English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Metastaseis by Xenakis, music and architectonics 1:30 I'm delighted to be with you again, as always, and especially after this beautiful excerpt for which I thank Pierre-Alain, who is officiating this evening, and this beautiful piece by Iannis Xenakis, a Greek composer. And here we heard one of his best-known pieces, namely Metastasis, movement.
2:04 Lots of terms in Greek. To say movement, we're already getting into scientific connotations. With Aristotle, we distinguish mechanē, dunamis, right? And metabolē, well you see, roots that are familiar to you otherwise, right? It's been more than 2500 years that we've been doing variations with…
2:34 I chose this piece first because it's beautiful, that's a value judgment, you'll say. I apply to myself what I often say, which is that for now I'm rather speaking about myself when I say it's not just that it pleases me. I don't learn much about the musician, about the piece that way. But still, there's a consensus in praising it—even those who generally find contemporary music grating recognize that it's… People recognize when it's a piece from around…
3:04 Well, the sixties, that it was a masterpiece called Metastasis, I repeat. I should also specify that Iannis Xenakis is an architect by trade. An architect who composes—we're neither in architecture, nor in tone, nor in music, but in the architectonic, right? You see, that exists. Yes, I also deliberately chose a composer with a scientific connotation. You saw the image appear.
3:34 Xenakis is also known—forget all that for now, momentarily, I'll remind you later. He dug into that and listened to his music above all. But he's known for having initiated the genre called stochastic music, music assisted by computer, which makes use of a statistical distribution of sounds. Anyway, let's not overanalyze it, the piece is worth something in itself.
4:05 The proof is that even those who know nothing of all these theoretical elements found the piece had something irresistible about it. So I made an exception to the alternation, you see, of the ring. For those who miss the ring, I miss it too, don't worry, we'll come back to it. But, in principle, those who follow closely know we're not straying so far from it.
4:37 But I wanted not to leave things where we left them in our last episode, where we barely covered a first part of what I was calling a bit the geopolitical metaphor, since I have the two imperialisms follow one another—philosophical imperialism, on which I dwelt rather too long last time, but still, Aristotle, that's quite something, it was worth it.
5:10 And today, we move on to the antithesis, scientific imperialism. So, to introduce it, I'll perhaps dive straight in medias res, as they say in Latin—it means at the heart of things, right, in the middle of the thing, in medias res. Right away, into a text you'll probably see on the screen, a text—thank you, thank you Pierre-Alain—a text by Max Planck.
Max Planck and the three conditions of a scientific discourse 5:41 Do I need to introduce Max Planck? First of all, it would intimidate me to do so, one never knows—he's not even a philosopher, he's above all an immense physicist. And his name—I'll be a bit grandiloquent—his name, right, sits enthroned in the Empyrean, at the summit, alongside those of Einstein, Newton, Galileo, in reverse chronological order? No, no, seriously, he is after all the founder of quantum theory, right, of quantum physics, of quantum mechanics.
6:19 And nothing happens in physics laboratories—don't picture retorts, as in Professor Nimbus's workshop, or in Doctor Faust's den, no, no, it's a laboratory in an almost purely theoretical sense, it's often, almost always mathematics, or theoretical physics if you prefer, but in the calculations being done, as we speak, at the summit, at the most cutting-edge levels of physics, the most current physics, which I speak of from very far away, since I'd be quite incapable of speaking of it up close, there are few pages that can do without Planck's constant, you see, H, Planck's constant.
7:10 Well now, why did I choose this text? Because it brings us back—they've illustrated this text well, since we're going to talk about scientific imperialism tonight—not a somewhat pretentious definition of science, but the set of conditions from which one can decide that a discourse is truly scientific. I had gathered these conditions for you, I had proposed them to you, quite modestly, but I'm sure that's been forgotten, so now is the time to recall them, and then to see how far Max Planck confirms for us here that this is indeed what is considered scientific by those who are its greatest representatives.
8:00 What had I said? A discourse is scientific when it has a proper object, first condition, a proper object—in short, when it doesn't speak of everything and therefore of nothing, but of a determinate object, proper, which is its object. Botany, right? Sorry, the set of plants, right?
8:31 Offers a proper object to botany. The set of animals offers a proper object to zoology. Afterwards, you can make, right, subsets as much as you like, right? Inside, plants, or outside—since this has varied a bit historically—you can distinguish fungi and within that, mycology, right? Inside botany. A proper object.
9:04 Once again, a science of everything—that's often a reproach I make against a certain environmentalism, not against serious ecologists, who themselves aren't ecologists but glaciologists, climatologists, astrophysicists, specialists in the sun. The rhythms of solar activity have a gigantic influence on our planet's climate. It might be time to remind those who are megalomaniac enough to think their own activity matters more for global warming than, say, solar activity.
9:46 It has an effect too. When I exhale, that too warms the planet. Okay. That's… A proper object, that's what it means. What I reproach a certain environmentalism for is that they talk about what? The environment. Within the environment, there are a thousand disciplines. Take that, there's architecture. Carpentry, furniture.
10:20 So, first condition. A discourse is scientific when it has a proper object. That's not sufficient, far from it. Secondly, because one could say theology has for its proper object God. Or the divine, if you prefer. That doesn't mean it's a science. Secondly, this object must be subject to laws. Because we're going to see this more closely with Max Planck's text. Laws, that is, universal and necessary propositions.
10:53 I won't go further because Planck will give us his own definition of law. I'm not going to risk the ridiculousness of duplicating him at that level. But roughly, universal propositions, that is, valid everywhere and always. Everywhere in space, always in time. And necessary. That means that once the cause is given, the effect follows necessarily. Not sometimes yes, sometimes no.
11:26 Thirdly, because for now we're still in the theoretical realm—it must formulate its laws in such a way that, here we move, you see, to the manner of expressing science now, to its language if you like. I've said before that mathematics isn't really a language, but its discourse must be expressed in such a way that it lends itself to experimental verification involving measurement.
12:00 I repeat this last condition because it's a bit longer. Well, it must express its laws, the laws governing its proper object—to sum it all up—in such a way that these laws can be verified by experiments involving measurement. In other words, allowing not merely for experience—because there are those who say, 'Oh you know, Africans, I've been dealing with them for 40 years, I know them well.'
12:34 No, that's not experience, that's ideology. It's prejudice, as Descartes would say. We'll come back to that later. But no, no, experimentation. It's not a matter of saying 'it's hot, it's cold.' That's not experience. It's not quantified. You have to say 'it's 18 degrees.' Hot, cold—that's up to each person. Ask a Russian and an African, 'It's 18 degrees, is that hot or cold?'
13:04 They won't give the same answer. It took millennia to move from quality to quantity. And one of the greatest regressions of our era was, at the end of the fifties, at the beginning of ecological discourse—I'm being consistent—when people started saying, 'Oh, quantity isn't everything, pensions, wages, fine, okay. Let's leave that to the Marxists. What matters is quality of life.' You know, quality of life on half of welfare benefits, that's great.
13:35 Come on, let's be serious. A discourse is scientific when it has a proper object, when this object can be, when it subjects this object to laws, and when these laws are expressible in terms that lend themselves to experimental verification involving the quantum, in the plural quanta, measurement, quantity.
What Planck calls a physical law 14:07 I'll hand things over to Max Planck. I have the text in English, but honestly, it's so clear and so simple. I'll try to do a simultaneous translation. I'm not really the most hardened of English speakers, but still. So, 'What now do we mean by physical law?' Now there, you see, I stop. Now, what do we mean by physical law? This is no longer a scientist speaking here, this is a philosopher of physics, for this is the Socratic question par excellence.
14:37 What do we call a physical law? That's what he's asking. So this question falls into the category of essence. What do we call it? I don't yet know whether it exists, whether the world is subject to laws, but before knowing whether the world is subject to laws, we must agree on what we call a law. And that's the question he starts by raising. And he answers this: a physical law, 'the physical law,' is any proposition, so any proposition, stating a fixed and absolutely valid relation, establishing a connection between what?
15:18 Between quantitatively measurable magnitudes. You see, I'm translating word for word, it's not very good French. Word for word, so it's clear for everyone. But you see, this confirms our previous conditions from which this discourse can be called scientific. So there, a law establishes a connection between two magnitudes, between several magnitudes—magnitudes, so almost pleonastically, right?
15:53 Magnitudes, that is, quantifiable things. A connection that allows us, or that allows one to calculate one of these quantities if the other has been, has been able to be, measured. That's all that involves the intervention of mathematics in applied sciences, right? From one known quantity, we can find the unknown one, right? The highest degree, right, of knowledge for any physicist consists in obtaining knowledge, knowledge, the most perfect possible knowledge of the laws of physics.
16:41 You see, we find again more or less all our conditions one by one, if it seems to physicists, in the plural, from a utilitarian point of view, to make use of them because that makes them able to save themselves even the trouble of the effort of measurement, or to have a deeper view.
17:20 I'll skip two lines—'profound yearning,' good, after knowledge, and to have a firm basis for a science of nature. There, we've summed up, we've clarified what we already suspected, what we already knew, right, roughly, as we had formulated it. How did we discover, one by one, right, the individual laws, and the laws of physics, and what is their nature?
17:55 We should note—watch the turn the text takes here—we should note, to begin with, that we have no right to presume that physical laws exist. Now look at the extraordinary progression of this text, philosophically speaking. We began with the question of essence, what do we call a physical law, does it exist or not? Now that we've formulated it, well, that Max Planck has formulated it, he tells us, it's not at all obvious that outside of us, something exists which corresponds to what we've just said.
18:36 Or, if they have existed up to now. Or that they will continue to exist in the same way in the future. Water boils at 100 degrees, for example—will water continue to boil at 100 degrees tomorrow? That's it. And there's this incredible sentence, right, which shows the caution of the greatest scientists compared to the ignorant.
19:06 Excuse me, but I was exasperated to see all the great figures of this world, heads of state and so on, forming an obscene consensus of environmentalism right now, as if they cared about nothing anymore but the planet, right, far more than about humanity. And I think of poor Greta—I don't hold it against her, the poor kid, right, the Swedish girl, poor Greta—I hold it against those who lobby through her, who are moreover among the greatest fortunes in Sweden, everyone knows them over there.
19:40 It is perfectly conceivable—yes, she says it all the time, she used to say, 'listen to the scientists'—that's, listen, in the Middle Ages, they said, 'outside the Church, no salvation'; it's quite something that we now apply that to scientists. I can guarantee you that in a team of Nobel-worthy physicists, a team worthy of the Nobel, or even having won the Nobel Prize, you can find in the same team one who believes in God, one who is completely atheist, one who is a determinist, another who is finalist, one who believes in chance, right, and one for whom there is on the contrary a conception involving anthropic reasoning—we'll see that another time—and who holds intelligent design; none of that is at all incompatible, insofar as they do the same calculations, the same experiments, and draw the same conclusions from them.
20:33 So, 'listen to the scientists'—still, one needs, right, to know what one is talking about, which is what we're doing here. And there's this extraordinary passage—it is perfectly conceivable, that's my favorite expression in this text, I underline it, one fine day—that's not the most scientific phrasing—it is perfectly conceivable, so we cannot rule out the possibility, if you prefer, that one fine day, nature might bring about a perfectly unexpected event that would catch us all off guard.
21:15 In short, roughly, I'll close our reading here, that starting three weeks from now, falling bodies might drop at half of g. Nothing experimental—since that's their criterion, as we saw earlier, for validation—nothing experimental rules out the possibility that this could happen. For the law states what is, and not what will be; what will be is not, what has been is no more, what will be is not, the only thing that is, is now.
Hume: the illegitimate leap of induction 21:51 And someone, a philosopher now, from the end of the eighteenth century, doubtless the most subtle of the English philosophers—I seem to often criticize a certain simplicity in Anglo-Saxon thought, but I find it not simple at all and much more complex, the works of Locke, Hobbes, Hume—but I'm thinking of David Hume here, right, from the second half of the eighteenth century, who reflected a great deal on this question, and of whom Kant said he was awakened by him from his dogmatic slumber—that's quite a tribute, we'll have time to see what that means.
22:33 Hume said that laws, as we've just defined them, are supposed to be—it's exactly what Max Planck just said—an objective link between objects. And Hume then says that, if we look closely, it's a subjective link, because we, as subjects, are so used to seeing one phenomenon followed by another that we end up deciding there is an objective link between the two, and laws.
23:08 So, I have my pot, I put it on the fire, it starts boiling, I have a thermometer, so all the conditions are met, including measurement, quantification, and I see that when it reaches 100 degrees, the water starts to boil. From there to saying 'water boils at 100 degrees,' for Hume, there is an illegitimate leap. Because if my—wait, let's be clear, we must look at the words we use. If we say experience is our criterion—because for now we are in the typically Anglo-Saxon field of thought called empiricism, empeiria, that's experience, peripheral, that which is around, going around the thing, with our senses.
23:50 I'll come back to this with a fine text by d'Alembert in a little while, who was moreover a contemporary of Hume. So, we are in the field of empiricism—if experience is our criterion, experience tells us what is here and now. We do not experience the always and the everywhere. I am not measuring the temperature at which water boils within the star Sirius.
24:26 Nor in the year 3027. So, for Hume, we make an illegitimate leap when we pass from the particular—what's called induction, if you want technical terms, I am led, duco, to lead, led—into the thing there, into the thing that is right there in front of me, in front of my nose, before my eyes, here and now, I am bound to the here and now.
24:58 The moment I say 'water boils at 100 degrees' as a law, I am in the everywhere and the always—there is an illegitimate leap. When we pass from induction to deduction. So there, Hume had already, right, laid the foundations of what allows Planck, Max Planck, right, two centuries later, to say, well, for now, we formulate laws, and up to now Planck's laws govern and belong among the most decisive laws of contemporary physics, the most decisive along with relativistic physics, roughly, relativistic mechanics and quantum mechanics triumph, one rather in macro-physics, the other rather in micro-physics, but in any case, even though the opposition is sometimes a bit artificial, and neither of the two, right, cancels out the achievements of their illustrious predecessor, Newtonian physics.
26:08 isn't that so, only, they are much more extensive, more general, and let's say that what, what the little universal word, the epithet by which Newton expresses his law of gravitation, no longer appears, from the point of view of contemporary physics, since the beginning of the 20th century, relativistic and quantum physics, no longer appears except as a particular case of an even more general law, so, Planck is not preaching skepticism, on the contrary, he has considerably widened the field of our knowledge, but, he says, as long as it works, we're lucky, for now, nature seems to submit to the laws we formulate, well, let's hope it lasts, there, that's why I'm going to begin with this text.
Galileo, inertia, and the end of finalist physics 27:05 So, since we're talking about law, since we're talking about universality and necessity, I'm going to bring in a second text here, more familiar to quite a few of you, because I've already quoted it for other questions, but here, it's going to be central, isn't that so? It's a text taken from the Discourse on Method, by Descartes of course, so here, you see, we're going back in time since we're in 1637, the Discourse on Method appears in 1637, why do I repeat the date?
27:50 Because a year earlier, in 1636, Galileo was condemned by the Holy See, as they used to say, in Rome, isn't that so? Was condemned, sorry, for having defended and validated and even expanded the Copernican system and for having shown—well, the ignorant always think that what's important in Galileo is the roundness of the Earth and that it revolves around the Sun and not the other way round, but that's Copernicus first, not Galileo.
28:23 It's much more global than that, the revolution is the appearance of scientific physics in a general way. It's above all inertia—I don't want to wander off, but inertia, you know, which Galileo discovers but for which we have to wait for Descartes to formulate that a body subject to no force is either at rest or moving in a straight line at uniform speed. You'll tell me, yes, fine, we're pushing at open doors, that sounds pretty flat.
28:54 Ah yes, open doors—he nearly got burned for saying things like that. Because it means that everything that had governed so-called physical thought until then is finished, the approach to nature, not a scientific but an ideological, even delirious, approach to nature which constantly consisted in interpreting movements, that is mechanics, not in a mechanistic way but in a finalistic way, explaining movement by a mysterious goal pursued by a soul inside the object.
29:29 Thus, Aristotle had seen very well what anyone can observe and experience in everyday life—as you see, this experience doesn't go very far, it doesn't involve measurement—that bodies accelerate as they fall. But he gave an explanation not far from delirium when he says it's like a great spirit—well, that's not where he's most relevant, in his mechanics. When he says, well, it's a bit like horses—what's the connection?
30:03 Well, in Aristotle, there are natural movements and violent movements. Needless to say all that has disappeared, hasn't it? For example, rain falling is a natural movement, it's the law of falling. On the other hand, if I throw a stone in the air, that's a violent movement because spontaneously the stone wants to rejoin its natural place, like all heavy bodies. It's Aristotle speaking, not me. Heavy bodies go to rejoin their natural place, which is down below, whereas smoke, for example, light bodies, go to rejoin their natural place, which is up above.
30:39 I presume you know enough, even if you're almost as ignorant as I am in physics, to know that heavy and light no longer exist, haven't for a long time. Earlier I said hot, cold—that's disappeared in favor of 18 degrees. Hot and cold are matters of individual perception, we're no longer in science. Whereas 18 degrees is precise and we can agree on it. We stop making millions of dead over what we're talking about. We're not arguing over whether it's hot too, it's cold too.
31:10 No, but here too, it's the same, there's no heavy and light. A schoolbag, isn't that so, will seem heavy to a little schoolboy. This is a passage from Shakespeare's "As You Like It." It's a marvelous Shakespeare comedy. And all English schoolchildren have learned this passage where Shakespeare lists the seven ages of life.
31:42 "Seven ages of life" where there's the beginning, where there's the baby mewling and puking in his nurse's arms. "And then the whining schoolboy," isn't that so, the little schoolboy, with his sullen face going in the morning, isn't that so, with the caterpillars tickling his face. Well, badly, unwillingly, unwillingly to school. So for that one, the schoolbag seems heavy. For a market porter, it's a feather, the schoolbag. Say it weighs a kilo and a half, but then, we know what we're talking about.
Mathematics unites men, politics divides them 32:16 We're in the universal. We're peaceful. Aristotle, you know, I quoted him against himself with his delirious theory of falling. Now I'm going to show his greatness. Mathematics unites men, politics divides them. That's almost where we left off last time. You see there's no shortage of occasions to tirelessly repeat this formula which hasn't aged a bit. Mathematics unites men, politics divides them.
32:49 Because, to return to my irritation, I started with poor Greta, but there are plenty who think that there exists Science, the scientists, a community, people all thinking the same thing about all problems, and even that we should let them speak, isn't that so? As if there weren't a diehard Nazi among the greatest scientists in the 1930s. And the 1930s, you know, that's quantum physics, that's relativity. Someone like Heisenberg had obvious sympathies for the regime. And I'm speaking in euphemistic terms so as not to overload this physicist who is otherwise a great mind, in his discipline at least.
33:25 But yes, there's the same misconception. There are people who think that a great writer, a great painter, a great poet, necessarily shares my values. That's not moral, political. No, absolutely not. You can be an immense creator and a thoroughgoing scoundrel. So you'll tell me, yes, the proof, look, look at Céline—maybe he's not recommendable politically, but what style! I think a bit like our friend François de Negroni, that maybe it's precisely his style that is the most Nazi thing about him.
33:57 I didn't say he writes badly. I'm saying that here we must separate aesthetics and value—aesthetic value, sorry—from moral, political value. Careful, careful. And when in '68, isn't that so, the leftists—I'm not saying the left, the leftists, isn't that so, those who put the left in the state it's in now, whereas it used to make the bosses tremble at one time.
34:28 When the leftists said "power to the imagination," it's terrifying that people could forget to such an extent, as early as the sixties, that not so long before, imagination had been in power. Look at the great squares of Nuremberg in the 1930s, with the torches at night, forming the swastika, Hitler's great masses, with people, convulsive faces—they had art, showmanship, aesthetics, they knew it. They knew it. So I come back to Descartes, on purpose, to calm all this down, because he formulated the principle of inertia, all hidden forces—speaking Latin, the fullness of the word, especially when there's Latin in it, comes here—Molière shows this admirably in his comedies, isn't that so, the fullness of the word comes to replace the emptiness of the thing, isn't that so, when I don't know much and someone asks me a question and I answer in Latin, or even Greek, or even German, among French Heideggerians, isn't that so, to give myself a kind of fake depth.
Molière and the dormitive virtue 35:37 I'm not saying that sometimes one shouldn't give the original word in the original language. That can happen, there are cases where it's indispensable. But at every turn, it may not be necessary. So what am I alluding to? I'm alluding to Molière—Nietzsche also alludes to it. When someone asks a "doctor in spite of himself"—you know what Molière thinks of the doctors of his time, he wasn't entirely wrong, that there was a good deal of charlatanism, biology had not yet appeared as a scientific discipline.
36:11 When they asked him why opium makes you sleep—we've known since antiquity, haven't we, that it's rather sleep-inducing, opium is hypnotic—he answered "Quia est in eo virtus dormitiva," because there is in it, quia est in eo, a dormitive virtue. That, that's science, that's called a tautology. What does a dormitive virtue mean? That is to say, there is in it something that makes you sleep.
36:41 Why does it make you sleep? Because there is in it something that makes you sleep. That's strong stuff, you know. So you laugh, and you're right, that's what Molière is for. But you do it all the time, we often do it. You know, when someone says, my son is incredible, he hears a piece of music, he reproduces it immediately. He hears a text, he knows it by heart after the first hearing. In other words, he has memory.
37:11 What does having memory mean? It's remembering things. Why does he remember them? Because he remembers them. We put a faculty into the head of the person we're talking about, in a magical way, we put in a faculty, memory. And we think we've explained something when we've just put in a word. We still know nothing of the complexity of the mechanisms of memory and amnesia. But we've had a good number of talks among ourselves about that. And we may have the chance to come back to it.
The four rules of method 37:42 But I've lingered enough on a recent period. So, why am I taking this text of Descartes? I'm going to place it so you understand why I'm selecting this one. Because it comes immediately, in the Discourse on Method, after the statement of the four principles of the method. So, a reminder, I sum up what I've just said about this text. An extract from the Discourse on Method. The work was published in 1637. One year after Galileo's condemnation.
38:13 Why did I bring that up? Now I'll say it. Because it made Descartes cautious. And his motto was "I advance masked," larvatus prodeo. I advance masked. I don't want the same thing to happen to me as happened to Galileo, right? He even goes so far as to say, at the beginning of the Discourse on Method, that his method isn't there to dogmatically state what must be true, but simply as the account of the paths he followed to arrive at certain conclusions, and that it can be taken as a fable. He goes so far as to say, like a fable.
38:43 You see? Clever, Descartes. And there is nonetheless a strong moment where he arrives and speaks of the principles that must govern our knowledge. And with that, in scholasticism—scholasticism, there was a "schola," the school, that's what was taught in school in theology because at the time philosophy was the handmaid of theology. And since Saint Thomas Aquinas had made Aristotle the great inspiration for the philosophical scaffolding of theology, Aristotle's logic and metaphysics—that is, the thing furthest from the modern physics that had just appeared with Galileo—swarmed with principles one had to know by heart.
39:42 And Descartes answers, and this is exactly what precedes the text we're going to read, instead of these numerous principles, I believed the following four would suffice. And these four, I'm not going to give the whole detail of the text, these four, I'll state them first and then move on to our text. The first was never to accept anything as true that I did not know evidently to be so. This is called the rule of evidence.
40:14 And to include nothing more in my judgments than what would present itself so clearly and so distinctly to my mind that I would have no occasion to doubt it. You see here the problem of doubt, which plays a fundamental role in Descartes. No occasion to doubt it. That means, because there are things that are evidently doubtful. I hear a rumbling in the distance—is it a storm, is it a plane, is it a truck?
40:46 Is it my neighbor moving a piece of furniture nearby—I could have a doubt, right? But on the other hand, here, I believe that, well, I see this tablet, I see this microphone, and I see the screen. There, I can't doubt it. Descartes distinguishes, in the first metaphysical meditation—the work that will follow the Discourse on Method—he clearly distinguishes distant sense-objects, the plane, the rumbling, from nearby sense-objects that cannot be doubted; he means, no occasion to doubt them.
41:19 That means if there is the slightest reason to doubt it, I act as if it were absolutely false. That's the great Cartesian trick, which I sum up with this formula, which is his and which I quote to you verbatim. I decided to regard as false everything that was merely probable. All that lies behind "to include nothing more in my judgments than what would present itself so clearly and so distinctly that I would have no occasion to doubt it."
41:52 First rule, evidence. Second, to divide in order my thoughts—I'm going a bit fast—this is what's called analysis, as soon as one divides things into their most elementary parts. There's the house, I divide it, there are the walls, in the walls there are the bricks, in the bricks there is the earth, the constituent part—it's like doing Lego in reverse, that's analysis. And when, afterward, with the elements of the Lego, I build a crane, that would be synthesis. So I move on to synthesis: to construct my thoughts in order, beginning with the simplest and easiest to know, the simplest, the bricks, and rising as if by degrees to the knowledge of the most composite—we're almost at our text, not quite yet—the most composite, and here there's a crucial sentence: supposing even an order among those which do not naturally precede one another.
42:51 That is to say, even if I don't see in an evident way the passage from this step of the staircase to the next one, in short, if a step or a rung of the ladder is missing, I must act as if it were there, I must take upon myself the gap and tell myself that in reality there is a passage, there is a mediation, and we will find it, which allows me, like Jacob, to climb to heaven, rung by rung, isn't that so? Jacob's Ladder—I take the opportunity to tell music lovers that it's one of the greatest masterpieces of contemporary 20th-century vocal music, it's a pocket opera, as they say, a short opera, marvelous, orchestral and vocal, by Schoenberg, Die Jakobsleiter, Jacob's Ladder.
The long chains of reasons and determinism 43:42 And so, once he has stated these four principles, there is this passage now that we're going to look at more closely. So, now let's analyze—that means it's not me who's going to speak, but we're going to let dear Descartes speak. "Those long chains of reasoning, all simple and easy, which geometers are accustomed to use to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations"—you see how he speaks of ease? Easy for him, eh?
44:12 To arrive at their most difficult demonstrations, I repeat, the subject group, those long chains of reasoning, all simple and easy, which geometers are accustomed to use to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations—geometers here being a metonymy for mathematicians in general—had given me occasion, now here's the verb, had given me occasion to imagine that all the things that can fall within human knowledge—well now it's no longer just about mathematics, isn't that so?
44:49 All that can fall, all that can fall, I read, within human knowledge, everything that can be an object of knowledge, gifts, cardboard, excrement, freedom, God, meteorology, everything that can fall within human knowledge, follow one another in the same way. In the same way as what? As the statements of a geometer follow one another. And that provided only that one abstains from accepting as true any that is not..., you agree?
45:23 That if you remove one link, the chain falls, right? And that one always keeps the necessary order, going from what is demonstrated to what is not yet, from the simple to the complex, from the known toward the unknown, by reducing the unknown to the known. I'll give you a very simple example, I take a polygon, any polygon, that is, a figure with lots of sides, isn't that so, going every which way, not a rectangle, a square, but far more, with whatever angles you like.
45:57 I divide it into triangles because I'm asked to calculate the surface area of this monster, and I have no idea. On the other hand, I divide it, you see, into as many triangles as make it up, because I already know, beforehand—that's in the known—how to calculate the surface of a triangle, and I just have to add them up to get, isn't that so, the surface area of this polygon. Thus, I've reduced the unknown to the known, the new to the old.
46:31 And that provided only that one abstains from accepting as true anything that is not, and that one always keeps the necessary order—and here begins an immense hope—in order to deduce them from one another, there cannot be any so remote that one does not eventually reach it, so there's no longer any limit, there cannot be any so remote that one does not eventually reach it, nor so hidden that one does not discover it. Let me go back over this text, because I went rather quickly over the very first sentence, those long chains of reasoning.
47:14 The metaphor of the chain, here—I'm not getting into what Descartes thinks, but into what these words say, and these words say more, perhaps even more than what he thought about it, but there they are. When I think of a chain, you think more of a prisoner than of a free man, and you're right. Because what Descartes is stating here is what we'll call today determinism.
47:44 Everything is determined in being, in nature, for example. If there's a storm, it's because there were causes beforehand, an accumulation of energy, negative and positive electricity, an electric arc, etc. If there's rain, it's because there was evaporation from the ocean. These long chains, you see, all these phenomena are linked together. That means each depends on the other.
48:15 We are here, not in the kingdom of freedom, but in the empire of necessity. Not in Descartes's own thought—Descartes absolutely holds freedom to be a value. But, in the domains penetrated by this new scientific knowledge, which is indeed our subject tonight, from the moment this object is subject to laws, that is the proof that freedom is excluded from it and that this object is rather the fruit of an implacable mechanism expressed in the sober and univocal language of the sciences by the formula Y equals F of X.
49:06 Y depends on X. Y is a function of X. Y is determined by X. If Y is the measure, isn't that so, of the increase in length of a railway rail that is in the sun and is expanded therefore by the heat, isn't that so, that means the length is determined by the temperature here. The difference in length is determined by the rise in temperature, Y equals F of X, is a function of.
Science and scientism: homage and critique 49:43 We are in determinism, and there we need to put a little order into what Descartes means here, in our thinking. Because I have titled the part I am currently developing "scientistic imperialism." I didn't say scientific, because I have nothing to say against science. By what right? Especially given my position. I am not a scientist.
50:13 What right do I have to set arbitrary limits on science myself? No. On the other hand, I have the right to speak and even to discredit scientism, which is not a science but an ideology. And the scientistic temptation is present here in this text of Descartes, which is admirable moreover but which opens the door, and there are often fools who lack Descartes's genius—what we owe Descartes in scientific terms is no small thing.
50:44 Every time you make coordinates, you know, the Y' Y' X' axis, these are called Cartesian coordinates. Yes, it was he who worked that out. No, you shouldn't think we're going to be too hard on him. I'm going to level a critique at his scientistic temptation, but don't think I'm belittling him. These are immense advances. He synthesized the geometry and algebra of his time.
51:14 There's a famous passage in the Discourse on Method where he says he united the advantages of the two while leaving behind their drawbacks. Leaving behind their drawbacks. The advantage of geometry is that you see evidence — in 'évidence' there's 'vidéo,' look closely, all right? But on the other hand there's less rigor than in algebra. So by unifying — I'm quoting him now — the geometry of the ancients and the algebra of the moderns. Look how precise that is. The ancients are the Greeks, that's Euclid.
51:44 The moderns, Al-Jabr — it's an Arabic word, a recent invention. The apogee of Arab science, and especially of mathematics, between Damascus and Baghdad, my God, poor people. Ever since Lawrence of Arabia, spying for His Majesty's British government, annexed all that to Western imperialism — poor countries, isn't it, look how they get thrashed.
52:15 At the time, the apogee of Arab science was the opposite — it was the California of the day, the Arab world as a center of scientific development, while we were still in smoky huts, not far removed from Gaul, right? Barely out of Gaul, I mean, during the 12th century there was the apogee of the study of the quadratic equation in mathematics by immense Arab mathematicians, including al-Khwarizmi — I pronounce it badly — but his name is the origin of the word 'algorithm.' Yes, you find the 'al' again, as in algorithm. So when Descartes says 'I unified the geometry of the ancients and the algebra of the moderns,' and that gives the Cartesian graph — so yes, I pay homage to him first, but the scientistic temptation went in one word — actually three words — those long chains of reasoning, all simple and easy, which geometers are accustomed to using to arrive — let me read the text, it's harder — that demonstration had given me
53:25 occasion to imagine that all things which can fall under human knowledge — which can fall, in fact — follow one another in the same way. All things — here, the composition of water, why not, of course that will happen soon, in two centuries — but also love, jealousy, aggressiveness, all of that can be brought back to and studied on the model of these long chains, and hence chaining, and hence the exclusion of freedom, chaining of reason — there. So, in order not to hold the floor too long, I'd like to hand it back, let's say, to the main texts that punctuate the development of this thought which will give rise to scientism — the term didn't exist before the end of the 19th century, it's Romain Rolland, one of the first not to be fooled, who criticizes it, who is moreover
54:35 a novelist too, a humanist, a musicologist in his spare time, with a fine book on Beethoven, and by chance, I presume, quite a few of you have read his Jean-Christophe, right, that kind of Bildungsroman as they say in Germany, a novel of education that follows the hero through his whole formation, from his first stammerings to his maturity. Yes, so the word is recent, but I made a point of going back to Descartes, a contemporary in the broad sense of Max Planck, the most cutting-edge physics, quantum physics — Descartes who is the exhaustive expression of what had just emerged in Italy, Galilean physics, modern scientific physics, and who was going to add his own work to it: scientific optics begins with the equality of the angles of incidence and reflection, right, which is a theorem of Descartes. I'm making a point of taking texts that punctuate
D'Alembert: direct and reflective knowledge 55:45 what will lead, no longer to the temptation, but to unbridled scientism — a new stage not long after Descartes, a century later, in the Age of Enlightenment, contemporary with Hume — I'm going to quote an extract that serves as a preface to one of the greatest mathematicians in our history, d'Alembert. It serves as a preface to that incredible collective work, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, work of popularization ever undertaken — at least at the time it had no precedent whatsoever. That is, of course, you've guessed it, Diderot was the team leader, but many people collaborated — Rousseau wrote all the entries on music, for instance, at Diderot's request; he talks about Arab, Persian, Hindu, Chinese music. I say this for those who believe that moving beyond Eurocentrism started with them — you know, the Enlightenment. So the title of the work: the Encyclopédie, a reasoned dictionary
56:56 of the sciences, the arts, and the crafts, with an admirable preface written by Monsieur d'Alembert — Monsieur d'Alembert, a great mathematician, known to mathematicians still today for a formula he came up with — and this text has the advantage of giving the principles that will govern the thinking, the ideology if you will, that leads from science to scientism in the 18th and 19th centuries. I'll read it to you without further ado. First, it's very clear, very precise: we can divide all our knowledge into direct and reflected. So there is direct knowledge and composite knowledge — the opposite of direct is reflected. Direct knowledge is what we receive immediately — there's the key word — without any operation of our will. So here
58:07 the subject is crushed, if I may use a slang expression — the subject effaces itself and is entirely absorbed by the object. I see this cup — that's how it seems to me, we'll see later that these are illusions — that I see it like that immediately, that there's no intermediary, I don't even think the word 'cup,' I have no word, no thought, I see its color, its shape. Direct knowledge is what we receive immediately, without any operation of our will, which, finding open, if one may put it that way, all the doors of our soul, enters without resistance and without effort. One could not better insist on the passivity of the subject in this ideology. That's for direct knowledge. Reflected knowledge — and it's a mathematician speaking — is what the mind acquires by operating on direct knowledge, uniting it and combining it. So it's clear, two categories of knowledge
English ideology and the bourgeoisie's rise to power 59:18 direct and reflected. Now, what are the direct ones? You guessed it: all our direct knowledge reduces to what we receive through the senses. Here we are in empiricism, and not far from sensualism at that. We are here, like almost the whole of the Enlightenment — Rousseau excepted — in an ideology dominated by English thought. Voltaire's first great publication was the Letters Concerning the English Nation. England never ceased to be the theoretical, ideological, political, economic model for the French bourgeoisie. The French bourgeoisie was in full rise at that time — so we're going to do a bit of a detective story here — it was in full rise, and soon after, the Revolution would sanction this transition to take over from what had for centuries held power: the feudal aristocracy. You'll tell me, no, it took over from the king.
1:00:28 No, there were kings after the Revolution, the Restoration — no, on the contrary, this transition — it's a detective story, right, I'll have it start in the Middle Ages — there's the aristocracy, feudalism, the lords, the warriors — careful, the nobility of the sword — we often forget that nobility had a meaning, a function, a social usefulness, when it drew its sword. So there's the feudal aristocracy which, of course, possesses the land, real estate, etc., and which does not work — its function is war, not working, neither agriculture nor commerce nor anything at all — and at the other extreme the peasantry. From the 12th century especially, a small middle layer begins to appear — the communes, the bourgeoisie, the markets, the burghers, the townsmen — because I don't want to stray from our subject, but still, I want to say that we arrive
1:01:38 at the classical age, the 17th-18th century, the king who was never anything more than primus inter pares, as they said, first among equals — that is, the boss of the aristocrats and the other feudal lords. The king had much more trouble in French history, for example, with the other great lords than with anyone else — think of Louis XI's dealings with Charles the Bold, of Philip the Fair with that power, that state within the state, which the Templars were. Look at Louis XIII who, on Richelieu's orders if I may say so, had duels banned — you forbid the nobility of the sword to draw the very thing that until then was its reason for being, its sword. There was Monsieur de Cinq-Mars who wanted to say, no, what business is it of his, this kind of priest, Cardinal Richelieu — I'll show him that the aristocracy obeys no one — you see, he thought it was still the era of the great medieval lords, he hadn't understood that absolute monarchy was starting to be put in place. He came to fight
1:02:49 a duel under the windows of Cardinal Richelieu; he was beheaded with the king's authorization. Those are pages turning in history, well. So what am I saying, the detective story — you see, there are deaths, there's blood, there are corpses, everything for a good detective story, the characters are there — it's that the king is going to lean on this rising bourgeoisie — I come back to it, that's what will produce the Enlightenment in the 18th century — to counter the great lords who threaten him far more than the bourgeoisie does. And he's going to lean on it so much that inevitably this bourgeoisie will settle everyone's fate, and the turning point of this struggle between bourgeoisie and feudality, with the king's agreement in favor of the bourgeoisie, will be the famous Edict of the Paulette, which Michel Clouscard dwells on at length — I recommend those admirable pages in L'Être et le Code, which is an immense historical detective story running from the dark times of the Middle Ages up to the Revolution, not included, where he dwells on the edict drafted by Monsieur Paulet, P-A-U-L-E-T
1:03:59 that's why it's called the Edict of the Paulette, which established what was called at the time the venality of offices — you could buy offices as long as you could afford them. That was in 1610, roughly the year of Henri IV's death. Before that, at the dawn of the classical age, before that, you had to be born noble to be noble. There we are in ontology — you are or you aren't; it's not a matter of having or not having, it's a matter of being or not being, which is more radical than having. And there, from now on, I'm not noble, but I can become so — becoming replacing being — all I need is to pay up, to buy a title of nobility, an office of nobility, and of course for that it has to be put up for sale. Who's selling them? The nobles! Look how rigorous the detective plot is, since they don't work, do they, and since the growing central power
1:05:09 of the king had pacified the kingdom internally — externally, he wages war. What does the nobility do? It spends its time all the same watching plays by Molière and Racine at Versailles — even if that's part of why the château was enlarged, so that it could put on its airs, its grandeur, into 1914. But what's left for it to do? That's where you see the logic of things: the nobility can only grow poorer, since it doesn't work; when it is active, it's war, and war costs money, it doesn't bring any in — you have to pay people to fight. There's a very fine text on this by Voltaire in the Letters Concerning the English Nation. So once again, the aristocracy weakens, the bourgeoisie grows stronger, and the king leans on the bourgeoisie to get rid of his main adversary. When there remains
Industrial revolution, the zero degree of the subject, and Gödel 1:06:19 only the bourgeoisie facing the king, one on one, all that's needed is a guillotine to decide between the two. That's how my detective story ends. So you see, I wanted to put things in perspective — I did a little sequence here on historical materialism, precisely to show that our discussion of science isn't purely theoretical, and that there's a path leading from the scientific revolution that took place in the 16th-17th centuries all the way to the Industrial Revolution, practically two centuries later, which begins in England and then spills over onto the continent, with Germany coming last but catching up with a brutal acceleration that explains a great many things — and not the most glorious ones — in German history. Small aside: in 1913 the traffic of the port of Hamburg surpassed for the first time that of the port of London, the busiest in the world at the time — war between the imperialisms became inevitable, whereas until then
1:07:30 Germany hadn't counted on its navy, it was continental, agrarian, but Bismarck had said 'our future is on the water' — in order to make a place for itself alongside the great empires, France and England, you know, with all their colonies — power projection forces, as we'd say today — that's how it all holds together. So I made a point of giving this text by d'Alembert because he began with what we might call the zero degree of the subject. Philosophy begins with the Socratic 'know thyself,' right, with reflection — direct knowledge, reflected knowledge, the mathematical arrow that turns back on itself, not A equals B but A equals A — we're entirely entitled to say that, A equals A, though there are some mathematicians who dispute it — no, no, not quibblers, I mean mathematicians, because either you're talking
1:08:40 about something you don't see — which brings us back to empiricism again — or you're talking about what's written on the sheet of paper, that A equals A, but who's to say it has the same number of ink molecules in the second A as in the first? I don't want to split hairs, but there's a school called the intuitionists, also in mathematics — old debates. I take this opportunity, because earlier I seemed to insist that within a team of mobilized researchers there can be completely different, even opposed, ideologies — in religion, in aesthetics, in whatever you like — without that causing the slightest dissension at the strictly scientific level, in the laboratory or in the team. And in the same way, I'll take one of the greatest names in contemporary mathematics, in the broad sense, 20th-21st century — I'm thinking of the immense Gödel, right, Kurt Gödel and his famous so-called incompleteness theorems — well, Gödel
1:09:50 used to often say that he found that, since the philosophical advances — and in particular in philosophy of science, and in particular in the reflection on mathematics of Leibniz and Plato — not only had we not made much progress in the 20th century (he says this after Cantor), but that on certain points we had even rather regressed. It's not me saying it, it's Gödel. It's not a philosopher saying 'science will never manage to prove such and such, no, that's idle chatter, what does the philosopher know about it' — no, it's Gödel saying that. It gives you pause. Yes, true science is not scientistic. So what am I reproaching scientism for? What we see in this text is that you have to associate in your mind empiricism, mechanism, cause, facts, mechanism with an asymmetry — how shall I put it — mathematical: the cause acts on the facts and not the facts on the cause — and at the same time the banishment of any
1:11:00 of any subject, that is, of anything that is properly active — you see, I repeat the words in what d'Alembert uses to tell us how we ought to behave, right, in — so let's scroll back up a bit here — there, thanks, a bit higher still — the paragraph above — ah no, sorry, no, I'm going the wrong way, lower down, sorry, that's it, it's below, there, there, sorry — no, that's not it — no, higher up still, I don't quite understand because earlier we had — when he says 'we must' — there, there, that's it — the paragraph that comes up there — that's it, exactly, a bit more — there: we can divide all our knowledge into direct and reflected. Direct knowledge is what we receive immediately, without any operation of our will — you see the passivity of the subject — which, finding open, if one may put it that way, all the doors
Instinct and institution: the example of the meal 1:12:10 of our soul — I hand over the keys of the city, so to speak — it enters without resistance and without effort. What's acting here is the object, not me — I above all must do nothing, I must remain objective, I efface myself as a subject — that's important, whereas philosophy had begun with 'know thyself.' Now, that's fine when it comes to knowing objects, you have to go through that — I criticized subjectivism earlier, twice, when I said that 'hot' and 'cold' concern only subjects, that it's not scientific in any way and teaches us nothing universal or necessary about the thing in question, which is neither hot nor cold but is 14 degrees — up to each person to decide whether that's hot or cold, even for the same individual, moreover, depending on whether they had their hands in scalding water beforehand or in cold water — a change in temperature makes water that had felt cold in another context feel hot, water that had come from even hotter water. So all this is very much relativism
1:13:20 and subjectivism, and so I am not defending the subjective against the objective when it comes to talking about objects — on the contrary, you have to set aside every subject to show why acid produces bubbles on limestone, effervescent on limestone, from purely inert, objective principles. That's excellent in the sciences of the external world, and in particular of nature. But as soon as you move to the sciences of history, the human sciences, etc. — and that is indeed our subject, let's not lose our thread — this conception turns out to be considerably reductive, that is, it is caught in the trap of its own principles. I'm not reproaching it for reducing everything to material, empirical, experimental things — I'm all for verifying the maximum of things, I'm for democracy, so as not to be the only one deciding, so that
1:14:30 we all agree on the same result and there's consensus — but precisely, the real, the empirical real, is not taken into account once you leave — through scientism — once you leave the order of the natural sciences. I always take the same examples because everyone can know them, everyone can measure them, in every culture in the world — let's set aside all relativisms, oh that's valid for the Japanese but not for us, that's valid for the Bantu but false for the Indians of South America — let's set that aside. What is universal in all human cultures? You don't eat food as is, the way a lion devours a gazelle as it is — it doesn't season it, it doesn't say to the lioness 'you've got a bit of basil and chili on you because I'm sick of always eating the same bland gazelle' — the taste, fine, in this life where boredom is deadly — but animals don't reason like that, they don't get bored, they're always in the present moment. What am I in the process of saying? In every
1:15:40 human culture, first of all, food is cooked, not eaten raw — that's already absolutely not necessary for biological survival, don't start making anachronisms, don't think it's to kill bacteria — they didn't even know bacteria existed, don't attribute to the ancients knowledge that only appeared millennia later. Conversely, everywhere, in every culture, there's something — there are rites of the meal, someone is served first, it depends on the era, you put out a nicer tablecloth than usual on feast days, you don't start by throwing yourself on the food, there are aperitifs, there are starters — you see. Now, to set all that aside, to take into account only deterministic causality, Y and X — that is, 'I eat because I'm hungry' — that's reductive. Ah, if there were no hunger I wouldn't eat and there would be no meal, but reducing the meal
1:16:50 to what is caused solely by hunger is to miss a whole host of things that can be measured in every culture in the world and tested experimentally — the fact that there's a pretty lace or starched tablecloth is not at all necessary for reaching satiety, nor for supplying the quantity of carbohydrates, lipids, proteins the organism needs. Of course that matters, and without it there might be no reason to sit around a table and eat — one eats because one is hungry, but if one doesn't merely eat, but decides — not the instinct 'to eat' but the institution 'the meal' — that's for reasons that are never present in those who insist on applying, in the human, anthropological domain, what was valid at the physical level, in physiological nature, in natural causality. From the moment one passes from the raw to the cooked, to borrow
1:18:00 a famous title from Claude Lévi-Strauss, one has left the purely natural order — which is not to say it has been annulled, it is present — but if one refers only to it, one makes inexplicable a whole host of new phenomena, which are no less sensible, experimentable phenomena than the color of a plant or the speed of an electron. So there, I mean this is why I'm going to make use — well, let me look at the time all the same, it's 9:49 pm, yes, so I've gone a bit past the point where I shouldn't — I wonder if there are any questions. So, thanks to the new equipment that Philippe and Pierre-Alain installed, and Pierre-Alain being the first here
A historian of manners today: Houellebecq and Clouscard 1:19:10 to use it live, to make my task easier and above all yours too — I now see the questions displayed, which pleases me. I see there's a question from Christian Régnier, whom I'm very happy to hear from again, and I thank him for his loyalty — he asks whether, in my view, there is an unconscious link, he says, in parentheses, a filiation, between the irrationality of Heidegger in his 'being-there,' literally Dasein, 'being there,' and the decolonial activists and their like — thanks, interesting question. I'll read a second question — I'll go on to a question from Armin Shahardoli, I hope I'm pronouncing that right — good evening, is there a chronicler of manners like Balzac in contemporary French literature, in your opinion, and if so, who, for example? So, I'll first — there's a third question but I can't quite see it yet, I need to scroll down a bit further
1:20:20 but I'll go ahead and answer this second question right away, since Christian Régnier's question is more complex. I'll first admit my relative incompetence — I don't have a broad enough culture of truly contemporary fiction, of what's been published, let's say, over the last 15-20 years — there are so many publications that I don't want to pretend I've read them all. There is, for instance, I believe — though there are plenty of things that irritate me about the persona, even the themes — a certain someone, people whom I respect otherwise and whose opinions I often find very pertinent, thought that someone like Houellebecq, the novelist, had done a very good job depicting a certain milieu, the mores of a certain milieu of middle managers in open-plan offices — in short, a world you know better than I do. It seems to me that this world is a bit — let me commit a barbarism here — a bit 'Balzacified' now. But I'm going to be very serious
1:21:30 and now I'm going to answer your question, I'm not dodging it. There is a writer who has doubtless, perhaps, best expressed the transformations of manners produced within capital, in the passage from the capital of yesteryear — the capital of thrift, effort, work, from before the war, if you like, when the working class wasn't yet feared — to the period after the Popular Front, the war, then the Cold War, right, when the problem was to curb this rise of the masses. Someone really ought to write an essay on the hatred of the masses, which underlies all contemporary ideological deviations — we're too many, there won't be enough for everyone, resources are limited — the hatred of the masses on the part of whom?
1:22:28 On the part of those who are part of them — I don't know, because among those who think we're too many, none of them start by killing themselves — it's always the other guy who's superfluous, never me. I pick up my thread again, so I built a bit of suspense — I'm thinking simply of Michel Clouscard, of course. There are passages that are sometimes a bit theoretical, a bit hard going, but if you want, for instance, to see a masterpiece entirely equal in pertinence, in concrete flavor, depicting the transformations undergone by the bourgeoisie — in that passage I mentioned, from papa's capitalism to the libertarian liberalism that now dominates the planet — not the Chadian woman or the Cambodian peasant — libertarian liberalism, which takes almost the opposite stance from certain aspects of papa's capitalism, which will never be forgiven
1:23:40 for having failed to curb the Popular Front, right, and the advances of liberation, social security, and pay-as-you-go pensions — well yes. So I was saying, if you want to see a masterpiece that answers your question, it's the chapter titled 'The Country House' at the end of Le Capitalisme de la séduction. Well, listen, this wasn't planned, but because of your question I'm going to read an extract — no need to go far, except to find my glasses — there we go, right, there — well, listen, it's very quick, I have here the original edition, because it's been reissued by Delga, I have both editions — the one from Éditions Sociales, which unfortunately is out of print, here with this jean
Reading of Clouscard's "The country house" 1:24:50 which Michel Clouscard talks about at length, which divided women into two categories, those who can wear it and those who can't — those are things you don't find elsewhere. There, we're not dealing with subjective judgments, values, and society-page chit-chat on TV panels — we're dealing with things that are, alas, objective. So, let me give you this — there, sorry, time to find it — there, page 233, you see, it's very precise, page 233 — I don't give you that pagination for you to find in this edition, since you won't find this particular one. So you see: 'The computerization of society in the service of conviviality' — as if it were something new, he writes this in the '70s — 'will be the humanist ideology of the new social-democratic society' — at the time Michel Clouscard hadn't yet coined his phrase, and he's the first to use it — 'libertarian liberalism' — that Pompidou and Cohn-Bendit are exactly
1:26:00 the same politics — proof of which is that Cohn-Bendit called for a vote for Macron after having been passed off as the great rebel, which just goes to prove Merleau-Ponty right when he said that if the philosopher were a mere rebel he'd cause less offense — no, Socrates, if he's condemned to death, it's because he's a revolutionary; the city can sense it very well, revolting the MEDEF, the bourgeoisie, the employers, who always prefer a rebel to a revolutionary — it's so much less dangerous, a rebel evolves fast. So I'm not talking about the necessary revolt of adolescence, which we've all gone through and which is irreplaceable, that's another matter. So you see: 'the computerization of society in the service of conviviality will be the humanist ideology of the new society' — he doesn't yet say 'liberal-libertarian,' he says 'social-democratic' — later he'll say 'libertarian social democracy,' and finally 'libertarian liberalism.' This ideology — I remind you this is under the socialist government, well, socialist so to speak, socialo-Mitterrandist, since I don't want to insult
1:27:11 the socialist tradition of a Jaurès all the same — it's from that point — I've even seen on Facebook people who think it was Sarkozy, of course they accelerated things, Sarkozy, Chirac, etc., but the bulk of the work was done between Bérégovoy... I don't know — 'the computerization of society in the service of conviviality' — those are today's values — 'will be the humanist ideology of the new social-democratic society. This ideology is a synthesis, that of the two apparently opposed dynamics constitutive of the system. This synthesis is only possible once each component has been perfected. Animation had to reach conviviality, and the technocracy had to attain computerization.' You'll tell me, wait, that's not Balzac, that's not a novel, that's theory, it's abstract — yes, that's the introduction, worldliness
1:28:22 the manual, if you will, for the consumption of the new bourgeoisie will have gone through three great periods: first, the wild colonization — you see, the theme of the zadistes doesn't exist yet, this is 30 years earlier, look how prophetic it is — the wild colonization first, that of the gang, of subversion, the reign of the provocateur, of rock, of rhythm, of hashish, one had to offer... he's not talking about hashish itself, there were huge numbers of Moroccans or workers who smoked hashish, that's not the point, he's talking about a posture — I discussed this a thousand times with Clouscard — if you don't have a joint at a party, you're not with it, my friend — that's not at all what hashish could represent, comparable to a glass of red wine, right, that could help the worker of Zola's time get through the day, a little snort — 'the reign of the provo, of rock, of rhythm, of hashish, one had to offer models of rupture, striking, violent' — then the mass colonization, after the provocateurs, after the marginals, the society usages according to the three levels of the new social hierarchy, right, and finally the last period, we're getting to it, after the emergence of the model
1:29:32 here, 'computerization in the service of conviviality' — you'll say, but what does that have to do with the country house? Well, I'll skip a few abstract passages and read you this: 'The place of synthesis: the country house. It will be the symbol of the meeting and reconciliation of the two great systems of exploitation and profit of the system — we will make it the symbol — the country house of the new society, of the new humanism, and the means of their explanation.' 'Gaullist France' — the UDR was the Gaullist party of the time — 'of Gaullist management is a marvelous example of economic, political, cultural arrivisme. It put in place a whole new system of profit, of reinvestment of that profit, a new form of class — upper-middle, middle, lower-middle bourgeoisie — appeared, a new social class which is essentially the profiteer of the system. Its trajectory is urbanistic, from the real-estate speculation one can do in Paris, to the country house, from Pompidou's rabbit hutches — you know what we now call
1:30:42 the tower blocks, the slabs — Pompidou's rabbit hutches, to the sumptuous secondhome.' Yes, it gets increasingly concrete: 'The profit made on the city is partly reinvested in the countryside' — and he adds in parentheses, 'as the bourgeoisie has always done since the Middle Ages: come see my trees, as they used to say' — 'three socio-cultural moments of this speculation' — now look how concrete this becomes: 'first, the desertification of the countryside' — and now we talk of 'peripheral France' as if we were discovering all this today — 'the desertification of the countryside, rural depopulation, the collapse of agricultural prices means that peasants abandon the countryside, they go looking for work in the city, the small local town or the big city — sending the peasants and inhabitants of small towns to work in the big cities and in the Paris suburbs, and sending Paris workers out to the suburbs too' — yes, before looking at manners, you have to look at what serves as their setting — and then, 'buy up cheaply
1:31:52 land and houses at a low price' — you see what the ecological discourse will be used for — 'buy up cheaply land and houses; finally, through the capital-gains tax, prevent other latecomers from making speculative gains too' — and in parentheses, 'the hippie situates himself too within this current, like a scavenger; he settles into the rural misery of desertification, he creates a bucolic decor out of archaic, artisanal restoration' — I remember, this had inspired Clouscard in the Drôme too, because he often came to see us, we served a bit as his home base since he was a bachelor, and he was very close to us, our children loved him a lot, he was a very good uncle, so he'd come from time to time to spend a few holiday days at our place, and I'd take him around a bit in the Drôme, and he'd see 'the artisan's house' — you know, you see that everywhere now, you think there's local traditional craft, in fact it's the same jewelry you see in Tokyo, in Bastia, in London, what I call the 'Nippo-Scandinavian jewelry' — so, 'from archaic, pseudo-artisanal restoration under the table, a source of income'
1:33:02 'liquidation of old France, reinvestment of profits from industry and commerce, ecologizing bucolism — triple dimension of the second home, which interweaves the gains of technocratization with the pastoral daydreams of arrivistes and parvenus.' As for the settling-in of usages — I'll skip a passage — we now arrive purely at manners: 'having used and abused every kind of entertainment in Paris, ready to set off for new shores, the new bourgeois relaxes in his country house' — look at how many well-made films correspond to this — 'relay and pivot of his prodigious mundane migration, an inverted reflection of the migration of the rural worker he displaced. Conviviality expresses well the cordial mood, joyful, jovial, even hilarious, of the new bourgeoisie which has succeeded. The ideology of participation in the city — proximity, we now say — becomes, in the countryside, conviviality, a moment of potlatch, of the display of wealth, of sumptuary little gifts'
1:34:12 'In the city, one clings on, one charges ahead, one fights — Balzac; in the countryside, one relaxes, one entertains friends, one shows off one's success, one has made it, no more feverishness, the die is cast, the gang has triumphed, it has become a caste or class stratum, even one selected by the system — the proletariat is an outdated, archaic notion that makes people smile. One can still, among old pals, reminisce about the old days, the lean years, after having shared out the profits' — there — 'at this cordial and jovial feast, and there's good reason for it, one can even invite a poor person to the end of the table for dessert, it brings good luck — but the most awaited guest' — we get to the manners now, the father-son relations, think of Molière, miserly father, prodigal son — 'but the most awaited guest is the son, and the most unexpected, the most celebrated, his surprise, unplanned arrival — Dad, can I bring some friends — will be a great family moment, the crowning of conviviality. The father agrees to overlook a great many things; his welcoming, benevolent country mood surprises and touches.'
1:35:22 the prodigal son, a bit sheepish and embarrassed, and the father — the system will even offer the rebellious son the setting of his dreams, a wild nature, well there you go, the very reality of the hippie dream, an elsewhere without the other, without the producer driven off by rural poverty into the city, a wild nature that is nothing other than a nature long worked upon — I refer you to the series I did on landscape, on how it was formed against nature over millennia — an elsewhere without the other, without the producer, a wild nature that is nothing other than a nature long worked, humanized, then abandoned, a falsely wild, desertified nature; a certain countryside has been cleared of its praxis, of its industrious activity, there you have it — on rural territory, the great moment of reconciliation between father and son will be the shared restoration people have been talking about for years, all rustic: the father brings the money, the son his visions and cheap labor, that of undeclared work, the arts-and-crafts buddies, the ex-hippies reconverted into craftsmanship — you know what follows
1:36:33 perhaps better than me, there — I allowed myself to dwell a bit on that answer regarding Christian's question, thank you very much, Armin, and I salute him for this excellent question. As for the question, I'm not sure I understand it well, not that it's obscure, but I'm afraid I understand it in two different senses. When he says, is there in your view an unconscious link, a filiation, between the rationalities of Heidegger in his being-there and the decolonial activists and the like — well, I presume he has a grudge against the decolonials, and I don't think at all that it implies — correct me if I'm wrong, in any case it's not my case — that he's making the case for colonization, agreed, but there's a way — and I experienced this well when I was overseas, as you know, a long time ago, in technical assistance, as it was called after independence, in cooperation — it's terrible, those words, when you see the state the African continent is in after 50 years of "development" and when we lecture
Heidegger, decolonial thinkers, and neocolonialism 1:37:43 the Chinese about what they're doing in Africa, as if we had lessons to give them, when you see the state in which we leave them the continent, between the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund — those are the multilateral cooperations — the bilateral cooperations, French, German, Zusammenarbeit, the German ministry of cooperation, the American AID, isn't that right, development aid, which already made Clinton say aid not trade, trade not aid — oh no, rather the opposite, trade rather than aid, trade not aid — that's the social democrats we were just talking about, because the secret of the right that rules the world, that has dominated the world for several generations now, is that the further right you are, the more you try to pass yourself off as someone on the left. And we really ought to devote a seminar someday to these notions. So I remember very well the anticolonial discourse
1:38:54 I believe that's the one Christian is denouncing, correct me if I'm wrong — anticolonial from those neocolonials who were... I knew both, I was born in the colonial world, I saw colonial rapacity, it was small-time compared to daddy's stuff, that's what it means next to what the neocolonial world became. Here, a very simple figure: we were 5,000 French people in Côte d'Ivoire before independence, 50,000 fifteen years later — that's quite a nice deal, that independence. And we weren't only among the French, everyone was there, it was a free-for-all — before it had been a private hunting ground, then the Germans, the Japanese, everyone, and after that it produces civil wars — I'm thinking of what happened in Côte d'Ivoire and Mali, it pains me to talk about it, those were the calmest places in the world, and what merit is there in being calm in poverty — it's not just poverty, you can't even imagine, Mali, Niger, the whole Sahelian belt — no, but it was, you were there, calm, you could walk around with your wife, your girlfriend, at 2am in Bamako, you were safer
1:40:04 than on a Saturday night on Boulevard Saint-Germain, and now it's fire and blood, there are 50 villagers killed practically every day, every night, in general indifference, isn't that right, while at the same time, if all of a sudden a leader of the Hong Kong students is imprisoned, all the cameras have seen it, though it wasn't shown much, but you can see it and see it again whenever you want, the documents are there, in the office of the American embassy, taking the subsidies and the instructions, a bit like the American Secretary of State handing out pastries to those who were shooting at the police with firearms in Ukraine to install the current neo-Nazi regime — you see, no, I may seem harsh, but I fall short of the truth, I go too fast to say it in all its horror. So if that's what being decolonial means, that is, for me to justify my rapacious presence
1:41:14 I saw cooperants who avoided telling their servants they were leaving for good, so as not to owe them severance pay — the same ones who, on arriving, had said, you address your houseboys informally, that's not normal, you should address them formally — in a country where the poor wretch addresses the president informally if he feels like it: hey president, you need to give us food, you need to sort it out — yes, that's politically correct but rapacious, politically correct meaning in the expression, in the appearance, there you go. If that's it — it's not because there's this, there's a trial of colonialism going on right now, we never do it enough, but it's curious that it's being held at the very moment it's least topical, and that it takes aim above all — I think that's what Christian means — at French imperialism, which has been on its last legs for a long time now, whereas if there really was a colonialism that succeeded the most, that is, with settlers who established themselves, who made a colony and stayed there
1:42:24 it's the United States of America, at the cost of a genocide that is very often glossed over, because those colonists weren't as foolish as the Nazis, waiting for a final solution — they carried out an initial solution: you liquidate everything that's there first, and afterward you invent a legend relayed by admirable Hollywood masterpieces — I have the greatest admiration for John Ford and Howard Hawks — to make people believe that they arrived on virgin land with a gun in the right hand and a Bible in the left. Don't forget it was the American services that were fighting French colonialism in Algeria while also being in cahoots with the partisans of French Algeria, the OAS, who carried out attacks against the movements and the partisans — well, that's getting nauseating. So is there a filiation between that and the irrationality of Heidegger? That's where I don't understand the chain of reasoning, because a link is missing for me, because let's say colonial history is not specific to German history, apparently
1:43:35 it's true that if you associate colonies with exotic, hot countries, that obviously wasn't the case for Germany, apart from a few examples — Cameroon, Togo, Tanzania, we could come back to that — but it's nothing compared to the English, the French, even the Portuguese. On the other hand, I mean the German colonial empire is in Europe, it's the Balkans to the south and Eastern Europe to the east, and the infinite steppes opening up to the east, the conquest of living space, isn't that right — it wasn't the Périgord, it was first Ukraine, then the Caucasus. Germany got its colonial empire back just before the wars of Yugoslavia broke out — the mark had become the currency of exchange in Slovenia when Yugoslavia hadn't yet been dismantled into several states. There, I won't read the third question, Pierre-Alain, maybe you can scroll back up, a question from Athée, I only see the beginning, I don't see the rest, so unless it's a question for next time, we'll perhaps leave it there
1:44:45 for this time. So I'm going to develop a little bit the scientistic imperialism — today I wanted, next time, to finish with peaceful coexistence and come back to today's ideology, isn't that right, which is a regression relative to that peaceful coexistence, that is — I'll give you the summary of what will follow — which amounts to nineteenth-century scientism, as to a regression, because we had finally been able to take into account all that empirical richness, that objective experiential richness, of the nice tablecloth you put out on a Sunday, isn't that right, of customs whereby here you eat with chopsticks, here with forks, here with the three fingers of the right hand, it doesn't matter, provided it is never immediate — that is precisely the point, that man always imposes his mark on the satisfaction of his needs, and that is the source of desire, that's what transforms need into desire, isn't that right, and turns it into infinity, and that's why
1:45:57 I'll take the opportunity to say that next time we'll see that only the symbolic order can elevate this empirical realm — once again this immense part of reality that we don't want to see, but which is just as manifest, empirical, and observable and experimentable as the phases of the moon — it can be elevated to scientific rigor, and that's exactly what we'll be dealing with in the coming sessions. In any case, thank you for this time, I thank Pierre-Alain enormously, Philippe, who handled the handover and prepared the computer so it would be compatible with the new equipment allowing us simultaneously, on Facebook and on YouTube — these are big firsts — allowing us to have sound and image; for the image it shows a little less, but above all more reliable sound
1:47:07 than previously, and your remarks prove it well when the tests — it's a shame that the sound spoils the operation a little — we hope to start making very noticeable progress in this area, and I thank you for attending, I thank the technical crew and in particular Pierre-Alain this evening for having risen to the occasion of this big first. So, see you very soon, and until next time — next time it will be the ring, next time, promised
