English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Returning to epistemology after the Ring 1:00 Omnipresent, invisible, and inconceivable God.
1:44 Well, dear friends, I'm very happy to be back with you. First of all, to thank you. All the more so since, according to the statistics that the production team communicates—Pierre-Alain follows this very closely—the last two analytical reveries have made the audience numbers explode.
2:15 You understand that we are the first to be delighted about this. Thank you very much. And yet I made quite a leap between the character of Mignon, apparently far from all politics, who is a bit lost in dream and poetry, and Lenin's text, which is not so far from dream, which even enjoins us, which even fires a few jabs saying that we don't dream enough if we listen to the most card-carrying of our comrades, if you prefer.
2:54 But there you have it. There, you see, we're getting back on track. I played a bit of extra time in the ring last time because it was the final scene. Let me take this opportunity to tell you, before continuing, before telling you that now we're going back to epistemology, to the reflection on the relation between historical science, natural science, hard science—how to make sciences of history the way we make hard sciences, it amounts to more or less the same thing.
3:28 Let me take this opportunity to say that, regarding the final scene of Twilight of the Gods—I won't play a second round of extra time in the ring—but I want to say: we had had a sound problem that was entirely beyond our control, and the sound has been completely redone with the same excerpt, the same timing, the same staging, of course. So go back to the video of the Twilight of the Gods finale and you'll see that...
4:04 that... Well, I don't know where that sound is coming from, but anyway, excuse me. It really is coming from my end. There, that's what I wanted to tell you. It's night and day in purely audio terms. And because I know some of you are not so used to this kind of repertoire, nor to its length, nor to its complexity.
4:36 And if on top of that the sound cuts in and out or isn't quite reliable, that doesn't help the accessibility this work deserves. So there you go. Don't hesitate to watch it again. I'm speaking especially to my comrade and fellow countryman Jean-Jacques Marzot, who will understand, and who is kind enough to let us know from Bastia whenever the sound is faulty.
5:06 There you go. So I think he'll be delighted with the new soundtrack. Let me get back to today's session to tell you that, after the ring, we return to this reflection on the human sciences, but enriched in the meantime by discussions I've had with scientists, several of whom, in fact most, are members of our association—which delights us both humanly speaking, since these are people we love talking with, and not only about philosophy of science, but also given their level of expertise.
5:57 These are people working at the forefront of research on artificial intelligence in particular—not exclusively, but we do have several friends and comrades working at a more than cutting-edge level, if I may say so, and may they forgive me if I make them blush, on current research, of course, into artificial intelligence, and hence the interest that such research can raise, along with all the nonsense, mind you, that people don't fail to utter when they think they're speaking about it with competence from a distance, especially those who don't see it from the inside.
6:45 So then, even before addressing these problems of artificial intelligence, which came up in the course of conversations with these comrades, I note with you how congruent they are—could not be more congruent—how central they are to what was our preoccupation, namely the famous, to speak in Kantian terms, unbridgeable gulf between the sciences of nature and, as he says, between the domain of legislation by nature, to speak in truly Kantian terms, and the domain of legislation by freedom, which I prefer to call, following Hegel and Marx, following post-Kantianism which is not neo-Kantianism, the historical sciences, in the plural, mind you, insofar as the whole set of so-called human or social sciences—I don't know, how else would you talk about economics? Economics unfolds within history, demography unfolds within history, human geography is the mark of history on territory, in every case.
7:55 it is indeed the historical element—I take the word 'element' here in the sense of the surrounding medium, the historical element, the way fish swim in the aquatic element, if you will—which is the generic term for all these disciplines. So what is an unbridgeable gulf for Kant is, on the contrary, what we would like—and this is indeed what characterizes the efforts of post-Kantianism—to throw a bridge across, however timid and frail at first, and more solid afterward, so that, in the domains that interest us most, we can... and that is no doubt why they take much longer to become scientific than the others.
Why there is less agreement in the historical sciences 8:47 It is in the domain that interests us most, and I'll come back to this—I'm not throwing things out at random—that it's hardest to reach agreement, which is rather normal. If I tell you there's ammonia in the star Sirius, I'm talking nonsense—I mean, spectroscopic analyses have found methane, ammonia, whatever you like, hydrogen, that we're sure must be there.
9:23 You might tell me, perhaps—we won't argue about that—unless you happen to be the actual astronomer specializing in Sirius, but I mean, for most people, it's not among their most immediate interests, it's not what concerns them most closely, it's not like the girlfriend who just left them—I'm going to the other extreme, from intimacy—or finding themselves unemployed, or both, the latter being the effect of the former, as often happens, and so on.
9:54 No. So that's why I told you—I'm coming back to it, I'm doing it now, it's rather logical—when you look at the table of appearance that notes the appearance of the sciences within the scientific element, in the simple chronology of their entry onto the stage, starting with mathematics, which was the first, as we've seen, so I won't dwell on it too much, to break free from the philosophical imperialism that contained them all in Aristotle's time, for example—since mathematics, as early as the 4th or 5th century BC, proclaims its independence—that's how it goes, when there's an imperialism, it encourages attempts at emancipation.
10:35 Then you still have to wait about a century to move on to physics, because with physics we move away from essences—3 plus 2 is not 3 cherries or 2 apples, it's 3 and 2, that's essences, that's the mathematical world. I have a fellow countryman quite well known among those who, in French-speaking thought, reflect on the epistemology of mathematics—I'm thinking of Jean-Toussaint Desanti, a generation above me, who wrote, who gave a beautiful title to his book, which he called Mathematical Idealities.
11:11 There you go. So as long as it concerns the intelligible world, one can always quibble, but once you move to physics, you move into the world we actually live in. It's normal that there's more resistance. You find again that element of negativity which is the most neglected in the countless theories of knowledge piling up on philosophical ground, and I'm thinking in particular of the Vienna Circle.
11:52 I'm not speaking of it with contempt or irony—these are extremely brilliant people. I'll say, in fact, that I plan one day to submit a text, to give a close and sustained reading of a text by the founder of the Vienna Circle, Schlick, who was also something of a martyr to the cause since he was assassinated by the Nazis at the time of the seizure of power, at the time of the Anschluss in Austria.
12:22 But anyway, I mean, the people who gathered around Schlick, who descended from people like Ernst Mach—the one Lenin targets in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism—Mach was someone who was a teacher of Einstein, I mean, and they had important exchanges; Schlick had written theses in theoretical physics and in mathematics too, I mean, there were logicians, anyway, I mean, these are people of a very high level, but precisely, they are at the other extreme, in the cognitivist illusion.
13:05 It never occurs to them that the subject can oppose itself, which is negativity internal to the subject. And that's normal, I mean, that they don't suspect it, because, I mean, if there's one thing that sets Hegel apart in the whole history of thought, it's precisely having been the first to grasp this negativity that runs through the interior of the subject. I'm making a long introduction because it's been a while since we talked epistemology, we need to come back down to earth here.
Descartes, the two substances, and the biological unconscious 13:46 Look at what constitutes, doubtless, the most significant—I don't say the most important, 'most' involves value judgments—the most significant, that is, the most heavily consequential for posterity, of the Freudian initiative and its reflection. The soul and the body—that's a dichotomy that existed well before Freud. In Descartes, you have two substances: the thinking substance, the cogito, and the extended substance, matter, extended substance, space.
14:20 The res extensa, to speak in Cartesian terms. We're not yet at the point of showing, as Einstein did, that space isn't quite independent of the matter it contains. Here, we must pay great tribute—these aren't digressions. You need to become familiar with a few fundamental notions. At the time, just after Descartes, let's say, in Leibniz's time, already a contemporary of Newton and of Pascal and Spinoza, Leibniz had sensed that space is not a simple frame in which you just have to place things—galaxies, planets, ourselves, I don't know.
14:57 This piano, no—space is curved by bodies. It undergoes determinations from the bodies it contains. There, let's leave that aside, mainly because I risk saying foolish things if I'm bold enough to go into detail. And what should be retained is that there is the thinking substance and the extended substance.
15:33 Isn't that so? So the unconscious existed well before Freud. It's not that—it's not the general term of unconscious or involuntary. It amounts to more or less the same thing—what escapes my consciousness, my will. Everyone knew perfectly well before Descartes, and especially before Freud, sorry, who had medical training. He was surrounded by people who practiced what's called the patellar reflex, already, you see. This was very well known, and it goes back to the 17th century already, to the triumph of Galilean-Cartesian mechanism, even if its genesis is a bit more complex than that—but I refer you to Alexandre Koyré's admirable History of the Concept of Reflex, a great epistemologist of the immediate postwar period, Alexandre Koyré, K-O-Y-R-E, History of the Concept of Reflex.
16:28 Well, mechanical effect—that's the reflex, you remember at school, the frog's leg, we tore it off the frog, sorry to the sensitive souls, I'm one of them, every time I think of it, the frog's leg—we put it on a blotting paper with a small drop of acid, and the leg withdraws, even though there's no brain left, nothing left, not even the spinal cord, you see? This is to show that here the reflex is due to the mechanical action of the acid on the sensory nerve, etc., then the motor nerve.
17:09 We knew very well that there are all sorts of processes in my body that entirely escape my consciousness, and thankfully so—can you imagine if we had to be conscious of it, like, 'since I ate that, I'll need to add a little acid to my stomach because that requires more efficient digestion,' and then, 'now I'm going to counterbalance that by generating something basic,' in my guts.
17:43 We'd need 100,000 computers if we had to think, mind you, about the transformations that alter every one of our cells every second that I'm speaking—each of the billions upon billions of our cells undergoes an alteration at the very moment I'm speaking to you. And yes, nature always listens to the little birds, the trees, the blue or green planet. In short, we see it from the outside. The least fantasized representation—relation—we can have to nature is the one we have within ourselves.
18:16 When you have a toothache from a cavity, or when you're sleepy or hungry, these are effects of natural determination, or thirst. Well, it was well known that all of this went on without consciousness. It's the old opposition between instinct and reflection, etc., and thought. So there you go, things were clear. There's the substance that thinks, you see, the cogito, the mind. And then, what's new in Freud isn't saying there's an unconscious, because there I was talking about the physical, organic, biological unconscious.
The psychic unconscious: thoughts I do not think 18:53 Freud speaks of a psychic unconscious. Now that's scandalous. That's scandalous. Purely on a logical level, it takes us aback. We no longer know how to speak. It means, as I've often said—sorry to those who've heard me repeat it—it means that there are, within me, thoughts—not movements of acid, of base, and of muscles contracting or relaxing. No, there are, within me, thoughts that I do not think, that I do not want to think.
19:23 Wills that I do not want. You see, the subject opposes itself. There, in a manner of speaking, to remind you what negativity within the subject itself means. Because there's also the negativity that a peasant exerts on the nature surrounding him, isn't there? When he breaks up stones before plowing his field, when he removes the stones, when he drains a marsh.
19:56 I was talking about the Dutch last time, need I even mention it, isn't that so, when you drain marshes down to the marshes, or even the surface of the sea, to turn it into fertile field. Holland doesn't have the highest cereal yields in the world for nothing. That is the negative relation, that is the negativity of man toward the world surrounding him. From split pebbles, pile-dwelling houses, hunting, fishing, whatever you like, of course, the building of tools.
20:32 But here it's about the contradiction, not between me and objects surrounding me, but between me and another self who is likewise a subject and who does not let itself be treated as it pleases, isn't that so? Why do you think we have nightmares? Because there, in sleep, the tension relaxes a little. The vigilance of consciousness, the agency within us that doesn't want to know, the one that wants to preserve the narcissistic identity of the self—I'm going fast, but I'm sure we understand each other.
21:03 Words speak, don't they? You know, Narcissus, who contemplated his reflection on the surface of the water, and his whole anguish was that this reflection not be disturbed, that there be no breeze, or that no deer leap up and come to trouble the image, or else that it reconstitute itself quickly enough so he could contemplate again the object of his desire, which is precisely his own identity. The most dangerous position, because there's nothing more precarious than an imaginary identity.
21:37 There's nothing more precarious than my image in the mirror, because the mirror is ready to shatter into a thousand pieces. When one clings so tightly to maintaining one's integrity, that's called paranoia. When it takes a pathological turn—because we're all a little bit like that, it's not that we attack the image we have of ourselves, it doesn't please us much when it's chipped away at. But there you have it, I mean, the more elevated an image one has of oneself—and in pathological terms, in clinics, unfortunately, it's rampant, psychiatrically speaking, I'm thinking of megalomania.
22:12 There's a very beautiful passage, but pathetic, in Nerval, who was truly afflicted at that level. Yes, I don't say this with contempt, he's one of my favorite writers. But then, from the symptomatological point of view, I mean, he's arrested by policemen, in reality, on a night patrol in Paris, because he undresses and sings songs in Arabic while following a star through the streets of Paris, the deserted streets of Paris at night, and he says, 'I took care not to touch them too much, for I had a supernatural strength, I was afraid of breaking them.'
22:49 You see, an enormous overvaluation of self, which tolerates all the less, isn't that so, any alteration, the slightest infringement on this identity thus pathologically reinforced. As we are currently burdened with identity, since, you know, a white woman doesn't have the right to translate a text written by a Black woman—I was talking about this with sub-Saharan Africans, weren't I, recently, who were furious, weren't they, that things have come to this, more in the North actually than in the South of the Sahara, by the way.
A third term between subject and object; traumas 23:34 That's where I had gotten to, isn't that so, in other words, between the thinking substance—I think, the pure subject, reduced to consciousness, abstracting away the unconscious—and, that's how the problem was posed before Freud, and the object, between the thinking subject and the thought object, in extension, in space, there was no third term. And then Freud brings about a considerable extension of the subject, of which consciousness is no longer anything but the emergent part, but which also cannot be conflated with the object, and therefore does not belong either to physics, chemistry, or biology.
24:20 That is, to rigorously scientific discourse, when it deals with objects—stars, molecules, X-rays, whatever you like, the background noise of the universe, the echo of the Big Bang—and yes, it's not billions of years ago like that, there are echoes, we can still hear the echo, and yes, even those who first perceived it thought it was static and dirt on their radio telescope.
24:54 That's how we became aware there was background noise in the universe. It's extraordinary, all the same. Well, I'm thinking of Hölderlin, who speaks of Asia, the origin of historical civilizations—I'm not speaking, of course, of prehistory, Africa is much earlier—but he says, 'I still hear it,' 'O Asia, the echo that comes from you,' and of such a jubilant cry, from the first civilizations, of the Indus, the Yangtze, isn't that so, the Nile, the Orient, and especially Mesopotamia, and of a cry so intensely jubilant that even today our ears still resonate with it.
25:38 It's not billions of years there, but still, it's a bit the same idea. One could almost hear the cry uttered by Dionysus, for Dionysus is a late god who comes into the Greek pantheon—you think I'm wandering off—who comes into the Greek pantheon on a chariot borne by tigers. Look at the history of painting. Dionysus always has ivy leaves around his head, all the attributes of Dionysus, of Bacchus, it's the same thing. Ivy, an evergreen, perennial plant that does not wither.
26:09 The pine, a tree with non-deciduous leaves, isn't that so? No autumn for conifers, the pine, the myrtle—you remember the line by Nerval, 'the pale hydrangea,' that's for the Christian saint, 'joined to the green myrtle,' that's for the pagan fairy, 'the pale hydrangea, joined to the green myrtle.' What rigor, all the same, poetry has—there are still those who doubt that this field could be raised to scientific rigor.
26:41 But let's not get ahead of ourselves, let's continue on the same path, between thinking substance and thought substance, there is this subject whose consciousness is now only a periphery. That's what's scandalous about the Freudian message. It's that it's a second expulsion of the subject from itself. It's not me who made that step. It's Freud himself who noticed that there have been several traumas historically like this, in scientific history.
27:12 The passage from geocentrism to heliocentrism was a first trauma. I believed I was at the center of the world, we mentioned this last time, it's so familiar there's no need to dwell on it. And now I find myself on the periphery, on the distant periphery. And then there was a second trauma. My ancestor is not the gods of the Greek pantheon, it's primates. Isn't that right?
27:42 I don't say monkeys because it's a bit more complicated than that. You'd see them like that in the scenery, you'd take them more for monkeys than for men. So there it is. And trauma. And there, all of a sudden, someone tells us, everything you think, the image you have of yourself, what Marx had called well before Freud, ideology. I think I'm thinking objectively about things, about economics, about the origins of human history, etc.
28:12 and in fact, I'm in Robinsonades, in fantasy, isn't that right? And I'm there where my unconscious is walking me around. Slang puts it well, he took the guy for a ride, that means language has thrown things out there, you see. Let's continue our walk, but let's be attentive. Let's stroll like little Tom Thumb. Let's mark our path with little white pebbles, isn't that right? So that the Minotaur doesn't devour us the moment we've forgotten to watch where we're going and end up getting lost in the labyrinth.
Schoenberg and the abandonment of the tonic 28:49 So, why did I start, apparently far from scientific rigor, with this evocation, well, with this evocation, this hearing and this projection, since it's about opera, of the first seconds, of the curtain rising, of the only great opera that Schoenberg wrote — Schoenberg lived at the beginning of the 20th century, to go quickly — a moment when the acceleration of upheaval in artistic forms, to go quickly, whether in painting with cubism, which already succeeded the deliquescence, not pejorative, of contours in impressionism — the subject in the pictorial sense, this time, not our subject, a table, a flower, what made it so you knew what the painting was about — becomes more and more indeterminate.
29:51 It corresponds in music, isn't that right, to the abandonment of tonality, that is, the reference that structured all Western music for centuries, isn't that right? Yes, when I do this, do you know this? There are eleven notes. I just played eleven. Out of the eleven, look how many times there's this one. Four.
30:23 Five. Nearly half on a single note, out of the eleven notes. Five. It's called the tonic. And you feel it well when we come back to this... You feel that the phrase is finished when we return to this one, like a dancer who has taken risks with gravity, with his center of gravity, and who suddenly lands back on his feet after a... a gestural display that dazzles us, isn't that right, expressed? I'm not even talking about Olympic gymnasts.
30:53 So, one... There, I'm concluding in the Wagner style on purpose, isn't that right? He manages not to do... There, it's finished. But if I do... Well, we can pause, we can rest a bit on this after these modulations, but visibly, we've moved to another land, so we continue. I can do...
31:28 I'll finish on a little blues. There. That, you see, is as if we abandon the tonic, it's like a ship that has no more compass, no more heading, no more sextant, I no longer know where it's going. As soon as you leave port for the high seas, you have to set a heading.
The sign and the signal 32:06 There, that's what I wanted to recall. Well, so, I'll leave aside the general side of this introduction. Now I'm getting to the heart of the matter and I'm coming back to my discussions. You'll ask me what does this have to do with artificial intelligence? It's that we approached, I mentioned, while discussing with my interlocutor, with Christophe Denis, whom I'm announcing has kindly agreed to take on the role of interviewer very soon on the same channels we have here.
32:41 So, Christophe Denis, who works at Jussieu on artificial intelligence and who also has the merit of having teaching experience, so who is used to leaving the language of equations, even though he's a brilliant mathematician, to try, in natural language as they say, you see, we come back to our issues, to try to make understandable things that are not...
33:14 ...that are very far from common understanding, if I may say so. I explained to him the distinction that should be familiar to those who have been listening to me for a while, and you're more and more numerous, which pleases me greatly, the distinction I often make when talking about language between the sign and the signal. So here I'll do some recapping, because there are newcomers joining those who've been here for a long time, and that pleases me too, so here, we really must, no one must be left behind, given the importance of the stakes.
33:48 And given that it's on this distinction between sign and signal — which is not trivial, since one doesn't receive a sign, a signal, we won't split hairs to stay polite. So there's a gulf, truly unbridgeable, between the two. I'll give an example first, that will give you a rest. A signal, I'll take the same example as last time, that will remind some people to go back to certain videos, smoke signals fire.
34:20 For an animal in the bush, the smell of smoke is a signal by which it immediately recognizes there's a danger of burning in what's called a bushfire. And it dashes off, isn't that right, in the opposite direction from where the smell is coming from. It's much better equipped than we are, not to capture it, it has olfactory sensors far more developed than ours. So, that's the signal.
34:52 And then, there's the sign, the word smoke, F-U-M-E-E, I even write it, you see, to really see it, that here I'm talking about the word, not the thing. I don't know. Yes, but then, there's something that has nothing to do with it, it's the same idea, but expressed by the English word smoke. Smoke and fumée have nothing to do with each other, neither for the ear nor for the eye. Write both, you'll agree.
35:22 I say lion in French. Then you'll tell me, yes, lion, that's a bit similar. Yes, it's a European language, it's close. Löwe in German, fine. Leon, yes, fine. But when you go to Mali and speak Bambara, you say Diarra, D-I-A-R-R-A, or I don't know, there are great footballers who are named that, because many great footballers come to us from the Sahel, Diarra, yes, no connection at all. In other words, the difference here is that whereas in the relation between smoke and fire, there is a link created by nature itself, there's a consecution in the same place and at the same moment, which here is the bush — first there was fire somewhere, and then the smell of smoke reaches my nostrils, my snout.
36:11 So here, the link is natural, not conventional, not arbitrary, it has nothing arbitrary about it, it's a natural law expressed through smoke, you know the saying: no smoke without fire. Whereas, the proof is that the signs, Diarra, Lion, Löwe, for the animal, for the beast in question, or, I don't even remember what I said, or whatever, smoke, or fumée, have no natural relation to the objects, no natural relation at all.
36:59 The proof is that when you change countries, the sign changes completely, that's what's called in linguistics, well known, indeed what characterizes human languages — I say this because don't think that just because animals communicate with each other in a very effective, very efficient way, even if it's extremely limited to always the same needs. By the way, we'll see that's one of the main differences: watch closely in living rooms after a meal, the moment people talk the most is not the moment they're hungry.
37:34 It's like at a party, either eating, or at the aperitif before, they give you little snacks like that, to trick your hunger, as they say so well in French. And then afterward, when your stomach is full, and you're getting to the digestif, then, are you still living with that bimbo? Or, are you still living with that idiot, speaking of a boy, I mean, we're entitled to all that. Well, we talk, we can start addressing problems that aren't the most urgent.
38:10 The arbitrariness of the sign, total break between the sign and the meaning. The meaning is a mammal, well, a beast, I won't name it, because if I name it, I switch to the sign, isn't that right. And then this meaning, this meaning that belongs, whose content belongs to zoology, that's not my field of expertise, when we want to communicate it to one another as humans, the lion passed through here, hunter, in the Kalahari, in southern Africa, it will be said Diarra in Mali, Löwe in Germany, and then lion for us.
Naturalism and materialism; critical mass 38:53 You see, so, we get the impression that it's trivial, sign, we can substitute one for the other — no, it's the old opposition, it overlaps with old oppositions between the natural sciences and the historical sciences. There are signals, I put it in the outline that was surely distributed to you, well, that was posted on social media announcing tonight's session, there's the whole gulf that separates the signal, a natural mechanism, from the sign, a convention, between subjects.
39:37 ...not the effect of an object on a living being, be it even an animal, still less of one object on another object, like acid that bubbles on limestone, effervescence as they say in chemistry. No, here it's about a subject communicating with a subject, and there we completely take off from natural constraint — not material, never confuse naturalism with materialism, otherwise you fall back into the dominant ideology.
40:10 There's nothing left but naturalism. Whereas this here is at least as material as I am myself. There's nothing natural about it, I think the distinction is simple. Language knows it, you know it when you speak since you say 'but that's not natural, that's artificial.' Everything that is produced artificially, everything that is the product of art — the Greeks had the same word for art and for technique, that is, techné precisely — is a non-natural matter.
40:45 We must get used to these distinctions which are hidden from us like never before. Because the subject doesn't want the subject to be known. The subject doesn't want the subject to know itself. We've already seen that each of us sets certain limits on self-knowledge, even if those limits are unfortunately fragile and can be pushed aside. And on the other hand, the dominant subjects — well, I mean, they make enormous efforts so that you don't reach, we don't reach, we the people, the critical mass.
41:27 No, I'm not being demagogic when I use the word 'people,' I mean the vast majority. The more the figures evolve, the fewer there are, you know, the 1% who own everything — well, you follow the figures, good. Power does everything so that the dominated don't reach critical mass — once, in passing, a bit quickly. So that's why I'm dwelling a bit. I defined what I called critical mass, I'm borrowing the metaphor, it's not the making of atomic bombs, I mean.
42:05 So if I'm saying nonsense, my friends will rap me on the knuckles, but roughly speaking, still, there are safety systems in nuclear weapons, of course, you realize, it's not when they're stored — and these systems consist of isolating parts of the easily fissile radioactive mass, enriched uranium, from plutonium, keeping them separate. And then, at the fatal moment when suddenly, on the president's red phone, bang, I mean, the atomic attack is triggered, the release of the safety mechanism here corresponds to melting away the separation of these parts, which reunite and reach what is called, in volume, as in geometry — that's a bit more complex — critical mass in density, in volume.
43:09 There, that's a metaphor. So applying the metaphor, it means that those in power fear above all that you and I reach a numerical threshold, that we become more and more numerous knowing more and more things about them and about ourselves. That's terrible, critical mass. It's absolutely necessary to produce what Michel Clouscard and I had called, during a seminar held by Henri Lefebvre at the École Pratique des Hautes Études at the end of the sixties, what we had called — it was just a bit before '68, in the mid-sixties — the genesis of innocence.
The genesis of innocence; industry and exploitation 43:54 How power, isn't that right, casts a veil like that, a curtain over the terrible history that preceded its power, isn't that right, it's the history of the commodity, you read in Marx the chapters titled 'Primitive Accumulation,' that is, the history of the objects that make up the wonderful world of the commodity, and you'll see it's barely bearable. I'll take the best-known example, because otherwise it would require demonstrations, but I've seen there are a lot of videos, so it's fairly well known now, and all the better, that the veil lifts a bit from time to time on these kids, except it stops at pity, no one says who owns what — but anyway, these kids who work in mines, particularly in the Great Lakes region in Africa, Congo mainly, but also Rwanda, or the Central African Republic, all these countries that are very rich in minerals, how kids, but kids
45:04 who should barely be finishing primary school, isn't that right, work like mad in the most unsanitary conditions in the mines — imagine mines in the equatorial jungle — to extract this famous metal we need so badly in our cell phones, me first, that's not why I feel guilty about it. Those who show these images blur the lines a bit by saying it's the misdeeds of industry — no, it's the misdeeds of capitalist exploitation, we could very well extract this metal in much better conditions, with workers paid much better, but I know it's as if, that what I'm saying is almost wasted, since there's a crowd of people — and it's not tonight that I'll try to sketch them out — it's not that they believe themselves anti-capitalist and in fact they're anti-industrial; we could build a much more productive industry, since there are still many shortages and gaps that require an increase in production, in particular certain kinds of production, and an abandonment of others, which I'd be the first to co-sign.
46:15 Superfluous, but it's not up to me to decide that, it's up to the plan. So there, I mean, critical mass is when a maximum number of citizens reach a maximum of knowledge, but not knowledge of... How many grains of sand are there in the Sahara? What's the half-life of uranium turning into lead, whatever, after a few million years?
46:54 No, no, not about isotopes and the number of electrons in the eighth box of Mendeleev's table. No, that's not it. But there are more and more people who know more and more things about ourselves, about where we come from — not our biological origin, we've never known so much about that. But the trails remain blurred. It's been a long time since biology alone could explain why we are here and why we go left, right, and why we get laid off, and why suddenly we find a job, a wonderful fixed-term job.
Replacing "what is it?" with "what do you call it?" 47:36 Ah, good, that'll last me two weeks. There. So, I was recalling that this simple difference between sign and signal brings us back to the foundation, to the very first lectures with which I launched the community we're beginning to form and which keeps growing since, and I'm very happy about that. The first series of videos was called 'Between crises and wars, philosophizing'
48:12 in which I applied myself not to defending this or that philosophy, whether Descartes's, Marx's, Foucault's, or Plato's, but to trying to make understood what philosophy is in relation to other disciplines. I'm now recalling the fundamental things, that is, not dissolving it into things I respect but which are a different field — the religious field, the scientific field, the aesthetic field, the artistic field, I prefer to say, because aesthetics is a part of philosophy that reflects on art and on beauty in general, whether natural or artistic.
48:56 So what specifies the philosophical approach, I had condensed it — it's simple to remember — in the difference between two questions, and here again the difference seems trivial: replacing 'what is it?' — the question asked by the chemist, the astronomer, all the hard sciences, isn't that right? What is a number, after all? The answer isn't simple. And replacing 'what is it' with 'what do you call it?'
49:28 ...replacing it whenever one wants to be subsumed under the concept of philosopher. And I had recalled, following a very pertinent question asked of me, where the interlocutor indeed had the merit of saying that the distinction didn't seem very obvious, and that allowed me to remind him that the stakes are considerable. Since, when I say 'what is the sun?' and I address an object, we come back to the same thing.
49:59 An object doesn't speak. You see how we're going to come to language? It's not going to answer me 'yes, I'm not a planet, I'm a star, I produce my own light, I'm not a reflection.' It doesn't speak. It's man who's going to make all these distinctions. He says 'what is it?' So it would be a monologue if — fortunately the history of science unfolds otherwise — if the astronomer remained alone facing the stars, as astrologers did when it wasn't yet a science, precisely, isn't that right?
50:35 Atop the ziggurats, the Mesopotamian towers, isn't that right? As if, at 40 meters high, which was enormous for the time, as if we'd know more about the stars, which are billions of light-years away, by getting 40 meters closer. Well, on the other hand, that astronomy appeared in desert regions of countries is no coincidence. That, on the other hand, nothing is clearer than the swarming of stars in a desert sky.
51:06 Except, that of the very high mountain when there's exceptional weather, when the day has been exceptionally beautiful, as happened to me last time in the high Engadine, very close to where Nietzsche's little cabin is, for which I have affection, he loved to walk near the high Engadine. A kind of Swiss Tibet at nearly 3000 meters altitude, isn't that right, between Maloja and Saint-Moritz, near Lake Silvaplana. Strange language, which is Romance, like that, it's not German, it's not French, it's not Italian, it's Romansh.
51:42 A swarming of stars. There. So, 'what do you call it?' must replace 'what is it?' And I was saying, the question is much more radical, because in saying 'what do you call it,' I'm addressing — the 'you' doesn't address an object, the 'you' addresses a someone. You, the astronomer questioning the star, what do you call a star? How do you distinguish it from a planet? And he'll answer me, she'll tell me, the star, it produces its own energy, and the word becomes a string of words. The subject 'star,' the grammatical subject 'star,' becomes a predicate.
Mallarmé: "a purer sense to the words of the tribe" 52:15 It starts to have a content, precise determinations, which means we know a little better what we're talking about, that the same words start designating the same things for the same people. And above all, even for different people, that's the advantage. You see, we're recalling what makes it possible to give a purer sense to the words of the tribe. And yes, I'm quoting Mallarmé, but wait, he wasn't talking about philosophy, nor even less about mathematics, Mallarmé.
52:47 He was talking about poetry. It's in the tomb of Edgar Poe that you'll find this line. He made a series of tributes. Tributes are a poetic genre. The tomb, sorry, is a poetic genre. Excuse me. The tomb of— Intel, he made the tomb of Verlaine, in which there's this pretty line. He is hidden among the grass, of Verlaine. The grass is as frail and as fluid as the melody, as the music of Verlaine. He made the tomb of Baudelaire.
53:17 He made a tribute to Wagner. It wasn't a tomb because Wagner was still alive. And then there's this tomb of Edgar Poe — to understand where the line comes from, you should know that he was inspired, the images in this short sonnet, by Edgar Poe's grave as it actually exists in Baltimore. There, Poe was found in a coma, probably alcoholic, in the gutter.
53:48 It's not certain, but it's likely. And he had found work again, all that. He was doing better. He had given up drinking when his young wife, a wife of fifteen, died. And he, who had already lost his mother, in a theater fire — his mother was an actress and singer — it was a bit too much. He started drinking again. Anyway, I'm digressing. So this tomb was made for him.
54:19 He was considered a cursed poet. You see, he's a poète maudit. His poetry is alcoholic, it's the ramblings of a drunkard in Mallarméan terms. They — they, the public — don't understand. They proclaimed very loudly the spell drunk, in other words the effect of Poe's drinks, the drunken spell, in the dishonorable flood of some black mixtures. Like a bender, as we'd say in French — 'biture.'
54:50 Bitter means bitter. They proclaimed very loudly the drunken spell, in the dishonorable flood of some black mixtures. And the monument is a somewhat grandiloquent statue with a block of granite bearing an outstretched arm holding, I believe, though I'm not sure, a sword, toward the sky. May at least this granite forever mark a boundary to the black flights of Blasphemy scattered in the future. And that's where he says — speaking of the crowd that doesn't understand him — like a vile recoil of a hydra — a hydra is a thousand-headed monster, the crowd — like a vile recoil of a hydra hearing, once, an angel giving a purer sense to the words of the tribe, they proclaimed very loudly the drunken spell in the dishonorable flood of some black mixtures.
55:42 Wait, he's talking about poets here! What is this 'amalgams' business? We were on the relation between how the philosopher goes back to the root of the words of language through which he questions the scientist. What do you call a star? What do you call a number? What do you call a median? I'm sure many of you remember it's no accident that the poet came up.
56:14 For I had concluded this whole first cycle, in which I tried to specify what is properly philosophical, with all the differences there can be among philosophers — what makes it philosophy and not religion, which I respect, or science, which I respect and admire, and on certain points envy, or aesthetics, etc., or economics — what is specifically philosophical, when you define it precisely, you define a field where suddenly three people appear, where the philosopher is the third, the mediator, the middle figure of a trio, a triangle, a trio where, besides himself — that makes one — there's the mathematician, and at the other extreme the poet.
57:07 What do the three have in common? Their relation to language. What do you call...? I told you earlier, she knows a thing or two, language does, when it says 'that stuck in my throat.' There, she sees very well the relation between soul and body when she says 'that grosses me out' in slang, 'that disgusts me' in more proper French. Each time, it reminds us that nausea isn't only due to excessive alcohol intake or indigestion — that there can be moral causes of nausea.
57:48 And that sometimes it's better to keep away from one's mother-in-law. Sorry, I'm falling into clichés, the traditional mother-in-law of caricatures. It's a hard trade being a mother-in-law. I'm paraphrasing a fine poem by Baudelaire. It's a hard trade being a stepdaughter. Or being a beautiful woman. I'm not doing so well. Beautiful woman, sorry. And so the relation to language is what unites the three figures.
58:18 But in a very different way — the mathematician, by dropping, by letting go of what is properly linguistic in language, the words: pear, banana, star, planet. You know that in astronomy nowadays, a star is most often a number. It's safer. You know exactly which celestial body you're talking about. You can't give it the twelfth name of Hercules or whatever. And we've seen that we risk stumbling over words from everyday language.
58:52 So when we get to the difference between — is it material or is it a field? I don't know. I'll let Einstein speak in a little while, and you'll see these aren't indifferent problems. So, there. And we return to this reflection on natural language, which the mathematician drops. Let me go back. Which the poet transforms.
59:25 That's why great poetry isn't always obvious, isn't it? That the poet uses everyday language, unlike the mathematician, but makes it say almost another language, as if speaking another code. That's what made Rimbaud say that to understand my word, it must flee and fly. For example. Or what made Hölderlin say, a century earlier, 'a sign, such are we, and of no meaning.' You see how we come back to the sign?
59:57 'A sign, such are we.' We don't produce signs, we are sign, and of no meaning. And — I almost forgot what was supposed to illustrate my little parenthesis — 'and we have almost lost our tongue in a foreign land.' There he is, right in the heart of Germany, there's a beautiful break in the clouds, an illumination in the Rimbaldian sense, in an almost literal sense — the sun reappears from behind a cloud after a storm — 'and we have almost lost our tongue in a foreign land.'
1:00:34 And then there's the philosopher, who is caught between the mathematician — he'd like to put into words the same rigor the mathematician puts into the signs of algorithms, but signs are not linguistic; on the contrary, they try to avoid the polysemy of language — it's discursive, it's a discourse; mathematics, at the cost of not being a language, is often very silent — and then there's the poet. And we see that all three, in the end, are preoccupied with the words of the tribe, with a few attitudes and a few solutions brought to the problem that the words of the tribe pose them. There, I'll still take a quick look at the time, because I can't see much — it's 9:30 p.m., is that right? If I'm asking, it's because usually it's 9:30, it must be
The Evolution of Physics: the axioms 1:01:45 my internal clock, I don't know — there, I'm checking anyway — yes, that's right, it's 34. So I know you're certainly going to have a lot of questions to ask, but you know that I no longer rush through answering questions in the 20 minutes, or in happier times half an hour, that I can devote to them at the end of the session — I'll take care of that before the next workshop, before the next workshop, within 15 days. So I'll take care to answer your questions in detail, as we've been doing now for several sessions, and I've seen that you're very attached to this kind of exercise, and so are we, it makes us very happy too. But I would like us to part on a text by Einstein — Einstein, one stone, One Stone Einstein — which I'm sure is going to prompt quite a few of the next questions, in addition to the ones we ask tonight. This text is taken — well of course it's not the Einstein of the equations
1:02:55 because there, I could even — relative to the scientific community of his time, he had trouble making himself understood; it seems it was Henri Poincaré, the immense French physicist and mathematician, who did a great deal to clarify and popularize — as they say, but in the highest, most refined sense here — Einstein's advances. Well, let's not stray. So this is a book intended for the general public, called The Evolution of Physics, as you can see it's a kind of journey, somewhat diachronic, one might say — not historical — through the fantastic transformations physics underwent since its emergence with Galileo and its culmination in classical physics with Newton, then with the appearance of electromagnetic disciplines, to move quickly, and periodic ones, and of course the great upheavals of the early twentieth century, which are more than revolutions — the theory of special relativity, then general relativity
1:04:05 and of course, lastly, quantum theory — all of that in the space of a pocket handkerchief, I mean within the first fifteen years of the twentieth century: the essence of relativity theory and the work surrounding Max Planck, or Heisenberg — Heisenberg a bit later — but it must be said, it's all in the space of a handkerchief. I'm dwelling on this a bit because I often lament — I had a conversation with researchers at CERN in Geneva, I mean, it seemed to me — I'm a layman, so I don't trust my own impressions — it seemed to me that it's been a long time since there's been that dazzling progression, like a curve, of scientific advances, such as there was between Galileo and Max Planck, say, passing through Newton, Einstein, etc., and I'm leaving out some of the greatest — and I thought I was saying something foolish, that they'd correct me, because in the mainstream you're made to believe every time that there have never been so many upheavals as now, that they confuse technology
1:05:16 it's not the practical application — and when you think, for instance, that a cathode ray tube, which we'd never have been able to put to use as what's called a simple television screen — I'm talking about the most classic TV screens, not even getting into digital ones — cathode ray tubes and the reproduction of images at a distance — to achieve that, mathematical models had to be used that borrow from a category of numbers called complex numbers. Except complex numbers were modeled as early as the late Middle Ages by an Italian named Bombelli, with two L's. It's true that the theory was very quickly what's called saturated in mathematics, meaning it reached near perfection very early — in other words, it was formulated by a mathematician who never imagined it would one day have practical applications, certainly not that one, when he developed it he simply needed to extend his theory of numbers for strictly internal mathematical reasons. So there, The Evolution of Physics, I refer you to it, it exists in paperback
1:06:26 I advise you to get it, no more commentary — let me read: 'Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem' — especially when you listen to television, to TV panels and the pervasive neo-positivism — 'and are not, however it may seem' — that's Einstein speaking — 'uniquely determined by the external world.' You'd think a mathematician was speaking, but he's not a mathematician, he's a physicist — right — it's thought, it's ideas that lie at the origin of any physical theory. Mathematics has a character of absolute certainty simply by the fact that one agrees on — and he begins with the example I often like to take — what Euclid called 'demands,' the primitive notions, the definitions, the axioms, the postulates, those undemonstrated propositions which are at the starting point of all mathematical modeling, and like all the other hard sciences — applied mathematics, otherwise they're not really sciences — everything rests on these first notions, which are not
1:07:36 demonstrated, but which we must agree on — and in order to agree, there must be several subjects. That is what lies at the foundation of mathematical rigor. We think we're in pure objectivity — yes, in the Kantian sense, objectivity meaning valid for all subjects, but not in the sense of speaking about an object — it's not that, it's a relation between subjects. I ask you to grant me that through a point in the same plane only one parallel can be drawn to a line, one and only one — Euclid's famous postulate, for example — I ask it of you; if you don't grant it to me, I can't go on. There, let me continue Einstein's text: 'Mathematics has a character of absolute certainty simply by the fact that one agrees on the fundamental propositions' — the axioms — 'as well as on the methods to follow in order to deduce from those fundamental propositions other propositions' — the rules of algebraic calculation, roughly. Here arises then — watch out, because this is vintage Einstein, because up to now he's been summarizing a bit the development
The enigma: why mathematics applies to the real 1:08:47 of the sciences; now we move to philosophy — 'here arises a puzzle' — he's not talking about the solutions provided by mathematicians but about the puzzle their solutions pose — 'a puzzle arises which has at all times strongly troubled inquirers,' the greatest ones — 'how is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought independent of experience' — he's not an empiricist, Einstein, and don't let anyone in the name of some pseudo-Marxism tell me — I see you coming — that you're going to criticize experience, empiricism, that you're going to sink into idealism — so let me recall that Lenin, who was a fierce anti-idealist, who never lets go on that point, never, and for good reason, unlike Marx he dwells little on the question except in that youthful period — Lenin, he was in the political fight, he knew who he was dealing with — but Lenin's most cited work
1:10:00 in the field of reflection on the sciences, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, is precisely directed against empirio-criticism — it's not empiricism — it's not a doctrine worthy of someone who claims Lenin's heritage. There, let's drop it, because there are certainly listeners who don't claim Lenin's heritage after all. But let me repeat, the puzzle — here's how it must be formulated: how is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality? Common sense — I build things, models like that, purely logical, in my head, I'll be more precise in a moment — and there I end up making man master and possessor of nature simply by applying these models, so to speak, to things, when I obtained them without any reference to any thing — how is that possible? That's what's called the epistemological paradox. Einstein often sums it up more elliptically but very clearly by saying
1:11:10 the important thing — listen, remember this formula well, it's not mine, I can only recommend it to you — the important thing is not — someone like Einstein knows what needs to be done to know nature, physis — the important thing, the most astonishing thing, that's not the most important, the most astonishing here, he says troubling, is not that we can know the world, but that the world should be such that we can know it — that it lets itself be so easily dominated by models drawn from speculation farthest removed from external data. The most astonishing thing is not that we can know the world — I'm driving the point home — but that the world should be such that it can be known. You see the great advantage — he says that's philosophy. Why?
1:12:04 Because here Einstein poses a problem, raises a problematic — he can, because he has provided solutions, he's not someone posing problems to justify having nothing to do, someone who, as Rimbaud says, 'has made my tongue so treacherous that it has thus far preserved my laziness, kept me from making a living, more idle than the toad' — no, no, he can allow himself, all of a sudden, to say — since he has considerably covered the field of what no longer astonishes since him — he's given examples of explanations, in particular the law of equivalence of matter and energy, his most famous formula, but also his conception of motion as an effect of the curvature of space — not to stray — he has covered a field, but like any field it reaches its limits, that is, what troubles him, what remains a mystery, is how it is that it works, how it is that, long after Einstein's death, there have been plenty of experiments confirming it, in particular with the observations
1:13:15 made on the trajectory of Mercury, the planet Mercury which passes very close to the sun — and Einstein had predicted that the sun's mass would curve the light instead of it going in a straight line — I don't know, that it would take more time than the Newtonian models would have predicted, models set in a flat space, whereas here curvilinear space was needed — I'm simplifying enormously — and so the delays observed relative to the predictions, the reappearance of Mercury after its rotation around the sun, this delay is due to the curvature imposed by the mass — the gravitation, the enormous mass of the sun — on this planet which is so close to it. But Einstein deduced that it had to be this way without ever having observed it — it's not an experiment that taught it to him. Second example, isn't it — the Russian who is behind — in every chemistry classroom there's a table by Mendeleev
Mendeleev and Kant: knowing before going to look 1:14:25 a table of the periodic classification of the elements, following an order from the atom with the fewest electrons — because every atom combines a nucleus and electrons, but not in the same quantities — the hydrogen atom, the simplest, up to atoms with hundreds of electrons, radioactive matter in particular, uranium — all the elements present in the universe, the fundamental bodies of which all other bodies are composed, thus hydrogen and oxygen which make up the water we drink, or the air we breathe, not in the same proportions — these elements are in Mendeleev's table, but he had left empty boxes because — it's purely mathematical, his periodic classification, it's called a mathematical combinatorial analysis — you know, we're five at a table
1:15:35 how many possible combinations are there of who's on the left of whom, on the right of whom, across from whom — you see, and there are all the more combinations the more of us there are, you know, factorial 3, factorial 4, factorial 5, symbolized by an exclamation mark — so that's how he arrived at combinations of atoms, a number of atoms that corresponded to no experimentally known body in the world as it was then known, which was already considerable. Well, they were discovered — beyond the solar system, sorry, beyond Earth — they were discovered astronomically, later, their existence was confirmed, they came to fill the empty boxes, to take their place in the boxes left empty. There again, the power of the human brain, theoretical rigor, allows one to take an option in advance on reality — to know before going to look — that doesn't mean you shouldn't go look, and I don't want to take up too much of the time we have left, but Kant's sentence
1:16:45 remains perfectly relevant, and sends packing both the foolish empiricist and the idealist who wants to know nothing of experience: 'Although all our knowledge begins with experience' — Kant isn't foolish, without experience at the start, without sense data, without all that, no knowledge is possible — 'although all our knowledge begins with' — and he underlines the word 'with,' in a certain translation — 'it does not follow that it all arises out of experience' — underline: experience — don't confuse it with correlation and cause — 'can human reason not, then, without the help of experience, discover by its own thinking activity the properties of real things?' We note with evidence — you see how words trap us, in 'evidence' there's 'video' — while he's in the process of criticizing visual experience — we note with evidence how wrong are the theorists of knowledge who believe that theory
Induction, deduction: contradiction presupposes diction 1:17:55 comes by induction from experience — I say this for those used to the rigor of these terms — that induction is the opposite of deduction. Induction is what makes me go from the particular toward the universal: I see an apple tree, I see a cypress, I see a baobab, I see a fig tree, and I drop the differences, I look at the common frame — roots, a trunk, branches — and I form the concept of tree. I induce, these different experiences lead me to formulate the concept, I start from the particular, from the experience of each of these trees, toward the concept — we'll see it's not so simple, but roughly speaking — whereas deduction is when you start from something already known to be true, for example from the definition of a circle: the radius, the set of points equidistant from a single point called the center, etc.
1:18:49 I can deduce, as a theorem, that all the radii of a circle are equal — otherwise I contradict myself, equidistant means at the same distance, so the radii are equal. That's deduction — that is, formulating a statement that I cannot declare false without contradicting what had already been granted to me as true beforehand. So here it's no longer a matter of agreeing with the external world, of seeing whether I'm describing well what happens, whether I observe well, whether I'm attentive to what's happening — it's a matter of being attentive to what I say or what I write, it comes to the same thing, to what I formulate, in order to flee, as much as possible — and we come back to language — contradiction, without which mathematics would never have appeared, without the negation of which, without the refusal of which, mathematics would never have appeared. You can make any hypotheses you like, any mathematical models, provided they are coherent, or if you prefer, the opposite of contradictory. You know, those long chains of reasoning, I've often quoted this from Descartes, I won't go back over it, but I said I'd come back to it, and here I am — non-contradiction
1:20:00 brings us back to language — for there to be contradiction, in order to know whether or not there is contradiction, there must first be a statement, a diction. So it is between statements that one can decide whether or not there is contradiction. There, we are not in the real, in physics, we are in logic — logos, the body, soliloquy, monologue — I speak, we are in the world of words, and we're saying, watch out, let's tune our instruments here — that words relate to things or not is another matter. I can say a castle with a million rooms has twice as many as a castle with 500,000 — no castle of that kind exists, but the sentence contains no contradiction, it's impeccable from a logical point of view. Don't confuse logic and physics — Aristotle always reminds us of this distinction, kata logon, kata physin — what is true in the logical order and what is true in the physical order. But now this distinction is suddenly blurred by the extraordinary success of the hard sciences
1:21:10 success in their application — and you understand better now the epistemological paradox and what troubles so much, and so many — you'd have to be ignorant to say to us, 'but no, of course, that's normal, we conduct experiments and then we arrive at laws, so it's normal, we've studied reality well, so we can dominate it' — but no, that's not how it was done, we didn't look at reality, we paid attention to what we were saying, that's how it began — these are laws of language that govern the objects around us. Wait, there's a problem here — this is the problem Einstein raises. There, I wanted to leave you with this problem, we're not going to solve it, I haven't taken a position, I'm showing you that one of the greatest scientists of the contemporary world doesn't hesitate to pose it, and that is his whole greatness — the extraordinary thing is not — the most astonishing thing, depending on the translation — is not that we can know the world, but that the world should be such that statements deduced from purely logical constraints impose themselves on the external world, that the world of words imposes itself on the world of things, when those words
1:22:20 follow an order. There, well, I hope some of you will say, 'that was still nicer, the ring, there, all sorts of things were happening.' I mean, I'm sure that for some of you the epistemological serial is increasingly taking a detective-story turn, which delights me for my part, and you'll see we haven't finished looking for pieces of evidence, and we'll have texts at least as fascinating next time. Thank you in any case, I of course thank the control room, Pierre-Alain, for the texts he projected for us, it helps me enormously, it helps you even more, and I'll see you next time, and don't forget you can rewatch our last episode of Twilight of the Gods on our YouTube channel, you'll be pleasantly surprised to rediscover the sonic splendor this work deserves. There, until next time, and thank you
1:23:31 in advance, and to our next analytical reveries — but before we part, I'd like to insist — I said it somewhat in passing at the beginning — I wouldn't want to leave you without reminding you that we will soon have — I can't give you a date, it's not far off, it's a matter of a few weeks — an interview where, this time, I won't be playing the leading role, I'll be asking questions, I mean, to researchers who are among the most brilliant representatives of the disciplines at the forefront of research in artificial intelligence, among others. There, see you next time, and in particular to our comrade and member, a member of our association, Christophe Denis, whom I thank for agreeing to get involved in this fine venture. Until next time, thank you for everything, good, thank you
