English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Hegel, Clouscard and the parliament of the collective worker 0:00 I'll hand the floor straight back to Michel Clouscard. Well yes, my agenda has been a bit disrupted. Disrupted because we're in France, what did we expect, it's a terrible country. Hegel said the French have their heads close to their caps. He quotes it in French, he likes the expression. It means you shouldn't push them too far. When you think they're asleep or have disappeared, the French make a comeback.
0:30 No, I'm not being narrow-mindedly French, that's not the point. I have an immigrant's name. But no, he did say that. He said, we're deep, us Germans. We're deeper than the French, we think deeply. We think what they do, but they actually do it. He admired the French capacity to move over into the political order. Not to remain always in the theoretical order. I say this because he's an author with a reputation for dwelling in abstract speculations.
1:05 And he says it, don't ask me where, it's in his correspondence. Where it's developed the most is in the second-to-last part of the Lectures on the Philosophy of History. And that's why I'm starting with this quotation, because of its incredible relevance today. So, as a result, my plan was the revolutionary thought of Rousseau and Lenin. In fact, I should have extended it as far as Clouscard.
1:36 Listen to this instead. It's from Refondation progressiste, one of the last works by Michel Clouscard. It was written some years ago now. He talks precisely about the lack of representation of working France within the institutions supposed to be representative, isn't that right?
2:10 in the delegations of sovereignty, like Parliament, the Senate, etc. So this paradox of the collective worker, because Michel Clouscard had the project of adding to the chambers that already exist and that he did not want to abolish, I insist. I'm interrupting myself because it's a rather rare text, its context. "We just need to," "they need to," that's all we hear, on the left of the left, I mean.
2:43 Whereas here, this is one of the rare revolutionary, propositional, very positive texts, which says here's what we can do, here's what we could do as soon as possible. In this case, I'll stick to this one point, creating a third chamber, the Parliament, which he calls that of the collective worker. This paradox of the collective worker is at the heart of the class struggle. It is the unity of action in the production process and its incapacity to recognize itself in political terms as class consciousness.
3:17 But is that necessary for the Revolution? The Communist Party, conceived as the vanguard of the workers' movement, the class consciousness of a class that has no consciousness of itself — wasn't it putting the cart before the horse? Wasn't it tainted with objective idealism? The Party in-itself must become for-itself. We haven't strayed that far from Hegel, indeed. Class consciousness objectifies itself in the production process and negates itself in the consumption process. You wouldn't believe this was written some fifteen years ago.
Vulcan against Narcissus 3:47 The collective worker on the ground is negated by the consumerism of libertarian liberalism. If Vulcan becomes the collective worker — do you see who Vulcan is? He's one of the rare gods who is dirty and ugly. Of course, he's the only one who works. Hephaestus, among the Greeks. It's interesting to see that the theme of the smith, the blacksmith deity, comes back in several mythologies quite far apart from one another. Look at the role played by the smith Alberich in the epic of the Nibelungs, which is roughly, in the Germanic world, the equivalent of our Olympus and our Iliad.
4:20 It's through him that everything begins. When he wants to grope, there's no other word for it, the daughters of the Rhine, but they're slippery. And they spend their time, a bit like saloon girls in a western, saying, oh, he's ugly, he stinks, he can come down. You see? He talks about it too, the Nibelung dwarf, in the same Clouscard book I've been referring to. But there's also, more unexpectedly, in a work already cited, set in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in the Sahel zone, and especially in the Mandé, Malinké zone, Mali, a linguistic zone that also includes part of Ivory Coast, Burkina of course, Mali, and Guinea, etc.
5:05 which plays the same role as the Iliad, the Mandingo epic. It exists from Présence africaine editions, recommended by schools, it's cheap, it's a little booklet, it's the merde. I'd cited it in connection with the role of the griot. Now, the blacksmith, Balla Fasséké, if I remember correctly, plays a fundamental role. It's he who gives Wiro to Sundiata Keita, the weapon that will allow him — you know this, like Star Wars, the lightsaber, or the equivalent.
5:35 It's always the same stuff. There, I'm commenting here on the appearance of Vulcan in the text. Vulcan, in mythology, who is he given as a wife? Yes, well done, Venus, some of you know it, that's good. Yes, mythology is dialectical. The ugliest god, he limps on top of it, he has everything going for him. Venus. And Venus cheats on him with…
6:06 With Mars. With the warrior. Alright, let me go all the way with the anecdote. Excuse me, but… it's rather fun, at one point furious Vulcan calls the gods to catch them in the act. Come and see, they're in the middle of… well. So he shows up, there, caught red-handed. So you'd think there'd be scandal, condemnation. And what happens? The gods burst out laughing. There, I wanted to recall the great Homeric laughter, the laughter of the Greeks. That's how it is. It does you good sometimes, all the same. A Corsican is telling you this.
6:37 There. They burst out laughing. You're not the only one, come on. Alright. So, if Vulcan becomes the collective worker, Narcissus, the antonym, the antithesis of Vulcan, isn't it — the one who finds himself so beautiful, who only leaves himself in order to return into… who falls in love with his own image in the mirror of the waters — and if Vulcan becomes the collective worker, Narcissus becomes libertarian liberalism.
7:08 It's the CGT against Cohn-Bendit in '68. The collective worker in everyday life, or Bigel, is constantly distanced from himself. With double exploitation, he ends up snubbing himself. There. I'm a bit, you see, disrupted, fortunately disrupted, by this topicality. It was planned, I mean. You'll see that in the texts we have to comment on, there's something directly connected to what's currently happening, since Hegel is the thinker of the French Revolution, and there's currently a circulation of the symbols of the Great Revolution such as I've rarely seen in a long time.
7:53 Two more reasons to demand the estates-general of the collective worker — it's exactly what the people being interviewed at the roundabouts are demanding, if you look carefully. They're asking for estates-general, for representation. There is no national representation of workers as such at all, already — already fifteen years ago — and according to their own management. Of course there are works councils, economic and social committees, the Ministry of Labour, but the latter is run by the state with its own administration.
8:23 No, no, he doesn't dismiss the unions with a wave of the hand, he's no libertarian-liberal, Clouscard. But these have had limited powers all along and can often only note the damage and gauge their own powerlessness. Reintroducing union play into the Parliament of the Collective Worker would reproduce their eternal problem without a solution: unity of action. There, topicality of this text, Refondation progressiste, isn't that right? Published by L'Harmattan, I wanted to point that out in passing.
Finitude in Rilke's elegies 8:56 So, that said, to get back to our topic, I'd left off, hadn't I — I'm picking up not from the last session but from what followed, for those who may have, online, been able to see… now that we have the possibility of streaming online, which isn't the case tonight unfortunately, of streaming our sessions online and, in exchange, receiving questions online, there have been two sessions online, for those interested, answering questions, which are now already on YouTube.
9:44 and among the questions, I dwelt at length on a cluster of questions that circled around the same pot, so to speak, namely what relationship there was, in Hegel, between mediation, negativity, and death, the role that death plays as the foundation of anthropology. Not death, because ants die too, but the awareness of finitude, I prefer to say.
10:14 It's not specific to the philosopher, because nowadays there's a tendency to eliminate any difference between man and animal, as if there were only differences of degree, etc. Now, I'm the first to say there's an animal part in us, which we keep until death — having to eat in order to live, to take that trivial example, wasn't invented by man. But you see, not only among philosophers but also among poets — here I'm quoting an excerpt, a very beautiful poem by Rilke, that Austrian poet torn apart by the war of 1914, because it pitted him against the French, for him he felt as much Parisian as Viennese, well anyway, Rilke, the Eighth Elegy: "With all its eyes the creature"
11:12 he's talking about the animal — "With all its eyes the creature beholds the Open, with a capital O. Our eyes alone are as though reversed, set all around it like traps at its escape's free edge. What is outside, we only know from the animal's countenance; for we take the very young child and force it round, to see forms, not the Open that lies so deep within the animal's face."
11:45 "Death: it we see alone. The free animal has always its going-down behind it, and before it God, and when it moves, it moves already in eternity, like fountains flowing. It's beautiful as an image, you see, a deer moving forward in the forest — a free animal always has its decline behind it. And before it, God. And when it advances, it advances into eternity like springs flow. But we, never, not for a single day, do we have before us that pure space in which flowers endlessly bloom. Always it's the world and never the nowhere without a no, that pure, unwatched element that one breathes."
12:15 You see? Limit, finitude, there. So you'll tell me, but that's anti-humanist. Look, look, the same poet makes a strongly Hegelian progression. He hadn't thought about it that way, but it's even better that way, that it turns up objectively, you see. He says this in the Seventh Elegy this time, the one just before: "Every dull turn of the world has such disinherited children, to whom no longer what has been, and not yet what is coming, belongs."
12:51 "For even the nearest thing is far for human beings. Let that not confound us; may it help us preserve the form we still recognize. This once stood among mankind, in the midst of fate, the destroyer, in the midst of the not-knowing-whither, it stood as if enduring, and bent stars down to itself from secured heavens." It stood — I'm underlining that, three times now he says "it stood," I remind you, I'm dropping little white pebbles along the way to show I'm not jumping randomly from one thing to another the whole time.
13:26 I remind you that Hegel had seen an asymmetry between the order of nature, where the law of falling is emblematic. The science of nature is truly scientific, generally speaking, only since Newton, if you like — the Galilean break culminating in Newton's classical physics, if you will — in which, as you know, the law of falling played a decisive role. And Hegel, you see, a curious asymmetry between this downward movement of falling, from high to low symbolically…
14:01 High and low are symbolic notions. In physics, high and low mean nothing in reality. Down below, there are New Zealanders who say that when they say "down," that's us. There is the order of freedom, which is exactly the reverse. It's what stands upright, as the poet says here. And the Greeks erect temples, don't they, and the Indians erect totems, cathedrals, mosques, whatever it may be. "It stood." So, "it stood," underlined, "once among mankind, in the midst of fate, the destroyer."
14:45 "It stood in the midst of the uncertainty of the roads. It stood as though endowed with being, and drew the stars down to itself out of the secured heavens." That's the era — this isn't astrology exactly, and the constellations from which destiny was read, and the heavens that were secure — angels, so there, he addresses, you see, he addresses the supernatural. "Angel: to you, still, I show it — there! in your sight, at last saved, upright now, pillar, pylon, sphinx, the striving thrust of the cathedral, gray, arising out of the dying or the alien city."
15:22 "Was that not miracle? Be astonished, angels, for this is ours, great angel, this is us, you see — there's a glorification of anthropology here — we who have no longer such things. Proclaim it! My breath would be too short to celebrate it. Thus we have not, after all, failed to make use of the spaces, these generous spaces, our spaces. They must be terribly vast, since thousands of years of our feeling do not fill them up."
15:52 "But a tower was great, wasn't it, O angel, it was great even next to you. Chartres was great — and music went even further." A Hegelian progression from the plastic arts toward the arts of time, and music went further, higher still, and passed beyond us. And what indeed can there be above all the plastic arts, sculpture, painting, music, what can there be? "And even a woman in love, alone at her nighttime window, did she not reach up to your knee?"
16:26 "Do not think I am pleading, angel, and even if I were, you would not come; for my call is always full of refusal, against so strong a current you cannot advance." — that's the current of history and of Spirit, in the Hegelian sense — "against so strong a current you cannot go. Like an outstretched arm is my cry. And its hand, held open above, to grasp, remains before you, open, as if in defense and warning." A magnificent text that ends almost with a warning, you see, to the angel — this is what we were capable of.
Teleology: the Phaedo and the four causes 17:03 So, when I speak of an awareness of finitude — none of that would have existed otherwise, would it? And that's where I'd left off in my answers to questions; I'd finished with a long development on the notion so vilified, so denigrated in modern and especially postmodern thought, the notion of teleology. Telos, the end in Greek, sorry, telos, finality — not finalism, that's something else — but finality, the fact of invoking a purpose to explain a behavior.
17:41 I remind you of a passage from Plato's Phaedo that shows clearly the problem of finalism versus its antonym, mechanism, has existed for a long time, hasn't it. When, in the Phaedo, in its prologue, Socrates says: I had heard about a book — interesting, it tells us something about what bookselling was like back then, papyrus and all that — I had heard about a book in which the author said that the universe has for its origin the nous, translated as intelligence.
18:20 That's where the word "noumenon" comes from — a notion, quite simply. He's referring to Anaxagoras. Among the pre-Socratics — you know the pre-Socratics are easy to cram for exams. There are a few small fragments scattered here and there, in one author, in another, in Aristotle; unfortunately nothing complete has survived. And the longest fragments we have run at most two or three pages, and most of the time just a few sentences. But to cram them, it's easy. Each has a name — Heraclitus, Parmenides — a place, Parmenides of Elea, Heraclitus of Ephesus, that is, in Turkey now, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, etc.
18:59 Because there are other Anaxagorases, we've never managed to place them exactly. And above all, you know, you'll thank me for this, each has one principle. Democritus — it's the atom. Everything, everything that can be of a cognitive order has for its principle the atom. And one formula. So, I tell you like that, and we know the essential of Democritus, or all the rest can be deduced. There isn't much more anyway. "Nothing exists but the atom and the void," and all the rest is commentary. Meaning, gold, paper, God, love, are combinations of atoms.
19:30 That's rigorous, all the same, for the time. Democritus. I remind you that the young Marx begins his first publication with a thesis on the difference between the systems of Democritus and Epicurus. There. Parmenides, now, his principle is being. He has a formula, easy to remember, let me phrase it simply: What is, is; what is not, is not. Yes, I know, it makes people laugh. You're laughing.
20:00 It makes my students laugh, especially in Africa. "Hey, sir, you don't need to be an intellectual to come up with that." I was apparently right. But you have to understand that Parmenides is in the process of discovering what's called in logic and mathematics the excluded middle. A or not-A, there's nothing in between, there's no "but"… No, we're not at the market. We're in logic. We're not in "come on, my friend, I'll give you a good price." Ah, that's important too.
20:30 But that's something else. Here, we're in the realm of knowledge, aren't we. So, either it's a tablet or it's not a tablet. There. So, who's telling you, sir, that I'm a man? You see that one? Like me, that wasn't bad. Alright then, what is, is, what is not, is not. Without that, there would have been neither Euclid, nor logic, nor probably Socrates, who is rumored to have started out as a student of Parmenides, after all.
21:03 Even if afterward, he has to kill him. You know all great philosophies are patricidal. Plato criticizes Parmenides, Aristotle criticizes Plato after having stayed thirty years at his school, isn't that so. Kant criticizes Descartes, Spinoza too, Hegel criticizes Kant, Marx criticizes Hegel. It's interesting, I'm proposing a thesis topic for you: patricide in philosophy. Trying not to reduce it to the psychological field, mind you.
21:37 While not excluding it either. So, there, each has a principle, a formula, and so Anaxagoras, for him, at the origin of all things there is the nous, intelligence. And Socrates picks up, Plato picks up the word and says: now that pleased me, that's a finalist program, Plato's. That means it's not chaos, it's not chance, it's not the struggle of everyone against everyone, etc., but an order in being. And so I couldn't wait to get hold of the book to see in detail how he would trace everything back to what we'd now call intelligent design, if you like, in Anglo-Saxon terminology.
22:18 There, we find intelligence again. And what a disappointment it was when I came across the book, to find an author who, instead of explaining everything through intelligence, invokes the actions of water, of fire, of pressure, of air. You see, finalism, mechanism. Already a positivist explanation, as we'd say today, isn't it. And there, the interesting part, the most interesting part begins. In short, says Socrates, he seemed to me exactly like someone who, asked why I am sitting here with you — because this is Socrates's last conversation with his disciples in prison — would answer, because Socrates has muscles and nerves, and his muscles have the property of bending thanks to the tendon connecting the nerves to the muscles, and that's how he can be sitting here.
23:08 That's not false, you'll see, Plato, finalism, we've made progress on our problem, the finalism-mechanism issue. Whereas, he misses what seems to me the essential cause, which is that the city has condemned me, I was offered a chance to escape, and I judged it better for me to stay here, because I spent my life defending the order of the city, and I'm not the one who's going to set an example of sedition. Otherwise, by the dog, these bones and these nerves would long since be off in Megara or Boeotia, wherever the idea of what's better would have led them.
23:42 And he adds, this is the most important point in the terminology and it shows that Plato is not so idealist as he's said to be, and where materialism pokes its nose in, he should say not that muscles, bones, etc. are the cause, but that it is, I quote, that without which the cause would never be a cause. Yes. That is to say, if there is no matter, there is no cause either.
24:13 There we can feel the young Aristotle taking notes at Plato's side, who will go on to develop his great theory of the four causes in his Physics. You know, the four causes in Aristotle. In physics, in today's physics, only the efficient cause is retained, the model of shock, isn't it? One body is in contact with another, transmits motion to it, etc. Whereas Aristotle invokes four causes; the first one, what he calls the efficient cause—so let's take a statue, that's the example he uses.
24:49 for the cause of the statue—let's say it's the statue of Alcibiades—you need a model. Alcibiades is what he calls the formal cause. We have the form, the model. Then you still need marble, the material cause. Everything is there in the four causes. Because otherwise, I have a project in my head, like that, but it remains a project, it remains an ought-to-be. There has to be the marble. There's the marble as a block, like that, and then there's Alcibiades posing, starting to find the time long.
25:23 Ah yes, well there's also the sculptor's arm, the movement. That's the efficient cause. That makes three. The fourth, you know it, the most important. Yes, the final cause. And of course, this is where we see the often circular side of teleology: the final cause, that is, the one supposed to be at the end, is actually the first. Because all of this gets set in motion because I wanted, at the start, to make the statue of Alcibiades.
25:55 Final cause, formal cause, material cause, efficient cause. So there, I've recalled this detour to show that the position of finalism versus mechanism is ancient. I don't want to go back over it because I've already dwelt long enough on the answers to questions. But on the other hand, there's an element missing that I'll try to develop today. It's that we can sum up the whole history of thought, of philosophy if you prefer, but that also includes cognitive thought and reflection on the sciences from Antiquity to the great stages that follow.
Aristotle's philosophical imperialism 26:38 There are two imperialisms that succeed one another. I'm using the political metaphor on purpose, you'll see why. There's the Aristotle model, the most systematic thought of Greek Antiquity that has come down to us. You know, a small detail of the history of philosophy: you know that of Plato we've lost everything that was systematic. That is, the courses that made up what's called his esoteric work. Not because it was secret, but because it was what he said to his disciples, like that. It was written, but we lost it. We've only kept his exoteric works made for the public, very elaborate in the Greek style, very literary, very staged, the dialogues.
27:19 Admirable. Aristotle is the opposite. It's a curious fate. He wrote dialogues that in Antiquity were considered masterpieces. Don't think that Plato is the artist and Aristotle is the... No, no. But we lost those dialogues. And, unlike with Plato, we kept his lecture courses. That's why Aristotle has this firstly, secondly, thirdly side to him. If you happen to slog through Aristotle, you see what I mean? There's a didactic side to it.
27:49 I take Aristotle as the most complete, the most explicit expression of the thought of Antiquity. And in Aristotle there is an imperialism. It's philosophical imperialism. That is, philosophy is the great discipline that encompasses all the others. All of them—what we call the sciences, I don't know, chemistry, biology—are parts of philosophy. That seems surprising to us today. Today you have the Sorbonne here, then you have the CNRS elsewhere, or Jussieu elsewhere.
28:20 You see? It's interesting. We'll get there. But we're not there yet. It's the opposite. Philosophical imperialism. You find the best expression of it in the extraordinary fourth book of the Metaphysics. A Vrin edition with the enormous critical apparatus of dear Tricot, isn't it? Sometimes there are more notes than text. There are two lines of Aristotle and then there's that, two notes, unfortunately. And yes, the three preceding books, you can skip them—you should read them, but they have only historical interest, because in the three preceding books Aristotle lists more or less everything that had been said on the subject before him.
28:58 So this is the first time we have a history of philosophy. That's interesting too. Here are the ideas of our predecessors on the question. Three books. Three books, three chapters. Don't let that scare you. And once we reach the fourth, we get to the heart of the matter. It begins with this solemn sentence: there is a science that studies being as being. There is, implicitly, one single science that studies being as being. Not being in motion—that's for the physicist.
29:29 It's Aristotle speaking. Dynamics, as we'll say later, mechanics, mekhanè, dunamis, all that—these are the Greek terms expressing different forms of motion. The plant is a dunamis, isn't it? That's a mekhanè. There's kinesis, which gives us cinema. That's for the physicist. There's being in motion that has a soul. That's psychology, biology. The plant, the animal, man. Which he will study in his De Anima in Latin, Peri psukhès in Greek—psyche, psychology, psychoanalysis, all that we talk about.
30:04 Well, but all that consists of attributes of being. The subject is being. You see, we find again the foundations of grammar: A and B, subject, copula, attribute. There is a science that studies being as being. It is unlike any of the so-called particular sciences. I quote: one, because each of the particular sciences cuts out a part of being and reasons about the attributes that belong to that part alone.
Scientism and the usefulness of philosophy 30:36 But the philosopher alone studies being as being. It keeps coming back like an obsession. There you go. So you see, it's quite clear that the other sciences are parts of philosophy. So why do I call it imperialism? Because it also means that none of those sciences has what we would call autonomy, let alone independence. So I keep spinning the political metaphor. When you have an excess of imperialism, inevitably you're bound sooner or later to face a Vietnam, a Cuba, an Algeria, I mean.
31:11 We get struggles for independence. And the first to gain independence, of course, is Euclid, mathematics, before all the other scientific disciplines, saying: we don't need to be philosophers to say that if A equals B, B equals A. There, from that point, we can start to move forward. Provided we drop the everyday language in which philosophy remains stuck to this day. You'll tell me, no, when I read Kant, I don't get the impression it's everyday language. Yes, it is, because he uses everyday words. Well, their arrangement is sometimes a bit strange among philosophers.
31:43 When Hegel says "the pure porosity of matters," we understand nothing. I mean, pure, porosity, matter—all that, you know those words. It's the combination that's a bit strange. Whereas X equals Y implies all that. Those are signs, by the way. You see, I have trouble... it's made for writing, that thing, at the limit, a silent verse. That and nothing else. So, you see, I tell you "democracy," and you see how we can argue for hours, not agree, but well, nothing, huh.
32:14 Well, and you dethrone a man. So mathematics is the first to gain independence. Well, you know what follows: a century later, it's physics that breaks away. It's not with Galileo. And you can feel the second imperialism coming, which will give rise to modern positivism, etc. Scientific imperialism, which claims to be scientific but isn't—many scientists themselves reject it—and which is called scientism, which is not science.
32:46 And even less the sciences. It's a claim that everything can be reduced to that kind of explanation, which is quite different. Positivism, scientism—these notions are linked, I won't dwell on it too much. You see, one imperialism succeeds another. So let's take a final topic, it'll be relaxing like that, isn't it, an agrégation year, since I'm talking about Hegel, who is on the agrégation syllabus. But it could serve for the agrégation, what shall we say?
33:16 That doesn't mean the simplest and most fundamental things when we manage to make breakthroughs. A topic that could be a run-of-the-mill essay topic, as they say, for newcomers to philosophy, first-time philosophy students, in the final year of high school. For example, I presume it's rather a science-track final year class, as they now call the science students, S, S, T, I don't know, is that right? Namely: has the development of science and technology made philosophy useless?
33:46 The topics get phrased differently, but it's the kind of topic that keeps coming back. Well, what's the point of bothering with philosophy that doesn't help us earn anything? We'll look at cognitive science and that'll settle it, brain imaging and all that. And I believe I mentioned this once, two or three years ago, in the workshops. And of course the conscientious students are going to question the terms of the topic—philosophy, science, technology, all that, they're heavy, complicated words—without getting to the point.
34:21 What's the most important word in the topic? Thanks. Yes? Useful. Bravo. Good. There are some who follow. Everyone follows, more or less. Yes, useful. The word that goes most unnoticed, the most familiar one, the one nobody thinks raises any problem. That one, I know it, no need to dwell on it. But if that's it, the whole topic is there—does it mean anything, useful? You know, it comes from the Latin ut, even if we haven't studied Latin—ut means "so that." We come back to finality.
34:52 Ut implies that we have a project, a projection. Marx. Marx as a materialist, what you're telling me... Finalism is a form of idealism. You remember, Marx: what immediately distinguishes the clumsiest architect from the most skillful bee is that the architect has the house in his head—ah, the project—before realizing it in the sensible, in the outside world. We haven't finished with teleology. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
35:22 So, yes, what does "useful" mean? It means fulfilling its purpose, its function well. In that case, philosophy is useful. Let's suppose I remove philosophy and put rain in its place. That's the example I had taken. Is rain useful? The answer, Tariq. Do you have a good memory? For the farmer or for... That is, on Marx's side? For the beachgoer. For someone who has a straw hut in Corsica. Yes, well there you go. Well, we don't get the same answer.
35:52 It's a catastrophe for the beachgoer. The rain, isn't it? Especially on August 15th. And then it's a blessing for the employer, for the farmer coming out of two months of drought. We agree on that. In other words, these aren't words that designate things. That's the problematic word. It's a word that has no meaning unless we spell out the end that is presupposed. There, we see it clearly. And so we need to reflect on the end in order to know whether the development of science and technology has made philosophy useless.
36:29 Because, phrased that way, it presupposes that science, technology, and philosophy—and Aristotle fell into this trap too—all pursue the same end, and that along this shared path, philosophy has been shoved aside because, for that end, we now have more powerful means called physics, chemistry, biology. That's coherent. It's false. It's completely false. Because to know whether something is useless or not, one must reflect precisely on the one thing the scientist, as a scientist, does not reflect on—as a man. Don't worry, he hasn't waited for us to not reflect on it as a family man, as a lover, as a citizen, as a warrior or a man of peace.
37:05 He has the right to reflect on ends, on values. But there, what he learned at science school is of no use. There it can happen that an ignorant, illiterate peasant—I don't say that pejoratively—might be better qualified to advise me in a tough moment of life than a math professor or an astrophysicist. You see what I mean? And that a sage deep in an African forest or out in the desert, I don't know, might be more relevant on questions of purpose, value, the goal of life, after all, than a scientist who can be monstrous—that can happen.
37:50 It's not because of his science, but still, I mean, that doesn't prevent it. We saw that under the Third Reich, I don't know. Not only there. So there, the good student is the one who says, wait, wait, to know whether something is useful or not, we need to reflect on the end. And reflecting on the end is precisely the object of philosophy and not of the sciences. So it's more useful than ever. And I would even say the more efficient the sciences become, the more we need philosophy. Because technology—do science and technology make philosophy useless? I'm not forgetting my topic. I'm not leaving a single word to chance.
38:20 Technique, technology especially—because that kind of technique has existed since Neanderthal times, but technology, that is, a technique that has gone through the theoretical detour, and is therefore overwhelmingly powerful, resulting not merely in a chipped pebble—that's mere skill—but presupposing a great deal of intelligence, presupposing chains of equations. I'm thinking of a particle accelerator, an electron microscope, there you go. But say, doesn't that considerably strengthen not only our knowledge but our power, yes or no?
38:57 So that can be terrifying. It doesn't make us better, nor more wicked. It strengthens our power to be wicked or good. I mean, I can do damage with a knife, but with a nuclear bomb, I can do a bit more. But with the nuclear bomb, with nuclear energy, I can just as well cure a cancer, I can just as well open up a mountain, I mean, that was blocking an access.
39:28 with a knife, I can kill someone or I can save them by removing their appendix at the moment they were threatened with peritonitis. You see, I'm telling you how tired I am of putting the means on trial when we should start from the end. You see, the dialectic of means and ends. The means, if you want to be a bit technical, always has an axiological neutrality. Axiological—that's everything concerning values, the beautiful, the true, the just, etc.
39:58 the axes, the axes of value. The means—I just showed it with the knife—it's not the knife that gets sent to prison if someone has been stabbed. Men aren't crazy. We've never seen a trial where we send the knife to jail. It did happen that pigs or dogs were hanged. In the Middle Ages, there were superstitions like that. It happened. It's in the annals, you can see it. We've moved past that. Poor animals.
40:30 Not that we should attribute our own wickedness to them. Good and evil are privileges of man. But both of them. Let's not send it back to Rousseau, we've already seen that. Even the worst atrocities in the animal world, which seem atrocious to us because we can't help but attach a moral connotation when I say atrocious. Like those insects that struck me. Those insects that lay their larvae inside another insect that's much smaller, and the larva, as it grows, makes the other insect explode.
41:01 It's appalling. It's not wicked. Everyone has the right to live. It has to live too. The animal does what it can. It's neither in good nor in evil. It's about power, not duty. I won't go back over all that. But I wanted to take this simple example. Has the development of science and technology made philosophy useless? You think about this topic and you have a problem we haven't yet resolved.
Peaceful coexistence according to Kant 41:32 philosophical imperialism, scientistic imperialism. I don't know. And now I'll keep spinning my political metaphor just to please myself, just to—sorry, just to drive a wedge into Althusser. But, I admit, humbly, there's one point on which he seems to be right. No, because he says somewhere—I'm keeping this metaphor going, but you can't spin a metaphor forever. I'm trying to stretch it out, aren't I?
42:03 But I'll stop there. Political metaphor. Imperialism, declaration of independence, we just saw it—what's left? Peaceful coexistence. It's a political figure. Well, the younger ones don't know it, but you know, in the sixties, between '60 and '70, the world wavered. We thought we'd get to breathe, didn't we? After the terrors of the nuclear blackmail of the superpowers, suddenly there was a period of détente. You know what's called the thaw, détente, on the American side, even on the Soviet side.
42:35 That is, that the competition, the space race, may the best win, but not war. There was the red telephone. That's not common, is it. Have you seen who's just been named chief of staff, over there at the White House? Strange things are happening right now, aren't they? I'm not the only one saying it, even journalists notice it. Namely that we no longer know who governs in the United States, and yet it's the United States that governs the world. Yes, for now, the current news is that there's a disengagement, I don't know.
43:07 I'm talking more clearly about the news of the day, even of the night, last night—this dates back to the Middle East and even Afghanistan. 18,000 billion, for nothing. We blew up machines, drones, we razed villages, for nothing. Well, you're the best, here are the keys, we won't do it again. But at the same time, the same... Trump, to put it plainly, I'm not saying it to please anyone, I'm not Hillary Clinton, I sent that back to us.
43:38 And... meanwhile, he appoints as chief of staff Miley, M-I-L-E-Y. You don't see who that is? No, he's escaped public attention. I'm searching for his first name, it'll come back to me, but I'm looking—chief of staff of the American army, M-I-L-E-Y—the speech he gives, because it's on YouTube, a hallucinating speech, he supported Hillary Clinton's campaign and he threatens systematic destruction of anyone who contradicts American policy in the world.
44:14 He's someone terrifying. So, at the time I'm talking about, it was the opposite. We tried—there was a red telephone, right? Cuba: we're not going to start World War Three over Cuba, well okay, fine, you withdraw the missiles from Cuba, Soviets, and in exchange you remove your missiles from Turkey that were aimed at the Black Sea. There you go, that settled it. They should have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize, people weren't paying attention. So, all right, I'll leave my...
44:45 I said it was a metaphor, let's leave it in its literal sense, I come back to philosophy—what's the scientific question? It's Kant. It's Kant, and you find it in Kant's masterpiece, in his last critique, in the Critique of Judgment, Critique of the Faculty of Judgment depending on the translation, and in particular in that superb introduction, where Kant draws up his final assessment, I mean, the last stage of his thought. So I'll tell you here the essential point and why I call it peaceful coexistence.
45:15 he distinguishes two domains. Up to now, we had, you see, a monism—monism of philosophy, monism of science—and now suddenly there's a dualism. All right? Two domains. There are two ways of legislating, that is, of being able to know. There are laws, there is an explanation. There is legislation by nature, which corresponds to scientism, to positivism. Y equals F of X, as I often say, that's it, its general formula.
45:45 causality, cause, facts, determinism. There is a legislation by nature. And there is, but completely distinct, a legislation by freedom. That's where we find teleology again. Right? I do something because I pursue an end. I am here, I, Socrates, sitting here with you because I judged it better for me to remain in prison.
46:15 You know Rousseau says that the impulse of mere appetite is slavery, obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom. Kant took good note of this lesson from the Newton of morality, as he called Rousseau, didn't he? There is a legislation by nature where force reigns, but without this being pejorative, diabolical, or divine, right? A relation of force, the stronger prevails.
46:46 A trivial example: the Moon orbits the Earth because the Earth's mass is greater. So the force exerted by terrestrial attraction is greater than that of the Moon, because the Moon also attracts the Earth a little, but not enough. There, it wanted to go straight and the Earth makes it turn around it. In passing, it takes the tangent. Otherwise, if the Earth suddenly stopped and exploded, the Moon would take the tangent of its trajectory. It's nice, the derivative. So that's legislation by nature.
47:17 And then there is a second domain, a legislation by freedom. Only, and this is where Kant went deep, these two domains exercise their legislation on one and the same territory. Some of you know a thousand texts. Yes, on one and the same territory - these geographical metaphors of Kant's. I was using political metaphors, I was using geographical metaphors because he is contemporary with Bougainville, with Cook, the moment when Oceania, Australia are being discovered.
47:52 But yes, right? It's often the case that in metaphysics we arrive in front of unknown lands, you see, somewhat. Domain, territory - well yes, it's not the same thing. Come on, let's put some order and clarity into all this. I fly over the Amazon in a helicopter. I like this image myself. What do I see? Almost - it's been two hours that I've seen only that, it's magnificent. The canopy, that's what the top of one of the largest forests on the planet is called, along with Siberia, Canada.
48:24 There. The canopy is magnificent, the flowers, the monkeys, the monkeys that take refuge up there, they're more at peace. The birds. The canopy. Everything I see in the canopy can be reduced to legislation by nature. Everything I see can be explained by laws, principles at work in zoology, botany, physics, chemistry, etc. until suddenly there's a clearing, the men's hut, the women's hut, a village, good grief.
48:55 Prohibitions that don't exist in nature. The prohibition of incest. Well yes, the English brought rabbits to Australia. The rabbits didn't say to themselves no, no, no, first cousins, that won't do. No, no, no. A pair of rabbits, there were 3 million of them within a few years. Did you know that? It was a plague at the time. They had to introduce myxomatosis to wipe out 500,000 of the poor things. You see? They were all inbred.
Foucault and Descartes's first meditation 49:28 Well, there, I'll say - and it's a space. I say this because Deleuze wants us to believe that it's the modern state that is totalitarian. Deleuze, Foucault too. Foucault says one can't say that we became totalitarian the instant there was reason, starting with Descartes. Reason is totalitarian. Since Descartes excludes madmen from humanity. Which is a total misreading of the content of the first meditation, which Foucault knew at least as well as I do, and probably better. So I denounce his bad faith here. They don't have poor eyesight.
49:59 I'm alluding to the first meditation, when Descartes - the one meant to review all things that are doubtable, that we have the slightest reason to doubt. Descartes is not a skeptic by temperament. He would like to arrive at certainties, but true ones. He had already sensed what Hegel would distinguish - certainty and truth. There's a long way from the certainty, for example, that the ground is motionless here. This certainty is not a truth. It depends on the laboratory you're in.
50:30 From the Moon's point of view it's not motionless. So Descartes says this crucial sentence which gives the method of the first meditation: I decided to regard as false everything that was merely probable. Either it's 100% certain, or I act as if it were absolutely false. That way at least I don't risk being mistaken - a bit of a paranoid streak in Descartes - and one doesn't risk being deceived. So he begins doubting sensible things.
51:00 These are the more doubtful things. I hear a rumbling in the distance. What is it? Is it a plane? A truck? Thunder? It's evident to everyone that this is the realm of doubt. But as Descartes says, it's the distant sensibles, the nearby sensibles - that I have this notebook in front of me, that I'm here talking to you - that's certain. I can't doubt things like that. Unless I compare myself to those madmen. And that's where the madman comes in. Whose brain is so clouded by the black vapors of bile. It's a strange, strange conception of madness, but that's how it was at the time. A mechanistic one.
51:31 As if there was bile that came. Whose brain is so clouded by the black vapors of bile that they imagine themselves to be kings when they are stark naked, that they have a body of glass or are pitchers. But what? They are madmen. But what? They are madmen. It's the musketeer speaking. Careful. Hand on the sword. I would be no less mad if I modeled myself on their example. Me, I'm reason. Them, they're madmen. Up to that point Foucault is perfectly right. Full stop. But Rousseau - no, he hasn't only read one paragraph. Foucault hasn't only read one paragraph. He knows very well that what follows is a splendor - it's the self-humiliation of the great philosophers.
52:07 However, yes, however, I have to consider here that I am a man and that consequently I am accustomed to sleep. Descartes is methodical. Men sleep. And to represent to myself in my dreams things as extravagant, and sometimes more extravagant, than what these madmen experience when they are awake. So that, thinking about it carefully - since they've decided that at the slightest occasion for doubt one must treat it as if it were absolutely false - so that, thinking about it carefully, I see that there is no conclusive sign that allows one to distinguish sleep from waking, at which I am quite astonished.
Cause-effect and sense-sign 52:40 At the time, thunder - for him it's a shock. So that I am quite astonished, and this astonishment, I quote him word for word, is almost capable of persuading me that I am dreaming. Can you imagine, magnificent. How many times has it happened to me to dream that I was sitting here by the fire writing, when in fact I was completely naked in my bed. I have been so often deceived by similar illusions.
53:10 Let me open a parenthesis - and we see clearly here, when I speak of peaceful coexistence, I haven't yet formulated the pairs of concepts, and I'm getting to it - that for the order of nature, the pair, as you can guess, the key is cause-effect, which I symbolize more unequivocally as Y equals F of X - Y is a function of X, Y is determined by X, Y depends on X, all that is equivalent - and then there is the world one would call, in Lévi-Strauss's terms, culture, or history if one is more of a Marxist, or spirit - a Hegelian term, but it designates the same sets. In mathematics we call that equipotent sets, when they designate the same objects and the same number - which is what Rilke was talking about in that admirable poem earlier: there's the cathedral, the sphinx, the pilot, the music, the lover at her window with a violin.
54:22 blond, rather splendid - he says this is legislation by freedom, where explanation no longer belongs to cause and effect but to the pair meaning-sign - these are signs that refer to a meaning, and you see here that my reflection on ends brings us to the notion of meaning. You suspect this - highway code, I say 'sens' [direction/meaning] and I'm sure you have in your head a little image with an arrow, direction - it's that way or this way, meaning it indicates a goal, a direction, it's not axiological neutrality, it's not a line that in both directions is indifferent. Meaning-sign - let me dig a bit into the difference, not between meaning and sign, but between cause and effect versus these two pairs. That's what's interesting: the one that governs the hard sciences, let's generalize, and the one that reigns, or should reign, and give intelligibility to what's called, in all the human sciences, the social sciences, the humanities and social sciences - everyone's talking about it and how they should even be named.
55:32 And for Kant these disciplines all have in common that they unfold in this domain he calls the domain of legislation by freedom. So now I get back into my helicopter, we're still above the Amazon, and I'm hovering vertically above the Indian village, where suddenly there are things that not only differ from nature but contradict it - which is why it can't be reduced to nature. When I observe Ramadan, when I observe Lent, etc., it's exactly the opposite of what my stomach prescribes to me. There's no biological law that says 'I'll fast anyway.' There's no biological law that says 'you shall drink booze,' yet in every human culture there's - here, a corn beer, there, potato alcohol, schnapps - and, what's the most common, in reverse - good answer, everywhere I've been - palm alcohol. I know Black Africa a bit - yes, a millet beer.
56:42 In Burkina Faso, there. You can't say that's prescribed by the laws of health - I'm not saying it doesn't do some good now and then, but still, deducing from the examination of the human body that one absolutely must lack alcohol is strange, you know - it's like the one who sees the drunkard looking at a wall that says 'alcohol kills slowly' and writes underneath 'I don't care, I'm not in a hurry.' Legislation by freedom - and both are exercised, and that's where I can dismiss my helicopter now, but it helped us see this: that the two dispute one and the same territory, the one Kant called the phenomenon. Because for there to be a village, I have to cut down part of the forest; for there to be a field in Normandy or wherever, either the marsh must be drained or a forest cut down, transformed.
57:52 the natural given - if only how moving it is in the Sahel, the arable layer, the fertile one, is so thin over the sand, they barely skim the ground with very light rakes like that to plant, the complete opposite of the plow which stirs and tills rich soil. Well, you see clearly that we're disputing one and the same territory, which is the set of objects of a possible experience - yes, I'm staying with Kant, I say this because in my schedule there's from Rousseau to Lenin, passing through, in order, Kant and Hegel, and I've spoken of Marx and Lenin, I haven't spoken much of Kant, I've made allusions - and what is he doing in revolutionary thought? Well, indeed, indeed - let me start with the anecdote to whet the appetite. You know, Kant is easily caricatured - the German, the Protestant, orderly, with his little walk every day up to a certain point, not a meter more, then he comes back to work until a certain hour - it may be more
Kant, the Revolution and the Copernican revolution 59:02 nuanced, his life, but anyway, roughly, from the outside, that's it - not a life of debauchery, not a life of Casanova. Yet twice he departed from his habits, twice he went a bit further on his walk, was a bit rushed - the first time is the day after the storming of the Bastille, he had to be the first to get news; the second time is to get the first copy of Rousseau's Social Contract. So, the revolution does not leave Kant indifferent. Hegel is right to say the French have their heads screwed on tight, they act, they're in politics, we're in philosophy, we're better than them there - but still, we think, we think what they did, but they do it - ah, I can't stop thinking about my yellow vests, if you will, but they do it. There. I'll leave the anecdote now. Kant speaks of revolution in the preface to his most important work, the one that most marked posterity, the Critique of Pure Reason - even though I maintain that the richest one, which contains pure reason
1:00:12 and which adds, moreover, an unprecedented reflection on aesthetics, is the Critique of Judgment - but let me return to the Critique of Pure Reason, which is Kant's great answer to the great question. In the famous preface, the second preface, Kant clearly says one must be done with a certain empiricism. Kant never says one must break with experience - on the contrary, there's this quite clear sentence of his: all our knowledge begins with experience. If there's no experience, there's no knowledge. But he adds this: this does not mean that all our knowledge derives from experience - and he underlines 'with' and underlines 'from' to oppose them. All knowledge presupposes experience. You see, Plato earlier - the cause could not be a cause if I didn't have bones and muscles, matter is needed for form to exist, but that's not the cause, it's that without which the cause would never be a cause - it would remain in the world of ideas, in essence, it would never attain existence. You see, Kant says something similar - so one must engage in experience
1:01:22 rather because - there's the one who says 'I lived 40 years in Africa, I know Black people' and has seen nothing; sometimes it's the guy who says that who's had 40 years of blindness, it happens - so let's not confuse that kind of experience in the ordinary sense - like 'don't talk to me about women, I've had 15' - with scientific experimentation. Experimentation is an act, it's not just experience, that is, it presupposes a great detour through theoretical order. There, I'm not doing epistemology, but let me recall it - Kant specifies how this happens, experimentation, what happened - because Kant isn't far from what's called the scientific revolution in the history of ideas, that is, Galileo, then Newton. Kant takes stock of that trajectory, Galileo, Newton, and he says: when Galileo made his moving bodies roll on an inclined plane - it's him speaking here in the preface - when Torricelli
1:02:33 made water rise in pumps - that's in Venice - when Stahl, a German chemist, transformed lime into metal and metal into lime, it was a flash of illumination for all physicists - so, the exact formula, excuse me, I have a small blank - they understood that reason - listen carefully to this sentence - reason sees only what it itself produces. Strange - up to then, what came from outside was opposed to experience, what is brought to me like a mirror - there, I am a passive mirror in which the real is reflected. That's the vision or hearing. So roughly, I have a camera here, I have a tape recorder, right, and that gives me memory - except you know very well that the older the tape gets, the less audible it is, whereas we have things that happened to us at age 4 that feel like yesterday, and other things that happened to me yesterday morning that I've completely blanked on. Do you agree?
1:03:37 I'll go on personally - memory isn't as mechanical as that, but let's leave that aside, it's a subject that would take us far afield. So reason must - reason sees only what it itself produces, reason is active, it's no longer a passive subject like a mirror, I continue my metaphor - no, it knows what it's looking for before seeing it. And so, to the metaphor of the mirror - and to stay with the optical metaphor, not political or geographical this time - I take the example of the prism. What is a prism? Light enters on one side; when it comes out, it's transformed - there was white light, now there are colors, so to speak. So if the prism is the subject, is reason, that means reason is a factory that transforms - it doesn't leave things as they are, whereas until now we believed that to know is to respect what's outside, to state things or express theories most in conformity with the object, with what's external - what was said in the old epistemology of antiquity: adaequatio rei et intellectus
1:04:49 truth is the adequation of the thing, 'rei', the real, to the mind, the intellect. Kant is telling us truth is the adequation of the mind to itself. Reason sees only what it itself produces. And now I come to the densest part of his sentence: it must therefore present itself before nature - for Kant is not against experience, he knows we'll never do enough of it - holding its principles in one hand and posing questions to nature, not like a schoolboy who lets the teacher say whatever he pleases, but like a judge in office who forces witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them. In other words, shepherds, farmers, for centuries, millennia, saw apples fall in Normandy - they didn't become Newton for that. No, but sometimes we're told an unbelievable history of science - Newton was dozing, taking a nap, an apple fell - that's it, he had it! No, that's nonsense. It's like the other one in his bath - he must have been reflecting for a while in his bath for it to be an illumination, because Archimedes
1:06:00 he did make equations, he even brushed against infinitesimal calculus - let's not stray - but his method is called the method of tangents to curves, with a method of exhaustion, which was the closest approach before Leibniz and Newton in the quest for calculating areas enclosed by curves. So there, reason must present itself before nature not like a schoolboy who lets the teacher say whatever he pleases, but like a judge in office who forces witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them. So little Kant there, rather humble, taking his walk and hugging the walls - what an emancipation of the human spirit, of man, it's extraordinary - and we suddenly understand Mendeleev's table. You know Mendeleev's table, it's incredible - he takes stock, Mendeleev, starting from a purely mathematical combinatorial calculation of how many ways there are to combine electrons around the atomic nucleus, and he deduces from it how many elements there are in the universe - so the boxes you know, iron, oxygen, you know the table from chemistry class - except there were empty boxes, meaning there were combinations he had identified in his calculation that corresponded to no element known on Earth - yes, but they were found afterward in the sun, helium
1:07:10 it's called helium because of Helios, the sun - you see, for example, that means an anticipatory capacity of theory when it's coherent, when it's the agreement of thought with itself, when what is, is, and what is not, is not - you see the path from Parmenides to Newton, no less. So there is a true emancipation, and that's a revolution, and Kant says so - what happened here is what happened to Copernicus, the Copernican revolution, that is, ceasing to make the stars revolve around the observer, but making the observer revolve around the stars - emancipation, the subject is active, no longer passive at the center of everything. There, I wanted to make this excursion through this immense break that is Kant - don't forget that the three kids there, the teenagers Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin, students at Tübingen - you should see their correspondence, I recommend it, it's magnificent - they talk about Kant, Kant is the Moses of our nation. That means old philosophy is like a promised land one is finally reaching
1:08:20 finally, freedom - and it's contemporary, and I get there too, I can't stop thinking about my yellow vests - with the French Revolution. Rousseau and the Newton of morality, well, they're specific - Newton is legislation by nature, we need it, perfected by Einstein at certain speeds, we pass from one to Einstein, I'm simplifying, and it's the order of nature - but as soon as it's about relations between men, and not another relation to nature, to objects, but relations between subjects - Rousseau, it's enormous, these breaks that occurred at that moment, right, cause and effect on one side, meaning and sign on the other - last step
1:09:30 of this great picture, right, from Aristotle to us - for now, it would seem to me, to Kant's credit at least, that he doesn't say one is worthless and I prefer - no, I prefer finalism to mechanism - it's not that in science, he gives each what's called in mathematics its domain of definition. You know, in mathematics we like, if I'm not mistaken, to correct scientists - before even studying a function, we first look at its domain of definition, otherwise what nonsense would we utter - the denominator must be different from zero, for example, otherwise contradictions will appear. So each has its domain of competence, legislation by nature, legislation by freedom - but where does this come from?
Durkheim: the object of sociology and constraint 1:10:24 where does it come from, this faculty which makes a being, among all others in creation, decide to put the men's hut here, the women's hut there, to make legislation, to make the Ten Commandments or the Code of Hammurabi - in short, I'm citing several ancient modes of legislation because I'm thinking of a somewhat forgotten little work - but the human sciences began with this work: Durkheim's Rules of Sociological Method, which I recommend to you. Why?
1:11:03 because Durkheim devotes himself, throughout the whole first part, to giving sociology an object. I'm making a metonymy - I'm assuming here that sociology is the essence of the human sciences, which would hold for the human sciences generally, which would not be superfluous when one thinks that Aristotle says man is the social animal, the political animal - depending on how one translates it, the animal that lives in society. So one must start doing sociology if one wants to understand man. Now, here is the first statement: every science is defined by its object - the set of animals defines the domain of zoology, the set of plants defines the domain of botany, the union of these two sets makes the domain of biology, for example, you see - so each science has a specific object, a science that deals with everything deals with nothing, that's a bit the flaw of Aristotle earlier, right, and of a certain ecologism today - either there's a serious ecology, or ecology is a team where there's
1:12:13 a glaciologist, a specialist in ice cores for example, a hydrologist, someone specialized in precipitation, a geologist - these are not at all the same disciplines. How could anyone have knowledge universal enough? It's paranoid and megalomaniac to believe one can be an ecologist at the scientific level - I mean, these are team efforts, let me note in passing. So each science, on the contrary, is defined by a quite specific object, but it does not define its object - you won't see a zoologist asking the question of what one calls an animal. I've already said, what is a star - that's an astronomer's question, if you recall; what do we call a star - that's a philosopher's question. Science is immediately within being - there are animals, and then we take one, we experiment on it, we watch how it behaves, we expose it - no, I say this because I once asked a science teacher, I said, how do you distinguish animals
1:13:23 from plants, that interests me, that's their specialty. It's quite simple: in animals there are colloidal cells; in plants, colloidal cells that we don't see in animals. I said, yes, but how do you know that? Because we take bamboo - yes, but you already have the idea that bamboo is a plant, you already know too much there, right? You see, what do you call interesting? You know I say this because you'll tell me I'm splitting hairs - fine, if I have a hen, you're not going to say it's a plant, of course, but not everything is like the hen. When I was your age, mushrooms were classified as plants - there may still be a few stragglers among you who believe that. I tried to get up to speed, I'm very motivated, I've lived so long in a country with no autumn that I love picking mushrooms, it's my exoticism - so I got interested in the question and now it's a separate order - no, but I didn't believe - look it up on Wikipedia, in the sciences there are cells, bacteria that make certain mosses too, lichens, which go with the fungi, which are neither in the animals nor the plants, that's it
1:14:33 it's not simple. So, back to sociology - he says if we explain everything, as is somewhat done in cognitive science, through biology, for example, human behaviors, there's no more sociology, it has no specific object anymore, or it's a branch of biology; conversely, if we explain everything through the psychological field, through psychology, well, those are disciplines that existed before, and sociology can't find its place. You know, for there to be a field, as we saw earlier, part of the forest has to be cleared - for sociology to have its own object, it must carve out its place, which is neither that of biology nor of psychology, you see. So why do I make this rather long detour through Durkheim - because he was one of the very first to ask this question, and because he has an answer that's surprising, even for the time, I think - I'll try to give the conclusion. There's the conclusion of this first part, you see: is a social fact, properly speaking a social fact - that's understood - any way of acting, fixed or not
1:15:43 capable of exerting on the individual an external constraint - ah, tones, an external constraint - we're at the table, aren't we? Put your hand in front of your mouth when you yawn, close your mouth when you eat, yes or no? It's not only me who's been told that - and don't tell me, yeah, that's because we're civilized, but among the 'savages' - the 'savages' are 10 times more codified than we are, 10 times more codified. A 10-year-old child who comes to ask his father for a tool that his mother asked him to bring - he looks at the ground, he doesn't look his father in the eyes, never - that wouldn't fly here, would it?
Constraint, negativity and change of sign 1:16:22 he looks at the ground - 'Mom is asking you to give her the hoe.' And I, in Africa, have often seen someone - not saying to someone directly 'you're an idiot,' because never - but saying to a third party who's present, 'tell him he's an idiot' - that's refined cultures, yes, it's very codified, otherwise violence breaks loose, it's terrible. There's the world of man. Durkheim has brought us the element we were missing - with Kant guiding us there, to bring us back moreover to the Hegelian dialectic. Constraint - constraint, what does that mean?
1:17:00 it means no, and no, and no, and no - you see what I mean? And we come back to negativity, the fundamental Hegelian concept, the only way to return to monism, not to remain in Kantian dualism - because where does this come from, that man has the possibility - it's not what, it's not God who did that. Kant never answers that. Kant doesn't like genetic concerns, how this was engendered - our reason is so made that we have sensibility, understanding, reason, fine, but that's where we're left a bit hungry. If I had stayed with Kant, he'd have made me take a giant step, but here's what's unsatisfying: we don't know how this legislation by freedom is produced. So, not from heaven - Kant did more to ruin metaphysics in this sense, he accomplishes the program of the Enlightenment far beyond what Voltaire did - there, Voltaire even did it, but it took Kant to systematize the effort of the Enlightenment. Metaphysics would never again have the same look; it had its apogee before Kant, with Leibniz, Spinoza, the post-Cartesians, Father Malebranche, whatever you like - from Kant onward it's on the wane, so it's critical philosophy, as they say, but
1:18:10 the drawback is this: there's no genesis of what makes this difference. So why do I say all this about constraint? Constraint can be light, it can be laughter in an assembly, laughter that mocks someone who doesn't know the code - like Rousseau, who must have been mocked in the salons of the time, when the sense of the ridiculous had reached its peak, when wit in the French sense, and especially Parisian sense, had reached its peak - and the Swiss guy who came with his dreadful accent from Geneva, this belittling - I love that. And Rousseau himself says, oh dear, I understood - I understood the jokes on the staircase, hence the notion of 'esprit d'escalier' [staircase wit], when it was too late. So laughter is a light coercion exerted on the individual to show that the social group is not entirely integrated into the values - which Clouscard studied admirably, with that significant title, Being and the Code, going so far as to say that in human history, the code comes just barely before being, if at all.
1:19:20 So then, how do we get back to the dialectic - we're right in it, with the negative. I return to monism - dualism was bothering us a moment ago - a materialist monism, since I was saying, one must move on to Marx and Lenin. I'm hungry, I have sexuality, this game is, for now, an animal game, because that's not only found in man, we agree. How can I manage to make another world emerge, an inverse world - come on, I've given you the answer - is it that the inverse in mathematics is the set, is it Z or -Z, the relative integers, is that it - sorry, the opposite or the inverse, the opposite, sorry - 2 minus 2, what is that, is that inverse or opposite - there, I'm confused, thank you - there, it's Z, no, there - and to nature, the inverse world, we're almost there, well it's my famous 'I'm hungry,' I say to the lady next to me during a banquet, please, madam
1:20:30 serve yourself first - I keep matter, energy, I'm a materialist, but I invert the sign, I change the sign, you see - we had the sign and the meaning in the world of culture, of the human spirit, to go fast, I don't know, oh good grief, with the word sign we had the key - we have matter, but we can invert it, say no, no, don't strangle - it's not your little brother - that can be useful. I have wild dogs, I really like wild dogs, first because I once woke up in a reserve that Anne knows well, the Comoé, in the north of Côte d'Ivoire, a magnificent wildlife reserve where I'd spent the night - it wasn't - I bribed the guard a bit to be able to spend the night without going back to the lodge - because I wake up like that, and, morning of the world, the car was surrounded by a pack of wild dogs - you know that even the lion, the elephant, backs away from a pack of wild dogs, it's organized, the lycaons or hyena dogs.
Surplus value as a minus 1:21:41 For those who are interested, they're a bit smaller than hyenas, the ears a bit round like that, they hunt in packs, it's very organized. I read, when I got interested in the animal, I read that in the mother's womb, when there are twins, one of them kills the other. Can you believe it? Well yes. When I say "don't strangle your little brother" - no, but some people believe the anarchist is going to say no, say no. But since when do you have to assert yourself? Wait, there's a way of asserting yourself - Caligula also wanted to assert himself. Well, Marx said - I seem to be jumping from one thing to another - that surplus value, which is not profit, is not rent, is not benefit, it's a new concept brought in by Marx that explains rent, benefit, land rent in agriculture, whatever you like - the concept, that's not a representation, the concept is surplus value. He says you can talk about it for three hours, an agrégé of philosophy understands nothing; you talk about it to a worker, he understands it in 5 minutes. It's curious. So what is it?
1:22:53 Surplus value in Marx - I'll go very fast, I'm not demonstrating it because I don't have time - it's a part of one's working time that isn't paid, which I'm in the process of saying is a minus. You see the connection with what we were saying - what explains everything is a minus. You'll tell me: but no, the capitalist wants to make a plus, he wants to make a profit, he never has enough, always more, as that idiot Closets used to say, deploring the fact that people always want more. But no, Marx - the capitalist has a big problem. Ah, not the working class, he knows how to handle that - well, when it doesn't take to the streets or the roundabouts. No, the problem is that he's not the only capitalist on the market - the poor guy has competitors, that's a dirty trick. I'll open a parenthesis - I worked for, let's say, Hachette, I say it because it's not a secret, I'm loyal, on my side, my African side, I'm loyal to whoever pays me.
1:24:03 And so I defended the cause of the Hachette book, knowing very well that the other one was just as good - it's false, it's the same product, a type of school textbook - and I kept hearing Hachette's executives coming from Paris being ironic about the cultural advisor - that's the one, that's your taxes, that's the French embassy, with your money we're giving, I don't know, in order to respect the cooperation agreements, to Côte d'Ivoire, 200,000 French textbooks for the start of the school year, since they're mixed, let's move on. He said to me, "Pagani, you got the contract" - they were constantly being ironic about critical civil servants, but they were begging me to get the state contract. Yes, yes, there's an internal contradiction. Let me come back to very, very precise things: it's a minus, there's a part of the labor that isn't paid, it's through a minus. But wait, the benefit is a plus, isn't it? No, because indeed I can say that this book cost me, I'm making up numbers, 2 euros to produce, and I decide to sell it for 15, 20, 30, 50, 60 - why would I reduce my profit
1:25:13 out of my own spinelessness - as the Anglo-Saxons say, greed? It's not that simple, because I'm not the only publisher on the market, that's the misfortune. So my slider - yes, it's true there's greed pushing me to push the slider to the right, the highest possible price, but there's competition pulling the slider in the opposite direction, you see. So I can't skimp on the machine, try not to put fuel in the car - do you think it's going to work? It's the news these days, all this about fuel - if I wanted to sweeten the oil, it would grind quickly and the engine would be ruined. There's a marvelous thing: human labor power. That's Marx - you understand, capital is crazy about it, it's like the antelope's scent for a lion, it's the only thing, because all other commodities lose their value as soon as you consume them, as soon as you drive a car it loses value, do you agree?
1:26:09 After 10 km it's already lost a lot of value, same for a cell phone etc., used is cheaper than new - I'm stating the obvious. Except there's one single commodity which, when consumed, brings you a return: that's labor power. It's labor power. Well yes, you put in a ton of cotton, out comes - I'm simplifying, there are no scraps, no losses - a ton of shirts, right? And here's the thing: the raw cotton ton is worth 1000 francs, in the form of shirts it's worth 1500. What happened in between?
1:26:43 You know very well - labor, it's a fantastic story, that's why capital is crazy about finding manpower, labor - don't say that capital doesn't love labor. Once I had students in Côte d'Ivoire who wanted me to denounce apartheid, which I was happy to do, but there are informants in every class, it was the era of the one-party system and all that, and since the head of state at that time had opened up what was called the policy of the outstretched hand toward apartheid, etc., and there were negotiations, it was right in the middle of apartheid - I told them, well, listen, I answered like journalists, it's the policy of no - no, excuse me, I've got it backwards, I ask them the question: what is apartheid for you, since you want me to condemn it, what is it? They answer: it's the policy of separate development. That's good, that's a journalistic term, separate development - whites here, blacks there, yes or no, white men and... which also existed in the United States not so long ago, when I was, let's say, a teenager, before the Little Rock riots under Kennedy, you know, you didn't take the same buses. But let's leave the history of Nordic peoples aside
1:27:53 Nordic peoples aside. So I tell them apartheid doesn't exist - everyone in the class, I do it on purpose, I provoke them a bit, you see, philosophy is bad, you're saying there's no apartheid, our brothers are suffering there. I say, well, I didn't say they aren't suffering, I said that if it's that, it doesn't exist, because if there's really one domain where the whites of South Africa can't do without your brothers, it's precisely in development - because when there's a gold mine, there are some in South Africa, there's Mr. Kruger up top, right, and there's Moussa down below. Mr. Kruger can't do without Moussa - as soon as there's development, he calls on Moussa, it's not separate development, it's the opposite. Watch your words. They agreed, we had a good laugh afterward, especially since they know who the informant in the class is - I didn't know, but they know. That's not really relevant, but they know. So, back to my minus, I haven't finished with my minus, I'm going from Marx to a figure from Greek mythology - you're starting to jump from one thing to another - no, Marx
Prometheus and the path open to all 1:29:03 in his thesis on the difference between the systems of Democritus and Epicurus alludes to the person I'm going to talk about - go ahead, those who've read this thesis - he talks about a figure from mythology, thank you, Prometheus. My minus - well yes, it's incredible what a coincidence, you know Prometheus is the brother of Epimetheus. Epimetheus means in Greek "the one with the imperfect mind," the one who isn't very sharp, in plain English. And Zeus had charged Epimetheus - these are the Titans, all this is before humans - with distributing qualities to creatures in a balanced way: to that one you give strength, the elephant, without agility; to that one you give agility without strength, the bird can flee but it's fragile, the elephant is sturdy but a bit clumsier, etc.
1:29:58 Although don't trust that, it's fast - but since he has an imperfect mind, Epimetheus distributed his gifts badly, and when he gets to man, he has nothing left - no claws, no scales, no feathers, no fur, a pitiful man next to a polar bear, he's in real trouble, he's going to get scolded by the boss. So he goes to find his brother Prometheus - there, Prometheus enters the scene. Prometheus says, let me handle it - you know what comes next, what does he do?
1:30:35 Yes, I see that you know - yes, so if I saw that you knew - yes, he leaps up to Olympus, to the gods, because there you have to change orders, it's not on earth, he goes to fetch fire. You see the metaphor, because fire is both the literal and the figurative meaning, the inexhaustible richness of fire - it's fire in the literal sense for forging metals, blacksmiths, I was talking about that earlier, the first metallurgy ten thousand years ago, but it's also the fire of intelligence, it's the light of the Enlightenment, and the two go together - what good is a skilled blacksmith if he doesn't have the fire of understanding, right?
1:31:21 So what secured man's domination over nature and over other animals - you know, in the Old Testament, I often quote this, God gave Adam the privilege of naming creatures: you will be a donkey, you will be an ox - it's extraordinary, giving a name is exercising a form of mastery. Because the non-dupes err - that's a pun, Lacan - the non-dupes, those who don't want to be fooled, are in error, "les non-dupes errent." So, yes, my minus is that everything started from there - if man is a plus, it's because at the outset he is a minus. That's what the myth says: that he started off badly, that he was inferior at the strictly natural level. You see how my minus circulates, from Marx's surplus value there, I subtract - it's not from the worker a part of his working time that isn't paid, you'll see the demonstration, everyone calls it his surplus-labor time, as Marx says
1:32:31 And because, I repeat, if I don't pay for the machine at its value it grinds - the only thing is that labor power can be made to work longer than what it needs each day for what it came there for: to earn the price of a movie ticket, to eat, to pay for a round of drinks with friends, etc. - a minus. So, this story of mine about changing the sign, I'm telling you because I don't think you'll find it in many books - I don't want, I don't want to put myself forward, that's not the point, but it seems to me that we can locate there, in the change of sign, in the inversion of the sign, the reconciliation of both the materialist requirement, which allows one to stay in step with the achievements of science and therefore with intelligibility - I say that because it's important, intelligibility, everything that belongs to the order, maybe not of reason, that's quite obvious, but of understanding. You know Hegel often criticizes understanding, which is one-sided, understanding
1:33:41 It's a bit like what Kant calls what is exercised in legislation by nature - but still, you have to pass through it, otherwise you fall into delirium, superstition, or the imaginary. So it gives you this, if you will, pardon - so, the form is Hegel, in the preface to the Phenomenology - I'm illustrating why it's important to stay in step with the universe of science without being reduced entirely to it, I'm spending my time saying there's something else, it's not a science by freedom, but the intelligible form - intellect, understanding, intellectus, Verstand, and not Vernunft, that's reason - the intelligible form of science is the path of science, a path open to all, there's a democratic requirement - it's yellow there, I wouldn't have left it, but I have the yellow markers, you see - a democratic requirement in the very notion of scientificity. I've often said that in Euclid there aren't axioms but definitions, they're requests - I ask someone, not something, to grant me that, unless there's an agreement among subjects
1:34:51 there's no object. The intelligible form of science is the path of science, a path open to all and equal for all, open to all and equal for all - there are almost two of the notions from the motto of the Republic already there. To arrive at rational knowledge by means of understanding - see how precise that is - to arrive, ratio, reason, to arrive at reason by means of, via, through the detour of understanding - understanding is: if A equals B, B equals A. To arrive at rational knowledge by means of understanding, that is the rightful requirement of the consciousness that approaches science, for understanding is thought, the pure self in general, and the intelligible is what is already known, the common element of science and pre-scientific consciousness - a great pedagogical concern of Hegel's - a common element between science and pre-scientific consciousness: if it's common, then one can pedagogically lead pre-scientific consciousness to science, it's the complete opposite of a sect, where they say that's reserved for an elite, it's sacred, you can't divulge the secrets, no, no
1:36:01 It's open to all, and if you follow the steps like a staircase - there's that admirable passage from Descartes: those long chains of reasoning, all simple and easy, which geometers are accustomed to using to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations, you see, had given me occasion to imagine that all the things which can fall within human knowledge follow on from one another in the same way, and that provided only that one abstains from accepting any as true which is not, and that one always observes the necessary order in deducing one from another, there can be nothing so remote that one cannot reach it, nor so hidden that one cannot discover it. Musketeers, well - and yet there's a woman in a bed, Descartes. So I repeat, a capital sentence: the intelligible form of science is the path of science, a path open to all and equal for all - to arrive at rational knowledge by means of understanding, that is the rightful requirement of the consciousness that approaches science, for understanding is thought, the pure self in general - that's what it is
1:37:11 That's also its defect, if we stay at abstraction - and the intelligible is what is already known, the common element of science and pre-scientific consciousness, which can thus open up an immediate passage toward science. So how do we reconcile the requirement of scientificity with the specificity of what Kant calls legislation by freedom, starting from Kant, of the culture of the spirit, whatever you want to call it, of what for a long time people believed they had to seek in an already-given metaphysical realm, the sphere of the religious for example - while keeping the world of matter but changing the sign. And that is an act, it's no longer something cognitive, it's not a progress in knowledge, it's a progress in action - the fact that we end up training a baby so that it becomes potty-trained, in the sense that applies to babies, is a way of saying no, and it's a way of bringing a minus for a tremendous plus. There, I've eaten a bit into your time
Comparison and symbol 1:38:21 time for questions, I'm sorry, the floor is yours - because I didn't want to stop before taking the step still missing from critical philosophy, Kant's, in order to arrive at an intelligibility of both the world of nature and the world of man. Yes, on the question of the relationship between meaning and sign in Hegel - in the symbolic art, in his treatment of symbolic art, there's a moment where meaning and sign, in Hegel's aesthetics, the relationship between meaning and sign at a certain point is confused, and he makes a distinction between symbol and comparison. So what interests me in relation to what you're saying is what you think - can we articulate this confused relationship that can exist between meaning and sign with a form of forgetting, of repression, as it was thought through by Freud with the notion of tertium comparationis, for example - could you develop that?
1:39:14 Yes, I could, to answer your question - can I? Yes I can, but I won't do it - given the time we have left? No, it's a huge question, but I'll give you the leads to answer it. The leads: it's good to talk about Freud in connection with Hegel, the leads, in particular for the distinction, very good, comparison, symbol, because Freud also distinguishes them - access to what Lacan calls the symbolic order presupposes that we have this distinction clearly in mind, this distinction between: he is black as ebony, meaning he is black as ebony, and black, there's no unknown in that, that's not poetry, as Baudelaire says, beauty is always strange - there, there's nothing strange. Is "he is black as ebony" - there's no surprise. Whereas "the yellow and blue awakening of the singing phosphorescences" - what's that from?
1:40:13 "The Drunken Boat," bravo, ah that's pleasing - yes, a kid of 17 managing to write a line like that: "the yellow and blue awakening of the singing phosphorescences." Me, I saw the sea - I was about to say before he was born, excuse me, I mean I was three years old, on liners, because jets weren't really a thing back then, you took the boat - the sea is like the desert, it's always the same, it's never the same, you never tire of it, you look at it, it's so well observed, that line written by a kid who had never seen the sea, who arrives at the symbol. There's comparison - comparison is tied to the real, it's black as ebony, strong as a bull, to multiply, white as an aspirin tablet - but the yellow and blue awakening of the singing phosphorescences, the most beautiful seascape in our poetry, "The Drunken Boat" was written by a 17-year-old kid who had never seen anything but the Meuse as a body of water - it's extraordinary, isn't it?
1:41:15 Another line of Rimbaud's that I've already quoted to clarify the distinction between comparison and symbol - quickly, in the same poem: "the exalted dawn like a flock of doves." You agree that's not "black as ebony" because there's "like," which means as, in the manner of, in the same way as - if you permute, as they say, you can put lots of expressions in place of "like," you get the impression there's a comparison - yes, except I don't see the common point. If there's a comparison, it's said insofar as there's, on the left of the "like" and on the right, something in common - that's what comparison is, which you find in "like" of comparison, "comme," Latin - but I don't see what's common between what?
1:42:01 "The exalted dawn" and what? "A flock of doves." If you remember, we had found what's common but isn't immediate, unlike in comparison, that has to be searched for - do you remember? "Aube" (dawn) - bravo, there you go, you see, the literature teachers, they're strong, stylistics, watch out - and yes, any French speaker - I didn't even say a Frenchman - it could be a Moroccan, it could be a Togolese, a French speaker, because "au" and "al" in French are linked in his linguistic unconscious - "cheval-chevaux," "alb," "aube" - you might ask how he knows that; well, because he has "albinos" in his head, he has "albâtre," you know that - so there's whiteness there, yes or no, poetry is powerful, isn't it, playing with our unconscious, our linguistic unconscious, I'm not talking about sexual unconscious right now. So we already have, with the doves, a common point - that belongs to the order of the symbol, that is to say
1:43:11 when the vehicle is given, the tenor has to be sought - that's exactly what Kant says about the reflective judgment in the Critique of Judgment, exactly that. When I say this table is useful to me so that I can write, because it is because it's nicely flat, I make a judgment of value, but it's a determinant judgment because I can determine very precisely why I'm praising it - it's useful to me for a purpose I'm perfectly aware of. But when I say I like the blue of this shirt, I'm talking nonsense, I even wonder if it's blue, actually it's green - no, the light - well I thought it was blue, am I getting senile or is it my eyesight or the light dimming, or both - this shirt pleases me, this dress pleases me, that means it pleases me for what pleasure? Because it comes to satisfy a desire, like the table, but which one? You know, when you buy a shirt - yes, absolutely, it's because I like
1:44:22 peas, and since it's a polka-dot dress - no, it never happens that way. You feel the aesthetic pleasure first, and you can search all you want afterward for the desire it comes to satisfy - good luck, that's going to make you enter labyrinths. There you have the reflective judgment, that is, I'm forced to reflect on the object in order to suddenly understand what happened - it's it, what a humiliation, it knows more about me than I do. So, to answer your question, the symbol presupposes a third term, a tertium quid, as Freud says somewhere - not, well, you have it very precisely in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, for example, a series of lectures to a broad public, so very accessible - there's a tertium quid, whereas comparison is binary, between the vehicle and the tenor - sorry, between the tenor and the vehicle - the screen is black as ebony is black. There you go. Yes, Samuel - so my question, in the end, it seems to me, it doesn't seem to me that the sign-meaning distinction
Sense, sign and subject 1:45:33 is an explicitly Kantian theme, that is, he talks about anthropology but he doesn't say, here, anthropology is the space of sign and meaning - no, he doesn't use that pairing explicitly. So my question is precisely whether what you're bringing, in fact, isn't it you who make appear, as a transversal line running through the history of philosophy, the emergence of anthropology as being, well, this relationship of sign to meaning - that's question one. Second sub-question: when you present it, you set up sign and meaning on one side, which is anthropology, and cause and effect on the other, which would be nature - so at first glance we get the impression that for humans, well, the sign is the cause, and in fact one is tempted to project the cause-effect structure onto sign and meaning, as if the sign emitted a meaning and prompted the action, you see what I - well go ahead - and in fact my question is whether, on the contrary, precisely, isn't there a dialectic of meaning and sign, that in fact the sign isn't necessarily - you see, sorry, excuse me if I'm taking time - we get the impression that sign and meaning, the sign is exterior and meaning is interior
1:46:43 and that it's a somewhat binary relationship, and that in reality there isn't a dialectic between the two, that the sign can be interiorized and meaning can be embodied externally. That's good, I'd say clearly put, thank you - I'll pick up on the end of it. It's true that meaning is supposed to be interior while the sign is always exterior - "a sign, that is what we are, and devoid of meaning," that's a magnificent poem by Hölderlin that begins like that, isn't it, "a sign, that is what we are, and devoid of meaning" - yes, because what we see first is the sign, I see a warning sign, it's a signal, well to simplify, telling me watch out, there's a stop sign 100 meters ahead, in other words it isn't there, what I see is the sign, the content, the meaning, the signification, the Bedeutung, is what isn't there, so it has to be interiorized, I can picture a stop sign at that point and watch for it. But as for what you said at the beginning, I'm not at all making a connection between the first pair and the second, I'm not saying that meaning
1:47:53 is the causality of the sign - not at all. What I wanted to show, and you're right to say it's me who makes Kant say, that in the anthropology that he founds, in what he calls legislation by freedom, we cannot better define it than by a field swept by the sign-meaning pairing - it's me who makes him say that with those words, but as he says, they're not - freedom refers to the end, that's Kantian, because he does say that it's the kingdom of ends, reason is the faculty of ends, he says that in so many words, doesn't he?
1:48:25 Telos, teleology, whereas in the natural sciences there would rather be means, the set of means, as we saw with the knife earlier and its axiological neutrality, precisely as long as we don't yet know for what end I'm going to use it, its point and its blade - so I take these words because I believe I'm respecting the letter of Kant - it's freedom, that is to say that the notion of end, the notion of meaning, the notion of soul, all these notions imply, from a logical point of view, that there isn't just something but a someone, there you have how I answer your question, in short, a subject. And we suddenly understand what is profoundly post-Kantian in the sentence, one of the most solemn in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel says - you know this sentence well, for those who know it - everything depends on this essential point in the system, it's very rare that he sums things up like that, he doesn't much like doing that, for him the essential lies in the detail - to express and grasp the True not merely as substance, everything already given, but equally
1:49:35 and precisely as subject - that's modernity. What I believed to be in an already-given exterior - I come back to your sign - only takes on its full content when it's brought into relation with a subject. When Lacan says: before signifying something, every word signifies for someone, he ratifies what I just said, please, doesn't he - he doesn't say there aren't some "somethings," there are some "somethings," but there's a triangle: there's me, number 1, the one I'm speaking to, number 2, and the object I'm speaking about, number 3 - I express something for someone, but before signifying something, every word signifies for someone. That means that a private soldier on a train - excuse me, that doesn't exist anymore since there's no more military service, but before there were always private soldiers on trains, and it's my wife who liked to tell that story, she's German, she said it makes French people laugh, he tells any old nonsense, the soldier - people try not to listen, then finally the whole compartment bursts out laughing, everyone likes that. And Stendhal - you make a woman laugh
1:50:45 you're in her bed - Stendhal, I didn't say that, I wouldn't allow it, to continue - and what does the soldier do? He forces his speech to mean nothing, he tells any old nonsense, as long as the attention of the someone who's there doesn't get off at the next station - that's the whole point, it's to keep the relationship going, the intersubjective relationship itself. There, that's how I answer your question - yes, Anne - the sign-meaning pairing, it seems to me there's also the code, because there's code, there's meaning, there's code - so it seems to me it's a pairing that should have a third at least, a third, and with code we find again "cum," that's the same prefix, "with," it's a relation, it's the same one found in "copain," "compagnon," "composition," the "com" or "con," depending on which consonant, Latin, it's the s-y-n, symphony, voices together, that's what it means, yes exactly. So the code
1:51:55 very quickly, I'll recall, in information theory - there I go back into the scientific world, right - whose origin comes from Mr. Bell, yes, the telephone, the founder of the telephone, if I'm not mistaken, who had a technological, commercial problem: how to optimize the relationship through this signal in a material messaging system, how to eliminate as much as possible of, what's it called, what's unwanted - yes, noise, thank you, noise, static on the line, to put it in more familiar French - how to optimize what is purely signifying, if you will. And for that, information theory - I'll go very quickly, we don't have much time - there has to be, between subject A and subject B, a code. Right now there's the French language between us, for example, it's not the only code but it's the most obvious one, but that's not enough, because if there were no air between us, you'd see my mouth moving but you wouldn't hear anything, so there also has to be a channel, a channel
1:53:07 it's an ionized flux in the telephone, here it's the air, it could be light, of course, semaphores, there has to be a channel - staying materialist here too, the channel owes nothing to legislation by freedom, the code, yes, the code presupposes that subjects have agreed among themselves that nothing obliges them to. There, thank you for bringing up the code - are you hungry, is that what you want to tell me, it's not on time - no, but that's fine, I think I'll stop unless there are other questions, but I'll say yes, Romain, sorry, pardon, Romain - yes, sorry - whether there wasn't a more fundamental link between what you were talking about, the minus, and Freud - you sketched it a bit with the baby, when you said, ah well, there - but maybe, well, that's very good because it's quick, my answer, but quick doesn't mean light, because I was looking for it, I couldn't find it, you're reminding me of it, I knew there was a third one
The minus and generic prematuration 1:54:18 for the worker - there's the minus, surplus value presupposes a deficit for the worker; there's Prometheus, the myth of Prometheus, sorry, which reminds us that all of man's superiority comes from a natural inferiority, there's a minus; and there's, in the anthropology derived from psychoanalysis, a way of explaining this exorbitant privilege of the relationship to the other in the human animal, compared to the relationship to the thing which we share with all animals, that would come from the generic prematurity of man, that is, the human species - so it's generic there, there are premature babies born at six months, but there's also - the human species in general is born before term, this has been proven physiologically, the fontanelle is a trace, among others, isn't it, that all this isn't finished at birth. According to physiologists, I mean, the transition to bipedal stance caused, over millions of years, an obstetric catastrophe in women in particular - "you shall give birth in pain" - religion sensed that, namely that the pelvic bones have narrowed, the birth of the little human
1:55:28 is much more problematic than the birth of the little antelope, which after a few hours can stand on its four legs and flee at the first danger, within 24 hours - we take three years to try to manage on our legs. There's a generic prematurity, and so this minus - bravo for reminding me of it - this minus, this inferiority of man that the myth of Prometheus expresses so well, means that I am entirely dependent on this plus that is there, that is given to me by the already-there, historical, cultural, spiritual, that I find upon being born, when I don't find a cave but a stroller, a voice - not necessarily the mother's in general, but not necessarily the wet nurse's either, doesn't matter, even the father's. I say that, I'll finish on this, I reassure you - I'm often admiring, like old people, I grumble against the ignorance, the amnesia of today's generations, how come you don't know that - I'm in admiration before the fathers of your generation, there, I'll finish on that, we have a lot of lessons to learn from young people today, the way I talk about the boys, how they take care of their child, on that note, enjoy your meal
