English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Question from the audience on the novel of formation and telos 1:00 Hello Dominique. Good evening Philippe. Thank you for being with us this evening. The idea is to extend workshop 2 from Sunday the 18th with the questions that were asked both at the end of the session and also two other questions that were sent on YouTube and Facebook. Online then, all right. Which one was online. So I'm going to read the first question.
1:32 Yes. I don't know if it's clearly legible for everyone, but I'll pass the card on screen at the same time. There we go. So I'll read it. It's a question from Raphaël. I would be interested to know Mr. Pagani's opinion on a phenomenon that seems to bring together, in theory, a fairly large portion of the philosophers making up the historical and philosophical division he has drawn, namely the Bildungsroman. Of course this includes Rousseau's Émile, to which Goethe's Wilhelm Meister seems to constitute a bourgeois reply, but also Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, in Hyppolite's phrase.
2:12 And although more distantly, Lenin's "What Is to Be Done?", whose title takes up that of the famous work by Chernyshevsky, whose reading and rereading are said to have played a major role in Lenin's radicalization. Indeed, the Hegelian-Marxist conception of history has often been compared to the form of the Bildungsroman. My question is therefore the following. Beyond the concept of becoming which lies at the very heart of the form of the Bildungsroman, as well as of the revolutionary spirit, what importance might the concept of telos have, equally central to this literary form whose activity is the revolutionary mentality?
2:55 Lenin's dream, which you mentioned in your talk, is for me a striking example of this. Could you elaborate? Well, this question is rich enough in itself for us to separate it from the second one, which we'll look at afterward, in a second stage. I'm struck by several things. First, I have no standing to evaluate those who ask me questions, but I'll allow myself nonetheless to congratulate Raphaël for the richness of his question.
From Émile to Wilhelm Meister: the ambivalence of the Bürger 3:35 And at the same time, for the well-documented and knowledgeable side it expresses in its formulation. Let me explain. We can see that he knows the subject fairly well—and when I say fairly well, that's a litotes—the references or models, if you prefer, in which the concept of the Bildungsroman is embodied. I'll remind you there's an s at the end of Bildungs, which is the genitive s, meaning "novel of formation."
4:12 The references he himself uses, those of Rousseau, of Rousseau's Émile, are unavoidable—it's the almost founding example. Setting aside, at least, the parallel I drew last time regarding our friend Cécile's question, who had asked me about the sixteenth-eighteenth century parallel, Renaissance, Age of Enlightenment—I had already shown that as early as the Renaissance, as early as Rabelais and Montaigne, formation, education, transmission played a central role in the political problematic, which I had summed up in the formula common to the ideal of sixteenth-century humanism and eighteenth-century Enlightenment humanism, namely that, in both cases, the pedagogical is the antechamber of the political.
5:00 There, that, I believe I developed that last time, I won't go in circles and come back to it. I'm simply referring to it to recall that, at a more modern level, it's Rousseau's Émile that is foundational, because it proposes to form the future citizen of the social contract—that's really the spirit of Émile. But I see that Raphaël follows it up with its best avatars, so to speak.
5:31 I take "avatar" in the sense of the successive transformations of this model. First, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, which he rightly says is the bourgeois reply to Émile, in a sense that isn't necessarily pejorative. Everything hinges on the ambiguity of the word "Bürger" in German, which first of all simply means "citizen." So, ultimately, if I take the word "Bürger" in its etymological sense, there wouldn't even be a contradiction between Wilhelm Meister and Rousseau's Émile, since in both cases it's about the citizen.
6:16 Isn't that so? Here "bourgeois" means "citizen," the inhabitant of the borough, the town, the city, the polis. We find the same ambiguity—I'm deliberately not resolving it for now, I'm letting it float in its ambivalence. We find this same ambivalence in the notion of "bürgerliche Gesellschaft," that crucial notion in political philosophy, especially from Hegel onward, but also in a whole tradition of German and contemporary political philosophy—what we call civil society.
6:54 In French, the German expression "bürgerliche Gesellschaft" is translated literally as "bourgeois society," which doesn't mean a "reactionary society" in some bourgeois sense, but rather a "modern society" of those who live in towns, as opposed to the patriarchal and archaic society of the countryside. This ambivalence of the notions really needs to be recalled. Good. And finally, I fully agree with him that the extensions, even going as far as Lenin—I had also added last time, in answering Cécile's question, and even during the workshop, Flaubert's Sentimental Education, where we clearly see the transformation of the hero Frédéric Moreau throughout the novel, from his naive romanticism, his naive idealism, especially in his love relationship but not only there, at the beginning of the book, to his disillusioned and almost libertine side at the end—libertine, that is, in the sense of having one's eyes opened.
Teleology, a taboo of post-modern thought 8:05 So, there is here very rich and very concrete material. But here is the philosophically most important part, at the end of Raphaël's question. He clearly sees—and it's fitting to say "end," because the end of his question deals with the concept of end, telos precisely—and the teleological coloring it gives to the concept of the novel of formation, to which, of course, the Phenomenology itself belongs, as Raphaël says, and I'm quite ready to endorse this, as does, in a certain way, the Hegelian-Marxist conception of history.
8:48 So, I did address the issue, though rather allusively, within the walls of the ENS last Saturday, when I recalled that the notion of teleology had become an almost repulsive notion, a deterrent, in postmodern thought—particularly after structuralism—such that to claim teleology was to fall back into archaisms, and of course these archaisms were tainted with a totalitarian aim, since whoever speaks of finalism evokes the living, the living evokes organicity, organicity evokes totality, and totality evokes the totalitarian.
9:50 I'm going a bit fast, but it's not hard to keep in mind the thousands of pages that have kept flowing since the sixties, especially the seventies, up to today on this subject. The important thing to note is that it had become almost a taboo to invoke a teleological dimension in thought without this contradicting a scientific aim.
10:21 That's how the problem was framed: either one is scientific, or one is teleological. And we understand better, with this double ban, to what extent a certain neopositivism triumphs at present. I stress "neo," because the neo- is always more reactionary than the substantive without the prefix. I mean, I have nothing against, say, classicism, but neoclassicism, the vogue for baroque music, for instance, in the twentieth century, doesn't quite do the same thing as the undisputed and indisputable richness of the music of a Telemann, a Vivaldi, not to even mention Bach.
11:05 So, there it is, and I recall here that things never repeat themselves in history, except in the mode of comedy, to borrow a famous quip, in Marxology, in Marxography even—but I insist on this point: if one is teleological, then one is no longer scientific, one is in the ideological, and preferably in totalizing ideology, and therefore ultimately totalitarian.
The drunken demiurge of the Timaeus 11:45 Now, there is here an enormous confusion between two teleologies. Classical finalism, so to speak—well, of course, we're bound to refer here to Greek antiquity, and even more to Aristotle than to Plato, which is saying something, since when one reads Plato's Timaeus, one sees to what extent the cosmos is the object of an intelligent design, if I may use an anachronistic vocabulary from today, but that's roughly it—when one sees in the Timaeus the construction of the world by the demiurge—well, "construction," not "creation," we are not in the modern, Christian, transcendent, Judaic or Muslim world, that is, there isn't an absolute god creating the world ex nihilo, saying let there be light and, presto, there was light—no, there is already a given matter called chaos, that's the mythology, I'll remind you of that nonetheless—and the construction of the world amounts not to creating it from nothing, since matter is already there,
12:55 but it is topsy-turvy, that's roughly it—looking at chaos, there is neither up nor down, neither left nor right—but to order it, to give it form, to shape matter into form. There. And we recall that the demiurge Plato invokes in the Timaeus, who will be the primordial agent of this cosmogony both metaphysical and humorous—I say humorous because it's worth pausing a moment on this—Plato tells us that at the origin of this arrangement of chaos which will produce the cosmos—cosmos meaning harmony, the opposite of chaos, the opposite of a rhapsody without order, to borrow an image from Kant—for this shaping of the matter provided by chaos, how does the demiurge go about it?
13:52 He goes about it by having before his eyes, so to speak—of course, the eyes of the soul—the cosmos noetos, that is, the empyrean of the world of ideas. He contemplates the ideas, the models, the paradigms, and Plato compares him to a potter—a very interesting metaphor—here is the matter, the earth, the clay given, and with his potter's wheel he must give it a form, must make pottery out of it. And so, here, instead of creating the world ex nihilo, chaos is arranged, that is, matter is informed, given a form, like clay.
14:36 Except that here's the thing, and this is where there's an extraordinary humor in Plato, and if I mention it, it's not simply to raise a laugh, it's really to remind us that Plato isn't as foolish as the anti-finalists believe, isn't that so? The problem is that he's a bit drunk at the moment he sets about working his potter's wheel. He's had a drink. And Plato tells us in so many words that the cosmos was shaped by, I quote, a drunken lawgiver.
15:09 Tipsy! So, from time to time, things go a bit off track. For example, he has before him the idea of the circle in the cosmos noetos—the idea of circle, not ripples on water, that's too crude, or the circle some guy draws on the blackboard, which is hopelessly crude. No, no. The idea of circle which exists only in the mathematician's statement, the locus of points equidistant from a given point in a plane—well, I'm giving the archaic and classical definition, even though it remains valid at the level of school geometry—and lo and behold, since he's a bit drunk, his potter's wheel slips a little and his circle turns into an oval, an ellipse.
15:49 So it is that the world around us does not conform to the model. It is full of defects, of small approximations. There we are. It resembles the model in a certain way and at the same time is unfaithful to it—a very rich myth of the Timaeus that shows to what extent there is both identity and difference, conjunction and disjunction, between the cosmos noetos, the world of ideas, and the cosmos aisthêtos, the sensible world. Good.
16:19 There, I'll stop there—these are references to recall the extent to which Plato is finalist, but also the extent to which something not anticipated already slips into that finalism, a mechanism, something accidental, "the tooth of chance," as Parmenides had already said before Socrates. As for Aristotle, well yes, he is the champion of teleology, which Hegel—and a fortiori Hegel's successors, since we speak of the Hegelo-Marxist tradition—absolutely rejects, that is, external finalism, meaning a finality that would already be in things prior to human action itself, established by God, by a God, by the gods, by divine harmony, whatever you like, by providence, which leads some to say all the same how well-made nature is.
Hegel and the critique of external finality 17:15 Yes, this is something that has come back into fashion with a certain environmentalism for which, if there were no human intervention in nature, everything would function perfectly. There is a place for everything, everything in its place, everything corresponds to a function—there, and if man were there just to mess it all up, to use the polite academic phrase, well, nature would be a permanent harmony.
17:45 Now, I am reading a passage from the preface of the Phenomenology where Hegel very precisely distinguishes these two finalities at the moment when he rehabilitates one of them—for already in his time, this finalism had long been not only superseded but critiqued and deconstructed, above all by Galilean-Cartesian mechanism. Indeed, the two centuries preceding practically the Hegelian initiative are marked by the triumph linked to what history calls the scientific revolution, starting from the Galilean break, or the Copernican revolution, whichever you prefer—it's all connected—and the demand that we no longer explain anything by ends but by laws, laws that express nature as a blind mechanism in which there is no subject representing an end to itself, pursuing an end, whatever it might be. And it is precisely against this Aristotelian finalism that the physics still taught in our laboratories today was constructed.
18:52 So I'll read this passage. What has been said can also be expressed in this way. Reason—I remind you that since Kant, German thought systematically opposes reason, Vernunft, to understanding, Verstand—so reason is the operation conforming to a purpose. That is precisely what is absent from the sciences in the positivist sense of the term, where only Verstand is at work, which does not at all prevent these sciences from being exact, but which does mean they suffer as soon as it comes to applying them to the anthropological domain.
19:36 But here, we are in the realm of reason. Reason is the operation conforming to a purpose. The elevation—and since he knows very well that the notion of purpose has been contradicted and refuted by modern mechanism, he takes care to specify—the elevation of a supposed nature above misunderstood thought, and principally the banishment, understood as by Galileo and Descartes, the banishment of all external finality, that is, a finality that would already be there in nature prior to human action, have cast discredit on the form of purpose in general.
20:19 It is not a matter of going back on this. But in the sense in which Aristotle determines nature as the operation conforming to a purpose, the purpose is—he recalls Aristotle's basics—the immediate, that which is at rest, the unmoved which is itself the mover. Here, Hegel elevates what had been wrongly placed in the physical domain in Aristotle, in order to transport it to its legitimate place, which is metaphysical: the unmoved which is itself the mover.
20:57 That is the end of ends, in Aristotle, the form of forms. Thus this unmoved is subject. Aristotle's error was to make it an object existing outside us. The unmoved which is itself the mover. Thus this unmoved is subject. Its power to move, taken abstractly—and thus wrongly, when one has a bit of Hegel in one—is being-for-self or pure negativity. The result is what the beginning is, because the beginning is purpose. In other words, the actually real is its concept, only because the immediate as purpose has the self, or pure actuality, within itself.
21:39 So, I repeat, the first words which are essential: the elevation of a supposed nature above misunderstood thought, and principally the banishment of all external finality, have cast discredit on the form of purpose in general. Indeed, when one looks at the critique that begins in Galileo's time and develops, of course, powerfully in Descartes and his successors—think of the mechanism that governs nature, and the mechanism in Spinoza, for example.
Ancient finalism as alienation 22:24 When one looks at this critique of ancient finalism, and principally that of Aristotle, one would be right—or rather one would be wrong—to treat it as a simple error. It is not a matter of saying Aristotle was stupid and Galileo intelligent. That would be absolutely absurd. Rather, it is a matter of seeing that there is, in ancient thought, an alienation—here I deliberately use an anachronism—that is, what is proper to man is attributed to something other than him, to nature.
23:01 Since we are surrounded by manufactured objects that are made for a purpose—and this is even more true today than ever, with the machines we build to which we assign a function (function is a polite term so as not to say purpose, but it's the same thing, it's what the thing in question is used for)—since we are surrounded by objects, one need only look around this room, as in all human dwellings, I mean there are incomparably more objects conceived—how does he put it, operations conforming to a purpose—than things due to chance and a blind mechanism, like lava flows on the slopes of Vesuvius or stardust resulting from a shooting star.
23:57 So, once again, there is here alienation in the strict sense, insofar as man ends up seeing the world around him, including the natural world, on the model of his own manufactured objects, that is, obeying a finality. That is where the alienation lies, that is where the error lies. This is what is commonly and crudely called anthropomorphism. One gives the form, morphê, of man, anthropos, to everything that is not man—to the cosmos, to nature, to the universe, etc.
24:31 Good. But then, if we keep this critique—of which I do not claim to take anything away—if we retain this critique, and one must be fair, that means we have not eliminated finality. We have removed it from where it has no business being, that is, from the natural order, and put it back in its place of origin from which it was born, that is, we have restricted it to the human domain, the anthropological domain. So that, to sum up, I would say there are, roughly speaking, three stages in the history of thought at this level.
25:09 There is ancient finalism, which is an imperialist conception of philosophy—I take on this political metaphor. Why? Because philosophy is somewhat the science of sciences, and with its notion of finality it encompasses the whole human world, the natural world, everything is included. Aristotle's system is the most representative of what I am describing. I need not insist that it is one of the most formidable efforts of thought ever made.
25:41 I am speaking here only of what was found wanting from the scientific revolution onward—that doesn't mean it's a heap of nonsense, far from it. On the contrary, I am showing that Aristotle's errors have a reason for being. There is an entire epistemological field, especially the French epistemological school, which shows that, unlike a Voltaire who is content to say religion is nonsense—I'm not putting it quite like that, one would have to be stupid to believe such fables—I mean the real critique of religion, the only one capable not merely of correcting an error but of getting rid of an illusion, which is far more difficult, is the one that consists in understanding why it has this force. An illusion is not just any error; it's not 3 plus 5 equals 12 because I'm tired and a cup of coffee is enough to dispel it. Rather, illusion corresponds to an interest.
26:51 There is a reason for being—I have an interest in being mistaken; it is more comfortable to believe oneself at the center of the universe than to think one is a mere inhabitant of its suburbs, so to speak, of the revolution, of the pre-Copernican illusion, for example. So one has not completed the understanding of science until one has done the philosophy of error, of the pre-scientific error which consists in attributing to something other than the subject, alienating what is proper to the subject and transporting it into the object being studied.
27:28 There are thousands of examples; I'll content myself with the Copernican revolution, which is an emblematic example. So I won't go into everything specific to illusion, as distinct from error—the true is not merely different from the false, it is its inverse, not exactly as in a mirror. Thus I believed I was at the center; I am at the periphery—there, when things are set right, it is a total reversal, as in a mirror. Let us stand before a mirror and we will easily understand that nothing resembles more, which is why it is so hard to rid oneself of an illusion, and yet everything is reversed.
28:04 So correcting the error means here, not eliminating finality—I return to the center of my point—not suppressing the telos, the end, the idea of an end as an archaic notion, but on the contrary saying: the end does exist, but only in the world of the one who fabricates objects, in the world of man. In the world of praxis, it is praxis that gives form to matter, that turns the leather, the goat's or cow's hide, into a sandal.
The architect and the bee: end, representation, sign 28:35 That is the example Aristotle uses when he speaks of praxis, or how nature's clay becomes pottery by passing through the potter's wheel, to take the earlier example. There, but for that, it is not enough for it to be merely a blind mechanism turning the potter's wheel; it must be a movement conforming to an end.
29:05 And indeed, Raphaël is perfectly right to extend Hegel through the Marxist tradition, since Marx, in an equally famous passage, says very well that what immediately distinguishes the clumsiest architect from the most skillful of bees is that the architect has built the house in his head, so to speak, before building it in reality. There is a representation, that is, the subject has in his head something that is not there—even dialectically, there is something there that is not there; that is what a representation is.
29:47 It's giving a presence to what is absent. That can only exist in the human world because that is exactly the definition of the sign. A sign is something that allows a presence to be given to what is absent. And that's why the first sign, séma, which gives us semantics, semaphore — the first sign is the tomb, which expresses absence par excellence. The first sign is the tomb, which in Greek is called soma; it's a play on words found from Plato right up to the contemporary world, between séma and soma.
30:23 A sign, a tomb. And while I'm at it, I'll pick up on something — you alluded to it when you introduced our question-and-answer session. There were two questions asked at the end of last Saturday's workshop, Saturday the 18th, on the ENS premises, which I answered very sloppily, as often happens at the end of a session because of a rather borderline management, if I may borrow that foreign word, pardon the borrowing, of the allotted time.
31:05 One question concerned precisely the relation — someone asked me what relation there is between mediation and the negative, and negativity, and another question said, I thought Hegel was the philosopher of freedom, and now today I learn, through the intervention I allowed myself to make last Saturday, that at the base of the anthropological process there is something negative.
31:38 allusions, of course, to the important role death plays in Hegelian dialectic. Now, what relation does this have to the notion of end that I have just restored to the center of the debate here, making clear that this is not a regression to the old external and superstitious finality, but to the end that is proper to the anthropos. You see how coherent this is. Today people try to dilute human specificity into the animal world.
Cause-effect and sense-sign: the political stakes 32:13 It would be so much better for capitalism to say that we are all animal species busy devouring one another. It would be so much better, and that we are governed by blind mechanisms, and that it's quite futile to try to institute a social contract in the midst of all that in order to introduce democracy there, and to create a willed order rather than a suffered chaos into which capitalism would love to plunge us back. No — because there's that behind the stakes of teleology versus mechanism.
32:45 These aren't just problems of knowledge. There are major stakes involved. Why is capitalism so fond of neo-positivism? I think of the vogue for cognitive science. That's surely no accident. That is, scientificity is accepted as soon as it concerns objects. Scientific rigor — that of the understanding — is accepted in the laboratory without going as far as reason. That is, when it comes to seeing what governs things, but certainly not what governs others, that is, relations between subjects.
33:17 for objects, we're quite willing to have science, because we need it to have an enslaving technicity. But we don't want that technicity to be managed democratically by the general will, because that would mean passing from the understanding to reason, and passing from capitalist civil society, so to speak, to the Republic — to the res publica, both public and common.
33:48 So, I'm deliberately recalling here the stakes underlying this question of the presence or absence of the teleological question in the debate. The point isn't to be a teleologist or an anti-teleologist; the point is to show that there is ideological distortion and delirium when one attributes an end where there is a pure mechanism that fully suffices to understand things — as is the case in the so-called hard sciences, the so-called natural sciences — and that as soon as we're dealing with the human domain, the meaning-sign pair must take over from the cause-effect pair.
34:33 I'm not saying it 'must replace it' — that would be obscurantism. I say 'take over.' Taking over also means extending. Because I keep the system of cause and effect, which remains valid even for beings like us. It's obvious that if I must eat to live, there's nothing to see in the meaning-sign pair there. It's the effect of a natural causality that has the form Y equals f(X), like everything that governs the hard sciences as soon as one wants to introduce a law. It doesn't matter here whether the function is mechanical or probabilistic as in quantum physics.
35:07 But that — there is in me animality until the end of my life, cause and effect — but to that is added, is grafted on, from the moment praxis intervened, from the moment there is an animal that produces the world in which it lives — not merely, as happens with quite a few animals and not only monkeys, that it uses objects that are there instrumentally to achieve an immediate, natural end, namely food.
Instrument and tool; the end between God and the pebble 35:43 That's not very mysterious. A monkey taking a stone to crack a nut, a bird picking up a pebble on the beach — that can be observed whenever one wants — a seabird flying up quite high, sorry, picks up a shell it wants to swallow, and to break it and eat the animal inside the shell, flies up high enough to make it shatter on the pebbles and then eats it — which appears even more sophisticated, because we do say 'birdbrain' or 'featherhead' to mean there's no thought at all in those tiny brains — that's a misconception, because among the largest brain-to-body size ratios there is the crow, and the ant, for example — but anyway, back to my bird — a passerine, which can commonly be observed to snap off, with its beak, tear off a thorn from a branch to stick it into a hole and skewer a worm which it then enjoys pulling out of the hole thanks to the thorn — these are acts
36:53 extremely sophisticated, but obviously these are not tools at all, they are instruments — where's the difference? That's why, by the way, I recommend the admirable work of Trần Đức Thảo, the Vietnamese Marxist who is also familiar with phenomenology, who wrote an admirable essay on the origin of consciousness — sorry, of thought and language — where he shows very clearly the difference with man, who first constructs the tool itself, not the instrument — who doesn't merely use an instrument that's already there, but produces a tool that has never existed before, because — and this is what distinguishes it from all the instruments one can find in a natural given — it has a typical form, as Trần Đức Thảo puts it very well. Thus we speak of the civilization of ceremonial axes along the route running from the Mediterranean to Ireland via the Atlantic coast; in the burial mounds one finds axes buried with the warrior or the deceased, whichever — I mean, they all have the same shape, with a handle, and likewise
38:03 likewise, among the Franks, the francisca is the axe with a double blade — I mean, each time, the tool carries the memory of a form that can be embodied in wood, in stone, depending — but with arrowheads it's even clearer. I who went to the Sahara, in Niger in particular, when the wind had uncovered the dunes, you see thousands of arrowheads all made on the same model, so to speak, and it's this typical character that presupposes that in the brain of whoever produced these tools there is a fixed representation, a form, an eidos — the same word that gives both 'form' in Aristotle and 'idea' in Plato. So it's to this form that Marx alludes when he says that even the most unskilled architect is infinitely beyond the mechanical work of the bee, which builds its cell — an admirable hexagonal cell, by the way — but insofar as the architect has his house in his head before producing it in reality. So that's how I answer Raphaël's question
39:13 — yes to teleology, yes to rehabilitating the concept of the end, on condition that it be inseparable, as an implication in the mathematical sense of the term, from the notion of a subject, and of a finite subject. That's where we see it's not at all a return of the religious — a subject finite in space through his body and in time through death; I'm alluding to man, of course. Only there does the notion of an end make sense. Why? Because God pursues no end whatsoever — which Spinoza saw perfectly well: when you have everything you want, and have had it for eternity, since you're omnipotent and eternal, I don't see why anything at all would still be lacking to you, to the point of having any end to pursue. So God pursues no end. At the opposite extreme from God, the pebble pursues no end either — that's pure mechanism, where Y equals f(x) suffices to explain the pebble's movements in the universe — not before man gives it, uses it to build a wall, for example — then it changes meaning. So the pebble pursues no end; nature in general, before man works on it, pursues no end; God, the absolute supernatural, produces no end. It's only between the two
40:23 that is — oh, surprise — in the middle, in the means, that there is an end. Instead of opposing means and end, I show the intimate dialectical nature of the two notions, and the best proof is that I now take up the other question precisely, which I recall was also somewhat botched in the last workshop, where I was told, I don't see the relation between mediation and negativity, and the other question said, I thought it was freedom that was at the center of Hegelian thought, at the center of his model of historical movement, and now I'm being told there's a negative at the origin of all that — and I want to show there is absolutely no contradiction, and here I change texts, I stay within Hegel but change texts, and I first read a text from the end — from within the beginning of Hegel's — I'm thinking of the Principles of the Philosophy of Right, and paragraph
Negative freedom and the fury of destruction 41:33 5, 6, 7 — it takes about two pages, a page and a half each, so not very long, 5, 6, 7, the Principles of the Philosophy of Right — this numbering holds for all translations — and from which I extract, in the second part, just first, this sentence, to which I'll come back afterward: the first two moments — I'll skip ahead, I'll come back to them shortly — that the will can abstract itself, and at the same time be determined by itself or by something else, are easily granted and conceived. That means, we didn't need Hegel's word to distinguish indeterminate will from, on the contrary, absolutely determinate will — they are easily granted and conceived, because each taken separately they are abstract moments without truth. You see Hegel's contempt for everything one-sided, for everything non-dialectical, for every opposition where each term is taken apart with no relation to the other — they are abstract moments without truth. But the third, the true—
42:43 the speculative — you know, in the last part of Hegel's work the term 'dialectical' tends to fade and give way to this 'speculative,' to preserving itself while being preserved — as we shall see, there is nothing more dialectical than the speculative. The speculative — Hegel's parenthesis — and the true as conceived can only be thought speculatively — is it that the understanding — no longer reason — always refuses to grasp it, calling the concept itself always inconceivable — this is of course an allusion to the negative part of Kantianism, which says the concept can conceive everything except the essential, that is, the absolute, the thing-in-itself. So, I repeat: the speculative and the true as conceived can only be thought speculatively — is it that the understanding always refuses to grasp it, calling the concept always inconceivable — the demonstration and discussion of this heart of speculation — so what is he talking about? Here we come back to the questions about the negativity of the infinite as negativity
43:53 that relates to itself — I'm quite willing to use a very contemporary notion of self-destroy, but that wouldn't be entirely a betrayal of what Hegel says, because negativity that relates to itself, if you look closely, is not far off — the demonstration and discussion of this heart of speculation, of the infinite as negativity relating to itself, of this ultimate source of all activity, of all life, and of all consciousness — the demonstration therefore belongs to logic as purely speculative philosophy. In other words, if you want to know more, you must refer to my Greater Logic and my demonstration. I show here the solidity of this passage to underline the importance of what negativity means here — it is negativity relating to itself. Now, still in this same series of paragraphs 5, 6, 7, he studies the will — very quickly, well, quickly for him, not quickly, but I'll summarize it very quickly — he needs it to establish right, of course, the philosophy of right, and as I've often repeated I won't dwell too long, but there is a first moment
45:03 that develops, which is the abstract will, the will typical of the modern world behind, where the self determines itself as having no determination — the self determines itself negatively: I am neither this nor that, I am neither French nor — someone who tells you, sir, I am a man — we've seen that recently, it's gone around all the screens — I am not a sex, I am not a nation, I am not any identity whatsoever — the abstract self. I think of Rimbaud, who says in A Season in Hell, if I had any antecedent at some point in the history of France — but no, nothing. There you have pure indetermination, the self grasping itself negatively, that is, by opposing itself to everything that is not itself, which is very profound — one has to go through that, even if it's very dangerous to say so here — that's what we're about to see. So here's the extreme: here, the will contains the element of pure indetermination, or of the pure reflection of the self into itself, in which all limitation vanishes — let's let the words speak: limitation, finitude, termination, determination, delimitation
46:13 definition — all that goes together; if one refuses a determination, one is in the indeterminate, and thus in the infinite, or the indefinite, whichever you prefer — the element of pure indetermination, or of the pure reflection of the self into itself, in which all limitations vanish, all content furnished and determined, whether immediately by nature — I am a boy, I am a girl, I am of the white, yellow, or green race, who cares — needs, desires, and instincts, all these natural determinations — or by some intermediary, that is, by culture, by history, by family, by language, whatever — in any case, it is the refusal of all these determinations that characterizes this first moment of the will. Second: unlimited infinity — so that goes with the indeterminate character of abstraction; I abstract from everything determined in order to posit myself — the unlimited infinity of abstraction and of absolute generality, the pure thought of oneself, pure thought of oneself. What follows is a remark — I'm making a slightly ironic allusion here to the era of the Kathmandu trail in the sixties, when there were plenty of young people
47:26 who trekked along the paths of Nepal, because the youth world moreover, who used to repeat, on beaches, sitting in the lotus position, who used to repeat the sacred syllable Om, like that, whatever, in short, to reach the indeterminate, the atman, which corresponds exactly to this absolutely infinite — but in the sense of indefinite — conception of the self characterized by the absence of any determination. Remark, which I'll probably skip, on the defined aspect of the will — here, this absolute possibility of abstracting myself from any determination in which I find myself, or in which I have placed myself, this flight before any content as before a restriction — as soon as I'm given a content, it limits me — who tells you, sir, that I am a man, who tells you I am French, who tells you, in short, is that to which the will determines itself — one often says, but why put a label on it, am I not beyond every label — that's what representation posits for itself — meaning, common representation posits for itself — as freedom. And it is only thus that — and here Hegel
48:36 corrects — negative freedom, or the negative freedom of the understanding, because it is obtained only through the negation of everything that is not itself, and he comments: it is the freedom of the void. I was alluding earlier to nirvana, you see, right now — I mean, it's the freedom of the void; it can manifest itself in a real form and become a passion. Then, if it remains merely theoretical, it is the fanaticism of pure Hindu contemplation — you see, I wasn't far off. If it turns toward action — and here there's an extraordinary passage where he even anticipates the greatest genocide of the modern world, which took place in a Buddhist culture, which is quite extraordinary, I'm thinking of the Khmer Rouge — if it turns toward action, then, in politics as in religion, it is the fanaticism of the destruction of every existing social order, and the excommunication of every individual suspected of wanting an order, and the annihilation of every organization trying to come into being. If anyone has ever expressed, in its pure logical determinations, what unfortunately gives meaning and thus a possibility
49:46 of existence to the worst of modern totalitarianism, it is indeed Hegel in this passage. It is only by destroying that this negative will has the feeling of its own existence — the mere feeling of existing needs to destroy what is, in order to feel itself exist. I illustrated this in my last workshop with the extraordinary avatars of this tale of Rimbaud's — a magnificent illumination less than a page long, which I recommend reading, and which, in the Illuminations, is simply called 'Conte,' C-O-N-T-E. It thinks it wants a positive state, for example the state of universal equality — you see we're not far from the Khmer Rouge — or of universal religious life, which could be any fundamentalism, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or universal religious life — but in fact it doesn't want the positive reality at all, for it introduces at once some order or other — who's going to do the dishes, for example, there will always, of course, be the women, as Clouscard says, the capitalism of seduction, even in the country house there are the good subjugated girls doing the housework for everyone — I make my parenthesis again — but in fact it doesn't want the positive reality, for it introduces at once some order, a singular determination, both of institutions
Language, negation of the thing 50:57 and of individuals, whereas it is precisely by negating its specifications and its objective determinations that negative freedom becomes conscious of itself. Thus he sums up in a striking way the political stakes behind these apparently theoretical problems: thus, what it believes it wants can, for itself — that is, in its own mind — be only an abstract representation, and its realizations can only be a fury of destruction. Well, that's where we see the importance — I'm speaking, instead of this immediate abstract self that relates immediately to itself — of passing through the importance of mediation, and here, since I've spoken quite a bit about the three moments of mediation last time — memory, language, and the tool — I haven't sufficiently spoken, well, sufficiently, one never speaks enough about it, in terms of praxis, about the tool, but even at the level of language, we didn't see how mediation implies — sorry, yes — mediation implies negativity and suppression
52:07 but look at what Hegel says in the other, first philosophy of spirit, that of 1803 — I show here the cover, still published by PUF, in the Épiméthée collection, still translated by Planty-Bonjour — here, when he comes to the moment where consciousness accedes to language, in its logical genesis, he says: first of all, language speaks only with this self, only with the meaning of the thing; it gives the thing a name and expresses this name as the being of the object. Hegel, a student who had, after all, just gone through — it's still quite fresh — a few years earlier, an apprenticeship in theology with his fellow students Schelling and Hölderlin, remembers well that it is said in the genesis of the Old Testament that God gave Adam the privilege of naming the creatures — so he retains here indeed language's function of denomination: this is a tree, this is a bird, and so on. So, language speaks only with this self, only with the meaning of the thing
53:17 it gives the thing a name and expresses this name as the being of the object. What is it? We answer — it's underlined in the text, the 'is' — it is a lion, a donkey, etc. — 'this is,' that is, says Hegel, is absolutely not something that has a yellow color like the real lion, which is thus suppressed — this is what we see here, the negativity of the paws and so on — it's not that at all, it is an autonomous being of its own, it is a name — underlined — a sound, S-O-U-N-D, underlined, a sound, vibrations in the air — we're a long way from the object of zoology — it's a name, a sound of my voice, something quite other than what it is in — presumably empirical — intuition, and that is its true being: it is only its name; the thing itself is something else. That means we fall back then into sensible representation, and, as he says, he alludes to it: such is the first creative faculty exercised by spirit — Adam gave a name to every thing, that is the right of majesty and the first appropriation of the whole of nature, or the act of creating
54:27 this nature out of spirit — Logos is reason, the essence of things, and discourse. I recall here, in parallel to the text I just read, that we find this annihilating function with regard to empirical reality, which language performs, also in the Freudian field, and this is what makes us pass from an outer world — let's leave that to physics, that's not my specialty — the world of objects, to the world of subjects communicating with one another through language. And to understand this world, one must set aside — I repeat, we can never repeat it enough — one must set aside the cause-effect pair, not because it's deficient, but because that's not its field of application. One must leave the cause-effect pair to the world of nature, to the world of natural matter — but here we have symbolic matter, and so one must apply to it the meaning-sign pair if one wants to make sense of it. That, essentially, is—
55:37 how I would answer the two questions from last time — and I want to add, I'm going to add perhaps a small complement on death, since the question I was asked at the end of the session seems not to understand how death could have this decisive function with regard to a philosophy of freedom. So I take, still in the same work, the Jena Philosophy of Spirit of 1803 — I go to a passage that I go back to, but a passage I haven't read yet, going back to an earlier stage, prior to language, where consciousness already has imagination and memory but not yet words, and so it is in the night of representation. Why — and it's he who says 'night' — why? Because, look, I see the book here — this is not the night, this is the world of light, here it's electric light, but it could be sunlight, daylight — it's the world, empirical reality
'Man is this night' 56:48 but if I now close my eyes and represent the book to myself, yes, I do have an image, agreed, but it is in my inner night — it has nothing more to do with the book in material exteriority. This image, now I read — you'll see the connection with death — this image belongs to spirit, spirit is in possession of it, is its master; the image is preserved in the treasury of spirit, in the night — the word 'night' is underlined. I now ask that we count how many times the word 'night' will appear in the lines I'm going to read, in an author like Hegel, who is known for one of his most famous phrases, ironic toward the Romantics and toward Schelling's Absolute, when he says that one must not confuse the absolute with the night in which all cows are black. It's important to see that they don't get rid of the night with a wave of the hand either. So I resume: this image belongs to spirit, spirit is in possession of it, is its master; the image is preserved in the treasury of spirit, in the night of spirit, it is unconscious
57:58 it's underlined in the text — that doesn't stop us, you know, from being made to believe that we had to wait for psychoanalysis to discover the notion of the unconscious, the unconscious continent — that Freud brought things we would not even have suspected before him, that's clear, and it's certainly not just this concept of the unconscious alone — there's something else, there's content in Freud, not just form. So this image is unconscious, that is, it doesn't have to be exposed as an object before representation, like the book I see with my eyes. Man is this night — now he no longer says man is in the night, man is this night. Last time at the ENS I said man not only performs mediations, he is mediation. Now what does Hegel say here? Man is this night — one must pass through the mediation of the inner world, that world I call night because it's the world I access by closing my eyes; I can close my eyes and that doesn't stop me — not only from listening to music, I've done that sometimes in excellent conditions, to feel certain perfumes, to experience them
59:09 to listen to music and for many inner activities — it's not at all a diminishment to close one's eyes. Man is this night, this empty nothingness — you see the negation here — this empty nothingness, since I've suppressed everything external, which contains everything in the simplicity of this night — third time — man is this night, this empty nothingness, which contains everything in the simplicity of this night — a wealth of infinitely multiple representations and images, none of which, precisely, comes to mind, or which are not present as such — that's night, fourth time — the interior of nature, which exists here — meaning, in inner representation — which exists here, pure self, in phantasmagoric representation — one must take 'phantasma' here in its etymological sense of the production of images — that's night, fifth time — all around is night — all around, here suddenly, strange, a bloody head surges up, there another white silhouette, strange, alternating red and white, and they disappear
1:00:19 likewise, it is this night that one discovers — this is the culminating point of this text — when one looks a man in the eyes, one plunges one's gaze into a night — sixth time — that becomes dreadful — it's underlined — it's the night — seventh time — of the world advancing here to meet each of us. I'm restoring this astonishing text, which is in the first Philosophy of Spirit of 1803, a set of texts that we came to know late, since Hegel never published them — they were found in his manuscripts quite late. So it's really crucial to see here that it took the annihilation of the given world to arrive at this being — I'm thinking here of man who resurrects from this death to the world into a world produced by himself. Man is a bit like a raccoon — I say that as an image, because a raccoon can't eat something unless it has first dipped it in water and washed it — man consumes only what he produces
Man only consumes what he produces 1:01:29 one must — man, the object of human desire must bear the mark of a human activity, and it is thus that where the animal eats raw, man eats cooked; the food itself must bear the mark of a transformation, a production. It's no accident that Lévi-Strauss uses this title, The Raw and the Cooked, to establish the divide between nature and what he calls culture, and which, as a Hegelian-Marxist, I prefer to call history — even if for now it fulfills the same function, that is, making a world emerge that must absolutely not be confused with that of nature. In Bororo culture, in the culture of the Amazonian Indians, it is the jaguar that initiates man into the creation of fire, into the making of flame, whereas in nature it is precisely the animal par excellence that eats raw — I mean, and yet it is the jaguar who taught cooking to man, in Bororo mythology. I just wanted to recall here that
1:02:39 it took the annihilation of man's interest in immediate life — from the moment man becomes conscious of the finitude of the world surrounding him, of his limitation in time — his natural given loses all interest, and so it is not surprising that all his action invests itself in an end other than the one dictated by the sole natural law of need: eating to live, drinking when thirsty, reproducing the species — all that is essential, agreed, but eating among fellow diners at certain hours, here with chopsticks, there with forks, elsewhere with three fingers of the right hand — I mean, each time with an addition of something that is strictly useless from a purely physiological and natural point of view, which adds nothing to the natural function but which is essential for man, to the very point that this is how we recognize we are dealing with humans — it's when there is what employers would be capable of taxing as superfluous. I'm alluding here to the sordid notion of the minimum vital wage, right, the minimum for living
1:03:49 cave man had already surpassed it when he painted on cave walls. So, thank you for this question about the end. The end here is the exact opposite of an end: the end is a means never to find oneself with a determinate end — it is an infinite end, like the tip of the cathedral steeple or the minaret. There you go, Dominique, there's a small question — actually quite a big question — among the comments of the people who kindly follow this little program. Yes, good evening — there's a question from Patrick asking, in short, for Hegel, is the opposite of death freedom, question mark? That connects to the last question that was asked at the École normale — the opposite, it's not a logical opposite, I mean, to overcome the total loss
Question: is freedom the opposite of death? Money 1:04:59 of taste for life engendered by the thought of death — that's rather what needs to be understood. You know, why I use the metaphor of taste, it's no accident — I'll cite precise texts of Hegel right away, but I'll start with the general stakes so it's clear — I mean, so as not to remain in the total absence of interest, as the world once it's seen as consequent and mortal. Negativity, mediation, produces another world. One must understand that technology, from the first split pebbles up to today, is not meant to satisfy natural needs — otherwise we would long ago have remained at a certain Neanderthal stage — Neanderthal man ate very well, he was the greatest hunter human history has ever seen, right, it wasn't food he lacked — but behind technology there is something other than utilitarianism — and yes, Anglo-Saxon thought dominates the world, one must from time to time understand that the truth of the pudding is not limited
1:06:09 to the fact that one eats it, to paraphrase a famous English proverb, right. So it's to overcome the total disinterest we would have for the being in which we are immersed, at the thought of death, that another world is produced, that we pursue other ends which are not necessary from a vital, biological point of view — and that's why I answer here very precisely by the fact that fixing oneself an indeterminate end, or the fact that no determinate end is ever truly satisfying — which I illustrate once again with Rimbaud's illumination, commented on last time, which shows this very well — and the fact — I open a parenthesis here on money, on money, fiduciary money — I begin with a quote from Mallarmé, who insists on the double mediation. Mallarmé was one of the rare poets who had a great philosophical culture and who knew well
1:07:19 Hegel. Mallarmé says, in Variations sur un sujet — this is on Wikisource — 'speech has a relation to things only commercially' — careful, there's a stop, pass me the salt — right, commercially, it may happen that speech has a relation to things, but implicitly, in nine-tenths of the actual occasions on which men exchange words, it's not only for that — I stop my voice-over, I resume Mallarmé — speech has a relation to things only commercially, again implicitly — if that were all it were, it would suffice to silently place a coin in someone else's hand. A brilliant parallel drawn by Mallarmé between two forms of mediation between men, two forms of exchange: money and language. There, I come back now to Hegel, but we really weren't far off. The fact that money has such importance in human history in general, since the highest antiquity — it's banal to say that we always run after fortune, that money, in more familiar language
1:08:29 in the bars of the suburbs, people say only cash counts, etc. — fine, those are familiar notions, one could argue, one could say it's health, and among the things that keep coming back, among the things supposed to subjugate all other values, often it's wealth. Now, we can observe here what Hegel says about money in the first Philosophy of Spirit of 1805: it is the general form of desire. Why do I insist on that? Because we don't see the tantalizing side there is in this definition — precisely because it is the general, therefore indeterminate, form. It's not a particular desire — when I've gotten my salary, I have the money in my pocket, I don't yet know what I'm going to do with it, but I have a kind of hubris walking out onto the sidewalk because I have the possibility — I know I have the possibility, if I feel like it, I don't know, of treating myself to a meal in a restaurant, of going on a trip, of buying the music I like best — I know I have it, but none of that is yet determined or specified, and if money drives us mad, it's because — for us, it's valid for all
1:09:39 for each, for no one in particular, whatever — but if money has such importance, and is so recurrent, it's precisely because it comes to satisfy something fundamental in man, namely never being able to answer precisely the question: so, what do you want? It would be nice to be able to answer immediately — why do you take the subway? Because I'm going to high school. Why are you going to high school? Because I have to pass my exams. And why do you take your exams? To get a job. And why do you want a job? To get money. And what are you going to do with the money? Well, that I no longer know — and besides, do I even want to know? After all, when we say to Africans — I'll end my chapter on money there, my parenthesis — when we say to French-speaking Africans, I say this because they're the ones I know best, does money bring happiness, what do you think, Mamadou? You know what Mamadou answers — this magnificent answer, no one has ever done better: you have to give it to me first, I'll tell you afterward. To really have — money, to ask the question — give it to me first, I'll tell you afterward. Fine, but once you have the money, you know that—
1:10:49 You still haven't determined what you're going to do with it — well, so I leave aside here this other form of mediation which is money, isn't it, which is an intermediate medium between my desire and its satisfaction, as Mallarmé put it so well: speaking and exchanging money are two acts of mediation. And so that's how I believe I've answered the question — I'm quite willing to ask myself the question again, because I'd like to know whether I've answered it halfway or fully. Patrick, thank you already for the response — the question was: what is the opposite of death for Hegel? For questioning, it's freedom, yes, but on condition that it's clear this freedom is always in potentiality, and that it's not a freedom one simply has or doesn't have, as an audience member said very well last time — one has to move from freedom to liberation. Every time I act, that's where we see the link between death, praxis, and freedom — this time I have all three terms, agreed, so that death
Cunning of reason, dullness and the work of the negative 1:12:00 doesn't destroy me, I take a detour through praxis. Hegel — the famous Hegelian concept of the cunning of reason, of ruse — a ruse is always a detour, I'll come back to that — the cunning of reason: Hegel, in his early works where he uses this expression, it's always at the moment when he conceives of the tool, the instrument, the tool in the Marxist sense, the tool that serves for production, for material production. So again, in order not to be struck down by the idea of death — not simply that it will strike me down, but worse still, and that's what I'll come back to shortly, I'm getting to it now — there's a new value that appears in Hegel: it's the opposite of blandness, of the bland. Up until Hegel, the essential thing was the true and the false — that's the great pairing of the search for truth. And the postmodernists believe we have to wait for Nietzsche to say that maybe that's not the most important thing, that it's values that matter. You know that in a famous passage of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche says: ah, philosophers, they make us believe
1:13:10 that they might not agree among themselves about the means of pursuing truth, about which path to take — they might not agree on the route to follow, but they all agree in making us believe that they're seeking truth. And why would that be a value, says Nietzsche — he's right to raise the question — why, why should we have such an interest in knowing the truth? Isn't it perhaps a greater value to fabricate something untrue for ourselves, not to know the truth? And Nietzsche tells us the myth of Marsyas, that faun who had been — that flute player who had pursued a faun for an entire day through the thickets to ask him the secret of our existence, because fauns are somewhat semi-divine. So Marsyas the flute player wanted to know, and the faun, turning around at one point, said: wretch, you want to know the secret of our existence — the greatest good that man can have in this life is to die, and if he cannot have this good, if he is forced to be born, then let him die immediately after. That's very pessimistic, agreed.
1:14:21 And so there you have it — there's another value that Hegel knows well, long before Nietzsche, which is: it's not truth that is the supreme value here, but rather what prevents life from being bland. You see how I come back to the matter of death, because from the moment there is death, there is repetition — what lions do, I've never seen — I've seen lions in Africa, in wildlife reserves, I've never seen one that wasn't snoozing. Every time I've seen one, it's snoozing. That means there's nothing more repetitive than a lion's life — I like to say 'the lion' by metonymy for the animal in general — but there you go, from time to time it opens one eye like that because suddenly instinct wakes it up, it does need to eat after all, so it looks — ah, it's fine, the females are taking care of that, it's good, I mean, back to sleep — then the food arrives, a little growl to push everyone aside, the cubs, the females, they eat and go back to sleep. We already find it long that we spend 33 years of our life sleeping — well, a third of our life sleeping — the lion, it must be 90% of its life, I mean. But there you have it, man cannot live like that — once you have the idea of death in your heart, I mean, he cannot resign himself to that repetition.
1:15:31 which make bees — I took the example of Japanese bees, ours, those of California — which have had the same way of life for millions of years. There, we realize the difference between human ways of life over a million years — between, say, the Neanderthal world, the Roman world, the medieval world, and our own, for instance, to go very quickly. Why am I saying this? Because Hegel says in the preface to the Phenomenology that the life of God and that of the spirit can, if one likes — you see, for Hegel this is even more important — be expressed as a play of love with itself, so there he would agree with Schopenhauer, why not — but this idea, that's where he adds, sinks down to edification, even to blandness, you see, I was speaking of blandness when it lacks seriousness, pain, patience, and the labor of the negative of history — a crucial quotation — perhaps the truth is that spirit is always in colloquy with itself, but it's an idea that is bland when it lacks content. And that content
The detour of the finite being: Hölderlin, Proust, the rose in the cross 1:16:41 man gives himself through an immense detour — I insist, and I said earlier, and I'll finish on this, that I'll come back to it — a ruse always presupposes a curve, a tropos, a tropism, a detour, because if I were all-powerful like God, I don't see why I would tire myself with a detour. If I have omnipotence, I go directly to what interests me, nothing stops me. Ruse — and theologians know this very well, Rimbaud had already said that theology is serious — theologians know that it's the devil who resorts to ruse because he is not the omnipotent one, he is somewhat less powerful than God. This isn't a Manichaeism, it's not a Christianity that would be obliged — to have our soul, that's what interests him, the devil, you know it well — to go about it through ruse, to seduce us with bling-bling, to enact the capitalism of seduction, to borrow the title, isn't it, a title dear to my heart, as you know. So making a detour presupposes a being that is not all-powerful — that's man, he makes a detour through technè, through the tool, through praxis. But this detour, at the same time, this very detour
1:17:51 is what makes Hölderlin say: the gods cannot do everything, for men before them reach the abyss; thus with them — so with us, with us, with all of us — the echo changes, for time is long, but the true comes about; thus a world has arisen. I'll finish with an illustration — if I take it the other way round now, to understand everything this detour has brought, because some might say, still, that's a lot to grant to a ruse, to a detour — isn't a natural world better, looking at how beautiful nature is, confusing nature and landscape — but I'll come back to that next term. I quote a passage from Proust's In Search of Lost Time, a passage where he catches the gaze — he's still shy, he's an adolescent, a narrator who never quite gives his own age — he catches the gaze of one of the young girls he had noticed on the pier, and he's too shy to speak to her, she's on a bicycle, which is very modern for the time, and she looks at him, and suddenly he has this reflection, I quote: if we thought that the eyes of such a girl
1:19:01 were only a shiny disc of mica — in short, if she were a virtual girl, as we say now, the bionic woman if you will, a girl who would be the appearance of a girl, perfectly reconstructed as an image — you know, that's entirely your generation, we can now do much better than the automatons of Descartes's time — well, if we thought that her eyes were only a shiny disc of mica, we would not be eager to unite her life to ours, we wouldn't desire her, I mean. But he says, on the contrary — implied — we feel that what gleams, from the verb 'to gleam,' so here he's not even talking about the material composition of the eye but about the glow within it, about what comes from inside — but we feel that what gleams through, I quote, this reflecting disc — I follow this with Hegel's text, mastery unto death, which one sees when one looks a man in the eyes — I now follow it with a surplus of life in the gleam of this young girl's eye, a gleam that I compare to the one on the lip of the young girl with the pearl, by Vermeer, to take a painting well known to everyone.
1:20:11 and which I hope indeed is known to everyone, men and women alike — so this same gleam, we feel that what shines in this reflecting disc is — comma — unknown to us, and there begins the reversed subject — the dark shadows of these ideas, the dark shadows of the ideas that this being forms in relation to the people who interest her, the room she's about to enter, the plans she has made or that have been made for her, the casino, the pastry shop she's going into, the racecourse lawns where she goes to the races — in short, it was her whole life that inspired in me an infinite desire, limited and painful because I felt it was unrealizable. What does he cite? Everything that history has produced — a bit of the racecourses through which is written the casino, the world she's about to enter. We know very well, deep down, and that's why I have great admiration — I alluded to it last time — for the loves of shopgirls, isn't it, that's how we speak of these young women, sometimes with a certain contempt because they're not as cultured as those who go listen to the chatter of Philippe Sollers or others.
1:21:21 in literary salons. Well, I find that admirable, because they are well aware that all these stakes exist, and they wouldn't want all the artifice stripped away, everything produced by the praxis of their daily life, because, poor things, with the little pay they're given and the exhausting work they're assigned, they wouldn't have much left. There, I cannot pay a finer tribute to what man has done to overcome death — it's good news, I'm not paralyzing man with the Hegelian idea of death, quite the contrary — and certainly not Hegel, Hegel says clearly in the preface to the Philosophy of Right that true knowledge gives a far warmer reconciliation — to conceive reason, this will be my conclusion, is a quotation from Hegel in the Philosophy of Right — to conceive reason as the rose in the cross of the present, and reason is cunning. There, thank you very much. Dominique, thank you — remind me of the name — so it was Patrick for the last question, thank you Raphaël and Patrick, there, we can finish by telling ourselves
1:22:31 that workshop number 3 — we don't yet know the date because there are always small uncertainties about the room — yes, I believe we won't know until the very first days of December, agreed, okay, we'll let people know — I work with structure, so we can't know yet, okay, in any case we'll announce all that on Facebook to everyone as soon as we have the date. Well, listen, thank you very much, and thanks to those who have been following us, and for the comments, I'll pass on to you, Dominique, all the comments that have been posted — thank you, they are welcome, including negative comments, that helps us move forward — thank you.
