English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Resumption in person: "And the subject in all this" 0:00 Good evening everyone, good evening to our friends, members, comrades, subscribers. We're among friends, if there are people here it's still solemn, because in the room, because I'm also addressing our friends online, and I thank them, because the weather is gloomy, for having come here, especially since some of them have come from far away.
0:30 And from the deep provinces, and it's still, I won't deny a certain emotion, as sub-prefects say in their pointless speeches, that I'm resuming these sessions live, with participants in flesh and blood, and I thank all those who urged me to resume these sessions live. I had gotten used, since the lockdown, to doing them remotely.
1:09 It's true that your presence, I'm speaking to those who are here, is irreplaceable, even though that doesn't stop me from saluting the faithfulness of those who are listening to us from farther away. So, I had announced a little bit the program for this year, I say a little bit because the outlines were quite vague, but I had still, no worries, I had still tried to concentrate the content of the cycle beginning this evening, in the word hesitation. If you remember well, the first video was titled, and the subject in all that.
1:56 It's a bit humorous, you know, it's a title, I don't remember, was it Clavel? And God in all that, well, that's not your generation, never mind. A great friend of the new philosophers could drop that. And I remind you, Jean-Michel perhaps, and God in all that. Good for you, you don't deal with those texts, you're quite right. And the subject in all that, you see, in place of God. And you, that's me, it's a democratic subject.
2:30 So, I could have touched on the subject right away, by saying, in a somewhat more academic way, by saying that what dominates now, when one says the word science, one immediately thinks of the hard sciences, if you don't specify, isn't that so? One thinks of the hard sciences. We have a number of excellent representatives of the hard sciences here. I have never said a word against the hard sciences. You'd be witnesses to that. But philosophy aims, we saw this when we did Nature and Origin of Philosophy, and we'll have the occasion to come back to it, the nature, philosophy, seeks to be, to reach, seeks, seeks, I haven't managed, to reach the human sciences in general, and philosophy in particular, seeks to reach a rigor comparable to that found in the hard sciences, but without giving up for all that the language that I'm speaking right now with you, which is the language that linguists call natural language, no doubt out of an unconscious taste for antiphrasis.
Clouscard's reply to Morilhat and the era of the leftists 3:34 I don't know, because there is nothing less natural than language. And that Clouscard, that's why I started with this quotation, isn't it, which I took from a text I recommend to you, Michel Clouscard's response to Claude Morilhat, Morilhat, sorry, I don't know why I absolutely want to say 'mordit', Morilhat, who was at Espace Marx at the time, and who wrote as part of what were the regular publications of the PC at the time, and who had had the excellent idea of devoting an article to Michel Clouscard.
4:15 in, good grief, of Recherches, Reflet, there were so many journals, it wasn't La Pensée, it was more recent. Well, it'll come back to me, there was, well, it'll come back to me, and an excellent article, well, excellent for intellectual honesty, which can be summed up with this formula, which Clouscard takes up in his response right from the start, because it sums up his point well, addressed to Morilhat: Clouscard, unavoidable but insufficient.
4:55 And Clouscard had said, well, that's honest, I mean, I never claimed to have covered every question, I mean, of course, it's insufficient, but it was the first time an official body of the PC granted Clouscard this recognition, Clouscard unavoidable, that's still something, I mean, and in a periodical, because after all, this was in '87, this article, if you search, it's on the net, it's a bit tedious to find, but it's called Clouscard's Response to Morilhat, quite simply.
5:31 And that was in '87, and two years earlier, another first, for the first time, a text by Clouscard was published, at Messidor, at Éditions Sociales if you prefer. I recall that Éditions Sociales was directed at that time by Lucien Sève, whom we lost not so long ago, but well, he mainly had a political role, in the most defensible sense, I mean, the properly editorial work, the choice of authors and so on, he most often delegated to his right-hand man, whom some of you certainly know, since he has since founded Éditions La Dispute, I'm thinking of Richard Lagache.
6:14 And it's Richard Lagache, whom we used to see, who was a... I'm opening a parenthesis, it's only a first detour, but I don't think we're straying far from the subjects, and even in fact from current events in a way. It was the time when the communists were under assault from all the leftists. You know, when I say leftists, I'm not a man of the right, for the man of the right, everything that's left is leftist. Communist, well, I'll leave that aside. Or again, what does he say?
6:44 Cultural left, cultural marxism. That one needs to be brought out anyway. an easy resort, what a mind is satisfied with, etc. But, what's more interesting, is that I, when I say leftists, it's rigorous, and without value judgment for now, that is, the union, in the mathematical sense, of three subsets, which I present in chronological order, so as not to upset anyone, the Trotskyists, who are the oldest historically, the anarchists, the Trotskyists, and the Maoists.
7:22 Roughly speaking, the set. Since then, it's gotten more complicated between the extreme-right left, the identitarians, complicated, but anyway, that's how it was in '68. The PC was under assault from this triad, isn't it, which was on the left, of the left, of the far left and of the PC, and which turned out to be to the right of De Gaulle, I won't go back over it. I'm thinking of a Jospin, who was a Trotskyist, and who ended up saying, my program is not socialist. I'm not talking behind people's backs, me.
7:52 I'm not interpreting them, I'm quoting them. Trotsky who was Frida Kahlo's lover. Yes, well, of course, yes. A beautiful photo, moreover, in Mexico, of Trotsky, with Frida Kahlo, with Mrs. Trotsky, with, yes, yes. That's where you see the destiny of guerrillas in Latin America, we'll have to devote something to that one day. Gangrened by a certain Trotskyism, I'm thinking in particular of Allende, who was caught between the CIA's henchmen, and that was no small thing.
8:25 I don't know if you've ever heard Nixon live. Someone calls him about what's happening during the storming of La Moneda. So, you haven't killed him yet, that bastard, that son of a bitch, speaking of Allende, who is such a bastard that he never dared to have the demonstrators shot at, because he's a great humanist. I wonder if he ever thought about that, all this time passing. So, yes, he was caught between that, poor Allende, or rather his regime especially, and the Trotskyists who had infiltrated the truckers' union in Chile, that's where it started, and who staged protest after protest to denounce the dictatorship.
9:10 Well, Allende's dictatorship, imagine that. So why, I'm still in my parenthesis, it's to situate Richard Lagache for you, who in the meantime became a friend, even if we don't agree on everything, but, at the time, he told me that he, as a militant, was in the UEC, the Union of Communist Students, and when he went to the student cafeteria, he was broke, a poor student, he came from a very working-class background, there were Maoists who blocked his way with iron bars, you won't eat at the people's restaurant.
The publication of Le Capitalisme de la séduction at Messidor 9:49 That's to show you the atmosphere of the time, I mean. It was this same Richard Lagache, then, who had decided, to pick up my thread, to publish Clouscard, and that gave us Le Capitalisme de la Séduction, which has been, and remains still, his biggest print run. And, I'll take the opportunity to give you a scoop, I believe there are one or two here who have already heard it, well, I allow myself to call it a scoop, you'll judge for yourselves, but it's a political scoop.
10:26 We were in the office at Messidor, at Éditions Sociales, Clouscard was there the whole time, and we had gotten to choosing the cover photo. You see? So we were waiting for the picture researcher who was supposed to come back with three slides, and it was your humble servant who chose, it's the one that was picked, by the way. And I showed the photo you know from the original edition, as editor, you see, the atmosphere, it was nice.
11:00 And, all of a sudden, Clouscard, while we're waiting, says to Richard Lagache, to the publisher, why are you publishing me now, I've been saying the same thing for years? I don't know if there are those who remember that I told this story, no, perhaps? If you remember, Étienne, the reply, at under 15% in polls. It was in '78, at that point, you see, after the collapse of the Common Program, etc. You see, it's interesting, at under 15% in polls, we have nothing left to lose.
11:36 Now, we have even less to lose. The movement has already begun. So, I'll skip the details of that response, I refer you to it. It's a major text, I allow myself to say so. I devoted a filmed video at the home of our chief stage manager who had preceded Pierre-Élie in his functions and who now travels so much between Paris and Lyon for his work and can no longer help but who follows us attentively, Philippe Moreau, whom I can never thank enough.
12:11 And it was at his place, I remember, for the music lovers, because he wanted it, because he had an acoustic piano at his place, which I play like this as the theme for the segment, the canon from Bach's Art of Fugue, canon by augmentation and diminution, in contrario motu, in contrary motion. It's more learned music than popular music. Even though I've shown that one never goes without the other. I refer you to the article for the details.
The potlatch of surplus value: an avowed metaphor 12:45 What I retain for this evening and for the cycle ahead of us from this article is the insistence Clouscard puts on answering questions of semantics. He doesn't just take the word for granted. He sees the fashion, it's a structuralist backlash at the time. But, people are always looking, the style is a bit, either sloppy, or this. Me, I've summed up Clouscard's style with a quick phrase: 'bulldozer touch.' It hits or it misses, but Clouscard, that's how he writes.
13:16 And I note that alongside rough passages, I'm still talking about his style, there are others that are quotations verging on prose poetry, sometimes. I'm not just talking about 'under the paving stones, the beach' or things like that. the meaning of the phrase. But, I remember the insistence that struck me and that led him to respond about that.
13:58 It's semantic and in particular about the reproach that 'yes, there's often the sense that one never knows if it's the figurative or the literal sense, it's a metaphor.' He took an example for Morilhat, why speak of 'potlatch of surplus value,' quoting Clouscard's text? 'Potlatch of surplus value.' I say this for those who don't know, it's not because it's social-science vocabulary, it's a bit less fashionable than it was at the time, so I recall it anyway, it was borrowed from anthropology and ethnology starting with Lévi-Strauss, we say anthropology.
14:31 'Potlatch' is a name of Amerindian origin, North America, and it's the ritual by which the ritual — yes, the ritual in the broad sense, not only the religious sense — by which the chiefs of a village, of a tribe, of a group, first those at the top of the local hierarchy, in order to assert, before the public, before the community, their superior position, to show that they were above the constraints that dominate the common man, what we are, would throw away or destroy riches, you see, to show that they were above all that; among the Indians, they would take 20 buffalo hides and burn them, you see, and in my video on this text, the response to Morilhat, I recall that this forcefully reminded me of a Gallic, Celtic custom, very widespread, Celtic — the Germans did it too, but in barbarian times.
15:42 you may perhaps know, some of you, what torcs are, torques? No? Nobody, really, well, that was the time when at school one learned something, sorry, Jean-Michel witnessed, at your age, which isn't that of these young people but which is still far from mine, so yes, they are splendid bracelets, necklaces, bracelets in solid gold that these barbarians, the Gauls, made, they worked gold admirably, and those in general, and some of you have perhaps once seen an exhibition called 'The Gold of the Scythians,' if you remember the workmanship, it's somewhat of that order, there are fewer animal representations than among the Scythians, it's more oak leaves or roses, you know, gold is soft, it's remarkable craftsmanship, they would take them and throw them into the Garonne, into the Saône, into the Marne, you see, all that, me, I'm really a boss as we'd say.
16:52 in Africa, I say that because I did a 10-minute stint on a debate about jazz on Abidjan radio, it's the only time, and my wife knows jazz well, better than me actually, and she told me that the show's host said 'your husband there is a boss,' yes indeed, so among the skills we could discuss, and in this series of semantic justifications, the potlatch, Clouscard takes the bull by the horns and says, yes, yes, yes, potlatch, yes, it's a metaphor, yes, I transposed it from its original domain, because Morilhat was saying, how can that be, it's valid for Amerindians, you see, cultural relativism right away, so it's not valid elsewhere, there's no universal, so I've just shown you that the Gauls didn't exactly, they didn't give the word between the Gauls and the Sioux, well so I sum this up, or rather Clouscard sums up perfectly the—
"That is Socrates' problem": philosophy and mathematics 18:11 But in the language that linguists call, I repeat, natural language, and that Clouscard, in the quotation I'm about to give you right now, calls in a way much more adequate to that language, I'll give you the quotation. 'How? Starting from ordinary ideological language.' Not natural. Ordinary ideological language. I'll say the sentence in full first.
18:42 'How, starting from ordinary ideological language, do we arrive at the necessity of the concept?' Full stop, new line, that is the problem of Socrates. End of quote. So, a Marxist's tribute to philosophy. There is a continuity. If you prefer, because Marx wrote 'The Poverty of Philosophy,' it's very precise, he said, comrade Proudhon, but it's a supersession-preservation, one might say, in German philosophy.
19:20 How, starting from ordinary ideological language, do we arrive at the necessity of the concept? The expression 'necessity of the concept' echoes what I tried to say earlier, that philosophy, in part, looks toward mathematics, from its very foundation. Since the first written system that has come down to us, Plato: let none enter here who is not a geometer. I said this in the very last video, but I'll repeat it anyway. Leibniz, who outright creates what would be put into practice by all of today's computers, namely what was called at the time the universal characteristic, is that right, Victor?
20:00 That is, to express all communication using just two signs, 0, 1. Leibniz, 17th century. Spinoza, I'm taking examples from what was the height of classical metaphysics. Spinoza, whose masterwork, his opus magnum, the Ethics, is famously known to have an approach called more geometrico, which follows, which aims to reason in the manner of geometry, a demonstrative mode, QED, etc.
20:46 So there's an old complicity, philosophy and mathematics, it's not repeated enough, but we're far from having defined philosophy from that alone, because there's the other pole, precisely because it expresses itself in ordinary language and not in mathemes or algorithms. And that's not a reproach I make to science for doing so, because given the object of science, the hard sciences and mathematics in particular, they did very well to have left behind the ambivalences of everyday language in order to have statements incomparably more univocal.
21:28 But philosophy, and here we come right back to the title of my cycle, isn't it, the logic of the subject, but the hard sciences, they did well from the standpoint of their own purpose, which is the knowledge of objects, not of subjects precisely. Mathematics did not post at the entrance of the math department, 'know thyself.' Well, that was posted at the entrance of the oracle of Delphi, or rather, the sanctuary of Delphi.
21:58 The god who was supposed to know, Apollo, turned the question back in the questioner's throat. 'What have you just asked? Know thyself?' You see, poor Oedipus should have meditated on that. I'll say it badly in Greek, but you'll correct me, it's really a chance to have a Greek speaker here. 'Gnôthi seauton.' How do you say it?
22:30 'Gnôthi seauton.' Ah, that feels good with the accent. Thank you. There. 'Know thyself.' 'Auton,' yes, already, 'autobiographical,' we find it in, 'cognoscere,' 'to know,' 'cognitive sciences,' 'agnosticism,' when it's negative, etc. I never miss a chance to recall these back-and-forths in vocabulary, because, when you think about it, you know these words. And it grants us considerable knowledge when we put them side by side.
23:04 The fact that, second parenthesis, that Latin is no longer taught, for example, in schools, well there are some who are furious about it, because, in my day, we learned Latin, me, it's not out of conservatism, it's the missed opportunity that interests me. It's that, when you spend a huge amount of time telling philosophy students that rationalism has some relation to reason, if you've done Latin, 'ratio' means reason, you're not wasting your time. So, you see, I make these back-and-forths on purpose to tell you, you have this linguistic capital.
23:35 even if you are only strictly French-speaking, you don't open up any other language, that's already huge. The connections we can make, we'll have the occasion to come back to this within this evening's session. So, how, starting from ordinary ideological language, meaning, which is not made for knowing, so the sciences were right to set it aside, because science comes from the verb 'scire,' 'scio,' first person, 'I know,' in Latin, which means 'I know.'
24:05 It's not opinion, that, that's knowledge. A equals B implies B equals A, that's not an opinion at the corner café, oh, I think Marseille cheated in the match, no. No, Bastia, that's an old rivalry, Bastia-Marseille. And, this really surprised me, third parenthesis, that taxi drivers in French-speaking Africa know all that by heart. Oh, you're Corsican? But Bastia, really, that's a good team. Fantastic.
24:35 No, seriously, a taxi driver from Bamako and a docker from Abidjan know international politics better than the presenters on our TV channels. I say that seriously. No, no, I say it very seriously. It's worrying, in a way, all the better, not for them, but for us. So, this question of semantics summed up by how, starting from ordinary ideological language, do we arrive at the necessity of the concept, that is the problem of Socrates.
Ordinary language is bent by an idea 25:10 But no, I haven't finished with this quotation yet before moving on to the rest and back to my outline. But it governs the whole outline. That's why I'm lingering on it. Ordinary ideological language which comes to us in everyday life, having a viewpoint marked by ideology, we all agree on that. But that's not what he's saying. He says that the language we speak, from the moment it is everyday language, is ideological. That's enormous, what Clouscard is saying. We mustn't slide too quickly over statements like that. Because there's the word 'ordinary.'
25:41 Ordinary language is ideological. And there, Clouscard rejoins an immense philosophical tradition going back to Plato. I'm going to speak of the idea, ideological. It's pejorative among Marxists. Yes. But it's not reductive. Especially since Lenin said — there are some who will be annoyed that I repeat it — when he reaches the end of the most idealist work, as he calls it, of Hegel, the Great Logic, that the unfolding of the Idea with a capital 'I' like that.
26:21 At the end, when he gets to the chapter called "The Absolute Idea," we're apparently not in Marxism-Leninism at all. Lenin himself—one shouldn't try to be more Leninist than Lenin. This passage is truly remarkable. It's the most idealist in Hegel and also the most materialist. It's contradictory, but that's a fact. Take the example of the seed. We've never reflected enough on that formula. I say this because Althusser, in 1953, congratulates Stalin for having condemned the negation of the negation—which Lenin, for his part, praises under Hegel's pen.
27:00 You see, these are important issues at stake. We think we're just among intellectuals, dealing with abstract things, researchers. No. Stalin isn't Marx. Like Lenin, he's someone who had real power to manage, real situations to deal with. So you see, when Clouscard replaces "natural language"—the linguists' expression, which I keep when I'm speaking with linguists, so we're sure of what we're talking about—with "ordinary ideological language," he's reminding us that each of our words, I'll get to this now, is under the sway of an idea that bends it.
27:44 "Bent" is tropos in Greek. I don't know if it's isotropic—isotropic spaces in mathematics—or simply heliotropic, that is, sunflowers, the light of the sun that turns flowers toward the direction of the star of day. That's tropos, simply put, so we say someone has a tropism, I don't know, for redheads, whether male or female—I'm trying to be inclusive.
The sun, offspring of the good (Republic, book VI) 28:18 That says exactly what it means, "bent." I repeat the main thread: Clouscard reconnects with a tradition that perhaps goes back to the deepest passages of Plato—because with Plato too, there's a mixed bag. He's still someone of his time who says, in the Republic, that one shouldn't leave the city before the age of fifty, because one risks picking up new ideas elsewhere and that causes trouble. Careful—but there's also the same in him.
28:50 And then there's the... the philosophy of rights, Plato could have done without advising nurses to run back and forth with babies in their arms to get the baby used to being a warrior—let's not exaggerate either. No, seriously now, the great Plato, perhaps one of the greatest, is the one at the end of the sixth book of the Republic. I'll give you the references. Republic, book—don't worry, for those who think there are ten books like that, it's barely in this last chapter. Sixth book, the Republic, the end.
29:20 That is, what precedes the beginning of the seventh book, where he directly sets out the famous myth of the cave. These are solemn passages, all the same. And in the sixth book, after having laid out the whole itinerary leading from what will later be called the bottom of the cave toward the sun—well, anyway, from the world of opinion, of café chatter, of whatever you like, which grasps only shadows, simulacra, and so on.
29:50 You know this Platonic vocabulary, it's textbook Platonism. Up to the sun—Plato tells his interlocutors that the sun is not the Good, still less the idea of the Good, but is its offspring. There are translation issues here. I say this because I like to say "offspring," since in good translations... because he says, "I cannot speak of it."
30:21 The Good in itself, I cannot speak of it, it's beyond language, it's beyond. There's something transcendent there, I won't dwell on that for now. That's the great Plato. But I will, on the other hand, since you're pressing me with questions, since you absolutely want me to talk about the Good, I won't talk to you about the Good directly, but I'll talk to you about its offspring, that is, the sun. The one that is in the visible world resembles the Good most closely, by analogy. You see how we get to the metaphor? He says this: light, the sun in particular, light in general, is what allows—it's a third term that allows, first term, the eye to see, second term, the object to be seen.
31:02 Because you have a healthy eye, working perfectly well, and you have an object ten meters away from you—if it's in darkness, you still won't see it. So for there to be vision, a third term is needed. Light, the sun, very well. And he says the Good is roughly what allows the soul to know—you see, the equivalent of "see"—the soul to know, and objects to be known, that's the equivalent. We could stop there, it's already considerable, it's the widening of the binary into the ternary, just like that.
31:33 And then, all of a sudden, there's an aside. But the Good doesn't content itself with being this third term—it also gives beings growth and nourishment. You know, that's rare. There's an almost ontological side to it, you see, as if the final contact with the sun were almost a suckling, growth and nourishment. Our first nourishment is a suckling, to pay tribute to our mothers and to the lineage of Isis.
Mallarmé: "I say a flower" 32:06 So there you have it. What does this have to do with what Clouscard says about ordinary ideological language, in relation to the answer to this question, with the insistence I put on telling you: everyday language is not made for knowledge. Human languages had words to designate the sun long before we had any scientific knowledge of it, yes or no?
32:36 The word existed before, but it wasn't meant for knowledge of the sun—it was meant to arrange a meeting for hunters, I don't know, as soon as the sun rises, careful, we'll have to make human sacrifices on the solstice, right? Because the sun sets between the eggs and Stonehenge—I'm saying nonsense. No matter. Anyway, there was something of that in the air. I say this because I've just come back from death in Brittany.
33:06 And well yes, before these Judeo-Bolsheviks, the Jews, brought us from the Orient these relations, these religions of transcendence, there was blood, the pagans. You laugh, but how many people are there on the internet into that stuff? So many. It's appalling, really. Well. So, I insist on this point: language isn't made for that.
33:36 It's in service of an aim. You see, I'm getting to the idea. An aim. Something one pursues. An ideal. You know, the famous passage from Mallarmé that I quoted in the last video. I'm coming back to it. "I say a flower." That's a famous passage for literary types. Mallarmé says "I say a flower," without specifying. He doesn't say a tulip, a rose, a carnation. Yes, precisely.
34:06 "I say a flower." And I'll give you the translation afterward—I'm going to translate Mallarmé's French into ordinary French. "And out of the oblivion where my voice relegates any contour, insofar as the known calyxes," that is, let's forget all the familiar flowers, the known calyxes, a past course of verse of knowledge. That is, Mallarmé: "And out of the oblivion, my voice relegates no contour, insofar as the known calyxes, musically arises when I say a flower"—what? "Idea itself." You see? There we are.
34:36 "Idea itself and suave." Have you ever seen an idea that gives off a fragrance? "Idea itself and suave, colon: the absence of any bouquet." He's right. When one wants to do so without specifying—go look at representations in every culture from the Orient to now of the flower in relation to eros. You see, the flower is what seduces, and so on. It's not the fruit, but still, it's what attracts the bumblebee that ends up closing in on itself.
35:07 "And the still-virgin rose closes jealously again on the pearly hornet, which she intoxicates as she dies." You don't know that. Maybe someone knows it. I'd be surprised, because it's not your generations anymore. Yes? Ah, you're aging me here. No, it's me who's aging, thank you, but it's nice to see that someone as young as you knows it. Yes, you can't imagine, with the... These were the most widely read poets, the Romantic generation. There you go.
35:37 And even up to my school days, everyone knew Musset's "Nuits" by heart. That's the "Nuit de printemps"—if that's more interesting. There are four, one for each season. So, "a flower," you see, connotes—it doesn't denote, denotation I'll leave to the botanists, that's not my field. You see, we're far from contours, from known calyxes. Let's speak as in the army about calyxes. But when we say "a flower," flowering, all that, it quickly suggests an unconscious.
36:11 That's especially what I want to insist on today. That's what Clouscard reminds us: ordinary ideological language manifests itself the moment one speaks as we are speaking right now, with the words of everyday language, before a Socrates arises in the city and, in order to give back a purer meaning to the words of the tribe—this is another quotation from Mallarmé—starts saying, in effect, "What do you call...?" What do you call virtue?
36:42 What do you call courage? What do you call beauty? But if the question arises, it's because we all started speaking without a license, in violation. Do you understand what I mean? We have a driving license, we don't have a speaking license. We jumped in the water with our parents, or our nurses, whoever it was who passed it on to us. We jumped in the water—we never really had... I didn't start using the word "flower" or the word "horse" only once I had the unambiguous definition. No.
The veil of language: the unconscious, Descartes, Hachette 37:14 We agree on that. So, it's something you know—we don't take advantage of what we know, we're not in relation with our own knowledge from one piece to the next. This language exists well before the demand for scientific knowledge, which is historically recent in human history. I recall that what is called the scientific revolution straddles the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. History—not even counting prehistory—began millennia earlier. The language we speak every day is behind, at that level.
37:49 But it's all the richer for that, because it contains everything we don't dare say to ourselves. That's where I come back to the unconscious. I touched on it a little with the flower business. If I'd said "the rose," that would still bring to mind the pink Minitel services. You remember, the "Minitel rose," that was porn. That's how the other guy made his fortune, what's his name?... Pardon? I didn't hear. Yes, yes, that's it, that's it. CEO of Free, right? Yes, among other things, and so on.
38:22 I only remember that my son, once he realized—he was working for Numéricâble out there, I mean, in Marne-la-Vallée. And it was in the days of the unspeakable Drahi, who was his boss, and after seven years he realized he was earning less than when he started. He timidely worked up the nerve, nice kid that he is, to ask for a raise, and the other one told him, "You're not going to put me out on the street." He'd just bought a company for 14 billion in California, with money he didn't have.
38:52 You know how it works, these financial arrangements. You know the rule. There you go. No, we're onto serious matters. "Minitel rose." Pink is connoted, for reasons we don't... Do you know why pink was chosen, and not green? For eroticism, who knows. It's strange. You see, if we start lifting the veil—the veil, that's lêthê in Greek, "alêtheia" is the Greek word for truth, right?
39:27 The veil removed. I'm thinking of Descartes. Come on, I'll give you... No, I'm serious, because I don't want to keep doing what I did in previous years, piling up more and more references until you get lost. I want to dig into the one I started the last video with, and so on. This year we're going to spiral around the same center. You see, this question of communication through ordinary ideological language.
39:57 Yes, when Descartes expresses that immense hope, once he'd found the cogito, and from there, a bit like Archimedes who said, "Give me a lever and I will move the world"—right? Descartes found this fulcrum, which allows access to a form of knowledge that has no more limits at all. What Kant will later call the temptation to overreach. It's a bit like a solid, in passing. But anyway, for now let's stick with this hope, which shows that Descartes is, in some sense, more the last figure of the Renaissance than the first of the classical age.
40:32 The Renaissance is the hope of wanting everything. There's a poem by Ronsard that begins with... Do you know it, maybe? Now I'm going to keep testing you. "I want to read the Iliad of Homer in three days." There's one that starts like that. It's typical of the era, which wanted to read everything, go back to the sources, translate. I'm quoting this text of Descartes, which is in the Discourse on Method. I'm not taking some little text, a letter to his grandmother when he was twelve. "Those long chains of reasoning, quite simple and easy, which geometers use to reach their most difficult demonstrations, had given me occasion to imagine...
41:12 Watch out, we're leaving mathematics behind. "...had given me occasion to imagine that all things which can fall within human knowledge—all things: love, cardboard, excrement, God, all things which can fall within human knowledge, the immortality of the soul—follow one another in the same way as a manual of geometry." And that's not all: "provided only that one abstains from accepting as true anything that is not," the chain—remove one link, that's it, it all has to fit together well and one must always keep the right order, from the simplest to the most complex.
41:53 And that's where we get to the veil—I was talking about the veil, I'm not rambling, my son. "There can be nothing so remote that one cannot eventually reach it, nor so hidden that one cannot discover it." And me, I picture my Descartes pulling the sheet off some lush woman, like a musketeer—careful now. No, no, but there you go, our discourse, our everyday language is connoted whether we like it or not. I worked for the Hachette group. Dare I say it, oh yes, absolutely, Hachette the octopus, as it's called in the trade, no?
42:26 Did you hear that? In union circles, "the octopus," for Hachette, the group—which started out with newsstands in train stations, originally. Hachette is named in a poem by Rimbaud—do you know that one, perhaps? In "What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers," about flowers sold at Louis Hachette's, the founder—yes, he'd understood the niche: people going to visit their grandmother in the provinces, dreading fifteen hours on the train with three changes back then—take a little sentimental novel along. That's how it started, it's interesting.
43:09 Anyway, so, that made me lose my thread. That's because I worked for Hachette for a long time. In principle, you should help me find my thread again. But no, Rimbaud, no, yes, no, Rimbaud, that was before, I was already talking about Hachette. The veil, thank you, yes, that's it. Yes, I don't always find it again, but no matter.
43:40 The idea continues—yes, I was talking about the eroticism immanent in our way... yes, that's it, when I was working for Hachette—speaking of eroticism, it's coming back to me now, you noticed. I was saying, yes, anyway, we can't put that in because Beninese capitalism—I make books for French-speaking Africa—"Mr. Pagani, we don't like that word here."
44:10 "We say liberalism, market economy, we're among decent people, we're..." Capitalism, how horrible! Hachette, hmm? That's no small capital, is it? That was before Lagardère bought it out. Isn't that right? So I say this because we're so caught up in illusion that when we discuss things among ourselves, trying to find things out and so on, we believe language has a cognitive function.
44:44 We don't realize we're not using the right tool, if you will. You see? To get there—whereas mathematicians, they've managed it. As if they wanted to calculate the surface area of a triangle, I mean, it's based on unambiguous notions. They're not representations. It's defined, one tries to be non-contradictory, to see how far one can go. Whereas... Go on! Contradiction, that's right in my outline, isn't it?
Baudelaire: autumn and twilight 45:14 Did you notice? The outline ends with the distinction between contradiction and the contradictory. If you look closely at my outline. So, I might take this opportunity to... Why did it move, that thing? For me, the internet is miraculous. I don't know what I'd do without it, but I have one big complaint—it keeps moving all the time. You know how to control it, but... I can't find my outline anymore.
45:44 And yet I had it right there. I lost the mouse. Yes. You remember that I had—for those who saw the last video, the one that opened the cycle, and the subject in all this—I commented, among other texts, on three poems, three poetic extracts.
46:16 Well, three poems. Three texts. Two poems, one extract from Hölderlin about the Ister, the Greek name for the Danube, one extract from Mallarmé, on... "what does it mean to act." "For whoever begins the exercise only by smoking," says Mallarmé. And yes, because one really has to draw on the cigar. Smoke the cigar well. There's a very beautiful portrait by Manet, showing Mallarmé on a divan, facing... there was Gide, there was the whole intelligentsia of the time, coming to Mallarmé's Tuesdays on Rue de Rome.
46:50 He listened to him talk. And you can see this cigar smoke which, good painter that Manet was, forms the diagonal of the painting. There you go. And then, since it's a response to a young man, in prose—for me, that's great poetry, but still, it's a text in prose. And then, then, I brought in two poems by Baudelaire about autumn, to be seasonal.
47:22 Not to be seasonal exactly—I took advantage of the season. But it's not a coincidence. And the first one begins with "Soon we shall plunge into the..." Excuse me, it's called "Chant d'automne," singular. "Chant d'automne": "into the cold darkness," of course. "Soon we shall plunge into the cold darkness. Farewell, bright light of our too-short summers." So there, autumn, well, what comes after autumn—winter, night—is connoted negatively.
47:54 "Soon we shall plunge into the cold darkness." There's a logic to language. "Farewell, bright light of our too-short summers. Already I hear falling, with funereal thuds, the wood resounding on the courtyard pavement." It doesn't get any better. Let me take this opportunity to fire off another arrow at the environmentalists. When wood heating was the norm, you should have seen the walls of Paris. I remember, myself, when I arrived in the fifties, right at the start, in Paris, Notre-Dame was blacker than it is now.
48:24 The soot from charcoal is far more polluting. Anyway, I'm going to get worked up, I'll stop there. "I already hear falling with funereal thuds, the wood resounding on the pavement of courtyards. All winter will enter my being: colon, anger, hatred, shivering, hard and forced labor." And the last line, I'll stop there. "And like the sun in its polar hell, my heart will be nothing but a red, frozen block." Not very cheerful, is it? What's the connection with the ambivalence, the contradiction of BSA's language?
48:59 Next poem. "Harmonie du soir" [Evening Harmony]. Here again, it has the same negative connotation for those who come, but in a calmer, more ecstatic way, if you will. "Here come the times" — it's a magnificent poem about twilight. I remind you that autumn is the twilight of the year, since we're in metaphors, right? That spring has its dawn, if you like. And you'll notice that all the texts, almost all the poems relating to autumn, have a melancholic tone, a melancholic turn, and those set in spring are a bit more fun.
49:36 Here again, there are connotations not unrelated to eros, I note in passing. What do we say about mating season? I'm not making anything up. And so this poem, much more voluptuous: "Here come the times when, vibrating on its stem, each flower evaporates like a censer, the sounds and scents turn in the evening air." Yes, they're perfect. There's nothing but sensations, nothing but impressions. Baudelaire is a contemporary of Manet; Impressionism is being born.
50:06 These are not feelings, not ideas, not reasonings. With Hugo, the best and the worst sit side by side. And no wonder, when you have 50 volumes like him, you can afford to have some waste. It's fabulous when it works. But often there is not poetry but thought put into verse, which is somewhat different. You see what I mean? Here, that's not the case. It's pure. It's incredibly modern for the time. There's no plot, no story. In this poem, nothing is being narrated. A succession, like a magic lantern, of olfactory, visual impressions: the sounds and scents turn in the evening air, melancholy waltz and languorous vertigo.
50:43 And at the end, the last stanza — I'll skip it since I analyzed it enough last time — a tender heart that hates, from the verb "to hate," the vast black nothingness, so again a negative relation to the dimension looking toward the future in terms of the verb. A tender heart that is the vast black nothingness of the luminous past gathers every trace — you see, he turns back toward the past, like Proust in Remembrance of Things Past — of the luminous past gathers every trace, the sun has drowned in its blood which congeals, etc.
Night as festival: the contradiction of the subject 51:16 You see, in both cases, night, darkness, winter — some won't be surprised, some hate winter. Fourth parenthesis: my son. Yes, I must be getting senile because I quote my son more and more. So, he lived a lot in Ivory Coast, you've understood, that's important for what follows. And in Ivory Coast there's a well-known beach called El Bassam. So we'd go to the beach — imagine when you've parked the car badly because there was no space, because all the expats park at the beach, and when you come back after it's been baking for five hours in the Ivory Coast sun, you can barely touch the steering wheel, you see.
51:54 And I'll say, come on, roll the windows down fast, we're suffocating. No, no, dad, let's stay a bit longer, we're fine here. You see, some people like that. I'll say, you're crazy. There, no, he's a real cold-sensitive one. So, it's connotated negatively. Well, I quote that same Baudelaire — that's how it's done. So, to go down, you have to raise your fingers. Right, right. What dialectic is that.
52:26 In a prose poem called "Refreshing darkness of the gifts." It's no longer the same tone. So look — I don't know about the prose poem, but this excerpt. "O night, singular, o refreshing, plural, darkness, you are for me the signal of an inner celebration." But hold on, isn't there a contradiction there? I'll go deeper into a contradiction in a moment. "You are, night, the deliverance from an anguish in the solitude of the plains, in the stony labyrinths of a capital" — implied, in the world of day.
52:58 Twinkling of the stars, explosion of lanterns. You are the fireworks of the goddess Liberty." Great. But that completely contradicts the previous texts. That's why I put in the outline, right, that this language of Clouscard's, this ideological, everyday language, is that of a subject. And what characterizes a subject is internal contradiction. I'm not saying that sometimes we contradict ourselves, that happens — who doesn't do that, that's not the question.
53:30 Some are saying, "me, never." That's the most general case, but that's it. It's the oak and the reed. No, but what's serious here is that I'm saying internal contradiction is constitutive of every subject. If you and I are not merely objects, like the mountain which, because of erosion, is decreasing in height over millions of years and which, after a few million years, becomes a plain — what geographers call a peneplain.
54:05 You know, when it's a former mountain that could be 10,000 meters high — there have been some — and then it flattens out. At every instant that it's diminishing, millimeter by millimeter, the mountain, you mustn't say it was high and became low. That's for us, looking at it. It, at every instant, is entirely itself. You see, there's no contradiction in objects. For there to be contradiction, there must be diction — objects don't speak. That's precisely what defines objects.
Animal communication and human language 54:37 As for the matter of animal language, it's a bit more complicated, but let me remind you all the same, we're here to set things straight. There are, in the animal world, communication systems of incredible efficiency. Careful, though: it's only by metaphor that one can speak of language. I'm thinking of bees or dolphins, to take illustrious examples that have been studied — I'm thinking of von Frisch who studied bees, the language of bees, you know. Some of you know roughly how bees communicate.
55:09 No? Yes, yes, well done, yes. With a dance, yes, it's through dance, you know that — a great dancer, sorry, allow me to say — no, not in the Latin sense, I wouldn't allow myself that. The bee teaches, the dance. This is serious business — yes, the scout bee, when she's found booty, comes back to the hive and, to communicate to the community where it is, in what direction, at what distance, and in what quantity.
55:44 well, quantity, in a manner of speaking — there's a lot, there isn't much — she does a figure-eight dance, this has been very precisely observed, figure-eight shaped, whose frequency is inversely proportional to the quantity of the find: if there's a lot, yes, yes, I do the figure eights very fast, right, otherwise it's a bit more moderato cantabile, right — and the angle formed by the axis of the figure eight relative to the sun, or rather the bisector, the angle the sun makes with the bee itself, indicates the direction, and the hive follows. It's very sophisticated. I'm not saying only humans communicate, no, it's a form of communication, not a language — a very developed form of animal communication. I won't give a thousand examples — dolphins, everyone's fascinated by sonar, you know, with sound vibrations, like many cetaceans besides, like whales; it's dolphins who have the most sophisticated version. Why?
56:52 First, because there's the innate and the acquired: there are no dance conservatories in hives where bees go to learn, say, which dance to perform to communicate — no, it's programmed from birth in every individual bee, it's in the genes, it's programmed. And above all, a great discovery inherent to the start of modern linguistics, that is, subsequent to the famous Course in General Linguistics — that was before structuralism, structuralism borrowed the word from Saussure, but Saussure wasn't a structuralist — an immense scholar, a linguist, in which Saussure reminds us that what characterizes properly human language above every other attribute — there's no other, to our knowledge — is the double level of articulation.
57:48 Does anyone see what that is? It's a university — it's more, I see what you mean, that's quite right, but it's not the same thing. It's a science, that's yet another thing, the arbitrariness of the sign, all that, we'll get to it, you're right, but here it's the double level of articulation, that is, our language presupposes two articulations: one which articulates the whole set of sounds that the human throat can emit, and that has nothing to do with culture or history, that's in our nature, that is, the human throat can emit certain sounds, below certain frequencies and above them it cannot — which, by contrast, the dog can do, the bat, you know, ultrasounds, bats, there — so that, the set of sounds the human throat can emit, gives a status to what's called phonetics, which classifies them, and also arranges them into signs, but phonetics is not phonology.
58:58 we don't speak — no people speaks language in general, but each people speaks a particular, determined language, right, which doesn't have the same phonetics, doesn't use — which has exactly the same stock that other human beings can emit, but doesn't use it all. I'm thinking of English, which never uses the [French] U — yes or no? Whereas in German, it's there, for example the U, you see, count in English up to 10, that is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 — I say no, it's not 8, it's 8 [with the French U] — when I say 8, you see, the U is hard — there, and then we have all sorts of sounds, Russian has sounds that we don't have, I don't know — so, generally speaking, that's what makes phonetics, in the end, a natural science — the set of sounds the human throat allows — while phonology is a human science. You see these distinctions? They seem like nothing, but you see how much work it takes — everyday language, even with words that go a bit beyond ordinary usage, if I may say so.
1:00:08 of that language — so that's where we see that it hasn't been done, we can't fail to recognize this double level of articulation. There's the first, which I've just defined, and the second — yes, now we can get to it — which Médine was reminding you of, is the arbitrariness of the sign in human language, which distinguishes it, which distinguishes the world of the sign, which is the properly human world, from the world of the signal to which the animal has access. Smoke signals fire, no smoke without fire — so in the bush, there's an antelope that smells fire, it moves off, because it knows a bushfire somewhere, it's the dry season, it has no wish to be grilled, it leaves. What's the difference?
1:00:58 It's that the relation between the signifier and the signified is not at all the same in the two cases. In the animal's case, there is a natural link between signifier and signified — there's no smoke without fire, that's not a human decision. Right? Whereas to say "lion," well, you know, you'll say Löwe in German, right? Lion in French, we'll say, yes, okay, they resemble each other, it's Indo-European, there's the L, yes, fine — but in Malian, well, one says "diarra," D-I-A-R-R-A, you know it because there are footballers named that, right?
1:01:32 That's how you escape the miseries of immigration, we do it well, just as African-Americans got out of segregation through jazz and boxing, well, and sport — it's interesting, all this, it repeats itself — but "diarra" has nothing to do with "lion," there's no relation at all in human language between the signifier — there's the arbitrariness of the signifier — that means it presupposes a relation between subjects, that if I had been raised, adopted by Chinese parents, I would speak Chinese, I would understand neither "diarra" nor "lion," that means I had to be in contact — it's not in my genes, there are no French-language genes in us, well yes, you suspect as much, but we do everything to forget it — language is not natural, it wouldn't exist without this contribution from nature, careful, it's not because I'm diminishing the role of nature that I'm diminishing that of matter, all this is material, language brings us the sounds the throat emits, and if the guy's throat is wrecked or if he's mute,
Helen Keller and ternary language 1:02:42 you know there are substitutes, sign languages, semaphores — man will always find a way to agree, convention, code, highway code, will find a way to reintroduce a system of signs where the signifier never has anything to do with the signified, has no natural link — when I say nothing to do with it, the limit case being — but some of you have surely heard of the famous Helen Keller, no?
1:03:15 Do the old-timers know? Can you remind us, Victor, of Helen Keller's case? Honestly, the poor woman had a bad start in life — mute from birth, deaf, blind. And yet she taught university courses in her life, she wrote books — how did she manage it? Through love, I'm searching for the title of her book, I don't recall it, the title of her memoirs, anyway — the love of a servant, a nurse who looked after her, household staff, who, every time she asked for something to drink, like a little animal, deaf, mute, blind — she hadn't had a relationship with the other — thank you for coming, there are trains to catch, thank you very much, I've come from Grenoble — every time she asked for a drink, before satisfying the need, she'd take the girl's finger and make it trace a circle in the sink, because she still had touch left — that's where you see you have to remain materialist, the senses have to be workable — there, and so she began to create a bond,
1:04:25 a code, and it makes the little girl's brain explode — you know that's been measured too — feral children, it's been observed that they don't have a very developed synaptic system, you need stimulation, training, just as a muscle would atrophy if it wanted, if it weren't trained — there, so I insist a great deal on the fact that language results more from a subject-to-subject relation than an object relation, even if language allows us to communicate objects to one another, and that's why I often say that language is ternary, that is, through language, I, number one, allow me, you, number two, or the reverse, communicate the notion of a computer.
Aristotle and the principle of non-contradiction 1:05:17 Two subjects, right, communicate objects to each other — language is ternary, it's interesting to see that, it's not stimulus-reflex, it's not binary, like cognitive senses. And all this, to show — you might get the impression that Clouscard writes rather off the cuff, lacking rigor — well, I could have been rigorous from the start; I'm showing that one cannot arrive at absolute rigor with this kind of language, at least not at an unequivocal rigor.
1:05:52 So, I've shown the contradictory side, but you'll tell me, wait, Baudelaire has the right to find one evening that the night is dreadful, that winter is to be feared, and another time to rejoice, what a beautiful winter, right, this snow, why not — yes, but here I'm talking about internal contradictions constitutive of anthropology, that's what I insist on, that you and I would not be human beings if we were not traversed diagonally, through and through, by an internal contradiction between us and ourselves. When I say internal, I'm not talking about hostility toward an external opponent, so it's much more serious, if you will. So, for that, we need to agree, and that's where I'll introduce the distinction — I'll introduce the distinction between contradiction and the contradictory.
1:06:57 When I say internal contradiction, I haven't departed from the rule of non-contradiction. It sounds like I'm confusing you — no, on the contrary, we're clarifying things. Aristotle gave us, handed down to us, this invaluable advantage of being able to speak rigorously about contradiction. When, in his Metaphysics — one can call it, roughly, his opus magnum, well, it's complicated with Aristotle, because there are several opus magna, I mean, the Physics in several volumes, but the Metaphysics, many books, chapters — the first three chapters, I'm not saying to skip them, they're fabulously interesting, but it's the first history of philosophy, a bit like in On the Soul, he summarizes the opinions of his predecessors on the question.
1:07:54 And so, we only get to the heart of the matter in the fourth book, Book Gamma, in Greek terms — it's alpha, beta — in the fourth book. And this fourth book opens with a solemn statement that apparently has no connection either with language or with contradiction. It's — do you know it? "Being is said in many ways" — it's rather difficult. Before that, there is, there is a science. Ah, there is a science of being. More than that, there is a science that studies being qua being.
1:08:29 Solemn, all of a sudden — being, not being qua something, being that moves, that's the object of the physicist. Metaphysics isn't needed for that, to study motion. Not being that moves and that has sensations, that's biology — well, it's not called biology, it's the animate being that has a soul. Among the Greeks, psychology and biology are merged. Animals have a soul, plants too. So everything that is living, animate, as opposed to inert — the notion of "animate" is more extensive among the ancients than among the moderns.
1:09:05 So, there is a science that studies being, not qua being-in-motion, animate being, but that studies being qua being. That's the fundamental one. And, first statement, second statement, there is a science — it's a single one — that studies being qua being. That's the philosopher's task. He's the only one. Which neither the physicists nor the others do. This chapter is important. And, to refute the sophists — because Plato has been opposed to Aristotle for 2500 years, we do nothing but oppose them.
1:09:35 And God knows there's reason to. Aristotle often takes the opposite position when he criticizes the mathematicians or the dialecticians — even if he doesn't name them, it's somewhat against the Platonists, more than against Plato himself, actually. A bit like Nietzsche railing more against the Wagnerians than against Wagner. Well, the parallel stops there. Back to Aristotle. Here, he shows just how much he agrees with Plato on essential matters against their common adversaries, the sophists. Because he seeks — to bring this back to the passage on contradiction — he seeks to arrive at propositions that no one can contest, not even the most twisted of sophists and skeptics, etc.
1:10:11 And he finds precisely the principle that will get all mathematics started: the principle of non-contradiction, the principle of identity. Right? The same thing — if stated positively, it's the principle of identity; if stated negatively, the principle of non-contradiction. That's what Descartes was alluding to when he speaks of those long chains of reasons — chains meaning no link falls, otherwise everything collapses. If you find a contradiction in a demonstration, the whole demonstration has to be reviewed.
1:10:42 You see? Very important. And so, the criterion of relevance in mathematics is not a relation to something external, as with physics or chemistry or biology. It's not an applied science. But it's what will allow all applications to be scientific. Its principle, mathematics' principle, is not what exists, it's not existence, it's essence. And essence consists in there being no contradiction between statements. Statements, essences — we're not...
1:11:12 You see? Because I can make a non-contradictory statement about things that don't exist. A castle of 6 million rooms has twice as many as one of 3 million. Do you agree? There's no contradiction in that, even though there has never been a castle of 6 million rooms. You see? No, but you can make plenty of statements. An angel is an imaginary figure. You see? That's not a contradictory sentence. An angel is an imaginary figure. I'm speaking of something that doesn't exist, but I'm making a non-contradictory statement.
1:11:47 But I haven't yet arrived at the essential point that Aristotle now reaches. Because he says: "Since this principle, which governs all true knowledge and which defeats the opportunism of the sophist and the skeptic, is so important, we must examine more closely under what conditions we can say there is contradiction." Aristotle did an enormous amount of work to arrive at three conditions. In my outline I'm moving toward the somewhat odd heading "Contradiction and temporality"
Contradiction and temporality 1:12:17 what does time have to do with this? You see? You'll see why. He says: for two statements to be contradictory, two opposite attributes — hot, cold, big, small, two opposite attributes — must be affirmed at the same time — you see, that's where time comes in — of the same subject, thirdly, in the same respect. I'll develop this, now I'll illustrate it afterward so it's less abstract.
1:12:51 At the same time — if I say "Socrates is old, Socrates is young," that's not contradictory if I mean he's young at 15 and old at 70. Do you agree? It's so obvious we forget it. So Aristotle was right to point out that for it to be contradictory, it has to be at the same time. I arrive at a crossroads and I don't know whether to go left or right — I don't want my right leg going right and my left leg going left, that hurts. Yet that's what philosophy has been doing for 2500 years, even more so in the schools of opinion [opontique]. He's not entirely stupid.
1:13:22 You have to want, with everyday language, to have the rigor of mathematics. So, at the same time — next, of the same subject. It always has to be about Socrates. He's old, young, that he's annoying, interesting — we're talking about the same subject. And thirdly, in the same respect — one can say Socrates at 65 is old in his arteries and young in character, in vigor, in wit, in character and temperament.
1:13:57 So it's necessary — Aristotle traps, right there, all the opportunists. All three conditions really need to be fulfilled. I myself dwell on the "at the same time." Why? Because as Heraclitus says, you never bathe twice in the same river. There isn't a single instant of time that is "at the same time" as another. And there's a hugely famous passage in Hegel's Phenomenology where he speaks of the "now." Those who have tackled it, even those who got discouraged, who gave up on the book after four exhausting chapters.
1:14:29 Most people give up starting with "Force and Understanding," I've noticed. They still reached that passage though. But before that, what seems simplest, sense-certainty, the "this-here" — those who think the most certain thing is what I see, what I touch, etc. You have to start there, you have to be honest. He speaks of the here and the now. This sense-certainty consists in dwelling on what is this, here, now. So it's a double dimension, spatial, here and now, temporal.
1:15:00 And he says, the now has ceased to be at the very moment I speak of it. The now that is, is other than the one that was indicated. Yes, there's a whole magnificent sentence. "And we see that the now is just this: that it is already no longer, when it is." Listen carefully to that sentence. So, one can have an internal contradiction — I'm picking up my thread again — which is constitutive of man, without it being contradictory, because it's not at all certain that it's at the same time.
1:15:32 We're in temporality, in flux. Because if we were like pebbles in eternity and in the instant, as I was saying about the mountain earlier, we'd be dead. It's good news that we're in time. I say this because among the counter-revolutionaries there's a master of them, de Maistre—I don't know if you know Joseph de Maistre a bit, "the impeccable one" as Baudelaire called him. A counter-revolutionary of real stature, mind you, this isn't a matter of pretending, in this...
1:16:02 De Maistre said, "Man is not made for time." It's one of his most famous statements. He joins the bad side of Plato. For Plato, time is always a degradation. Do you agree? Every time, the more time passes, the further we get from... It's the Ion that concludes this. Exactly. And then at the origin—let me open a Platonic parenthesis—he's still the greatest artist in the history of thought, a prodigious stage director.
1:16:37 His introductions, his epilogues—what a dramatist! In the Timaeus, one of his last dialogues, he says the world was created by someone, a potter, who looks at the models, over there, in the world of ideas, where there's the perfect circle, and who, with his clay, tries a bit like I'm doing right now with natural language, to bring you toward rigor. How does Clouscard put it? Start from ordinary ideological language to arrive at the necessity of the concept.
1:17:11 You see we're still on the same problem, but we've made progress. Plato's potter tries, with the clay, to sculpt the ideas, that's clear enough. At this moment—this is where we talk about Plato's humor—he was drunk at the moment of creation. So the potter's wheel slipped a little, and the circles became ovals, planets.
1:17:43 He didn't yet know that the planets had elliptical orbits, we'd have to wait for Kepler, but still, that's what it means: there are flaws in the world around us, what do you want? It's because at the origin, the demiurge was drunk. There you go. We're dealing with very serious things. My transition to the relation between contradiction and temporality is a bit difficult, but that's why I gave you the reference, and I refer you back to it—read that extraordinary text from Book IV, it's not very long, in Aristotle's Metaphysics. Look at the solemnity he brings to introducing this principle—he talks around this principle for ten pages before stating it: "so now we shall state it, since it allows us to..." and then, delay again, and there: two contradictory attributes cannot belong to the same subject, at the same time, in the same respect—take it in whatever order you like—cannot belong at the same time, to the same subject, in the same respect.
1:18:45 So, one last thing, then I'll hand it over to you—this is a hypothesis I'm putting forward now, so I'm trying to be intellectually honest: it seemed to me I was passing on solid ground up to this point; from here on, it's a Pagani hypothesis, so you can check me on it, it's not Plato, Aristotle, all that, I can't measure it. I think the fact that contradiction is constitutive of anthropology comes from the fact that we never go all the way to the end of "know thyself"—we have an interest in not knowing everything, if you will. So our relation to time is a flight we're constantly engaged in, a beneficial one, it has created anthropology, so as not to remain in—I don't know—either an anxiety that would paralyze us, or, you see, it's a hypothesis I'm putting forward like that.
Contradiction and the contradictory 1:19:39 So, since I've been in the abstract for a while now, I'd like us to rest our brains a bit thanks to your questions, if you have any now. I'll ask Pierre-Alain if I haven't forgotten anything with regard to our friends online. I was going to say—don't forget that those who are online, thanks to the technology linking us to Radiojour, can ask questions at the same time, yes.
1:20:14 I had a question—you said we were going to see the difference between contradiction and the contradictory. Oh yes, well yes, thank you, thank you. Well, no, that's quickly said, we've done the essential work, so it's quickly seen: the contradictory is what's forbidden in mathematics, right? And I'm showing that we are in contradiction—I want and I don't want, I love and I hate, the same person sometimes, ambivalences, as Freud says, it's a term in Freud, ambivalence. It's not ambiguity—ambiguity is being two-faced, to put it plainly, it's someone who knows what the truth is and doesn't want to say it, hides it, camouflages it. Ambivalence is a case where, without my knowing it, I don't see to what extent I'm contradicting myself. I'll take a rather strong example: the mother who is anxious—anxious, I say "the mother," I myself was worse than my wife—when the baby gets too close to the edge of the pool, or things like that, I don't know, oh my God, he's going to kill himself, or he gets too close to the balcony, you see, there are women more anxious than others. Freud goes so far as to say that she would rather like to be rid of the baby, because she sees all her friends
1:21:24 going to balls, going out to parties, and she's like, ever since I gave birth, I'm stuck like this—you mustn't say it's malicious on the woman's part, it's her unconscious, it's not her, just as it's not because Oedipus wants to kill his father that he kills him—it's not that; the son's love for his father is no less sincere, is it, than the Oedipal rivalry. There you go, acting out—I look in the shop window, right, at a dream shirt, I'm not going to break the window to take it, all the same. So there, so my answer: the contradictory, which is truly logical, is two contradictory statements, forbidden in scientific notions; contradiction, on the other hand, has the right to enter existence insofar as the two terms of the opposition are precisely not simultaneous, and that's where we see the fruitfulness of the Hegelian notion of "moment," which resolves the aporia of Baudelaire from earlier—why Baudelaire sometimes says the night, the coming winter, is a nightmare, a tender heart that hates the vast black void of the luminous past
1:22:34 gathers up every last vestige, right, and on the contrary, the night, how does he put it, is the feast and the lantern of freedom—it's not the same moment, it's not the same disposition. We have all—because we have all been children before being men, as Descartes admirably says in the Discourse on Method—had to be guided by our appetites and our tutors, who were not always in agreement with each other; that's, in reduced form, what we've had to take on. Our tutors, parents, educators said: don't talk with your mouth full, put your hand in front of your mouth when you yawn, you must never show the organic interior, you must never demonstrate that we are desiring, vulnerable, and determined beings, as a machine is—it's interesting, you see, education has a meaning that no doubt escapes both the tutors and the tutored, if I may allow myself that barbarism—you see, there's a meaning: you must not exhibit your naturalness like that, we've had ten thousand years of history, it's not in order to regress. Clouscard didn't like seeing couples kissing at the table in a restaurant, he'd say, I don't want
1:23:44 the mixing of the organic. There, that settles the contradictory: the contradictory is logical, contradiction is ontological, it enters into existence in man, and that is his privilege. A question from those online? So, there's a question from Estavisky. From whom?
Kant, time and interiority 1:24:14 Estavisky. Ah, the faithful one! The faithful ones, very short, school of the good life in all that. I won't rise to the provocation, I'm quite happy about it, moreover. Then, a more serious question, I told you: why does Kant insist so much on removing the reference to time in his formulation of the principle of identity—the supreme principle of analytic judgments, in parentheses?
1:24:47 There, someone who knows their stuff. Yes, well, it's funny because I gave the answer before you told me the question. It's because contradiction is a drama in man. There's a tragic side to existence, without great trembling, I say that just to say it. The Pascalian analysis of diversion—I deliberately use as a reference a great Christian, you see, but one who is more materialist on this point and more realistic than many holy-water frogs.
1:25:23 If you look, because he was the first who could explain our behaviors, unlike today's cognitive sciences which still lag behind on this, right? That is, which explain our behaviors by a carrot placed in front of us, this stimulus, this reflex, I mean, by an enzyme, a gene, etc., an object—whereas Pascal explains our behaviors not by something posited, positive, in front of me, but as something behind my back that I'm fleeing. That's what diversion is in Pascal.
1:25:54 "When I set myself to examine men, I noticed that all their unhappiness comes from a single thing, which is not knowing how to stay quietly in a room." Whereas a dog could be given the same food every day, as long as it has its master near it, it doesn't care about the rest, it can have the same life every day, it doesn't get bored, it doesn't have the problem of boredom. That's important. "You know him, reader, this delicate monster—hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother." Speaking of boredom, that's the first poem of Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, with that magnificent apostrophe, contradictory, since he says to the reader, hypocrite reader—he starts by pushing him away, slapping him, and then, my likeness, my brother.
1:26:37 We're all in the same boat. There. Yes, because, that said, to be fair to Kant, Kant does have the merit, all the same, of being the first to make the turn that leads to Hegel and Marx on this point—namely, that the two terms of the problem of knowledge are no longer, on one side, the subject, and on the other, the essentially spatial object, as had been the case since antiquity, that is, the relation of thought and extension—if you know your classics, in Descartes, that's it, the relation between the cogito and the res extensa, extension, space.
1:27:20 Whereas from Kant on, he's the first to show that time is the primary constitution of the subject. That is, we couldn't perceive space if we didn't first have a relation to time. How could I go from that far end over there to the table if time weren't given? You see, for instance. And so, after distinguishing—I'm doing Kant justice here, to keep answering—after distinguishing the two a priori forms of sensibility (they're not categories, they're a priori forms of sensibility, it's precise, Kant's language is democratic, he never uses a technical word without first telling you what it means).
1:27:59 The a priori forms of sensibility are the frameworks without which we couldn't exercise our senses at all. We wouldn't see anything, we wouldn't hear anything. And there are two forms: space and... How could I perceive a sound if there were no time? Even if it lasts a millionth of a second, I mean, already I don't hear it, it's not enough, but you see, a fortiori, there has to be duration for me to even begin to perceive it.
1:28:30 And to sustain the sound, even at the same pitch, one has to keep acting to produce it—with the bow, with breath, whatever. So, space is, Kant says—now I'll be precise—the a priori form of all external sensations; I couldn't perceive this computer if it weren't in space, for example. And then he says: time—and I think of my grandmother who, alas, passed away long ago, because grandmothers are perishable—but that, my representation of her, has nothing spatial about it.
1:29:10 But on the other hand, it's a duration. Our imagination—I refer you to Bergson, who wrote a beautiful page on this—and then all of a sudden, Kant, thinking to draw this out, says, ultimately, since every spatial sensation passes through the internal sense, time is the a priori form of all our sensations. Immediately with regard to space, and immediately with regard to internal intuitions. If I'm not being clear, tell me.
1:29:41 It seems to me Kant is quite clear, he has the merit of making pertinent distinctions. There. In any case, starting from him—and now I'm really insisting on this historical side that leads to Hegel and Marx—it's man's relation to time; the next step will be Hegel and history. And after that, it will be Marx, who opens a door leading onto a path that can lead to a science of history. You see, I'm being careful. Obviously we would need to actually get there. We're not there yet. It's up to you to kick that door open and take that path, collectively, of course, so that the human sciences no longer have to put quotation marks around the word "science."
1:30:23 I prefer to say "the historical sciences." That's my incorrigibly Marxist side, because I can't imagine a linguistics, a literary study, etc., that would exist outside of history. I've simply never seen one. All the human sciences study behaviors or events that take place within History with a capital H. There. So I insist on the fact that Kant is a great turning point into interiority, because time is more interior than space.
1:30:57 And to illustrate this—I'll stop with this answer, since I don't want to eat into the other questions—but one must look, in history, among what are called the fine arts, right? In the order that runs from the arts producing works most engaged with exteriority—I'm thinking of architecture or sculpture, where all the dimensions of space are present. Length, width, height, depth—in a sculpture, in a building, you have all of that.
1:31:31 Then—I'm making big leaps here—you move to painting: there are only two dimensions left, there's no depth, since it isn't really present there, but indirectly, mediately, through the artifice that came to be called, from the Renaissance on, perspective. Which means, let me note in passing, that all painting—there's no need to wait for the Cubists—all painting is abstract, all painting, insofar as it unfolds on a surface, unlike architecture and sculpture, all painting, all images in general—this isn't meant for this screen—is abstract, that is, makes an abstraction, calls on our imagination to produce the depth and everything else that isn't materially there.
1:32:24 We remain within space, but with only two dimensions left. And then with music, there is no longer any spatial dimension at all; instead, internally and temporally, if there is no time, there is simply no more music at all. There, that's to make you understand how much of a link there is between temporality and interiority. Man has interiorized contradiction—I come back to the earlier question—and that's what puts him in time, like the river, I don't know.
Subject and substance in Hegel 1:32:57 I didn't hear. I'd have a small question to follow up a bit on the title of the lecture you gave us, and the subject in all this. Yes. You spoke, of course, of Kant and Hegel, and I'd have another question, about substance in all this too. The subject, there's substance, and between Kant and Hegel there are Fichte and Schelling, so you gave a magnificent account of the almost Schellingian temptation of our era to repress the subject in order to plunge into the night of substance, repressing the repressed as subject. Except that there's another temptation that Hegel—on the word too—it's the temptation of Schelling, it's...
1:33:31 The temptation? The Schellingian one, the milieu of substance in order to plunge into the subject alone. There's a fairly large shortage of essence. We've had a great... A lasting shortage? There's a Schellingian moment—now that the Schellingian moment has taken hold, there's an essence, there's a substance—perhaps the Fichtean temptation can return, that of the subject without substance. And could you tell us how Hegel manages to overcome precisely this temptation? It's always present in him, since he's buried like a Fichte.
1:34:01 He always relies more on the subject than on substance. Darn, I meant to bring that up myself. Good, you beat me to it. But still. Yes, it's important. It's important. It's no innocent sign that he asked that, of course. I'll repeat, for those following remotely, Victor's question, which presupposes, to be understood, that we recall a bit that Hegel's philosophy only truly takes on its specific shape from the moment he breaks with the two thinkers who had the most influence at the time, the two philosophers—now we can say it very precisely—Fichte and Schelling.
1:34:44 I'm giving them here in chronological order. Fichte was already fairly old by the time these young men—these three young men, Schelling, Hegel and Hölderlin—were all together at the Protestant seminary in Tübingen, which I visited; I was in the courtyard, I'll put up a photo, I can show you the window of the room. Thank you, Sébastien, we'll understand each other. You took me there. So, Fichte and Schelling were by far the two most influential thinkers of the time, of what's called German Idealism, the most difficult and most fruitful of periods.
1:35:27 I won't dwell too long on this period—I wouldn't keep coming back to it so often if I didn't remind us, since it might annoy some people—what's he going on about with idealism again? I'm thinking of certain people who are a bit sectarian, let's say. I could name a few little chapels, but there are several. Anyway, I find that this is always a waste of time. I'll remind you that in the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx pays tribute to German Idealism.
1:36:00 That's the moment when he breaks with his Feuerbachian, naturalist youth, incidentally—which is important in his development. Feuerbach had the great merit of upending the religious taboo, mind you, but to the benefit of nature, and completely neglecting the historical dimension, which does pose a slight gap in anthropology. And so Marx recalls that it was German Idealism that made it possible—even if in mystified forms—to recall the Tätigkeit, as they say, the activity of the subject.
1:36:39 There, that answers your question. And thank you for your question. Am I being clear—I say this for our friends outside. I'll move on now to my answer, because Victor's question ultimately concerns the notion of subject compared to that of substance. It's a very interesting question, and you'll see, we come back to how trapped everyday language is, and at the same time how fruitful these traps are as soon as we interrogate them—which is what Socrates was the first to do, right?
1:37:10 Let me open a parenthesis before continuing: I get comments quite often saying I don't understand why Pagani keeps insisting on the Socratic revolution, the birth of philosophy resting on the distinction between "what do you call it" and "what is it." Surely it's not so—okay, fine, I do see the difference, but is it really so important? It's enormously important. I'll remind you that the title of one of the most famous books—it's not every day I quote Foucault, take advantage of it—is The Order of Things [Les mots et les choses, literally Words and Things]. That's quite a dichotomy after all.
1:37:41 Between "what do you call it" — I recall that the astronomer asks the question "what is the sun?" Is it a planet, is it a star—and the little philosopher standing below the telescope addresses the astronomer, not the sun, who will never answer. "What do you call the sun?" There, a dialogue can be established, depending on the astronomer's answer, etc. You see, the stakes are enormous—monologue on one side, dialogue on the other. I close my parenthesis, these are important reminders.
1:38:13 I come back to subject and substance. I tell you, you'll see just how much language is, to borrow a word from Clouscard, sly—damn, that guy's sly. So, etymologically, the two words mean the same thing. Whereas the whole of Hegelian philosophy is based on the opposition between subject and substance. I'm not saying this behind Hegel's back—there's a famous passage in the Preface to the Phenomenology, the work where he takes on his full shape, where he says very clearly, according to my point of view, which will be laid out at the end, in the system—this is a preface—everything depends on this essential point, open your ears.
1:38:49 When Hegel says "an essential point," that's extremely rare, because he doesn't like to say what's essential—for him, what matters is the detail and the development. But still, for once, it's so important that he says everything depends on this essential point, colon: to apprehend—I've now given you the exact words—to apprehend and express the true, no longer, implicitly, as it has been since the beginning of philosophy, as substance, but also, precisely, as subject. That answers your question. But also, and precisely, as subject.
1:39:19 So, you speak of precision—I come back now to my etymology: substare, to stand beneath, in particular—let the words speak, that's the best thing to do. Language knows more than we do; we think we use language, but language uses us if we don't question it, if we just say, oh come on, you're talking nonsense, don't say that, it's not correct usage. So, substare, that which stands beneath—beneath what? Beneath attributes, of course. Like a saucepan.
1:39:50 Because the water, the vegetables, the salt, you have to put them in some container, yes or no. The container is the substance. Now, Aristotle doesn't say "container," he says "substrate." You see? Second meaning of substrate: that which is underneath. So, I can say of the flower, it's superb, it's wilted, it's faded, it's radiant, it's pink, it's green, whatever you like. But none of these attributes could exist if there weren't something to carry them.
1:40:23 Have you ever seen yellow that is neither the yellow of a sweater, nor of a notebook, nor of a book, nor of a chick? What is it? Attributes don't exist if there isn't a subject in the grammatical sense. Yes, I said "subject" instead of "substance." You see it's the same word at root, except one is Latin, "that which stands beneath." And "subject" is a bit more archaic, also Latin, from subjacere, whose supine or participle gives "conceptum," which you find again in "concept," by the way—the c being pronounced like a k originally.
1:41:00 So, namely, that which "jacere"—jacere is what gives us the French verb "gésir" [to lie]. Do you know this verb? Where do you find yourself? Yes, "ci-gît" [here lies] in cemeteries. Yes, it's a defective verb used only in a few forms, "ci-gît" generally. Sometimes in the imperfect, "il gisait là" [he lay there], but it's not used much. In any case, word for word, the subject is that which lies, that which is thrown down there, same root, underneath.
Beware of adjectives: subject, predicate, alienation 1:41:35 The subject, the B has disappeared, for euphonic reasons, before J. So it means the same thing, which allows one to give unity to all these qualities that I'm laying out here. We're saying things that are politically important — and what does that have to do with politics? But wait, we're right in the middle of it. There was a Nobel Prize awarded recently, wasn't there? A Mr. Aspect, among others. I think there were some fine ones too, no? Weren't there three who received it?
1:42:05 Well, in any case, the Nobel Prize was awarded to a team that made enormous advances in quantum theory. All right? I'll tell you without going into detail, I don't know anything about it. You need accounts, you have to be serious. There are pages and pages of equations at quite a high level, I presume, the models used in this. On the other hand, I read the reports. They're written in language — what does he call it, Clouscard? — ideological, ordinary language.
1:42:35 "Ah, it's extraordinary, we've finally recognized the genius of those who definitively brought down the notion of matter." That's what I read! If that's not ideological, nothing is. But yes! As soon as we switch to everyday language — you've understood what I've meant since the start of this session. As soon as we switch to everyday language, he's right, ordinary language is ideological, and not just at certain moments. As soon as I want to express the work — and I'd love to, but I'm not good enough at math to follow the actual modeling of these scholars.
1:43:12 But on the other hand, there are people who make use of this work, work that is often scientifically robust. But let me remind you that one can be an immense scholar and an ardent supporter of the Third Reich, and think that the Jew — or rather the Judeo-Bolshevik, since it's all the same brood — Marx, the Jew, Christ too, all that stuff comes to us from the Orient. It doesn't come from the steppes or the forests.
1:43:44 Marx said one should avoid stirring up the Teutonic forests, in a famous text — you know that. Tell that to your environmentalist friends. So this is important, what we're seeing here. I'm going to tell you something important, important, something operative for each and every one of you, easily. Beware of adjectives.
1:44:17 It's in adjectives that one detects the ideological side of a discourse. When you're told about the appalling crimes of the Russians — there certainly are some. What war doesn't have appalling crimes? We shouldn't kid ourselves either. But you see, someone will speak of appalling crimes when there have been the first massive bombardments, a few days ago, on Ukraine — we're now talking about 14 dead, or 19 on their side. All right? There were about 75,000 dead in Raqqa, and nobody cares, in Syria.
1:44:53 Isn't that so? In Yemen, a few months ago, not that long before the war in Ukraine began, the UN, humanitarian organizations, said it was the greatest humanitarian tragedy on the planet at the time. Remember? I'm not inventing anything. We don't talk about it anymore. So what does "appalling" mean? It's an adjective that measures nothing. You see where I'm trying to get to? There is no science except of the measurable. Careful, I didn't say of the measured — I'm not a positivist — but of the measurable, something that, in case of dispute, can lend itself to measurement.
1:45:27 Which is what led Leibniz to that beautiful motto: when in doubt, let us calculate. You see, this is important, what we're looking at. The subject, the substance, is opposed to the attributes. Or if you prefer, the subject to the predicate, in logic — it's simple, these look like abstract words. The subject, God, is eternal — predicate. That's what is said of the subject. "Prêche" [sermon] has the same root.
1:45:57 There you have the predicate. Hegel insists a great deal that when discussing the predicate, one must not keep the subject as a fixed point. It's an obsession with him. It's very important. That fixed point is the substantial apprehension. I'm dwelling a bit on the answer to Victor's question because it lets us sum up a bit the essence of what we've seen, the philosophical takeaway.
1:46:27 We all, in grammar at primary school, had our first logical acquisitions granted to us by the schoolteacher. Namely, what is the subject? What did he tell us prompts it? Yes? Who is it that? Yes, it's the answer to the question "who is it that?" There you go. Not "what." All right. So there we are, we've solved everything, that's settled.
1:46:58 Plato began, Pagani finished, philosophy — we can't do any more. But no, the problems are just beginning. It's that in words, yes, the subject is someone, not something. That's what I'm saying, it's "who," not "what." But in reality, in everyday language, is it literal meaning or figurative meaning? I almost gave that title to today's session. Literal meaning and figurative meaning — it comes down to much the same thing. You see? My example is very simple, some of you have already heard it: the wind shakes the trees.
1:47:31 The teacher will say — she'll give 20 out of 20 — to the pupil who said: the subject of "shakes" is the wind. Who is it that shakes? — the wind. But that's not a subject. Because the wind is just as little a subject as the trees are. It depends on differences of pressure, of heat — I get a bit lost — of temperature. There you go. There are the causes of the wind. Exactly: if the trees are bent, it's because there is wind. If there's wind, it's because there were differences of temperature and atmospheric pressure.
1:48:02 But of course! There are no first causes in nature. There is no subject in nature, if you look closely. Except by metaphor, as we've just seen. But language doesn't warn us when it shifts from the literal to the figurative. So the question is very important. So I would say, to be clear now, I don't want us to be left with a confusion, is that we must carefully distinguish substance from subject, for when the subject believes that such-and-such an object — well, speaks of an object as though it were a subject.
1:48:39 That's it. And I'd rather say that substance, which has its letters of nobility, I'd call it the substantial. All right? Alienation is that. Alienation is taking an object for a subject. And that has been done since the dawn of time. When a child bumps into a piece of furniture in the house and the parents hit the table saying, "the naughty table, we're going to punish it." You've seen that. All right?
1:49:09 That inscribes in the child's mind forever that it's not an object, this. "You, I reserve 'chain' for you, my chain; you, 'table.'" You see? Yes, but this is important, what we're looking at. You're all going to have children, I hope, for your sake — for your children's sake. So this can be useful. So there you go. Watch out. Qualifying adjectives, attributes, predicates — that's where I don't know how, all of a sudden, ideology slips in. Because we're in the realm of quality. And I'll give you the floor right away.
Quality of life and recognition 1:49:42 I'll finish on this. The decline of our era — I'm speaking, still, I'm reacting from a conservative angle. It's not the far right, it's the true conservative right. The decline in the sense that time is not going in the right direction. Plato is anything but far right. But I'm not speaking that way either, not like some right-wing type. I'm talking about the decline of progressive values, precisely. It began when we trivialized notions like "quality of life." "Fine, you're on half the minimum wage, but come on, what quality of life!" You live in Corsica, right? It's serious.
1:50:15 I spent some time in Corsica. I remember — union, yes — but you brought me back a... Yes. I still have it, I put it on the fridge. Well. People hide the poverty there. They don't want to show that there is poverty. And they say that everything negative comes from the mainland. It comes from outside, from the Arabs, from the French, all that. But when you look at the judicial archives, it's appalling. For centuries still, there you go.
1:50:46 So watch out. To pin down what's ideological in a discourse, the most vulnerable point of an ideological discourse is those adjectives. Qualifying adjectives, as we learned at school — it's precious. Let me recall here that the origin of logic is grammar. Historically, the Indian grammarians were the first logicians. Even before the Greeks. There were logical disputes between grammarians in ancient India, and whoever was proven wrong could commit suicide on the spot, in front of the audience.
1:51:24 You see, it's serious. Yes, sorry, Medhi. Last one, because I think some of you had a question. It was a proposed line of solution on the question of language that holds together. On the question of? Of everyday language being ideological. If that seems a bit strong. It was on the question of everyday language being ideological, of perhaps raising consciousness beyond that ideology through the concept of recognition.
1:52:00 So you didn't speak this evening about the fact that the philosopher, especially in Hegelian and Marxist work, recognizes precisely what is contradictory, ideological, in a way of expressing ourselves. And there it was, about action. Absolutely. A very good point. I simply referred to it indirectly, without naming it, when I recalled that language is trapped by everyday language until the day a Socrates emerges — I did say this — by asking the question: what exactly do you mean by what you say?
1:52:32 To detect the contradictions, etc. But you're right, it's about recognizing. But that's precisely your "re-cognition." Because it's the "re-" that's important. I'll make a point of it when you say "I want to be an other." Yes, "I want to be an other." In this ideology, there is an other who is not simply me, but who is also the level of consciousness of, say, a social class, that orients the discourse. Absolutely. What I want to get at is that we think we think for ourselves.
1:53:03 Yes, my God, we consume too much, as you often say. Yes, I think I am the center of the subject. There you go. Whereas in fact, and it's true that the notion of subject is actually complex, because we often think of it in the singular, whereas in fact it's also the universal. And there's that whole level too. When Clouscard talks about subjectivity, it's always this collective, and it's the concept that is an achievement of history. Absolutely. And it's the concept that is the tool for recognizing our determinations.
1:53:33 Well, I'd like to clarify for those following us from a distance, because we often can't hear what's happening at the back of the room, in any case for the audio of the future video. I'm clarifying, for the live audience, that this is a question from Medhi Touffe, who very rightly says that I did not mention this evening the term so important, at the center of Hegelian thought, perhaps the most Hegelian term of all, that of recognition, isn't that so?
1:54:05 which is a — which is nonetheless at the center of all the subject's activity, consisting in calling into question the false certainties conveyed to it by everyday, ideological language. There, we're in agreement. And I answered Mehdi that I did speak of it indirectly, insofar as I said that the philosopher in general, Socrates in particular, as initiator, as principle — principial, in the twofold sense: origin, and at the same time, at every moment when philosophy advances, it steeps itself again in the Socratic initiative, which consists precisely in not letting oneself be taken in by found language, but in using dialogue and exchange precisely in order to recognize.
1:55:00 I like that — it's the prefix that matters most here, because Plato indeed says all knowledge is recollection. At the end of the inquiry, I realize I could have found it all by myself, common sense. All right? But I didn't want to know it. Ah, well, there you go. I don't know what you think, but maybe we shouldn't... There are still several questions in the queue, we can listen to them if you like. Is there... doesn't anyone have obligations? Yes?
1:55:31 I'm aware there's a small fraction of many questions. No, no, but I imagine we can't extend this indefinitely. Yes, yes, absolutely. We'll have an intermediate session before the... It's in a month that we resume the in-person session, but Pierre-Alain won't let me down, and I won't let him down either. And in less than 15 days from now, we owe you a virtual session. There you go. Where I'll answer the questions I left unanswered this evening.
1:56:02 Thank you all. Thank you. Thanks. And enjoy your meal.
