English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Opening and choice between natural sciences and human sciences 0:26 Good evening everyone. So I think we're live, but Dominique, you need to turn your mic back on. Like this? There we go.
9:02 between two forms of rigor, depending on whether it's a matter of knowing the time it takes for the light of a distant galaxy to reach us, or what happened when the Nazis burned down the Reichstag and managed to have the communists blamed for it. These are not quite the same causalities, the same laws at work. So anyway, throw out a little bridge, even if it's still fresh and shaky, hoping that you'll help us reinforce it, between the sciences of necessity, the sciences of nature, and what Kant called the domain of legislation through freedom, the human sciences.
9:48 So, you have the choice between the two, and I'll hand it back to Pierre-Alain, who I think will show you how easy it is to express your choice with a click. Let's go. Exactly. So I'll go back to the home page, but don't hesitate to send us your preference. Next, we have an introduction tab, where we've put several videos. We're actually going to add more, but these are introductory videos.
The introductory videos and the film on Niger 10:19 a first one, a discussion with Loïc. Samuel. So, there's a first one, it's a discussion with Loïc Chéniot. Oh yes, yes, sorry. And after that, there are several discussions with Samuel, and we're actually going to add 4-5 more videos, which give a good introduction to the workshops in general, really. Yes, I'll say something about this too, but more briefly. Yes. To explain why we're putting this series of videos as an introduction, rather than a single introductory video, it's because all the workshops that you've been kind enough to follow since the association was formed came after a period when I was being interviewed here and there, by precursors, so to speak, who had the kindness — they were the first, if you will — to familiarize me with the world of the Internet.
11:15 And that was Loïc Chéniot, to whom I pay tribute here, and who continues to maintain organic ties. He just sent me a very interesting link to an Arte program about the scam — who would have thought, coming from Arte and Germany — the scam involved in green energy. And then there's Samuel Zarka, who made a series of videos where he really, where he asks me the recurring question: stop beating around the bush, what is really the essence of what you're saying?
11:56 You see? So that's why it seemed to me so important, to understand things, or at least to find your way, to keep in hand — as an image, if you like — either Tom Thumb's white pebbles that help avoid getting lost in the forest, or Ariadne's thread that helps avoid getting lost in the labyrinth. It was useful to start with this series of videos with Samuel and with Loïc, which have the merit of raising the problems I've been discussing nonstop for six or seven years, since those introductory videos.
12:29 There you go. And I see that Pierre-Alain, before I hand it back to him, has of course put online in the middle the article, made a photocopy of the article from Les Lettres françaises. I had the great honor of getting a review in Les Lettres françaises. I say an honor because it's still the newspaper founded by Aragon. And it was about my little essay on femininity and community, which is referenced in his introductory videos.
13:00 There you go, I'll stop, but I wanted to explain why it's better to start there — before, after, your choice, you can enter wherever and whenever you want, you can start with the last video, with the second-to-last one. There's no strictly chronological order. You know how much I go in circles, I spiral, I go back and forth. But if you don't have all the time in the world and you want to get to what's called the essential, you have to start with this chapter called introduction.
13:30 That's right, Pierre-Alain, on the page. That's it, that's the introduction. I'll hand it back to you. Below that, there's your little biography and also the film, the clash of cultures. Maybe you could introduce that too. Yes, well, I have to, yes, I have to say a few words. Don't hold it too much against me for everything you'll hear me say in this video. It was the time when I was a project manager. I was never paid so well, that's why I allow myself to make this clarification.
14:00 Funded in Niger, in the field of music and traditional music mainly, by the European Union, that is, by your taxes, after all. Right? I did extort all that from you. And so that the manna would keep falling and Niger could benefit from it as long as possible, so it wouldn't remain just a whim of Brussels — because culture doesn't put bread on the table, you can do that, and go to meet the expectations of the musicians of Niger — I had to lay it on a bit thick, as Africans there like to call it, because they like linguistic archaisms, the funding bodies.
Search, video workshops, and other videos 14:38 There you go, I'll hand it back, and with that clarification aside, it has historical value, and for those interested in African and traditional music, I think it's worth the detour. So next, thank you Dominique, next there's a research tab, where you can search across the whole, really the whole content of the site, so here's my last search that stayed there, so either you can really type a word, whichever one you want, and then you'll...
15:12 A keyword, is that it? Right, you really type whatever you want, and it will really, it will find in the site all the, let's say, passages where Hegel is quoted, for example, then you can also search by author, so there's a list of authors that have been covered by... That was maybe the most important part of your presentation, you mean you managed, thank you, to have two indexes, one by theme — by theme, sorry, by keyword — and another by author.
15:47 So, there's a... search. Right, there's a search by author with different author choices, and then there's also a search by keyword, so with quite a few different words, where again, it will display, it will search for the keyword you've chosen. And there's also a completely free search, where you can type anything you want, and you'll find all the occurrences of that term on the site.
16:20 So you have three ways to search the site, right, which are quite simple. I'm still going to improve this search a bit, so you can have a highlight, a... how to put it? Of the searched word on the page, which for now isn't highlighted, let's say, but it will be soon. So it'll be easier to find your way in the search results. Next, you have all the video workshops.
16:51 So you can either click on the video workshops and find the list here. Which is in descending chronological order, right, from the most recent to the oldest. That's right. So the most recent is season 9. If you go to the season, you'll find all the videos from this latest season, each with the timing, the summary, let's say. If you click on the time of a video, you'll be taken directly to that moment in the video.
17:27 That opens a new page directly at the chosen moment. That's precious, wow. So there you go, you have all the videos from this season number 9 and all the videos from the first to the last. Then we have other videos. We tried to be as thorough as possible. So we've gathered here really all the videos you can find online, I think, with Dominique. I'll interrupt you there too, when we say other videos, that implies videos other than those made within the framework of the association.
17:59 We agree on that. Either because... within the framework of the workshops. Before, like the one I mentioned earlier with Samuel and Loïc Chéniot, or at the Université Populaire de Saint-Dizier and many others. There you go, I won't list them all to save time. But anyway, everything outside the association, Pierre-Alain was kind enough to gather here. So I made a little introduction for all the videos to explain a bit where they come from, all these other videos. And you can find them, of course, by hovering your mouse over the Other Videos tab and then scrolling down.
18:36 So there are about, I think there are about really all the videos that exist online. Sorry, you said hovering the mouse over the tab, because I myself got caught out, without clicking first to get the summary, right? Right, so if you click on it, you arrive at this page. You also have the list of all the videos with an explanation. If you don't click, a summary appears, a drop-down summary, where you can then choose.
Féminité et communauté read and commented on video 19:07 Sorry to nitpick, but for old fogies like me who aren't longtime web users, this might be good to know. Right, there on Clouscard, for example, there are quite a few videos. Right. Then, in public, so, just, let me note that in other videos, there's Femininity and Community in Hegel, which is a project by Hugo and Philippe, I believe. So you can find all of it, I think half the book has been done so far, but the other half, I hope, will be done soon.
19:44 So you have the text of the book and then a video commentary by Dominique. Yes, I'll say a couple words about this too, quickly. Philippe and Hugo were kind enough to travel over a whole period, every Saturday, early in the morning, to my place, to interview me and film my answers. About what? About my little book on Hegel, Femininity and Community, on the relationship of political aesthetics, because they felt — and they're not the only ones who found it — sometimes too dense, too elliptical, and in short, asked for clarifications and explanations.
20:26 And so we read it from the first to the last line, that was the principle. So you have the text of my book online, in full — I thank the éditions Delga — with the original notes, the editor's notes, and then, separately, with another logo, a little camera icon I think, you have the moments where it stops and where my answer is filmed when needed, when a certain passage requires an explanation. So I won't hide from you that there are more than fifty videos just in the reading of the first part alone, and it's a considerable amount of work — I'm very grateful to Hugo and Philippe, and to Pierre-Alain for integrating it into the site — and these videos range from a minute and a half sometimes, when I'm just clarifying the meaning of a word, to sometimes almost 20 minutes when it's a philosophically important point.
21:23 There you go, I'll hand it back to Pierre-Alain, it's really a state within the state, so to speak, this series of videos on femininity and community, it deserved a little explanation. Yes, very good. And then, in the publications section, so it's a... also, there's an unpublished piece, let's say. So there are the books that were published by Dominique Pagani, Sans détour, with the talk given at the Librairie Tropiques.
22:02 Then also, Féminité et communauté published by Delga with the review in Les Lettres françaises which you can find here. Then all the prefaces and afterwords published by Delga. There are still a few missing, but we're going to try to add them all. At Delga, mostly, or elsewhere — I've written prefaces for other publishers too, for François de Negroni or for Michel Clouscard, that sort of thing. There are also some at Materia Scritta.
Tribute to Christian Riochet and Henri Krasucki 22:34 At Materia Scritta, indeed. The PDF here of the texts. In particular for Rousseau's draft constitution for Corsica, among others, there you go. Then, there's a small section on — maybe you want to say a few words about it, Dominique — on Christian Riochet. So that's a text written by Christian Riochet on Clouscard, Dominique, on, well, there you go. Yes, with Philippe Moreau's agreement, well, I won't dwell too much on it, but Philippe and I lost a friend, and not just any friend, since he's none other than the younger brother of René Comer, whose name is familiar to several of you since you know he was the best friend of what's rather loosely called the Corsica school, or the school of Le Chalut, named after René's restaurant.
23:32 Actually, it was very informal, a group of friends who got together periodically, especially during holidays since everyone worked. And René's younger brother died in tragic circumstances last year, and for a few years already, Philippe Moreau had established a bond with him — he was in a very great material hardship somewhere in the Massif Central, in the Cévennes and the Ardèche, and Philippe Moreau had the excellent and very generous idea — as we know, or rather don't know enough, the quality of Philippe, because he himself knows it —
24:12 He devoted a website to him covering all the publications and/or conversations or interviews of Christian Riochet. Upon his death, and those are the two elements taken from this site that you see in front of you. Thank you Pierre-Alain. There are two elements taken and that are available on the site. It's the interview that Philippe Moreau did with your humble servant right after Christian's death, and also extracts from an essay, with Philippe's agreement, an essay that Christian had written back in the 70s already, called On Friendship, Class Complicity — I was still a student then, very young at the time — and which contain biographical elements of four people you no doubtless know well, since they are Michel Clouscard, François Negroni,
25:22 no, François wasn't in the picture yet at that time, excuse me, of Michel Clouscard, of Louis Schiavo, that immense artist based in Bastia but also a globetrotter and a fine Egyptologist too, I should add, since it's often forgotten when listing his many talents, and of his brother René, of course, Comer, and of myself. So, since Christian Riochet had a solid philosophical culture, I'll take this opportunity to mention — since we've just marked the anniversary of the death of that immense militant Henri Krasucki, former member of the Political Bureau of the French Communist Party and former leader of the CGT, where he succeeded Georges Séguy, and who coughed up his lungs in the Nazi camps he survived — not by miracle but by militancy, so to speak, because communists have their kind of militancy —
The Sub-Saharan Paths of Praxis 26:33 they helped survive and they helped many even non-militants make it through at the time — that Christian Riochet had done, and it was very rare, a magnificent interview with Henri Krasucki that nobody talked about during his recent anniversary, that's why I allowed myself to dwell on it for a moment. There you go, that was just to explain this reference to Christian Riochet on the site — may the earth rest lightly on him. In Africa now, we're going to move on to talk about the Sub-Saharan Paths of Praxis. Yes, gladly, do you want to present it? I'll say a word about it, however you like, present it, I think you'll do it better than me. It was, at the outset, I wanted to mark the tenth anniversary of the death of Michel Clouscard, and since Delga had just published his final work, The Paths of Praxis, a posthumous title as you know since the work...
27:43 isn't entirely — the manuscript isn't entirely finished — I thought, to pay tribute to Michel, of making a variation that I called The (Sub-Saharan or Sahelian, if you prefer, in your mind replace sub-Saharan) Paths of Praxis. In fact, I illustrate the great moments in the history of praxis, from hunting and gathering or nomadism to settlement, to agriculture, the great moments in a well-defined geographical area, which is the one in which humanity first appeared — sub-Saharan Africa, no less. But since this is a humanity close to the desert, the Sahel, I can use references that are both biblical — since, as you know, the three great religions of the book, as the adherents of transcendence call it, the Jewish religion, the Christian religion, the Muslim religion — I said that in...
28:53 chronological, historical order — all three appeared within a fairly small geographical handkerchief, but actually even in the literal sense, since desert in German is Wüste, in a geographical handkerchief that is the desert, there you go. And so I thought that deserved a kind of isolated section on the site, with very beautiful photos which I would be incapable of taking myself, and which are most often, almost always, paired with a very short text — not a very short commentary, it can be two words, it can be a quote from an author, or it can be a philosophical commentary that I make myself. There you go, in short, let's stop here for a moment. Here we see a Sahelian man walking, surrounded by a swarm of that plague that is swarms of locusts, which come to devour the little harvest that can be made in the appropriate season. Well, I take the opportunity to illustrate the seven plagues of Egypt, of which locusts were one, in the Old Testament, which many of you...
30:03 already know, there you go. It's a little Sahelian serial that I'm offering you, with very beautiful photos — I say that because they're not mine — and texts that we tried to make as interesting as possible. It goes in no particular order — Rousseau, Bachelard, Hölderlin, the Bible, well, there you go — there's something for everyone. So then, sorry, I forgot to say, this is the first time these Paths of Praxis have appeared in their correct order, with the corresponding photos and texts, and I thank Pierre-Alain for having launched this fragile ship, which means a lot to me. There you go, so now I'll move on to what comes next — I made a little music tab where you'll have access to two short films made by Aliocha, one called The Wrong Note — do you want to present them, I don't know if...
Musical films and playlists to get out of the sonic ghetto 31:13 well, yes, present them together, since you tend to fade into the background — yes, it was by Aliocha, a great filmmaker, and I can never thank him enough, especially since generally they've had very good reception as films, I can say that — it wasn't me who filmed it, but there were two cameras, Aliocha's and Pierre-Alain's, you see, so it's a real film, it's not just an interview filmed with a camcorder, I mean, it's a real film made by professionals of image and sound. I also thank Catherine and Jean-Hermé, in whose home we were able to film, who kindly gave up their apartment for several days in a row to film this foray into musical consumption. There's one, I'd say, of some length — it remains a short film — The Wrong Note, and then there are very short ones, extracts edited from footage I made afterward with Aliocha,
32:23 and Pierre-Alain again, devoted to different moments in the history of music, and you haven't heard the last of them — there are two already edited that we're offering here, one on Mozart and one on Gerry Mulligan, for variety's sake. And then I've added here the playlists that Dominique made on his Deezer page, so you have access to quite a few playlists, and also especially up here you have access to Dominique's YouTube playlists too, by hovering over Music you have Playlists to Escape the Sonic Ghetto — I haven't put them all up yet, but we're going to work on making categories, on making different genres so you can find your way among these playlists — you have access to musical goldmines. Yes, there's already plenty to explore. I'll pick up the thread again, sorry Pierre-Alain, but excellent idea from Pierre-Alain, integrating — I never would have thought it possible, but I'm so new to all this —
33:34 to all this — my personal playlists, originally, right, musical ones on Deezer, well, they're very uneven on Deezer because I had a way of managing — well it depends on the periods, subscriptions, some in premium, others periods when it was cut off, so, well — so some are extremely full on Deezer and others have huge gaps relative to the importance of the section. On the other hand, there are enormous hours of music on my YouTube playlists, which I care about a lot. So I imagine it's mainly that one Pierre-Alain says isn't finished, and far from it, because there are so many — I don't know, I'm just saying, but just for the pianist Bill Evans, in a musical genre apart which is jazz, and within jazz specifically pianists, you have, for example, and Bill Evans alone, there are already 60 long videos, each time, right — so, and there you can listen either to polyphonies from Melanesia — not the islands —
34:44 or from Micronesia or African polyphonies, you can listen to music predating Baroque music, or on the contrary the most current, the most contemporary. So there you go, that's to tell you — I just got a clarification from Pierre-Alain, I'm telling myself — so we agree, it keeps going, there's still more to add, provided we make an effort to guide the visitor a little by grouping them, let's say into, into folders — the early music folder, Baroque music, these are my own classifications — I say early music for everything ancient up to but not including the Baroque period, and then, well, and then afterward, individually, there's a Chopin playlist, Stravinsky, Bach of course, and sometimes there are several when it's a substantial body of work, you have in Bach the choral music, the instrumental music, right, you have in Mozart the chamber music, the symphonies —
35:54 separately in Beethoven likewise the piano separately the quartets, there you go, we'll help you with all that, but yes, well, Pierre-Alain, I thank him for speaking of treasure because I have nothing to do with it, I've only deposited things in my sack, if you will, and I'm the first one happy that this sack is available to the public — don't hesitate to dive in, I promise you that even those least prepared for most of the music available there certainly won't regret it, and especially by coming back as often as possible. There, I'll hand it back to Pierre-Alain, and thank you very much for these playlists. Not at all, but yes it's true there are already many, but very few compared to all the playlists you've made, so we're going to work on organizing them, making little folders as you say, to sort things out so everyone can find their way. We're almost done — in the More tab there are links, we called it Our Comrades.
Partner sites, membership, and shared texts 37:04 so it's, well there's Hybrides Tropiques, éditions Delga, a bunch of friendly sites, basically our partners. Then, sorry, on your list we shouldn't forget the Université Populaire de Saint-Dizier which made a big effort, and then there are others, there are our Norwegian friends, there's Convergence des luttes, and there are certainly others still, we'll need to add them, of course, growing that — all the Université de Saint-Dizier videos are here, if you want access to all of theirs, including the ABCDR — and the ABCDR too, the ABCDR is here, which is an initiative of the UPSD — yes that's it — then you also have access to become a member of the association, so you have that also on the home page, but you can also pay the membership fee directly here, there you go, and then...
38:14 so there's, up here on the top right, you can log in to the site, become a member of the site, so to speak, and what that does for you is give you access to shared documents, so you have the workshop texts that we'll be updating with Philippe, so before each of Dominique's live sessions online, you'll be able to find here — so if you click on season 9, for example the latest one, if we click on it we find here the texts that are offered to you, that Dominique studies during each, during each session — so there you'll have direct access on the site to all the texts studied in the live sessions. Yes, I should mention that this responds to a request from the audience, or at least a good part of our audience, who said, will you talk about these texts again, will we be able to revisit them? So there you go, now you have them available. There they'll all be, so we've started putting them up.
39:25 but there are still more, I think by next week everything should be, everything should be there, and this too is bound to grow, but there are books that are very little available or even no longer published, that, well, that we share with you. There, there are texts by Jacques D'Hondt or texts by Hegel, translations that are no longer available, by Lefebvre, there you go, so there you have access to books, to complete books that you won't find anywhere else, like this translation by Jean Hyppolite of the Phenomenology which is no longer available, which you can't find in bookstores anymore, right, or which are outrageously priced online. There you go, I think we've made the rounds — a big thank you, a big thank you because this tool is unhoped for, and also a big thank you to everyone who worked upstream of your initiative, who started the enormous work of referencing, well anyway, I'm grateful to everyone, and I'm very lucky, there you go, and to you too, the audience, so I'll let you...
40:38 Dominique, perhaps, answer the questions — yes, we're starting the second part of tonight's program, thanks again and a very, very good rest of the evening, a busy one, Pierre-Alain, thank you, see you soon, see you very soon, thanks again, thank you.
