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The state of exception and the double discourse 0:00 Good evening everyone. I wonder whether this isn't our last session in lockdown, our last hitching to confinitude, though—who knows where we actually stand on that front. You see, I'm already starting to speak in a zone that isn't clear-cut between lies and truths there. Because the number of times we thought, that's it, everything's going back to normal, we'll be able to live like before—oh no, no, no, no, already people in the Paris region can't travel more than 100 kilometers from home, and elderly Parisians like me, mind you, are bound to certain company and excluded from other kinds.
0:50 You can't get on public transport without a mask. Some things are quite defensible, that's not the issue. But I say this to tell you that—and this is much less defensible—everything happens as if they were trying to make a state of exception permanent. There are always new decisions and above all new uncertainties. Yesterday we learned that we could go on vacation in July and August—but only yesterday.
1:20 Yes. There you go, so—this isn't the occasion to go back over current events, you can imagine, which we won't miss, especially when talking about lying in politics. But yes, yes, I paused for a moment because I wouldn't want people to think I'm obsessing over our executive.
1:54 Even if the policy it's deploying is increasingly worrying—but I'll say that for now in the form of a euphemism. But still, lying doesn't date from this regime, the impact of lying in political action. I'll quote you in a moment a few texts drawn from the New Testament, where it's even said that there's a link between evil, power, wealth, and the essence of lying.
2:36 The essence of power and wealth, sorry, are constituted by lying. We'll see this a bit more precisely in a moment. But what led me to focus on this problem of lying, which I haven't gotten into yet, is a publication from a review called Café Pédagogique—you certainly know it, perhaps; I knew it little myself, since National Education is my former house, and since I retired I see things a bit more from a distance, but I did well to take a look, because in the latest issue of Café Pédagogique, I posted the link on our Facebook page, where you have the full text—I'm only giving this excerpt, which is the beginning of an important declaration by senior National Education officials,
3:49 I won't say more, I'll read the text. Today, we can no longer remain silent. I've skipped some very interesting lines, but I can't read the whole article either, it's very long. Today, we can no longer remain silent. Beyond even the chaotic management of Covid-19 in schools, beyond, in this complex context, the minister's contradictory, evasive statements or those immediately contradicted by the Prime Minister, we consider it would be an ethical and political failing—let us observe much more precisely what even the most seasoned journalists are not writing.
4:26 And there, it's written in bold in their article: we see first of all an immense lie. You see, that's our topic today. We, as officials, see unfold without restraint a permanent double discourse feeding a rhetoric of chronic duplicity. Double, duplicity. And I who was speaking to you of the New Testament, and in which they speak of the prince of this world—that's how the devil is referred to in the New Testament.
5:05 Now, the devil and the double share the same root. If you're attentive, as I so often ask you to be, to language, which knows so many things about us—yes, the language we speak knows more about us than we who speak it. Familiar, almost slangy language has us say quite naturally, 'The bastard, he doubled me'—he double-crossed me.
Error, illusion, lying 5:35 You see? He doubled me—double-crossed me. Lying, well, I'll stop there. I could illustrate it with quite a few texts, but we've seen many texts during these Confinitude workshops, and I'd like to take the opportunity to tighten our conceptual tracking a bit, as we sometimes do in our monthly workshops.
6:10 and I'm going to ask you for a little effort of abstraction, but you'll see the game is worth the candle all the same. So I'm going to postpone for a little while the readings of texts that will illustrate the point, and ask you to make a little effort of abstraction, starting by reflecting, stepping back from these words as common as the ones we use—lies, truths, etc.
6:43 You know, we often rightly tell philosophy exam candidates that the most important operation at the start of the work, especially at the start of an essay, even more than in text commentary, is to problematize the subject. Now take the concept of truth, which is the most common antonym of lies—I don't know, but that of lies certainly.
7:19 There's indeed a difference between truth as the opposite of the false—that one, logicians and mathematicians know well, there are even truth tables in logic, as you know, mathematicians are very familiar with them. So a proposition is either true or false, it can't be both at once—that's the so-called principle of the excluded middle.
7:50 And here, the false is simply different from the true. V different, equals, crossed-out F. That's its structure in algorithmic, unambiguous symbolic language. Already we've often had occasion, in the course of our workshops, to note that one thing is the false as a genus, another thing is that species of the false which is illusion.
8:30 A common example I often use: 4 plus 5 equals 12—that's an error, because the sum of 4 plus 5, namely 9, is different from 12. There you go, V different from F. It's a simple slip of attention, presumably—I'm going to put some water on my face because I'm tired, or have some coffee, or both, and then it's fine, the error disappears.
9:03 On the other hand, if I say that Germany was surrounded by a threat in the 1930s, when it was actually Germany that was the greatest threat at that time for the world—here, the true is not merely different from the false, it is its exact opposite. There, I'm going fairly quickly, we've often had occasion to distinguish illusion from simple error. In both cases, it's a matter of the false. You see?
9:35 So that already makes two examples of the false—error-false and illusion-false—where I'm not yet at what's properly called lying. I can sincerely be under an illusion, after all. I'm sure there were plenty of Germans sincerely convinced that the Jews—well, the Jewish Bolsheviks—were a threat to the Reich. When you read the literature of the time, there hadn't yet been the forgeries, the abject ideological operations of the Cold War, coming after Hannah Arendt or initiated essentially—but not only—by Hannah Arendt, and taken up by the whole Atlanticist movement, consisting in putting Nazism and communism back to back.
10:28 No, no, one couldn't, because at that time, the documents are there, you can't hide the sun with your finger. Don't take my word for it on matters this serious. Consult the press of the time, the articles of the time, the texts of the Nazi theorists—their obsessional adversary is not the Jew, it is not the communist, it is the Jewish Bolshevik. Because for them, it's the same essence, all of that. Right.
10:58 So you see, here, the false as inverse of the true. That we had seen. And then there's the lie. That is to say, I know—I know what is false, but I don't say it. Sorry, I know what is true, but I conceal it. And I switch it for saying the false, in accordance with an interest of my own—never mind for now whether it's individual, collective, whether it's trivial, benign, and without serious consequences.
The devil, father of lies, in Saint John 11:39 The child who says, 'I'm not the one who ate the candy,' I mean, when it is him—that's not a crime. Now, now, you see, I move on to the Gospel of John—there, we're no longer with the child who wanted the candy. Look, it's quite solemn all the same. I take two excerpts. One that's in the Gospel proper, chapter 8, verse 44, for those who want the reference.
12:16 He attacks those who doubt his word, who are always trying to trap him, called the Pharisees in the text. And he says: you have the devil for your father—yes, we saw earlier that this also means the double. You have the devil for your father, and you want to accomplish the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning. And he does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.
12:50 When he utters the lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of lies. And there you have it, the essence of evil defined as lying. We're not going to say that the kid who pinched the candy and ate it and says it wasn't him—we can't say that's the essence of evil. So you see that now we're obliged to make distinctions of species within the genus 'lie.'
13:21 I take a second quotation from John, the same evangelist, but this time in Revelation—not in his Gospel. Verse fifteen of Revelation. When the catastrophes have multiplied—the times of sulfur, fire, the locusts, the earthquake, everything you like—all the plagues of the Apocalypse. And behold, a voice rings out in the sky, saying: 'Outside, the dogs, the sorcerers, the debauched, the murderers, the idolaters, and all those—'
14:02 and implicit in one phrase—'and all those who love and practice the lie.' There you go. Now, that's a curious sentence—I... I know some will say I'm making artificial connections, but well, I can't help thinking of Marx. He said that religion is the opium of the people. Let me open a parenthesis here. That is one of the greatest tributes ever paid to religion.
14:33 No, if you think about it for a minute. I'm speaking politics here, seriously. It's entirely to Marx's greatness that he chose this metaphor. Have you ever tried to get someone addicted to an alkaloid to stop? A heroin addict or an opium addict. It's derived from opium, all that, morphine, heroin. Unfortunately I knew quite a few in the jazz world I frequented at one time.
15:05 I know some who lived only on whatever little intelligence they had left, all concentrated on how to buy their dose today. Entirely focused on that. So when Marx says it's the opium of the people, that means it's something fiercely powerful over people. And if you want to remove it from a people, you can and, from that political standpoint, you must follow Marx. But then you must take care to give something substantial in exchange.
15:38 There, I'll close that little parenthesis. Because people often misread this quotation—Marx's enemies say, there, that's what Marx reduces the religious to. It's not a reduction. The comparison to opium is enormous. It means it corresponds to something deep and very powerful. This parenthesis, if not closed—since one is never done with that story—at least suspended. I go back to my parallel with Marx.
16:09 No, no, it's very precise. It's not Marx in general. He has nothing of the holy-water-sprinkler type, as you know. On the contrary, he rarely misses an occasion to denounce the worst abuses committed under the pretext or alibi of religion or philanthropy.
16:39 Often the two are linked. You need only see when he speaks of the Quakers who justified having 10-year-old children work 10 hours a day by saying that at least this way they weren't hooligans in the street. Well. So by killing them slowly, one was doing charitable work. No, no, that's not it. No, it's precise. It's the fact that here the apostle John concentrates in one word, in the word 'lie,' nearly every species of evil.
The 1859 preface: infrastructure and time 17:11 Outside, the sorcerers, the murderers, the idolaters—everything he considers abominable—'and all those who love and practice the lie.' It reminds me of that so important passage in the extremely famous preface, or introduction, that Marx placed at the head of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which is the first sketch of Capital.
17:43 Isn't it? You should know that this title—'Critique of Political Economy'—was originally the title of Capital. Preface published in '59, in 1859, in which, after speaking of the material economic base of society, the infrastructure, he says—upon which is scaffolded, basic Marxism, with a spatial distribution of high and low.
18:17 We've already seen this in our workshops, I won't dwell on it too much, since it's trivial Marxism, in the mathematical or statistical sense of the term, so to speak. You don't need me to know that one. And precisely, I want to dwell on a passage where he shows it's not so simple. It isn't that the bottom determines the top as though this were outside of time—it's in space. The bottom, the top, that's a spatial determination, the economic base—that's the 'saying' of society, so to speak.
18:47 Because all of a sudden, he introduces time, and we'll see just how important this is for our story about lying. Marx introduces time by saying: at a certain degree, at a certain moment in their development, the material productive forces of society—productive forces, that runs from the plow, after all, to the particle accelerator, passing through a nuclear engine—come into contradiction with the relations of production, essentially the political systems of property, within which they had moved until then.
19:34 Until then, says Marx, these relations of production—feudal relations of production, bourgeois relations of production, Asiatic relations of production—until then, these relations of production were, to use Marx's own word, the form, the appearance of, that whose content was the material economic base of society.
20:06 And now, not only do the superstructures no longer express what is at the bottom, but on the contrary, what is at the bottom comes to contradict what is at the top. And Marx adds: then an era of social revolution opens. And he insists that this takes more or less time—often a great deal of time—before everything that was at the top ends up being affected by the changes that first occurred at the bottom.
What changes while we sleep 20:47 For there are quite a few changes happening at the top right now. While we sleep, while we sleep—sleep, I want it. That too is a form of lying. Everything a hypnotist can make me believe when I'm dependent on his will. Right? I'm alluding to the fact that there are gains for which there were enormous struggles, for which sometimes there were 50 million deaths. I'm thinking of the social advances that occurred at the Liberation, particularly in 1946.
21:24 I refer you to the admirable research of Bernard Friot, and not only to his research but to his modeling, to see the extent to which... There is often an already-there of revolution that escapes those who believe revolution had to wait for them, and who wait a whole night standing sometimes, right? And who go back afterward to their café, or their rave party.
21:55 while we were sleeping, quite a few changes occurred, in particular. There has been an attack that, a few weeks ago, a few months ago, we would never have thought could go beyond mere scratches—calling into question freedom of expression under the pretext of an anti-fake-news law. It's the executive, the government, that has authority over information.
22:32 The worst totalitarian regimes, even in their wildest dreams, ask for nothing more than that. So, when I say it takes more or less time before the upheaval in the economic structure produces its effects in the superstructure, sometimes it happens fast.
23:07 While you had your eyes—and here's where I'm coming to—fixed on the virus, all they talk to you about is the virus. Go on, switch channels, take another one—it starts with Covid, every section, fashion magazines, glamour magazines, everything, the serious and the frivolous, to borrow a great title from Clouscard. All the economic reviews, the stock market reviews, as much as the latest Chanel, start with Covid.
23:38 and meanwhile, freedom of expression is being whittled away, and what was said freely at an evening among friends yesterday becomes a matter for criminal law tomorrow, today. So, I come back to Marx's sentence.
24:09 He says, since there's now a contradiction between the productive forces, the new ones, and the relations of production, that's exactly what's happening in the economic and social crisis, and the function of this whole pile of so-called information about the health situation is to conceal it. All the same, we're now up to 30 million out of work in the United States.
24:40 I keep telling you, telling you, telling you. And now, the circles, well, the media, the ones normally least inclined - and I know them well because I've followed them for a long time - the ones least inclined to paint a bleak picture, who generally, on the contrary, always tend to say that business is going better than people say, because otherwise shareholders won't come and buy shares. Those very circles are now starting to say that in severity we're about to surpass the crisis of the 1930s.
25:12 You know, the one that ended with 50 million deaths. No, I'm talking about today's lie. And if I told you that the virus is a total sham, completely fake, that it poses no danger at all, and that we're only talking about it so as not to talk about the economic crisis, I would also be a liar. A liar, or at best irresponsible, at worst a liar.
25:42 No, the virus is serious, it's nasty, it's bad, even though it's much less serious than other epidemics that occurred two, three, four generations back - not even going back to earlier historical times - which were far more deadly, and which already give the lie to the very common claim of the last two months that this is the worst health crisis ever faced. It's unbelievable.
26:12 Go and explain that to the few survivors still around who lost relatives in the Spanish flu. 100 million dead worldwide. It started in the United States, and in China alone it caused 2 million deaths. That takes nothing away from the seriousness of the roughly 26,000 deaths from Covid here. I'm not talking... No, I'm not saying the virus doesn't exist. I'm saying we've managed the political media coverage of it brilliantly, and it's not over, and I'm not sure - I'm even certain - that the changes using health as a pretext are not going to stop tomorrow.
27:03 The virus will have long since disappeared and we'll still be invoking its possible return, its possible return, its potential, to push through real changes that always go in the same direction. Increase working hours, stay home. There's the question of who says 'it suits me, maybe, maybe. Me too, it suits me after all.'
27:33 But I'm not on piecework. I'm not on rotating shifts, I'm not fitting electrical wires onto vehicles in a car factory. Those workers aren't told 'stay home.' They're told 'you'd better go into the metro and put on a mask.' That's to tell you that I keep coming back to this sentence of Marx, who isn't thinking about the virus, but who says the following - because I hadn't yet arrived at the point of shooting it like a Parthian arrow, as an example at the point where he converges with the words of the evangelist, of the apostle.
Ideological forms and the analogy of concepts 28:27 Let me remind you that the apostle gathers several species of evil under the concept of the lie. So Marx says - when there are such changes, let me give him the floor again - one must always distinguish between the change that occurs in the economic base, which can always be verified in a measurable, scientific way. How much labor is needed to produce a given commodity - you can clearly see the changes according to the evolution of the productive forces and technology.
28:57 That's easy, it can be measured. One must distinguish this from something else. Now here it begins. Forms. Look closely at the list. He speaks like the apostle. Juridical, aesthetic, religious, philosophical, in short. Ah, he too has a generic word for all that. In short, ideological. I had to go through these examples in order to now ask you for an effort of abstraction.
29:30 An effort along with me. There you go. You weren't expecting to land back on Marx after quotations - I don't know - from Rimbaud, but 'which made my tongue so treacherous that until now it has preserved my laziness.'
30:01 There's someone who was at least lucid about his ability to lie to himself - we'll come back to that. Mephistopheles, who embodies the infernal essence in Goethe's Faust, a work of a whole lifetime, says: 'I am the spirit that denies.' You know that in Freud, denegation is called 'Verneinung,' and 'Nein' means 'No' in German. I am the one who denies.
30:35 Well, precisely, I'm bringing together things that we're not used to placing in the same category. I'm going to talk to you about what Hegel calls negativity. There you clearly see the connection with saying no. Negativity in Hegel.
31:05 Repression in Freud. Ideology, as we just saw in Marx. All of that is different. I'm not establishing identities, amalgamations, or even comparisons. These are analogies. What A is to B, that's what C is to D. That's the arithmetic - sorry, mathematical - definition, because here too there's an algebra of analogy.
31:38 A over B equals C over D. The ratio of 5 to 10 is the same as that of 12 to 24. There. The ratio of half to double. This is interesting because we see here that there can be an infinity. It's not just to illustrate the ratio of half to double - I could have put an infinity of different numbers, even staying simply within the natural numbers. What doesn't change each time is a half.
32:13 The proportion, one half. That is to say, a relation - it is not a thing. Because if I say to you 'half the cake,' the cake is a thing. If I say to you 'half of the French in the latest poll,' I think each Frenchman is something that exists, material - but the relation, no. And yet it's the relation that lets us see clearly. So let's be attentive here to something.
32:47 We started from truth and its opposite, the lie. Then we noticed there was scientific truth - that's not what concerns us here, because its opposite isn't lying, its opposite is simply the false. On the other hand, when there's a trial and the accused are asked to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, that doesn't mean 'don't say something false,' it means 'don't lie.' We're not going to penalize a witness who made a mistake by saying, I don't know, that Montreal is the capital of Canada - he's saying something false, but he's not lying.
33:35 He's asked not to lie. See our progression. Then we saw the example of the child - he lies, but it's not that absolute evil that the Gospel, and Kant - we'll see a very short text of Kant, Kant recalling and quoting Scripture on the subject of the lie, of all things, twenty-five centuries or twenty centuries later.
34:11 In any case, here the lie is presented with such solemnity - to the point that the devil in Faust is the one who says 'I am the one who denies' - that there isn't just a quantitative difference between that lie and the child's lie. It's not just that I stole more than candy, it's that it shouldn't have the same form - it's not only the content of the lie that differs here, it's the form.
34:44 And since I alluded to the unconscious in Freud and to ideology in Marx, you can clearly see that in both cases, what they have in common is the unconscious side of the lie. Now it gets complicated. That's what philosophy is - problematizing concepts that seemed simple from a distance. Not for the pleasure of it, on the contrary, not to create confusion, on the contrary - look at the clarification we nonetheless arrive at.
35:15 For there is also lying to oneself. What in everyday language - we didn't wait for Freud to talk about this - well, it's not quite the unconscious, but it's heading that way. When we say 'bad faith,' that's not quite the same as saying 'it wasn't me who robbed the Bank of England.' That's not the same. That's a lie, if I'm one of the gangsters who did the robbery. But bad faith is different.
35:46 It's when I end up convincing myself, isn't it. So, I asked you for a small effort of abstraction which will continue before we rest on a coming text. I move on to Hegel - a formula, not a long text, a formula of Hegel that you'll find - I say this for those who have Hegel on the agrégation syllabus this year, I'm being a bit more precise with references.
Hegel, pins, and the end of the gold standard 36:17 It's from the First Philosophy of Spirit of 1805, published by Presses Universitaires de France. Hard to find, but still, on the internet you can still find it. In which - I shouldn't have said the author, because sometimes I read passages, ask who wrote them, and I'm told it's Marx. I read it to people who would never have believed there were so many connections between Hegel and Marx. Jean-Canet, and even Althusser.
36:49 In an English manufactory, 18 men work at making pins. Each has a particular task and only that task. A single worker could perhaps not produce 120 pins, nor even a single one. These 18 distinct operations divided among 10 workers... No, I'll stop there, that's not at all the passage I meant to quote. And it's to show you that sometimes people confuse this with Marx. But Marx himself never had any knowledge of these texts, which Hegel never published and which were found among his papers after his death, isn't that right.
37:20 It's interesting that Marx never knew the most Marxian Hegel. Alright, I come now to the passage where Hegel starts from civil society. That was very new in philosophy, when one takes interest in works on economy and civil society. And he arrives at the problem of money. You see, I'm not leaving the context of the crisis we're in. Before reading the text, I heard a commentator, well, a specialist in financial law, say that Keynes, John Maynard Keynes, the economist, had said as early as the signing of the Bretton Woods agreements.
38:04 that the dollar had signed its death warrant with the Bretton Woods treaty. In other words, that a series of potential crises were bound up in that treaty. Which aspect of the treaty above all? The one which, for the first time, authorized one country - what an exorbitant privilege. It's still the case. But no doubt the crisis we are living through is moving toward the end of that privilege. That's why I think it matters so much, the moment we're living through - the only country that has the same currency for its internal exchanges and its external exchanges.
38:41 Before the 'gold exchange standard,' as it was called at the time of Bretton Woods, and especially before the 'Nixon shock,' as it was called - in 1971, the announcement that stunned the business world, when the head of the American executive, President Nixon, 'Tricky Dick' as he was called, the cunning Dick - Richard Nixon, the crook, the one who said, 'so you got that bastard.'
39:13 that bastard, speaking of Allende on the phone in his communications while the presidential palace in Santiago was being bombed, by Nixon's puppet, Pinochet. Yes, Nixon suddenly announces to Japan, on an official visit, 'you have dollars' - well yes, everyone has dollars, everyone who sells things to the United States, that makes a lot of dollars, all the Volkswagens, all the Japanese cars, all the French goods, the Renaults, the champagne, the Dior, all of that makes dollars - well, you can keep them, but they're no longer guaranteed by gold at all, there's no longer any relation between the dollar and a standard, well there you go, all that's asked of you is to believe in it, credo, credit - you're going to hear these words in the weeks to come, and especially in the months to come - that doesn't mean 'you'll think of me,' it means 'think of Marx.' So I come back to Hegel, for now, who says this - he's about to give his definition
Money, possibility of all things of need 40:23 of money. His varied works - you saw the pins - he has just described the way in which - and yet he only saw the embryo of it, in a civil society that is beginning to undergo the industrial revolution - it's not the case that every sector of activity is dependent on the others, what we now call globalization - these varied works aimed at the satisfaction of needs, taken as things, must likewise realize their concept, their abstraction - it's a bit abstract, but never mind, I'll move on, I'll slow down when it matters - their universal concept must likewise be a thing like them, if you sense money coming - a thing like them, but a thing which, insofar as it is a universal, represents them all - money, it's underlined, is this material concept, existing - notice, it's underlined - existing, the form of unity, or again, listen carefully, this is what matters most to me for coming back to talk about lying - the possibility of all the things of need.
41:33 there, I can put the book down: money is the possibility - you agree - not necessarily actualized right away - I've just got paid, I've got a big bill in my pocket - I'm old now, it's credit cards now, but anyway, they're well loaded, well credited - I go out into the street, I'm whistling - it doesn't last long, the end of the month comes quickly, but there's a moment of euphoria, everyone knows that - even though I haven't bought anything yet. It's possibility. So it's extraordinary because it's the universal that interests me, you see - money is the possibility of everything - universal quantifier, as mathematicians say - of all the things of need - I don't yet know what I want to do with it - let's take an even more spectacular example - I won the lottery, I don't yet know what I want to do with it, but my goodness, precisely because there are so many possibilities, it's been noticed
42:44 that it often ends badly, even for those who weren't prepared to have a large sum. Fine, money is possibility, but what does that have to do with lying? That's where I ask you for an effort - not just of attention, but of demonstration, an effort of logic. If money is the general form of need, the general is the indeterminate - I haven't yet determined what I'm going to do with the bill in my pocket - am I going to go to a travel agency and book tickets for the countries I dream of, or the places I dream of - often it's not far, not necessarily - am I going to buy a gift for people close to me, people dear to me - am I going to go to a great fashion designer, a great tailor - I have no idea, it's indeterminate. So listen carefully
43:54 that's the great turning point, I ask you to pay attention - I am not obliged to know what I want. I want to depart from the Socratic imperative - know thyself - the Pythian imperative, it was written on the temple at Delphi, there where the Pythia prophesied, hence the Pythian temple, because a python had been found there. Going to Delphi, I saw that there was a spring, the sacred spring, the spring - because there's a very high mountain right above it, and I, being an old African, saw that it's indeed an ideal place for a serpent to nest. Anyway - know thyself - no, I am not - you're beginning to understand why I spoke to you at length about absolute knowledge and absolute non-knowledge, that absolute knowledge carried something dangerous, and doesn't suit me - but here, I am not obliged to know.
45:04 it suits me not to know, it suits me to have money - among other things, use value - I'm not just saying it suits me because I wanted an orange juice and I'm sipping an excellent one right now without looking at the price - no, no, I'm not talking about use value, I'm talking precisely about exchange value, about the sum of money that this represents, which could have been allocated to something else - I am not obliged to know. Whereas someone who is in dire straits, who cannot at the same time - you know, someone who hesitates during the day, either I buy the metro ticket or the baguette, but not both - I'm speaking of our wealthy countries, imagine what it's like in the rest of the world - and even without looking for the truly destitute, a mother with several children who hears on television every day being called a filthy consumer
Money gives the time not to know 46:14 who is making the planet warm, while when she goes to a supermarket she spends her time looking at prices and only buying the cheapest goods, saying to herself she really ought to give her children something else once in a while - let's stay calm here, I can't - you see the relation to time, you hadn't seen it, we don't see it right away, and for good reason: money gives me time. I can put off knowing what I want until later. That's something we never say - we hadn't made the connection between lying - the lie here is to oneself - it's a deprivation of self-knowledge, it's an infringement of the Pythian imperative, it's an evil, at least a philosophical one. I think that when the apostle John says that the essence of evil is the lie, he's thinking rather of lying to oneself, rather than of saying 'it wasn't me'
47:24 who stole the candy. So you see, I go back over this logical passage because, first, it's not common, so it deserves revisiting, and it's not simple. Once we've seen the mediation - money is the general form of need, as Hegel puts it in the First Philosophy of Spirit - insofar as it is the general form of need, we're not far from what Marx will call exchange value, or value simply put. Insofar as it's general, this need, this desire - never mind the distinction for now - what I want remains indeterminate, and can remain indeterminate thanks to money. So I'm not obliged to plunge painfully into self-knowledge, whose great models we saw in Nerval, in Rimbaud, throughout all of modernity
48:34 how absolute self-knowledge produced catastrophes - the collapse of the certainties I had, the collapse of the narcissistic image I had of myself, the collapse of what in the Freudian field is called the ideal ego, the 'Idealich' - it has nothing to do with the narcissism people talk about in drawing rooms, someone with a certain self-image - it's not that at all, it's much more serious, it's simply the identity that was forged since one's origins, by another and for another, and here that's what collapses, like a mirror shattering into a thousand pieces - I told you about the fantasy of the fragmented body with Hieronymus Bosch's paintings last time, you see these are serious matters - well, I'm not obliged to undertake this descent into hell, I have money. Clouscard used to say that the same misfortune can produce a murderous psychosis in the proletarian - he's unemployed, his wife cheats on him
49:44 leaves him for another man - he goes and kills the wife and the lover, it's the kind of story you always find in the gutter press, isn't it - the same wrong will produce a psychosis in the proletarian and a simple neurosis in the bourgeois - 'darling, go treat your depression at our villa in the Virgin Islands' - it's not the same thing, the rich have a cruder way - as if they knew it - a cruder and more expeditious way of acknowledging that difference, when they say it's better to weep in a Rolls than in a 2CV - I leave them the responsibility for that kind of vulgarity, and besides I don't know if it's very appropriate here, because we want to understand the modeling of the lie in politics - money is the general form of need, but the general leaves the object of need indeterminate, and thus, let me read on with you, the indetermination of what I desire, I'll - if you like - let me...
50:57 there we go, ah, ok, ok, thank you - the indetermination, it's written in bold, of what I desire, sorry for the accent - suits the pleasure principle, I don't have to endure the displeasure of having to choose, let's see, what's the priority for me - it's always a nuisance to make a budget, because it leads toward frustrations, deprivations - so financial wealth, you see, is an occasion for making a - I didn't write this down, so let me linger on it - a temporality emerge, it gives me the time to postpone until later a more determinate knowledge of myself. In other words, I can activate my negativity toward myself - negativity is Hegel's concept; in Freud it will be the mechanism of repression that produces the unconscious, because
52:07 this is the last effort of logic I'll ask of you, we'll move on to texts afterward - but in order to repress something, in short, to the extent that it bothers me to think about it, to put it simply, I must at some point have thought about it - so there is indeed a moment when I see the truth, before it tips over into the darkness of repression - logically, if I repress, it's because I'm conscious of the unpleasantness it involves - so deep down I do know there's an unpleasantness, but I dispatch it, I give myself time not to think about it. I'm only multiplying species that are ever more precise within a genre I might call confined - I'm dealing only with lying to oneself now, I've set aside all lies in the ordinary sense, the lies that are matters for legal settlement, which don't concern us here in philosophy, and don't seem to interest the apostle either.
53:18 and which Marx isn't referring to either when he speaks of ideology, nor Freud when he speaks of repression - so I'm keeping only this aspect: a deprivation of self-knowledge, an amputation of what I could know about myself, and within this unconscious - I let the word slip - I'm not yet at something as condemnable, in terms as violent as those John uses in Revelation - so there are still distinctions to be made, and in order to bring them out, I'll now quote to you - well, actually I'll read to you, because there's no need to have the text in hand, I've used it often in workshops, and besides it's so clear there's no need to have it in front of you - a passage from Aurélia. We've already seen quite a few extracts from Aurélia in the previous 'Attelages de la confinitude' sessions, but not this one, which is nonetheless beautiful, and which I had used in a workshop two years ago
Reading of chapter 4 of Aurélia 54:28 for another purpose - chapter 4 of Aurélia, which begins like this: 'One evening I believed with certainty that I had been transported to the banks of the Rhine.' Well, there, I won't repeat it several times, but anyway, we owe the text of Aurélia to Nerval's psychiatrist, who told him something that was very modern for the time, very positive: 'if it would ease you to put your visions, your obsessions, in writing, don't hesitate.' And that gave us Aurélia. And you see, Nerval summed up his madness, the form his delirium often took, with this beautiful expression: 'It was then that there began for me what I would call the overflowing of dream into real life.' There you have it - there's nothing pathological about dreaming, even the most delirious, the most psychotic things, if we had the same hallucinations in broad daylight - but for Nerval that was his case. So you see, he says 'one evening I believed' - he doesn't say 'I was dreaming' - 'one evening I believed with certainty that I had been transported.'
55:38 On the banks of the Rhine, in front of me stood sinister rocks whose outline was taking shape in the shadow — for the moment we're in imagery, I'll go quickly, we're in the imagery of what Germany represented in the Romantic era, with ghosts, the Rhine, the Erlking, sinister rocks whose outline was taking shape in the shadow — that's not, I haven't given it to you yet — I entered a smiling house, contrast, I entered a smiling house through which a ray of the setting sun cheerfully passed — we were in the sinister a line and a half before — through which a ray of the setting sun cheerfully passed the green shutters festooned by the vine — for anyone familiar with Nerval's text, as we were when we did the close reading of Angélique three years ago, we know this is the maternal house at Mortefontaine, in his village, so in other words this is typical of dream, for now, except that here it's not certain he's asleep — he's dreaming in broad daylight, dreaming while awake, he superimposes the maternal house, which is 40 km from Paris, between Compiègne and Roissy, between forest
56:49 and pond — he superimposes it onto the banks of the Rhine, 500 km away. So it seemed to me that I was entering a house I knew — indeed that of a maternal uncle, the mother's brother, a Flemish painter dead for more than a century. Sketched paintings hung here and there; one of them represented the famous fairy of this shore, an old servant whom I called Marguerite and whom I seemed to have known since childhood. She said to me: 'Are you not going to bed, for you've come from far away, and your uncle will be back late; we'll wake you for supper.' I lay down on a bed — on a canopy bed draped in large-flowered red chintz. There was a rustic clock hanging on the wall in front of me, and on this clock a bird that began to speak like a person. I would have said that my ancestor's soul was in this bird, but I was no more astonished
58:00 than I was by its language and its form, than I was at seeing myself as if transported a century back. The bird spoke to me of members of my family, living or dead at various times, as if they existed simultaneously, and — watch, it's the bird speaking — said to me: 'You see, your uncle took care to paint her portrait in advance' — 'her' is emphasized — 'you see, your uncle took care to paint her portrait in advance; now she is with us.' My eyes fell on a canvas that depicted a woman in ancient German costume, leaning over the edge of the river, her eyes drawn to a clump of forget-me-nots. Meanwhile the night was thickening little by little, and the appearances, the sounds, and the feeling of the place blurred together in my drowsy mind — I stop the excerpt here precisely because it becomes blurred, because up to now it had been of a staggering clarity — I lay down on a bed draped in large-flowered red chintz — and then all at once, meanwhile
Re-reading: the mother, the Rhine, the Lorelei, the bird 59:10 the night was thickening little by little, and the appearances, the sounds, and the feeling of the place blurred together in my mind — all of you who have followed our close readings of Angélique by Nerval know it, I hope, independently of what I can say about it. I take this opportunity to recommend once again the admirable lectures available on video on YouTube by Jean-Nicolas Illouz, I-L-L-O-U-Z, Jean-Nicolas Illouz, on Nerval, in particular 'the literary genres in Sylvie,' that's what it's called, 'the genres of Sylvie' — I have rarely encountered such relevance in content so difficult and subtle. So I'm picking this text back up — remember, I was talking about privation of self-knowledge which is not always a lie, that's where we are. I'll start again from the beginning: 'a dream that I still have' — sorry, it moved there, there — 'everything changed shape around me' — no
1:00:21 that's not it, how did that move, sorry — well then, since I know it by heart, that can prepare the same — I'd still like to, out of scruple — ah there, I know it starts with an evening — 'I believed with certainty' — sorry, I have a frog in my throat — 'I believed with certainty that I was transported to the banks of the Rhine; in front of me stood sinister rocks whose outline took shape in the shadow; I entered a smiling house' — now, going back, I need to pause a bit longer: banks of the Rhine — Nerval never knew his mother, that's the issue, we're not here to do his psychoanalysis, but I'm telling you everything useful to know, though it's not enough to answer the question we're asking. So I'll tell you fairly quickly: it plays an enormous role in a way he only becomes aware of very belatedly, and even then very partially — Nerval is not the best placed to see how important this is for him, and so
1:01:34 by superimposing 'I entered a smiling house' — by superimposing the maternal house, which we recognize, onto the banks of the Rhine, it's to remind us that his mother is buried there, for she had the misfortune to follow her husband, who was in the Napoleonic campaigns — Nerval's father. You see how traumatic it is in the unconscious to see that the one I loved, alone even still tenderly, as he says in a poem, to see that the being one loves most, and whom one thinks loves only you — I'm speaking from the infant's point of view here, which we have all been, so I'm not just talking about Nerval, but this happened to him — he really had no luck at that level — that she was so in love with her husband that she followed him on the Napoleonic campaigns; there weren't many wives who did that, leaving the infant in the care of aunts and cousins — hence the importance of the female voice and popular songs, Nerval as he often says, songs passed down from mothers to daughters. So that's all of it, the banks of the Rhine — Nerval, the dream fulfills, as you all know
1:02:44 isn't that right, the dream is the fulfillment of an unconscious desire — I want to join, I want to head toward the tomb of the mother, and so I go toward the Rhine. 'One evening I believed with certainty that I was transported' — transported, as in floating — 'to the banks of the Rhine; in front of me stood sinister rocks whose outline took shape in the shadow. I entered a smiling house, through which a ray of the setting sun cheerfully passed, the green shutters festooned by the vine. It seemed to me that I was entering a house I knew, that of a maternal uncle' — so here the maternal field is confirmed — 'a Flemish painter dead for more than a century. Sketched paintings' — we're at a painter's — 'hung here and there; one of them represented the famous fairy of this shore' — all German schoolchildren, and even quite a few cultivated French people, know the legend of the Lorelei. Lorelei means 'to lie,' as in English, isn't it — that is, one doesn't say a mermaid when it's on the Rhine, when it's fresh water, one says a naiad, a nixie, in Germany one says beings, often malevolent, ondines, whose songs were so, as in Homer
1:03:55 whose songs were so irresistible that the boats — and God knows there are many that cross on the Rhine — shattered on the Lorelei rock, as it's still called, quite near Mainz, Mainz. So 'sketched paintings hung here and there; one of them represented the famous fairy of this shore' — those who follow my lectures a bit know that as soon as there is a bank, a shore, a riverside, there is danger in the symbolic field, terror, undertaking, a song — I write to Alice, to Aricie, to Ariadne, he says of Theseus in Racine's Phèdre, when she learns that Theseus might be roaming down there toward the kingdom of the dead: 'what charm drew him to its dreaded shores' — but shores are always dreadful. 'One of them represented the famous fairy of this shore, an old servant' — that's quite reassuring — 'whom I called Marguerite and whom I seemed to have known since childhood, said to me: are you not going to bed' — that's wonderful, this is not at all the eternal poor wretch — at the time he was going to die in black misery, and here he is, in his dream, entering the maternal house, an old servant who tells him: are you not going to bed, for you've come from far away
1:05:05 implying, you must be tired — 'and your uncle will come back late, we'll wake you for supper' — implying, don't worry, all is well here. 'I lay down on a bed with columns draped in large-flowered red chintz. There was a rustic clock hanging on the wall in front of me' — you see the clock here, the relation to time, to memory — 'and on this clock a bird that began to speak like a person' — that too, in the symbolic field, as you well know, you know that the Roman augurs, in antiquity, to know the future, consulted the entrails of birds, isn't that so, and you find in many musicians — Schumann for instance — a very beautiful piece, almost pre-Debussy-like, for solo piano called 'The Prophet Bird' — birds prophesy; before the Queen of Sheba reaches Solomon, in that immense meeting the Old Testament tells of, before she physically realizes it, the messenger hoopoe, this bird, breaks away from the Queen of Sheba's procession and goes ahead of Solomon like a message
1:06:16 and there are so many African masks that have a bird on the head; I've often, when I asked those who know the traditions there, why the bird — which is very often a hornbill, by the way — they'd answer me: because the bird is the one who will communicate your thoughts to the other. Nice, isn't it, for the slip of the tongue, or things like that, things I didn't want to express but that fly off anyway, you see. And don't forget — I'm speaking of Africa here, but don't forget our ancestors the Gauls, and the wings on the helmet. So the bird tells me, then, you see, and this would be — I had the idea that the soul, I'll skip this, it's rather strange indeed — and I had the idea that my ancestor's soul was in this bird, but I was no more astonished by its language, since in dreams one is no longer astonished by anything in the end, than by its form, than at seeing myself as if transported a century back. There too the dream fulfills this marvelous desire to go back in time, to undo the irreparable, the stain
1:07:26 'the bird spoke to me of members of my family, living or dead' — how can one not think of the dead woman, he who says in one of his most famous poems 'the thirteenth returns, and she is still the first, and she is always the same' — it's the sole moment, it's death or the dead woman, in the singular, so you clearly see whom he's speaking of — but you'll see that this isn't how to get the key to the Nervalian complex just by speaking of his mother; I haven't yet said what interests us. 'The bird spoke to me of members of my family, living or dead at various times, as if they existed simultaneously, and said to me: you see, your uncle took care to paint her portrait in advance' — as if he knew the child would never see her, the uncle saw — 'now she is with us. My eyes fell on a canvas' — so the canvas that represents the 'she'
1:08:18 this pronoun is emphasized — 'which depicted a woman in ancient German costume' — again the relation of this woman to Germany, so it is indeed the mother, who is even now buried — well, now it's in Poland, because since the last war this part of Germany has passed to Poland — she is in cold Silesia, in the Polish Catholic cemetery of Glogau, even now, you see. And the painting — sorry, the canvas — depicted a woman in ancient German costume, leaning over the edge of the river, her eyes drawn to a clump — ah no, you don't have the text, but listen closely — of forget-me-nots. Now, Nerval became famous in the literary world by translating, at 19, Goethe's Faust — a translation of such quality that old Goethe said — it's quite a rare tribute like that, from an author to his translator — 'ever since I read this translation, I can no longer read it in German,' seriously, ask any German speaker. Now Nerval, so the key is that
The forget-me-not and the blurring of the dream 1:09:28 'forget-me-not' is said in German 'Vergissmeinnicht,' which gives in English 'forget me not,' do not forget me. 'Meanwhile the night was thickening' — you see, this is the moment it becomes blurred — I go back to the privation of self-knowledge, I'm not there in the room where Nerval is dreaming, it's not me who blurs his dream, it's not you, it's no one, it's himself, he is inside himself, no force other than an internal force, no agency other than the one within the subject — you see how I return to the fundamentals of this year's course — no other force compels him here to blur, at the decisive moment, the moment we are so close to the great secret of his whole life. Nowhere does he say 'it's my mother,' nowhere — but at the moment it's so clear, that's precisely when it becomes obscured. 'Meanwhile the night was thickening little by little, and the appearances, the sounds'
1:10:38 'and the feeling of the place blurred together in my drowsy mind. I thought I was falling into an abyss that crossed the globe' — at least, taking on proportions, we're far from the little maternal house — 'I felt myself carried without suffering by a current of molten metal' — I'll spare you, read Aurélia, it's incandescent, that's the word for it here, molten metal — 'and a thousand similar rivers, whose hues indicated chemical differences, furrowed the bosom of the earth' — well, here he's caught up again in his cosmic, telluric visions. But for an instant we came very close to a primal scene, very close to unveiling a secret, and at the moment we were about to unveil it, the setting blurs. So can we here accuse Nerval of being a liar? You see our problem returns, more and more of a problem — he's not a liar at all, but at the same time it's true that there is a force in him that doesn't want to know the truth, but that doesn't want him himself to know the truth — the unbearable, it's interesting
1:11:53 to see that we have a Pharisee in his prose, and that in the poems — you'll tell me it's unbearable, and yet earlier you quoted a text where he says clearly, 'the thirteenth returns, she is still the first' — you know that 13:00 and 1:00 are the same, the loop is closed, that's it, the secret is pierced — 'the thirteenth returns, she is still the first, and she is always the sole one, it is the sole moment' — that is, all the women I have loved are always the same one; in fact through each of them whom I loved, it is death, and it is always the sole moment, it is death or the dead woman, oh delight, oh torment, oh delight I have finally found her again, oh torment I have found her again but as dead. And Nerval's maternal village is called — the name is nowhere in this dream of course, but in reality — Mortefontaine. How can a fountain be dead? The fountain is life, it's the source, it's what nourishes, what waters, what quenches thirst, it's the origin, it's not mourning, it's birth, the fountain, the source. And there it is for poor Nerval, he had death at the source, Mortefontaine. So I understand, but this doesn't contradict what I'm saying — that he writes it without being conscious of it
1:13:03 in the poem again, though he doesn't speak of his mother — it's much more explicit in the poem, but precisely because it's been noted, in his poems and sonnets, hence their very mysterious, hermetic side, and that's why they were the object of intense admiration among the Symbolists first, then among the Surrealists — the poems contained in the collection Chimeras and other chimeras, one must look at the variants, this is the moment of Nerval's madness, the poems, he always wrote them during his fits of madness. You know the most famous one, most of you know it, sometimes even without knowing it's Nerval: 'I am the shadowy one, the widower, the unconsoled' — see, the widower, the one orphaned of mother, who says 'the widower' — 'I am the shadowy one, the widower, the unconsoled, the prince of Aquitaine of the abolished tower, my sole star is dead, and my constellated lute bears the black sun of melancholy' — and here 'melancholy' has a clinical sense, it's not much more serious than romantic, voluptuous melancholy, hence the black sun
The sin against the spirit and Antéros 1:14:14 so Nerval's prose does not go as far in symbolic expression as the poems, but when it approaches it, everything blurs — it's admirable, this quest. So you see, I've found a new status, so I'm going to be a bit more indulgent than the apostle — you see, one can commit what the Gospel calls the only sin that is not forgiven, in the religion of forgiveness — there are still those who believe it's the sin of the flesh, that Judeo-Christianity is obsessed with the affairs of men and women — no, it's the sin against the Spirit, it is stated in so many words in the Gospel that it's the only one that's not forgiven. Mary Magdalene the prostitute is not the one seen worst in the Gospel; she's even the first to wash Jesus's feet, which Jesus will do afterward with his apostles on Holy Thursday, he will wash their feet, no — no, on the other hand I'm going to reread you, I'll reread you the evangelist's sentence
1:15:26 still, it's violent, you see that. So there it is: 'outside are the dogs, the sorcerers, the debauched, the murderers, the idolaters, and all who love and practice falsehood' — a generic term for all species of evil — 'and as for the devil himself, you have the devil for your father, and you want to carry out your father's desires; he was a murderer from the beginning' — 'principle' has a double sense, chronological and logical, meaning both the beginning and the essence — 'he was a murderer from the beginning, from the principle, and he does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him; so his essence is falsehood; when he utters the lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of lies.' So we just saw, in Nerval's case — the Nerval they called 'gentle Gérard,' everyone who knew him called him that, it was a marvelous case, gentle Gérard — yes, but you see, it's complicated, the problem, I submit it to you, do I have the solution, I'm not saying
1:16:37 that one must remain ignorant of oneself — no, no, it's good to know as much as possible, but still, I mean, it's not criminal either — except that in a poem, precisely, called 'Antéros' in the Chimeras — Antéros, both anti-Eros, it's prior to Eros you see, and at the same time Antaeus, in Nerval, I'd need 30 hours to explain half a line sometimes, it's so overloaded with symbolic connotations — but Antaeus, in Greek mythology, which Nerval knows inside out, which everyone knew at the time, but especially him, Antaeus is that mythological figure, that monster that Heracles rid the earth of, but who had for mother the earth, Gaia, and so Heracles was forced, in order to strangle him, to lift him up and strangle him in the air, because every time he touched the earth again he regained his strength from the maternal earth, you see. So in 'Antéros,' the title of Nerval's poem, there's all of that — you ask, we don't know who's speaking, 'you ask why I have so much rage in my heart' — how, 'gentle Gérard,' look how suddenly
1:17:48 the return of the repressed — 'you ask why I have so much rage in my heart, and on my flexible neck an untamed head' — rebellious Nerval — 'it's that I am descended from the race of Antaeus, I turn the darts back against the conquering god' — the conquering god is God the Father, the mother's husband — 'still, beneath Abel's pallor, alas bloodied, I sometimes have Cain's implacable redness' — so it goes as far as murder here, and you find, how curious, our pair from last time, red and white — 'beneath Abel's pallor, alas bloodied' — that was the snow that covered the surroundings of King Arthur's court, in that icy winter, in the tale of the Grail, isn't it, and against which stood out clearly the three drops of blood of wounded birds that fascinated Perceval in a long fascinated contemplation — well, 'beneath Abel's pallor, alas bloodied, I sometimes have Cain's implacable redness'
Negativity immanent to the self according to Hegel 1:18:58 the color of hell, there. Now that we've multiplied a few examples, I'll read Kant's text fairly quickly because it's first of all short, and — sorry, there it is, where has my Kant text gone, I don't know if I sent it, in principle it should be there, it's displaying, all right, and yet I looked at it
1:20:09 in the opera folder and I didn't find it — ah yes yes yes yes, how silly of me, yes of course, well anyway, otherwise we can move to the other one, I'll find it, because I had filed it well myself, there — well, in the end it should be there, that's it, I don't understand, well how about that, well it's indeed there on Saturday, yes, I'm surely not going to have deleted it without meaning to, but apparently I have — well, never mind, it's a text found in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals — ah good, very well — and in which precisely Kant alludes to what I just read to you in the Gospel, so as far as the substance is concerned
1:21:19 you see, but Kant himself is of a severity equal to the apostle's regarding lying — there was a rather significant controversy in his time, and he had it with Benjamin Constant — for him, lying is never justifiable, yes for Kant. I'll move past that for now, but in a moment I'll come back to my equation, where I related — not an equality but an equivalence, I don't know, an equivalence — Freudian repression, ideology in Marx, the high that wants to know nothing of the low, negativity, repression, ideology, the unconscious. So, and as for negativity, now I'm approaching this text, which is excerpted
1:22:30 from the Philosophy of Right, paragraphs 6-7, at the beginning of this — how shall I say — text, this text, so to speak, is Hegel's political testament: 'to conceive negativity' — here we're in the subject, immanent in the universal or in the identical, as in the self — negativity within the self, that's what we just saw with the blurring of the setting in Nerval's dream. We didn't decide it was a lie, that would be too clear-cut for this stage — isn't it, it suits him well of course, at that moment, not to have to, not to recognize the mourning, the irreversibility of the mother's death — but still, it's not a deliberate lie to anyone either. 'To conceive negativity as immanent in the universal or in the identical, as in the self, was the progress that speculative philosophy still had to make' — I remind those of you doing Hegelian studies that at this point, starting
1:23:40 from the Logic, so to speak, the Greater Logic, Hegel increasingly tends to replace the term 'dialectic' with that of the 'speculative moment,' the moment of speculative philosophy, speculative and dialectical reason against one-sided, mechanistic understanding, etc. So, 'to conceive negativity as immanent in the universal or the identical, as in the self, was' — understood, I've made it — 'the progress that speculative philosophy still had to make. The first two moments' — which I'll skip — 'that the will can abstract itself, and that at the same time it is determined by itself or by something else' — it's very simple, but for those who find this abstract, never mind, it's what follows that matters — 'are easily granted and conceived, because taken each on its own they are abstract moments without truth; but the third, the true, the speculative' — the one that places negation inside the self, the subject — 'and the true as conceived can only be thought speculatively; so the third moment is what the understanding'
1:24:51 always refuses to penetrate — the understanding never wants to know it — mathematical understanding for example, it's ideal for detecting an error, a paralogism, a contradiction, fine, but not the contradiction that is within the subject, as if the subject were splitting in two. 'The demonstration and discussion of this heart' — look how solemnly he speaks of negativity within the self, of the split within the self, Rimbaud's 'I is an other,' we've seen that these are the definitive aspects of modernity — 'the demonstration and discussion of this heart of speculation, of the infinite as self-relating negativity, of this ultimate source of all activity, of all life, of all consciousness, belongs to logic, the demonstration, the discussion as purely speculative philosophy' — so we're presupposing here that we've already had the logic, well then
Kant, the first lie, and Pascalian diversion 1:26:01 you see, we're still in some real problems — ah, there it is, I found Kant's text — yes, back to lying. I'll read it anyway: 'It is worth noting that the Bible dates the first crime, by which evil entered the world, not from fratricide, from the murder of Cain' — which is already enormous — 'but from the first lie' — you see, the term is emphasized — 'because nature itself rises up against this crime, and designates as the author of all evil the primal liar.' You see, Kant, the father of lies, he read the text well. 'Reason moreover can give no other explanation of this propensity of man to deceit, which must nevertheless have preceded' — never mind — 'the Fall afterward, which concerns us less' — but the deceit, we can't say Nerval is deceitful in his dream, the poor wretch, he's already in a rather serious state as it is, and so he can spare himself one more trauma, and above all
1:27:12 that it was an almost paradisiacal dream, isn't it, and so it would be terrible if it ended like a nightmare, as happens in other passages of Aurélia. So we're going around in circles, but not at all in the negative sense — on the contrary, I come back to my equation from the start, when I spoke of the modeling of lying in politics — the simple fact of belonging to the social class where I have less trouble with wealth, I'm speaking in euphemism, isn't it, where I don't — where money, my riches, my fortune, depending on the case, grants me this exorbitant privilege of not having to make the choice within myself of what my deep and true desires are — I go with the one I have today, period, or in a month or three weeks, in short, or with the one that's been nagging at me for a good while now, you see. If I'm disappointed
1:28:22 afterward, never mind, I still have money to move on to something else, and so on — I won't give you the whole Pascalian analysis of divertissement, but it's no accident that Pascal alludes to the king; he says indeed that the greatest advantage kings and the great of this world have is that their servants and their court spend their time entertaining them, for, says Pascal, if the king were deprived of all diversion he would be unhappy, king though he is, if he thought about it, like the poorest of men, like Job the king. Pascal says, 'when I set about examining men' — this sentence was often quoted by people in lockdown during those recent weeks — 'when I set about examining men, I saw that all the misfortune of men comes from one thing only, that they cannot stay quietly in a room' — because there, we're forced to face ourselves, aren't we, to bring out a few determinations of the self
1:29:32 that I usually dispatch and put off till later. I think the hardest thing to understand — and that's why I come back to it, asking you to dig into it — is the temporal dimension of the thing: money doesn't remove the problem, but it lets me gain time before confronting the unpleasantness the problem poses — again, I'm using euphemism on purpose, it can be traumatic. And that's why — you see, he was severe toward the understanding, Hegel, in the text I read you — well now we're going to see a text where he rehabilitates it, because the understanding is what must be common to science and philosophy, with this difference: philosophy doesn't stop at the understanding alone but also needs reason, not because science lacks something — the sciences give themselves everything they need
The understanding and the prodigious power of the negative 1:30:43 in relation to their own end, which is the knowledge of objects — but when it comes to the subject, reason must take over from the understanding, dialectical reason must take over from mechanical understanding, which is satisfied only with truth as non-contradiction. And so you have this decisive text in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit where Hegel breaks definitively with his youthful Romanticism, because you can well imagine that the understanding, in the mathematical sense of the term, pure intelligence, the pure intellect — I'm not speaking of that here, but here I really mean the understanding, the understanding alone — was despised, vilified by the Romantics, who preferred to it intuition and other modes of immediate knowledge, because what's held against the understanding is that it's always mediate knowledge — it's by means of another truth that I demonstrate
1:31:53 a theorem, in mathematics for example, I presuppose a prior theorem known, which lets me demonstrate the statement I want to validate, either by bringing in a prior theorem or by bringing in outright an axiom or a definition, a first notion. Now Hegel is going to recall here that the essential function of the understanding is analysis — analysis, again very much scorned by those who think themselves profound enough to belong to the order of synthesis, isn't that so — analysis first in the most ordinary sense, chemical analysis, which consists of dividing water into hydrogen on one side and oxygen on the other, or dismantling an engine, if you like, in more material things — even more material, sorry, more industrial things in any case — dismantling a whole engine on a garage floor piece by piece, or anatomy — it's even a prefix, 'ana-lysis,' in medicine one divides the whole
1:33:03 into its constituent parts. And so I'll begin the text here, isn't it: 'The activity of dividing' — this comes after the first point — 'the activity of dividing is the force and the labor of the understanding' — it's emphasized — and there's this astonishing passage — 'of the most astonishing and greatest power there is, or rather of the absolute power' — you know, Archimedes said, give me a lever and I'll lift the world — 'the circle' — now he speaks of the opposite of understanding, isn't that so, of intuition, which is circular — 'the circle that rests within itself, closed upon itself, and which, as substance' — the opposite of relation — 'holds all its moments together' — implied, and immediate relation, which provokes no astonishment — 'but that the accident as such, separated from its surrounding context' — you see, I have a book here, I have a book, all right, it's a whole, and well, I decide to say the top of the book, I isolate through thought what in reality
1:34:13 is not isolated — that's what analyzing, abstracting, means, it's isolating through thought, it's extracting — so I can extract a slice of cake and set it aside, abstract it from the rest, but that's not analysis — analysis is when I do it through thought — but what a force! And in the top of the book I can distinguish the middle of the top, and the right-hand corner and the left-hand corner, and so on to infinity — that's why he speaks of absolute power, to infinity, there's no limit. 'The activity of dividing is the force and the labor of the understanding, of the most astonishing and greatest power there is, or rather of the absolute power' — I'll skip the sentence about the circle, which is the opposite — 'but that the accident as such, separated from its surrounding context' — the top of the book — 'that which is bound and effectively real only' — implied, usually, before analysis — 'in its connection to something else, and that this accident as such should attain an existence' — that doesn't mean a proper existence and a distinct freedom
1:35:23 implied, thanks to my analyzing thought — 'this is the prodigious power of the negative' — you see how it returns, our divided negative — it's negating the totality that was given to me. 'This is the prodigious power of the negative, the energy of thought, of the pure self' — when you say that between A and B there is an infinity of points, but that's an extraordinary power, it means you have instituted an infinite on a small two-centimeter segment on your sheet of paper — no need to look at the universe and other things to think the infinite, you have it right there, the infinite immanent to the finite, the infinite that makes the finite explode from within the finite itself. So I repeat and continue: 'but that the accident as such, separated from its surrounding context, that which is bound and effectively real only in its connection'
1:36:33 to something else, attains a proper existence and a distinct freedom, that what usually exists only through another attains an existence through itself — this is the prodigious power of the negative, the energy of thought, of the pure self. Death, if we want to give that name to this unreality, is the most dreadful thing' — well yes, if I set aside my cerebellum, that's because I'm no longer alive; anatomy is done on a dead body, and analyzing a triangle is, metaphorically, killing the totality that was given at the start, isn't it, taking a semicircle is dividing the totality of the circle that was given at the start. So, 'death, if we want to give that name to this unreality' — he's in the process of saying, Hegel, why the Romantics don't like the understanding, because they know feathers get plucked when you look closely with thought, that nothing resists the intellect
Beauty without strength and the self as mediation 1:37:48 sharpened to the point of the concept — 'death, if we want to give that name to this unreality, is the most dreadful thing, and to hold fast to what is dead' — that's what Nerval was not doing, of course, in his vision — 'and to hold fast to what is dead is what requires the greatest force.' We're not going to blame poor Nerval, are we, for not showing the greatest force here — and there's this sentence, so important, and which at the same time is a farewell to his youthful Romanticism: 'beauty without force' — he says 'kraftlose Schönheit,' beauty without force — 'hates the understanding' — from the verb to hate — 'because the understanding expects of it' — of beauty — 'what it is not able to accomplish.' Hegel gives a slap, two centuries in advance, to all post-Nietzschean aestheticism — you remember, ignorance doesn't teach itself — that Nerval had already slapped Nietzsche. 'Beauty without force hates the understanding, because the understanding expects of it what it is not able to accomplish. It is not this life that shrinks back in horror from death'
1:38:58 it's narcissism, 'and keeps itself pure of destruction' — narcissism contemplating its image in the mirror, and therefore at the mercy of the mirror shattering, of the body dislocated as painted by Bosch — that's what awaits the narcissist, it's terrible. You have this in the admirable preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, that marvelous novel by that delightful reactionary — there are obscene reactionaries, this one is delightful — in what we see, it's called The Picture of Dorian Gray, in the preface, which is a kind of series of aesthetic maxims, there's: 'all art is at once surface and symbol,' the danger of questioning the symbol, the danger of plunging beneath the surface — whoever does so does so at their own risk and peril. 'Beauty without force hates the understanding, because the understanding expected of it what it is not able to accomplish. It is not this life that shrinks back in horror from death' — narcissistic — 'and keeps itself pure of destruction'
1:40:08 but the life that bears death and maintains itself in death itself — so it's not a matter of death, and not exactly of a zone, it's not a matter of going toward the deadly, no, on the contrary, it's in order to access true life, which is the life of the spirit. 'Spirit attains its truth only on condition' — listen carefully — 'of finding itself again' — so the same is preserved, knowing oneself — 'in absolute dismemberment' — you see a beautiful example of dialectic — finding oneself again in infinite division, isn't that so, when I learn that I am not at all the one I believed myself to be and to whom I clung so much. I've often used the figure of Hippolytus again, in Phèdre, isn't that so, the one who thought he would never have to suffer those misfortunes in which men are trapped because of amorous passion, because he himself was insensitive to it, he preferred hunting a thousand times over, and he dreamed of one day being a hero like his father, of taming monsters, that is, of subjugating not stags or wild boars but those monsters that prevent man from dwelling on the earth, as Heracles did — and meanwhile
1:41:21 he trains himself in hunting, and then all of a sudden he doesn't come upon a monster, though — he comes upon the ravishing Aricie, and to whom he makes this confession that sums up what Hegel called the split, the negativity within the self and the subject — you see how I go back and forth between the abstract and the concrete: 'Enslaved now beneath the common law' — that of love — 'enslaved now beneath the common law, by what troubles do I see myself carried away far from myself' — you see, before you stands a deplorable prince — 'of a reckless pride' — you see the narcissism — 'of a reckless pride, a memorable example, I who against love proudly rebelled, who long insulted the captive of its chains, who, contemplating mortals' shipwrecks, always thought to contemplate them from the shore.' Enslaved now beneath the common law — that's one of the moments
1:42:31 The most terrible thing in life is when the character I had forged for myself as being unique — we are unique, but in a somewhat indifferent sense, look, I do this and I see my landscape there, already a few millimetres different from how I've ever seen it, since as soon as I move everything changes, everything is unique, but that is indifferent difference. True uniqueness is demanding, it's difficult to pass from the mere particular that we all are to the individual that few attain, to what is truly an individual, to what is rarer. And well subjected now under the common law, by what disturbance do I see myself carried far from myself? Well, Hegel says: no, let that self move away, being far from your true self is the true life of the spirit, it's the one you are living right now. And Hegel has this beautiful formula elsewhere, he says that the self is mediation — the true self, agreed, is the mediation between becoming other and being oneself. The self is not the child I was, it's not the adult I'm going to become, it's the movement of passing from one to the other, and of passing from the adult
1:43:41 to old age, and from old age to death — that's all of it, the self, and from childhood to adolescence too, of course. I believe we have sufficiently established the relations between lying, the unconscious, negativity and ideology. Yes, now we understand why ideology is what is up above, in the superstructures — 'super' means above — because it is above, socially speaking. You don't need to live on the 20th floor to be among the powerful of this world; on the contrary, in fact, the powerful of this world are often proud, rightly so, indeed happy, rightly so, to own hectares under their feet — come see my trees, as people used to say. Are there any questions, Philippe?
Audience question: Hegel and Africa 1:44:45 I'll ask the control room if — yes, a question that comes up often, that is, Hegel through the back door, to say what someone of his era could think about Africa — but that is a very insufficient answer, as you can well imagine. I will answer first with Lacan's phrase to Hegel — Hegel had an enormous, a very high awareness of his pedagogical role. Now Lacan says that before signifying anything, whatever Hegel says about Africa — any speech signifies for someone. If you want to understand what Hegel says about Africa, look at who he is addressing: people who dreamed elsewhere, the Romantics, already well before the Zen fashion and
1:45:55 and the jokers there, the Buddhist-ecologist types — well, there was — I'm not talking about the Buddha's teaching, which is something else entirely, I'm talking — it's the distinction I make between the admirable music of Telemann, Bach or Vivaldi, and the discourse by which the 'baroque purists' brandish it against all the music that came after, which is always presented as a mutilation. So back to Hegel: he wants to dissuade them from thinking that there is, in origins, an already-there. But I'm very glad he raises the question, because there is the Hegel of the lecture courses and the Hegel who feels freer with respect to censorship, because in the courses there is the oral part — all the witnesses say that Hegel went much further in his oral teaching than what he cautiously attempted in writing. You know, spoken words fly away, written ones remain. Why do I bring up this distinction between written and oral? Because I won't get up to look for it, but because it comes down to a word
1:47:05 so it's not worth it — but we've just found, we've — a few years ago we thought we really had almost all of Hegel's manuscripts. We have just found, in the library of the Sorbonne, an old private collection that belonged to Victor Cousin, who had left the works there himself. You know that Victor Cousin invited Hegel — the few days that Hegel spent in Paris were at Victor Cousin's invitation, Victor Cousin — and so a small pamphlet was found, entitled 'Aesthetics'
1:47:37 written by one of Hegel's best students, whom Hegel had tasked with saying — several times Mr Cousin writes to me to have — I don't know if he'd understand much of it, and by someone who mastered French admirably; it's very well written. And there, Hegel is addressing someone in particular — it's not published by a publisher, he sent a handwritten pamphlet. And at the end, at the end of his 'Aesthetics' — when it's not the four volumes, but it's the same plan — which ends with modernity. You seem to know Hegel's aesthetics, you know that we moderns, says Hegel, are contemporaries of museums; with us, museums have multiplied, we — we enjoy millennia of artistic production from all places and all times, something no era ever did in the old days, when Father Kircher, the Jesuit, in the 17th century, came back from his journey to the Orient and wanted — he made drawings to illustrate his accounts of the Orient, his descriptions
1:48:47 he made drawings of the pyramids, he added caryatids to them in the Versailles style, with little bell-towers and little rococo motifs — it's really extraordinary. And as for Racine, he had his Greeks played with feathers and made them speak like people of Versailles: 'Do you seek me, madam, so charming a hope, would it be permitted to me?' — you see, imagine Achilles talking like that. So why am I talking about this text? Because Hegel says there is something a bit bitter in saying that art no longer has the place it once had for us; it has never been so profound. Hegel says, careful, don't misread this: but on the level of creation, those who lived before absolute knowledge, precisely because they did not have absolute knowledge, still counted on the work of art to receive revelations, and so they put their whole soul into it. I often use the example of Fra Angelico, who painted the Virgin and the Saints on their knees, or those who sculpted
1:49:58 the gargoyles that we admire on cathedrals at vertiginous heights, and who put as much care into their work as if it were meant to be exhibited in a museum, even though there wasn't even a signature — it was the age of faith. Well, Hegel says, if it's not — and these are the last words of his pamphlet — if it's not that we would need to return to the enchanters of Africa. I'll point you to the pamphlet, I don't want to waste time looking, because I have a small room and quite a lot of disorder among my books, but you see: Hegel's Aesthetics pamphlet from Victor Cousin, meant for Victor Cousin — I'll leave the link, if you can't find it I'll leave the link on our Facebook page — you see, suddenly fascinated by the enchanters of Africa. That's my first answer. Second answer, quicker: in the chapter on religion in the Phenomenology, you know there are all the investments that consciousness goes through, from perception to absolute knowledge, passing through honour, money, wealth — and there is a moment of religion; that moment is itself divided into three parts
1:51:09 natural religion, aesthetic religion, absolute religion. He begins with the oldest, natural religion, the one we have all gone through and that we still often have, especially children — it's animism, giving a little soul to all objects. And Hegel says that the peoples who are at that animist stage were the first to figure the absolute, and he starts from the totem, the totem animal, which is the first figuration of the absolute. As for the rest, I mean the reductive way he speaks of it — for example, there, I presume it's an allusion to Reason in History — those are Hegel's public texts, his exoteric texts. As material, he didn't have the benefit of Mr Balandier or Lévi-Strauss, he only had missionaries' accounts. Frankly, I'll finish on this: I have an excellent friend who lived for a long time in the Amazonian jungle, doing research on the egg-laying
1:52:20 of female alligators. He had a great musical culture, we had lots of exchanges on that level. He told me that in the remote villages of the Amazon — I'm talking about Indian communities — the missionaries, who were often people from Nordic countries, teaching English to the little Indians, to the children, giving them lessons, the languages they had to learn, Portuguese, English — they had to stop there for the insults, to say bastard, thief, wicked — they said 'communist.' It's through this channel that documentation about Africa came about. Africa is the continent of orality, it's the only, the only great continent where written history doesn't exist. And believe me, I know what I'm talking about, and I allow myself to say it — after all, I am behind the appearance, in paperback format, of the first General History of Africa accessible from a financial point of view
1:53:30 to an African student researcher, when I was working for the publishing house, for a subsidiary of Hachette, on 'South of the Sahara,' published with UNESCO's agreement, by an enormous team of African researchers and historians, because the specialized books that existed on the little that concerned the history of Africa were inaccessible given their price to African students. So there, that's how I answer, but try to get hold of the pamphlet, the Aesthetics — not one that dismisses but on the contrary arrives at what could — it's the case to say it — re-enchant us, we who no longer have the magical relationship to art that our ancestors had, is to draw inspiration from the enchanters of Africa. There you go, if there's anything else in that vein, thank you, and I hope that next time
1:54:40 we will be back within our walls. I need to get in touch with the Centre Goscinny about that, because we have of course, like everyone, suspended our lecture calendar within the walls of the Centre René Goscinny for a little while. I hope to see you there again soon; in any case, you'll be informed through the same channel. Thank you very much for your presence, and until next time — thank you.
