English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Welcome and exposition of the plan 0:19 We'll get back to philosophy. No, thank you for being here, because today is the start of the holidays, isn't it? In this region, I believe. First of all, I'm sorry to receive you in poor physical condition, because I had surgery on Monday. I don't want to complain, but I'm suffering more than the surgeon told me I would. He told me, pfft, by Friday it'll be forgotten. Well, maybe I moved around a bit too much. I don't much like being immobilized, I shouldn't have, but there it is.
0:50 But I was worried about sitting badly, because I sat very badly at home, and I notice that here it's fine. It'll be fine thanks to you. Thank you very much. So, I told you about a plan, as some have it and others don't, and that we don't have Wi-Fi here today for once. I still have it here though. I'm going to read it to you. It's shorter than usual, I reassure you. I'm going to read it to you without comment first and say a few words afterward. I'm going to do an introduction taking as its theme a return to the theme of this cycle on the subject.
1:27 I'm going to go back over the way this very particular cycle presents itself. That's the full title. So, a return to the theme of this cycle on the subject. I'm going to emphasize its bipolarity.
1:57 There's a part of the theme that is properly philosophical. The logic of the subject, you can't get more Sorbonne than that. Sorbonne or the Institute of Hegelian Studies in Tübingen. There's an embarrassment of choice, there was. And then there's a more political or historical aspect, the reconstitution of Nazism. Well, when I say historical, its constitution is contemporary.
Being one's time: the philosophical and historical bipolarity of the cycle 2:28 Still, there shouldn't be too much contradiction between the philosophical aspect and the political aspect, since an aphorism of the young Hegel that he puts in his journal and that I like to repeat is when he says: you can never be more than your time, but at best, you will be your time. As if the historical present were, for each of us and in every era, the horizon—in almost the astrophysical sense of the term, you see—the horizon beyond which philosophical inquiry no longer has any relevance.
3:02 As if it were a limit. It's very strange, but that's at the very least true if we realize that we are far short of our historical present in our heads. We're much more often in the past, or imagining a utopian future; we're rarely in the present. So. Maybe it's not so contradictory after all, the philosophical aspect, the logic of the subject, and the properly historico-political aspect—and not, as the typist put the first time I said it, hysterico-political, which is a nice slip.
3:36 Hystérico-political. On the other side. And I also note, and this will be the end of this recap and of this introduction, that over the last workshops—we're now at the fifth on this theme—we practiced, mainly me, together with your ongoing follow-up, an alternation: sometimes the workshops were more properly philosophical—I'm thinking of the second-to-last time, when I recalled the apparently complex, but not so complex, relations between the concept of substance and that of subject, practically from Aristotle down to today, if you remember that, that's really philosophical, hardcore stuff, as the Anglos would say.
4:29 And rightly so. And at other times, there was a more properly historical-political dimension, in particular last time, when I contented myself, in good Corsican fashion—darn, it's being recorded, too late, I'm going to have trouble again with my compatriots—in good Corsican fashion, with not doing much, and just showing the screen behind me, where there was, you know, a video by the historian Chapoutot, who is an immense specialist, immense, he's young, very brilliant, but probably the best-documented man in the historical sense—Catherine, who is a historian, I believe, Catherine knows him well, at least his works, and I think in terms of documentary effort there are few equivalents, I mean he even goes head to head with the German archives, because I've learned it's not so simple to get access, that all sorts of administrative pretexts are used, that if half a letter is missing, or a stamp, you can wait forever for the document—so we alternated a bit between sessions with a philosophical dominant, and sessions with a historical dominant,
5:42 and well, precisely, today I'm going to emphasize their—it's in the plan, I'll read it to you—their mutual implication, structured by the substance-subject pair, at the penultimate stage of its development—I repeat, because it's a bit pretentious, but I'm the one who formulated it that way, and I realized afterward that it was a bit convoluted—their mutual implication, structured by the substance-subject pair, that, I don't know, we've already seen; at the penultimate stage, I remind you that the penultimate syllable is simply the second-to-last one, it's often paired with the one before it, which is the antepenultimate; thus in Italian, the tonic accent is sometimes, for certain words, on the antepenultimate—when you say popolo, the people, popolo, that's the third-to-last syllable, so penultimate is the second-to-last, yes—so their mutual implication, structured by the substance-subject pair, at the penultimate stage of its development, colon: brute modernity, between absolute knowledge and absolute non-knowledge,
6:53 I said, I wasn't going to comment, I'm finishing the introduction, it's done, the somewhat convoluted sentence I just quoted is the first part, and the second, I quote it, the griffin and the crane, postmodern alternation between the illusory aesthetic ascent—the crane is a bird—and its opposite symmetric, the descent into political hell, and finally, thirdly, a few avatars or models of these matrix structures—so everything revolves around these matrix structures, that's the penultimate stage, that is, not quite the last one, it's the second-to-last, of the substance-subject relations, and now I'll clarify a bit, as it appears at the moment of what, for a good while now among us already, I've been calling, trying to be a bit more precise than that generally 'Olympian' term, modernity, without imposing it, I mean, you could very well say that modernity begins with Homo sapiens as opposed to Neanderthal, you know, the cursors can be placed wherever you like, there are even a few crackpots
Modernity: industrial revolution and French revolution 8:03 who say that starting from hunting and gathering, that's it, it's over, it's decadence, we shouldn't have touched anything, we shouldn't have touched nature—but I've seen that, Aurélien Barrau, you see, Barrau—and one can also say that modernity begins with the Renaissance, for historians, the official history, that's the case: there's Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and at the end of the Middle Ages, at the start of the Renaissance, the modern era, generally linked to the great discoveries, including that of America, among others, and above all the printing press, and the rediscovery of our ancient sources—in modern times, so modernity, I don't deny any of these meanings, it doesn't cancel them out, but the modernity I'm talking about is yours, ours, mine, the one I'm marking out—you always have to try to set markers, for whatever they're worth, but I find it hard to see more relevant ones—one that begins with these two great cracks, I often repeat the metaphors, namely the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution, both unfolding within a chronological handkerchief called
9:13 the second half of the eighteenth century—there, that's this modernity, the one we come from and in which we continue to live, which I call the penultimate stage, the second-to-last stage of the relations between substances and subjects. So, I'm glad to see there are many new faces today, even though that can sometimes seem like a handicap, because I can't just say, in a slightly rude way, 'you just have to catch the train as it goes, you just had to be here from the start'—that's not my style, and besides, as you know, I like to make detours, returns, without recourse, don't I?
10:04 So that suits me fine, you know my approach is somewhat spiraling, forgive the barbarism, that is, a bold attempt at synthesis between the circle and the straight line—the spiral, which turns in circles but progresses at the same time. So it works out for me that, taking as a pretext the presence of new faces, I go back over certain notions that are indispensable for understanding what we're going to see today. Because—and here I'm speaking to those who've been here from the beginning, ah yes, here I go again—it makes no sense, what we're doing, if there isn't a minimum of cumulativeness to my talks.
10:45 I'm not going to play the old, senile professor grumbling because the students no longer do their lessons, that's not it. But I noticed, let's take a random example—who has already seen the plan online? Good, which passage seemed the strangest? In the plan, the most unusual, the most enigmatic? Non-knowledge and knowledge. Ah, others have seen it too? Everyone give their opinion. You'll see why this survey is important.
11:17 I think there's the question of aesthetics. There's a question of aesthetics. Right. The illusory aesthetic versus the descent into political hell. That's it. Absolute knowledge, that is, what? Sorry? What is absolute knowledge, that is? Absolute knowledge. Knowledge and absolute non-knowledge. The struggle between the two. That's the theme we're going to develop. I'll come back to it, of course. That seemed a bit clear to you. That's it. Very good. That's funny.
The griffon and the crane of Nerval 11:47 I thought someone would have pointed out what seems strangest to me in it, which is the griffin and the crane. No? You're stronger than me. Me, I find that quite paradigmatic actually. It's not from me. You know my habits. It's from Nerval. In one of his notebooks, his notes jotted down somewhat haphazardly like that, he had written this sort of imperative he imposes on himself as a poet, doesn't he? Make the griffin rise from the sea and make the crane descend from the sky.
12:23 It's not enigmatic. Make the griffin rise from the sea and make the crane descend from the sky. The crane, as I told you, is a bird. I'm not taking it in the slang sense. Let's stick with feathers. But the griffin too is a monster, a kind of beast but with wings. The griffin. And it appears very, very early in the history of humanity. I'm not talking about prehistory but in the history of the great civilizations, since it's one of the themes that recurs most often in Mesopotamian sculpture.
12:54 go see the Ishtar Gate, where we have fantastic museums in Berlin, the Pergamon. Because there were a lot of spies. We don't say spies, we say archaeologists. In risky places like that, like the Near East, from the very start. You know, Lawrence of Arabia, you've heard of him, he was one of His Majesty's greatest spies. It's he who basically brought about the whole situation of today. To fully play up local identities, to play the Arabs against the Turks.
13:25 At the time, it was the Turks who were the enemy, you know, for the English. So, playing on Arab nationalism, it's he who created Saudi Arabia, practically, who united the Bedouin tribes. You see, when I say spies, they're entitled to it, it's not pejorative, he's classy, Lawrence of Arabia, well anyway. So, the Germans, each had their chosen territory. France, it was Egypt, Champollion, the prestige, the decipherment, the French museum of Alexandria. Egypt was English, but the culture was French. I heard the Egyptian representative at the African Development Bank in Abidjan tell me one day, in the 1970s, 'Mr. Pagani, but if there were political will in France, everyone would speak French in Egypt overnight.'
14:07 Interesting, we speak English like that because it's practical, but the prestige, for us, is French. That's old, that's from the '70s. Since the political will hasn't come since then, I don't know if the same fervor is still there. So. And then the Germans, it was Mesopotamia. So, the griffin is a form that recurs often. But what interests me here is this quasi-dialectical movement between the high and the low. There, that's it. Make the griffin rise from the sea.
14:38 Good evening. The return of the repressed, as a psychoanalyst would say, for example. For example. You see, in any case, that doesn't contradict it at all. Because what rises back up is the repressed. You see, try pushing a ball or a balloon underwater for your kid when they're taking their bath, small children, a ball in the water—as soon as you let go, poof, it jumps right back in your face, the ball. You see, that's the return of the repressed. It's rarely calm and often takes a monstrous form. But not at all, me, I'm a good guy, I'm a nice, balanced fellow.
15:10 I see, I don't know, I come across as a monster. Make the griffin rise from the sea, know thyself, and make the crane descend from the sky. Maybe, perhaps, I don't know, for example, making the essence of Plato's world of ideas pass into existence. Making sure that the kingdom of God—here I'm putting it in the religious field, aren't I—is no longer merely a beyond that is not of this world, but that it makes a descent down here, this descent that closes the New Testament, this extraordinary ending of the Apocalypse, where after a series of stunning catastrophes that the Orient has the secret of, with dreadful metaphors, the lake of sulfur, the great Satan falling like that, behold him defeated, the ancient serpent who accused our brothers before the Eternal.
The descent of the kingdom: Apocalypse and the adulterous woman 16:06 This religion which people constantly say is Judeo—sorry, Christian, that is, guilt-inducing, but what a misreading, it's really ignoramuses who say that, sub-Nietzscheans, not Nietzsche, Nietzsche is subtle, but well, you know, I often make the distinction between Nietzsche and the fraudulent use of Nietzsche during the Cold War, because there's a very fashionable neo-paganism, you know, that wants to be done with, the 'guilt-ism,' I'm inventing this word, Judeo-Christian, whereas it's a religion, well, I don't know, everyone knows the story of the adulterous woman, Christ intervenes to say stop with your traditional guilt-inducing morals, or else, if you're an immaculate virgin, you may perhaps throw a stone at her, and everyone leaves shamefully—that's not, and we stop there when we tell the story, we shouldn't, the sequel is even more scandalous with regard to traditional morality, when he's alone with the woman, sorry, with Mary Magdalene, what does he say to her?
17:04 Does someone perhaps know? Go, and sin no more. Sorry? He says go, and sin no more. Yes, but before that—that's the conclusion, bravo. Where are your accusers? Eh, but you know, that pleases me. Bunch of unbelievers all the same, thankfully there are a few who save the day. Woman, where are those who condemned you? I don't know, go, I don't condemn you either. It's not 'I forgive you,' that would imply something, I'm not betraying the text. I don't condemn you either.
17:34 If you want us to drive the point home further, he tells the Pharisees: you, you judge according to the flesh, I judge no one. These are still sentences that are so much the opposite of what we're told. Judeo-Christian guilt—that sets the record a bit straight. There. I'm not defending Christianity, am I? People often oppose Christianity and Islam even apart from political stakes. That requires abstracting from a lot of things. But let's even grant that there would be a difference, I don't know, cultural, religious.
18:04 I tried to see whether all that could be kept separate, which I don't think it can. But let's grant it, all the same, I spent my last years in sub-Saharan Africa in a country that's 98% Muslim called Niger, which is occupied by the great desert—in Arabic, Sahara—in its northern two-thirds. It's a Black African Islam—sorry for not being politically correct, but Africans say 'the whites,' they don't say 'the Euro-Asians,' or 'the Afro-Americans.'
Ibn Battuta, African Islam and the musical center of Niger 18:39 It's an Islam much less strict, isn't it, than either in the Gulf countries, or in certain parts of the Maghreb. And there's the African side to it. I laugh because I think of Ibn Battuta, the first Arab historian to recount the history of this region, of Black Africa. He's the first through whom Black Africa enters into history. We have a written trace, an immense traveler, geographer, geographer among other skills, who is thus the first who, in the fourteenth century, crosses the great desert and arrives in the place that now corresponds to today's Mali and Niger.
19:14 You'll see why I'm laughing, excuse me. He's admiring, he sees admirably well-policed cities, especially in Mali, in Timbuktu, Gao—it's awful to say this now, or since the stupidity we committed in Libya, it's death and desolation. What is it? Well, let's set aside how. These were places where you could take your wife out at 3 in the morning and be safer than on a Saturday night in Saint-Germain. Now it's kidnapping, hostage-taking, or being gunned down in your hotel as soon as you sit down.
19:47 So, he's very admiring. He sees gold sellers who are scrupulous about weight, about calculating the alloy of gold. He sees the curfew at a very regular hour at sunset. And he says—and this is what amazes him—he says 'the blacks and the whites.' The whites, that's him. He himself comes from Kairouan, in Tunisia. He passed through Morocco. It's thanks to the Almoravid armies of Morocco.
20:21 Of which Marrakesh is, in a sense, the capital, that Black Africa became Islamized. And he's very admiring of their piety. That strikes him a lot, as Muslims. They keep their children tied to learning until they know the Quran by heart. The Blacks, you see. People will tell me, don't you dare say that, you're enslaving them by saying that. No, that's not what's funny. He says, there is one thing I don't appreciate about them.
20:51 There is still something that pleases him. He saw thirty favorites enter the sultan's palace, practically naked, to put it in French terms. You see the difference, Black Africa, in effect a Black setting. All the same, that's not proper. A relationship to the body that's a bit different in sub-Saharan Africa than in North Africa. Even up to Corsica, it's all the same. I'm not casting stones at our friends from the Maghreb. So, I'll finish my little parenthesis here anyway.
21:27 I knew a Corsican fisherman in Calvi. A French friend who had the misfortune of marrying a Corsican fisherman in Calvi—I'm going to get grief for this again—and she wanted to send their daughter to middle school. The husband, mending his net like that, said: if you send her to middle school, middle school is a mess. If you send her to middle school, you see, the rifle on the wall, it's for you. That's not so long ago. I wasn't born under Vercingetorix. There.
21:58 Ibn Battuta crosses and sees regions already well-policed at the time. So, I'll sum all that up, because I'm coming back to my relations between high and low, to transcendence. There, I just showed that the opposition between Christianity and Islam—I was there before my long parenthesis, my long digression—about Islam, it's in Niger that I truly discovered Islam in everyday life.
22:35 And I worked in the field of music, a music school founded thanks to your taxes since it was the European Union that paid for it—I never earned so much money. If you criticize the European Union, that's my square to defend. You could say, there's one exception, it did one smart, intelligent thing, which was to pay Pagani to set up this music center. It's a music training center. Actually, it was clever, because the funders, as Africans say—they love these archaic African expressions. They don't say 'international finance' or 'multilateral organizations,' that's a bit abstract.
23:07 They say 'the funders.' They like that. Culture doesn't cost much. We'll say a pittance in comparison. A transnational highway, now that costs money. Go take a hike. Go dig up all the coal that's under the ground. In Niger, there are gigantic coal deposits everywhere. Oh no, no, that would disturb the natural balance. The eco-conscious aid workers, no way. No way. Even though it's a country that's dying.
23:37 The few trees there are disappearing because firewood is still the main source of energy. You see what I mean. The women's chore is water and wood, to fetch and gather branches in a country with no trees. And no water. There, I need to calm down. Well, I had a Nigerien colleague, a national, who was the national director of the training center, which had a triple function as a conservatory. But it's a revolution in the country, because it's not France, it's not Europe.
24:10 Over there, they don't have the means to buy a guitar string. I mean, you can't count on there being a piano at home, even less so. We had to import all the musical equipment. It was moving to see young Africans in rags, because I'd placed it in a working-class neighborhood—I mean, I didn't just want expatriates' children in my center—lining up near the studios where there were pianos to practice on. Kids who had only ever known, at the time, Vanessa Paradis, or the soup that RFI broadcasts as the glorious representation of fifteen centuries of Western music.
24:47 And what did I say? I need to calm down. No, but I often ran into businessmen there who would ask me, 'And what do you sell, you, here?' They don't say 'What's your job?' They say 'What do you sell?' So I say, cautiously, 'I'm in music.' Oh, they have music in this country. The guy, he only had Julio Iglesias at home, and maybe one or two hits from some boy band. There. Now, this colleague, who managed to get a European scholarship to go to Strasbourg and become the first musicologist of the Sahel, an ethnomusicologist with a diploma, I mean qualified to do research and hold a doctorate, told me that when he was young, before I went to Niger, in the 1980s or so, he had witnessed bonfires—not of books, since it's not a written culture—but of traditional musical instruments, set by the imams.
25:47 You see, Christianity has its Inquisition, Islam was fighting against instruments that were tied to rites, I don't know, of cannibalism—I'm not defending it, I mean, Islam did play a civilizing role, exactly, so people oppose them, but in fact they have the same function with regard to the preceding paganism. There. Just to set things straight. So, the high and the low, that's where I was—make rise, that's my thread—the griffin from the sea and make descend the crane from the sky, try to hold both at once, the high and the low.
Falling upward: Hölderlin and the Aufhebung 26:23 And I have another example, you'll see why I'm reasoning through these examples—I'll theorize this approach right after, but I prefer to start with the concrete, with singular examples, I mean. Yes, in the last one, with the poet, you have there too, it could be an aphorism, but in fact it's an excerpt from a theoretical text he ventures into in his near-final years before his collapse into madness, where he says: one can fall upward just as well as downward.
26:55 And for someone who died mad, it's... I'm not making a pronouncement on madness, I'm saying what people say, I'm not a specialist. I'm saying this because some of his friends, like Sinclair, an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution, said that this was a way for Hölderlin to protect himself against the police of the Restoration who were hunting down all the supporters of the French Revolution. I'm telling you this. Anyway, we have a few testimonies which were in a sorry state.
27:28 So he said one can fall upward just as well as downward. And you find this in linguistic roots — that 'to fall' [tomber], you find it in the same root as in 'tumulus.' Now, the tumulus is more of a mound than a hollow. The hollow is the tomb, the mound is the tumulus — same root. And you find in two authors rarely associated with each other, Hegel and Freud, the same fascination for, in languages, particularly in German, since that's their common language.
28:01 You can guess it, for those who are well informed — words that express a real contradiction. The most famous being... Antoine, I'm sure you want to let others speak and you know it. A word that expresses something contradictory in German. Yes, thank you. Which means at once to suppress and to preserve, if you please. Either I suppress, or I preserve.
28:35 Yes, but as Hegel says, the fruit fulfills the flower. The fruit is the fulfillment of the flower. But at the cost of suppressing it — for the fruit to appear, the flower, despite its beauty, must disappear. So that it doesn't content itself with a bit of showy appearance, but finally becomes useful. That's me adding that. I have a taste for freedom. Yes, that's what it means. To suppress in the sense of to fulfill.
Fulfilling the law: the Gospel and Rousseau 29:06 And I come back to Christianity. I said that this method, I move from one example to another, but to circle around the same point. When the Pharisees who follow Christ's every step to trap him, to get him to say the phrase that will be used to condemn him — for example, when they rest on a Sabbath eating ears of wheat in a field that has already been harvested, the Pharisees say your apostles are eating ears of grain on the Sabbath day.
29:38 Christ answers: the Son of Man is master of the Sabbath. We don't give a damn about your rules. It's harsh all the same. But that's not what I want to quote here. It's when they try to trap him. I'm trying to find the exact quote. Yes, that's it. When he says when someone strikes you on one cheek, you must turn the other cheek. You know that one.
30:08 It's extremely famous. It's in complete opposition to the law of Moses, to the Old Testament, in which it says an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. And that's what the Pharisees say to him. Moses told us an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and you say we must turn the other cheek. You see? And Jesus answers: I have not come to abolish the law — forgive me for laughing — but to fulfill it. That's clever! As I just told you, to fulfill it is to suppress it. We no longer need it. And by the way, I'll quote his answer to the end, because it inaugurates a historial function, if I may put it that way.
30:44 It's rare that I borrow words from a full-blown Nazi like Heidegger. Well, I'm doing it here. No, but it's true, I... I'm a bit dishonest usually because I avoid this concept so as not to owe him anything, but anyway, it's a well-found word, historial, not historical. You'll understand right away. Let me give another example before coming right back to this one — it's when Rousseau says it's true that there are men born to command and men born to obey. That's what Aristotle writes, but he mistakes the effect for the cause.
31:15 Because if there are men who are slaves by nature, it's because they were made slaves against nature. So Rousseau restores history. He never wrote history books. That's why I say it's historial, not historical in the sense that Voltaire writes The Age of Louis XIV, which is a very fine historical monograph. Force made the first slaves — still in The Social Contract. Their cowardice perpetuated them. You see, that echoes La Boétie a bit, look into it.
31:48 Force made the first slaves. Why not? The blade at the throat in battle — when I'm asked whether I'd rather die or serve, I become a slave. But anyway, we lost a great rebel slave these past days. I'm thinking of Kirk Douglas. I'm sure you were going to appreciate that. Médier is a great film buff. Yes, you know, his most famous role is Spartacus, which he plays admirably. It's rare for Kubrick to make a peplum.
32:18 You see, what a triumph. Yes, Crassus alone, one of the men of the triumvirate, had 10,000 slaves. Listen, if you can't manage to rebel with that, the master is in a somewhat weak position. You know, it's like debt. You know, if you have a million in debt, you're in a bad spot. If you have a billion in debt, it's your creditor who's in a bad spot. You see, spread the word. It'll do the central bank good — that is, the Bundesbank.
32:50 So I come back to Christ and his answer. He says, yes, Moses said an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but that's because at the time you had a hardened heart. So he introduces a historical dimension, that is, now this law can be set aside. And elsewhere he says, as Moses raised up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be raised up. You see, I'm circling around the point.
Center and periphery: Hölderlin's The Walk 33:21 So now I'll explain why this method circles around the point. And here we're going to arrive almost at the heart of our session today. Penultimate stage of the substance-subject relations. Why don't we rush straight at the point? You see, that's the burning question on your lips. Why am I constantly... just as we think we're getting there, I make a new digression, we never reach the center. I'll make one last detour to help you understand.
33:51 But this time it's not a detour through the theme I just illustrated, through high and low, but through the one that concerns us in the question I just raised, that of the center and the periphery. Philippe Moreau had kindly come along with Hugo to Mont-Dôme-Sille to prepare a series on nature and landscape, if you remember. And I had shown several excerpts from Hölderlin, including one called The Walk, a poem from the so-called period of madness.
34:32 Paradoxically, the poems of the madness period are much clearer than the texts of the period just before. There's something undone, unknotted. It seems he kept repeating this phrase at the carpenter's: nothing happens to me. Nothing happens to me. Something is undone. But at what price? And so this poem is simply called The Walk. Like many of these late poems, it's a text of an almost naive-painter-like simplicity. You see, a bit like Verlaine saying the sky above the roof, so blue, so calm. You see, with its basic, simple colors.
35:09 And in this poem, he begins by simply expressing what presents itself to his eyes and senses during the walk. O forests so prettily painted. You see, painted as if on a surface like that. Splendid images of the landscape I haunt. And then it ends with a crescendo, and here I come to the center and the periphery. This crescendo rests on a single sentence. Often the divinity guides us.
35:42 Friendly. With — I'm thinking in German, I'm translating on the spot — with blue to begin with, then clouds which it arranges into a rounded, grey shape, then, you see, there's a crescendo, the clouds, the fields, the claps of thunder, and the beauty that wells up — the verb 'wells up' — but on the edges of the very first image, full stop.
36:12 In the end, we see nothing more. You see, there's a limit. We only go as far as the fringes. Depending on the translation, it's the edges, the fringes. And the beauty that wells up. It's 'wells up' [sourd], it's the liquid that comes from below. In Rimbaud, you find the young girl with the orange lip, knees crossed, in the clear flood that wells up from the meadows. Well, this periphery, we can't go beyond it. There's a prohibition.
36:42 That's what I'd like to address today. As if we were repressing it. We were drawn to the center. All our work was to move toward this center of the enigma, as we say in French 'le pot aux roses' — the heart of the secret. And in a way, my hesitations are only the reflection of the difficulty there is in going straight to the goal. You have to get there through successive attempts. That's why. Here I'm borrowing a concept from Lacan. You know, I don't situate myself entirely within the Freudian field, far from it, nor even the Lacanian one, even though these are immense advances.
37:16 But in Lacan there's a very operative concept, which is the chain of the signifier. You see, I know, I move from one signifier to another, constantly deferring the signified to later. That's this center. So, this is where I arrive at absolute knowledge. First, let's avoid a misunderstanding. Well, on the contrary — Hegel, the megalomaniac who believes he knows everything.
Absolute knowledge and eternal truths in Descartes and Spinoza 37:47 That's a somewhat naive view of Hegelianism. He never claimed to rival the French mathematicians he cites in his Greater Logic, who are the pinnacles of the mathematics of the time. I'm thinking of Lagrange, for instance. There's another one, very important at the time, Laplace. He's the one he cites the most. But he never thought he knew more than that in that field. Not an idiot.
38:17 But what does absolute knowledge mean? It means something accessible to everyone, not just to Mr. Hegel. Proof of that is that he spends his time transmitting it as a teacher, to the point that most of the Berlin works are the notes of his students, validated by him. But still, he didn't write them himself. And absolute knowledge is the stage that modernity has reached, I come back to it, arising from the cracks I spoke of, which caused our relation to collapse.
38:51 Now I'll sum up everything we've said in recent sessions. Here I'm going to the center. Our whole substantial relation to the world, to replace substance with subject. Until then, since the appearance of man, the subject was alienated within substance. Let me give you an example I've already cited. That's why earlier I was pretending to hold it against you for not being cumulative enough. You have other things to do. And besides, I have gaps too.
39:21 But still, look at Descartes. There's a disagreement between Descartes and Spinoza. I don't know if anyone remembers, I already mentioned it once. There are several, but there's one that's famous, classic in university studies. It's the relation to the concept of eternal truths. You know? A equals B implies B equals A — that's part of what Descartes, just as much as Spinoza, all of classical philosophy, the apex of Western metaphysics, before it was practically ruined by Kant, held to.
39:58 That's called eternal truths. It's not true on Monday and false on Tuesday, it's not true in Timbuktu and false in Abidjan. The difference isn't there. Where is it? Victor, could I put it into words, perhaps, the difference? In relation to God, I mean. For Descartes, eternal truths are true only because God willed their content. Whereas? For Spinoza, it's the reverse. There you go. For Spinoza, these truths are so fundamental that they impose themselves even on the divine understanding.
40:32 When God thinks the sum of 2 and 3, he finds 5. Agreed? Descartes says no. No, no, no. God does what he wants. He's the Almighty. He can't be constrained by the sum of 2 and 3. It's extraordinary as reasoning. Agreed? That's where we see that the stakes aren't strictly philosophical. Still less scientific. Agreed? You see clearly that it's... I'm talking about the unconscious, ideology.
41:05 I veered off onto Descartes when I spoke of alienation. Did you notice. Because Descartes gives more importance to freedom here than Spinoza. Agreed? Even a reactionary poet. Reactionary — there's far worse. A great right-wing figure. Catholic, I'm thinking of Péguy. Even a huge poet. Even a poet like Péguy says... Descartes, yet books don't like Descartes. Descartes, that's the French cavalryman who set off at such a good pace.
41:37 You see? That's the history of the freedom of the subject beginning. A thing is true because I think it — cogito — and not because nature or God imposes it on me. Well, this human freedom, Descartes doesn't go all the way there, it's still an era when man's freedom is not thought as such, but being — we're not at the French Revolution yet — is alienated in God. God is there. You see? That's the substantial relation to the world. It's what is properly mine, and I put it into an other, alius in Latin, than myself. I think I'm being clear.
42:08 It's this alienated relation that made people say 'it rains' [il pleut]. Sorry, we still say 'it rains,' but at the time, people really believed there was a person, since 'il' is a personal pronoun, to conjugate — sorry — impersonal forms like 'it rains.' Because at the time, they said it was a divinity making it rain, a person, you see. Now the world has gradually been de-substantialized. Not for everyone, not for the Papuans of New Guinea.
42:42 While we're talking, there are Papuans right now attacking a neighboring village to carry off two or three women. I'm not saying this against them. All societies began with the abduction of women. Well yes, the rape of the Sabine women. If you know Roman history, it begins with the abduction of the Sabine women, from neighboring villages, the Sabines. You have to be practical in life. I didn't say that what's practical is going to carry off the neighbor's women. I'm not going to say what I didn't say. What I'm saying is, we're so used to, in our macro-societies where there's choice.
43:17 A place like Paris, fine. But when there are, let's simplify, 100 of you deep in the forest, a small tribe, a hundred, let's say, to simplify, 50-50 men-women, I exclude, from my possible access to women, those who are too young, those who are too old. I exclude those already married. I exclude those excluded by the incest prohibition, which varies from culture to culture but is always present. That is, sometimes I think I'm dealing with third-degree relations, sometimes it doesn't matter.
43:47 There's not much left. You understand why we go looking for the women next door? Well yes! To show that the real is rational, as Hegel says. It may be cruel, this business. But it has a reason for being. Rational means that, it doesn't mean it's good. It means men are not idiots. The immense Montesquieu, in the 18th century, had already said in the admirable preface to The Spirit of the Laws, when I examined men, I noticed they were not guided solely by their whims.
44:22 In every era, laws correspond to something. Well, there you have it. Besides, Christ himself says it, what he says, I told you earlier. Yes, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, that was the law before, now we no longer need it. Because your hearts were hardened at the time, barely out of barbarism. Thank you, Romain. There you go. So, I've summed up the essentials — we had a relation that gradually, in certain regions of the world, that's why I mention New Guinea by contrast, but which is potentially within reach of every man.
44:56 A New Guinean born tomorrow and raised in Chicago, I mean, will have a relation to the world that is less substantialist, less animist, of course, than if raised deep in the New Guinea jungle, one of the most impenetrable there is, which is both the handicap of the jungle and of the mountains. And, it's one of the summits, aesthetically speaking, of body painting — the Papuans, I say this in passing.
Christianity desubstantializes the world 45:26 And they have a music much more complex than we think, polyphonic at times, but let's not get sidetracked. So, one of the factors that most contributed to de-substantializing our relation to the world is precisely the religion of the West, Christianity. From the moment you say my kingdom is not of this world, from the moment you say God is not here but beyond, our relation to the world becomes secularized.
46:03 We can exploit the forest, we can build a little dam on the spring to give water to the village because the spring isn't nymphs, it's H2O. You understand that Descartes couldn't... Descartes is a metonymy for the scientific approach to the world. Couldn't have appeared except in a world that's, I hesitate to say, de-paganized, if you like. Isn't that so? A world de-animated, if I may risk that barbarism. Because before, everything had a soul, precisely.
46:35 He understood that. So, you see, de-substantializing, de-animating, reducing to inertia what was once believed alive. I often use the example — I'll keep going, circling around the point — of children who bump into a table, and whose parents, right, ostentatiously slap the table saying the table is naughty. That's the ideal way, isn't it, to anchor animist alienation in the child's mind, to make them believe the table is naughty.
47:10 You see, for example, we spontaneously have this relation to the world. It's much more spontaneous than the rational relation. Necessarily so. So, where I'm getting to, I'm getting to the last part of my outline where I say that starting from — if you look closely, there is, well, I'll give you the reference. That's why I'm glad we mentioned the huge and superb indexing work done by Stéphane — sorry to make you blush, Stéphane — in his beautiful spreadsheet, which covers practically six years of monthly two-hour talks on average.
47:56 And so that you can consult them interactively and quickly. That is, if what interests you in my rambling is only — I'm not saying I talk about Mallarmé at random — you type M, A, two L, and thanks to him you'll land straight away on all the passages, 15 minutes 08 seconds, where I talk about Mallarmé. Isn't that a fantastic piece of work. Well, I refer you to the video labeled 3, 2, that is, 3rd year, 2nd workshop, 2nd month.
The alternation between romanticism and formalism since the Revolution 48:29 In which — that's why I'm glad there are new faces so I can repeat it for their benefit, right? And I'm sure the old-timers will say, ah, that's it, now I understand. Someone had asked me to go back over — I had mentioned the fact that from the French Revolution until now, I don't know if some of you remember, there was an alternation in the world of poetic creation, to use a rather pretentious word, but not to say only literary — it's also true in music, it's true in painting, it's true in...
49:07 Right, aesthetics, I'm wary of that word because it's rather the part of philosophy that deals with art, that's different, I'm talking about the creators, there was an alternation between a romantic surge, romanticism arrives with modernity, it's the expression, chronologically the first expression of modernity, the explosion. Careful, when I say romanticism, I'm not only referring to French romanticism, which is supposed to begin in 1821 with Lamartine's Poetic Meditations, that's how it's put in the textbooks, and which ends on December 31st at midnight, I'm exaggerating a bit, with the failure of Hugo's Les Burgraves — this failure is generally taken as the measure of the fact that romanticism had gone out of fashion, it, which had filled theaters not so long before, no longer worked, and afterwards we move on to realism, then, symbolism, the three great movements that punctuate 19th-century literature.
50:03 I'm being very academic here. So, since then — that's romanticism in the very narrow sense — for example, German romanticism, which is by far the most fertile in terms of modernity, of endurance, and which is anyway the original one, German like English, but especially German, since Madame de Staël, you know, said that light comes to us from the north. When romanticism began — I said it began in France officially in 1821 with Lamartine's Poetic Meditations, before he made political meditations, since he became head of the provisional government after the revolution.
50:43 So, by 1821, all the German romantics were already dead, mad, or had committed suicide, almost, almost all of them. Romanticism therefore has a much wider extension than the one usually meant in the narrow sense. And then there is a romanticism beyond the world of literary and artistic creation, there's a legal romanticism, there's a historical romanticism — look at Michelet, he has romantic sides, Michelet, Catherine. There's a military romanticism.
51:14 You look at the portrait of Bonaparte at the bridge of Arcole — maybe all of that is arranged, a legend, as we'd say today. Because the great strategists of history — and we're part of that too — aren't the ones who throw themselves under gunfire like that. They're the ones who decide which model of boots the foot soldiers are going to wear. That's what decides battles. Don't forget that when the French army defeated the whole coalition of émigrés at Valmy, they were called the army of the barefoot and the cobblers.
51:47 Don't forget. Yes, as a military motif, the figure of Bonaparte will remain a reference. Look at Hegel's famous letter to Niethammer, his friend, when he put the final point to the Phenomenology in 1807, at the moment when Napoleon entered the city of Jena. You couldn't invent things like his. There must have been some legend to it, it wasn't at the exact moment he put the final point, but it's true that he witnessed Napoleon's entry into Jena.
52:17 Prussia was done for, for a long time, after the crushing defeat at Jena. In that famous letter where he says, "I saw the Emperor, this world-soul." This world-soul. You see, there's a romanticism, a military one, of the man who, from his horse, dominates the world. The whole German intelligentsia was waiting impatiently for the arrival of the forces of the French Revolution that were going to rid them of — I'm talking about what they had in their heads — petty squires, grand dukes and lesser dukes and princes.
52:50 There you go. That's the era when there were 400 different states in Germany with legal archaisms going back before Charlemagne. There you go. You know that Napoleon, with a single signature, put an end to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. I'm not making anything up. I'm talking about romanticism. It's going to inaugurate a feeling — I mean concretely — a very troubled feeling, well, ambivalent, because troubled has a pejorative side, it's at once worse and better than that.
53:23 — of turning melancholy or sadness into a voluptuous pleasure. That was unthinkable before. Rousseau is one of the very first. I don't like it when people call him a precursor. You know, a precursor is someone who is supposed, lexically, to do a little of what his successors will do a lot of later. Rousseau does it far better than his successors, and we'll really have to wait for the symbolists, starting with Baudelaire, to go further. In his letter to Malesherbes, when he says at one point that he ran across the Île Saint-Pierre saying "O great being, O great being," unable to say or murmur anything more, he says that nevertheless his soul was saddened by the nothingness of his chimeras.
54:07 Suddenly he realizes that all of that is in his head. The nothingness of his chimeras would come and sadden him all at once. "Well, sir, that very thing was enjoyment, for I was filled with a sadness I would not have wished not to have." You couldn't be clearer. Why am I dwelling on this aspect of romanticism? Because, as you can guess, this symptom will be called, throughout the century that follows, the mal du siècle — the sickness of the century.
The century of Evil; Rousseau, the Newton of morality 54:37 Yes, the sickness of the century. It was the century in which, to be fashionable, you had to be a little tubercular, a little... well, a bit like me, no, with a little more shoulder. But anyway, a bit skinny, you see. Yes, phthisic. Look at Nerval at the start of Sylvie: "I would appear at the front of the theater box in full courting attire." Already Nerval shows that romanticism has gone out of fashion, he's mocking his own youth. "I would appear every evening at the theater, at the front of the box, in full courting attire."
55:07 "I am in love with an actress" — a caricature. So this sickness of the century is going to continue — what comes after the 19th century? The 20th. It's a golden relation. The century of sickness. You see, as I come back to another subject, the reconstitution of Nazism — I think there's a link.
55:37 We must look for the reasons behind the emergence of a phenomenon like Nazism. There have always been atrocities in history. It's not the Nazis who inaugurated it. That's the only credit I'll give them. When you read the descriptions of the crimes committed by the Assyrians — it's on the enemy's own tablets — well, I mean, eyes gouged out. Anyway, there's plenty to choose from. What a vale of tears, the Bible says, doesn't it? There are wars of religion. There are whole villages where people had their tongues torn out and so on.
56:07 Do you know Mornas, on the A7 motorway? Everyone passes through Mornas. You know, when you arrive before the Lançon interchange — you know where Lançon is, it's the start of Provence. No, you do know all that, surely. South of Avignon, look, on the left, Mornas, it's marked on the motorway, Mornas exit. You see medieval fortifications on the ridge. Do you know Mornas? No, no, no, you don't want the southwest one. Do you know it?
56:37 You live right nearby. I'm not exaggerating. That's where they threw the Protestants off the wall. Bastards. They did others in too, the Protestants. Well, so that's not what characterizes Nazism. First of all, it's that it happens precisely in a non-barbaric, civilized, refined era. Among the French collaborators, there were people who adored Proust, who adored jazz.
57:08 But yes! Don't think it's your redneck brother-in-law, that's just what they make you believe. The fake left that makes you believe it's Harlem Désir versus Le Pen, that that's all there is in France. That's what's been running us for 50 years. Convenient. No! The right is intelligent, cultivated. That has never prevented horror. That's where you see the depth of Rousseau — that practical philosophy, to speak in Kantian terms, that of values, has no relation to the theoretical dimension.
57:44 That's profound. When Kant said Rousseau is the Newton of morality, that's what it means. It means that he stands in the order of values as Newton stands in the physical order. And just as in the physical order, the law of falling bodies, the law of heavy bodies, which they had at the time, became emblematic of the new legislation to which nature finds itself subject in modern physical determinism — I include quantum theory in that.
58:15 There are those who believe that quantum theory ruined determinism. Nonsense. It's on the contrary far more refined. In quantum theory, determinism becomes a probabilistic determinism — correct me, Étienne, if I'm wrong — we manage to predict with even greater precision — not positions, but movements. After that I lose myself. I'll hand it over to our physicist friends at the drinks reception. What the law of falling bodies represented in the order of bodies — to speak of Pascal's era — in bodies, in the order of spirits, is the order of charity.
58:52 It's freedom that takes the place of gravity in the order of values. And Rousseau is the first to establish this as the foundation of anthropology. Not that man ought to be free, but that if man had not from the beginning been potentially free, then, in other words, the social contract is constantly being violated. That's how Rousseau must be read. Force made the first slaves, their cowardice perpetuated them.
59:22 They were free to revolt. I told you I was born in Vietnam. It's still a small country, a small people, that defeated the two greatest imperialist powers of the time. First during the Indochina War, then during the Vietnam War. A trifle, three million dead, who cares, who cares — communists after all.
59:56 Rousseau does indeed say that freedom comes first. He says clearly that force cannot constitute a stable power. The strongest is never strong enough — I'm quoting him verbatim — to remain always the master unless he transforms his strength into right, and obedience into duty. Excuse me — the strongest is never strong enough to be always — this is surgical precision — the Social Contract, this isn't the Reveries of the Solitary Walker or Julie, this is Rousseau the theorist.
1:00:29 The strongest is never strong enough — he can be for a certain time, that's what it means — to remain always the master unless he transforms his strength into right, and obedience into duty. Because it's right that regulates — there I can feel the duty to obey — whereas when it's force, as soon as the other weakens, I'm the one who takes power. It's unstable. It's the permanent war of each against all. There you go.
Naturalism, theology, anthropology: the three positions 1:00:59 So, I'm in the middle of recalling that absolute knowledge — I pick up my thread again — the possibility of absolute knowledge appears, that is, of realizing that the die is not cast, that destiny is not written into nature or into God, that it is up to man to decide. That's absolute knowledge. That's the lesson of modernity. It's simple to remember — not in detail, but in principle. It's fundamental. All the more reason not to forget it. If you forget everything else about philosophy, I have one piece of advice to give you, as a landmark.
1:01:32 It's that all philosophical theories, whatever they are, the ones I like, the ones I don't — that's not a problem, since we're not here to see my philosophical moods — can be reduced to the following three, can be classified under one of the following three. There's the naturalist position, illustrated today by cognitive science, for example. Right? My passion for Mehdi, for example, would be explicable by physico-chemical processes — I'm not saying just anything.
1:02:10 And I wanted — I wanted to use a female example, but now you have to be careful. Because otherwise she'll say #MeToo. Anyway — by a stimulus-reflex, naturalism. No, I'm not caricaturing. It's the immense tradition of the hard sciences, without which I wouldn't be here, nor would humanity. That's quite serious. But which sometimes has excesses outside its domain of competence.
1:02:40 The total antithesis: the theological conception, not the naturalist one. It's not nature but supernature that explains the world we're in and that gives the law. That's the Ten Commandments, for example. Given on Sinai, by a God who says — what are God's very first words to Moses? The very first, before the Ten Commandments — I like to recall this — even before saying "I am who I am."
1:03:10 "Take off your sandals, for you are standing on holy ground." That's what the Eternal says to Moses first. There is the sacred, there is the profane. The first division of transcendence. I say this because I once posted a photo on Facebook of a little mosque in the desert, the kind you find plenty of in the desert. It's overwhelming to see. It's small stones arranged in a circle like that, with a little opening you go through to pray.
1:03:47 Now, those are true believers, because there's no one watching in the desert. There's no one to say "you're praying properly." No, no, the imams aren't there. What would he build with? There's nothing in the desert. There are only stones. What does he have? He has four goats, a few sheep. He's a nomad. But he has to perform five prayers a day. That's a mosque. It's extraordinary. It's not the same space before the stones and after the stones. That's what matters. Inside the circle, it's sacred.
1:04:18 So, there's the naturalist conception. There's the supernaturalist conception, the antithesis — to make it symmetrical, I do say supernaturalist, whatever the religion here — whichever religion, I mean. And finally, of course, there's the one where you're used to seeing me line up, though I don't impose it: there's the anthropological position, which I'm in the process of identifying, probably, with modernity. That is, to go back to the classification: the first says that it's nature that makes man.
1:04:51 The second says that it's God who makes man. The third says that it's man who makes man. There you go. If, just once in philosophy, you can try to see how the text you're reading, or your own position, situates itself within one of these three, I guarantee you'll leave nothing to chance. It's 8:15. Yes. So a quarter of an hour. Yes, that's good. It's good to give a quarter of an hour's warning this time. And I even wonder if we shouldn't stop there.
1:05:22 Ah, yes, we're going to take questions. Although, for today, we said — I don't know if you saw the little notice that Thomas kindly posted — I'm at your disposal during the drinks reception, there, if I'm not howling in pain. But no, I was worried because I've often had more pain sitting than standing since my operation. And here it's going very well. So maybe we can stop now and continue answering questions around the treats you've brought us.
1:05:52 I said to bring light things. If you find it a bit austere, that's my fault. It's because afterwards, we're going to have a blast. There you go. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.
