English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Opening and question on the "inextricable truth" 0:00 We are governed by, not by Gaullist right or Marxist left, no, but by the extreme center. You know that formula I like to repeat, the extreme center, to denounce. You see the cynicism? The cynicism of those who pass off their extremism as moderation. Fragments of Hölderlin. Reds to name it and pass over in silence the most beautiful of heroines.
0:35 Whose corpses litter the beaches of Turkey or the southern or northern Mediterranean or the Greek islands. When I think that all of Europe knows the name of Navalny, that racist, xenophobic scoundrel, who talks about Chechens as insects and cockroaches that should be crushed underfoot. The proletarian's greatest desire is to get out of poverty.
1:09 It's not that everyone joins in there. No, you think a capitalist is rich, you haven't understood anything. The two distant producers meet in the middle, at the market. The market, the shop window, the part that's shown and therefore is not the truth.
1:46 And you'll see that one must never confuse the shop window and the back shop, the one where production happens, the one that's hidden, the monstrous, the obscene. No, you have to look at West Berlin. The showcase of the West that was shown to populations that had been razed.
2:16 There is first a question from Frédéric. He alludes to our efforts at transmission. He says "work of thought and sharing in their inextricable truth." I really liked the phrase. I'm not here to do literature. I find it very relevant in terms of content, not just phrasing.
2:46 "Work of thought and sharing in their inextricable truth." You admire the tension at play just from the juxtaposition of two words we don't usually fuse together like this, through the link of the epithet to its noun, isn't that so, "inextricable truth"? Generally, truth is clear and it comes to untangle everything that seemed inextricable. And there, is the consciousness of the consciousness of the consciousness not, in the final analysis, the dialectical expression of the victory of bourgeois materialist cynicism?
3:29 First, I don't like it when people say "I don't understand any of it." We always understand something. I remember, I had relatives in my family who weren't intellectuals and who, out of curiosity, would pick up a book at random at my place. They had opened a Kafka book saying "I don't understand any of it, I don't understand it at all." I'd have them reread the sentence right in front of them. So, the dog entered the room and started circling around, then headed straight for the terrace. I said to them, "for now, what is that?" No, no, that I understand. But well, let's say that all the same.
4:00 No, come on, let's be serious. To reassure you, I'm going to locate what makes it hard to sort this out immediately. It's that we don't see a relation between the subject of this sentence, the consciousness of the consciousness of the consciousness, that's the subject phrase, and its connection with, I quote, "the victory of bourgeois materialist cynicism," rather, the dialectical expression of what?
4:31 Of the victory of bourgeois materialist cynicism. What connection is there between bourgeois materialist cynicism and the consciousness of the consciousness of the consciousness? Well, you see, by putting the two together, a relation, if only to say that this is what creates the difficulty, we already have an opportunity to untangle a big part of it. I mean, I'm holding a little bit of thread, to continue my metaphor, with which we could untangle, literally, as sailors or seamstresses do, isn't that right?
5:04 Of what seems here to him, as he puts it, inextricable. For that, and let him correct me whenever he wants, in writing or through the same channel, it seems to me he's alluding to a metaphor I had used, or if he's not alluding to it, it's even better to find oneself in a relation of analogy with this reference, but it's a metaphor. When I spoke of the subject-consciousness, you see, we're getting closer to it, I had used the metaphor of the projector.
From the empiricist mirror to the Kantian prism 5:41 You see, to make it understood, for example, perhaps the essential stake of the Kantian critique of knowledge — I'm not talking about Kant's morality, practical reason, I'm talking about the critique of pure reason, of his effort in the theoretical domain, which by far has caused the most ink to flow in Kant's posterity, isn't that right? In the era of the empiricists, the subject was a passive mirror. Empiricism from Aristotle down to the Anglo-Saxon empiricists who are still dominant, especially since it's become something of the sole accepted thought, isn't that right?
6:17 Since there's no longer any alternative facing it. Continental thought aside. Namely, Kant replaces this passive attitude of the subject, which is summed up in the scholastic formula. If you don't see the connection with the question I just read, don't worry, I'm in the process of establishing it. So it's normal that we don't see it right away. But I make these reminders for that reason. This passive side of the mirror-subject, which I link to the empiricist position, empiricism in the most common sense, truth being everything I see, everything I hear, etc., what comes to me through the senses, through experience, and not even scientific experience, but before that, immediate experience, sensible experience, the kind that comes to us through the senses, in the strict and simplest sense.
7:04 So the subject is passive there. If, for example, I've just seen my cat go by, it's because my retina passively receives, just like that, light rays coming from the cat and arriving at my retina, and so on. Then afterward it flips upside down, right side up, I get a bit lost, I'm not an optician or an ophthalmologist, I'm about to have cataract surgery soon, maybe that's why I spontaneously reach for optical metaphors. No, no, I've always used optical metaphors to make things understood, as you'll see.
7:35 This position is admirably summed up in a formula that goes back to Aristotle, according to commentators, and that runs through all medieval scholasticism and still holds authority in empiricist thought, mostly Anglo-Saxon as I said, namely: there is nothing in the mind that has not first passed through the senses. You can't say that's complicated. There is nothing in the mind that has not first passed through the senses.
8:09 It's the "first" that's important, as you might suspect. There, you see why my optical metaphor is useful. That amounts to saying there can be nothing in a mirror if there isn't first something in front of the mirror. Could it be simpler than that? For talking about the mirror, it's very simple. Except that for talking about the mind, it makes it entirely passive. Now Kant is going to replace, while staying within the optical metaphor, replace the mirror with a prism.
8:40 Do you know what a prism is in optics? There's a light ray that goes in, exactly like the image of my cat a moment ago striking my retina, but what comes out afterward, the image I have, is not the simple passive reproduction, the reflection, however faithful and undistorted by thought, ideas, words, language. No, in a prism, white light goes in on one side and colors come out on the other side, colored light.
9:13 What comes out is the rainbow, if you prefer, the spectrum of colors in other words. Here, what lies in between, what goes in and what comes out, namely the subject — we're getting closer to consciousness — the subject is no longer passive at all, it's on the contrary a little factory that transforms white light into colored light, for example. Isn't that right? And that's why Leibniz, to take the opposite stance while still incorporating the traditional formula "there is nothing in the mind that has not first passed through the senses," so I'll give you his Latin reply so you understand it: nihil est in intellectu, in the mind, in the intellect.
10:02 Quod prius, which first, quod prius, fuit, in sensu, which will have first passed through the senses, nihil est in intellectu quod prius fuit in sensu, period. Among the empiricists. Leibniz adds a comma and adds nisi intellectus ipse, except the intellect itself. Let's grant, says Leibniz, that it's a mirror, but the perfect mirror doesn't exist. A mirror is always a bit convex, a bit uneven, with spots here or cracks there, more or less clear, more or less dark — just ask astronomers what it costs them to get a mirror that comes even a little close to the ideal one never reaches.
10:50 I admire those who transport mirrors that will end up at the ends of telescopes, mirrors that are 5, 6 meters in diameter, which have to cross the Andes to reach the Peruvian desert where the climate is so dry that they've built an immense observatory, the most powerful ground-based ones — I'm not talking about the labs, the telescopes that are in space aboard satellites. So, we're not straying off track, I took an optical metaphor.
The projector that cannot illuminate itself 11:22 Now, when I spoke of the logical return of the subject — and there I suddenly get closer to Frédéric's question — I had compared the illusion of knowledge before Kant, before Kant expressed and denounced this illusion, to someone who wants to light up his garden to see what's inside it. Because his obsession is to know how the garden is objectively, that is, with the subject not being in it. And for that, he lights it up.
11:52 At night, he lights it up. He lights it up. The more powerful his floodlight, 500 watts, 1000 watts, 2000 watts, 10,000 watts, 10 million watts. Isn't that right? The more you see every detail, but you see less and less, don't you, what the garden is independently of the subject. Because if there were no subject, the garden would be in darkness and we'd see nothing. So there is an effect of the subject on the way we empirically receive the object.
12:23 There you go. I'm saying things that are so banal, and which moreover have a physical translation more complicated than what I've just said. And which is not a denunciation of any experimental method whatsoever. Far from it, on the contrary, it's a refinement. In the experiment, I'm thinking of course of Heisenberg's uncertainty relations, which express very well that it is our very activity of knowing that makes an objective grasp of the object impossible.
13:00 I'll give a very simple example: to locate the position of a particle, you have to light it up. For example, and to light it up, you bombard it with light particles, photons, waves, whatever you like — I'm not taking sides, neither with those who say it's a particle, nor with those who say it's a wave, nor with those who say it's something that combines both. But in any case, you have to bombard it with light, and this bombardment changes the particle's speed and makes it change position, and so on.
13:32 In short. So, now, the projector can light up everything except itself. And I had said, except itself, of course, if you put it in front of a mirror — but that's not what it wants to know. And it's wrong, that's what it should do. Know thyself. You see how we always come back to that, and there we leave the sciences for philosophy. The subject keeps its eyes wide open all the time. It does like Oedipus, the tragic error of Oedipus who searches for the culprit everywhere, taking draconian measures so that whoever doesn't say all he knows about anything that might allow finding a lead to the culprit will be condemned to the worst punishments.
14:09 He looks for the culprit everywhere, outside himself. Can he search for long? So the projector would need to light itself up. Well, there you have it, consciousness of what? Not of an object, not consciousness of the screen in front of me or of my cat that just walked by again, but consciousness of consciousness. You see the loop called reflexivity, in mathematics, the little loop that reads the relation R, not ARB in the sense of A equals B or A greater than B or A less than B or D1 perpendicular to D2 on the right or parallel to D2.
14:56 All that is relations, it's ARB, but ARA, that's reflexivity. So it's no longer an arrow going from A to B, it's a looping arrow that turns the question back into the throat of the questioner. Who are you, you who ask the question, what do you call that? You see, and there we've clarified what "consciousness of consciousness" means, because it seems like we could go on to infinity like that.
15:32 The moment I try to have consciousness of myself, it's no longer really what I'm aiming at. I don't get what I was aiming for, since the moment I have consciousness of myself, I no longer deal with myself as subject but as object. What does that have to do with bourgeois materialist cynicism? And that's where, that's where Frédéric, whether he knows it or not — and as I say, it's even more impressive if he doesn't.
The category of the milieu, the blind spot of cynicism 16:02 If he doesn't know it, if he hasn't been informed about it, he arrives at exactly what I say sometimes, but I have the impression that my listeners slide over it a bit, so much so that there is perhaps something rather frightening in what's at stake. It's when I speak of the so-called category of the middle. I'll take a very simple word first, the middle. You know, the midpoint M of segment AB. I can't make it simpler.
16:32 I'll take it further, you see, not just any random point somewhere in the middle of a segment AB but the median point. You see, simpler to visualize. And remember, because this, I think, everyone remembers, well, those who heard it. Supposing I've painted AM in red paint and MB, the second equal part of the segment, in blue, everyone will grant me that point M is purple.
17:03 It is both red and blue if you like. So where am I going with this? To the fact that point M is not clear. It's a blind spot. And so I begin to understand this business of cynicism. For me, it's the word cynicism. Cynicism, you see, is a pure gaze in the complete absence of any moral qualm. Remember Primo Levi, that Italian who was a prisoner in the death camps, who escaped by miracle and who recounts among...
17:41 Frightening things, but I'm not here to play the voyeur, there's no shortage of choice. Simply, he had torn off a piece of ice while he was working, a small piece of ice, because he was thirsty. He was dehydrated and was sucking on the ice. When someone, an SS man, tore the ice chunk from him, and Primo Levi, well, the prisoner, couldn't help saying why. Warum denn? Es gibt kein warum.
18:12 The answer: there is no why. "Why" is already a moral qualm. Why bring the subject into it? That gaze, steel blue, you know, that gaze like that, which is pure medium, medium now in the physical sense, as we say fish are in the marine element. This element is called in German Mittel, milieu, middle. In Hegel you have the term element, not in the atomistic sense, the elementary element, no, but in the sense of milieu, as we say birds are in the aerial element, fish in the aquatic element, and so on.
18:54 Element here means surrounding milieu. So this strange category of the middle, which is neither this nor that, but their interpenetration. You see, today people talk about the "red-browns," for example. I've already been questioned about this notion, I said it deserved a critical approach, simply, before absolving, glorifying, or denouncing.
19:28 as Spinoza says, it's not a matter of laughing or crying when it comes to knowing, it's a matter of understanding. And there, when it's purely a matter of understanding, all affectivity set aside, all moral qualms set aside, then it's a faculty in us, and only one of the three great faculties of which Kant constituted our entire knowledge: sensibility, understanding, reason. But it's the one in the middle, as you heard, it's the understanding. It's precisely the intellect, pure intelligence.
19:59 "Nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu." It's a category of the middle. So I develop the middle, it can be the means. Means, you know, everyone knows what the hub of a wheel is. A bicycle wheel has a hub. That still means the center, the middle, even if it's a middle of a surface, and not of a segment this time. Yes, I keep moving from the literal to the figurative sense, but that's how metaphors act on us.
The extreme center and Adamov's Monsieur le Modéré 20:29 It's starting from very concrete objects that stay with us throughout the metaphor, however abstract and abstruse it becomes, or however future-oriented now, passing from the midpoint of the segment to the hub of the wheel, to the center. You've already heard me in politics denounce what has been governing us for so long. So long that we wonder how there could ever have been anything else. At the time, people still spoke of the Trente Glorieuses. How could there have been that other thing, the Trente Glorieuses, when since then we have been governed not by the Gaullist right or the Marxist left, no, but by the extreme center.
21:12 You know that formula I like to repeat, the extreme center, to denounce. You see the cynicism? The cynicism of those who pass off their extremism as moderation. I had even quoted one of the last plays written by that great forgotten communist playwright Arthur Adamov. I salute his memory in passing. The third of that great trilogy of the theater of the absurd, which was capped off by names far more glorious for the first two.
21:48 Beckett for the tragic. Ionesco for the comic version but of the same, well, not the same, absurdist vision of the world. And Adamov. And he's the one who fell through the cracks. His name has been forgotten even though he was very well known at the time, in the 50s-60s. And you can find his works published by Éditions de l'Arche. And there are also some very fine DVDs of his plays. I'll name a few at random, masterpieces like Ping-Pong, like Professor Taranne, like Paolo Paoli, La Politique des restes.
22:24 Sainte Europe, already Sainte Europe. Brussels' Europe is compared to the Holy [Roman] Empire. Off-limits, which takes place in American underground circles. Off-limits. There you go. Well, I'll stop talking about Adamov, except that toward the end of his life he had written this play titled M. le modéré [Mr. Moderate]. Of course, in reference to M. le maudit [Mr. Damned/Cursed]. M. le maudit is a serial killer with a compulsive urge who has to slit a child's throat in order to start breathing again, until...
23:03 After that, you know the rest of the film, don't you? The police are looking for him, and among the crooks there's a race against time between the underworld and the gangsters who are fed up with this guy, because since he's been around and public opinion is growing impatient that he hasn't been found, and terror reigns in the working-class neighborhoods where he operates, with children being snatched in courtyards or in the street. As a result, the underworld doesn't much like the police poking their nose into matters or arriving in lawless neighborhoods, as they're called now, where they weren't used to coming, and so the underworld decides.
23:37 to catch the serial killer who is played by that extraordinary actor Peter Lorre, whom you find again in Casablanca, where he doesn't last long, where he falls under German bullets. In short, Peter Lorre, great actor, M, yes, and here Adamov gives it a form that's apparently comic but even more atrocious: M. le Modéré. He's obsessed with always being in the just middle, in moderation, and that's what produces millions of deaths, the extreme centre.
24:10 So you know, whether it's centre-left or centre-right, big deal. But that's what has been governing us for so long, so long that we've forgotten there might have been something before, perhaps. Were it not for history — but history is not a very glorified discipline these days. Is that a coincidence? Since structuralism we've privileged synchrony over diachrony. You know I'm a dialectician, or rather I advocate the dialectical approach — that marked, I don't say method, the dialectical approach, the dialectic immanent to what is — and that's why truth needs diachrony just as much as synchrony.
The bourgeoisie as middle term and the middle strata 24:56 But precisely, it's not a matter of annihilating history in favor of timeless structures, as we've tended to do since the sixties. So we're beginning to see more and more clearly the bourgeois materialist cynicism. Good grief! It's so obvious we hadn't seen it. You see it's much simpler than we think, this apparently enigmatic paragraph. The bourgeoisie is the middle term between the proletariat and the aristocracy. Whether the aristocracy be, in the historical sense, feudal monarchy, or whether it be, as they say in the United States, the sardine-oil king or the ketchup king.
25:35 These are the people who tell me, we started from nothing — yeah right. Do you realize how many bottles of Heinz there are, in restaurants, in homes, in families, of ketchup. Heinz — every time, it lands in Heinz's coffers. Isn't that so? The ketchup king is an aristocracy too. But between these extremes it's not MEDEF, the cut-rate Wall Street, so to speak. It's not the cheap version of Wall Street, MEDEF.
26:06 And the proletariat — you and me, for heaven's sake, the middle classes enriched by consignments, this Clouscardian concept of "couches moyennes," because you see the middle class is too broad a term, it covers too many different things, because after all neither you nor I risk perishing in those boats trying to cross the Mediterranean, fleeing poverty or insecurity or both, which sixty years of development aid have instilled in sub-Saharan Africa among others, because it also comes from the Middle East, from regions at war — and among this sub-humanity, socially speaking, I mean these are the most dignified men there are, those who attempt that effort, I tell you, with their children and their wives, and let this be an occasion to pay them homage. And when I think that all of Europe knows the name Navalny, that racist scoundrel
27:16 xenophobe who speaks of Chechens as insects and cockroaches that should be crushed under one's heel, as a great hero of freedom, who fills page after page, even hours of television bulletins — except since he stopped his hunger strike three days ago, have you noticed, we don't hear about him anymore, which shows we didn't give a damn about him, by the way, because one should say: he's saved, don't worry, no — the moment he's no longer a liability against the Soviet power, or rather, he's already less interesting. But above all the fact that we talk about him, and talk about him a hundred thousand times more than about each of his heroes and heroines, "Heldin"
27:58 "I would like to name" — "and remain silent" — "the most beautiful heroine" — fragment of Hölderlin — "Reds, to name them" — "and pass over in silence" — "the most beautiful of heroines" — whose corpses litter the beaches of Turkey or of the southern or northern Mediterranean, or of the Greek islands. We are not those. We are not MEDEF either. We do not own whole islands in the Indian Ocean
28:29 Or even entire archipelagoes, some do. So we're in the middle class. You see how that lumps together things that are too different. From the small restaurant owner who can barely make ends meet, who was beginning to manage when the Covid closures forced him to shut up shop, all the way to a great doctor — perhaps not known the world over, but whose business is doing well, who has a nice pleasure boat
29:01 And then, all the better, I have nothing against wealth myself, I look at how it's acquired. I don't say everyone should be rich, I'm not for bringing everyone up — I'm a bit like the proletarian myself: his greatest desire is to get out of poverty, not that everyone join him there. Well, that's another debate, but you see it's not very far off. The bourgeoisie is too vague a term, too broad.
29:33 It's the one who's no longer in the countryside — you understand, I'm not talking about someone with a second home, there's nothing more bourgeois than that, it's the very height of bourgeois-ness. Read the admirable chapter by Clouscard on country houses — I read part of it two or three times, two or three sessions ago, an excerpt from Le Capitalisme de la séduction — look at the table of contents of Le Capitalisme de la séduction, and look at the end of the volume, "La maison de campagne" — I've already said, it's worth its weight in gold, it's a real prose poem. And no, no, it's not about — precisely — a very great Parisian doctor, I say a doctor, or the owner of a pharmaceutical plant that's doing pretty well without being one of the Big Pharma trusts, and who as a result has bought himself a villa in the Luberon, then a chalet in Megève, then a little house on the beach in Corsica — there, you see, put that together with the little restaurant I was talking about where they're slaving away like mad at the dishwashing, and putting all that in the category "middle class" is too broad.
30:43 that's why Clouscard spoke of "couches moyennes," those that appear starting from the end of the 60s — well, well, '68, the end of the 60s, curious coincidence, you see — and which are produced by the new capitalism, still capitalism, more than ever, but it has found a new way to perpetuate its domination: no longer being daddy's capitalism, effort, work, saving — no, if you start saving we go bankrupt, people have to spend, and the illusion of belonging to the consumer society, that is, of returning to the middle — you see this concept enriching itself as I say it — now the middle is the market, the market is the middle term between two producers, originally, in the Middle Ages, when the bourgeoisie was not even embryonic, or rather, I mean, you would really have needed a microscope
The market, showcase and backroom 31:53 to discover its first germs, the "dusty feet" as they were called, because these were people who walked on the dirt roads of the time, the dusty feet, yes, a fellow who produced — I say anything — wooden objects or cheeses somewhere up in the mountains, and brought them down into the valley, the markets were in the valleys, at the confluence of rivers, at the confluence of roads — that's what a market originally is, you have to walk to get there — yes, that's where it comes from, all right. And there he found himself with a blacksmith and could exchange his cheeses, whether the exchanges were monetary or in kind, it doesn't matter here, it was already monetary, he could exchange his cheeses for a blade, some knives, or, more likely, a little treat for his wife, a bit of cloth, a pretty little collar. The two distant producers meet up
33:03 in the middle, at the market — the market, the shop window, the part that's shown, and therefore not the truth. Read carefully that little Marx pamphlet called Buying and Selling Labour Power — no, called Wage Labour and Capital, sorry, that's the title, in which you have a key chapter, Buying and Selling Labour Power, which concentrates what will be developed in the theory of surplus value in Capital, right, and you'll see one must never confuse the shop window and the back room — the one where production happens, the one that's hidden, the monstrous, the obscene. No, one must look at West Berlin, the shop window of the West that was shown to populations that had been razed, a martyred population that had left 30 million corpses on the ground and 70,000 cities destroyed, while the United States — I'm glad for the American people, this is no reproach — not a single brick of a house
34:13 of a city, however small, suffered the slightest scratch during the greatest cataclysm of all time, the Second World War. But all the better for them, I don't deplore that — it's not that they weren't destroyed that I deplore, I deplore that those who made the greatest sacrifice to free us from the Nazi jackboot came at Christmas to show off their bling-bling: look at us, how rich we are in the West — don't you want to give up your communist nonsense and come over to the West, we'll give you five marks for one East mark. Well, I'm saying things familiar to those who lived through those times and those places, but say these words, my life, hold back your tears, as Aragon would say — the market, the middle, that's all of it, the victory of bourgeois materialist cynicism. Good grief, that's excellent, Frédéric, because it joins up with my last remark — unless it was he who put me on the track, I don't know, since he has a very concentrated form, I mean, maybe he does it on purpose to stay
Capital, neo-positivism, and Comte's balcony 35:23 well put, by the way, I appreciate it, this is no reproach — when I tell him it's allusive, enigmatic, almost aphoristic, he joins up with my remark where I tell him that today's dominant ideology of the bourgeoisie — I said I didn't want to use terms that were too broad — of capital in its most current version, to put it in a way that's already much more measurable, because we're speaking as bourgeois among ourselves, but we bourgeois are not all capitalists, who cares, right — that is, you think a capitalist is someone rich? You haven't understood a thing. No, no, a capitalist is neither rich nor poor, it's the one who starts with capital rather than starting with labour to acquire capital, who begins with capital — we'll talk about this another time — it's the difference between C-M-C and M-C-M, between commodity-money-commodity — remember the market, the cheese-maker and the blacksmith, each makes a commodity, C, and they meet up
36:34 at the market, or with money, M, they exchange, right, commodity-money-commodity — whereas capital is money first, M: with money I buy a commodity, the labour power of the proletariat, and with that labour power it makes me earn money again, M-C-M prime, it makes me earn more money than I put in, I'm saying it very schematically, you see this deserves to be revisited, you see it's always in the middle that it happens, each time it's the C or the M in the middle, you see. Now, in my last remark, I said that the dominant ideology of capital today is not idealism — I'm not defending idealism, I'm noting that concentrating one's attacks obsessively against idealism, as if we were still in the era of a Politzer, and of course of a young Marx, because afterward, starting from the
37:44 Theses on Feuerbach, he suddenly recalls that idealism highlighted the activity of the subject — how we come back to it — which Feuerbach's materialism did not do, a materialism singularly lacking in dialectic, and above all in historical dialectic, because there are still those who want to go back to Democritus. Well, I think Democritus's view of the atom is more idealist than Leibniz's idealism, for example — that's a viewpoint, it's interesting to discuss among specialists, but here we're not among specialists, we're in public, let's be democratic. The dominant ideology — I'm building suspense on purpose — today is neo-positivism. He speaks of materialist cynicism, but here we are: what are you complaining about, you're a Marxist, what do you have against materialism? Ah, no, no, no, historical materialism is opposed to naturalist materialism
38:54 that is, matter reduced to what's left of matter once we've abstracted away everything man has transformed since the appearance of man on earth — of the given — that is, when history is reduced to zero, to annihilation, as they said in the Nazi era, that annihilation — after which I make the amalgams, I'm far from it, I'm far from — we're not here to terrorize populations after all — but that's where Frédéric's question takes me: consciousness of consciousness, right, consciousness that keeps searching for itself and fleeing itself, because the more it seeks itself the more it flees itself, because it wants to grasp itself but it is the grasper, it cannot be the grasped — it's Auguste Comte, a positivist but not a neo-positivist, who very judiciously said one cannot be both on the balcony and watching oneself walk by in the street — that's what the attempt to be the consciousness of consciousness would like to do. He stopped at 3
40:04 he could have gone to 10,000 — you see, you've already walked past mirrors facing each other, you see your image reflected to infinity. So I'll stop there for now regarding Frédéric's question, and I'll read another question. They didn't coordinate at all, but by superimposing the two texts, they shed light on each other, and superimposing them should help reduce the obscurity due to the elliptical, allusive form of the previous text — whereas here, on the contrary, Laurent, you'll see, is very explicit, but in an extremely theoretical and abstract way, which may require an unusual effort from those who aren't used to handling concepts, but rather to moving within what Hegel opposes to the concept: representations. Come, before reading his text I'll give you a very simple example, and you'll never forget the abyss that separates
Representation and concept: the example of the proletarian 41:14 the concept from the representation. First, let me say right away, we're all in representation to begin with, but from there to the link with the concept, it's harder. So here it is: proletarian — I say the word proletarian, and immediately, in some, in others, in some women, you have representations, you can't help it, even visual ones — some see it in blue, workwear, already Colmar, I don't know, I mean, you see, or a fellow from Zola's time going to l'Assommoir, a bit tipsy. Proletarian — I replace the image with words, with concepts: he who has nothing to lose but his chains, that's Marx's definition of the proletarian — not really a definition, but a predicate that characterizes the proletarian, that determines him, and in "determine" there's already "de-," "finished," "terminated" — that comes close to a definition. The proletarian is the one who has nothing to lose but his chains. So then, whether he's blue-collar or white-collar, what does it matter, whether he's a non-tenured teacher in a high school
42:25 or tenured, with the public education sector soon threatened with disappearing, being replaced, as Macron and all those behind him dream, for now they still haven't managed it but they're pushing in that direction, replaced by agencies, agencies that will handle our health, our education, through private firms — even though with Covid we saw the catastrophe, right, where private management dragged our hospitals down, and I won't even mention what our high schools have become, I'm not talking about those who teach, even if there's a mixed bag, I'm not trying to either sanctify or condemn — the teacher, in any case, deserves credit for working under the conditions we make him work in. I'll read Laurent's text, but you see, the proletarian has nothing to lose but his chains — the one in representation corresponds to what you had in mind when you pictured the proletarian, but the one who has a tiny little shop
43:37 on the street, where he laminates ID cards or driving licenses, he's already the owner of a means of production, his little laminating machine — he's no longer among the proletarians, he doesn't have only his chains to lose, he has a little capital, a little business. The proletarian is the one who has only his labour power — bring it back to that — if for whatever reason he's made to stop working, he has nothing left. You see the stakes of replacing a representation with a concept. Now let me move to Laurent's question, who is in concepts. So, good evening, could you please comment on this passage, which I sense is decisive, from the introduction of L'Être et le code by Michel Clouscard — here we are again — Clouscard writes this: "We wish therefore to show first in what way Kant's critical approach can be considered legitimate" — a notice to all those who believe Clouscard spends his time attacking Kantianism, when in fact he attacks neo-Kantianism, and he even goes so far as to say that Kant is part of
The transcendental subject according to Clouscard's L'Être et le code 44:47 the sequence running from Rousseau to Lenin, passing through Kant himself and Hegel and Marx — that's the philosophy called, so-called, of the French Revolution, a concept constructed by Clouscard. "We wish therefore to show first in what way Kant's critical approach can be considered legitimate," then, secondly, how the transcendental subject — a Kantian notion, there's the famous consciousness that's behind all consciousnesses — so you see how the two questions hold together, excuse me, I was trying to guess the common point, I'm in the process of stating it. Well, come on, it's interesting to superimpose the two, it's clear, you see it well: Kant says the "I think," that's the transcendental subject, the "I think, I am," borrowed from Descartes, the cogito — cogito means "I think" in Latin, it's the first person of the verb to think. The "I think" must be able to accompany all my representations — precisely, that I represent myself as king, as poor wretch, as man, as woman, or as both, it doesn't matter, and who tells you, sir, that I'm a man, it doesn't matter
45:58 and in every case these representations must be accompanied by consciousness, the "I think," the transcendental "I," must be able to accompany all my representations. And there you see clearly that the transcendental "I" is not François René Descartes with a beauty mark on his left nostril, or Kant with his little German regularity habits, his daily walk, hanging his handkerchiefs from the ceiling on strings so as not to waste time looking for them in his pockets, so assiduous was he at his work — that's everything individual, particular to each person. The "I think" is the same in each of us, it's the projector that illuminates nothing yet, whose light is unleashed, or an engine that turns no wheel — careful, it can race out of control, that can be dangerous, an engine engaged with nothing. The "I think," the middle, there it is — we think it's the source, in fact it's the medium in which everything bathes, you see, the milieu, the marine milieu
47:08 for fish — earlier — the medium in which all my representations bathe, the "I think" must be able to accompany all my representations. So let me repeat the quotation, now that we've clarified it with this Kantian concept I've explained, and which puts this question in relation with the consciousness of consciousness: "We wish therefore to show first in what way Kant's critical approach can be considered legitimate," then — in other words, to suspect that the subject is not merely something passive like that, but is a factory of transformation, one must become aware, in everything that appears to us, of what comes from us and what is brought to us, in order to be neither idealist nor stupidly realist, but intelligently realist, to be realist as you will — "We wish therefore to show first in what way Kant's critical approach can be considered legitimate, then how the transcendental subject perverts itself into a reactionary subjective idealism" — and yes, this transcendental subject, if you separate it from its content, if you forget Husserl's statement
48:18 which says, with the epistemic caution that honors it, that all consciousness is consciousness of something — a pure consciousness, consciousness of consciousness, which would be conscious only of consciousness, that is not being a consciousness without an object, the pure subject, the transcendental subject — there, what should be subject is made into object, made into a thing, we reify it, we thingify what is least a thing, we make into being what was thought as act, as Tätigkeit, activity, and Marx said in the Theses on Feuerbach that idealism managed to develop this activity — when we turn it into a mechanical matter, we thingify it, we fall back from act into being. And after that you're surprised that I'm wary of the unleashed ontologism as dominant ideology. So it's quite clear, it seems to me, isn't it, that even before pursuing the question to the end, which I'll hasten to do, you already see the relationship between this transcendental subject
Reification into class knowledge and the piece of wax 49:28 which, according to Clouscard, when it's isolated, when it's substantified — there's the term — when the subject is made to fall back into the category of substance — "We wish therefore to show first in what way Kant's critical approach can be considered legitimate, then how the transcendental subject perverts itself into a subjective idealism" — if only it were dialectical idealism — "reactionary," in other words we're not very far, earlier, from the cynicism of the bourgeoisie — in other words, the rise to the subject of knowledge, that's the whole itinerary running from Descartes to Kant, the rise to the subject of knowledge being revolutionary, that's a political category, it's Clouscard speaking, with respect to empirical irrational knowledge of the psychological self, the reification — meaning res, that's "thing" in Latin, the thing, the thingification — of this transcendental subject into an empirical and sensible class knowledge, this class knowledge which is present in all the faculties known
50:38 as human sciences or social sciences, into an empirical and sensible class knowledge, foundation of piecemeal anthropology, will be revealing — yes, the two texts really aren't very hard to superimpose: the rise to the subject of knowledge being revolutionary with respect to empirical irrational knowledge of the psychological self, and the reification of this subject into class knowledge, entirely unbeknownst, of course, to the individual who states it. We said one must clearly distinguish, in Descartes, the extraordinary revolutionary potential there is in the Cartesian initiative — which didn't exist before him, I'll come back to it, to sum it up in a way one can't forget the essential — coexisting in Descartes's work with, on the contrary, the emergence of a bourgeoisie, or a nobility of the robe, which amounts to much the same thing, which will progressively constitute the state apparatus of the absolute monarchy
51:48 and which prefigures the future cadres of the bourgeoisie. Look closely, our kings weren't fools, they surrounded themselves with bourgeois — the Colberts, the Louvois, the Vaubans, the Choiseuls, Louis XV's minister, a great diplomat and so on — I'm not saying what he did was good, I'm saying he was a shrewd diplomat — and they come from that middle class of the time, the bourgeoisie which has all the legal, economic, financial power, except political power — excuse me, it will only get that after the French Revolution. Well, in Descartes the two coexist, I'll give you an illustration of that now, which leads Clouscard to say that in Descartes you have this revolutionary side, which I'll specify further, but you also have how this state apparatus of oversight emerged
52:59 of feudal monarchy, or rather feudal monarchy, which constitutes itself as what he calls class knowledge, and this class knowledge must eliminate everything that is production in the manual sense of the term, which Rousseau will be the first to rehabilitate the following century — Émile must learn a manual trade, that's another story that comes soon after Descartes. So I'm going to illustrate the two aspects of Descartes to bring the two texts and the two questions together. When I begin with the negative Descartes — that's harsh — I mean, with the one who indeed expresses nothing other than the interests of his emerging class, which lifts its head at that moment — it's a small provincial nobility, but he's lower in social standing than a president of the parliament of Brittany or Aquitaine or Bordeaux — when Descartes poses the extraordinary question in the piece of wax, right
54:09 when he shows that the piece of wax, at the outset — what is this piece of wax? Like all of us, he's an empiricist at first, spontaneously; it's something white, that smells of the honey of the flowers from which it was gathered, that has a white color, a cubic shape, etc. But now, as I speak, we bring it near the flame of a candle, the white becomes yellow, its size increases, the heat expands bodies, the white becomes yellowish and, if you prefer, scorched — he doesn't put it that way, but in short, everything by which I defined it in sensible terms, as an object of my senses, has changed. And instead of changing the word, saying, well, there was the wax, now there's something else — no, he keeps the grammatical subject and changes the epithets: the wax was white, it has become yellow. Descartes has the merit of raising the question, which ordinary language doesn't do, since it keeps the permanence of the wax in the word. Descartes goes so far as to say: does the same wax remain after this change? There he goes very far, there he's on the path that will lead to Kant, to the thought of revolution
55:19 there he's revolutionary, even more so on another point I'll raise afterward, but I said I'd start with his negative side, period. "Certainly it remains, and no one could deny it" — certainly it remains, that's really the same wax, he hasn't had time to examine whether it was the same or not; barely has he posed the question than, as if seized with fear before his own question, he locks the answer down with that so un-Cartesian phrase, "certainly it remains and no one could deny it" — without doubt, without sifting it, without putting it through the sieve. So it's no longer a matter of knowing what this wax is, of finding which epithets suit it, nor of knowing whether it's really still the wax, the piece of wax. So there, to show you that Descartes can't always be — oh, he's so innovative that he can't always be at the peak of his innovations — he remains, in many respects, still someone of the Renaissance, thirst for encyclopedic knowledge in every discipline, he belongs more, actually, and this corresponds to him historically, to the Baroque age rather than the Classical age
56:29 that follows, which is darker, more pessimistic, and which humbles knowledge, whereas Descartes shows that it can go to infinity, limited only by the short duration of my life, etc. Now, the most revolutionary Descartes — oh, I don't need to look far, I'm not going to hunt for some rare passage, no, I'll take the very first sentence of his best-known work — yes, that famous sentence, you know, he had learned to give speeches, it's a Discourse on Method, and a discourse in that era was an extremely elaborate thing formally, because at the time there was one discipline that outweighed all the others in one's studies, in which Rimbaud was the first — so this lasted until the end of the nineteenth century — it was rhetoric. In literature class you first learn rhetoric, with its figures, how a speech is constructed, how one begins with an exordium and ends
Common sense, the thing most equally distributed in the world 57:40 with a peroration, with developments — I don't want that, Descartes knew that admirably, he'd learned it from the Oratorians, the Oratorian fathers, at the Collège de la Flèche, where there was already the avant-garde of the intelligentsia, if I may say so, an anachronism for his time. Now what is this most famous first sentence, in French, because Descartes cared about this decisive work, which is like a stone thrown into a pond — he wanted the maximum number of literate people to be able to read it, not just in Latin but in French, so as not to address only the intellectual community of scholars, that's Latin, but in French. And it begins, in French: "Good sense is the thing in the world most equally shared." He knew he had to start with something surprising, that isn't immediately understood — "Good sense is the thing in the world most equally shared" — and immediately follows with: "for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it," in other words, everyone strives
58:50 to be a bit more musical, a bit more mathematical, according to their tastes, their aims — but no one asks to be given more good sense, which is proof, Descartes says very ironically, that everyone has it. What is this good sense? The vocabulary isn't fixed, we're not in Kant, there aren't words like apagogic, ostensive, imperative, hypothetical, categorical, what have you — no need, we're not yet in rational pneumatology, don't worry, it's not complicated, all this, if it's complicated it's not difficult, once you have the definition it's nothing at all, and Kant gives the definitions before using the terms, it's not complicated, it's not difficult. Descartes, on the other hand, is all the harder because his vocabulary isn't fixed, so he specifies a bit further on, a few pages later, good sense, the faculty of distinguishing true from false, or understanding, or reason — for him it's almost the same word, all that — the faculty of distinguishing true from false. But what's most important, he says, is the second part of the sentence: "the thing in the world most equally shared" — there is an equality
1:00:01 of all men — there, that's what makes it a revolutionary bomb — purely of men, he specifies afterward, I'm not talking about those aided by grace, at the time he had to handle the Church carefully, which had just condemned Galileo — but man, not aided by divine visitation or grace, that is, relying solely on the resources of his own poverty, of his good sense, which makes him say that if A equals B then B equals A. The faculty of distinguishing true from false — what's revolutionary is that he says it's equal in every individual, there's no privilege at that level, it's not a matter of birth. To say that in an era when to be noble you had to be born noble is enormous, for all other differences of value are distributed unequally, whereas this one is shared equally, isn't it?
1:00:59 You see, someone from a lower class is necessarily dirty, necessarily vicious, necessarily has all the flaws that go with his rank, or rather his lack of rank. So you see, the most revolutionary thing in Descartes is that very first sentence: good sense, that lever which, as Archimedes said, could lift the world, that good sense which rests, roughly, on the principle of non-contradiction, the faculty of distinguishing true from false — if A equals B, I would contradict myself in not concluding that B equals A, not that it would be false outside of me, but that it's I myself who would contradict myself, it's good sense, isn't it, that enjoins me to avoid that. So I won't go any further tonight, but I've shown you that we've been circling, in the meantime, around this middle faculty among all faculties, the intellect, good sense, understanding, which is neither sensibility, which we share with animals — which also have senses, I'd even say a dog's snout is doubtless more sensitive than our sense of smell, I'm not even talking about
1:02:12 the hearing of the bat, you know, with the ultrasounds that let it guide itself by sonar, whereas we're in a much more limited auditory spectrum — dolphins the same, whales, which pick up vibrations in the water like that — that's sensibility. And then there's reason at the other extreme, isn't it, which is the faculty of ends — that's not something I have senses for, the end is what is not there, how would you have me see it, a road sign that tells you "stop" 150 meters ahead tells you there's a stop far off — television, seeing far off — teleology, the science of ends. So I'll leave you with this superimposition of the two questions; I hope that in trying to clarify the questions I've clarified a bit my answer to those who asked them, and in any case I won't fail to come back to it in the next sessions. Thank you in any case for the effort we've made together, we have been
1:03:24 a little bit Athenian this evening, since Hölderlin likes to say that the main thing he regrets about Greece is not — it's that no one was alone in bearing life, so in order to clear the ground for certain truths one must not be alone, one needs your contribution, and that is why I thank you as sincerely as possible.
