time than we have. One of the crucial and, in my opinion, decisive elements of this opposition, from a formal point of view — I'm not talking about content elements like the importance of the self, of feeling, no — but at the formal level, is that classicism is for the separation of genres and romanticism for their fusion.
37:21 That's what needs to be recalled first to those who ask the question. And in particular here, regarding this word — let's never forget that the classical, that is, the literary and artistic expression of the Ancien Régime — I'm neither demonizing nor idealizing anything, I'm making here a judgment of existence, not a judgment of value — when we say classicism, we must imply the separation of genres. And like every classicism — Hegel sees this very well in his Aesthetics — its absolute reference is the aesthetics and literature of ancient Greece, to the point that a Racine or people like that spend their time saying, 'the best one can do, at best, '
38:06 I'm making it deliberately pleonastic, 'is to imitate the ancients without ever being able to equal them, let alone surpass them.' And this movement gets underway in the Renaissance. From the Renaissance on, we see a return of Greek values in art and literature. I recall the little quote I made from Ronsard earlier, there's a sonnet that begins, 'I want to read Homer's Iliad in three days.' Well, most of Racine's plays take place in a Greco-Roman setting, don't they?
Shakespeare, Molière, and the poetic prose of Rousseau 38:42 So I insist on the link between the Ancien Régime, classicism, and the Hellenic reference. Why? Because we also find among the Greeks this very important care for the separation of genres. No question of having, as in Shakespeare — the emblematic reference of the romantic, as opposed to classicism — in the same play, in the same text, something to laugh at and something to cry about, the tragic and the comic, the buffoonish, the burlesque.
39:18 And at the same time, the passages that are undoubtedly among the most tragic — I'm thinking of King Lear, aren't I? That is, one of the darkest works a writer ever dared to put down on paper — even so, even in those darkest plays, there is always room, isn't there, for something comic, even burlesque. Which Hugo would later take up, for example. So, again, classicism separates the genres, romanticism fuses them.
39:50 You can guess that if I'm asked this question in the context of a lecture series entitled 'Revolutionary Thought from Rousseau to Lenin,' it's because the stakes of this separation and this fusion — or rather this separation, or on the contrary this fusion, contrary to what I said earlier — do not concern only formal elements, but also elements of content.
40:21 It's no accident that the genres — comedy, tragedy, the short scene, the impromptu, the Impromptu of Versailles, in Molière for instance — the genre of prose, the genre of verse — remember the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, don't you, how Mr. Jourdain discovers with that ingenuousness which is uniquely his, which is uniquely ours — we say 'bourgeois' now, socially — that everything which is not verse is prose, and everything which is not prose is verse — you see, it's clearly separated, either you're in prose or you're in verse, and therefore in poetry. Now, what becomes of this separation — and I'll now illustrate the fusion, the opposite of separation — with a Rousseau.
41:07 The word 'romanticism' barely exists yet. Its first occurrence is precisely under Rousseau's pen, in the Fifth Walk. Rousseau has only a few months left to live, we don't know exactly, when he writes the Fifth Walk. And it's at that moment that the word 'romantic' appears — and even then, in a very precise and restricted sense: it's the art of making gardens, what we now call English-style, as opposed to the well-ordered French garden. When he says, the shores of Lake Geneva are less, sorry, the shores of Lake Biel are wilder and more romantic than those of Lake Geneva.
41:38 If you see fewer fields and vineyards there, you see more forests, more... Well, that's the first occurrence of the word 'romantic,' as far as I know — I'm not a specialist in the history of texts — in our literature. In any case, it seems well established to me. Now, the word barely exists otherwise, or at least it certainly isn't common at the time, or it has a very technical meaning like the one I just designated, the art of making gardens that aren't too geometric. And this same Rousseau is the one who inaugurates what?
42:11 A poetic prose. What we had just separated with Molière and with Mr. Jourdain, and especially with Mr. Jourdain's teacher, who instructs him never to confuse what is prose and what is verse — now with Rousseau, prose becomes poetic. Ah, it took a while. It was so new. It's not present in the earliest essays, the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts or things like that, where he still has... a very classical language, sometimes emphatic, full of stock devices, of well-worn figures of speech.
Separation of genres and separation of classes 42:44 On the other hand, in the Confessions, in the Reveries, in La Nouvelle Héloïse, there are genuine — what will later be called — prose poems. So there, that's to illustrate fusion here. It's no accident that separation is characteristic of an era where the social spheres are, one couldn't be more separate, almost like castes. I recalled earlier that one had to be born noble to be noble. One couldn't become noble before the Edict of the Paulette.
43:15 And I often recall this little detail, which apparently isn't a detail for me, since I repeat it often in my teaching — in the preface Racine writes for Phèdre, in which, to justify the departure he makes from tradition — he wanted it to be Phèdre herself who goes directly to slander her stepson to her husband, her royal spouse Theseus — instead, in Racine's play, it's the servant who has the idea of the slander.
43:48 Phèdre's confidante, Œnone, her servant. And there's Racine, to justify this modification, going so far as to say, 'I thought that slander was too vile a thing to be put in the mouth of a princess, and that it belonged more properly in that of a servant.' It's extraordinary. We see that, depending on whether one is mistress or servant, these are separate psychological ontologies. There it is — a princess cannot slander, from birth. So, separation of genres, a sign that we're in classicism, the expression of an era where there was, so to speak, a place for each thing, and above all each one, man or woman, in their place.
44:38 Think of La Bruyère's Characters. And yet La Bruyère is someone who makes an interesting transition at the end of the 17th century. He's the first to speak, to draw the reader's attention in his Characters, to the appalling condition of the peasants of his time. That would become common later, in the 18th century and especially in the 19th, but there it is. On the other hand, it was unthinkable. Yet even La Bruyère shows to what extent he belongs to the Ancien Régime, because the very conception of his work, the Characters — each of the characters he expresses and lines up in his admirable collection seems locked for eternity within his character, within his determination.
45:27 There. I presume Sunbro is beginning to understand why — I'm delighted that he spoke of stakes. He understood very well that in my somewhat obsessive insistence, I admit, on dwelling on the importance of genres, whether separated or unified, or rather fused, there are stakes that go well beyond purely literary matters, purely formal or purely aesthetic considerations.
45:59 There. That said, these stakes aren't limited only to the separation into social classes — or rather, one must accept the consequences of what this connotation implies, this linkage, if I may use the anglicism, between the separation of genres and the separation into social classes. Because, still, since a certain Marx — so I'm staying within my program — we've learned that class separation isn't just about there being rich and poor. This separation has enormous effects on things we're not used to attributing to class difference.
46:40 elements that fall under psychology, aesthetic choices, even romantic choice. You only have to read the immense work of Clouscard to see — I'm thinking in particular of the Traité de l'amour fou, but generally also in Le Capitalisme de la séduction, the very title implies it — to what extent class struggle is not a foreign, external element to the twists and turns of seduction in the most novelistic sense possible.
47:17 There. That's where we see the stakes widen. Here we need to measure the whole spectrum. And here I've moved from the purely economic spectrum, that is, the most apparent determination of class separation, which is economic separation. I'm not saying it's inessential, far from it — I'm even saying what is essential about it is that it's the only separation that is measurable, demonstrable, transmissible.
47:51 I just think it shouldn't be reduced to that; one must see all the consequences that Marx, in Marxist language, would call superstructural, and that in more Clouscardian vocabulary would be attributed to the psyche — how the mutations of praxis, the mutations occurring in the sphere of the forces of production and the relations of production, have effects on what happens, let's say in our heads to simplify, but one could just as well say not only in our heads but in our hearts and in our souls, in our inner being, which Clouscard sums up in the fundamental concept of psyche — where I want to get to, since I'm on the topic of psyche, psyche, psychology, psychoanalysis, the soul, psyche — where I want to get to is the first appearance of the fusion of genres.
Romanticism from the North and the hecatomb of madness 48:44 I come back to romanticism. 'Light comes to us from the North,' as in Madame de Staël's famous work — there, she sometimes forgets the sense of the ridiculous a bit, but still she has great insight on this point — she knows very well, and her era knows it too, that romanticism, if this isn't taught enough here, is above all, before being Lamartine, Hugo, Vigny, Musset, before being French romanticism, which came very late — it began, of course, among the Germans, the English, etc. — something that comes to us from the North.
49:17 From the North come to us the mists, not the classical sun of Apollo, the Greek model and classical model par excellence. There. We must take all these differences seriously. Nietzsche said, to criticize the hyper-romanticism of Wagner — even though in the history of music Wagner is post-romantic — he said Wotan, the Zeus of Germanic mythology as staged by Wagner throughout his tetralogy, Wotan is the god of bad weather.
49:55 And when I speak of mist, and oppose it to the sun of Greece or Corsica or the Mediterranean in general, it's not entirely a whim on my part. What am I in the process of — I come back to psyche. When the lid finally lifts on the separation of genres, when suddenly the genres begin to fuse with the appearance of romanticism, there is a wave of madness. The soul takes a hit.
50:26 And there, I'm going to dig deep into my answer to Sunbro's question, since he's asking me about what's at stake. It's that the separation which meant that there was a place for each thing and each thing in its place, and above all not just something but someone—that one belonged either to the peasantry, or to the nobility, or to the bourgeoisie, or to the nobility of the robe, or to the nobility of the sword, but that all this was well separated—starts to be shaken up as early as the eighteenth century.
51:01 Look at someone like Beaumarchais—you have to wait for Beaumarchais's theater to see the appearance of a Suzanne in The Marriage of Figaro, who would be admirably expressed for the ear by Mozart, who saw very clearly the social and political stakes in The Marriage of Figaro, the opera he drew from Beaumarchais's work, since Mozart always chose the avant-garde and most corrosive works of his time, whether Don Giovanni, the libertine, or The Marriage of Figaro. Now why Suzanne? Because up to that point, the maids, the soubrettes, the cooks—I'm thinking of Molière, where there are unforgettable, admirable, delightful figures, I'm thinking of Martine in The Learned Ladies, who is perhaps the only reasonable one in the household of the learned ladies—still, she remains a maid, she stays in her place, that's the Ancien Régime.
51:54 And when the learned ladies criticize her for making mistakes in French, she answers superbly, and it makes the whole audience laugh, of course, but Molière is incomparable at this. 'My God, I speak straight the way we speak at home, I never studied like you.' There you go. But she remains a maid, of peasant stock. Whereas Suzanne is a character in her own right, she has a complicity with the countess in the psyche, in eros, and her love for Figaro is in danger, even if she gets him back in the end, of course.
The middle classes as social middle term 52:30 She's a heroine in her own right. So already, there's a transition from separation without passage to the otherness of social classes under the Ancien Régime, to the mixing that characterizes what Marx—not the first, but he liked to recall it—saw as an essential concept of modernity, not only economic but political: civil society, modern civil society.
53:01 And so I come back to what I was saying when I answered about pedagogy, regarding the concept of the middle. What are the middle classes? It's the majority of... That's why I said, half-jokingly earlier, that we are all bourgeois. That doesn't mean we have a bourgeois mindset or bourgeois criteria of judgment, but it means that socially, from the standpoint of measure, we are neither those poor wretches who are scandalously condemned to make and remake the journey from sub-Saharan Africa, risking the Mediterranean, risking drowning and enslavement,
53:40 I'm speaking of a global proletariat, I'm taking extremes, but we're also not on the CAC 40, and we're not members of the boards of directors of huge companies who wear themselves out with grueling work for a few minutes a year in order to come collect their dividends at the board meeting. We are in between, the majority. Of course, there's an enormous difference between the small middle—I don't know, say, the beginning teacher, who is very much to be pitied these days, since everyone is against them: the parents of students, the administration, the ministry, the students, everyone.
54:17 That's why I start with them. And at the other extreme, I don't know, I mean, the big bourgeois who sit on the boards of directors I was referring to. In fact, there you go, between the two, there's the vast majority that makes up the middle classes. We come back here—we've seen that the middle puts everyone in agreement. Where does this come from? Look at the Middle Ages, there is no middle between the feudal lord and the peasant.
54:50 There are only extremes. You see why I hold on to my syllogism? What is a syllogism? Extremes, the premises and the conclusion, and between the two, a middle term. Well, there are our extremes: the peasant, the lord. I go back to the Middle Ages on purpose. In the Middle Ages. So, the lord is there to defend material goods. That's his function, isn't it? He protects the fief against the neighboring lord. Right? We're not yet at the centralizing absolute monarchy, far from it—that's slowly being built.
55:24 There you go. And then there's the priest, the clergy. The priest, the bishop, whichever—the clergy who also protects, who defends, but not our bodies, not our material goods, but who defends our souls against the devil, of course. Those are the first two orders. And finally, there's the peasant who works, who—if one really works—works to feed the two previous ones. I'm simplifying, I'm caricaturing on purpose, there are monks who work too. There you go. But this doesn't move for centuries.
55:57 The bourgeoisie is barely embryonic. And then there's the movement of the communes that will give it importance. Because the bourgeoisie began in the 'bourgs.' 'Bourg' simply means town in German. Freiburg means free town. Simply that. Strasbourg, Freiburg, etc. And Charlottenburg is the town of Charlotte. And so on. What am I getting at? That this negligible thing is 'Pie powders'
56:27 as they used to say in English, that's 'dusty feet,' because the merchants were people who went from town to town in the markets. The markets were where the crossroads were, roads coming down from the mountains, or leaving the forests, and at a few crossings, people exchanged what came from lost valleys or distant regions. What am I getting at? I'm saying that this embryonic element, which was almost nothing between the lords and the peasant, was going to become everything,
56:59 in less than four centuries. I don't want to paraphrase Malraux. Malraux said, at the end of the Second World War, 'between the communists and us'—by 'us' he meant Gaullists—'there is nothing.' That was true at the time. Everything that was neither communist nor Gaullist, everything that was compromised and tainted by collaboration, up to the socialists, up to social democracy, was keeping a low profile at the time. But now this nothing has become the everything that governs us.
57:31 Since the sequence running from Giscard to Macron, passing through the 'tontons' and the Mitterrand generation, and so on. There you go. So, I'm cutting things short on purpose, but I'm being precise, since I'm being asked to speak about what's at stake. I've just shown how far one could extend this. And I encourage Sunbro to develop in the direction I've just dug into. That if human reason has wavered—I alluded to the madness that was the fate of many German Romantics, and among us, of those who are romantically akin, like Nerval for instance—I'm also thinking of Nietzsche, I'm also thinking of Hölderlin, etc.
Brutal fusion, romantic madness, and class unconscious 58:14 Well, just to take the most famous examples—but yes, you see, I'm not sectarian or dogmatic on this point, I'm not saying separation is bad and fusion is good, because separation is alienation into social class and fusion... No, fusion shouldn't be brutal either, the way the bourgeoisie imposed it by depopulating the countryside, right, in order to populate the factories. You have to look at the enclosure movement, which has been well studied, how the English authorities did everything to starve the peasants, so they would leave the countryside, so they would understand that if they stayed peasants, they would die.
58:58 And people were made into sailors, or workers. Being a sailor was atrocious back then, or a worker. Because there was a shortage of labor. So there's fusion and fusion. It's in the city that the middle classes, that the bourgeoisie—or rather, the city, I repeat—that the civil society we belong to developed, it's in the city. But still, one can have another conception of the city, another way of managing the passage from separation to fusion, a different management than the capitalist one, which is terribly limiting and alienating.
59:35 So this madness—because the Nordic German Romantics, 'German' being a metonym—were the first to have it hit them full in the face. What until then had been one of the advantages of separation was precisely that the subject didn't have too much to take in. In particular, look, it's inscribed on the pediment at Delphi, underlined by Plato in the Apology of Socrates: know thyself. It took twenty-five centuries before we began to formulate the concept of the unconscious, and I'm not speaking only of the Freudian unconscious here—as a Marxist and a follower of Clouscard, I prefer to speak of the class unconscious, that is, of what, even for a psychoanalyst, constitutes the unconscious of the unconscious, of his own unconscious, as a psychoanalyst. Look at the time it took, the ordeal, the patience and the labor of the negative, to use Hegel's phrase, to go from 'know thyself' as an abstract program, just like that, as a mere program, to its fulfillment.
Critical mass and collective elitism 1:00:41 It's that when you get to know yourself, you lose some feathers along the way. There, I'll end here, both on the psychological level and, conversely, on the collective and political level, on what's at stake in what is meant by the suppression—as this new person put it very well—the dissolution of separation. It's good that the word 'dissolution' was used, because it's as if there were an acid, and this will be my last metaphor—it's not my field, I hope I'm not saying anything foolish—but I believe I understood that the safety system used for nuclear bombs consists, through an acid, through a solvent—that's why I'm using this metaphor—in bringing together masses of plutonium, or rather nuclear fuel, which until then, inside the bomb, are kept separated by insulating partitions, and that it's by dissolving these separations that one suddenly reaches what is called, I believe, the critical mass.
1:01:46 Well, perhaps—and now I'm bringing the two questions together, this will be my conclusion, my conclusion for both questions—perhaps the immense didactic effort begun in the Renaissance, which culminates in that monument that is Rousseau's Émile, and which continues beyond it, through the extraordinary work of the Encyclopédie, perhaps it makes it possible to achieve what I call critical mass, but in politics.
1:02:18 That is to say, the greatest possible number of people, of citizens, let's say, having the maximum amount of knowledge. That, the powers that be, panic over. It's no accident that today they prefer facilitators to teachers. And this will be my last quotation, from a colleague—sorry, from a friend's colleague—who teaches and who, in a middle school in the suburbs, had a literature teacher undergo a recent inspection, and the inspector told him: 'I can't give you a good grade because you're doing teaching, you're doing transmission—you need to do facilitation.'
1:03:04 There you go, you can see the instructions that those in power give to their agents: don't reach critical mass, there should be a lot of knowledge in a few brains, and/or no knowledge at all in the majority of the population, but there mustn't be an encounter between the two—that would be critical mass, and this time a political nuclear explosion, which all alienating powers dread: if there's both extension across the population and elevation in the level of knowledge.
1:03:39 So I am in favor of collective elitism. — Thank you, Dominique, let's also thank the people who followed this live broadcast on Facebook and who shared it. — Listen, let's set a date soon for workshop 2, I don't know if you already have a date for... — No, we'll probably get it in the next couple of days. The little holidays of the people involved should give us the answer.
1:04:09 No, but let me take this opportunity, very quickly, to apologize to those who were kind enough to follow us live. As for Tuesday's session—actually it's my fault, well, it's my tablet's fault that the operation failed. There was a power supply problem. There you go. — Thank you very much, Dominique, see you again very soon. — Thank you, Philippe, thank you all.
