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Presentation of the session 0:00 Hello everyone, and thank you for coming, already in such great quantity and I'm sure quality, for this 9th Marxist Café. We have the pleasure of welcoming Dominique Pagani, whom we don't need to introduce anymore, but I'll still do it as a formality. You were for a long time a philosophy teacher in several countries around the world. You're also recognized as a philosopher, not so much for the written work you may have produced - you've written very little - but for the fact that you spend an enormous amount of your personal time on activities we could call activities of a go-between, really.
0:38 We can describe you as a kind of go-between, notably on the work of Hegel, the history of German idealism, the romantic era, everything around that. So for those interested, Pagani has produced, directly or indirectly, quite a few videos on the internet where he explains this. And we can say that in France there are two people capable of really explaining well what Hegelianism is. On one hand, Bernard Bourgeois, who works in a very academic field, etc., who also translated, I believe, remarkably, Hegel's Great Logic, recently.
1:13 And who has the honesty to accept himself as a right-wing Hegelian. And you, in a line, let's say, more Marxist - a Marx-leaning Hegelian, let's say. With this rather original idea, moreover, that according to you there isn't really a big distinction between Hegel and Marx - of course there are differences, but that's not a thesis unique to you, it's also shared by... There are pairs. Right, it's shared by Sebreli, the Argentine, it's shared by Clouscard too. So there you go, it's... By Montre. And by Lukács, in a certain respect.
1:46 And so you're also here to talk to us about the category of work, in Hegel and in Marx, in light of the great antisocial blitzkrieg currently being waged against us, which the camp of work - understood as the great capital-labor distinction brought to light by Marxism - is undergoing head-on. So I know, speech is quite monopolized like this, the space. So there you go. That's precious, thank you very much. Thank you, Simon. It's well delimited, if I may say so.
Reading of La Bruyère: peasants as wild animals 2:17 Yes, a body, I'm going to talk to you about work. It's being recorded, oh dear, I'm going to have problems again on my island. Well then... I'm going to start with a text. I'm tired, so I make others work. One sees certain wild animals, males and females. This was written under Louis XIV, that's right. I'm not starting with Marx and Hegel, but going further back.
2:49 Louis XIV, that's not the most social century. One sees certain wild animals, males and females. He doesn't say men and women, I'll stop interrupting. One sees certain wild animals, males and females, spread across the countryside. But yes, nothing's been all muddled up yet. It's tiring. Black. Me, I spent more than 34 years south of the Sahara. I know what that means, black. I'm not being politically correct here. So, spread across the countryside, black, pale, and all burnt by the sun, attached to the earth which they dig and turn over with invincible stubbornness.
3:31 They have something like an articulate voice. And when they stand up on their feet, they show a human face. And indeed, they are men. They withdraw at night into dens where they live on black bread, water, and roots. They spare other men the trouble of sowing, of plowing, and of harvesting in order to live. They thus deserve not to lack for this bread which they have sown. There you go.
4:01 All of that is written by La Bruyère in Les Caractères. It's a great classic, you can find it. Every 3 or 4 years, it must come up in the literature agrégation exam. I'm not going to go dig up some marginal text. An author of the great century, speaking of peasants as if - he's frightened himself - of animals. That's why he says males and females. He doesn't say men and women. I'm making a point of telling you this: there are males and females in nature, there are men and women in history. I say this because it's useful right now, when the Anglo-Saxons are raving about gender, gender.
4:33 You still remember. Men and women, that's culture. Males and females is fate - we have no choice. So, spread across the countryside, black, pale and all burnt. Black! Philippe Moreau isn't here. He was supposed to bring me a text by Clouscard which I've lent out so much that I no longer have it, called 'Progressive Refoundation.' I think a few of you may have read it. I mention it because Clouscard picks up this image, not from La Bruyère, but from Wagner's opera cycle, the Ring, which is based on Germanic mythology, where there's the underground world, the blacksmiths, like in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
5:16 The dwarfs, they work in the mine. They're not smaller. They're not black. In Walt Disney, let's not exaggerate, they were black. They would never have existed in Hollywood cinema. But at the time, black musicians who were filmed were played by white people. They put on black shoe polish. You know, that's how it was. The first film in the history of cinema is The Jazz Singer. The jazz singer was a white man. They'd put on black shoe polish to pass him off. No, I'm serious. When La Bruyère says they're black, at the time, you see, a pretty woman was a woman who had white skin.
5:49 That is, a woman who didn't go out in the sun. Because working, at the time, meant going out in the sun. There was no factory, it was the fields, work. There's a logic to all this. Whereas, a few centuries later, she says she's white as an aspirin tablet when she goes to the beach. It's the opposite. Values get reversed, you see? Because the money is now on the side of those who have a villa in the Bahamas. Or where I live, in Corsica. I'll take the opportunity to recommend a very nice little book by my comrade and fellow countryman François de Negroni, called 'Pro-Corsican Racism.'
6:19 Because as for anti-Corsican racism, you've got plenty of little fascists who'll tell you about that. No need for me. But pro-Corsican racism, not enough is said about that. There you go. I'm telling you this because all this, when I speak of the black color in La Bruyère, right? That of the peasants of the time. He's scorched by the sun. He says, 'And all burnt by the sun, attached to the earth.' The point, I mean, why do I start with this text? I'm being asked to talk about work.
6:50 I'm not going to dodge it. But I note that all these concepts are bogus. You know, there are those who are for work, especially for other people's work, for themselves. Then there are those who are against work, right? Because others work for them. It's like consumption. I'm not for it, I'm not against it. There are things we consume too much of and others we don't consume enough of. I'd like us to consume a bit more in Africa of anti-AIDS medication, if it weren't so expensive. For example, you can't say the chemical industry is doing too much.
7:21 Or pharmaceutical. So these are bogus concepts if we don't specify each time. I'm trying to specify here. That's why I'm talking. I'm talking about this text. I'm talking about this text to tell you that I'm not going to take advantage of talking about the abstract notion of work to forget the essential thing hiding behind it. That's the worker. The worker is the stake of discussions about work. The worker, he's black, so he's dirty, so he pollutes. There's a right-wing environmentalism that believes it speaks against pollution.
7:53 But the main polluter is the worker. He's covered in grease, you know very well. I'm barely exaggerating. He comes to dirty up my second home. I don't want a waste dump built when I've saved up to build myself a little second home on the outskirts of Paris. That's an impersonal 'I.' Me, I'm in 18 square meters in a retirement home, that suits me just fine. Well. I find there are areas where we don't pollute enough. I don't want to be provocative. So there you go, you see, these peasants, they spare other men the trouble of sowing, of plowing, and of harvesting in order to live, and thus deserve - La Bruyère, in the great century.
8:37 The least social century in discourse, they deserve not to lack for this bread which they have sown. La Bruyère is from the end of the 17th century. Louis XIV is on the decline, tongues are starting to loosen, the Enlightenment century is coming. That's why I took this text, a bit, to go a little further back than Marx and Hegel. So I'm now going to move on to Rousseau. You see the chronology. Because Rousseau talks a lot about work, he's the first to talk about it within the framework of a social relation. Otherwise, work itself in the sense of a relation to the object.
Rousseau and the praise of idleness in the fifth walk 9:08 There you go, I'm printing this book, for instance, if I were a printer-worker. That kind of work has been discussed for more than 20 centuries. Aristotle talks about it. Marx knew Aristotle's reflection on the notion of work very well. I won't dwell on it. I won't go back that far. On the other hand, Rousseau is the first to talk about work in the social relation. That is, not in my relation to the thing, but insofar as work makes me go from 2 to 3.
9:41 Good evening. Sit down quickly and stop bothering me. No, no, you're welcome. There are seats, there's still room there. So, can you hear me roughly okay? Is the sound working? Yes, when I say that Rousseau is the first to go from 2 to 3, I'm saying that he moves beyond the binary relation that exists.
10:11 I'm telling you, since Aristotle, people had reflected on the relation between me, number 1, and the object I work on, number 2. Aristotle talks about the cobbler who makes sandals. Praxis, as he calls it. We'll have occasion to come back to that. Whereas, in Rousseau, work is inscribed not only in my relation as worker to the worked object - that makes 2 - but the worked object is a mediation between me and the other me.
10:41 There, it becomes ternary. But Rousseau is the first to do that. And to introduce this reflection, the first truly modern one by Rousseau on work, which Marx and Engels knew very well, I'm going to start with a text where Rousseau praises - you're going to tell me it's my fine body, this is being recorded, he's going to have problems at home again - Rousseau praises Farniente. In Italian, literally, that means doing nothing at all.
11:14 Farniente. What to do, nothing? That's the Leninist question. What to do-niente? I'll start there, you'll see why. Rousseau - and I'll give you the context - this is his last work, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, the most famous, the fifth walk - the Reveries are divided into walks, there are ten, first, second walk, I don't know, to give a literature course, you'll look at all that on Wikisource. I recommend, when you don't have time - you don't have time to read and do everything, starting with me - I recommend at least not missing the fifth walk, which is the beginning of modernity in everything, in literature, in philosophy, in politics, well anyway.
11:54 And a text of which Rousseau does say that he suffers while writing it, because he has stone disease, he has kidney colic, and in Paris, on rue Platrière which is now called rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau in the Marais, he enchants himself, literally, incantare, incantation - he enchants himself writing with his pen, as later memories of the time prove, he was the happiest of his life. Well, that's a few weeks he spent on this island of Saint-Pierre in the middle of Lake Biel in Switzerland, where he was quickly forced to take refuge, I might say literally by force, because he was under arrest warrant by three powers, the three greatest European powers, France, Prussia, and the Holy Roman Empire, and he had to take refuge there, otherwise, if caught, he was condemned to death for having dared to write unhealthy things in the style of The Social Contract, or for having dared to say that property is the source of inequality, as they say among the 'Kairas' in bars - that's not done, brothers, that.
12:59 He took refuge there very quickly, and it's very important - I have to tell you all this to contextualize what follows, I reassure you I'll get there, but I have to specify this, it's crucial to understand - that while he was there he was convinced he was condemned to live there to the end of his days, that he couldn't get out of this little island - I'm giving you a sense of scale, three times the size of the Place de la Bastille, in a magnificent Swiss lake, well anyway - so important to understand why he was so happy. You'll say I'm exaggerating, we're far from Marx. 'They hardly let me spend more than two months on that island, but I would have spent two years, two centuries, and all eternity there without being bored for a moment, although I had, along with my companion, no other company than that of the receiver and his wife' - there was a tax receiver - 'and his servants, who were all in truth very good people, and nothing more, but that was precisely what I needed. I count these two months' - it's not long - 'I count these two months as the happiest time of my life, and so happy that it would have sufficed me for my whole existence, without letting the desire for another state arise for a single moment in my soul.' That's interesting, isn't it.
14:09 'What then was this happiness, and in what did this enjoyment consist' - I have to interrupt myself, I'm being annoying but that's my teacher side, I feel like passing things on to you anyway, 'go-between' is what you said, I take the opportunity because we do everything not to pass things on to you, so I try to balance things out a bit - if there's one keyword of the century, if there's one key concept, one notion that obsesses all Enlightenment writers, even when they're diametrically opposed like Voltaire the liberal and Rousseau the totalitarian communist - Rousseau who was the idol of Saint-Just, of Robespierre, mustn't forget that - if there's one notion they share and that fascinates them, and it's entirely to their credit, it's the notion of happiness. Rousseau talks about that - of course his vision of happiness isn't at all the same as Voltaire's. For Voltaire, happiness is money, the rug, the pretty girls, nothing against that, but I mean, with a big budget, let's say - one only has to read Voltaire's poem called Le Mondain, right, where all that is. Then also, Voltaire studies at Louis-le-Grand, and good for him anyway, you needed money.
15:19 At the time his father held a major notary's office, he was born into what today would be billions, and Rousseau, who didn't go to school at all, who was a vagabond on the roads, self-taught - you can't set the two of them up as opposites without a class-struggle backdrop between them. And since I'm on this chapter, I'll take the opportunity to recall that Voltaire - whom I admire, I seem to be criticizing him a bit, but whom I admire for having always fought against intolerance, fanaticism, particularly in the religious domain - Voltaire demanded Rousseau's head on the block because Rousseau dared to oppose establishing a theater in Geneva, and thus staging Voltaire's plays - I salute my publisher. So there you go, I wanted to give this context because when he talks about happiness, right, when he speaks of happiness - I mean, we're going to talk about work, you have a right to work, you have a right to happiness, we have to say it now, it's extraordinary - as soon as we're footing the bill, there's nothing but misfortunes, ecological misfortunes and misfortunes - careful, I'm going to say the word happiness.
16:29 Religious people before the 18th century had salvation, they aimed at salvation. Pascal aimed at salvation - I salute him in passing, he's a great thinker, Pascal - well, it's salvation, that presupposes religious alienation in Marxist terms, right. There are those who don't care about salvation or happiness and who seek only pleasure - that's libertine, that's like money, the Marquis de Sade, Choderlos de Laclos, or Don Giovanni, that's the lord, that's pleasure. Happiness presupposes having pleasure, careful, it's not opposed, but not only that, but that it lasts a little while. Happiness is conjugated in the imperfect tense in narratives, if you look closely - 'every morning I went to school' - that's bad, what I'm saying, I'm not a great writer, there you go - that's happiness, it's an imperfect tense, it's about long duration and a positive relation to the world, not to the other-world, not to paradise, not to death, but here and now. That's how it's progressive as a notion, and when Saint-Just says, in the middle of the French Revolution, 'happiness is a new idea in Europe,' well it's becoming a new idea again today, so much is the fight now not - so there you go, it's not innocent that we're talking about happiness. So you see, I set out to talk about work and I'm talking to you about Farniente.
17:39 So I repeat his question: what was this happiness, in what did it consist - 'What then was this happiness, and in what did its enjoyment consist? I would give it to be guessed by all the men of this century' - that's for the other Enlightenment figures - 'precious Farniente,' you see, doing nothing, 'was the first and principal of these enjoyments that I wanted to savor in all its sweetness, and everything I did during my stay' - six weeks - 'was in fact nothing but the delicious and necessary occupation of a man who has devoted himself to idleness' - to gifts, I told him well, listen, Farniente was there to talk about the right to work and to millions of unemployed people, I'm getting there, you see, the feeling - sorry - 'most men, agitated by continual passion, know little of this state' - the state of bliss he just spoke of on the island of Saint-Pierre - 'and having tasted it only imperfectly, for brief moments, retain only an obscure and confused idea of it which doesn't let them feel its charm.' And here Rousseau becomes the great politician again, listen closely.
18:49 'It would not even be good, in the present constitution of things' - ah, we're back to reality, careful, we're leaving the reverie - 'that men, avid for these sweet ecstasies, should grow disgusted' - you, I mean they should grow disgusted - 'with the active life which their ever-renewing needs prescribe as their duty' - action and work is a duty - but here he talks about himself again - 'but an unfortunate' - I remind you, someone who thought he was condemned to live on this island forever - 'but an unfortunate man who has been cut off from human society and who can no longer do anything useful or good here below, for himself or for others' - can't, must, can - 'can find in this state, among all human felicities, compensations that fortune and men could not take from him.' There you go, you see, he does say: don't do as I did, you mustn't stay - except during vacations, when you're resting, you have the right, you even have the duty to rest and to take as much vacation as possible, that's not the question - but here Rousseau clearly says.
19:59 'But an unfortunate man who has been cut off from the commerce of men' - not one who cut himself off out of love of solitude, that's not Lamartine, that's not a Romantic, that's not it - 'has been cut off' - the most sociable man of his time was prevented from being sociable, wasn't he, by being hunted down by the police of the three greatest powers of the era. There you go, that's why I made this little detour, to properly introduce what Rousseau is going to say about work, because I'm going to read you a second text of his now, and to keep you from thinking there's a contradiction - he gives himself the right to be in Farniente because he can't do anything better and be useful, neither to himself nor to others, as he says. And now I move on to another work by Rousseau - you've all heard of Emile, right, it's a magnificent novel about education, very well known, and moreover it inaugurates the tradition of the Bildungsroman, as they'll say in Germany, novels of formation - you take the hero from his birth and follow him to fulfillment, through all the stages of his formation, that is, to speak German, of his Bildung. Well, we get to the point where the kid is 12-13 years old, and he needs to be found a trade, and Rousseau says to his mother.
Émile: a trade for the aristocrat's child 21:09 who is an aristocrat of the old regime - it's important that Rousseau decided his pupil should be an aristocrat's child - he says to the mother: I remind you that what distinguishes the aristocracy as a difference regarding work is that it doesn't work at all - whereas the bourgeoisie worked at the time, not with their hands, they weren't in the factory, the bourgeoisie, but they did business, they sent a few ships like that to the West or East Indies, there you go - but the nobility, they don't work at all, that's why it was already in decline, the bourgeoisie was already taking over, we're not there yet. So he's talking to Emile's mother and he tells her: it's time he learned a trade. She doesn't understand: 'My son, a trade?' We'll get there. 'What will become of poor people?' Yes, yes, I'm telling you anyway, Rousseau starts like this - I don't have it in front of me but I think I'll be reminded - 'You, madam, you rely on the present order of society without thinking that this order is subject to inevitable revolutions,' he writes this in the 1760s, 'and which you cannot foresee.'
22:19 'Nor prevent, the one that may concern your children. The great become small, the rich become poor, the monarch becomes a subject; are the blows of fate so rare that you can count on being exempt from them?' Someone was never a prophet - that's remarkable - and it's here he says we are approaching an age of crisis and the century of revolutions - can you imagine saying that 10 years before the Revolution - 'We are approaching an age of crisis and the century of revolutions.' Careful, he doesn't say that the revolution is coming, he says that a revolution is coming that won't stop making revolutions - that's '89, that's 1830, that's, well, the Restoration, then there's 1848, and then there's the Commune, and then there's 1917, it doesn't stop, then there's the Liberation, then there's the Popular Front and the Liberation - I say this because each century in the textbooks has its number and its nickname, letters and figures: the 16th is the Renaissance, the 17th is the great century, the century of the Sun King, the century of classicism, the 18th the Enlightenment, the 19th there isn't one because it's a bit recent.
23:30 We don't have the hindsight - me, I propose to you, we decide: the century of revolutions - the sun - we are approaching an age of crisis, the century of revolutions, there, we validate that. 'What will become, deprived of everything, of this pompous fool who doesn't know how to make use of himself' - if he doesn't work, what do you want him to do the day everything is taken from him - 'and who puts his being only into what is foreign to him' - this pompous fool, your son, madam, if I may - 'who puts his being only into what is foreign to him' - for the first time you see here, not the word, but its definition, its function, of something that will flourish in Hegel and Marx: it's alienation. He puts his being into what is foreign to him - alienation comes from alius, Latin, meaning 'the other,' simply put, alienated is what has passed to another, what belongs to me. Well, that's what he does. Hello, you're our benefactor, please make a bit of silence if you would, I'll continue giving the floor to Rousseau, so I remind you.
24:41 That he's telling Emile's pupil's mother: what will become of your son if he doesn't work and he has nothing left, nothing left - 'what will become, deprived of everything, of this pompous fool who doesn't know how to make use of himself' - and definition of alienation - 'who puts his being only into what is foreign to him. Happy is he who knows how to leave the state that leaves him,' Rousseau writes well - happy is he who knows how to leave the state that leaves him - 'state' at the time meant social class, think of the Third Estate, the notion of social class is still too early, but the word it replaces, which we still often use in Hegel, is 'estate' - we said 'a shoemaker by his estate,' it was said fairly often - 'happy is he who knows how to leave the estate that leaves him' - in this case the estate of aristocrat - 'and remain a man in spite of fate. One may praise as much as one likes this defeated king who wants to bury himself in fury beneath the debris of his throne; as for me, I despise him, I see that he exists only through his crown and that he is nothing at all if he is not king; but he who loses it and does without it is then above the rank of king.'
25:52 'A rank that a coward, a wicked man, a fool can fill as well as anyone' - a rank that a coward, a fool, a wicked man can fill as well as anyone - 'he who loses it and does without it rises to the rank of man' - the rank of king, he rises to the rank of man - 'which so few men know how to fill.' Excuse me for being a bit pompous and solemn, but humanism has been so fought against over the last 40 years, especially in Parisian philosophy - I mean even Parisianist, let's be fairer - I'm thinking among others of Foucault, who said that man is a recent invention, and who, fortunately, is bound to disappear soon, for example, among others; I'm thinking of Lévi-Strauss, who said that structuralism is not a humanism; I could multiply examples, right, of Althusser, who spent his time saying that Marxism is not a humanism, well anyway. It does us good to hear this: the notion of man in Rousseau is a form of revenge against the division into social classes, it transcends, right, this separation.
27:03 Of man with man that the division of society into classes has instituted, following the social division of labor, of course. So I continue and conclude: he rises to the rank of man, which so few men know how to fill - he's not a fool, he's not into a naive humanism, he knows well that there aren't many men up to what the notion of man demands, right, and there are even many who fall short - 'know how to fill it, then he triumphs over fortune,' etc., etc. Well then I'll skip a small passage and read you this, which relates directly to work and property: 'He who eats in idleness what he has not earned himself steals it, and a rentier whom the state pays to do nothing' - the boards of directors, you know, you come for 10 minutes a year, you cash your check, and then you leave, and then you say 'I started from nothing' - 'and a rentier whom the state pays to do nothing is hardly different, in my eyes, from a brigand who lives off passersby.' You'll see he's not a workaholic fanatic either, we'll get to that - outside society.
Work, an indispensable duty of social man 28:13 The isolated man - we come back a bit to the island, island is isola in Latin, in Italian rather - 'the isolated man, owing nothing to anyone, has the right to live as he pleases; but in society, where he lives' - listen closely, that's the most important word - 'necessarily at the expense of others' - this is where Rousseau is closest to Marx, not just occasionally, no, no - 'as a man, if he is in society he is obliged to live at the expense of others' - it may not be unjust, well, at the expense of others, he owes them, in labor, the price of his upkeep' - that's Rousseau-style equity, not social justice - 'this is without exception; working is thus an indispensable duty for social man' - here we get to it, modernity - 'rich or poor, powerful or weak, every idle citizen is a rogue.' Now that's better than 'property is theft,' that dear Proudhon, whom Marx mocked, and rightly so, saying 'when property is theft' - so the worker who militated all his life, well who militated or not, but who reaches retirement, if he's a miner - I say miner because he used to die fairly young from silicosis - but who has.
29:23 Who has survived those dangers, who reaches retirement, who doesn't die before, for the benefit of the pension funds, and who buys his first color TV in the 1960s - he's a thief? That's incredible, honestly, what is this nonsense? No, Rousseau is more precise, far more adequate here to social reality than Proudhon, and this well before him - he says every idle citizen is a rogue. There you go, excuse me, there you go, I'm done with Rousseau. But you see it was important to make these two detours - La Bruyère and Rousseau - to arrive at the theoretical detour that will open the road leading to Marx, when he said Rousseau is the Newton of morality - excuse me, you understand well what that means, and.
The instrument in the First Philosophy of Spirit 30:34 While clearly seeing the shortcomings that exist elsewhere in Rousseau - Rousseau did not reflect on the industrial revolution, he knows nothing about the factory, he doesn't know what the working-class world is - his dream was to divide France into small, equal landowners, there you go - immense politically, but from the economic point of view he lived a bit too early. And so we have to wait for Hegel to get, for the first time, a dialectical theory of work, and that's the next stage - I don't know - and so now I'm going to read you a text, I'm going to read you a text that Marx could not have known, because it's an early text by Hegel that Hegel didn't publish, that he kept - it's the period when he was constantly reshaping his system before publishing the Phenomenology of Spirit, he had made only one publication up to that point, and I'm not here to bore you with the history of philosophy, that's another discipline, but it's just to give minimal context, and the text.
31:45 That I'm going to talk about, which is from a few years earlier, 1803-1804, before the Phenomenology of Spirit, which Marx admired so much - I don't know, and I'll give you the reference for those who'd like to get it, it's a bit hard to find on the internet, but in bookstores it's out of print - it's called First Philosophy of Spirit, in the NRF collection at Gallimard, in the Épiméthée collection, at PUF, sorry, Presses Universitaires de France - First Philosophy of Spirit, a very short text, you see, a pamphlet, I say this so as not to discourage you. Why is this text of exceptional importance to me? It's because it's the first time in the history of thought - not just philosophy, but thought since antiquity - that a philosopher, well listen, yes, I was saying, someone was the first to - to what?
32:49 Microphone, thank you - was the first to integrate work in the most Marxist sense possible, that is, material work, really, the tool, the instrument, as he says, into the genesis of what is apparently highest, most ideal, in spirit, right? And so, I'm telling you, I don't know if things get a bit harder - Rousseau apparently seems very complex when you look closely, well anyway, it's everyday language - with Hegel it's German idealism, it's a bit complicated, I'm not going to bore you with that, even though I know some among you are well-versed in this exercise, others less so - so I'm still going to read, so as not to entirely bypass it, a short passage that seems a bit like Greek to me, but well, the explanation is very simple, you'll see - where he's saying precisely that for spirit to appear, for it to arise in the universe, three conditions are needed - he doesn't put it that way - that there be three powers, no matter, it's like three roots, if you will, without which spirit would never have blossomed.
34:00 Memory is not our subject, language is not our subject, and — surprise — the instrument, the tool, that was new for a philosopher, it had never been done, given that the tool owes its existence also to... let's break this down, that had never been said and even less written among philosophers, and here's this passage — he says this to us — I'll tell you the Chinese first and try to translate into French afterwards — so the instrument is the rational existing middle term, the existing universality of the practical process; it appears on the side of what is active as opposed to what is passive; it is itself passive when considered from the side of the worker who falls to the worker — why did I start there — and, sorry, active of course with respect to the object worked on, for example this table — the instrument is active insofar as it is transforming the wood taken from the tree, from nature, to make into
35:10 a table — the instrument is active, but in my hands it is passive, it's I who am active, you see — I'm repeating his sentence at length because it matters — it is itself passive, the instrument, when considered from the side of the worker; it is at the service of the worker, and active with respect to the object worked on — so it is that in which labor has its permanence — ah, now that becomes interesting — because the worker, and Marx will take this up again, wears himself out in the labor process, and he wears out even faster than someone who doesn't work, as you can well imagine — the 7-year-old kids working next to the blast furnaces in steelmaking, right? You think the adults themselves rarely got past forty — so the worker wears out in the labor process, the object disappears as soon as you start working it, right? The tree disappears, it will become a chair, wood, table, chopsticks for eating in Asia for bamboo — what remains is what's in between the two, the middle term, the instrument — that's what Hegel discovers
36:20 because when we say "the middle term" we don't pay attention — oh yes, I use this thing, it's secondary, it's me who is important, me and then what I aim at as a goal — those are the two extremes — I'm going to do a bit of philosophy — Hegel is recalling the three moments of a syllogism — a syllogism has extremes and a middle term — first extreme: me, the worker; second extreme, at the opposite end: the object worked on; between the two, the middle term: the tool — it's not complicated, except that we believe at the outset that the middle term, I repeat, is my slave, it's secondary — and here Hegel is saying: no, I disappear, the labor and the object disappear, what will remain is the tool, what will remain for the coming generation is the tool — there, the tool — I'm sorry to end recess, it's fine now
The permanence of the tool: nature become landscape 37:30 So yes, I was pointing out how significant this was, the matter of permanence, that the tool is what remains when everything else disappears, which means that the next generation doesn't start from zero the way the animal world does — the mode of communication of bees, I'm not here to deny that bees have a communication system, it's not a language, but metaphorically we were allowed to say "the language of bees" too — but in any case the bees' communication system is the same in Japan and in France, it's the same 10,000 years ago and now, whereas between Japan and France the language has already changed — that's the first difference, but I'm not here to talk about language, which is important — above all, what matters is that the animal starts from zero every time, its genetic stock defines the species, whereas the human being too, if left to itself, if there were no social contribution, no contribution from culture, from history, from — I'll speak in Marxist terms now — the history of the productive
38:40 forces and of praxis, it would be an eternal return to zero. Which means it's not a return to zero, it's the tool, because from chipped stone we move to polished stone, and the kid of the polished-stone era doesn't start from zero, he advances polished stone soon toward bronze, and then afterward his grandchildren will advance toward iron, and so on — I'm skipping stages, you see what I mean — so when he says "it has its permanence," you see, he's specifying what I just said, because I want to show you that I'm not stretching the text, that I'm not making Hegel say things, I'm not trying to Marxify Hegel more than he already is — the tool, I repeat the sentence, appears on the side of what is active as opposed to what is passive; it is itself passive when considered from the side of the worker, and active with respect to the object worked on; it is that in which labor has its permanence, it is the only thing that remains of the worker and of the object worked on, as well as that in which their contingent being perpetuates itself — it is transmitted in traditions, history begins, it's no longer nature, we've moved to history — we are all
39:50 historical beings — look around you, well, whenever you want — nature, that's worked objects around us — we're told, you're exaggerating, we're standing at the site of the Bastille — really, we go to the countryside — what does that mean, the countryside? It means the fields. The fields are work. I'm telling you, but it wasn't like that — the Île-de-France was marshes and forests; to make normal hedgerow farmland you need millennia of labor — we've moved into nature — ah, it's beautiful, I'm in nature, it relaxes me, I had work, it's better — but it's not nature, it's landscape — yes, it's millennia of labor to transform nature into landscape — that matters — I'm not here to police language, I'm not saying you can't say "I'm in nature," but if we want to speak precisely, we have to be careful, otherwise we get tangled up, and politically it's serious — some people take advantage of that — but above all because in "nature" there's N-A-T
40:47 "Natale," nativity, birth — that means Christmas in Italy, but yes, that means what I have by birth — it's not much — but if there isn't culture bringing me the stroller — it's fine to be in the cave — but yes, the stroller, central heating, that's good for the newborn, all that is not nature, it comes added on top, it's labor over millennia — you see, we're getting closer and closer to Marx, we'll get there — but there, it's transmitted in traditions — by the way, I should still note, you'll tell me, but he's still an idealist thinker — yes, I note in passing that an author as revolutionary, as little suspected of indulgence toward idealism, as Lenin, the day he was engaging with the seemingly most abstract, most idealist work of Hegel, the Science of Logic, having reached the last chapter called "the absolute idea" — we're apparently at the opposite pole from labor and the materialist tradition — the absolute idea
Lenin as reader of Hegel, Dutch painting, and The Servant 41:57 we have no idea, with a capital I — Lenin exclaims in a note, you can read it in Lenin's admirable Philosophical Notebooks, he exclaims: this passage on the absolute idea is remarkably outstanding, it's the most materialist and the most idealist passage in Hegel — contradictory, but it's a fact, he's a great reader — so I'm going to leave Hegel now, neither the logic nor the study of the instrument there — worse than all that, aesthetics — frankly, we're far from the factory — not so much — we're not far from labor and workers, since from the start, I say for those who arrived a bit later, I say that my talk on labor would not consist in hiding the worker behind the abstract concept of labor — well, when Hegel works on Dutch painting — and I'm very grateful to Aymeric Monville, so I recommend a video that alludes precisely to this passage, if I remember correctly, from Hegel's Aesthetics — this wasn't missed — precisely, Hegel talks about Dutch painting
43:07 he talks about it aesthetically first, as the great difference from great Italian painting — it's not grand subjects, it's not the Virgin, it's not the Annunciation, all of which is admirable too — it's almost the opposite, it's everyday things, it's a glaze in a glass of wine, it's a purse lying there on the table, you know the Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer, you know, she has a little glint on her lower lip — that's Dutch painting, it's everydayness, but sublimated — so he starts talking about it that way, and then afterward he says, how is it that it's only in Dutch painting that we find this trivial sublimation of the everyday? It's because, he says, for there to be a glass on a table in Holland, it had to be conquered from the sea, it took a community laboring relentlessly to transform seawater into fertile field — and so when Rimbaud says in "The Drunken Boat" — it's the boat speaking — "carrier of Flemish wheat and English cotton" — even for there to be Flemish wheat, the sea had to be drained — the sea, that's complicated, it's not even draining a marsh, it's fantastic what's been done — and Hegel had enormous admiration for that little people, there, the United Provinces, the Netherlands
44:17 as they used to say, and who were above all much freer politically — there's a very beautiful plaque very close to Place de la Contrescarpe, a quote from Descartes, who lived in that neighborhood, saying: I'm going to Holland because I have one foot in Paris, there's a foot over there, which makes me freer — right, very seriously — if this Dutch painting gives this presence to things in everydayness, it's because that everydayness, precisely, didn't fall from the sky nor spring up from the earth, but was produced through this middle term between man and nature that is labor — that's why I insisted on "natal," N-A-T, because currently we're being fed the line that everything is by birth, that there are losers and winners by birth, soon you'll see that — oh yes, some are gifted, some aren't, and too bad for them, tough luck — well, I don't care — to recommend an excellent film to you, I'm not a film buff, I'm no connoisseur, but I've noticed that film buffs, I have friends who know much more about it than me, who tell me that this one is an excellent film
45:27 so he confirms it, it's The Servant by Losey, Joseph Losey, the English filmmaker — it's about relations between a very polished, very Nestor-like English manservant, you know, and a young English lord who's useless, unfortunately, with his hands or his feet, nothing at all — and it's a magnificent illustration of the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave, even if — even if the filmmaker perhaps didn't think it through, it's not in his head, but he does better than thinking it, he expresses it in his film beautifully — so if you can see it, because at one point there are somewhat tense relations between the master and his servant, and the servant decides to go on strike, as you might say — I'm getting to current events — he decides to strike — and there are surprises, there are parties, get-togethers, cigarette butts pile up on the rugs, on the carpets, the master is miserable, he's never picked up a cigarette butt in his life — if you're not used to picking up your own trash, when there's a garbage collectors' strike it's a catastrophe, you don't have the right to do that to me — and there we see that it's the other one who holds him, the slave master of the master — that didn't escape Marx
Reading of Marx: the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom 46:40 all that, and Marx, a fierce critic of Hegel on other points, particularly on certain aspects of the concept of labor, will never stop saying that Hegel was the first to grasp the dialectical essence of labor — he says this in particular in a very decisive way in the 1844 Manuscripts — so, precisely, to move on now to Marx's approach, I'll start with a somewhat synthetic text, if you will, that will let me go through several moments of Marx himself with regard to the notion of labor — sorry, there, hop — so I'll start with this text, which is really late Marx, an addendum that should have found its place in the definitive edition of the third volume of Capital — you see, it's part of the notes
47:50 the abundant addenda, one might say in editing terms, that should have appeared — you know that Marx died right as he was tackling the writing of the third book, which is pathetic actually, because the last lines are — there's a chapter title, "Social Classes," we were finally going to know very precisely Marx's modeling of that concept, which is not exactly marginal in Marx's thought — and there's what? Six lines, and he dies. Well, there are many social classes before — I'm not saying we should take advantage of that to make him say a bit of anything on the subject, but still, there he was going to treat it systematically — well, it's around the same date that he writes the note I'm about to read to you: "In truth, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labor determined by necessity and external expediency ends" — for now, an old opposition, two thousand years old, in the history of thought, we oppose freedom to necessity: either I'm forced, that's necessity, that's the implacable, or I'm free — in truth, the realm of freedom begins only — Engels will say
49:00 that we must oppose the empire of necessity to the kingdom of freedom — it's fitting to speak precisely at a time when imperialism bares its claws as never before — the empire of necessity, against which the kingdom of freedom must constantly expand, thanks to you, I hope, all of you — in truth, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labor determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it is therefore, by its very nature, the realm of freedom — by its very nature — beyond the sphere of material production properly so-called, that is to say, contradicting everything we've just said — Rousseau, a movement running from Rousseau to Engels, said that labor has a liberating side, and here Marx is saying that freedom begins when we stop working — so you'll see how this text sums up all the problems — it is therefore, the realm of freedom, I repeat, and I continue, by its very nature, beyond the sphere
50:10 of material production — that's underlined, material — properly so-called — just as primitive man, civilized man is forced to grapple with nature in order to satisfy his needs — ah yes, in 15,000 years I couldn't tell you the opposite of "you must eat to live," that's necessity, it's not like "you must obey the red light" — interesting, the difference — in both cases there's a law, an obligation, you see the gulf between a natural necessity against which I can do nothing — nature is not the realm of freedom, you have to know you must eat to live — and the red light, at 2am there's no cop — no, you mustn't do it, I know we're among French people — no, no, no, no, seriously, you mustn't do it, very serious, but I mean, you can run it, you shouldn't but you can — in other words, in the world of human law we have a choice, in the world of nature we had no choice about living without eating — that's beautiful too, right, it matters, these little verbal nuances — so I continue: just as primitive man
51:21 civilized man is forced to grapple with nature in order to satisfy his needs, to preserve and reproduce his life; this constraint exists for man in all forms of society and under all types of production — that means that even at a future stage where there would be only machines, natural necessity would still be there — with its development, this empire of necessity — he speaks precisely of the imperialism of necessity — this empire of natural necessity expands because needs multiply, but at the same time — look, the text starts to reverse itself — the productive process to satisfy them also develops — well yes, technical progress — in this domain freedom can only consist in this — prick up your ears, it's rare for Marx to be this clear on the programmatic level — I mean, the associated producers, socialized man, rationally regulate their exchanges with nature and bring them under their common control
52:31 instead of being dominated by the blind power of these exchanges, and they accomplish this while expending the least possible energy — this isn't Pierre Rabhi, this isn't unhappy austerity being sold to us as blessed happiness — that's making guys work for nothing — well, I'll stop, I'm going to get worked up — so no, but some people found the moon with him — no, that's not it — in this domain freedom can only consist in this: the associated, cooperative producers, for example, socialized man, rationally regulate their organic exchanges, bringing them under their common control, instead of being dominated by the blind power of these exchanges, and accomplish this while expending the least possible energy, under conditions most worthy and appropriate to their human nature; but the realm of necessity nonetheless still exists — I told you, we'll always have to eat to live — it's beyond, beyond necessary labor time, if you will, that the flourishing of human power, which is its own end, begins
The reduction of the working day, condition of liberation 53:42 I'm going to be a bit more concrete, if you will, closer, more current — in '36 we got the 40-hour week, right? Popular Front, the 40-hour week — today it's how many? Between 35 and 39, I'm talking about legislation, not about the Pakistani dishwasher in the restaurant — no, we don't even count the hours anymore, and then there's the boss in the small restaurants — officially, in the law, we went from my grandparents' generation's 40 hours to 35 — in the meantime, productivity was multiplied by how much?
54:29 I don't even want to say the figure — first of all I don't know exactly — but anyway, I mean, the figure is staggering — so where did the difference go? We should be working three hours a week with the technical level we have now and, to be serious, to get the same output — that's what Marx is saying — we've been had — you'll see, this is serious, this is very current — why? Sorry: it's beyond that that the flourishing of human power, which is its own end, begins, the true realm of freedom, which however can only flourish by resting on this realm of necessity — the reduction, that's the last sentence, listen carefully: the reduction of the working day is the fundamental condition for this liberation — so is Marx for labor or not? It depends which labor — if it's labor in which one loses one's life earning it, to put it quickly — well, no, we work far too many hours
55:39 now, as for earning one's subsistence relative to the technological level — we can speak in terms of today's productive forces — but to manage to free ourselves from it, we need not degrowth but on the contrary to shift gears and move to a technological level far superior to what we have — you see what Marx is saying — so there's the journey we've made since La Bruyère, right, and those animals in the fields that look like animals and, when they stand up on their legs, turn out to have a human face and even an articulate language — we've now arrived practically at today's world, and you understand why there's an objective complicity between a certain environmentalism — me, I'm for the healthiest environment, controlled as collectively as possible, not by lobbies, not by Monsanto and such — but there's a certain environmentalist discourse, the one that talks about degrowth, which curiously goes in the same direction as those who think there's too much hiring
Degrowth, the layoff-minded employer class, and the societal left 56:50 and not enough laying off — listen, think, think! MEDEF thinks there are too many jobs, especially in France, even still under Macron there are still too many — oh yes, I sometimes listen to BFM Business, I'm sorry to admit it, but yes, you have to listen a bit — Marx, what did he study? Capital — Marx sticks his nose in the English factory, and there you go — and there they are saying but Macron is too soft, can you imagine?
57:23 well yes, he'll pass the reform, reassure the politicians, they're scared, the French are ripe for skinning, you see, that's where we are now — well, it's a blessing if I'm from MEDEF to find environmentalists saying we produce too much — ah, well I'm fine with that, we produce too much, we have to close the factories, lay off — well yes, there's an objective complicity between today's employers, who are laying-off employers, and — don't listen too much to those who tell you it's productivism, that it was the religion of capitalism — that was true, yes, back when France was covering itself with railways, that's old — now they're cutting lines, I'm talking about SNCF on purpose — yes, current events are more about the slowdown of activity than the unleashing of activity — think about it, it's a blessing for an environmentalist — I don't mean for rational, democratic ecology, controlled by us in common — for environmentalists it's good — that's what it means, you know, those who were libertarian in '68 and liberal in '78, that's Cohn-Bendit
58:33 he said so himself, I'm not talking behind his back — the one who said he wanted to destroy capitalism in '68, we might soon celebrate, commemorate — me, I'm ready to celebrate the great leap forward of the minimum wage and union freedoms in companies — we're not talking about the same '68 — I listen to the media, I get the impression we're not talking about the same one — and so, I point out that there's a convergence between the employers' discourse and certain struggles that claim to be to the left of the left — but the societal left, you see, it's not — when I said, madam, that we should say "Madame la ministre" or not "Madame le ministre" — well, that didn't bother me, I find it a bit odd to say "Madame le ministre," from the point of view — I put myself in the French language, it's a bit odd — well anyway, don't tell me employers are trembling over reforms like that — how much does it cost them? Not a cent
59:44 yes or no? So there are those who put all their weight behind reforms like that, societal ones — I have nothing against them, but when you put that in the foreground, it's to push the social question into the background — that's exactly what's happening today — I started with La Bruyère's text, I did that on purpose to make a connection, because I told you I didn't want the concept of labor to hide that of the worker — I notice that in language, in the distributions of value that settle into language, this opposition always shows up — I remember that with our friend Clouscard, the great author of Elga, I remember we used to read in the reports in L'Équipe about a match, a football match between France and East Germany, which had an excellent football team at the time, and of course we got beaten 4-0 or something like that, and you could almost predict the article that would be written in L'Équipe, almost the vocabulary and even the syntax, namely, for example
The laborious in language and mythology: Titans, Vulcan, Narcissus 1:00:54 "French panache was defeated by the implacable German machine" — yes, you see, vocabulary, way of speaking — we've got the genius, well, we didn't have the luck, in terms of skill maybe the referee wasn't on our side, but we had the genius — them, they said, it's laborious, the implacable German machine — every time, you see, the proletarian, the worker, is valued in a way that in French, when you say "it's laborious," your thing is really laborious, it's really the labor — in the language it's not — it's rather pejorative, you see — young Marx, he'll come back at the end of his life, works on mythology — well, he didn't wait for Lévi-Strauss, he says different things — he works on the hearth in Greek mythology — some of you have heard of it — among the gods of Olympus, they don't work, the gods, it's not worth being a god if you have to work, they don't work, and they're served drinks
1:02:04 the cupbearers, and those who work for them, who make them weapons because they like to fight, the gods — you see Athena, she's one of the warriors, but you need weapons for that — and that's the work of the Titans in the underworld, the blacksmiths, the Titans work for the gods and at the same time are in conflict with them — there's the famous revolt of the Titans against the gods, the Gigantomachy — and Marx says this expresses, in the imaginary mode, in the imaginary field, in the mythological field, so the religion of the Greek peoples, this expresses the opposition between the free citizens, who represent about 20% in Athens for example, and 80% slaves, you see — but the laboring part, the enslaved part, thanks to which the other draws its subsistence, to take up what La Bruyère said earlier, at the start of the session, right — that part, either they're black, as we saw in La Bruyère and as we see in Clouscard — it's in Refondation Progressiste, I'm quoting one of his last works, I'm telling you where — they cite this Germanic mythology where the dwarf, there
1:03:15 the one who comes from the depths, from where he is, the blacksmith, he's black, he smells of fish, he's dirty, he's ugly, he's got everything going for him — he works while the gods wait for the underworld and the Titans to build them their palace — see, we always find this same division — yes, thank you, I'll try not to waste too much time finding the passage — so let's try to find that right now — in this passage, broadly, he contrasts two mythological figures, Narcissus and Vulcan, the blacksmith god, precisely, right, it's true that in mythology
1:04:27 Vulcan is supposed to be ugly, that's a rare god who is ugly — where he poses this, Marx says precisely, for example as early as the magnificent 1844 works, in the Grundrisse, that in the industrial world the worker ends up with physical deformations of the skeleton and of his physical form nonetheless — and so he contrasts the blacksmith with Narcissus, who admires his own beauty reflected in the water, as you see, and he sums up the relation between the two, between Narcissus and Vulcan, or Hephaestus in Greek, he sums it up by saying: "To you, to make; to me, to please" — that's not bad — it's Narcissus speaking — to you, to make, to produce; to me, to please — well that should speak to me, excuse me that I didn't have the book with me last night, there you go, no, because one might believe
1:05:50 that all this is natural — I take up again my critique of "natal" — beauty, ugliness, that's not natural — so, I lived for a long time south of the Sahara, where women constantly walk kilometers and kilometers to fetch water, I don't know, in countries where there's no water — once they've walked kilometers and found the water, they walk more kilometers to find wood to heat the water — they're not into degrowth, I'm telling you — and then afterward they start pounding grain, and that, pounding with a pestle — me, I get blisters after 10 minutes, they do that their whole lives with a child on their back and one in each arm, almost — and I don't think these women's problem is being the prey of sexism that reduces them to being a sex object — I'm not saying it's good, right, to see a woman being a sex object — I'm saying it's already a luxury to have only that problem — that's what spending time with women in developing countries teaches — they'd love to be a sex object for five minutes in their lives, those women, I'm telling you, so
1:07:01 so, I won't find it, I won't waste your time, but roughly he says this: he says it's no coincidence if the blacksmith god, without offense, without fish, in mythology — it's said, since he comes from the depths of water, he comes up from the earth passing through water — and that he's small, that he's ugly, and that he's black — it's a coincidence — I started with La Bruyère's text, which said that peasants are burned by the sun, and not so long ago in the countryside, when they said a woman was black, she wasn't good for seduction, because she went too often into the sun doing the harvest, or gleaning when the harvest was poor and it was famine time — I wouldn't want to monopolize the floor, but I'd like to hand back to questions, because I'm raising material, even if afterward I need to re-engage with the developments I think are essential — but won't there be questions on what I've just developed since the start? I'll take the mic — yes, sorry, yes
The Servant, Woman in the Dunes, and the notion of social class 1:08:15 Dominique, you talk about the film The Servant by Losey, and it's a bit of a coincidence, but since I just got back from Korea, I realized there's a precursor to this film, three years earlier, three years before Losey's The Servant, there's The Housemaid, which is a film — it's the father of Korean cinema, Kim Ki-young, and it's quite astonishing because it's almost the same scenario except it's a woman — the difference is she's seen very negatively, but there's a very dark atmosphere, following the Korean War, where you really get the impression that the whole household, the whole society, is undermined by contradictions — and that film is the equivalent of Renoir's Rules of the Game for the New Wave, it's a key film, it's constantly cited actually by international critics — so, do you know it? I'd like to know because that would be really — it's not a big deal, one can borrow — but I'd really need you to show it to me, because that would make for a real piece of criticism, because it would be interesting to see precisely how this contradiction, this dialectic, is at work
1:09:25 in society, and at work, including really at the other end of the world — and what's the common point and what's the difference — but indeed these are peaks, because they're peaks of dialectical contradictions, that's clear, social classes embodied in a powerfully individualized figure — yes, exactly — like tragic figures — so I worked a bit on the Korean world well before it made headlines the way it does now — I'm talking about South Korea as well — and it connects to a sort of housemaid, or family elements that have an enormous place because of Confucianism — the respect owed to parents, to hierarchy, to family, marriage rites — I was led to correct theses on marriage rites, I mean, it's exhausting how much you have to decline the family — so I imagine the housemaid, how negatively connoted that is — of course, there's also, since you're bringing it up, in Japanese cinema, a masterpiece some of you certainly know: Woman in the Dunes
1:10:35 it depends a bit on the tradition — translation, sorry — Teshigahara, bravo, there you go — so it's a man who comes from the city, he's an insurance clerk, a Japanese man like plenty of others, a little white shirt like that, and he lingers a bit on the beach in the evening, on the edge of the city, taking his walk when Japanese productivity leaves him the time — which isn't often, by the way — he has a little hobby, amateur entomology, he collects insects, pins insects in the sand because these are dune beaches like that on the outskirts of the city — and then afterward he places his insects, pins them in collections at home — and one evening he lingers like that and there's no more bus to get back, he's not worried, and he passes through some rather strange places, at the border between a Japan not yet really urbanized but also having left traditional countryside behind, like those strange anthropological zones that often make up the outskirts of big cities — and you have to be careful because you have to cross the sand between big pits in which there are houses, the houses are in pits in the sand to protect from the sea wind, and they come across
1:11:47 fires in the night, like that, or inhabitants — they say, sure, sure, you can spend the night there, there are people who will — then you give them a few coins like that, it's nothing, and you'll be put up, you don't need to, you don't have to wait for the bus tomorrow morning — so they lower him down with a rope ladder, there's a woman all alone, a widow, etc., she has a relationship with him really as if surging up from the depths of time compared to him, who's a modern executive — he laughs a little, he's quite pleased, he thanks her, she makes him a meal, and in the morning he yawns, stretches, bright sun — the rope has disappeared — he'll spend his life in the pit — it's an extraordinary film, he's caught in a trap because that area has been depopulated, that's depopulated, and the local inhabitants abduct people from the cities like that and force them to stay and reproduce — and I won't tell you the ending because it's admirable — and it's the same problem — we often think Japan is a homogeneous society, but there are fierce struggles, right, between forced urbanization, one of the fastest industrializations in contemporary history
1:12:57 and unheard-of archaisms — that's why the notion of social class, I come back to the point, there's a tragic element, but it's not that serious either, that Marx, right at the moment when he was supposed to tell us more — because, as he told us quite a lot — is that social class can't only be defined by income — I could be the son of a billionaire and be bohemian in the Latin Quarter, studying in Paris, unable to afford a room, a bit broke at the end of the month, I might even bum money off a working-class guy — that's not enough to suddenly put me in the class of proletarians — by my upbringing, by my way of speaking, by my habits and so on, I belong to the upper class — and it's profound, the notion of social class in Marx, it's really a whole — earlier, I didn't read to you, so as not to be too long, I didn't read you all of Rousseau's text, but when — when Rousseau has Émile's mother say Émile must learn a manual trade — a trade for my son, my son a craftsman, sir, are you thinking straight? I think better than you, madam, you who never wanted to make him anything but a lord, a marquis
1:14:07 a prince, and perhaps one day nothing at all — but that's social classes, and where does this come from? From a Rousseau — it's no coincidence, because Rousseau is not — I quoted you earlier, I pointed out that Voltaire, I don't hold it against him, all the better, it's very good, had the luck to study at Louis-le-Grand, one of the best schools in Christendom, while Rousseau was on the roads, a vagabond, playing truant, and reading whatever books he could in his uncle's library — we agree on that — which meant that Rousseau was a lackey at an embassy at one point, he served at table, he served aristocrats who spoke, who made quotations in Latin, and Rousseau got annoyed, he'd say, no, that's not it, and he'd correct the quotation, he'd give the correct line from Virgil — it was terrible, it was new at the time, that classes were colliding like this — that's why I started with La Bruyère — in La Bruyère's time, there's a place for everything and everything in its place, it doesn't move, the classes, which one doesn't penetrate — whereas at the French Revolution, the people of Paris asked Louis XVI to come out onto the balcony
1:15:17 you know that, and they forced the king to put on the red cap, the Phrygian cap, which made Hugo say later, "I put a red cap on the old French dictionary" — what the people of Paris made Louis XVI do, Hugo — because it was fashionable in a certain kind of right-wing circle to speak ill of Victor Hugo, who's supposedly a bit vulgar, a bit populist, a bit demagogic — yes, "I put the red cap on the old French dictionary," just as Balzac was criticized for inventing the novel where people sit down to eat — that's how it was back then — that's class struggle, it's not only struggles when they're obvious, when they can't be hidden, like at the time of the Popular Front, of course, the great strikes or the repressions — it's permanent — that's what I wanted — sorry, that was a bit long, my answer to your question, but through The Servant, which embodies this in powerfully individualized figures, it's important to make this detour — thank you for the floor, I just ask you to
Answer on degrowth: decrease what? 1:16:30 say your first names before — me, I'm Adrien, thank you — I wanted to ask you, if you don't mind, to clarify your position on degrowth — you mentioned it briefly, but there's quite a lot one can put behind that, and I don't think Rabhi is necessarily representative of that movement — and by degrowth versus MEDEF, I'd like us to expand a bit more, because for me the ideal of life isn't necessarily the same, and the means — sorry, excuse me — for me the ideal of life of the two models, either MEDEF or degrowth, isn't necessarily the same, nor are the means to be implemented to achieve it — so if you could tell us a bit more — I'm grateful, I'm glad, to respond to the provocation, that's why — so you're perfectly right, as a philosopher I'm delighted — you were asking if it was Socrates and the degrowthers, that's it, in fact — you don't let go, and you say to yourself, listen, I think we produce too much of this and
1:17:41 not enough of that — I mentioned it a bit earlier, these are hollow concepts — if we step back, degrow what? Are we going to decrease the number of nurses in hospitals? Certainly not, agreed — the number of housing units in Paris, that's already more complicated — one moment we build an 80-story tower, I'd be delighted, I'm the most anti-environmentalist in Europe, I say it publicly like that, it relieves me — yes, listen, there's no transition — how many young people are looking for housing right now in Paris? It's really frightening, I mean, it's terrible — me, I pay for 18 square meters in a retirement home, at a price — I could tell you my life story, I'm not complaining, I've never been so well off — at a price for which I'd have, at home in Corsica, a quality of life with a view of Italy and four rooms — well yes — Parisian prices are frightening — compared to London it's nothing, you know all that — so there aren't enough housing units, there I'm not for degrowth in real estate construction — when I was your age, we were building 500,000 housing units a year in France — and we're not going to build horizontally, otherwise — well then I'd be an environmentalist — otherwise this
1:18:53 would be even more concreted over, you have to build vertically — yes, so you can't have your cake and eat it too — for there to be a field, part of the forest or the marsh has to disappear — did you think there was — we need to stop with this everyone's-beautiful-everyone's-nice attitude, that's one of the most profound aspects of Hegel, negativity so that there can be positivity, negativity — Spinoza had already seen this before him, and Hegel admires it enormously in Spinoza, it's stated — I say this for the philosophers, it still matters — "all determination is negation" — for there to be a field, the forest must no longer be there, that's it, the place couldn't have both at once — yes, of course, go ahead, interesting or not, who defines — yes, it's the paradise of the bobos, excuse me, I'm being a bit harsh — Bhutan is
1:20:07 What a marvel, yes, gross national happiness, yes, it's a country of slavery, let me remind you in passing – not that it's the only one, I'm quite willing to answer you, but let's set Bhutan aside, unless you agree we hold a secret ballot referendum among Bhutan's citizens and ask them: don't you want a transistor radio to listen to the football match? I already know the result. Go ahead – I've spent 34 years south of the Sahara, you know – go and talk to them about degrowth there. When you see a man arrive carrying his wife on his back, who walked 14 km through the jungle so she could give birth at a clinic, and she dies of tetanus in the end because for ritual reasons they put earth on the umbilical cord in the village – go talk to them about degrowth. On that note, let's not say we're building too many hospitals, producing too many medicines, and making too many vaccines. What's the main cause of death in the world, do you know? Since it's AIDS – and it's not more said, especially in Africa, more than road deaths, more than suicides – it's malaria, congratulations, inoculated by a mosquito that I guarantee you is pure, organic, 100% organic. So we have to stop
1:21:22 with this nonsense, we have to stop – yes, sorry, because I can clearly see they find it convenient, don't they, your argument against degrowth – but not at all. In China again, with 'monsieur, it's too much, we produce too much' – the problem isn't the same for us as for people affected by malaria who have to walk miles to fetch water. Sorry to interrupt you, I'll let you speak right away – as you say, it's not the same for Africans as for us, you're making a geographical divide. I don't think it's geographical, it's social class – for us, what is it, what background? When you go into a supermarket, you don't look at the prices, you go straight for the top-of-the-range. Not me. I'm a citizen of one of the richest countries in the world, and I think I don't consume that much, I deprive myself – you have a bit of comfort, I think I don't have enough. Listen, you're asking
1:22:32 my opinion, I'm not complaining, but you know very well, if we don't face facts – a country like France, if you scaled up what a country like France consumes to the whole world, you'd need maybe three planets. Oh, I hear that every day, that's what people tell me – but yes, and if the Chinese get washing machines, their future language – so now I have to say the Chinese women should keep going to the wash-house in winter? No no no, I know, I know, I know, it's monstrous, it's monstrous, it's – no, it's of such violence, your discourse. No, no, no, I'm not finished, because I understand – everyone against everyone has understood, we read it every day in Le Monde, in Libé, it's on every TV panel. I won't finish my question, but finish it, finish it – I think perhaps degrowth should also be somewhat demographic, we are too many beings – less surprised, you're the one who's excess, not me – no, no, I'm joking, I'm doing it on purpose, but that's what the Nazis would say – but in order to keep consuming, to count today, if we wanted everyone to be able to
Resources that are not fixed, and a limit of religious origin 1:23:49 consume, maybe that we... yes, there would need to be demographic degrowth since the earth's resources are insufficient. But who told you they're insufficient? Resources aren't fixed. Marx worked on this – you think this is a problem of today? It's an old problem. Marx already had to deal with a trade unionist named Weston who said it's not by raising wages – it's not by making the spoons bigger that we'll get more soup. Marx said, yes, but that assumes the soup is always the same quantity – who told you the quantity is the same? And resources – already in the Neolithic we'd exhausted the shellfish in one pond, so we went to a farther pond. But now we can farm them, aquaculture farms, we can produce 10 million salmon – where's the problem? The problem is that it's managed in a capitalist way. That I agree with. It's incredible, you have luxury problems, I mean – but if you tell me Africans are still at the survival stage, I disagree. An African loves adorning himself with masks – that's not necessary for survival. Don't reduce underdeveloped peoples to mere survival consumption, it's a deep cultural consumption, they have extraordinary music
1:25:00 they have visual art too. So stop saying they only have survival needs. They too have the right to watch documentaries on Japanese art like you and me – well yes – and therefore to have flat screens, I don't see why we'd forbid them that. By what right would I forbid a Chinese housewife from switching from the wash-house to the washing machine on the pretext that we'd need, what did you say, 150 planets? Get to the point. But in fact the Western world developed through mad growth by using fossil fuels which are soon running out, and countries like China are getting into it full throttle, India is getting into it full throttle, Africa – good news, good news, you'll tell me – I'll cut you off, but I notice you're just repeating what everyone hears every day, so I don't see how it becomes more true because it's repeated, especially on TV panels, that's not a solid argument, I mean, have you ever verified this information – who told you it's a shortage? I want to come back to fossil fuels before going
1:26:13 into coal – we were in charcoal, you know that, people would take – we agree, let's start there, that's the best when we disagree, we start with what we agree on – we started with charcoal, if we'd kept going there wouldn't be a single tree left on the planet. Today's energy expenditure – we agree on that. Thank goodness ecological progress happened – yes, it's scandalous that we moved from charcoal to coal, and thank goodness we didn't stay with coal but moved to oil – but I'm not putting fossil fuels on trial, except that it takes seven times less oil than coal for the same amount of energy, from what I've heard. Thank goodness we moved from oil to gas, and thank goodness we're moving from gas to nuclear – the biggest nuclear plant in the region is the sun, I say that for the ecologists, naturally, the sun is a good path, that we satisfy more and more people – it's incredible we've come to this, you see what they've put in your head – exponential growth must have a limit at some point, otherwise – there you go, we need a limit. That's religious. At the Tower of Babel people already said men are building too much; if the Flood happened because we'd consumed too much, sinned too much – but it's as old as the world, that
1:27:25 you think this comes from modern productivity? It's religious, the idea that if we get rid of the frogs the cosmos will collapse – I mean, does that mean nature has a providence, that every animal species has its reason for being? No, no – the mosquito that carries malaria doesn't have a reason for being, we should eradicate it. When we started eradicating it and malaria disappeared, they said, oh, resistant strains will appear. When we started banning DDT – which was an American initiative – it's a person from an African country speaking to you – it's monstrous what we did. There are two issues that intersect, that is, one issue at stake is precisely to suppress – yes, I think we're on two tracks, don't censor me a bit, don't speak for me, but let's let the discussion flow, I don't think it's just that theme, I think we've touched on it, just to bring up the point, but of course, Marx – a question, I was saying there's this need precisely to improve everyone's comfort, to eliminate diseases, and that – but there's also the issue of preserving the ecosystem, in any case why does everything collapse for everyone, what's the point otherwise, I'm quite willing, I agree, get everyone out, so it's just that there's a double issue, that doesn't mean we have to stop, but what's an ecosystem, that's an ideological notion to me, I don't know what
A participant: capitalism, global inequalities, and social labor 1:28:36 an ecosystem is – what, the Luxembourg Gardens, is that an ecosystem or not? I agree that if tomorrow they decide to turn the Luxembourg Gardens into a McDonald's parking lot, I'll sign a petition with you to stop it, there's no problem, it's an ecosystem too. If I may, I'd like to bring an argument to the discussion raised by these two gentlemen, or these two comrades, I don't know, but I think it's rather these two gentlemen. So, you seem to take the current situation as definitive, on the one hand, or as immanent, as though there were no history in your account. Africa's situation today was manufactured, it hasn't always been like that; the situation of the rich countries was manufactured too, and in that manufacturing one thing counts a great deal: capitalism. Capitalism, as an Italian philosopher, Costanzo Preve, put it, is modernity – it's capitalism. And you find that expressed in another way in Marx's Communist Manifesto, namely, the world economy and capitalism, there are winners and losers, and Samir Amin, in a recent lecture I attended, explained that – Samir Amin is
1:29:51 a fairly good economist insofar as he places problems on the scale of the world and of centuries, and he cited a statistic – I don't know if it's reliable or not, it's an order of magnitude, so take it with a pinch of salt, but it's still very significant – in the 18th century the gaps in standard of living between Europe and the United States didn't exist yet, and between Europe and the rest of the world, that is, especially Asia – Asia was more developed than Europe still in the 18th century, the standard-of-living gaps were 1 to 1.3 in China's favor. Then it declined in China; today the standard-of-living gaps in favor of the Western world are 1 to 60. So your story about degrowth needs to be measured against those figures – that is, there's room. The 'state of nature' means nothing – a field is fertile if it's cultivated, if it's treated the right way, if it's fertilized, if it's maintained, if there are real farmers. But if you put a thousand cows in a barn, you'll get destruction of both the quality of the milk and of the
1:31:06 meat, and you'll get big profits for the financier who invested in it. So that's the problem with degrowth versus growth, that's fundamentally it. So I bring you this argument, do with it what you will. Now I have a question for you, dear comrade Jean-Claude, but the question isn't about what you said, it's about what you didn't say – I have a bit of a frustration regarding your view of the concept of work in Marx. It's a question whose answer is difficult, because Marx didn't give a course on labor – I don't know Marx well enough to give that course precisely on that concept – but you spoke of Hegel, who introduced into philosophy the tool, the tool as a consequence of history, as won by humanity through much labor, trial and error. But Marx adds something to that, it seems to me – he adds the fact that labor is social, that is, not only does the tool come from history, but the use of the tool takes place within a social framework, and the more you have complicated relations of production
1:32:17 developing this social framework further – today, to build an Airbus, you have millions of parts requiring the investment of labor from millions of people who don't work solely for Airbus – of course, that's the socialization of labor, and that's fundamental in Marx. And there's something else related to Marx and labor: labor is what is proper to man, because man is not a being of nature – you spoke of animals that endlessly repeat the same process, and the best example, in my opinion, is the octopus, because the octopus is an extremely intelligent invertebrate but does not live socially, has no society, so each individual starts from zero and must, with all its cunning and intelligence, manage to avoid being eaten by sperm whales and survive in an a priori hostile environment. Man is the opposite of that – man is human society. At birth, the Romans said, man is not human; man becomes human through education, and the maximum of education is labor. So that's where Marx intervenes in a positive and interesting way
Hegel on the machine, Heidegger, and primitive accumulation 1:33:30 that's where Marxism is a liberating ideology – because labor can be alienated when it's determined by external forces imposed on it, but it can also be creative, and man realizes himself and creates himself through creative labor, and he becomes alienated when he engages in work that doesn't belong to him. So that's Marx's considerable contribution, on which I won't be able to speak for very long, but I was expecting a bit of that, and in your next lecture I'd like you to talk about it. I'll be quick with the question – but I'll answer right away regarding the next lecture, even though it would need more time, indeed that's a lecture in itself. But as I said earlier, before you arrived, that Marx couldn't have known Hegel's youth texts, which Hegel didn't publish – well, let me read you the continuation of the passage on the tool that I mentioned earlier, where Hegel speaks of pauperization – texts that are perhaps the most Marxist ones, in the first manufactory, but judge for yourself, rather, in the machine, man suppresses even that formal activity which is his own, and makes
1:34:43 the machine work completely in his place – but this trickery man uses against nature, this cunning of reason, by which he stays back from the singularity of nature, avenges itself against him: what man gains over nature by subjecting it more and more contributes to making him all the weaker – very topical – by having nature exploited by all sorts of machines, man does not eliminate the necessity of his labor, he merely pushes it back and puts it at a distance, and thus man does not turn in a living way toward nature, toward nature as a living nature; on the contrary, labor before the machine – this is an English machine, at the time – it's a negative vitality, and the labor that remains to man becomes ever more mechanical. Man diminishes labor only for the whole, not for the individual worker, for whom, on the contrary, it increases it. There's the whole theme of alienated labor from the 1844 Manuscripts, already in germ here. I say this as a matter of the history of thought, but that's not a problem, it's history, Marx couldn't have known these texts, and in any case, even if he had known them, it's undeniable that Hegel would never have anticipated the tendential fall
1:35:55 of the rate of profit, would never have anticipated the cause of cyclical crises – the tendential fall in the rate of profit is at the origin of that, exactly – nor even the organic composition of capital – these are the immense theoretical advances we owe to Marx. I am not trying to reduce Marx to Hegel, far from it; I'm trying to pose the relation established between them differently, a relation that's often very ambivalent. Now, I'm quite attentive to your point – it's very complex in Marx, because sometimes in Marx you get the impression labor is the most alienating thing, sometimes it's what will liberate us. But that's normal, because as you put it very well, it depends – not on the productive forces – and that's the error of today's ecologism, reducing everything to productive forces, putting the tool on trial. If I kill someone with a knife, it's not the knife that gets sent to jail, let's be clear, because with the same knife I can cure someone's appendicitis and save their life – the knife's not at fault, leave it alone. But I say that because among the most Nazi of philosophers, I'm thinking of Heidegger – no, I say that because Merleau-Ponty wondered whether the Nazis were a kind of philosophers – let's be clear, it's
1:37:07 he who said we owe a debt of thanks to the Führer – if the body tells you a debt of thanks to the Führer, I've imagined slices everywhere – so, the one who said the greatest event of Western metaphysics is the creation of the Panzerdivisionen, that's in the notebooks from 1934, I'm not inventing anything, I'm not making false accusations, and it's in that man's shadow that the entire French philosophical school grew, from Sartre to Derrida – it's a serious thing I'm saying, that's not the topic so I'll set it aside – no, but I mention it because Heidegger spends his time putting technology on trial, that's typically Nazi, to make full use of technology while putting technology on trial. You know, among the Germans, I don't mean this as an insult, I'm the most Germanophile man in Europe in some ways, the most anti-ecologist, and – well, take it as you will – but I notice that they love having a high-performance hi-fi system, because they're good at music, careful, but in an old wooden cabinet, yes, in an archaic old wooden piece of furniture, the Germans use technology but don't want to show it, just as you've been told since you were little: put your hand over your mouth when you yawn, don't open your
1:38:18 mouth when you eat – you mustn't show production, mustn't show order, mustn't show the machines, mustn't show production, it's obscene. Because what I'm getting at, and I come back to my repressed diploma from earlier, is the underground world one mustn't speak of before Marx. I say this because I came across the writings of a certain – does anyone here know a Mr. Bruno Pinchard? I'm interested because he's written interesting things on... on music, well anyway, I'm a bit naive despite my age sometimes, and he ends up saying he's done a rereading of Capital where he says Marx only saw the negative in history, he only saw the moments of misfortune, he didn't understand that there are also 'Sundays' in history, well anyway, he reproaches Marx for having barely lifted a corner of the veil on what exploitation has been throughout history. What am I alluding to? I recommend it to you, because that part of Marx is – I won't say easier to read, clear and accessible to everyone – it's all the chapters called 'primitive accumulation' in the first book of Capital, I recommend it to you, take the first book if you're discouraged by the theory of value
1:39:30 everyone's given up on it, don't worry, you're not the only ones. But on the other hand, primitive accumulation, you won't believe your eyes and ears – that is, there he's no longer studying how capital functions, how it can grow, how surplus value is extracted, but how it originally formed. You'll tell me capital originally – primitive accumulation is terrifying, that's history. And this gentleman finds that he's saying too much already, when we're barely beginning to lift a corner of the veil on our history, on how many corpses we had to pass over to become what we are – the biggest gulag of all time was the English factory of the last century, I mentioned earlier the seven-year-old children working at furnaces in steelworks – how many Mozarts, how many Einsteins were swallowed up into nothingness, we never think about that, especially those who think Mozart or Einstein is a matter of chromosomes. So, I've partly answered your question, but it's clear that in Marx there are both – there's an indictment of labor as alienating, as dehumanizing, to be clear, and it's very clear in Marx classically, he shows that everything human is at the
Organization of production, war, and natural balance 1:40:40 same time – and there's, in the text I'm reading, the need to reduce the working day, and for that it's not that labor should disappear but that machines should do it in our place – that's still progress, isn't it. Question – yes, I just wanted to back up what Jean-Claude and Dominique were saying about ecology, and simply say that in fact the problem isn't so much the question of degrowth, which is a rather empty concept, but really what we do with the tool and how we organize production. It's clear that in capitalism, seeking profit at all costs, there are excesses in what's supposedly sensible and logical to produce. Let's take the quick example of packaging – packaging is an issue that isn't really one in itself, it only makes sense within capitalism because it covers the product that must be sold
1:41:52 and that must be rationed to a certain quantity, etc. — that's the only meaning packaging has, and packaging drives the entire petrochemical industry, for example. We talk a lot about oil consumption, we see that a great many of these ecological issues are really only issues of the organization of production, and that's also the case notably with agricultural production, it's also the case, for example, with the use of oil for cars — we're told we use the car too much, but why do we use the car too much? Because we're forced to travel 20 or 30 km from home to work, because everything is either relocated or we ourselves are far from the place of production. So on the question of consumption or overconsumption in so-called Western countries, it's not so much the overconsumption of the population as a whole that's the problem, it's the problem of the organization of the economy and the organization of — thank you very much, good evening. Actually, there is a problem with packaging: often packaging is
1:43:03 used to package several things at once, so I end up over-consuming objects — it's deliberate, but you have to understand that the basis of the whole current system isn't tied to a will to produce for the people who'll consume, the basis is: how do we make money. So indeed, more oil consumed, more distancing of produced objects from their meaning, from the place where they'll be consumed, etc., etc. — that's what needs addressing first, along with taxation that's currently the reverse of what it should be, that is, making it cheaper, paying less tax, when you buy new than when you have something maintained or repaired, or when you have ecological systems. No, I'm not responding specifically to that intervention but to all the interventions, in order to be understood properly — of course, I note that
1:44:17 most of the interventions concern ecology, at a time when we are entering war like never before, at a time when there's Iran, Syria, at the gates of Russia the most fantastic armada — I'm 70 years old, I lived through the Cold War, I've never seen such an accumulation of war danger, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea there's the most fantastic concentration of force NATO has ever assembled, likewise in the South China Sea on the other side of the world, and we're talking about what — building wildlife bridges for frogs. Go on, that was to respond — I know who's advancing, it doesn't suit me, that's all I want to say, luxury projects, indeed, and moreover these ecological questions, environmental as you like, are so tied to other macroeconomic problems that we also need to raise a question that has always puzzled me greatly: why is the main ecology party called Europe Écologie? Why do they want to change the national framework, which within the current European Union framework means abandoning sovereignty?
1:45:27 That is to say, if it were really about organizing production as sustainably as possible — let's see, the country that does that best is Cuba, because sustainability issues get pitted against each other, and that's why they're said to have the best treatments; in terms of productive forces, those productive forces are technical skills and worker training, and people have found them — he's just published in his publishing house a superb book on ecology in Cuba, I nearly forgot, but it's called 'Real Ecology,' it's a bit provocative, notably on the largest agroforestry plan, from 1948 in the Soviet Union, there you go, there you go, and following these good recommendations. Yes, what struck me was this change of framework, sovereignty, and therefore abandonment of sovereignty — so if it's about taking our production into our own hands, then we agree on these prerequisites, we'll all agree, even those who are most... humanity has the right to take its own production into its own hands, whatever
1:46:38 we do with it, whatever we decide, and I do believe it's ideological to say the problem is producing too much or not enough — it's above all a matter of how production is organized. So I quite agree with what the duke says — well, this question, how is it that the most 'ecological' party is the one that deprives us of our sovereignty, that is, of all our means of action. I'm very glad it was the PRCF that organized this gathering, I thank the comrades who took care of it, they put forward the four exits, that is, in addition to exiting capitalism, exiting the euro, exiting the EU, and exiting NATO — that's good, because we need to tie all these problems together, it's not enough to just say 'exit capitalism' as an incantation, of course, but we need to know exactly which framework, which straitjacket deprives us of our sovereignty, of our means of action. That's why these ecological questions — I think Dominique is right to speak of the urgency of war, the urgency of peace, all these questions are of course — yes, I don't want to force my thought either, I'm not saying let's just think about war and stop talking about ecology, it's not that simple, I'm not saying let's hide real problems, I'm saying they're posed in a dreadfully ideological way, that's what I
1:47:53 denounce — I'm not attacking realities, I'm attacking discourses, that's my job, philosopher, that's what I mean. When we talk, for example, about not doing this or that because it would disturb the 'natural balances' — that's monstrous, this notion of balance. Since when does nature know balance? Was nature more balanced when there were only volcanoes — that happened, if you know a bit about the history of the earth — when even an earthworm couldn't breathe or exist? Nature was neither more nor less balanced then than now, these notions mean nothing. Take away man and life, and the notion of balance no longer means anything — it's relative to us, balanced or not. Let me be more precise — I walk through a forest and you tell me, I'm warning you, there's been so much hunting there's not a single animal left — I'd be the first to be disappointed, even if I don't see a single one all day, I'd be happy to see a roe deer cross the road, but not because the deer is essential to some natural balance, but for my own pleasure, for yours, for its own sake, for your children's sake, and for that we create reserves, I mean endangered species, we ban killing them, we organize ourselves, very well — these aren't problems on a par with war and peace, they're not
1:49:05 complicated problems, there you go, I'm attacking notions like 'natural balance,' it means strictly nothing. I lived a long time south of the Sahara, I've already told you, I saw rock carvings in Niger — three-quarters of Niger is desert, the Ténéré, the most desert-like region of the Sahara, is full of oil — well, there are carvings, not paintings, engraved into the rock, over thousands of square kilometers, where you see engravings of rhinoceros grazing on grass during the day, buffalo, elephants — that means there was water there ten thousand years ago. Anyone who believes the earth is warming only because of oil has to be a fool, because when there was water in the Sahara, the glaciers reached down to Nice — some people find that interesting, well, why not — but still, the earth has been warming for 10,000 years, that has nothing to do with man. Or else let someone tell me exactly: here's the measurement, here's the part due to the solar cycle, and here's the part due to human warming, so many percent — let someone tell me precisely, I've never gotten that answer, not even from the specialists most involved in the question. Well, thank you all already for coming, thanks to
1:50:15 thanks to all of you for coming.
