English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Announcements and the editorial entrusted to Rousseau 0:00 Since this is the last session, I want to make it a bit more interactive than usual, to speak like journalists and pedagogues and all that. But I'll just say a couple of words anyway. First, I have a question for you. Have you read the text by Rousseau that serves as the editorial for today's session? No?
0:30 Can we? Well, it's scandalous that the newcomers, I mean... Yes, let me remind you that there's a website which is actually much more effective than Facebook. It's always useful to check Facebook, but on Facebook, after two days there have already been 350 posts, so you have to search back an hour. It's fungible, Facebook, you know that better than me. Like a bar of soap.
1:00 On the other hand, we have our own site, all right? Which is the most exhaustive source for all the information relating to all the talks organized by the association. Mainly mine. So yes, it's called dominiquepagani.net, I didn't make it myself, it was made by a professional based in the Philippines. Well yes, we did... how do you say it? There's a business term for that.
1:31 We deterritorialize. No, that's... Sorry? Outsource. Thanks, yes, that's it, we outsourced it. Exactly. Hello, Romain. And on this page called dominiquepagani.net, there should be three W's before it. Home. Check the word 'home' carefully. It could be confused with something else. You'll find all the information there, all the videos, you click on Facebook, you have YouTube, you have all the videos from the last 5-6 years, and even further back.
2:06 And not just the association's videos, also the ones I made both for the Tropiques bookshop and for the Popular University of Saint-Dizier, sorry, the UPSD, which I've just come back from actually. I was there last weekend. So that's for the YouTube link, and then there's the Facebook link, which takes you to our official page, and so on. And that's the front page. But behind it, you have lots of sections, the friendly sites. Speaking of friendly sites, I want to take the opportunity to greet the presence of Agnès and Branco, sorry to put them on the spot, but who were kind enough to invite me to Norway.
2:48 It's thanks to them that Clouscard-style Marxism-Leninism was able to spread even further north than Oslo, to Bergen. I thank them for that. There you go. And I'd like to remind you that when I say friendly sites, I mean their association called Alt går bra, which means 'everything's fine,' I believe. Which is already almost a provocation, isn't it? And they do extraordinary work in a context that is, let's say, ideologically difficult.
3:19 Pleasant, but difficult. So, back to today's session. On the front page of this dominiquepagani.net site, there's usually a text that serves as an editorial written by yours truly. Writing costs me a lot of effort. And you've noticed I prefer to speak. And then there are illustrations on the right, etc.
3:49 There was the rose window of Notre-Dame, you know, as a tribute to the fire. Well, actually, as a tribute to what's left of it. And... 'The rest is silence.' Those are the last words of Hamlet, I remind you. And this time, for once, I let Rousseau do the editorial. So why? Since you don't have it, I need to... Luckily I have the Wi-Fi here. So I'll refer back to our... So, François I, that has nothing to do with it.
4:22 There we go. So, it's a text taken from Emile. And for which... So, I have a second tribute, not to our Norwegian friends this time, but to Élise, who is here with us, Élise Delacroix, who reminded me of this text — it's been 35 years since I read all of Emile straight through, exhaustively, which I recommend you do. You don't know better. You can pick it up in the middle or at the end, but you have to read all of it. It's fabulous. It's like La Nouvelle Héloïse — you'd think it would fall out of your hands, and in fact...
4:53 And she got me hooked on this text, which couldn't have come at a better moment, so to speak, given how I intended to conclude this cycle, since it's the last session, which I remind you is in two phases, since there was a first phase where it was revolutionary thought, I remind you, from Rousseau to Lenin, during the whole first trimester, then Nature or Landscape. And apparently, if you go only by the titles, there isn't much connection between the first and second phase.
The wheat field and the Romanesque chapel are not natural 5:26 Except that a figure like Rousseau is actually relevant both to the sequence proper going from Rousseau to Lenin and to Nature or Landscape, since Rousseau is the first to speak about landscape in, let's say, modern terms, to put it quickly. Whereas a century earlier, as I've already told you, Madame de Sévigné used to go visit her daughter in the Drôme, in Grignan — if you pass through Grignan, there's one of the most beautiful castles in the whole south of France.
5:56 In the Drôme, the so-called Provençal Drôme, but that's consultant-speak, forget it, the Drôme was never Provençal. When she came back from Grignan heading up to Paris, she went along the Alps, past the Vercors for example, and she would draw the curtain, you see, because it was horrifying. The idea of appreciating landscape, scenery, mountains, is recent — it used to mean dangers, famine, cretinism, the 'cretins of the Alps.' Is anyone here from Savoie? Fine. And I have nothing to say, since I myself am from a mountain region.
6:26 So, thanks to Élise for getting me hooked on this text, which, as I said, is taken from Emile, from the fourth part I believe, and which deals at once with happiness, landscape, and property. The conceptual progression we made on the question of nature or landscape allowed us to begin, quick reminder, with the conjunction of the two — in everyday language, the two aren't really distinguished.
7:11 The scenery around us, how beautiful it is, nature is beautiful, the landscape is beautiful — you can take one for the other, it's not a big deal. Then afterwards, we tie ourselves in knots, as always happens in everyday language if we're not careful. Because, what are we going to do with the everyday distinction in language between the natural and the artificial, if I start by saying 'that's nature' while pointing to a wheat field in the middle of which there's a Romanesque chapel? Isn't that so? That's all artificial. The wheat field is an insane amount of work, isn't it? The Romanesque chapel, we won't even mention.
7:43 Both require just as much head-work as hand-work, don't they? Both are equally an expenditure of sweat, praxis, a transformation of matter, an informing of matter by the form the subject has in mind. This recalls Marx, who says that what distinguishes, at first glance, the most inept architect from the most skillful bee is that the architect has the house in his head before realizing it in reality.
8:13 So you see, we tie ourselves in knots. How beautiful, what a beautiful natural setting, that Romanesque chapel in the wheat field. Neither the wheat field nor the Romanesque chapel is natural. It's artificial. It's the fruit of art. I use 'art' here deliberately in the Greek sense of techne. That was the word. The Greeks didn't have our somewhat bourgeois-bohemian distinction between fine arts and the plumber, the electrician, or the technical crew, about which I wouldn't know much. So, because of that, let me continue the progression.
Separating nature and landscape 8:58 After that, we were forced to separate nature and landscape. It's not complicated. Basically, if around us we remove everything that implies the human hand — I've just shown this, the hand and the mind of man — if you've read Leroi-Gourhan, a great prehistory specialist, you should know that the two are inseparable. He even goes so far as to say that it's the hand that created the brain, Leroi-Gourhan, created, let's say, the mind that resides in the brain. If we remove everything bearing the trace of man, the remainder, this time, is nature — natural as opposed to artificial.
9:42 Basically, that's the whole universe. Let me remind you here that I'm often irritated — you can sense an anti-ecologist sequence coming, and you'd be right — irritated by the fact that people say 'nature' when everything they say about it only concerns this fabulous exception which is our planet, where there is life, isn't that so? I'm not saying it's the only one, that's not my field, but purely statistically speaking — we have mathematicians here — just in terms of the law of large numbers, there's a probability that other inhabited worlds exist. There you go.
10:12 But still, I mean, when you see how long it would take to reach them, it amounts to about the same as saying we're alone. So what an extension of the concept of nature — or rather, no, sorry, what a reduction of the concept of nature — to bring it down to the blue planet, to speak like Goldorak. No? But yes. No but it's true. Yes, Goldorak's a bit dated, but still. Well, for the green planet, in fact, it's the exception.
10:44 Conversely, nuclear power, which seems the height of artificial industry and which stirs up, doesn't it, all the resentment of ecologists — let me remind you that the biggest nuclear plant in our earthly neighborhood is nonetheless the sun. Like all stars, for that matter, which are centers of fission, fusion, nuclear, whatever you want to call it. There you go. A little anti-ecologist mood swing, but given the times we're living in, what I just said isn't too much — I'd say it's even insufficient.
11:15 So, that's where we were. It becomes clear: landscape, of course, could not exist without nature, but nature alone wouldn't be enough to produce landscape, which also requires an arrangement of nature by man. Up to here, that's fine. So the Poitevin marsh, the Beauce plain, the hedgerow country, and so on, and even certain forests we think of as natural. In fact, the Landes forest, it was planted, it's the largest in Europe. It was planted, mind you, by the State, around 1820, since so many trees had been cut down trying to beat the English.
Even raw nature is seen 11:51 The English navy, that is — they had to replant it, and it's still the largest forest in Western Europe. So, well, it's not so simple. Third phase: even when I'm in front of a spectacle that doesn't obviously bear the trace of man — the Colorado Canyon, the Grand Erg of Bilma in the Sahara (look it up, Bilma is in Niger), Antarctica — there, we tell ourselves, well, now this really is raw nature.
12:23 More recently, I went to Norway, I don't know, and I started tackling this problem. I did a bit of freestyle, since it was in English, I was nervous, I have a Frenchman's English, you know. So I got through it by improvising and starting by saying that I had never been so far north. That was the first realization of my talk that evening. Now, I come from the south, having been born in Vietnam and having grown up in Africa and Corsica. And there was a common point between the remote places of Africa from my childhood and Norway: nature there is powerful.
12:56 There, at both extremes, we find a powerful nature. It's only in this well-tempered zone where we live that there's this permanent compromise between man and nature, which makes Hölderlin say, 'O good town, not shapeless, but with no force against the enemy mingled.' It's beautiful — the enemy is nature. And you don't know where the forests end, the fields, the town. O good town, not shapeless — because it's not shapeless either — but with no force, no violence, mingled with the enemy. It's not like the great quadrangular ranch in Canada where nature is raw, there you'd have to...
13:29 There you go. So yes, these problems touch on fundamental things. I was saying that even in Colorado, even in Antarctica, we are not in the presence of nature. Because we're looking at ourselves, we always forget ourselves in contemplation. We look at it with a comfort of contemplation that neither the Inuit of the polar ice nor the Pygmy of the equatorial jungle possesses — who doesn't appreciate the forest at all the way we do, let me tell you.
14:07 And the spirits, moreover, the representations, the masks, the spirits that protect the village, in a traditional African village — I mean sub-Saharan Africa — are always located at the boundary between the village and the forest, for instance. So where there aren't trees, as in the Sahel, in Dogon country for example, in Mali, which alas is in the news again since there's just been yet another massacre since we invaded Libya with that — those used to be some of the calmest places in the world, but let's move on, it's going to make me angry — the tombs of the ancestors, the remains of the ancestors and the representations of the spirits, the fetishes, are generally attached to the cliff overlooking the village.
14:50 It's always at a boundary, isn't it, between the world controlled by man and what escapes him, that the sacred is found. There, I'm just recalling that. So even when we look at what we think is pure raw nature, our gaze is cultivated, in the anthropological sense, of course. We already had the example of crossing the desert, the Sahara, which happened to me fairly often in a country like Niger.
15:21 How could we possibly have the same relationship to the desert as these figures who emerge, as I've already told you, out of nowhere — you always think you're alone in the desert — emerging from a rock, two or three shepherds, shepherdesses, asking for water with a little five-liter plastic jug and giving you in exchange sheep's cheese that crunches a bit between your teeth because there are grains of sand in it, and who don't have at all the same relationship to the desert as we do, you can well imagine. Their dream, no doubt, is to go see the shops in Paris — well, yes.
Nature, a human creation; the concept of matter 15:54 I've already told you, the modern hates modernity. There you go. So, in fact, we almost never have an unmittelbar relationship, as Hegel would say, to nature — it's always a mediated relationship, through language for example, through all that historical-linguistic-cultural unconscious, I'm making up barbarisms, that we carry in our heads, to put it crudely, it's right there in our gut, when we look at what we call nature.
16:26 There you go. That's why this word is always a trap. Right? That doesn't stop us from using it in everyday language, I'm the first to do so. If you tell me, watch out, there's a stop sign, I'm not going to argue about what 'stop' means while I'm driving. Don't worry. But, if you will, I'll go so far as to say, and I'll end my summary on this before getting to Rousseau's text, I'll go so far as to say that nature is a creation of man.
16:57 So, I'm completely inverting the starting point. In other words, one must already have stepped outside of nature for the word 'nature' to have meaning, for me to distinguish natural flowers from artificial flowers. There have to be artificial flowers for me to feel the need to say, no, but these ones are natural. Do you see what I mean? I'm not saying man created nature, I'm not an idealist, I'm not saying man created the mountains, that would be stupid, but it means we need another word. And do you remember?
17:28 Sorry? No, no, to designate that in which man has made no contribution at all — as well as that in which... Yes, thank you, it's the concept of matter that brings all this together, which is more rigorous. You see the link between nature or landscape and the revolutionary sequence going from Rousseau to Lenin by way of Marx and historical and dialectical materialism. The notion of matter is the most extensive, in the sense that there is a vast set of material objects within which I make a first, rough, simple division between natural matter — the universe, you see, extra-human — which is not only outside us, but also within us.
18:09 Every time I'm hungry, you know, nature manifests itself. Be careful, don't be empiricist and think that nature is only exteriority, what I see with my eyes — it's also inside. So, there is natural matter and then, let's say, cultural matter, if you're a structuralist, a Lévi-Straussian, or spiritual matter if you speak in Hegelian terms, historical spirit in Marxist terms. As long as it maps out the same sets, as scientists say, we don't care — it's like back when people wondered whether light was a wave or a particle.
18:44 De Broglie's mechanics showed that it's a particle carried by a wave. I'm simplifying a bit, but roughly, that's it. In other words, as long as the experiments confirm both theories, we don't care about choosing between the two. There, that's the quick reminder. So, all that to get to... Why did I let Rousseau take over the editorial for this last session?
Reading from Emile: the demon of property 19:15 I'll read it to you first without any comment. From Emile: 'Once again, exclusive pleasures are the death of pleasure. True amusements are those one shares with the people. Those one wants to keep to oneself alone, one no longer has. If the walls I raise around my park turn it into a sad enclosure for me, all I have accomplished at great expense is to deprive myself of the pleasure of walking.'
19:45 'Now I'm forced to go look for it further away. The demon of property infects everything it touches. A rich man wants to be master everywhere and only feels good where he is not. He is forced to always flee himself. As for me, I will do in my wealth what I did in my poverty — richer now with others' possessions than I will ever be with my own. So if I come to be vexed by ditches, by hedges, it matters little to me.'
20:18 'I take my park upon my shoulders and go set it down elsewhere.' Isn't that beautiful? 'There's no shortage of places nearby. Whoever strays from these rules, however rich he may be, will turn his gold into manure and will never know the value of life.' 'It will doubtless be objected that such amusements are within reach of all men and that one needn't be rich to enjoy them. That is precisely the point I wanted to make.'
Finality, sign, and institution 20:48 'One has pleasure when one wants to have it. It is opinion alone that makes everything difficult, that drives happiness away from us, and it is a hundred times easier to be happy than to appear so.' Than to appear so. 'The man of taste, truly voluptuous, has no need of riches. It is enough for him to be free and master of himself.' There you go. So, we had already been moving, even before this magnificent text by Rousseau. It's even a rather rare kind of irony for Rousseau.
21:19 He's being sarcastic here, mocking the world — wasn't he a bit tipsy? Which was already a bit intoxicating when you mentioned La Nouvelle Héloïse, it comes back to me. We had well understood that freedom had crept in from the moment we saw that human action was present in the scenery. From the moment Marx says the sentence I quoted earlier — what distinguishes the most inept architect from the most skillful bee is that there is... a finality, an end that is set before the means, of leaving the world of pure essence to enter into existence.
21:56 That's what Marx is saying. That the architect has the house in his head. That's the essence. Plato's Ideas, if you will — try to materialize the architect's plan on paper. But a flat house, you're not going to take a shower in it, nor shelter from the coming heat. So, if what makes the scenery human is the fact that it bears the mark of a finality, a telos — you know, tele, in Greek, means 'far off,' television, we're going to see far off.
22:34 A little sign that says stop 150 meters ahead, that's a tele-warning. That means I'm not there to look at what's there, but to warn you of what isn't there, which is further off. That's it, tele. What isn't there, but needs something that is there to bring itself back to our thought. And that's why the first of signs, the reminders I make, is my, my semantics, my form. The first of signs is the tomb. In Greek, sêma, that's Plato, I'm not the one who made that pun first.
23:08 Troubling and profound. The first sign is the tomb, that is to say what's there, stones, tumulus, chariot, with the crushed, bent weapons. That's material. And it's there to make one think of someone who is no longer there. That's what a sign is. That's the world of man, this power. With material, we're not in idealism here. Remember that fine text of Plato's in the Phaedo where he says one mustn't confuse the cause with that without which — he's talking about matter — that without which the cause could never be a cause.
23:41 So if finality — form, in Aristotelian terms, always goes together — what is a form as we see it in a tool? For Aristotle, it's a realized end. It's an entelechy in Aristotelian terms, if you want to show off a bit, for enthusiasts or for competitive exams for professionals. As a result — and this is a gain since Kant, deepened by Hegel and Marx — freedom creeps into the picture.
24:21 It's that this finality realized by man in the setting has as its content ends that are not strictly natural — which doesn't mean they're immaterial. They need a lot of matter to be realized, of course. There you go. Eating, because one is hungry, doesn't need culture, mind, or any finality for that — at the limit, it's a mechanism. Claude Bernard, founder of biology, reminded us that the living is the dead. On the other hand, eating at a table, eating with forks, with chopsticks, with the three fingers of the right hand, depending on places and cultures — already a diversity of customs for accomplishing what seems to be an instinct, and which we see is actually an institution.
25:05 The same root, but not at all the same word. The meal is an institution. Hunger is an instinct. The meal, the way hunger is satisfied among men, is an institution. And this diversity is the proof that it's not natural. Because the law of falling bodies, whether in Japan, at the Pole, etc., is the same. The universality of the law, and the diversity of the rule. This is well known in anthropology, of course. The rule is less constraining, and you find in Kant the distinction between what is constitutive, what is the effect of the law — for instance, when every body occupies space — and what is regulative.
25:44 You see? As Pascal says, truth on one side of the Pyrenees, error on the other — polygamy, monogamy, those are rules, not the law. So this diversity is already the sign that there is a freedom. What does a freedom tell me? If you take it into your head to be polygamous where monogamy reigns, you'll get punished. Yes, fine, but these are laws that we ourselves have instituted and to which we submit. So we're not far from what Rousseau says: the impulse of mere appetite — there, that's nature, a term he uses broadly to mean everything that is instinct.
26:26 The impulse of mere appetite is slavery, in the Social Contract. Obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom. There's the word obedience which seems to contradict freedom. I obey, I obey the law, so I'm not free. Ah, yes — well, it depends. When I eat only because I'm hungry and caring about nothing but satisfying my hunger, I'm not free. That doesn't mean I shouldn't do it. In case of distress, we're quite glad to have water. But that's not when I express my freedom.
26:57 On the other hand, when I'm at the stake being tortured, being roughed up, so that I'll say, so that I'll denounce my comrades, and I say no — I mean, I'm obeying a law I've prescribed for myself, and that, do you want me to tell you? So freedom, that's the progress we've made. It has crept into the picture, and that's no doubt what gives its aesthetic quality to the landscape: there is an intimate link between beauty and freedom.
Exclusive pleasures are the death of pleasure 27:27 But now, with this text I've just read to you — I haven't commented on it yet, I'll come back to it — there's one last determination we were missing, without which freedom remains an abstract universal. That's property. And that's Rousseau. The great Rousseau. Look. Once again, exclusive pleasures — meaning those one enjoys alone, excluding others — exclusive pleasures are the death of pleasure. In the previous century, Spinoza had already said that there are goods that increase through sharing.
28:02 It's not food. With food, the more people there are, the more there is — there, there are goods that increase through sharing. You know, when you're at a concert, like that. Or when a beautiful goal is being set up on the pitch in football, for example, in rugby. There are goods that increase through sharing. That used to make Clouscard laugh, by the way, since thanks to Alexandra, here present, we were invited to Beaumont-de-Lomagne — and not 'en Lomagne', is that right?
28:40 Révisez-en trois jours. Clouscard used to say: before, there were freeloaders at the table, now there are freeloaders at the TV. Because every time there was the Five Nations tournament, the neighbors would say, 'You're watching the match, Michel, can I come over?' You see? There's no point watching it alone. It's not fun, all the same. You can't cheer against the Irish all by yourself, in your head. So, for now, you see, once again, exclusive pleasures are the death of pleasure; the true amusements are those shared with the people.
29:16 Those we want to have all to ourselves, we no longer have. A very fine dialectic of pleasure. We no longer have them. If the walls I build — he now illustrates his point, since it was a bit abstract and general — if the walls I build around my park (he never had a park, it's an impersonal 'I'), if the walls I build around my park make of it a sad enclosure for me, all I've done at great expense is deprive myself of the pleasure of walking. To go for a walk is not to be at home. There, I know everything in my garden, in my park, I know all the little details, I have no surprises, no expectations, I mean, there's no deer likely to cross the path.
29:51 But you see, that's why one must leave home. So, all I've done at great expense is deprive myself of the pleasure of walking; now I'm forced to go seek it far away. Indeed, if my park is 3 km long, I have to walk a long time before my walk even begins. The demon of property, the demon of property infects everything it touches. A rich man wants to be — he's not talking about the ownership of your toothbrush, your wife, or your husband. No, let's be serious.
30:25 I remember, in the Drôme, where I went to teach, there were posters during the legislative elections showing a bird of prey like that with the hammer and sickle on it, swooping down on a small flock of sheep, with the caption 'The communists will take your land.' Yes. Well, the land is indeed long gone, people have been stripped of their land, but communism still hasn't arrived. I don't know how many farms are closed down every week in France, agricultural ones, you see.
30:59 It's not Lenin's fault, for now. Well then, or Rousseau's. So it's admirable that suddenly this determination of property comes to enrich our concept of freedom. Let me continue. 'As for me, I shall do in my wealth what I did in my poverty.' That's a bit elliptical there. But remember — because I'm going to interrupt the reading of the text, the commentary, sorry, I'm halfway through and I'll continue the commentary but in a hollow way, that is, by commenting on another text, the complete opposite of this one, a text by Voltaire.
31:34 I'll come back to why, returning to Rousseau. Remember that Rousseau refused the gratuity, the 'sangouis' as Nerval calls it, that Madame de Pompadour wanted to grant him following his 'People' success — as we'd say today, his bling-bling or showbiz success — with his opera Le Devin du village, a charming pastoral, I mean, nothing extraordinary. It's charming, still worth listening to. But still, I mean, it's not Rameau, even though Rousseau ranks far above Rameau in his musical prose, in his literary prose.
32:11 But still, when he composes with notes, there's no comparison. He refused it. Because one could say — and that's what I'll read with Voltaire in a moment — one could say, yes, but it's easy to criticize property when you have nothing, when you are... You know, the Americans say that. When the Twin Towers were brought down, they said, 'They envy our way of life. They're envious.' So it's easy to criticize property, to be a communist in the ordinary sense, a collectivist, a 'partageux' as people on the right used to say.
32:44 Let me remind you, in economics, it's 'partageux' — it's those who don't like sharing who use that word. It's easy when you have nothing. Once you're a property owner, you're much more concerned about your property. That's what we'll see next. That's not the case with Rousseau, because he did have the opportunity to get out of poverty. He was a vagabond his whole life, and even homeless, when he was fleeing the three greatest powers of Europe, from one dwelling to another, since he had been declared liable to arrest.
33:19 That is to say, if he's found, he's killed. So he had this opportunity to get out of it, and he refused, in order to remain free — in keeping with his motto, 'Vitam impendere vero,' to devote one's life to the truth. Like Spinoza — there are strong parallels here — who until the end of his life polished lenses, at the beginning of Optics, after Galileo's telescope, in order to remain independent of the powers of this world. Rousseau's main income — you'd think it was La Nouvelle Héloïse, which had the largest print run of the era along with Voltaire's Candide.
33:53 No. Royalties weren't bad, but they weren't enough to live on. It was the fact that he copied music. There was no Rank Xerox, there were no photocopiers. All the scores had to be copied by hand. It was drudge work. He was independent. So, as I told you, starting from this point, where we're discussing the relation of wealth to whether one has it or not, I'm going to read you a text, a poem by Voltaire.
Voltaire's Le Mondain, the world and the planet 34:26 But yes, Voltaire didn't only write tales and stories and novels. He wasn't only the admirable historian of the Age of Louis XIV. Voltaire has a dazzling style, but here he's bad. Because here it's a poem, and that's not his forte. He's witty, has a very amusing verve and so on. But from a poetic point of view, it's mediocre. He knew it, I'm allowed to say, because he knew very well — he's a man of taste, Voltaire. He admired Racine, from the previous century. There. I'm not going to hold back — we're not here for literature — but this is to excuse it in advance.
34:57 It's nothing extraordinary, but the theme is clear. It's called Le Mondain. 'Let whoever wishes regret the good old days, the golden age, the reign of Astraea, the beautiful days of Saturn and Rhea, and the garden of our first parents, the earthly paradise. As for me, I give thanks to wise nature which for my own good made me born in this age' — so decried by our gloomy grumblers. That's Rousseau, who had just written the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts. It's about the sciences and arts.
35:27 'So decried by our gloomy grumblers. This profane age is entirely suited to my morals. I love luxury' — note that line well — 'and even softness, all pleasures' — the arts in the broad sense, as he says, in an extensive sense, meaning both the fine arts and craftsmen, whoever makes the garden. Well. 'I love luxury, all pleasures, the arts of every kind, cleanliness, taste, ornaments.'
35:59 'Every honest man has such feelings. It is quite sweet for my very unclean heart to see abundance here all around' — mother of the arts and of happy labors — it brought us from its fertile source — he's speaking of abundance — 'and new needs and new pleasures.' Tell that to Servigne, he won't be pleased. 'The gold of the earth, the treasures of the sea, their inhabitants, the peoples of the air — all serves the luxury' — a second time — 'the pleasure of this world', in the plural.
36:31 'Oh, what a good time this age of iron was' — they're ironizing against those who regret the golden age, the first age of humanity, the age of iron. 'The superfluous, a most necessary thing, has united both hemispheres.' Notice the North-South relationship here, it's interesting. 'Do you not see, do you not see' — this part is weak — 'these swift ships which from Texel, from London, from Bordeaux go seeking, in a happy exchange, new goods born at the sources of the Ganges'.
37:02 And there are those who think globalization is the same kind of thing. 'While, far off, victorious over the Muslims' — no, not the Crusades at all — 'our armies... our wines of France intoxicate the sultans.' Which shows that back then, sultans didn't turn their noses up at booze. Is he talking about the Sublime Porte? He's well informed, Voltaire. 'While, far off, victorious over the Muslims, our wines of France intoxicate the sultans.'
37:32 He's not good at poetry, but he's good nonetheless. 'When nature was in its infancy, our good ancestors lived in ignorance, knowing neither mine nor thine.' We're not in Rousseau here. What could they have known? They had nothing, they were naked. 'And it's a very clear thing that he who has nothing has no sharing to do.' There, that's clear. You see why I'm commenting on Rousseau in the negative here? 'Sober they were — oh, I still believe it — with no fresh good wine, whose froth or juice never scratched poor Eve's sad throat.'
38:05 'Silk and gold did not shine among them. Do you admire our ancestors for that? They lacked industry and comfort. Is that virtue? It was pure ignorance.' There, end of quotation. Le Mondain — read it in full, it's a large extract, but there's nothing extraordinary there, really, it's like a Wikipedia entry, all this. Voltaire, Le Mondain. Of course, those in the know are aware that 'the worldly' is a fundamental category of Clouscard's thought, fundamental, running diagonally through all of Clouscard's reflections, from the theological sphere to historical materialism.
38:47 I remind you in passing. Here, Voltaire knew. I recall that we've already opposed — but I do this often in detail so I won't linger — the world to the planet. The planet, for me, is not in danger. It will still be there. We'll all be dead. It will still be there. Something that's dead has nothing much to fear. Stones don't die. On the other hand, the world is not a relation between objects, is it, like the erosion of ice on mountains.
39:22 The world is relations between subjects. The Roman world, the world of classicism under Louis XIV, the world of the Enlightenment — these are relations between men. That is perishable, fragile. So, in every sense, the world of... you see. I recall that in the Gospel, especially John's — good afternoon, thank you for being here. I recall that on Maundy Thursday, Jesus' last conversation with his disciples, is a bit like the Phaedo — I don't mean to be sacrilegious, but it's comparable.
40:01 Socrates' last conversation with his disciples is the Phaedo, before drinking the hemlock; the last conversation before Calvary, before Golgotha, is Maundy Thursday. Jesus, for the first time, says: 'The prince of this world is coming, but he is already defeated, for his essence is falsehood.' The prince, evil, Satan, is designated as the prince of this world. You see, when I say 'the worldly,' it's all of that. When I say the theological aspect, there's also this. It's what reigns here below.
40:32 So I return now, forgive me, yes, to my text — sorry, yes, that's it — my text by Rousseau. And Voltaire's text isn't foolish either. It's true that 'he who has nothing has no sharing to do.' It's almost a tautology, if you like.
The theater or the popular festival: the Letter to d'Alembert 41:03 Sometimes I even feel closer to Voltaire, when he says we owe all this, after all, to industry, to progress — in Marxist terms, to the forces of production. You see, and some, rather naively, have thought it a pity the revolution didn't succeed by joining Rousseau's political sense — property, equality — with Voltaire's economic sense. You see? It's not stupid, but it's a bit naive. Yes, I'm playing with words — with 'naive,' 'old-fashioned refrain,' 'naive rhythm.'
41:34 It's the whole 'naive/foolish' combination. Namely, there is an economics in Rousseau. For instance, when Rousseau writes the famous Letter to d'Alembert on the theater, a text said to be the great turning point of Rousseau's whole body of work, coming after his major early publications and before his last ones, the Confessions and the Reveries. The Letter to d'Alembert on the theater, whose occasion was apparently a trivial matter — Rousseau was up in arms against Voltaire's project to open a theater in Geneva, which for him was a provocation.
42:08 We're a city of Puritans, of Protestants; opening a theater, a theater is... In today's terms, one might say it's whores, it's an orgy, the world of... No, but theater has always been like this since forever. There's an admirable sonnet by Shakespeare, a splendor, the 29th sonnet. You know, there are mysterious sonnets by Shakespeare — not plays — addressed sometimes to a beautiful blonde woman, sometimes to a young dark-haired man.
42:38 And the 29th — I don't know, in the 29th, he laments his status as an outcast, as he says in it, you see, an outlaw, an outcast, as an actor, received in no circle of society. Yes, that's it, when 'in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes' etc., 'I all alone beweep' etc., with my endless tears, cursing my outcast state, my status as an outlaw as an actor.
43:34 There, that's what I wanted to illustrate. Afterward, the rest of the poem is magnificent, because he's desperate, all that, and then the main point comes only at the end: 'Happily I think on thee' — the intimate 'thee' we find in old English. At that moment, by good fortune, I think of you, 'and then my state, like to the lark' — magnificent. And at that point, 'I scorn to change my state with kings.' I would not trade my state for a king's. Magnificent, the 29th sonnet. So already, you see, opening a theater in Geneva means leading people into corruption, into debauchery, spectacles, bling-bling, spectacle.
44:10 You see? I'll cite Goethe's Faust, when he wakes up in the middle of nature, in the middle of a landscape, actually, and suddenly sees this splendid landscape, he wakes up, rubs his eyes, and says, 'What a spectacle!' But alas, only a spectacle! It's illusion, it's surface — we've worked on this already, I won't go back over it, but you remember. 'But only a spectacle' — comma — 'where might I grasp you?' Then we go beyond spectacle: 'Where might I grasp you, infinite nature?'
44:40 Well, Rousseau, for all these reasons, opposes the creation of a theater in Geneva — it's a declaration of war as far as Voltaire is concerned. And then one might say, yes, I understand why you'd prefer Voltaire, that would be one point, because, to put it plainly, Rousseau is a bit of a pain here, all the same. I mean, it's good to have theater, to cultivate oneself — Rousseau adored theater, he went all the time, we mustn't get this wrong. He just doesn't want to endorse the era's thesis that theater improves morals.
45:16 No, he says, nothing of the sort. These are aesthetic masterpieces; that doesn't make them moral masterpieces, still less political ones — that's Rousseau. But here we're really getting into the serious part, the commentary on the text. So, what has become of the demon of property? We're getting there. The proof that he's not a killjoy, a puritan, is that he loves to enjoy himself. He himself says in there, moreover, he calls himself voluptuous. You see? At the end, when he says, the man of taste is truly voluptuous, has no use for wealth.
45:47 It's enough for him to be free and master of himself. He's not ashamed of being a voluptuary. But that voluptuousness isn't obtained or depends on the other—but above all, in the text, in Mercenariat, he sets in opposition to theatre, with all its fractures—it's he who speaks of its fractures—between the audience here and the actors there, you see? Between passivity and activity, between appearance, the stage, everything that is artifice, and the real, between essence and appearance.
46:18 What does he set against it? What for him is at once a spectacle and more than a spectacle, and a political success: the popular festival. So the finest illustration of this from his pen is the famous grape-harvest scene in Julie, or the New Héloïse. There, I recall that this is all in there. And in the New Héloïse, if you look closely at the grape-harvest festival, what is expressed there is that there is no more property. In fact, it's very feudal, we're at Monsieur de Wolmar's, who has his vineyards, but the thought was to offer the peasants a meal that isn't excessive either—as Rousseau says, there are no fine colors, no crystal glasses, etc.—but there are far more fruits and vegetables than fancy dishes.
Natural freedom and civil freedom in the Social Contract 46:57 Well, there. So you see, thanks to this text, we've added to freedom the determination of property—of collective property, that is, here. Rousseau is not against property, he's against private property. I'll remind you here that in Book 8—Nature and landscape refer back to the revolutionary thought of Rousseau and Lenin.
47:27 In Book 8—sorry, Book 1, chapter 8 of The Social Contract, a crucial passage called "On the Civil State"—by the way, I remind you that Rousseau makes very important distinctions, he himself speaks of a balance. Let's take up this balance with terms easy to compare, when he says what man loses through the civil contract when, from a being of nature, he becomes a zoon politikon, as Aristotle will say, a social animal: what he loses is his natural liberty and the right to possess whatever tempts him.
48:10 The right, not the fact, because it's not only me who wants to possess. What he gains—he no longer has natural liberty, that's Rousseau speaking with these concepts, natural liberty—but he gains civil liberty. So you say, well, he's precise, Rousseau. Natural liberty has as its limit... now, like an analyst doing mathematics, he draws the boundary. Go on, guess what limits natural liberty.
48:40 Yes? Stronger? Sorry? Yes, no, but that's in law, in morality—but here we're in nature, there's no law, no morality. So what limits it? Sorry? Yes, the individual, that's broad, but what about the individual? Force. So the full sentence is: natural liberty has as its only limit the strength of the individual.
49:10 In other words—you know, I took the example of the cheetah, it tries 50 times, it's the fastest quadruped in the world, in fact it does 70 km/h, but only for 2 or 3 seconds—in reality it's painful. It chases 50 times the gazelles who saw it coming, etc., who scatter, who confuse it, and when it finally manages to catch a sick one, a little fawn, there's a lion who's been dozing until then, who opens one eye, I don't know, who comes over—the lion is twice, three times the volume of the cheetah sometimes—and gives it a swat and takes the gazelle. You have to start all over again.
49:45 You see, the individual's liberties don't go very far—natural liberty. If it has as its only limit the strength of the individual, well, in any case, I wouldn't have survived long, scrawny as I am. There. And even if you're King Kong—you know one of the most important sentences in The Social Contract, the whole beginning of The Social Contract reflects on the notion of force, gives it for the first time a philosophical status: "The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms his strength into right, and obedience into duty."
Nerval before Rousseau's tomb 50:23 There. That helps us recover all these fundamental concepts. That's why—it's a shame you couldn't see—sorry, it's a small screen, but—you see, there was the editorial, that's Rousseau's text. You have Rousseau's tomb here, in the mist. It's wonderful, it's a photo, but it looks like a Corot. You see, an Impressionist with the mist. And there's a comment there by Nerval. You thought I'd dropped it.
50:53 Before Rousseau's tomb, saying—and we understand better now, after all our commentary, why he gives him this eminent place—"Here are the poplars of the island, and Rousseau's tomb, empty of his ashes." He never misses an occasion to remind us that it's not a tomb, it's a cenotaph. The ashes are in the Panthéon, as you know, not far from here. "O sage, you had given us the milk of the strong"—everything we've just seen, that's for the strong. The strong in spirit, of course. "And we were too weak for it to profit us."
51:24 There, we're right in the present. We made the revolution, then there was the counter-revolution. We no longer know where we stand. That's where we are today, no? We're not in counter-revolution, we're not in revolution. We're in a compromise between the two. We still have a bit of social security, and even some pensions. Did you see the news yesterday? No? It's not the latest from Micromégas, Macron. He had Philippe, the Prime Minister, say that yes, of course, we don't want to touch the retirement age, but we're going to think about an "equilibrium age."
52:02 I heard about that. It was yesterday. No, but all this is very current. As a great communist said in a superb poem set to music by Brassens—you know the refrain, it's "There is no happy love"—"Nothing is ever certain for man, neither his strength, nor his weakness, nor his rights. And when he thinks he opens his arms, they are stretched out to embrace his shadow, and that of a cross. And when he wants to grasp his happiness, he crushes it. His life is a strange and painful divorce." There. So all this is current.
52:33 When Nerval says—it's dense, that's why I'm interpreting it—"You had given us the milk of the strong, we were too weak, it was too new," so to speak, "for it to profit us. It was too soon." Hegel would say, patience is needed. Great counsel, small book—patience, the calvary of history. Well. Hegel often said: how is it that it took 2000 years to go from the Gospel to its realization in the French Revolution? For Hegel, it's the same thing. Starting from the storming of the Bastille, the teaching of the Gospel begins to pass from essence into existence.
53:07 Timidly. With back-and-forths, I speak of it. Revolution against revolution, restoration. What's it called again? The Holy Alliance. The restoration after the Revolution. Today, it's NATO. So, if that's where I am, let me continue with Nerval's text: "We have forgotten your lessons, which our fathers knew." Let's date it: this was written in 1840. Rousseau died in the 1780s.
53:39 That means it's not so old. They'd already forgotten. That's what restoration is. Even now, you read everywhere that Rousseau is totalitarian. He's misogynistic. It's already over. Yes, it's true that Rousseau had said the woman eats white where the man eats red—you know, the woman likes whipped cream, the man likes barbecue. He's Swiss. A little Swiss.
54:10 "And we have lost the sense of your word"—already in 1840. And then, the last echo of ancient wisdom—with this brilliant hyphen that Nerval creates, who knows a thing or two, as if nothing were the matter, discreetly, with Plato: The Social Contract and The Republic salute each other across 2000 years. There too, a "totalitarian" falls—you see, it all hangs together. There. So, I had told you we have an hour.
Nature is a copy of art: beauty and freedom 54:41 I won't sugarcoat things this time—I'm giving you the floor, but I wanted you to understand why I asked Rousseau to be so kind as to replace me for the editorial. Frankly, I gain from it—there, and so do you, of course. It could be about property, the relation between property and liberty, it could be about nature or landscape. I'll add too, sorry, that soon you'll find yourselves facing nature or landscapes, and the holidays.
55:12 So I'm giving you homework for the holidays—don't think you're going to get off that easily—you'll keep thinking about it: but is landscape natural, that? I'm ruining your holidays, there. Isn't that right? Hugo, can you pass me my black bag, please? Sorry, I won't be watching there, Hugo. Yes, that must be it. Thank you, that's kind. I forgot I had... I await your questions.
55:44 Thank you very much. Yes? I need you to remind me of your first name for everyone. There. Thank you, Cécile. Earlier you said there was an intimate link between beauty and freedom. Can you explain that a bit? I'm glad to be brought back to that. You too, admit it's a fun question. Yes, no, it's difficult.
56:17 Especially since, thanks to your question, I'll be able to address what has been, for me, the most important thing in my talks for the last 5-6 years. It's my wild dream, isn't it—to find what Edgar Morin—I don't quote him often, between three splutters he does happen to say interesting things—calls... No, he's kind. He's kind, go on. He's not a scoundrel, after all. Well, he's a bit... complexity, complexity.
56:48 I prefer Bachelard, who says science simplifies reality and complicates reason. Well. No, but he once said we need to find the Northwest Passage. You know, it's a navigator's allusion to the northwest of North America. There's ice there, you know, that prevents passage through the frozen Arctic. We'd need—especially now, with global warming. Well, the Northwest Passage—what was that for him? A bridge that would span what Kant called an unbridgeable abyss: the natural sciences and the human sciences.
57:25 That's my wildest dream, to try. You see, I'm starting to answer your question. How can a mountain, perhaps judged beautiful in this landscape—I'm deliberately taking something that apparently owes little to man, I imagine a mountain with no terraced cultivation on it, a high mountain—how can we judge it beautiful? I'm not leaving Rousseau, because Rousseau was the first to express the poetry, the aesthetics of the mountain. I told you earlier that a century before, it was a horror.
57:56 It was ugly—just as a century before that, Gothic cathedrals were judged ugly, "Gothic," that is, barbaric. I'll begin answering your question with a formula of Hegel's in his Aesthetics, famous for those who know it, but well, not much is done to make it known to the masses, of which I am one. He says, "Nature is a copy of art."
58:27 It's a scandal. Try telling that to Servigne. Yes, I say Servigne, poor old man, there are worse. What's the name of the minister who resigned? Hulot. You know, likeable Hulot. But who takes fabulous gear, an ultralight and all that, to be drawn to Kilimanjaro, and then tells you, enjoy watching my images. Superb. Me, I watch, I mute the sound—but I watch these images, and he tells you—that's why I muted the sound, I don't like the provocation.
59:02 Yes, but you won't see it because we've ruined these paradises. He's alone, in fact, enjoying it, the last one. Well, and now Hegel comes to take the opposite stance while saying nature is a copy of art. Well, that's where I started, if you look closely at Nature or Landscape. When I addressed the notion of surface, you remember when I said, imagine—I'm continuing to answer your question—what I call the liquid gold that we get to contemplate when we watch the sun set over the sea, for instance, or over the Seine.
59:39 But over the sea, I always think of Baudelaire: "I love the greenish light of your long eyes, sweet beauty, but today everything is bitter to me, and nothing—neither your love, boorish as it is, nor the boudoir, nor the hearth—is worth to me the sun shining on the sea." Wonderful. Now, this liquid gold that captures all our attention, which is a concentrate of beauty—we want to possess it. I had a girlfriend who was exhausting, she always wanted to go there. If we take a glass of it, we're terribly disappointed—we lift the glass, there's no color at all, it's just water, it's H2O with a bit of sodium chloride, if it's seawater.
1:00:19 You see, and there we understand what a surface is. We were under the illusion of believing we were dealing with a deep reality. And in fact, if I take a needle and push it a millimeter into the surface of the sea, there's already nothing left, not a millimeter of anything golden to see—do you understand my example? So why does this please us so much? I'm explaining Hegel's sentence. Because, thus dies a hero, for instance. You know, often the colors of twilight, red and gold, are epic colors, it's the agony of a hero.
1:00:49 For instance, the hero is the sun that dies at that moment. We negotiate with the Oedipus complex every time the father dies, we become melancholic. This isn't my own analysis, I refer you to interesting studies on this, don't I? I console myself for my anti-paternal aggression by being sad when he dies. Melancholy. "Melancholy cradles sweet songs in my heart that forgets itself in the setting sun." That's Verlaine.
1:01:21 So it's in this sense that what I believe to be nature is in fact a surface on which my own problems are reflected—a collective self. Above all, don't make me say, with my allusions to Freud, that you might think I've moved from the political field, from praxis, to the psychological field. Not at all. As I once told you, we all love the same thing—second scandalous statement. But not at the same moment, obviously. At 14, I didn't have the same tastes.
1:01:52 But we are all, roughly speaking, the same thing. Namely, I'll tell you right away, so there's no suspense, but it's going to be abstract: freedom. That is, since freedom isn't there—I told you earlier—we need something that gives us the impression that it is there. A young girl, slim, like that, who's gorgeous, meaning there aren't too many extra pounds, etc., so she's agile—she gives the illusion that she escapes the law. Sorry.
1:02:23 The law of falling bodies, isn't it? Which is fabulously unjust, because a 130-kilo woman can have an agility of thought, and I've even seen African women dance with a suppleness—it's not that they manage this with their 120 kilos, because there's a festival in the Sahel countries where the matrons come to taunt the young virgins who are slim and thin like that, and thus haven't found a man. It's very, very African, because there, prosperity is a source of seduction. So don't make me say what I haven't said. It can be very—but in the collective imagination, a slender person, it could be a boy too, slim, etc., a light-footed elf as the other said, can give the illusion—when he might be a scoundrel enslaved to all his desires, if it comes to that—the illusion of freedom.
1:03:11 And that is beauty. There, I'm answering your question deeply. Beauty is an image of freedom, but there's an abyss between the image and the thing of which it is the image. When it's said that God created man in his image, that doesn't mean man is God. Everyone insists on the resemblance, of course. Creating man in his image—what does that mean? That God has hairs in his nostrils? Come now. There's something in man that recalls God, that's what it means. It's rather freedom, if you look closely—language.
1:03:44 Since God gives Adam the privilege of naming the creatures—that resembles God, the logos. There. So I'm telling you, abstractly at first, I'll try to be a bit more concrete: we all love freedom. In the forms in which it appears—in a piece of music, in this, a music that bounces along, etc., that isn't too—you have a word, in your generation, "relou" [annoying/heavy], which is pejorative, the exact opposite of lightness. Do you agree? In the literal sense.
1:04:14 We go downward. And Hegel said it's interesting to compare the law par excellence, the natural law, Newton's law, the law of gravity, as they used to say, the law of falling, with the world of the human spirit, which goes upward—that's freedom. It's interesting. You're living, after all, in the era of space conquest. There. So I'm answering your question a bit—that's where there can be a passage, a link, between the aesthetic, the historical, and thus the political.
1:04:47 I'm saying that we must be very attentive to all forms of beauty, because they remind us of that mission which is freedom. But it's a program, not an actual reality, in act. So we must also be wary. We mustn't, as they say, mistake a bladder for a lantern—we mustn't take what isn't there as if it were already there. There, now I've finished answering the question.
Aestheticization of politics: Nuremberg and the Supreme Being 1:05:18 So, an ambiguous link, isn't it, between beauty and freedom. Beauty signifies freedom. So there must always be a distance. Very good question. Thank you, Cécile. Romain. I don't know if everything, but what it evokes for me is, in fact, there are certain political regimes that have sought to aestheticize politics, precisely so that—maybe it's a way of making people believe that great peoples are being given the freedom to govern themselves, when in fact—that's right.
1:05:58 So, what are you alluding to? Whom? When? And where? The fascist regime. Yes. I'm thinking of Nuremberg. Ah, well now, 200,000 torches like that, indeed, a swastika in the night—that's repellent. Well, we must be careful with pure aesthetics. Don't forget that one of the greatest photographers of the era was Leni Riefenstahl, known to those interested in photography and cinema, because she made a film, I believe, about the Olympic Games, which remains a model of the genre.
1:06:29 The 1936 Olympic Games, in the full swing of Nazism. Yes, we still admire it—that's not it, an extreme slow-motion sequence, the pole vault while the sun sets. Great artist. Hitlerian to 150%. No, I say it because there's often a certain left, social-democratic, not to name names, who thinks that we're on the side of the good, we're intelligent, we're cultured, we're leftist, and over there, there's the thick-necked brute, the man of the right.
1:07:01 That's not how it works. In other words, there's my buddy Harlem Désir, and over there, there's my brother-in-law. No, but that was French politics for 40 years, making us believe the only conflict is between my buddy and my brother-in-law, between Harlem Désir and Le Pen. No, but really. No. The right has worked. The right has been able to have enormous taste. Look at Voltaire earlier—it's dazzling, from the point of view of...
1:07:31 ...verve. I don't know. To put it this way: "It is very sweet to my heart, very unpleasant, to see everywhere here abundance all around." For him, freedom isn't a program, that's it, it's already achieved for him, and therefore it's achieved for the universe. Good. He's a businessman, he had a stocking business, silk stockings—no nylon at the time. He used his friends, the marquises, to advertise and promote it at Versailles, because he was exiled in Switzerland. He knows. "We must cultivate our garden," as he says.
1:08:01 There you go. So, you see, I'm answering your question. Of course, you're perfectly right, but in both senses. There also has to be an aestheticization of politics, a democratic and republican aestheticization. And that was the effort of the Festival of the Supreme Being. The antithesis, now, of Nuremberg. I don't know. Nuremberg tries to resurrect pagan tin-work, let's be honest. What is it? My ex-wife, still German, often told me how, when she was in the Hitler Youth—she's ten years older than me, that's not nothing—she was delighted, because for a kid it meant her place at that party, the campfires, you know, June 21st, the sun festivals.
1:08:42 No, because people make you believe that this was part of Judeo-Christianity, they make you believe that, in a certain left that is at the origin of Nazism. No, it's the return of paganism. I also allowed myself to point this out when I went to Norway. You know, that is, in regions where Christianity historically came rather late, compared to Mediterranean countries for example, and where it was resisted, and there it was good, it was progressive, it was resisting Roman imperialism, to keep the pagan gods.
1:09:13 A political stake of freedom, if you push it. And then it got reversed, so that now pagan tin-work, the critique of progress, of the universal, of Judeo-Christianity, of altruistic and collective values, means a return to brute force. Wotan, that is the German version of Odin, it's the same word, the same name, comes from a root Wut which means rage. Just as Zeus unleashes lightning—it's the same god, all of that.
1:09:46 Dumézil's gods. There you go, are we in agreement? So, there has to be an aestheticization of politics. It's a very complicated matter. I said it earlier, thanks to Cecil, he gave me the opportunity to answer it, it's ambivalence which is the exact status of the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Not ambiguity. Ambiguity is a bit murky, a bit two-faced, as we say in good French, but it's in my head, it's thought through.
1:10:17 Whereas here, no, even without my knowing it, it's ambivalence. I believe I love, when in fact I hate; I believe I hate, but in fact I love. Let me give big, typical examples. And there you go, I believe I'm in danger when in fact I'm the aggressor. Germany. But yes, we're threatened by the Slavs, by Judeo-Bolshevism. So, they're busy soaking the planet in blood, but it's them who are threatened. And they're obsessed with armor, with the Panzer. You see, I gave you an example earlier—I don't want to drag Bach into this, the musician—but still, Bach's most famous chorale, one of the most famous, which borrowed its text from Luther himself, is Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.
1:10:59 "A mighty fortress is our God." It's always defense. You see? So that's it, that's a way of answering your question. It's always ambivalent. It was a relative failure, the Supreme Being, but it had merit. I'll also refer you to the work of that historian, what's her name, who wrote precisely with that beautiful title, The Sensible Reason.
1:11:34 Reason is essence, therefore it's truth. Like all truth, it somewhat lacks reality. Essence lacks existence, truth lacks reality. Hegel's brilliant concept of the cunning of reason allows us to articulate the two. I'm revising thanks to your questions. Thanks to the cunning of reason, what does not yet exist can carve out a path through what exists and is already there, materially. Thus, the modern state—there's a vain and ambitious little Corsican there, who's called Napoleon, who does evil.
Modern naturalism and unhappy consciousness 1:12:06 But there you go, we're going to let him do it. Until he creates the modern state, right? Then afterward, once he's done it, we throw him onto Saint Helena, often. That's how history progresses. There you go. Are we agreed? So I keep this ambiguity. Yes, Rio. So, on nature and landscape, I get the impression that the more civilization comes about and the more productive forces develop, the more we're extracted from nature, and therefore the more we become aware of what nature is in opposition to civilization, and the paradox is that the more we forget civilization itself.
1:12:54 And I think that today, we're in... Are you referring to naturalist discourse, point being? That's what I think I understood. This sequence lets us properly model this naturalism, that is, we're so far out of nature that we can no longer see anything else and we forget that we're within civilization. But then, that means it's a bit contradictory. It means that the more we develop the productive forces, the more naturalist, ecologist we become, as they say in certain places. I'll quote M. Garnier. Good word. Yes, yes. I believe Garnier was the first to use it.
1:13:25 And so, how do we get out of this aporia? Basically, what are the weapons for tearing down market ecology? We're looking, we could stay three hours. Thank you very much. It's not a paradox. It's not that the more progress there is, the more productive forces develop, the more naturalist discourse we get. No. That's the discourse of productive forces that have developed, but within a certain mode of production—the bourgeois mode of production.
1:13:59 That is, with property that remains private, of the great instruments of production and exchange, to stick to the essential. That's why I say it's not your toothbrush or your wife that's going to be nationalized. I mention the woman and property twice on purpose, to recall that Marx said very early on that the first division of labor is between man and woman. A division of labor which is at the origin of the division of society into social classes. I recall that pregnancy alone suddenly imposes a division of tasks—you can't go hunting or gathering with eight months of pregnancy—and so gradually the woman, who awaited the return from the hunt at the encampment, prepared the food meanwhile; there's a complementarity there, not a conflict, as bourgeois feminists think.
1:14:50 Even though—and this can never be said enough, all other things being equal, I'll hammer this point home every time—it's still the woman who suffers the most, at every stage of production and in every mode of production. All other things remain equal. So in that sense, what you just said, I often express it by saying—so thank you for the reminder—that there's nothing more typically modern than hating modernity, nothing more romantic than wanting to escape romanticism and being baroque, neoclassical, Parnassian depending on the period—there are different fashions—neo-Greek, I alluded earlier to neo-paganism, all of that very romantic.
1:15:33 Nietzsche thought he had escaped romanticism and that he was a Greek. He's German to the bone. Another mad German too, of course I'm thinking of Hölderlin—there's an anecdote, we don't know if it isn't a legend, but it's so true that I think even if it never happened, it belongs to the order of essence—with the fatal trip to Bordeaux, he went mad in Bordeaux, and with his return from that South where he had finally seen the Greek world as he had imagined it, on foot and all that, he passes through Tours—if you look, it's still now the route of the A10—and an aristocrat of the time is watching from her garden, which was a French-style garden, with statues, you see, with quadrangular walkways. She says: I see a tall man, somewhat disheveled, who was lingering by the statues. I go down, I'm going to ask him—superb anecdote—he doesn't give me time to ask my question; when I arrive he says to me: 'we must treat the images of the gods differently,' and he starts giving a speech about Greece.
1:16:43 —recognizes at last—the lady, the owner, says to him: 'you're Greek,' and he replies—I'm coming back to Nietzsche—'on the contrary, madam, I am German.' Merkel and Tsipras—no but listen, there are structures like that, I can't help it, the North and the South—well, still, now we can send them both back to back, both of them. It makes me think that yesterday we talked about Madame Merkel's candidacy for president of the European Union—I look like I'm daydreaming like this, but I try to stay plugged into current events—so, to come back to what you're saying, is this specific to this bourgeois world?
1:17:23 What Hegel analyzed as the unhappy consciousness—so you're right to point something out there, alright? We have the means, thanks to productive forces—you were right to remind us—which have developed as never before, right?—to escape millennia-old void of misery, of constraint, agreed? And here we are, unhappy—when we eat, it's supposedly garbage, I'm speaking the way it's said in the papers, I mean you hear this all the time, we've never eaten so well, basically. So you're not talking nonsense—my grandmother, we always think of our grandmother, but grandmothers are kind, when their grandson arrives they do their best, but the everyday wasn't like that before, you can't imagine the number of food poisonings there were before refrigerators, when there were larders—you don't even suspect it, we mustn't embellish the past, it wasn't that—and I believe it's Philo Bragar, our friend from Saint-Dizier, the one who founded the popular university of Saint-Dizier, who recently posted on Facebook—I don't know if you saw it—that excerpt from the Vagabonds Act of 1500, did you see it?
1:18:27 —of 1500, do you know the Vagabonds Act? Do you know Tristan—no? Yes, yes, extraordinary—vagabonds must be arrested, tortured, castrated, killed—that's what some people call 'the good old days,' really. So there you go, and now that we have all the means to have escaped that, means that make the Malian woman dream, who walks miles every day to fetch water, wood to heat water, who pounds grain all day long, who would love to have a thousandth of that growth that those who have it—people talk about degrowth—I follow you there—here we are, and suddenly they're unhappy. That's exactly what Hegel denounces as unhappy consciousness, whose essential concept, I recall, spends its time denouncing the disorder of the world without thinking that it is itself what induces that disorder. I spoke earlier of Germans who fear an attack while being the aggressors, you see, it's a bit—yes, I'm very Germanophile, so this—so, if I'm not mistaken, unhappy consciousness is the one that recognizes itself nowhere—well yes, but that's a misfortune, that.
Freedom alienated in nature 1:19:37 And so, because you were saying that nature is a copy of art—yes, that's Hegel, not me—but so does that mean that what's offered in the landscape is what we recognize of ourselves, without necessarily understanding that it comes from us? So I don't really have a question, I'd just say—no, it's good, it's good to refine, absolutely, it's good to return to Cécile's question—basically because we're circling the same pole. If you look closely, the German Romantic finds the landscape magnificent, especially with the nocturnal moon, but like Faust earlier, a spectacle—but a spectacle is a moment where 'shall I ever grasp you, infinite nature'—but he doesn't know—thanks to Cécile we've advanced a little in understanding this—that it's because it's an image of freedom that he finds it beautiful. In other words, he doesn't have Rousseau's degree of political consciousness, who says right from the first sentence of the text I read you, doesn't he, that an exclusive desire is a desire that cancels itself out, there are only popular festivals...
1:20:47 You see, so since he doesn't know it, he's sensitive to freedom, but to his own—and even then he doesn't even know that it's his own that's being represented there. He thinks it's nature, that there's a vitalism, something, a providence that makes the form perfect, that there's nothing to touch, that it's enough for man to move for everything to—he's not this fine fellow—in all this we're answering both questions at once, are we agreed? So yes, it's a misfortune, not a very serious one—there were SS men, but these are things I've read as testimonies in Primo Levi, you see, people who know their subject well—SS men who did target practice in the morning at breakfast, then a prisoner like that with a revolver just to keep their hand in, but who sobbed when they saw a mistreated dog or a bent rose petal. Yes, but it's true, these are anecdotes—anxiety attacks, choking fits, hysteria, there you go. Yes, Branco—yes, I wonder if it's simply that they don't know.
1:21:57 Or that there's some kind of class struggle that has taken place, that there's a whole ideology hidden—that they know, but that this has to come from a country where there's a denial of class struggles, right, as in all very prosperous countries—what did we do, the two classes, now everyone is equal here—that's a bit what you hear in many rich countries. But yes, that's where we need to conclude: he doesn't know that there's a class relation in his unhappiness, alright? That is, the freedom he doesn't enjoy because there are relations of production that don't allow him to enjoy it, the petty bourgeois, alright, he alienates it in nature, it seems to him to come from outside, in nature—thank you, that lets us cross the final determination—and so you understand why nature here is a copy of art. In fact nature only represents, programmatically, what we ought to achieve, otherwise than in the mountains, than in the shape of mountains. That's why I'm going to try to quote you...
The Domain of Arnheim by Edgar Poe 1:23:07 A great reactionary, a great writer whom I mentioned—you should be able to guess—no, but it's true that Chateaubriand is a great reactionary who writes very well—someone more reactionary than Chateaubriand, more tenacious—but I couldn't say—yes, more counter-revolutionary in the Anglo-Saxon sense—so let me guide you here—whom I mentioned indeed, right at the very beginning of Nature and Landscape, because of a very strange story, that should remind you of something, and thank you, there it is—it's Edgar Allan Poe, you remember, I told you about it because there's this story of 5-6 pages, The Domain of Arnheim, borrowed from a town that still exists in Holland called Arnheim—missing an 'i'—where he imagines someone who has come into a colossal fortune, but one you shouldn't even try to imagine, but it's just a pretext to have the means to realize his dream, and dreams he had, because before coming into this fortune...
1:24:17 It's a fortune it took a century to accumulate—anyway, he had a dream, he had ideas about happiness, in which we're still a bit in the 18th century—it has the great value of the 18th century for him, happiness is very Anglo-Saxon, pragmatic. Three conditions are needed. The first is exercising—it's not stupid—free physical exercise in the open air, to acquire a taste for sport, I'll use an English word—well if I have a rage in me, that's already happiness, happiness isn't pleasure, it has to last, happiness—but still, there has to be pleasure too, because I mean it's a pleasure that lasts a bit longer than pleasure, happiness, and that repeats itself, and has a temporal thickness—but still, that's why I'll never say a word against pleasure, all other things being equal, I'm coming back to Spinoza here, if you look closely. So we're not in unhappy consciousness. So: free physical exercise in the open air; second, the proximity of a loved one—he says, of a woman; and third, an indefinite aspiration toward an ideal to be achieved. That's not a bad theory of happiness, you see.
1:25:27 Two things that are present, and a third that is not. And so when he inherits, he can finally realize what his inspiration was. He found that all the fine arts had been cultivated for centuries—music, painting, architecture—except one that had been neglected, that was quite new at the time: landscape gardens. You see how we come back to our theme. You know that in England you can visit sites like Fonthill, I think, near London—I don't know if you've visited—they're English-style gardens but over enormous areas. Haven't you seen that film, A Murder in an English Garden—a famous detective—you haven't seen A Murder in an English Garden, with the camera, we see the murderer—well, not the camera, the guy, the easel, the painter—doesn't matter—anyway, the opposite of the French-style garden, which gives the impression it's natural—we come back to it—the illusion is that it's natural, when there isn't a single blade of grass that hasn't been designed. That is, what still exists—for how much longer, I don't know, it's a tragedy I'm announcing to you—Jean-Jacques Rousseau's park, where his tomb is, Ermenonville, is being privatized, the county council is stopping subsidies, they're probably going to turn it into a Disneyland. Yes, well.
1:26:39 So he can finally realize it, but on a larger scale than a French département, you see—I told you at the beginning of the story, he does the whole world, with the narrator—that's it, he'll be the friend of the narrator, who speaks in the first person—to first find the site that lends itself, you see, the natural part, the site that lends itself, and arriving at one point at a summit where he says we have a view comparable to what you'd see from the top of Etna—Etna is over 3000 meters, it's not just Sicily, you see, it's Italy—and the friend says to him: well, we're not going any further, you'll never find better, it's not possible to do better than that. He says yes, after an hour to catch his breath before such beauty, you see, he says yeah, well, what is it, what isn't it—you know when we want to withdraw to the countryside, the expression—he analyzes the language, him—it's not to be exposed at the summit, to withdraw is to hide a bit, to have a property, a manor with ponds, forests, a castle—to withdraw—there's this extraordinary sentence, the greatness of Edgar Poe, his depth despite his reactionary side—for an occasional visit, nothing more beautiful; for the man who has death in his heart, he fears remoteness.
1:27:49 —like the plague. There, remoteness, that's the distance which suddenly makes you think of the infinite, which makes me anxious—magnificent text—for the man who has death in his heart, that is, every man, that's what distinguishes us from the animal, to have death in the heart—he fears remoteness like the plague. So it's not so bad to have death in one's heart, it's been ten thousand years that praxis has allowed us to create another world, agreed, but which is not equally shared—we come back to unhappy consciousness and so on. So Banco is perfectly right to say that in fact—and this will be my conclusion for this question, though we can continue—this landscape, quasi-ideal, and all the more beautiful, is the classless society realized, but completely unconsciously—that's a bit what you meant, finally—it's a representation of the heavenly Jerusalem, to speak as in the Gospel, that suddenly descends to earth. Well, that's not bad. Yes, I saw a hand raised—yes, Élise, sorry, a trick question, a polemical one—I recall it's to Élise that we owe Rousseau's text—but you'll dodge this trap easily if you look at Europe still—the beauty of European landscapes.
Beauty of European landscapes and property 1:29:00 Compared to—I don't know, but can we still—you're a diplomat, I don't want to say compared to—you don't want to be Eurocentric, that's clear—it's clear landscapes—we could still say, following Voltaire and—so then how do you—I don't see it at all that way—it's not that I want to get out of it, it's not very embarrassing—we had to go through that—I mentioned the cunning of reason earlier—the cunning of reason is to merge with the guy who is the owner, who is the entrepreneur etc., and then afterward, how many properties become public parks now? Look at Versailles, alright?
1:29:55 For example, cunning of reason today: the state of productive forces, that's my analysis, well, not in the privative sense—that's what Marx helps us understand—today the state of productive forces is of such power, there's such a potential, that we are far below—some people think we consume too much—we're far below what we could enjoy, agreed, because of the inequality in the distribution of the real wealth produced—I'm not even talking about the potential wealth that the productive forces allow—because the relations of production hold back the development of the productive forces. Let me take a simple example: when under Napoleon III we cover, we grid France with railway lines—but which financial director would agree to commit, how shall I say, in finance, the expenditure to do that? None—he'd say what, more nonsense—take the buses—wasn't that what Macron said, yes or no?
1:30:55 So there's a disproportion between the cramped, archaic, old-fashioned side—I take the opposite stance of the dominant discourse—of current production relations, bourgeois capitalist relations of production, and the productive forces relative to what they would allow. Does that answer your question? That's why we had to go through small property, and it's very good, agreed—Rousseau defends property when he says we passed, in passing, from the state of nature to the civil state—we pass from possession, a lion with an antelope in its mouth, that's not property, that's possession, until a stronger male takes it from him—that's not property, that's not law, that's force—nature makes neither the rich, nor the prince, nor the great lord. Yes, Mehdi, you wanted to come back to a claim you made in the last session—you say the more we try to escape our romanticism, the more we find it again—that makes me think of Goethe: the truth, when we push it away, we embrace it—and it's as if you had said that—it disappointed me.
Leaving romanticism through recognition 1:32:06 I said to myself, we'll never get out of it. Did I say that? Yes, I said that—you must have gotten me drunk. I'll ask you the question then—is it, finally—but that's tied to everything we've said—we can escape our romanticism but not in a romantic way, in the sense you meant, or at least the way I understood it, but precisely by acknowledging history, that is, by making sure that consciousness—our consciousness, I'm in the Phenomenology here—acknowledges the historical determination that lies in what it believes to be natural or innate—that we reconcile it with politics, that consciousness be reconciled with the collective and the political, and that this pull it, both individually and collectively, out of unhappiness, even if the objective conditions of unhappiness are still present, absolutely, because of the relations of production. Yes, then more—sorry, just a small aside, forgive me—there will always be what some call the tooth of chance, we mustn't dream too much either, there will always be a malformation, something, we can't exclude it, we have to reduce it as much as possible thanks to productive forces, to their development.
1:33:16 That's the question I was asking, I'm asking a question while proposing an answer at the same time, a solution I'm submitting to you to get your opinion—that ultimately we can get out of it, we can get out of unhappy consciousness if we reconcile, as you said, with the recognition and the historical determination, and with a collective consciousness—it's brilliant what you said about Rousseau—where it's no longer my personal pleasure that counts, and since I'm aware that real pleasure is always a shared pleasure, that's it, so I move toward the other, and thus I also reconcile with what is precisely rational—that's a bit what Branco said, when he said in fact it's class alienation that produces my unhappy consciousness—and I'm not distorting what you were saying, of course—yes, but I'm happy to see we converge. But for now we're living through a disproportion, gigantic as never before probably, between the state of productive forces, which keeps growing stronger, and the cramped, old-fashioned, outdated side of the relations of production. Those who say Marxism is outdated—maybe that's true.
1:34:26 But what—Marxism is a critique of capitalism, it's more recent than capitalism—no—if Marxism is outdated, that's a little topological law I'm telling you, that is, capitalism at that point is prehistoric—if you think about it a little, there you go, of course. So your point about recognition is very important—Hegel says that the true is the recognition of oneself in the absolute other-being—so that goes well in the direction of what you're saying, the Phenomenology, he says that, of course—it can seem abstract, but there you showed the concrete stakes of what that means. But for that, we mustn't invert things—if we're still in the symbolic order, it's because we don't teach, from primary school onward, what we're in the process of seeing here, and which is simple actually, if we look closely at what we've said about the natural, the artificial, matter, nature—it should be the ABC of a universal, rational education—meaning, not that I impose it like propaganda—rational, that is, something that can be criticized, that can—yes, Jean, to tell you what you said.
Mathematical language and natural language 1:35:37 Right now some books are coming out, relayed by magazines, in which you say the great misfortune is agriculture, the great misfortune is the appearance of agriculture—the appearance, yes, yes, I've already seen things like that—maybe it's a return—so we'd have to go back to gathering, yes, it's the Neolithic that's the beginning of the end—no, but it's very serious, I know—well, what I mean is, there's a question, it's not the approach we have of chthonic nature obviously, because animals too have an approach to nature, but ours is distinct as far as work today, well practice, praxis, the action we have on nature, and which also feeds back to us as knowledge, well, so there's a dialectical interplay, well, no, it's never fixed, that's clear, this thing, never—but there's a will, it seems to me, in the ideology of oneness, as they say, to fundamentally deny—someone mentioned history.
1:36:48 Well, this process of liberation—yes, of liberation as humanity, that's strong—one second—liberation is the synthesis of this classic antinomy which is determinism on one side and freedom on the other—we send them both back to back, we're neither free nor determined, we're not condemned to be one or the other, we're in a movement that goes from determination—we're all, at the start—toward a more free or less determined state, and that's called a liberation. I don't want to prolong this—it's simply about this notion of action on nature, which means we necessarily have a completely fantastical idea of it—completely fantastical, and, that is, we've identified ourselves, and, that is, we know we can go up to this point, and even that is upended by new theories which themselves raise infinite questions—but of course, we're at that point—so, I'll start with the end of your question, which is very important in the argument we have with these people you're talking about.
1:37:58 And that we often forget—as you said several times, the word 'scientific'—it's often people with very great scientific competence who hold this ideology—we agree on that—I remind you here, I'm trying not to speak entirely at random, that between the discourse, the elaboration of discursivity that allowed the emergence of hard sciences—I'm thinking here, of course, above all of mathematics—and that allowed the flowering of hard sciences, there would be no hard science without mathematics, none—they all borrow from mathematics, mathematics borrows nothing either from biology or from physics—that's an interesting antisymmetry, I say this as a matter of principle, in fact historically—on the other hand, what I just said is false—if there hadn't been military, ballistic problems, if there hadn't been a back-and-forth between the experimenter and the theoretician, there would have been no Newton, nor Einstein—if there hadn't been an exchange, even just the Michelson experiment for instance, which confirmed for Einstein...
1:39:08 ...that it wasn't that light propagated in all directions at the same speed—but what's important to remember is that we can't pass—this is philosophical—whether scientists are aware of it or not is their problem—we can't pass from mathematical discursivity to the language we're using right now among ourselves, what's called natural language in linguistics, natural language—there's fraud there—you can't start from equations and say—so I'm warning you the global collapse is next week or whatever—you're joking—me, I hear it 20 times a day on TV, because Servigne said maybe, maybe 2020 is the deadline, finally, and not—I heard it recently, huh, did you hear it too, yes—still, it's someone who certainly has some competence in hard sciences, better than me anyway, but that's not a problem of science—but of course, we agree—yes, and the little Swedish girl, Greta—no, but I'm not being ironic, she's a poor kid, it's scandalous how a serious illness is being exploited.
1:40:18 Because she's autistic after all, that's serious, autism, even if it's also an Asperger's case, which doesn't prevent intellectual faculties—to say if A equals B therefore B equals A, fine, but I mean you just have to look at her—besides, I just learned that her mother said, you know, that she sees CO2 with the naked eye—she's becoming a shaman if you will—I mean, we're not in science here—we don't see it, but she sees CO2 with the naked eye—no, but I've seen that among Africans, but they have their reasons, poor things, for seeing—watch out, still, we've come to this—she's being exploited by financial circles, you know, at the European Commission—it's scandalous to exploit the illness of a kid that age, honestly, I find—we laugh but it's serious to come to this—a civilization that comes to this. But the philosophical problem I'm raising, and here I come back to the fundamentals of philosophy, is that the philosopher navigates between two extremes in his relation to language, between the extreme of the mathematician and that of the poet—the three, the poet.
1:41:28 The philosopher, the mathematician, have a problem with communication, language, expression, communication—for now I'll lump that together a bit, alright, but with modalities not only different but often opposed. Neither the poet nor the philosopher leave what's called natural language, it's not a fully formalized language, there are no algorithms in the poetry of Baudelaire, or Racine, or Sophocles—no, but this matters, and algorithms are not words, it can be functions, it can be whatever you want, tensors, I don't know, but they're not words, even if sometimes we try to make correspondences—that sign there means implies—yes, but mathematical implication isn't quite what we mean by it—it's Saturday therefore that implies I can go to the movies—that's not the same, it's rigorously defined, there are rules that mathematicians have worked to make explicit—before positing an addition you need associativity, distributivity, symmetry, there you go, there are rules—well no, those people, we jump straight.
1:42:38 From equations to the end of the world, and for next week—that's the scam—you can't pass into everyday language—everyday language wasn't made for knowledge—so already, a scientist speaking to you in everyday language—I'll finish just on this chapter, I think we'll extend—is already dubious, already suspect from a strictly epistemological point of view, reflecting on knowledge, on science, because everyday language was never, at the outset, made to know whether the sun is a star or a planet—no, it was made to seduce, to threaten, to beg, to gratify, to pray, that's everyday language, to show off, to play the saint, the hero, the artist, whatever—that's everyday language, there's nothing cognitive in any of what I just said. So when you pass from the purely cognitive—not me, number theory, that's a field, complex numbers I believe, thank you—the field of complex numbers—to everyday language, well, there are losses, luckily there are good teachers like that from time to time.
Tragedy, comedy, and repetition 1:43:48 —to try to find equivalences, but still, I mean, there are losses—yes, you say the first name because we know each other, but for the others—thank you, Emmanuel, a bit louder, sorry—that was noted, that pleases me—no, it's not me, it's not me, it's not Hegel, it's someone who knew Hegel well, which is fairly rare among novelists, it's Julien Gracq, alright, who says that everything disappears twice: a first time in function, a tool that—well I don't know, pitchforks, we hang them on pizzeria walls to say that it's no longer wood-fired—and a second time in the sign, when even the sign says nothing more, there you go, it's not the concept anymore—but say it in your formula, go ahead—see, I had remembered it with a first tragic moment and a second common moment—ah, that's Hegel, sorry—yes, yes, agreed.
1:44:59 That's Hegel and Marx—Marx said history never repeats itself twice except—except the second time in the mode of parody, of comedy, agreed, it's more that. So, and as for Hegel—yes, absolutely, absolutely, there you go, everything is well what I called the tin-work of the Third Reich, agreed, and painfully and tragically comic, if I may allow myself this oxymoron, compared to the tragedy of a Sophocles, an Aeschylus, or the tragedy of life simply—of course, if that's what you want to recall. And as for Hegel, and I'll continue just—still in resonance with your question—he goes as far as saying that all the great aesthetic cycles, historically, Greek art, medieval art, always end on a comic note—irony, humor, comedy, the laughter of Aristophanes resonates over the ruins of the Greek city, when the Macedonian empire, and soon the Roman one, reduced the city to historical past.
1:46:11 There's nothing left but the laughter of Aristophanes over the ashes—there you go, so that's a bit tied to your question too, it's the highest degree of aesthetics somehow, the comic, for Hegel—that's still very modern when he says that, it's pre-Nietzschean in that sense, in the sense of the best of Nietzsche, I mean—how do we get from—why would we—have you ever seen, small or large, especially small, sleight-of-hand tricks that bluff you? There, we've all had that—it's still quite a good magician, a good conjurer, quite extraordinary—once you know the trick, I'll start there with my answer to your question, I'm starting to see what you mean—once you know the trick, you can no longer feel the same pleasure. It reminds you of that quote from Nerval: ignorance cannot be unlearned; once you know, you can't pretend not to know. I can't tell myself I've decided the earth is cube-shaped—that's hard—there are some who say...
1:47:22 Even now there are people who claim the earth is flat, and under the Third Reich there were scholars who strove to show that Galileo had gotten it wrong, that we had to go back to geocentrism — no, no, I'm being serious about this. So it doesn't catch on anymore, but on the other hand, since it keeps repeating, since the guy keeps going on his rounds and doing his tricks, it becomes painfully comic, you see. Does that answer your question? And Bergson goes so far as to say — I quote Bergson rarely, who was also reactionary, very subtle, I won't dismiss him just like that, and who had the merit, when the Vichy government wanted to give him the title of official philosopher of honor, of refusing it all the same — while he says, my whole trajectory... sorry for this parenthesis, but it's worth mentioning what we owe him, it's a shame — Bergson is a Jew — 'while my whole way of thinking pushed me to convert to Catholicism, I refused at the last moment so as not to break solidarity with those who tomorrow will be persecuted.' A great figure who renews the Socratic gesture in the relationship between the philosopher and his city. Bergson wrote a volume
1:48:32 toward the end of his life, a little pamphlet called Laughter, which I recommend to you, which is very subtle, that he sums up like this: laughter is the mechanical encrusted upon the living. You see, that's the answer — what he calls the mechanical, something that repeats itself, what Clouscard calls machine-like repetition, machine-like agitation, you see, that repeats like that, encrusted upon the living. The living does not repeat itself, the living innovates — being alive is precisely... that's interesting. So that's roughly how I answer your question. That's basically what allows us to understand how one can go from a certain figure that has grandeur and nobility to, all of a sudden, its caricature. Yes, Terek — so just a contribution in relation to what Jean was saying about the caricature. So the caricature — sedentary life would be the cause of causes of all the ills, and we could also add that sedentariness — I work in this field, in whatever you like, on the strength of health — that man, it's in interest — and Terek works in the health professions, and so it would be the cause of diseases, which is a factor of mortality
Cause-effect and sense-sign; where to place the fall 1:49:42 in the world — which factor? Sedentariness, ahead of tobacco. Actually I got to thinking again about this pairing, literally not moving enough — that's what you mean? Yes, that's it, all right, all right. I got to thinking again about this cause-effect pairing from science — we used to say it was less important. So, taking health as an example, in fact we often use the cause-effect pairing, that is, sedentariness is seen as the cause, and we forget to ask the essential question, which is actually simple: that a worker has six fewer years of life expectancy than an executive, even though he is more active — there you go, he moves around a bit more, even if there are cases where... in the morning I'm a bit more, I'm stressed, you know, those who just shuffle papers in offices like that — that costs nothing, in the science of the cause-effect pairing, which is in fact predominant even in the field of health promotion, which is supposed to actually use the social sciences, more the social sciences than the cause-effect pairing. There you go — I'm glad because you bring us back to my Northwest Passage, and at the same time we're coming back, because I didn't follow up with Jean on his story about agriculture, I'll come back to it
1:50:52 Yes, so very quickly, I'll conclude, I'll conclude with that, thank you Thomas — the Northwest Passage is an attempt to build a bridge between the hard sciences and the humanities. We agree that we want the humanities to be just as rigorous, even if it's not at all the same kind of rigor — I'll get to it. In nature, I remind you, in the hard sciences it's the cause-effect pairing, y equals f of x, roughly speaking, which is the formalization of causality that is determinant. In the humanities it should be the meaning-sign pairing — what does this signify, and not what is the cause. There, I remind you of what I said earlier about finality. And so, very quickly, for Jean, I wouldn't want to sacrifice either — it's a matter of where you set the cursor. Some set it right at the transition from nomadic gathering and hunting — as soon as we start cultivating three cassava plants, that's it, that's the beginning of the end of the world, to caricature it a bit. But actually the cursor keeps shifting all the time — some say it was the industrial revolution that screwed everything up, right, like in music, you know, some say that when the piano appeared, that was the end — yes, of the harpsichord — but there are others who say, no, when polyphony appeared, already in the Middle Ages, that was it, ruined — it's monody, Gregorian chant, there you go, of course
1:52:04 But as it happens, gathering is the dream of the earthly paradise, where all I have to do is gather without transforming anything. Thank you very much, and enjoy your meal, and happy holidays. [applause]
