English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Modernity born of two cracks in the eighteenth century 0:00 Thank you, Thomas. Thank you all, it's the reason for being here. You're braving all the prohibitions here. And yet, you know, this virus, it has to be taken seriously. A virus that allows us not to talk about the worst crisis of capital since the 1930s, falls from the sky. It really has to be taken seriously. No, no, I'm speaking quite seriously. I take seriously those who are its victims.
0:34 But really, at the last count, how many are there, 76 in France, out of 75 million inhabitants. Come on, thousands die every year from the flu, nobody gives a damn. I recall the passage. And if I bring it up, it's right at the heart of this subject I wanted to address, well before we talked about the virus. Namely, you were probably told that we'd have the same plan today as the one that had been proposed last time.
1:04 Because last time, it was a bit rushed thanks to the kindness of those who were kind enough to prepare my birthday. So it got a bit cut short. I didn't cover the essential part of what was written in the plan. So we're going back to the same one. I recall that this plan was centered. I'm not going to state it all. There were quite a few sub-paragraphs. The essential heading of the plan is that I'm referring to the period when modernity appears, in the sense we've agreed to give it, and which we're not imposing.
1:42 Once again, one could very well say — I recall that for historians, modern times begin with the Renaissance, for example in the 16th century, that is at the end of the Middle Ages — Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance. I recall that this is a very convenient classification. I say this half seriously, half a bit ironically, because there are two extremes, Antiquity and modern times, and between the two there's the middle, Middle Age. That's indeed the Middle Ages. We cram into it about 15 centuries, of which, for two thirds, we don't really know what happened, because there weren't many literate people.
2:16 You know that Charlemagne, to whom we owe the creation of many schools, in the first empire on European territory, was a priest who had to take his finger to sign with a cross like that. You see, Charlemagne even. So imagine, a peasant in the 10th century. Anyway, so, being that. One could also say that modernity — I don't know — that Shakespeare is one of the first modern authors, it hasn't aged a bit, when you watch Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar, which reproduces Shakespeare's text word for word, by the way.
2:55 I recommend it to you. Go with your girlfriend, because Marlon Brando is in it, in all his splendor. He annoys me, that one, he always stole all my girlfriends. Especially in A Streetcar Named Desire. We knew that well. Shakespeare hasn't aged a bit, Shakespeare's language. You'd think it was written yesterday. The tone was... But, democratically, between us, modernity. And here, I add our modernity.
3:27 Not mine. Nor that of Rabelais or Erasmus in the Renaissance. But the one that begins to emerge thanks to those two great upheavals, namely the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution, which occurred at roughly the same historical period, in the 18th century, and which create such a gulf between what existed before and us who come after.
4:01 I say this because, especially thanks to a certain kind of cinema, for several generations now in the history of film, extraordinary anachronisms are made. I mean, often, especially the Americans, who don't have a highly developed historical depth. This isn't a criticism. There are advantages and disadvantages. Aesthetically, it has the advantage of allowing them lapses of taste. It's not the old European culture. They care as little about lapses of taste as the Russians do.
4:33 So that produces a lot of waste, but when it produces masterpieces, it produces extraordinary masterpieces too. I'm being honest. Well, the Americans, they often cast some peplum figure, some person from Antiquity. And in fact you can see it's a Californian coming out of a nightclub, where he's been listening to Michael Jackson all evening. Something's not right there. So, I want to stress what the poet Hölderlin says: thus much lives, and separates, and time separates. You always have to remember that when we talk about Voltaire, Racine, and go back into the past, it's true, it's another universe that people had in their heads.
5:09 It's not at all ours. For example, for us, starting with Victor Hugo, the Romantics — I haven't lost track of my subject, don't worry, I still have the virus in mind — Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris transports us into a superb Middle Ages. We see the court of miracles, you know, oh yes, very well. It's an imagined Middle Ages, but based on quite a bit of documentation. In Racine's time, it would never have occurred to anyone to turn the Middle Ages into an aesthetic value. Gothic was a pejorative term meaning ugly, barbaric.
5:42 The cathedrals we admire, that the whole world comes to France to admire — I say this because in Germany, in Freiburg, there's a magnificent one. But after that, you have to go 400 km to find a second one in Germany. But here, just within two kilometers around Paris, there are 80. Two first-magnitude cathedrals, if I may say so. Just around Notre-Dame, look at Saint-Séverin, Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, all packed into a tiny area.
The Middle Ages become an aesthetic value 6:12 You cross the Seine once or twice. And then, Saint-Gervais, Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, the Barque-Bouton, and Saint-Merri, for those who frequent the Rue Saint-Denis. It wouldn't have occurred to anyone in the classical period to refer to the Middle Ages as an aesthetic value. On the contrary, it was repulsive. I had given you the example of the Saint-Eustache cathedral at Les Halles, you see, which reigns over Les Halles.
6:43 And which Nerval compared — and Nerval who frequented Les Halles at night. I'll come back to this, you'll see we're getting more and more into the subject. Because I'm going to talk about A Season in Hell. That's a title by Rimbaud. But Nerval already speaks, a generation before Rimbaud, of his experience of madness, in Aurélia. He says, I compare it to what the ancients called a descent into hell. You see, my subject is starting to take shape, as if modernity needed to pass through a hell in order to suddenly have the revelation of what finally frees us from the curse that reigned over the preceding centuries.
7:23 So, Saint-Eustache, when you see it, he compares it to a whale. Indeed, you see a kind of whale skeleton with the flying buttresses like that, you see, seen from the side. But when you look at it from the front, there's a dreadful thing — I shouldn't exaggerate, but still — it's spoiled by a neoclassical portal with columns made in the 17th century in what was then called the Vignola style, the Counter-Reformation style — it was the Jesuits who, to fight Protestantism, had great respect for classical texts.
7:55 So, I mean, it's difficult to have a historicizing kind of thought — I'd like to say, not historicist, that's pejorative and reductive, not historial, because that would make me pay a tax to Heidegger, which bothers me a bit — but a historicizing thought, that is, one that takes history into account to determine what we have in our heads, including at the emotional level. There, that comes from elsewhere. So, these two upheavals — and here's the thesis around which the plan revolved and which I'm going to take up again this evening — is that this modernity produced what Hegel calls, at the end of the Phenomenology, in the last chapter — you can forget everything else, but you have to remember this.
The Phenomenology as a novel of formation 8:51 Consciousness passes through all these illusions — thank you — to absolute knowledge. You know, people still wonder what this book, the Phenomenology of Spirit, is. Even within Hegel's work, it's a strange book after all, I mean, what is it? It's undeniably a philosophy book, but one that takes the form of a coming-of-age novel — you know what that is, a Bildungsroman, Rousseau's Emile, where you take the child practically from birth and follow him until he's reached his definitive cruising speed, so to speak, right? Flaubert's Sentimental Education, the young romantic man, like that, and then afterward, he doesn't even recognize the woman for whom he nearly killed himself 30 years earlier.
9:29 I'm thinking of Mathilde Wesendonck, do you know Mathilde Wesendonck? I'm sure only two people here know her. Wesendonck was the great love who inspired Wagner — who knew others too — in the character of Isolde, in the most devouring passion ever set to music for five hours straight. A pretty woman, who was married to a Swiss millionaire, from whom Wagner stole the wife, the money, etc. Her motto was: the world owes me what I need.
10:00 That needs to be said — an uninteresting character, but a great musician. From a distance, everyone who knew him closely says, you haven't understood anything, he has a bewitching kindness, including the conductor Hermann Levi — imagine, he's Jewish — to whom Wagner entrusted, at the end of his life, at the very moment he was publishing completely pathological antisemitic writings, his testament, Parsifal. It's complicated. Hermann Levi would say, no, but come, you don't know him, he's someone extraordinary.
10:32 There you go, I know. I'm speaking a bit out of order as always at the start, you know, it's because I'm answering out loud someone who isn't here, or who might be here — he told me he might make the effort to come. I'm thinking of Louis 25. No, he's not here. I'll respect his pseudonym for now. There we go. But he's the one who urged me to publish an essay on the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship. So I'm starting to broach the subject a bit here in my initial jumble.
11:04 And Isolde then, that is Mathilde Wesendonck, for whom he had this passion — he went off to purge himself in Venice because she went to rejoin her husband and all the classic story, and he went to brood over his passion in Venice. It was on the lagoons of an Italian city that had been dying for centuries that Tristan and Isolde was written, which is supposed to take place in the mists of Brittany.
11:38 It's an extraordinary story, even. And — well, Mathilde Wesendonck, this is why I bring it up — passed through Bayreuth 15 years later, she writes to a friend that she went unnoticed, barely recognized, at the festival, you see. Well. So, this is rather the Flaubert side, Sentimental Education, which starts out very romantic and then mocks a little, at the end, its own sentimental wanderings — Sentimental Education, about which Kafka said, it discourages me from writing.
12:13 A book like that, everything's been said, it's of such perfection, Kafka. There you go, Nerval — you know well, at the beginning of Sylvie, the very beginning, the first sentence of Sylvie, in the 1850s, I've already told you, as Romanticism was starting to go out of fashion — I used to appear every evening in the front boxes of a theater in full suitor's attire. Yes, you can already see the self-mockery. I was the suitor of those romantic times, I speak in the imperfect tense, I was young. I used to appear every evening in the front boxes of a theater in full suitor's attire.
12:45 Ah, avarice! There you go. And so, I insist that it's difficult to put oneself in the shoes of characters from before this break. So, what characterizes this break? And here now I step in. Because, for once, I'm forcing my hand a bit, or at least my tongue. I like to repeat, not out of false modesty, but because it's true, on the whole, alas, I'm not a creator, I'm rather someone who transmits.
13:17 It's not the creations with which I've had the immense good fortune to come into contact by chance — is there such a thing as chance in my biography? There you go. But above all when it seems to me to have a shareable interest. Except that here, for once, it's an initiative of my own, so I'm telling you this to warn you, it's a hypothesis of your servant's own. It's that what characterizes this modernity is that access to absolute knowledge — I'll explain further, of course, you can see it deserves coming back to, such a notion — this knowledge conceals such a danger for the one who gains access to it, a bit like someone who suddenly discovers a secret that calls their whole life into question, you see what I mean, that it engenders — this is my hypothesis — symmetrically, the temptation of an absolute non-knowledge, if you prefer, a repression, a denial, call it what you will, an absolute denial, an absolute I-don't-want-to-know.
Hypothesis of an absolute non-knowledge 14:19 You see we're suddenly not far from this year's subject, Nazism. Right? Don't forget that there were very great scholars in the Nazi party. Because sometimes people say, but what does he have against the hard sciences? I've never said a word against the hard sciences. I've never said a word against science. I'm quite happy, on the contrary, to say that democracy begins with Euclid's first notions. I don't know — insofar as he calls them postulates, which ask the interlocutor to grant them, otherwise one cannot demonstrate anything.
14:55 No, no. There isn't... I'll say, as Rimbaud did, one must be absolutely modern. But yes to science, no to scientism. You see what was called, pejoratively, at the end of the 19th century, scientism, or else positivism. I have nothing against positive knowledge. I'd love to have more of it. Something that isn't in doubt, that's truly positive, that one can rely on, that one can rest upon.
15:27 Even radical, all that. Depose, repose, superpose, prepose. There are verbs like that which form combinations. Dismiss, submit, remit, counter-put. Not the noun form. So there you go. Admit a non-knowledge, an absolute non-knowledge. An absolute non-knowledge. And we're always in the conflict of the two. Just as I told you, we are not in a revolutionary phase nor in a counter-revolutionary phase since the French Revolution.
16:04 We are in the permanent conflict of the Revolution and the counter-revolution. For now, I state it like dogmas, right? I'm often backed up with plenty of examples. And today it's just by way of reminder. So I won't get lost in the details. We have plenty of time to go deeper into that. But the conflict between this knowledge and this non-knowledge produces — this is what I'd like to stress today as something new — a kind of permanent little shuttle between these two poles, between these two extremes.
16:35 From a moment when suddenly consciousness — yours or mine — suddenly has the revelation of its truth. Consciousness loses its certainties and gains truth. That's where you see the difference. Because there have been certainties since the beginning of humanity. The certainty that this is solid ground and that it doesn't move. You see? Yet we're being carried around the sun at 30 km a second.
17:07 It took millennia to go from certainty to a timid beginning of truth, right, in the first Chaldean, Mesopotamian numerical tables. Before the ancient Egyptians began to approach the number pi, for example — for them it was 3.20, something like that. Well, it wasn't bad for the time. It was sufficient for the use they made of it.
17:38 It was for making columns, the circumferences of columns. You know what they called it? The 'beautiful number' pi. Go ahead, measure something curved with a ruler. Have you ever tried measuring a circle with a ruler? Yes? Étienne? Sorry? Bravo. No, but that's it. There, that's it. I find that much more moving than the arrival of extraterrestrials in a flying saucer. Like in Kubrick, which is a masterpiece of cinematic vision.
18:10 In Kubrick, if it weren't for the monolith coming from the cosmos, we'd never have known how to make a dagger from a bone. We agree on that. That's biblical. That's really the Old Testament. Without God, no progress. Well. Which isn't entirely inaccurate, except that it's put a bit naively. If the theologians' indication of... excuse me.
18:40 Liberation theology, excuse me, in Latin America, you know, part of the clergy that was massacred, often imprisoned, tortured, said that the question of whether God exists or doesn't exist as a past or as an original creator — God, it's up to us to make him exist by expanding the field of freedom in this world.
19:12 Great, right? Liberation theology. So, it's not entirely stupid to say there's a relationship between God and progress, but as a result, not as an origin. And we're still within Hegel here. I come back to this business of polarity, right? Consciousness obtains its truth — I stress this, it mustn't be forgotten — at the expense of its certainties. Well. Each of us, every one of us, has in our life already experienced the collapse of something that was a certainty. I believe I already told you what happened to my daughter.
19:43 She was 6 years old. I think it's adorable. She was 6 and she says, Father Christmas is nice. I say, yes, of course. No, because I don't believe in him anymore. He still brings me presents though. Kids are strong all the same. It's too cute. She'd already started wavering in her certainty. All the same. Well, there are more serious things than that which collapse, you see.
20:14 And I make use of — I don't subscribe to everything Freud says by using the notion of repression here. You can see its fruitfulness if I transpose it elsewhere than where it's used in psychoanalysis. Here I'm using it in a historical field. Let me go back to the example. I'm now going to give a few examples that illustrate what I've just said. There's something formidable in what the advances of knowledge have imposed on consciousness.
Pascal and the silence of infinite spaces 20:49 Sometimes against its will. I take — and I had already given you the example of Pascal. Pascal lived in the 17th century. He's known as an immense Christian thinker, not Catholic. He was Jansenist. He was skating on thin ice. He didn't end up at the stake. It was a near thing. But well, I'll say, he had to flee Port-Royal. Port-Royal, the neighborhood, comes from there. That's where the Jansenists were. They had to flee. So Pascal, an immense thinker — I don't say philosopher — he wrote Pensées.
21:24 I say this because he wrote a text of revelation — he felt God one night, like that, true illumination in the literal sense. And I tell you this because these are quite rare texts. They found, sewn into his coat at his death, as testimony to what happened to him that night, this 23rd of November, feast day of Saint Chrysogonus, martyr and others, from about 10:30 in the evening until midnight and a half. And then, on a new line, in three letters, just like that: Fire. God of Abraham.
21:55 I tell you, illumination in the literal sense: Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not that of the philosophers and the learned. You see, that's why I say he's not a philosopher either. You see, he's a mystic, a spiritualist, whatever you like, you know philosophers very well. There you go. And he humbled himself for the philosophical period that had been his own, when he writes against Descartes and those who dig too deep into knowledge. But he's one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He initiated the calculus of probability.
22:27 As for Pascal's triangle, Thomas will talk about it better than I can, but I believe it's a very important step in the history of mathematics. And he also, at the technological level so to speak, in applied mathematics, created the first calculating machine, with no electricity, using springs. At the time, imagine, purely mechanical, the calculating machine. Pascal, this frightening genius, said Chateaubriand with a somewhat romantic tone a few generations later, who had found all of Euclid's theorems at age 9 through pure deduction, who at 16 published a treatise on conics.
23:03 Anyway, still, the conic sections. Now, this Pascal says at one point, in the Pensées, and you know, the Pensées, it's a splendor as a piece of writing, that's rather rare, philosophers who write well, "the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." I quoted it to you before. Right? A Christian giving us a lesson in anti-ecology. A consistent Christian. Maybe it's ecologists who are right to know about this, deep down. The number of Christians who call themselves environmentalists, that I don't understand.
23:36 Christianity ought to de-paganize. Well, you see, nature is not the divinity of Christianity. "My kingdom is not of this world." Well, still, nature. How do you expect religions that arose in desert lands to take nature seriously? If there is salvation somewhere, either there is no salvation at all, or if there is, it's not here, it's beyond. All the great religions of the Book, in chronological order so as not to upset anyone, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, appeal to transcendence.
24:12 Trans means beyond. In Greek, meta, in Latin, trans, it means the same thing. It's beyond. Metaphysica, beyond nature, precisely. You see, none of this is by chance. In Tahiti, a religion like that couldn't appear. In your hand there's fruit, there are coconuts, there's fresh water in the streams. There's no problem. But there you go, whereas in the desert, one knows that salvation does not come from what is of being-there, as they say in German, of existence, of Dasein, isn't that so.
24:48 So I'm making these reminders to say that a man like Pascal realizes that Galileo's physics — I'm giving you an example of a progress in knowledge that is neither truly a philosophical progress, nor a purely epistemic, cognitive progress, if I may say so — the shift from geocentrism, that is roughly from anthropocentrism, the Earth at the center and man at the center of the Earth, the shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism, then afterward to polycentrism — you know the beautiful line of Pascal's, it's a sphere, the universe, whose center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere, but you're good, you saw that sense of antithesis in Pascal's sentences, everywhere, nowhere, it's a sphere whose center is wherever you like, the circumference — in short, what allows one to finish, to close off, to determine, horizon, from the Greek horos which means determination, the azure of the sky, immense and round, as Baudelaire says, who had sailed on a sailing ship — the center is everywhere, there's something frightening about it because that universe doesn't answer, it's mute, there's no spirit in it,
From geocentrism to polycentrism: losing high and low 25:58 there's no soul left, and that's what Galileo's physics teaches us, Descartes's principle of inertia — once you come after that, you can no longer take seriously the soul of the tree, of this or that, although in the bookshop next door I'm sure there are plenty of books selling with trees that think, that speak and that think better than I do. There, those are the reminders I'm making. So you see, at the end of this process, consciousness ends up obtaining — you understand better now what I mean by this example — an absolute knowledge, I haven't yet commented on "absolute," but a knowledge that makes prior certainties collapse.
26:38 and since, and since affectivity, psychic balance was tied to those certainties, you take away the up and the down from me, what's left for me? All our value judgments, what are they? Not all, but look, take just these two words in the language, high, low — I'm only taking French, because I know quite a few languages I've inquired about, since I'm not a real linguist, I asked specialists — everywhere you find the same distribution: low is pejorative, "he trampled all values underfoot," trample, that's under the feet, everything that's down below; "to hold the high ground of the pavement," that's good, because at the time there was a gutter in the middle of the street, on Rue Mouffetard for instance, you see, there was a little gutter, so when a lady passed by, people left the slightly cleaner, slightly less filthy passages, you see, a bit above, a bit above the filth, "to hold the high ground," "her highness," alto, what does that mean?
27:42 Up high, yes or no? Altitude, altimeter, highness — look how language, incessantly, because with me you become aware of it, but language does it, doesn't need to, language manages so that, without it reaching your consciousness, it governs all your values, our values, I include myself too, right? "What a height of vision," well yes, we don't say "what lowness of vision," or if we say "what baseness," it's to say there's no elevation of view, we only speak of the view; a woman of loose morals, we used to say "a streetwalker" — that's appalling, still, a streetwalker, that's on the ground; with just this high and low, take that away from me, and already there's centuries and millennia of affectivity that is mutilated, that is amputated, do you understand what I mean?
28:35 So, learning to live in that world which is no longer that of certainty, of consciousness, but that of science, of knowledge — I take "science" here from scire in Latin, which simply means to know — to come back to and return to my hypothesis, which I'm passing on to you today, asking you to put it to the test, because I'm not taking it from any authority, and again I rarely satisfy myself with you through the argument from authority, I'm not going to do as in the Middle Ages, when they said "it's true because Aristotle said so," Aristoteles dixit, that was the answer, indeed.
29:14 Well, I'm worth more than that all the same. You understand why Luther started by translating the Bible into German. One has to say, look, what the priests tell us about the Bible, it's a great political act. So, I repeat, the hypothesis I take responsibility for proposing to you is that the closer one gets to absolute knowledge, the more the force of the negation of absolute knowledge grows.
Reading of Rimbaud's "Conte" 29:49 The more absolute non-knowledge manifests itself. And now I refer you to a video, 3-5, third year, fifth session, thanks to Stéphane, our webmaster, I'm starting to find my way around even in my own videos, where I answer a question that had been asked me — I had presented a text by Rimbaud, an Illumination, if you remember, it's "The Prince."
30:19 You know, a prince had grown vexed at never having devoted himself except to the perfecting of generous deeds. Ah well, I'm going to go all the way through, since we're going to talk again about our desires. It's short. It's half a page. "A prince had grown vexed" — Conte, C-O-N-T-E, as one tells children. "A prince had grown vexed at never having devoted himself except to the perfecting of generous deeds. He foresaw astonishing revolutions of love, and suspected his wives of being capable of better than that complaisance embellished with sky and luxury." Well yes, a prince, that's rarely the case.
30:52 "Whether or not it was an aberration of piety, he wanted..." He possessed at least a fairly wide human power. Ah yes, princes, let's say Roman emperors, certain human powers, indeed, that has means. "All the women he knew were murdered." It starts in the imperfect tense. "A prince had grown vexed," and then, suddenly, the action begins. "All the women he knew were murdered." Not "were," simply. Yes, he doesn't just want to desire, he wants to be satisfied.
31:24 Of course, no object of desire — we've seen this in philosophy — really satisfies man, who is the animal that isn't content with having needs, but also has desires. One passes from the finite to the infinite. There are even some who trace "desire" back — I'm not a linguist, I tell you because this has often been said — desire would come from the Latin desiderium, which has a connection to the cosmos, sidereal. I'm not sure that's true. Check it. So, "all the women he knew were murdered."
31:54 "What a ravaging of the garden of beauty! Under the sword, they blessed him." And here we see appearing — I had told you — a first trap the prince doesn't notice he's falling into, which is that there is no resistance whatsoever. Being a great sovereign, he doesn't have, as we do, problems of money, of this or that impossibility. He only has to desire. "Bring me a woman from Illyria." They bring him a woman from Illyria. The great Roman empire. Fine. A Malian woman. Illyria isn't Mali.
32:26 And I say that because women from Mali have a great reputation in West Africa. We're not straying off topic. "And all the women he had known did not resist blessing him under the sword." "He commanded no others; the women reappeared." I had told you it was as though Rimbaud, without knowing it, had illustrated Hegel's thesis that desire is destructive, and that the subject who remains at the level of this destructive desire doesn't see that, wanting to affirm himself against the object, it is in fact the object that reappears incessantly.
32:57 I'm hungry, tomorrow I'll be hungry again. There will always be more objects to devour in the outside world, and I will die before having devoured them all. Isn't that so? So I mean, it ends up affirming the object. Beautiful dialectic. I want to affirm the subject by suppressing the object, and it's the object that ends up triumphing quietly, effortlessly. So, "all the women he knew were murdered, what a ravaging of beauty, under the sword they blessed him, and commanding no others, the women reappeared." Then — we leave the women — "he amused himself by cutting the throats of all those who followed after the hunt or the libations."
33:29 And there are allusions here to Roman emperors who had little fits like that, bloody ones, with their entourage. And that Seneca received a little note from Nero: "the emperor demands that you kill yourself." And well yes, that's a man — you know, it was very refined among the Romans, you know how he killed himself. It was fashionable among the Romans. No? He, no, wait.
33:59 In a — in a hot bath? There, there, yes, it was refined, in a hot bath so that the veins would swell up a bit, a good scalding bath, he opened his veins, it was less painful. "Then he amused himself by cutting the throats of all those who followed after the hunt." It already seemed the hunt or the libation. All followed him. You see, there's no resistance. "Then he amused himself by slaughtering the luxury animals." I told you this is also an allusion to emperors who went down into the arena. You know the sovereign can't help himself.
34:31 The sovereign dreams of being a subject drowned in the crowd. Have you seen the film Roman Holiday? No? You've seen it? I recommend it, Gregory Peck. Hey, but you know him, yes, Gregory Peck. Handsome as a god, but mostly eclipsed by Audrey Hepburn, who is ravishing. Sorry, it's sexist to shift everything I say. Isn't she pretty in that film. No, I pay her homage because she's an actress about whose private life we never really knew much. Which shows that those who say you can't escape the paparazzi when you want to, are wrong.
35:03 There. I don't know if she was at her peak. No, but it's the story of a princess. Now, they don't say so, but you sense that it's the princess of England. Very formal, like that, a bit more than protocol. "And madam, tomorrow you have an appointment with the Red Cross. And then you'll be asked a question about the League of Nations. You'll say you're for peace." You see, the wooden language. And she's, what, she's 18 years old, barely, I think. And from her window at the palace in Rome, she's on an official visit to Rome.
35:35 She sees a crowd of near-commoners having a popular dance by the Tiber, there, at the foot of the Castel Sant'Angelo, for those who know Rome, and she dreams of being there. Anyway, in short, you guess that throughout the film, she's going to escape from it all. There, she's going to run into Gregory Peck, who is a journalist who suddenly sees the scoop, who doesn't say he's recognized her. He's a journalist starving in Italy right after the war, who's even smuggled money for the United States, and who stumbles upon the princess of England incognito.
36:05 The film should have been a dud, with a masterpiece of a script. But you see, the princess's dream, her first thing, is that she goes to the hairdresser. There's this little Italian hairdresser of no consequence, and she says, "cut it shorter, no, shorter," "It's not possible, she has splendid hair." "Criminale!" He'll give her a whirl at the dance hall. It's adorable. Anyway, I won't tell you the ending. And you see, Roman emperors too went down into the arena like a common gladiator.
36:37 But watch out, the difference is that he risks nothing much. And Commodus, he went to face not bears nor panthers. He's not stupid — geese. It's terrible. Geese. You have to be wary of geese. If you've been to the countryside, beware of geese. But anyway, still, it's not a mortal danger. And if you didn't applaud him when he came to strangle the geese like that, being careful, if you didn't applaud him, there were lictors behind, with spears that would prick you.
37:11 to make you clap. There. So, Rimbaud alludes to all that. "Then he amused himself by slaughtering the luxury animals. He rushed at the crowd and cut it to pieces." You see, there's a crescendo of destruction. I'll leave Rimbaud, I'll suspend it. Yes, but not finished. But since we're at it, let's carry on a bit. I'll suspend it with a text by Hegel. Look. I've already read this to you often. It's not much more abstract, no doubt, the aspect of the will defined here — imagine Rimbaud's prince — "this absolute possibility of abstracting myself from every determination in which I find myself or in which I have placed myself, this flight from every content as from a restriction," and that to which this will determines itself.
Hegel: negative freedom as a fury of destruction 37:53 "is what representation posits for itself as freedom, and this is thus only negative freedom, or the freedom of the understanding." You saw the negative side. It's the freedom of the void. It can manifest itself — nothing is more devouring than the void. It's the freedom of the void. "It can manifest itself in a real form and become a passion. If it remains merely theoretical, it is the religious fanaticism of pure Hindu contemplation."
38:24 It's the void. Nirvana. It begins with a negation. "If it turns to action..." Well, we were still in contemplation. That's still all right, for others it's all right. "If it turns to action, it is, in politics as in religion, the fanaticism of destruction of all existing social order, and the excommunication of any individual suspected of wanting an order, and the annihilation of any organization attempting to arise."
38:57 "It is only in destroying" — and here one really thinks of Rimbaud's prince — "that this negative will has" — listen carefully — "the feeling of its existence." Not even knowledge. You see? No. The feeling — one feels a bit that one exists. If you've seen M, the famous film, every time he killed children, I think, every time he killed a child, he relaxed. But no, don't look at me as if I were a monster.
39:28 These are myths. Because in the times we live in. So, "it is only in destroying that this negative will has the feeling of its existence." There, that's it. So, I'll still give you the last sentence: "Thus what it believes it wants may be for itself in its own mind" — well — "only an abstract representation, and its realization nothing but a fury of destruction." You see, we're right in it. So, "he rushed at the crowd and cut it to pieces." There's a crescendo, how could one go further?
40:01 "Can one grow ecstatic in cruelty, rejuvenate oneself through destruction?" — implying that public opinion might murmur. "The people did not murmur. No one offered the support of his views." In other words, he doesn't even have — it's a late thing, public opinion, one has to wait for Voltaire, you know, the Calas affair and all that, public opinion starts to bother the powers a bit. "No one offered the support of his views." This destruction can go on like that for a long time.
40:31 "One evening, he was galloping proudly." But we're back in the imperfect. One senses the end is near. "One evening he was galloping proudly. A genie appeared." I had even asked one of you, what gender? A genie. A man, there, it's indeterminate, that's interesting. "A genie appeared, of ineffable, even unavowable beauty" — of a genie's physiognomy — "and from his bearing there emanated the promise of a manifold and complex love, of an unspeakable, even unbearable happiness."
41:01 "The prince and the genie probably annihilated each other in essential health" — the body is somewhere in there, in essential health. "How could he not have died of it?" I think there are those who find this language obscure; it's crystal clear. "How could he not have died of it? Together, then, they died." So, at last a contact that finds the object it's been seeking from the start, but there, one dies. You know that locusts mate, I was about to say make love, mate and die immediately afterward, for instance. Yes, they've done what was needed for the species, they no longer need to exist as individuals.
41:37 "Probably annihilated each other together, so then they died." Full stop. "But this prince was in his palace an ordinary age." — wait, "This prince died in his palace at an ordinary age. The prince was the genie, the genie was the prince." Yes, he had met himself. It was fatal. Full stop. Is that the end of the text? Yes. No, I can't hear. Oh dear, can I die peacefully now? That's good. Rimbaud's texts, this text is magnificent.
42:09 I'm glad we remember it. On the next line, there's a mysterious fall that seems to bear no relation to the rest of the text, but which nails the text shut. So this time, I tell you, it's finished. "Learned music is lacking to our desire." I was once questioned about this. Someone said to me, "but what did he mean by that?" If you remember. I think it was you, Philippe. There. And in answering that question, I had put forward a thesis, and that's why I made this long detour through Rimbaud's tale, because I'm going to quote another Illumination.
42:40 I had said, in my outline, at the end of last time's outline, a few examples that illustrate the antepenultimate, the tenth stage I'm speaking of, which is the moment when absolute knowledge struggles against absolute non-knowledge. And so I'll leave it there for now. In answering that question, "what did he mean by that?", I said that the advantage of learned music — one thinks of Bach, for example, in the classical realm, the emblematic example of learned music, although I should note that in Bach's music, even the most learned pieces, because it's "The Learned Ladies," because he's more or less learned, it's always learned music, but more or less.
43:16 Higher mathematics, that's the Art of Fugue, everything to do with counterpoint, works like that. But still, there's the Brandenburg Concertos, pam-pam-pam-pam-pam-pam-pam, that has the scent of popular dance too. In any case, even in the most learned works, it's written gigue, bourrée, gaillarde, even with popular dances. I mention that in passing. So you can identify the rhythm, just as you identify a salsa, a rock number.
43:46 And the advantage of learned music is that at first it resists, it isn't immediately as accessible as the little ditty — I don't say that pejoratively — songs of a disarming simplicity, which stand at the summit of music, like "À la claire fontaine." Nerval was mad about folk song, you know, we've done all that. But one mustn't forget — Nerval isn't like on television, where something plays and then it's over, now we move on to something else.
44:17 To get to all that, one has to accumulate a little. "The beautiful girl was sitting by the flowing stream," from his collection of Valois songs. And there, learned music, it resists, and so desire, which unconsciously does not want to be satisfied — which is what distinguishes desire from need — someone who is thirsty, well, isn't going to say "I'll take a detour because the water can wait."
44:48 No, no, no, no, if you've ever been thirsty, especially in dry countries, I mean, it's terrible. It's one of the most terrible deaths, death by thirst, whereas death by cold is one of the gentlest. Yes, gentle. Because you become numb — it's Russians who told me this. And when your ankles become as hard as steel, the pains you had, the suffering, hunger, cold, all of that disappears, all of a sudden you have the impression there's a thaw, you're dying. I'm telling you this because it's been described, it's terrible.
45:18 And death by thirst — in the Sahara they've found people who had drunk radiator water, and let's not dwell on the details. So, that's need. It's the most imperious of needs, since as for hunger — with thirst, you know, you can hold out a few days without food, but with thirst, you don't have much time. Desire isn't that. To arrive at creating the notion of a cocktail, you realize what an extraordinary detour that is, and the ice cube, the thing in it, and the frost on the glass.
"Learned music is missing from our desire" 45:52 I have — the frost on the glass. You see, right away there are things exactly like the meal — one doesn't rush at the food and eat it off the ground. No, one sits at the table, one puts down a tablecloth when there are friends over, as they say, etc. One does a little better than usual. It's all these detours that don't calm hunger but, on the contrary, excite it. They satisfy the need less than they satisfy desire. So, learned music belongs to that order. I had answered, but that's not my subject, I remind you.
46:23 That's it. My subject here is what? It's that he ends, Rimbaud, this fundamental poem on the very essence of human desire, illustrated by the prince, whom we all are deep down, in our own way, if we had the means. But he ends it with a cultural value, if I may say so. Learned music is what our desire lacks. And all the better for that, at that moment. Since we've seen that if one is satisfied, that's the moment of death. And there you have it, that tablet desires nothing and no one.
46:54 I'm not saying it's content with what it is, because that would be anthropomorphism. Well, you see, desiring is a privilege. Lacking something is a privilege that neither this nor... What's the other instance that has no lack at all? The stone and... Yes, and God. Good. There are two extremes, that's interesting. Well, God, we wanted it so that nothing was lacking in him.
47:25 That's what Spinoza says, which exasperated church people. While they spent their time proving the existence of God, Spinoza—that's not the question—but they said, no, the God I speak of has nothing to do with fault. You say he's angry because we sinned. Listen, I don't understand. You say he's all-powerful. Yes, he's all-powerful, so he can do whatever he wants. That's what that means. He's eternal. Yes, that means he's existed for an eternity. Yes, so it's been an eternity that he can do whatever he wants. Do you think something is still missing?
47:55 Your thing isn't coherent. Who cares about my sin, that's human nonsense. You see your God as a somewhat more powerful man, like a father a bit annoyed because of his children making noise at the table. Really. That's why in Latin countries, Mediterranean countries, people like the Virgin Mary. She forgives everything, she understands everything, all the girls. The girls love her a lot. She takes everything, she forgives all the time because she understands everything. The other one, the Father, doesn't seem fun. And as for the Son, he was unhappy, we're not going to bother him with our problems.
48:26 You see, there's still the Virgin Mary left. So, he ends with a cultural value. Learned music is what our desire lacks, and all the better, as I told you, desiring proves that something is lacking, unlike those lions. I've already told you once that I saw lions, they were dozing. I've seen quite a few. In sub-Saharan Africa, dozing. But when they're hungry, need wakes up. Watch if the lions aren't hunting, everything's fine.
48:57 As soon as it's satisfied, they go back to sleep. They don't spend their time in lack. Otherwise, they become dangerous. There's an old solitary lion with a thorn in his paw who can no longer hunt gazelle. Then he'd gladly eat a Maasai herder. Less quick than the gazelle. There you go. So I'm taking another poem to always get back to our modernity and to insist on my polarity, which consists of constantly moving from a happiness we didn't know before modernity.
49:31 An ecstasy, a study, isn't it? The Romantics are the first to express—but who, in the order of feeling, I'm summing up what we've seen—but which takes on great intensity in the order of sensation, of impression, at the same moment in painting, isn't that so? with the body in the last part of the 19th century. Look, all of Rimbaud's Illuminations are devoted to this kind of pleasure that had not even been suspected in literature and theory before, isn't that so?
50:01 So I'm taking another text that I read once, which I've cited less often than the tale, it's Movement. Do a few of you remember it? Is it ancient savagery that one forgives? Yes, exactly, thank you. So, well, I wouldn't want anything to be missing from the memory I have of it.
50:34 There we go. That's it, Illuminations. Yes, which—you're lucky to have at the time. Table of contents. But yes, you don't realize what a time-saver that is. At least afterward I can waste time for pleasure listening to music. That's fine. Yes, that's life.
51:05 So, historic evening—well, they're all masterpieces. Morning of Drunkenness. Do you know Morning of Drunkenness? They say it's about hashish. Yes. Well, for several reasons, in my opinion. And at the end, they say, we are all assassins. Actually it's hachichins—hashish-eaters. You know, that was a play on words of the time. Tale, that I just recited, Sentence. So, Movement, well, still, I didn't dream it.
Reading and commentary of Rimbaud's "Mouvement" 51:41 There it is. It's very short. So, I'll read it to you first, without comment. "The zigzag movement on the bank of the river's falls, the chasm at the sternpost, the swiftness of the incline, the enormous sweep of the current lead, through unheard-of lights and chemical novelty, the traveler surrounded by the whirlwinds of the Val and the Strom."
52:12 Don't worry, we'll translate it into plain French. "They are the conquerors of the world seeking personal chemical fortune. Sport and comfort travel with them. They bring the education of races, of classes, and of animals on this ship of rest and vertigo, in diluvian light, on terrible evenings of study. For, from the chatter among the machines, the blood—you see the modernity, machines, blood—the flowers, the fire, the jewels, accounts, accounts with them, accounts, keeping accounts, stirred aboard this fleeing vessel, one sees, rolling like a dike beyond the motive hydraulic road, monstrous, endlessly lighting up their stock of study.
53:00 They, driven into harmonic ecstasy and the heroism of discovery. I'll stop the poem there, there's a fall after that, only three lines remain. But I'm following this at that point in order to go back a little. The zigzag movement on the bank of the river's falls—clearly, Rimbaud was roaming, he wandered quite a bit between Belgium and Paris, via the Ardennes where he was from, as you know. And so, that's one of the regions that was starting to become an industrial hub in Europe; he often came across factories, because somewhere he said, at night I saw them anyway, blazing like a billion thunderbolts.
53:38 You see? Uh... And there, clearly, he's by the riverbank and he sees—the word is actually there, I'm not interpreting—the word, hydraulic wheel. There's a dam, a power plant. So, I'm telling you, because there are words that are less known now, he talks about the chasm at the sternpost. What is the sternpost? It's the invention of the rudder at the sternpost during the Renaissance. Actually, these are locks, built that way to let the water pass. So he does indicate that he's somewhere in an ultra-modern context for the time, technological, a bit like passing in front of a nuclear power plant now, something like that, the equivalent.
54:15 And so, the zigzag movement on the bank of the river's falls, the chasm at the sternpost, the swiftness, you see, the great speed of the incline, the enormous sweep of the current, all that is the subject group, grammatically, lead—there's the verb, lead—through unheard-of lights and chemical novelty, the travelers surrounded by whirlwinds of the Val and the Strom. Strom means current in German, it's stream in English, quite simply, it's the same word, Strom, Wester, or L, since he's from the Ardennes, there are often Germanic words; I have a word, he talks about the Wasserfall in Dawn, which means waterfall.
54:55 So, you see, there's an ecstasy of modernity, quite the opposite of today's degrowth and ecology, exactly the reverse; it's an illumination, not because of the beauty of a natural landscape here, but through a vision of the future. Moreover, he says elsewhere, in A Season in Hell, I created, beyond bands of rare music, I created the ghosts of future nocturnal luxury. I think of airports, now, with security, Vigipirate anyway.
55:25 They are the conquerors of the world, and here he's talking about the people inside, in the factory as he imagines it, the scientists, the engineers—they are the conquerors of the world seeking personal chemical fortune. Sport and comfort travel with them. It's something pathetic, because this vagabond, one imagines, must have had ragged trousers, on the roads, and must have been starving, isn't that so? He imagines sport and comfort—sport was all new, the word itself is English, it was power, it was America of the time, Victorian England, you see?
55:57 All that connotes another world. That's why in this text, he's never "I"—there's the narrator speaking there, and then there's "they, they, they, they," those—the engineers. You'll see. That's why I chose to stop first, now I comment. They are the conquerors of the world seeking personal chemical fortune, sport and comfort travel with them, they bring the education of races, of classes, and of animals on this ship, rest and vertigo. So, I'll hypothesize that it's...
56:30 this ship, they bring the education of races, of classes, and of animals on a boat—doesn't that remind you of something. Noah's Ark. Thank you, Noah's Ark. But you'll tell me, you don't like interpretations. Even when it's obvious, there, I check intertextually and what does he say? In diluvian light, that means in the light of the flood, in diluvian light on the terrible evening of study. For, and there's this magnificent crescendo of the chatter among the machines, the blood, the flowers, the fire, the jewels, accounts stirred aboard this fleeing vessel, calculations, that is.
57:03 One sees, rolling like a dike beyond the motive hydraulic road, monstrous, endlessly lighting up their stock of study. They, you see, they, driven into harmonic ecstasy and the heroism of discovery. You'd think he's talking about space conquest, almost, you see. And now, I'll tell you the ending, before which I'd suspended my recitation. To the most surprising atmospheric accidents, a rain, a storm, a clearing, to the most surprising atmospheric accidents, a young couple—well, there, we're no longer in modernity, that has existed forever—a young couple withdraws onto the ark.
57:43 I believe, a footbridge, imagine, a canal crossing a canal, that's nothing. Belgium, that applies to us, and in Holland there's even more. A young couple withdraws onto the ark, isolated—is it ancient savagery that one forgives? She sings and stays there, full stop, you see—but he's asking the question, in other words, is there still room for love, love, which has always existed between a man and a woman, whoever, between two people who love each other—is there still room for that in this world of calculation, of equations, of jewels, of the dam, you see, that's interesting.
58:24 Well, you see, he holds together the griffin and the crane. He made the crane descend from the sky, the griffin from the sea, all that. It's so beautiful. There. Modernity is that, this alternation of ecstasy—he says it himself, they, driven into ecstasy, heroism, discovery—and anguish. And there, I move on, you see, to a completely different text. I had handed them out to you, but I won't do you the trick of coming—don't forget to bring them back next time, because from one month to the next, I mean, I haven't had time to comment on them and I'll comment on them today, though I'm not sure you have them with you, but it's very short, don't worry.
The interlude from the Bastille to Waterloo and the passion for escape 59:06 So this was written well before Rimbaud, written at the very beginning of the 19th century, in Napoleon's time, mind you—it's not even yet the world we live in, and even less the old world, the old regime; it's that famous interlude I often allude to, an incredible interlude, when nothing was yet decided. The one between the storming of the Bastille and Waterloo. Yes, I go as far as Waterloo—you could say, I'm not imposing anything—you could just as well say from the storming of the Bastille to Bonaparte's seizure of power, but by the time Bonaparte takes power, the revolution has already long been betrayed, as you well know, by the Thermidorians and the Directory. And he, he's not at all a Robespierre, but his adversaries feared in him the progress of the French Revolution, which he was advancing with an intelligence that only a De Gaulle would later have.
1:00:05 I keep repeating that I voted against De Gaulle every time, throughout the whole period he was in power. So I can nevertheless expand on what the Communist Party called at the time the positive aspects of the General's foreign policy. The Phnom Penh speech, Vietnam, etc., the refusal of Britain into the Common Market with the Commonwealth, which is bad news for New Zealand sheep and French farmers. And all that, and above all, asking the United States to convert France's dollar holdings into gold. There, he signed his own death warrant—they gave him May '68 two years later.
1:00:36 The intelligence which is common to Napoleon—because there's a Bonapartist side to De Gaulle and vice versa, if you like—is the intelligence of these men of the right who know how far one must not go back. Napoleon keeps the blue-white-red flag, whereas the Comte de Chambord, for those who know a bit of their history, at the end of the 19th century, tries to bring back the fleur-de-lis flag in 1880. And fortunately, moreover, that he had that requirement, because the Assembly, voted—well, it was a bit much anyway.
1:01:09 The Assembly was already full of Mitterrands, of Giscards, to please the left—that is, people who are on the right but want to appear left-wing anyway. The fleur-de-lis flag was the case. Marine Le Pen understood that. Her father, the fleur-de-lis flag, that was Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet church, that was the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She's more collectivist than me, you can't beat it. It's almost the red flag. There, all right, let's leave the red-browns alone. Yes?
1:01:39 She's not yellow. Who's not yellow? She's not yellow. There, there, no, I don't want to exaggerate either. So, my point is that I insist on this parallel—this intermediate period between the old and the new regime, between the storming of the Bastille and, well, when I say Waterloo, it's a metonymy, meaning, up to today, Anglo-Saxon domination over the world. These are historical judgments of existence, not value judgments. Maybe it's good—I'm not acting as prosecutor here.
1:02:12 He must play the prosecutor and the inquisitors and inquisitresses. Uh... And so, we're in that period, but far from the revolution, in German Romanticism, in the darkness. And I told you earlier, the more consciousness approaches absolute knowledge, the more the force of absolute non-knowledge grows. But that's Pagani talking, I'm telling you, be careful, well, check it.
1:02:43 Because, for now, this force is a... I'm not saying it's a metaphor. So, uh... Now, in order to negate modernity, as I've indicated, it's at that moment that a passion appears that will ravage the whole century—ravage it, for better and for worse; it left masterpieces in literature—it's escape. You know, I pointed out to you that it's from Romanticism onward that escape becomes systematic.
1:03:14 You see, this poem by Baudelaire called, in the prose poems, One Must Always Be Drunk, that says it all. The problem is being always drunk, never being here and now, there, with a real problem, but always being a bit... But on what? He says, very cleverly, on wine, on vice, or on virtue as you like—the point is to be drunk. And in another poem, whose title is in English, in homage to Edgar Poe, who was one of his mentors, Anywhere out of the World, anywhere, as long as it's out of the world.
1:03:45 You see, this mania for escape. And I'll finish with Rimbaud, who in A Season in Hell, speaking of himself, in an extraordinary self-portrait done through another person—that is, he had lived as a couple with Verlaine at one point, and it ended badly, hence Verlaine's revolver, A Season in Hell was written during that crisis. And in it, he does his own portrait as seen by Verlaine. He imagines Verlaine painting his portrait. He's harsh with him. Well, and he has Verlaine say of him, I never understood this rage he always put into wanting to escape.
1:04:21 You see, it's really a key term of the era. Now that begins with the generation, yes, of Napoleon. Napoleon, who had a sense of reality. A great conqueror is not someone who charges onto the bridge at Arcole as the painting shows—it's magnificent. But no, he's someone who says, bring me a shoe size, what I see. He's someone who thinks about those real things. When you think about your soldiers' shoes, you've already won the battle.
1:04:55 Well, even that one, who was quite the realist, when he set off on the Egyptian campaign, do you know what was in his luggage? Goethe's Werther, the poems of Ossian, Chateaubriand's René, everything that was escape into autumnal melancholy—it's extraordinary, all the same, as an era. You see? I'm not even talking about the Romantic musicians, but Chopin develops a genre he didn't create—it's a little-known Irishman named Field, sorry, who invented it—the Nocturne.
1:05:29 The Nocturne is a way of leaving the real world—the day when one is grappling with a responsibility—for the world of night, of dream, and of Nocturne. Time is suspended, tempo sospeso. Well, between the two, there's a period when it's not yet settled, before the properly Romantic period when escape runs rampant. There's that moment, which, in music, would correspond to Beethoven. If you look closely, in Beethoven, there are slow movements that are among the most beautiful escapes ever made, but they never end there. They always end on a triumphant, collective song, including the Ode to Joy which has, alas, become the anthem of Brussels.
1:06:04 That's because Beethoven must be turning in his grave, and he was a great admirer of the French Revolution, against which the European Union was made. It's the emblematic example of that triumphant song, a liberated collectivity that can finally give itself over to joy, like Saint-Just who said happiness is a new idea in Europe. So this text was written at that time. But wait, you're talking about happiness, we're not there. There, we're in Germany. It's an excerpt... So, I can't tell you the author.
The Nights of Bonaventura: pure negativity 1:06:36 I'm not keeping any secrets from you. It's that they're still debating now to determine who is the author of the most extreme text from the standpoint of German Romantic thought. It's a literary text with a fiction. It's a night watchman who is supposed to keep his diary, his journal. His nocturnal, one should say. Every night he writes, he's a night watchman. At the time, the night watchman was someone who walked through the streets and blew a horn like this to mark the hours. You see? I'm telling you this because it's an important character in opera and in tales.
1:07:07 The only one who keeps watch when the others sleep is the owl. You know that the owl of philosophy is the owl of Minerva. I don't know. So, and at the end, the reference he gives, his work, the only one he published, is called The Watches, in the plural, The Watches of Bonaventura. That's his pseudonym. Up to now, we wonder who it is. Some say it might even be Schelling, Hegel's companion.
1:07:38 Still, you see, I made the hypothesis that it was Hegel. The most likely now—with him, that makes 50 years I've been thinking about it. I'm not a specialist. There are people who study only that. The Bonaventura dossier. But, from everything I've been able to learn, I think it's Jean-Paul. But why under a pseudonym, when Jean-Paul says the same things in his other works? Jean-Paul, the novelist, the most widely read at the time, now completely forgotten, especially in Germany. So, full of humor, him. And here, it's burlesque, it's grotesque, and it's terrible at the same time.
1:08:12 But I mention it for the modernity of the text. Because even Kafka's anguish, much later, doesn't go as far as... Look, enough commentary. Here is the conclusion of one of his watches. Behind the mask and its amorous glances, the death's head is never lacking. You see, the revelation of absolute knowledge is that death lies behind it all. You'll tell me, the ancients knew that. Wait. And life is only life, it is only the tinkling fool's-bauble. Tinkling, you know, the bauble is the fool's cap at court, with little bells.
1:08:46 So, the tinkling bauble. Bells, that's tintinnabulum. Yes, yes. And life is only the tinkling bauble that Nothingness—with a capital N—dons, to amuse itself with its little bells before tearing it savagely apart. That recalls a bit The Prince of Homburg. And to finish, the throw into the distance. All is nothing and swallows itself up. Look at this sentence, it's incredible. That's where I thought of Hegel. All is nothing and swallows itself up, choking on devouring itself too fast, gluttonously.
1:09:21 So wait, what subject, is it nothing? So wait, everything is nothing, and understood implicitly, and this nothing swallows itself up, so now I repeat the sentence, itself while suffocating itself, swallowing itself too fast with gluttony. This is exactly what Hegel calls negativity. Pure negativity. It hasn't yet invested itself in something you're listening to. Worse still follows. There's not going to be anything worse.
1:09:51 Yes, you'll see, everything is nothing and swallows itself up while suffocating itself, gulping itself down too fast with gluttony. And even this self-devouring is nothing but a treacherous illusion, a mirror duel, as if there were something. Implicitly, there is nothing. For if ever indeed the eager haste to swallow itself wanted to pause for an instant, if I stop desiring the book, nothingness would immediately manifest itself so significantly that you would be seized with terror.
1:10:32 Madmen hear and see eternity behind this interruption. But it is properly nothing but nothingness and absolute death. 1802, tell us. I'm telling you there's a break, texts like that were unthinkable. We know there were reflections on death, that is, especially in Antiquity where afterlife wasn't thought of, of course. There were consolations, a wisdom, one had to come to terms with it. But here, it's not that, it's not death at the end of life, it's death immanent to every instant of life.
1:11:05 It's not. In other words, there's no longer the distinction I so often make between someone and something. There's nothing, there's no one. So, you see, let me give you a Rimbaud poem, ecstasy, movement, they chased, ecstasy, discovery, the jewels, Noah's ark, and this polarity which I couldn't address last time and use to illustrate what I call the penultimate stage of consciousness, the second-to-last, before, I don't know, understanding that salvation lies only in the relation to the other consciousness, to the other subject, to intersubjectivity.
No solitary salvation, and the crisis that repeats itself 1:11:49 I don't know, but I don't like that term because it invites confusion. In any case, I know there is no solitary salvation from this modern anguish, this anguish that makes Pascal say as early as the 17th century, the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me, were it not for human society and diversion, Pascal's term, where I can divert myself, go to court, dance, etc. That's it, Pascal takes these examples. And he doesn't say it's wrong. He asks, what is there?
1:12:19 Coronavirus? Not really, I didn't have time to see, it was a flash. What did he say? Actually, he caught it. He could have caught it. What, really? He knows someone, I think he was pleased about it, something like that. Him himself? Yes, I think so. Wow, you know a lot of things? I know Bolsonaro said it, he's a flash. So what do I say? Thanks. There you go, there are famous examples. I took Rimbaud, two texts. Why?
1:12:49 Because, I mean, he wrote A Season in Hell, which I ask you to reread. It's not long. What is it, about ten pages? At least he knows that much. It's on Wikisource or something. It's dense. It's a text where he really descends into the greatest suffering, psychic suffering. But he says in it this admirable phrase, the spiritual combat is as brutal as the battle of men. It's a kid speaking. The spiritual combat is as brutal as the battle of men.
1:13:20 Hard night, dried blood smokes on my brow and I have nothing behind me but this horrible shrub. That's what my life has become. It's a bout of depression. Trellis, the shrub. And then he says in it, here I emphasize what will illustrate collective salvation, well, it's not collective, I who once called myself mage or angel, I don't know, that came with Romanticism, I am brought down to earth with the rough reality to embrace, sorry, I who once called myself mage or angel, exempt from all morality, here I am brought down to earth with rough reality to embrace and a duty to seek.
1:14:00 Comma. Peasant! Exclamation point. Speak to him, it's nice. This crisis will repeat itself. And that's why I'm talking about it. And I'm going to end on this structure of repetition. Down to us. Down to the coronavirus crisis. No, no, but I'm not joking. Which conceals the real crisis which wasn't called coronavirus, but capitalism. In China, it's a much more complex problem, managing 1.4 billion inhabitants, and where it appeared with violence at first, I believe, because of a badly cooked pangolin.
1:14:34 That's a more likely hypothesis, it's practically over. The problem isn't the coronavirus. The problem is saying that capitalism, in fact, breeds crisis and secretes it, isn't it, to borrow a famous quote, like the cloud covers, like lightning, right. It's always the same crisis starting over again. See the repetition, that of the 1930s. That of the 1930s, we could only overcome it because we made 50 million dead. Right? We were able to set things back later.
1:15:05 You see? No, but I'm serious. And it comes back as early as the 1960s. Special drawing rights, the collapse of the dollar, you have to inform yourselves. That's the moment when finally, you must say, because of the Vietnam war, your dollar is paper, it's a check without cover, give me gold. Like Gaddafi. They don't live long after that. They cross a threshold. And then, it was over.
1:15:36 And then, at the 2008 crisis, at the time, people said, capitalism, that's it, it has definitively defeated all other systems. You know, Fukuyama. Well, history is over. Liberal bourgeoisie is the ideal figure that resolves all preceding contradictions. It's a caricature of Hegel. As if there were no more negativity. And they are negative. It's nothing much. And then, crash! The subprimes, damn it! And then, the crisis, we can't say where it came from. Oh yes, the crisis is because you consume, you spend.
1:16:08 It's the French state, the welfare state, social security, pensions, and so on. No, it comes on the contrary from Wall Street. It comes from where the state, where the social state — because the military state is powerful — where the social state is least present. To the point that they say Bernie is a dangerous revolutionary socialist. There's worse than Bernie in the United States. He has a lot of courage, but well, I'll say.
1:16:39 Did they say to themselves this morning that stock market prices timidly rose? Today they said pale green. They're no longer in the red. It's pale pink. But for the United States, I refer, I do a lot there. Over there, where as soon as a girl was raped, they'd lynch 10 Black men right away. Over there, not so long ago. That's how it is. There. So I'm going to end there with this repetition. It's the same crisis. And here, one shouldn't say that capitalism is in crisis.
1:17:11 Because that confirms it. In fact, it works very well, capitalism. It functions admirably. Except that this bastard virus came to mess everything up for you. As for the missions, that's what there is on that. Now I leave you as prey to this virus. And once again, I'm very serious. I feel sorry for those who are victims of it. Those who are victims aren't you, it's more people my age. If that can reassure you at least. I know Pauline isn't quite in agreement. Good, good, that I'm being generous. There you go.
1:17:41 I'll say this. It hides a real one. There's a displacement in the Freudian sense. We don't know what a displacement is. There's a real one. There's a crisis, but it's not that one. There you go. I waited 75 years to see the biggest plunge in the history of the Paris stock exchange. Well, all the same. It's still extraordinary. No, no, you know, that was the day before yesterday. The biggest plunge was Thursday, the day before yesterday, yesterday, the biggest plunge, 12% in one day, that means even in the 1930s, it never did that. And at Wall Street, same thing, all records broken.
"Harmonic ecstasy" and the tension of opposites 1:18:12 There you go. We'll leave it on that note of hope. Thank you all. Enjoy your meal. Any questions? Any more questions? Yes, yes, no, no, but I can say... I'm done. I can eat. Oh no. The slip. Yes, yes, no, but I... I'm at odds with this clock. I always think I've gone over time.
1:18:43 I'm delighted to go into overtime. I'm not that hungry. Yes. I knew you were going to ask a question. I could see it in your glasses. I saw the eyes behind the glasses shining. Gladly. Yes, first, about the expression 'harmonic ecstasy' in the poem. Ah, I'm glad you picked up on that. Yes?
1:19:13 It's really strange, I find, actually. Because I find nothing harmonic in this poem. It's pure rhythm. Rhythm? What he describes isn't harmonic at all. Did you say rhythm? Yes. And what he describes, there's no harmony in it at all. Because, where is the harmonic ecstasy? Well, where's the harmony, you mean? Yes. Good, that's good, you're distinguishing harmony, rhythm and melody, right? That's all we need.
1:19:43 Harmony, between us, isn't a judgment of existence, it's a value judgment. Or else, we need to agree — in physics, it exists, we speak of harmonics, nodes, antinodes, periodic functions, if you insist. But in music, I mean, a chord that was dissonant in one era is perfectly acceptable in another. Take blues chords, they're completely wrong by classical harmony. Because in the blues chord that we owe to African Americans, the music of the 20th century, the most modern, the one that inspired the most contemporary genres, let's say, to give it a broad extension, I include genres as different as jazz, rock, for now, I mean, which wouldn't have existed without the blues — we owe it to the most exploited part of humanity.
1:20:33 People who arrived in chains and crossed the Atlantic, it's quite an extraordinary dialectic. And it's this music that freed the music of the modern world. Now you have in it, at the same time, I don't want to get too technical, major and minor together, which is dissonant in classical harmony. Play an E-flat and an E on a piano, people will say you're playing wrong. That's what anyone does, so, there you go, I presume Rimbaud meant that even in this chaos, you're right to say there's everything but harmony, it seems everything moves in it, everything is out of sync, as we'd say today.
1:21:11 That's what you're feeling a bit, the gulf at the sternpost, the passing of the surf, the fleeing shores, and despite all that, there's a harmony floating over all this. But the more dissonances there are, the more the harmony that arrives is sublated, it's very Hegelian. That's what I'm in the process of saying, isn't it? Spirit conquers, I quote Hegel, spirit conquers its truth only on condition of finding itself again in absolute laceration. You see? Okay, but actually, ok, it's not a judgment of fact, I understand, but actually, harmony, for instance, for there to be harmony, there needs to be, one way or another, opposites that work well together, something like that.
1:21:53 I don't know if I'm making myself understood. But here, there isn't. You know music well, do you? Yes, that's it. But here, there isn't. It only goes one way. Well, still, at the end, there's the ancient savagery which is the opposite of technological modernity. That's precisely the tension in this text that makes it admirable, I find. It's just at the end that suddenly there arises, and above all this question, I didn't dwell too much on it, is it ancient savagery that one forgives, as if love between two beings who love each other were almost badly received, it was a bit, one might say, not clean today.
1:22:27 You see in all that, in everything that's all smooth, you've seen, we say it's spatial. I go back to it again. It's admirable, I love this film, but then, it's as if they polished the space station every morning, as if there were 500 invisible slaves, right, you see the difference with Solaris, in Solaris the rocket is dirty. It's Soviet, they have coarse sweaters, the cosmonauts, whereas the others, blue-eyed like that. It's a response to 2001, sorry, since we're talking about harmonics and opposites, Solaris is a response to 2001.
1:23:03 So it seems, so it seems, I learned that on the job. Yes, it's not bad. So there you go, thank you for the very interesting questions. I'd be delighted to discuss it, musically, but there's a tension, in my opinion, in — let's follow the metaphor, since you have a musical ear, you'll understand, hear what I'm saying — there's a tension between a kind of ancient savagery, almost timeless, close to nature, essential, wild savagery, it's still the forest, the jungle, that we forgive, and at the same time, what is most current, most modern, at the cutting edge of technology.
1:23:45 So this tension makes me think of the very first musical instrument in history, one of the first — you know, ethnomusicologists have worked on the musical bow, which pygmies still use, for example, you see, I mean, that hunters, as early as the Neolithic, saw clearly that when the bow, when the arrow leaves, it makes a sound, like that, and now you still see shepherds, I've seen this, with a string, with the bow, like that, between their teeth, making melodies for themselves, the musical bow, it dates back a long way.
1:24:17 So this tension between two extremes, you're quite right to say that harmony presupposes — you said the union of opposites, that's it — presupposes indeed what Heraclitus, who is the first to have understood dialectic, not as the method for knowing truth or reality, that's more in Plato, but not as the path leading to truth, it's truth itself that is dialectical, that is contradictory, when he says a phrase all ecologists should meditate on: the bow is named life and its effect is death.
Inner repression and the ideal self: the example of Wagner 1:24:56 The bow is called life and produces death. Great, there you go. Yes, thank you. You said at one point that, basically, the closer we get to absolute knowledge of truth and life — we come back to the center — the stronger the resistance. Yes, that's it, repression, resistance, denial. But then, I wonder, is there really this greater intensity, because, in any case, in the representation of history, in eras when, precisely, faith was very strong, there was still strong resistance to scientific discoveries, maybe not, but then...
1:25:40 religion, the Galileo trial, for example. Yes, there's still an intensity too in the reaction and the... in the reaction and the... the conservatism. Yes, but the Church, a very good example, opposes the scientists, Galileo. Positive religion, let's speak in philosophical terms, is the official religion, the one posed before me, not natural religion. Positive religion opposes someone who threatens it.
1:26:15 The discourse is supposed to threaten it, he never thought of threatening religion, poor Galileo. Whereas for me, it's inside myself that I repress. It's me who is the enemy, it's within me, you understand, the difference lies there in modernity. It's when I realize that it's me who's cheating, it's me who is... So, if we want to stay with Freudian metaphors, I use Freud pedagogically, because it's more complicated to see it at the social level, to conclude with this — still, Freud speaks of the importance for each of us in our formation of the ego ideal, the ideal ego, sorry, the ideal I.
1:26:51 each of us has forged, and Lacan will develop this side enormously, on an imaginary model — this is what I would like to be, from earliest childhood, which is often the father, you can guess, or whoever stands in for him, no matter, the idol, whatever, depending on biographies. I mention adoptive father, a small parenthesis, since I mention adoptive father, father, to show that it's not the father in the natural sense only — I'm thinking of Wagner, you know, who has hardly any Nazi themes in his discourse, except antisemitism at a pathological level, which is very common, widespread in France and in Germany at the time, but which takes on in him a virulence that mostly erupted, to be fair, in Paris, during his Parisian stay, I'm telling you this for those who don't know the file, and here I'm answering Louis 25 who isn't here, I don't know, but who had asked me this question about the Nietzsche-Wagner relations, it's an enormous file, I hope that if I put even a thousandth of it in writing before I die, I'll have done a lot already, but let me at least touch
1:28:02 on this aspect — Nietzsche later ironized quite a bit about this, and he wasn't wrong, saying that Wagner, who calls himself the German par excellence and constantly opposes Germany to France and so on, found his way in Paris. When he was in exile, you know he took up arms on the barricades, you don't know this, in '48, he had to flee hastily, he was sentenced to death, and fortunately Liszt, the providential Liszt whom he knew, virtuoso pianist, idol of the crowds, gave recitals to raise money for him — Liszt, who wasn't yet his father-in-law, far from it, at that time — found him a passport so he could get out of there, that's how he stayed alive, mind you, he was in exile, he frequented Bakunin in the circles, in the poorest slums of Paris.
1:28:50 Bakunin had one of the first readings of Parsifal, Bakunin left impatiently saying that Jesus should have been portrayed as a coward, well, we didn't know him. And this Wagner wasn't yet — he had, I'll say, a 'normal' antisemitism, it's awful what I'm saying, but I mean statistically the most widespread at the time. There wasn't anything more widespread than anti-Jewish jokes, especially in Germany, I mean, in Germany, where there were Jewish ghettos, where there were — unfortunately they were decimated — Jewish ghettos in the districts of the big cities, even more than here, and let's not even talk about Poland, etc.
1:29:27 Well, so this Wagner wasn't yet really — he didn't at all have virulent antisemitism, and it didn't occupy a central place in his theoretical discourse, except that he wanted to make a career in Paris, because otherwise, if you weren't performed at the Paris Opera, that is, at the Italiens — you know it's Boulevard des Italiens, the Opera comes from there, Boulevard des Italiens, because it was the Italian Opera that reigned supreme, it's a metonymy, people didn't say 'go to the Opera,' they said 'go to the Italiens' — which reigned socially, at the level, a bit like a movie producer today who raises this one up, brings that one down, you see, total power, both money and glory, was Meyerbeer, a Jew, who reigned over Parisian music at that time, all right, and who somewhat blocked Wagner — well, then he became a virulent antisemite, you see what I mean, because he was preventing him from becoming fully Parisian, extraordinary story, and it's not over — he has an adoptive father, Wagner never knew his real father, who was a minor police official, an antisemite from Leipzig,
1:30:37 he was raised by a Jewish stepfather, Geyer, G-E-Y-E-R — why do I say his name? Because in German it means vulture, you see the vulture's beak, it's the imagery used to represent the Jew in antisemitic caricatures, and I'm telling you this because otherwise there are allusions Nietzsche makes that you won't understand, that French Nietzscheans understand even less — when one can't be an Adler, one can always try to be a Geyer, Adler being 'eagle' in German — when one can't be an eagle, one can always try to be a vulture — which suggests that Wagner is his adoptive father's son, you see?
1:31:18 And it's true that the adoptive father always adored Richard, and that Richard held an enormous admiration for him throughout his childhood and youth, some have even said it was a claim of paternity — there you go, imagine, if one of the greatest antisemites in history loses himself there, it's quite extraordinary — that's to tell you, when I say the ideal ego is built on an image one has of the father, I'm not talking about reality, right? So, when this image, which constitutes our identity, what is most intimate, the unity of our personality, is pumped from the outset by an otherness — if you want to know more, read The Purloined Letter, Lacan's seminar, it's a bit convoluted, it's Lacan, but well, if you get a quarter out of it, it's for this problem of imaginary identification — my personality, I'll sum it up for you, the essential point, is made by an other and for an other, it is alienated
1:32:28 from the start — do you remember what we said, we always have to start from there, that the human infant, now I'm generalizing, every newborn of the human species is unfinished — that's a medical issue, physiologists know it, not physically finished, for reasons going back to the transition from quadrupedalism to bipedalism which caused an obstetric catastrophe, if you will, the bones of the female pelvis narrowed, birth became difficult, which religion bears witness to when it says, you shall give birth in pain — I've often given the example, look at the time each of us takes to stand on our own legs, whereas the gazelle in the savanna, right, it's a matter of a few hours, or a day or two, to flee from danger with the rest of the herd — so what I'm getting at is that this distress, this lack, this minus — you remember what I said about Marx's surplus value which comes from a minus, from unpaid labor — you remember the myth of Prometheus, it's because man was deprived, he has no claws, no scales, etc., that he needed the supernature of the gods' fire, it's not thought or reason for labor,
1:33:38 of technology, because fire is also used to forge metals, don't have too intellectualist a view of fire, it's not only the Age of Enlightenment, but that too — it's because there was a lack at the start, it's because man wasn't like the animal, fully formed from birth, whether for making burrows, like the badger, it has claws, like that — but there you go, I say this because now, man, he hasn't invented anything, the firefly invented the LED lamp, well yes, you'd say that all the time, but no, well, except that man, precisely, produces all that because he has none of that at birth, precisely, the flying animal, well, is a specialist in generality — there you go, I insist a lot on this side, the fact that because we are disadvantaged at birth, the relation to the other has become primary as in no other animal species — you only have to see how the baby is absorbed by its mother who sings something to it, you see, how it tries to articulate something, you see its gaze, the mother, the nurse — again, here it's not, I'm not talking about heredity, I'm talking about inheritance, so this unification
1:34:49 of the human being, who is not unified at birth, who is unfinished, who is unbestimmt — I'm forced to say it in German — undetermined, who is not finished and who is completed by an other and for an other — there you go, any other questions, maybe we're around that, Romain, I have a question, I can't remember which philosopher spoke of a 'supplement of soul.' Bergson, that's it, so the body has become too big, so the body is the extensions, the tools, technology has become too big, so, my impression, listening to you, I'm elaborating a bit on what you just said — for those who don't know, Bergson, one of the greatest spiritualist philosophers, as they say, I don't know, anti-materialist, adored by the right, by reactionaries, he's worth more than that — I recall that under the Pétain regime, they wanted to award him honors, him who was Jewish, a power unworthy of its own principles, as Merleau-Ponty magnificently puts it in In Praise of Philosophy,
Bergson, the supplement of soul, and Büchner's Lenz 1:36:00 and Bergson refused, to remain faithful, and said, to those who will be persecuted tomorrow — a great figure, who renews the Socratic gesture, I said this to pay homage to him — but it's true that he's a philosopher whose whole trajectory led him to this spiritualist thinking, anti-scientific, anti-progress — you know this better than me now, and other generations do too — anti-technological, anti-body, anti-materialist, right, to the point that he was on the verge of converting to Catholicism, and he held back, it's said, I want to remain faithful to those who will be persecuted tomorrow — great figure, there you go, I give you the floor back, sorry.
1:36:41 So, the impression I have, but it's a poor understanding, is that, in trying so hard to find the soul that's missing from this whole body, this body that's grown too big — I think I'm saying it lacks a soul, and that his thought was offered as a supplement of soul. That's it — is it, in some way, that reaction, that will not to see, that going backward, that denial, yes. That's it, but it's also a way of finding, rather in our history, that soul we're desperately looking for, that we can't find anywhere.
1:37:18 of course, but you can find it again through the body. There are people who, in the anguish of being nothing — the terrifying text I read you — in order to feel something, need, even if it's pain, anything, as long as they feel they exist. I say that because there's a text — who recently acquired the German Romantics, it's the version of... who asked me for Armel Guerne's translation? Wasn't it one of you?
1:37:51 Well, anyway, by far the best anthology is Armel Guerne's. You look it up, you type in "Les Romantiques allemands anthologie, Armel," that's enough, you'll find it right away. It's on e-book, I mean you get the whole text — it's an anthology, but it's a treasure, it's an admirable translation. There's a very short text by Büchner, who died at 27, a good German romantic, one of the rare ones who wasn't reactionary but counter-revolutionary — no, very progressive — who wrote Danton's Death, for the theatre, which was performed by Gérard Philipe.
1:38:27 And by the way, Büchner, who inspired Alban Berg of the Second Viennese School, a disciple of Schoenberg, in one of the most beautiful operas of all modernity, called Wozzeck — the misfortunes of the ordinary little soldier, little private Wozzeck. Anyway, Büchner wrote a clinical document, the story of someone sliding first into depression, then into a madness for which he's locked up. It's called Lenz, after the character who actually existed. L-E-N-Z. Read that novella. At one point he throws himself into the Swiss high mountains, he's gone to take refuge with someone who does him good, a kind of hermit.
1:39:04 He throws himself into the icy fountain at night, at 3000 meters altitude, to feel something. He tears himself on nails, rubs himself against nails to feel his body. So you see, the need for soul can go through bodily sensation. That's interesting. It's very typical of a certain modernity. Think of Artaud, Artaud's relationship to the body, which is both pleasure-seeking and masochistic at the same time. It's like that in Lenz too, isn't it? It's like that in Lenz too.
"Ancient savagery" and the poetry of industry 1:39:35 Absolutely. Absolutely, exactly. Absolutely. So, good reference. Especially when Rimbaud says "essential savagery that is forgiven," it's as if we were ready for this spirit to be as savage, as destructive as possible, provided it's something gratuitous, of the order of... There, I'm not sure I agree with you. I'm not sure that "savage" in that text, "essential savagery that is forgiven," I'm not sure it alludes to savagery in the sense of destruction.
1:40:14 The savages who massacre the poor cowboys. No. The Indians, who are behind the reds — they were the ones exterminated, but in the films, it's they who do the massacring. A savage is someone who flees ["se sauve"]. He has good reasons to flee when he sees us landing. No, I think "savage" here means someone who still clings too much to pleasures and desires that owe nothing to science, to progress, to the modern world. So, do we tolerate them anyway?
1:40:45 Do we forgive them? You can stay there. Yes, that's it. It's extraordinary. I think it's savage in that sense, in the truly primitive sense. Not in the sense of cruel — on the contrary, otherwise they wouldn't be asking to be tolerated. It's ironic all the same, that we forgive them. I'm not sure it's ironic. It's not half ironic. Oh yes, half, I'll grant you that. No, no, but then it becomes ambivalent.
1:41:16 No, no, I'm not saying that ironically. I mean, it's true there's a... Rimbaud is very often ironic, even sardonic, meaning ironic in a nasty way. I mean, all those authors who, with their one-eyed intelligence, as he says, proclaim themselves the authors of their work. For him, one is never the author of one's own work. Do you know that one? "If brass wakes up a bugle, it's none of its fault." He writes that at 17 to his literature teacher.
1:41:47 You have to hand it to him, in a literature lesson. If the brass, the matter, wakes up a bugle, takes on a well-defined shape, it's not its doing, the brass. I am the author. There. I try a sentence, boom, off it goes. That's how it is. It speaks. It's not me speaking. It speaks through me. So yes, there he's very ironic, sordid, even violent. Verlaine — when he does his portrait through Verlaine's mouth, he goes so far as to say, he goes so far as to make Verlaine say "it was awful"
1:42:22 as a sentence. It couldn't have been sad, it couldn't have been cheerful every day for poor Verlaine, who was a gentle, kind boy, who was love itself. "I lived in his soul as in a palace that had been emptied out so as not to see someone as disgusting as you." You see, it's a terrible sentence. "I lived in his soul as in a palace that had been emptied out so as not to see someone as disgusting as you." So, that's himself — Verlaine.
1:42:54 It goes without saying that he's hard on himself too. Yes, yes. Yes, and still, I can't quite understand, because then, this ancient savagery, it's a kind of, how to put it, a kind of innocence. Yes, yes, yes. And in that case, it's a bit... It means that somehow, this earthly paradise we try to build on Earth thanks to science and technology comes back a bit to the paradise of origins, the paradise of Adam and Eve, yes, to innocence.
1:43:27 That's a bit what the environmentalists say. From before the fall. Sorry? That's a bit what the environmentalists say, that in the end it distracts us from the essential. Ah yes, yes, yes. No but, no but, all that... Except that here there's a richness of contradiction, thank you, which you don't find among environmentalists. For environmentalists, evil is the city, progress, and then good is, well, I'll say, you have a flash of it. He started out by writing a hymn to progress. Which isn't isolated in that poem, and which recurs very often in Rimbaud.
1:43:59 All the flaming wonders, like a billion thunders — he talks about steelworks at night. There's a poem by Verlaine too, very short, very fluid, much more fluid than Rimbaud. The Kobolds — does that ring a bell? — which must have been written on the train between Mons and Paris, so they cross an industrial region, and the poem goes: in the black grass the kobolds walk, the deep wind weeps, we want to believe. Kobolds are Germanic deities, gnomes, spirits.
1:44:32 More like hovels than houses. City with laughter, what a horizon of red forges. Sinister noise, what is it? What then rustled like citterns? You can imagine the noise the factory of that time must have made. Sinister noise, what is it? What then rustled like citterns? Eyes grow astonished, the stations thunder, what? Charleroi. The poem is called Charleroi, superb, as if the express train were stopping. There's a poetry of modernity that has since disappeared, by the way. It's 9:05, sir.
The griffin, the crane and Nazi bestiality 1:45:07 Are you taking your exam on the griffon and the crane? Yes. The young couple, the couple of youth, is the griffon that comes with its body, its sexuality, everything that isn't idealized. The griffon comes from below. To make the griffon rise from the sea and make the crane come down. That's literally Nerval's formula.
1:45:39 Something we still haven't managed to do. If we're still in crisis and it keeps repeating, it's because we haven't managed to hold the balance from the top. The top is everything man has produced above nature. I come back to my dichotomy of high and low, loftiness, height of view, etc., the high and the low. The low, which makes us find someone disgusting who eats like that, without putting their hand in front of their mouth. I mean, you see, who displays their naturalness, their organicity.
1:46:10 That's why we train children very early to mask their organicity, to mask determination. The fact that I'm hungry, the fact that, like any animal, I don't live on air alone. And even less a young couple living on love and fresh water. What's that? As the saying goes, it captures the language well. There, that's the high and the low. I'm giving a bit of content to the enigmatic formula. But we're going to make the griffon rise. But the griffon is also something monstrous. There's something that comes from the depths.
1:46:46 And gladly ripened, for gladly rest, before having ripened, fiercely, what stirs beneath. It's the feast of peace. It's the end of a stranger poem. The last one is called "Feast of Peace." In 1802, when the Peace of Lunéville was signed, and on the part... For gladly rest, before having ripened, fiercely, what stirs beneath. But fiercely, what stirs beneath can suddenly surge up. All at once, there. But I wouldn't want us to end this session only with interesting things, without leaving out the painful matter of Nazism.
1:47:22 Because this denial was never carried to its extreme consequences as much as under Nazism. Denial of the universality of the other, as you recall, Primo Levi, who said, he looked at me as one looks at a fish in a bowl, like another planet, entirely. So, that's all. That too comes from below.
1:47:55 I'm not against the animal, I'm against bestiality. I'm not sure the animal is bestial. And there I come back — remember, don't you remember anything? Evil, of course. Can you remind us? We were about to conclude on that. Well, I can't quote the text, but freedom is gained, yet society makes it so we can go even below animality. Thank you. It's especially the formula "below the animal." That's what you reminded us of, the essential. That extraordinary passage, chapter 8 of book 1 of the Social Contract.
1:48:25 I won't repeat it for the umpteenth time, but where he shows that we gained everything in passing to the civil state, that in the state of nature we had neither morality, nor justice, nor thought, nor culture. So, back to the central sentence. His faculties are exercised and developed, his ideas expand when he passes to the civil state, when he ceases to be an animal. His passions are ennobled, his whole soul is elevated to such a point that — and here comes the terrible phrase — if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below the state he came from, and there, mind you, one can therefore be below the animal.
1:49:06 That's no longer the beast, that's bestiality. Yes, it's the beast, but the one from the Apocalypse. You know, in life, we speak of "the beast." It's that beast, it's the essence of evil. It's the monster in thrillers, whatever you like. You can portray it in a worthless way or make masterpieces of it. Yes. I'll continue on what you're saying about the effects of denial. In a book I've started writing, there's a small reference to Alfred Rosenberg. To Rosenberg, Hitler's theorist?
1:49:37 Yes. Rosenberg, let me remind you, was the ideologue of the Third Reich. There's a quote that fits exactly with what you're developing, it's Rosenberg who said it: "The revolution of 1789 is dead. It was only an explosion without creative thought, and that is why we are witnessing today this decomposition." There. On the decomposed corpse of the French Revolution, Nazism can settle in. Bravo. The beast.
1:50:07 The one who brought Hitler — Rosenberg — the Under-man, sorry, from the American Stoddard, to turn it into the Untermensch. Can we go eat? Bravo for your questions.
