English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Worldliness, keystone, and Baudelaire's La Cloche fêlée 0:00 Near this dark cave where one breathes such sweet air, the wave struggles with the stones and the light with the shadow. I tremble at seeing your face floating with my desires, so afraid am I that my sighs might make it shipwreck.
0:30 I knew Tristan L'Hermite; who would have believed that the author of verses so full of grace was a dirty, coarse man. I have not frightened you. This is a place suited to storytelling. It is not surprising that a prince should appear here.
1:00 But I would not have believed you a reciter of verses, like those wits of the Marais whom you like so little. I know thousands of them. I was an actor sometimes in my youth. And often I must still be one.
1:31 Good evening dear friends, I am all the happier to be with you again this evening — you might say I say that every time, but besides the constant pleasure of being with you again, there's always a particular reason, which is that today I am in the company of Amélie and Étienne, who were kind enough to come, at Amélie's initiative originally, who had the excellent idea of bringing together several texts, texts which sketch out a constellation that fits into the theme we began last time, which we have not — will not have — finished today, namely mundaneity, especially when one raises it not merely from its ordinary status
2:49 of representation to that of a concept, as Michel Clouscard forged it, and you'll recall that I said, and I maintain, that it is the concept — I don't say the most important, that doesn't mean much, I'm not saying mundaneity is more important than the productive forces and the relations of production, but those are not concepts proper to Clouscard — Clouscard constantly takes them up, of course, but they are not properly Clouscard's own concepts, they go straight back to Marx, to a whole tradition of revolutionary thought, of dialectical or historical materialism. No, what is certain is that the concept of mundaneity as developed in Michel's work, and certainly the most Clouscard-specific one we know, serves so to speak as the keystone, as any keystone, in the sense architecture gives this object as its function — the keystone stands where forces meet
4:01 that sometimes run wild in opposite directions, but in order to maintain the balance of the whole without sacrificing any of the energy at work in the overall construction — think here of cathedrals, of course. So take for example — you know this is a theme, a theme I return to recurrently since almost the very beginning of my public talks, let's say from the moment when I began to comment on the first literary text that served us — not as a model in the epistemological sense — to draw out these concepts, I was thinking of Baudelaire's 'La cloche fêlée,' where it was precisely a matter of saying how — even though it is very Baudelairean — it begins with a kind of, well, a kind of voluptuousness of melancholy that is much more representative of the periods immediately prior to Baudelaire, that of Lamartine, of Romanticism for example: it is bitter and sweet, during winter nights, to listen by the fire that flickers and smokes, to the distant memories
5:15 slowly rising to the sound of the bells chiming in the mist — there, that's how it begins, how nice it is, we're by the fire, it's all fine outside, but the bells are chiming in the mist, ringing out the hours, tolling the hours — the title is 'La cloche fêlée' [The Cracked Bell] — and here are the quatrains, listen, it goes fast, it will ring itself out. So I recall: happy indeed the bell, we're happy, not far from happiness, it begins happy — happy indeed the bell with the vigorous throat, that one is not cracked, the one on our steeples which, despite its old age, alert and hale, faithfully casts forth its religious cry — one two three four five six, otherwise it's not an alexandrine — like an old soldier keeping watch under the tent. The sabre, the holy-water sprinkler, the church and the army — listen, sleep, good people, you are protected, the church protects you from the devil, the army protects you from material disaster, what more could you want — full stop, end of the line. And there the tercets begin: as for me, my soul is cracked — and that 'me' is what appears, what arises to embody what I have called, since our modernity
6:32 I say 'our' modernity so as not to say 'the' modernity, that would be pretentious — historians call it the modern age, don't they, the moment when the Middle Ages are over, antiquity, the Middle Ages, and then from the Renaissance onward, that is, from the end of the Middle Ages — a tautology, the 'modern' times, there, always in three periods, notice — they've agreed on it among themselves. But there are some for whom modernity begins the moment we abandoned hunting and gathering to settle down for agriculture — very fashionable, this story, each time we push back the moment of the catastrophe. There are those for whom the catastrophe is when we stopped playing the harpsichord to play the piano — yes, just like that, it's baroque fundamentalism — I'm not talking about the repertoire of admirable music, mind you, composed in the so-called baroque era, timbre-wise, whereas the musicians of the time did not see it that way at all — in any case not for talking about the music, but it was fundamentalism. Then there are some — I don't like making ad hominem attacks, but I believe it's Aurélien Barrau
7:45 as one sees on every talk show — he deserves a little scratch anyway — I'm not talking about the scholar there, I bow to that, because there are titles I won't go into, he's certainly an immense physicist, astrophysicist, but it's under his pen that I read it said that already, already hunting and gathering was predation — can you imagine, you filthy monkeys! Yes, the monkeys in the canopy, what are they doing, spending their time picking fruit instead of respecting this acme of the tree. Well, I don't want to be ironic. I can tell you that modernity — I don't want to talk about modernity in general, you can put the cursor wherever you like — the one I'm talking about is yours, mine, ours, the one that begins — I'm sorry to repeat myself for those who've heard it 36 times, but still we must take into account the new people joining our conversations, which pleases me greatly — and so I recall, to be a bit more precise now in historical terms, this modernity, otherwise the word means everything and therefore nothing, is the one that
8:56 that can be marked out from the English Industrial Revolution and the French political revolution, both occurring roughly in the 18th century, particularly in the second half, that is, within a stone's throw of each other, which is the century of Enlightenment — so let's not be too surprised if, among the texts gathered, pride of place — not only the texts that are somewhat later, others somewhat earlier, since the spectrum brought together by Amélie ranges from Molière to Musset — but still, pride of place here goes to the Age of Enlightenment, and that's no accident. You'll say to me — but it's been quite a while since you proposed to talk about modernity, and you're not even talking about it anymore. Well, it's you who isn't following, if I may say so — but yes, I am talking about happiness. Let me remind you, we are doing philosophy, we are not doing literary history — an admirable discipline — let's get back to essentials, philosophy
Examining the word happiness: pleasure and happiness 10:07 seeking what speaking means, giving a purer sense to the words of the tribe, what do you call a — these are reminders I'm making quickly — if we don't question words, we're not doing philosophy, if we're already in the thing itself — it's not enough to have the word to have the thing, well, that would be simple, life, 'open sesame' and it opens — can you imagine, we must leave that at the primitive stage, childhood — indeed the child is so weak that he gives himself a supernatural power, he loves fairy tales, there's magic in that, that makes sense as a child, but really, no — no, the word is not the thing, that's perhaps the best thing in Foucault, it's his title, one must be fair — but precisely, we're getting there: it's happiness that I'm questioning, the word 'happiness,' that is, it's not happiness there, you write h-a-p-p-i-n-e-s-s, no, you're forgetting the essential — it's the quotation marks, that is, it's the word I'm questioning, not the thing. Now, to characterize it — implying that when one wants to specify, characterize, refine a concept, it's because one risks
11:17 confusing it — one would never ask you the difference between a nightingale and an elephant, no risk of confusion there — but between an elephant and a mammoth, between an Asian elephant and an African elephant, you see, between a python and a boa, that's already more complicated, right, well — and that's where decisive distinctions must come into play. Now, happiness — often we say happiness, pleasure, beatitude, voluptuousness, I don't know, you see, all these words circle a bit around the same pot. Well, the difference — let's take the words — would I ever denounce pleasure? I would never say a word against pleasure, I mean, against it — provided it harms no one. That's more or less in the Constitution, isn't it, here in our revolution: liberty consists in doing everything that does not harm others. There — once no one suffers from it, one wonders why one should feel guilty about such-and-such pleasure. I'm sorry to insist, I'm pushing at an open door, but it becomes — and one must
12:29 insist on it again, since we are constantly under assault from the dominant ideology of a world dominated by Protestant cultures — I have nothing against the Reformation, I have — well, there are excellent things in the Reformation too — but still there's an inherent puritanism in the Anglo-Saxon world, that's it, that's historical, it's not me, it's not an opinion, agreed? There. And so we keep saying we mustn't throw that in the trash — not the plastic trash, I seem to be mixing things up — but whether it's sexuality, ecology, etc., one must always, remember, denounce fundamentalism — think of Muslims, of — yes, you're wrong to think only of Muslims, that's exactly what I'm saying. Happiness in relation to pleasure — yes, there is pleasure in happiness, I don't see why I'd oppose them, but there is a difference: pleasure can be quick, fleeting, even at its climax; jouissance can be almost infinite but it evaporates almost immediately, 'and mounted on the summit, it longs to descend,' as they say in Corneille. Whereas happiness — look carefully at all the texts speaking of happy moments in life — it always has a temporal thickness, a certain duration, a
13:43 repetition, often expressed in the imperfect tense — I've said this before other times so I won't dwell on it too much, but you see, this is the first determination that specifies the concept of happiness — it's no longer a representation now, it's whatever image you have in your head when I say 'happiness,' me too, but here we're elevating the representation to a concept, that's philosophical work — first determination: determined, finite, defined, limited, meaning pleasure — we've already got that, that's something else again — first determination, a certain temporal thickness, it has to last or be repeated, which amounts to almost the same as duration. I repeat, you learned this in primary school, the imperfect being the ideal tense for expressing these happy periods: 'the time when I was loved,' 'the time when I used to go every day' — I'm bad at this, I'm not a writer, I'll stop — 'I used to walk to school singing in the rain.' So, first — second reason, I'll say it quickly, a relation — I'll say it directly since I've often spoken of it — a positive relation to the world. See the connection with mundaneity — yes, because you're right
14:59 to bring up beatitude — the beatitude of the saints, that's a theological notion, how does one call God, in transcendent religions, whether Islam or Christianity — the blessed one, then, and forever, the blessed — but there, we are no longer in the world, that kingdom is not of our world, 'my kingdom is not of this world' — that's what religions of transcendence are, trans, that means beyond, it's not down here. Happiness needs pleasure down here, and one that lasts. There, that gives us the two determinations, you see — that's why I had to make this detour, and why I'm speaking of happiness in relation to mundaneity, because happiness has a necessary relation to the world. I'm going a bit fast today because I had cited Voltaire in the first episode of our new series, the author of this poem called 'Le Mondain,' where Voltaire never stops congratulating himself on living in the contemporary era, his era, that is, at the cutting edge of progress of that time, with comfort, isn't it — the beautiful carpets, beautiful women, the toilette, the beautiful lights, and not
Happiness needs the world: Voltaire and Rousseau 16:11 like Rousseau, of the forest, of I don't know what, of nature, of the lake — there, and I had even mentioned to you the admirable Letter to Malesherbes, the third letter to Malesherbes by Rousseau — Malesherbes being a good man who played what we'd today call an interface role between the Enlightenment writers of the 18th century and Rousseau, trying to reconcile them, and he had said to Rousseau: explain what it is that you find in the forest — it wasn't, well, that seems obvious to us now in our urbanized society, but at the time, remember, in the 17th century, not long before, Madame de Sévigné, when she went to see her daughter at Grignan — go there, it's splendid, the most beautiful château in southern France, the château de Grignan — when she went to see her daughter at Grignan, coming back, one had to go through the Alps, it's the A6-A7 highway route, and Madame de Sévigné, when she saw the mountains coming into view, would draw the curtain in the carriage — it was horror, the mountain. And yes, it's new — it's starting with Julie, or the New Heloise, in Rousseau — you have an admirable passage in La Nouvelle Héloïse on
17:25 this happiness one feels at high altitude — it's the first time, and it's no accident, that's the moment when Alpine tourism will begin, the English mainly — there, the first ascent of Mont Blanc, Mr. Whymper, in the 18th century — it all holds together. What are we seeing here — instead of quoting 'Le Mondain,' which is a mediocre poem — Voltaire is of immense quality as a writer, and insolent in his prose, in his verve, in his correspondence, in his tales, that's extraordinary — correspondence, some ten thousand letters — but as for poetry, first of all, the 18th century in general is our weakest century for poetry — name me the great poets of the 18th century. The century before, there was the apex of dramatic poetry — dramatic, I didn't say tragic, it can be comic too, like Molière — drama means action, in short, theater in verse, in verse or not, but mostly in verse — Racine, Corneille, to name only the most famous of the time, Molière — after the 18th century there will come the miraculous fountain, Romantic poetry
18:35 Romantic poetry, then Parnassian poetry, then Symbolist poetry — Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, the 19th century — if we do a bit of literary history, André Chénier, yes — the one who said 'on new thoughts let us make ancient verses,' yes, cautious anyway, good. But otherwise the most famous poets at the time were Delille and Roucher — you don't know them, but nobody knows them, who reads Delille anymore, there, pastorals of the senses. So Voltaire, all his life, wanting — he wrote plenty of plays, he dreamed of being Racine, he never managed it, and he was aware of it, not a fool. And on the other hand, I had quoted you an excerpt from the Letter on Commerce, in the English Letters, at a time when England was the beacon of modernity of the era, the country that is the reference point — I can't repeat it but again, I'll say it more quickly — economic model, foremost commercial nation in the world, Letter on Commerce
19:47 Voltaire says: 'I do not know, however, which is more useful to his country' — one speaks of the French model that scorns commerce, the aristocrat who doesn't even work with his hands, that's out of the question, not even enterprise — 'I do not know, however, which is more useful to his country, a well-powdered lord who knows exactly at what hour the king rises and at what hour he retires, giving himself the airs of a slave in a minister's antechamber, or a merchant who from his counting-house gives orders to Surat and to Cairo and contributes' — and this is the punchline — 'to the happiness of the world.' There you have the world and happiness together — listen, you have the champagne bubble bursting at the end of Voltaire's text, those golden colors — that's the word for it, because it's capital that bears fruit through the labor of commerce. There's already almost an anticipation of the contemporary trickle-down theory, whose first drops we're still waiting for, incidentally — we'd love to see them, there — but let's not mix everything up. So you see the connection, we find again this pairing of the concept of happiness with
21:03 that of mundaneity — happiness must have a relation to the world. In prison I can have peace if I am an extraordinary sage in meditation, I can have peace if I am a religious person or a mystic, I can merit salvation — all this resembles each other, originally that is to say health, 'salut,' and we still say 'salute' in Italian, meaning 'to your health,' 'salud' in Spanish, there, one's health, and 'Heil' — yes, yes, the 'Heil' of Hitler, 'Heil' is health, alive, health — yes, that's the 'hello,' it's the 'hail' that gives the English 'hello' — all of that is health, which in popular usage — and being spared suffering — is one of the necessary components of happiness. Go talk about the happiness of someone suffering from a toothache. So yes, happiness presupposes a positive relation to the world, and that this positive relation not last only the fleeting span of enjoyment, of mere jouissance alone
22:17 There, we had recalled all that, and well, listen, I don't want to remain too abstract, we shall now see that there are indeed many ways of shifting the cursor, isn't there, between the pleasure pole and the happiness pole, well anyway modernity unfolds across the whole span of the spectrum, and we shall begin with a text — I'm not following chronological order, why be a bit linear — we'll start with a text all the more popular for having been written for the theater, namely Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand of course, which he dedicated to Coquelin — Coquelin was an immense actor of the time, the first to embody the role of Cyrano, and in his dedication Edmond Rostand says: 'It was to the soul of Cyrano that I wished to dedicate this poem, but since it has passed into you, Coquelin, it is to you that I dedicate it.' There, and in the meantime it became even more popular when it went to film, with Depardieu.
Cyrano de Bergerac: "Délabyrinthez vos sentiments" 23:28 I mean, I love you — and in Cyrano, of course, the main character is Cyrano himself, who is first and foremost a poet, and who has become friends with a young man, a young little nobleman of the time, whom he sees is in love with the woman for whom Cyrano — he's not the only one, many people are smitten, to put it politely, the fair Roxane — well, I'm going fast — except that this young man doesn't know how to talk to women, he's a bit clumsy and shy, a bit crudely made, as we're about to see in the scene coming up, and at that time it was an insurmountable handicap, terrible for this young man, because it's the age of the précieuses, one didn't say 'here, have a seat,' one said 'here are the conveniences of conversation,' yes, one went through a periphrasis — that's what inspired Molière of course to write his famous play Les Précieuses ridicules — but let's not be unfair, because this preciousness did have a virtue: you know, at a time when domestic quarrels used to begin with a fist to the wife's face from her wine-grower or her
24:53 mason of a husband, it took quite a while before that changed — the change didn't happen on December 31st at midnight — but still, before, under the influence in particular of Eleanor of Aquitaine, gallantry began to enter into manners. That's still progress. So the précieuses exaggerate a little, don't they, in this excess of mannerism — I use it here in the ordinary sense, not the art-historical sense, it's not a flaw at all — but anyway, what's important is that at the time a man had no chance if he didn't know how, as they said then, to recite the Carte du Tendre, that is — you'd say sweet-talking, yes, but no, because sweet-talk can be just some fool spouting nonsense in the train car to get a laugh — no, excuse me, there's no more military service, no more privates in train cars — but still, provided that, as Stendhal said, quite happy is he who, once a woman — you're in her bed, I don't know if that's true, I don't want to send you off to your doom either — I'm telling you what — not only what is said but what is written
26:03 there, but still, one had to elaborate a discourse that presupposes codes, you see, that's what matters — the young man doesn't have them, he's a young soldier — whereas Cyrano is the champion of the word, but he's ugly, it's his famous nose, isn't it — 'do you love little birds so much that you tenderly took thought to offer their tiny feet a perch' — I won't give you the whole nose tirade, but there, that's the pitch, so to speak, as we'd say today — Cyrano will serve as ghostwriter for the young suitor, who goes to the balcony to speak of love to Roxane, but it's not him speaking, it's Cyrano, unseen in the shadow — she'll believe it's the young man, because she likes him, he's blond, she likes him, but she cannot grant him the slightest favor as long as all he can say is simply 'I love you,' yes, yes, but 'I love you very much,' good, yes, but that's what we're about to see, all right, so
27:13 Find him wherever he is, tell him that I want this very evening to fulfill the sweetest of my wishes: the beauties which for two days he has known how to write to me, I want to hear him say them close by me. Come quickly. Don't let those monkeys — watch out for them there, gathered around — let your metal not disturb the coarse fools, tonight or never — prepare your memory, the moment has come to cover yourself in glory. What? What are you still writing?
27:55 The words you're going to say, you'll have to speak them. What? Yes! She wants to see you up close at last. Don't waste time. Here, here's the beginning, sit down and learn it. No. Learn your lesson! No, I won't learn anything. I'm tired of borrowing these words that are yours. Now I know. Yes, I feel that she loves me. But if I'm no longer afraid, I'm going to speak for myself. Oh really? And who says I won't know how? I'm not that stupid after all, you'll see. Yes, my dear fellow, your example has proven fruitful. I'll know how to speak alone. And by all the devils, I'll still know how to take her in my arms. Speak alone, sir, then.
28:25 Wait, don't go. Vermilion mouth with the sweet smile, mouth of so graceful a turn, mouth that says what must be said, mouth that says less than the eyes. Beautiful eyes whose deep touch troubles hearts unceasingly, the sweet rest that is founded only on so sweet a movement.
28:55 Mouth, the marvel of mouths, mouth of delicious speech, mouth that gives soul to mere trunks. Mouth that exists only for the gods.
29:26 And who's babbling! Good evening, good evening. Christian, are you there? It's me.
29:56 No, wait. The air is sweet. It's nighttime. We are alone. Come. Sit down.
30:26 Speak. I'm listening. I love you. Yes, speak to me of love. I love you. That's the theme. Embroider it. I... Embroider it. I love you so. No doubt, and then... And then, I would be so happy if you loved me. Tell me, Roxane, that you love me. You're offering me broth when I hoped for cream.
30:59 Tell me a little how you love me. Well... a lot. Oh, unravel the labyrinth of your feelings. Your neck. I would like to kiss it. Christian. I love you. Again? No. I don't love you. That's fortunate. I adore you. Oh no. Sorry. I'm becoming foolish. And that displeases me. As it would displease me were you to become ugly. But... Go gather your fleeing eloquence. Listen. You love me, I know. Farewell. Not just yet. I will tell you... that you adore me.
31:29 Yes, I know. No, no. Go on, off with you. But I... It's a success. First rendezvous. Isn't it? First rendezvous. It begins like that. I love you. Evening has fallen. The two of them are on a bench. I love you. Embroider it, Roxane tells him. Yes, you see the metaphor. Embroider. It needs stitching.
31:59 So, Christian. I love you so. To make an effort. I love you so, Roxane. No doubt. And then... And then, I would be so happy if you loved me. Tell me, Roxane. Come on, you see. Rack your brains, you poor old man. Tell me, Roxane, that you love me. Roxane, with a pout: You're offering me broth when I hoped for cream. Broth is a soup that's gone a bit off. A bit fermented.
32:29 You're offering me broth. It's badly begun. When I hoped for cream. Tell me a little how you love me. Well, a lot. Oh! Unravel the labyrinth of your feelings. You've already conjugated the verb 'to unlabyrinth' in the imperfect subjunctive. Listen, frankly. You see the précieuses. I'll let you in on something. It's a little anecdote.
32:59 I was in tenth grade in Ivory Coast. There were six or seven of us French. And we were working — I hope, hearing it — Edmond Rostand's text, this very scene. And you should have seen my African classmates burst out laughing when they heard that word. And from then on — because they quickly developed a schoolboy complicity, didn't they — whenever one of us students was called up by the teacher to recite the lesson we were supposed to know by heart, and hadn't learned it
33:37 he would stand there stammering over the questions the teacher asked him, and the whole class would say in chorus: 'Unravel the labyrinth of your feelings!' You see. Still. So — let's see how the other one over there unravels his labyrinth. So, Christian. Stage direction — the instructions — who has drawn closer, devours with his eyes her blond nape. Your neck. I would like to kiss it. Roxane. Christian.
34:08 I love you. Again. She goes to rise. Christian, holding her back. No. I don't love you. Ah well that's fortunate. I adore you. Oh. Yes. I'm becoming foolish. And that displeases me. As it would displease me were you to become ugly. Ah. Look. It's interesting, the parallel. It's interesting. You don't know how to speak, therefore you're not handsome. It comes down to roughly that, the equivalent, you see.
34:38 You'll tell me there's a class difference. Well yes, obviously. But put yourself in the place of a young woman of the time who had more or less managed not to entirely ruin her life, hadn't she — the miseries, the pregnancies, the illnesses. And she has no desire either, does she, to return to deprivation. There. Yes. It's a bit of an outward sign of wealth, as they used to say back then.
35:09 There. I'll end this excerpt on this equivalence, in almost the mathematical sense of an equivalence relation, between the power of seduction and the mastery of discourse — and of a discourse of codes. You see? The code, in that sense.
35:39 That is, the one that precedes being, isn't it? Oh yes, before I was even a kid, before I had yet approached the female sex, well, or the other way round, if I'm a woman, right? The code was already in place in the society I'm entering. That is to say, the code precedes being. So, we started with an apparently light conception of worldliness, préciosité, which comes from the précieuses, which has its heyday above all in the seventeenth century, under Louis XIII.
Weak power, centrifugal culture: from the précieuses to Versailles 36:20 I'm telling you this because there's an important divide to draw here. People often say the seventeenth century is the century of the Sun King, or the century of classicism, or the great century. That's what we hear most often. That's when you look at it from a distance. As soon as you look closely, it's much more complex and out of step, the seventeenth century, depending on whether you're talking about the Louis XIII period or the Louis XIV period. I'll tell you right away, it's not symmetrical, it's not half and half, it's a third.
36:53 The Louis XIII part and two thirds of that century, during which the longest reign in the history of France takes place, never forget that, under Louis XIV. No king, no emperor, no Napoleon, no president of the Republic, has ever reigned as long as Louis XIV, over France, over the French. So that's not the case in the era of the précieuses. There's great political instability. Kings die too young, so children are too young to reign. And so a regency is set up, someone who handles affairs, so to speak, until the king is old enough to reign.
37:29 And the first regent is Cardinal Richelieu, for Louis XIII, then it will be Cardinal Mazarin, Mazarin, the one who comes from Italy, the one who used to say "the onion makes strength," you had to eat a lot of onion. No, I'm joking, but the French joked like that because he had an Italian accent and he meant "union makes strength." With the scientific cardinal, "the onion makes strength." Mazarin, who must have set quite a bit aside for himself, all the same. No, but I don't hold it against him, because he worked quite a lot for the kingdom after all. Careful, me.
37:59 Anyway, as you can see, if you go to Paris, facing the Pont des Arts, you see the Bibliothèque Mazarine, that is, it was Mazarin's house. I have simple tastes, but that would be the house of my dreams in Paris. I have room to house 325 friends—it's mainly for friends, not for me. Well, it's extraordinary. There you go. We put the memorial there. Inside there's the Institut and the Académie française, by the way. And no doubt one of the most beautiful libraries in the world, the Bibliothèque Mazarine. So, political instability.
38:29 The king nearly got lynched during the troubles of the League, the Fronde, the revolt, the last, the last convulsion of the great feudality, with the arrogance and disdain, as if he weren't a king who is primus inter pares, first among equals. He's one of us, that's all. But who made you king, as they used to say in a certain era. Gentlemen, death to Mazarini. Death! Death to Mazarini! Death! Mazarini!
39:07 Learn to read, you fool, it's written, it's signed Gaston d'Orléans, power has changed hands. The Spanish woman to the convent, and Orléans to run the affairs of France. Stop! That's an order! The royal family will not join Mazarin. It will not flee before the Parisians. Majesty, why are you clenching your fists?
39:37 For no reason, sir. And so now absolute monarchy begins to emerge, doesn't it? When Richelieu forbids duels, you don't realize what that means, because the nobility that has reigned for centuries in the Kingdom of France, the aristocracy, has been warlike from its very origin. You take away its sword, and you castrate it. It's a castration! You turn the warrior into a sheep!
40:07 What is it? That's what it means! He forbids duels. One of the greatest families of France, Cinq-Mars, saying, you've really shown that sort of priest in a red robe, I'll show him what French nobility is. He was beheaded. It was traumatic. You see, political instability. Why am I dwelling on this? I was talking about the précieuses.
40:38 Why am I on to politics? Because it's a law. When power is weak, culture becomes centrifugal. It's no longer at court, which will indeed be the case. In the following period, under Louis XIV, well then, that's the complete opposite of political instability, as I told you. The longest reign in the history of France. Today the face of the theater changes. Until this day, I have let my affairs be governed by my ministers under the direction of the late Cardinal Mazarin.
41:16 From now on, I shall reign alone. I shall govern by myself. You will help me with your advice when I ask for it. I order you to sign nothing, not even a passport, without my command. You know my wishes, gentlemen. Now it's up to you to carry them out. Your wars between the great lords and whatnot, your rivalries, that's over.
41:48 That's over. We don't wage war in the world or in the provinces. Besides, I'm enlarging the wings of the château. I'm keeping an eye on you. I'll give you Molière, Racine, Lully's music, ballets, fountains, fireworks. Monsieur Le Vau, Monsieur Le Nôtre, I want a fairy-tale garden. Flowerbeds, ponds, fountains, forests. Everything must be built from this perspective. Flat, sire.
42:18 The countryside around Versailles is hopelessly flat. The ground is a swamp. On the hills there are trees, but here it's nothing but marshland everywhere. Nature bends like men do. I want it, you will do it. Put a thousand, three thousand workers if need be. Plant full-grown trees. Here we'll build a canal as wide as a sea. I'll sail my galleys on it. And the statues. Le Vau, the statues, we'll talk about them again. The sculpture groups in the basins too.
42:50 There, we'll build a labyrinth in which to lose myself with whoever dreams of finding me again. Next to it, the outdoor theater for Monsieur Molière's plays. He will give me festivities without rival. Molière, come closer. We must already think of an entertainment, something lively, dashing. See with him, he knows how to please me. Yes, he will set the music, I'll dictate the outline. Certainly, I shall attend to it, sire. Listen to him. He'll set music to your words the way he sets it to my dreams.
43:20 We are going to make this marsh dance, make this whole kingdom dance. We will give balls such as no one has ever dared dream of. Illuminations to put the stars to shame. We will sing of life, of love. A reflection of paradise before the Fall. You see, at that point, culture becomes centralized again.
43:50 Before Versailles, that's not the case. And so the précieuses illustrate that scattering of culture into the salons. In the Parisian salons, not at Versailles, in the Parisian salons. I mention it because it will come back in the eighteenth century, once—otherwise, political instability, after the iron grip and the brilliance of Louis XIV, once it's Louis XV, who is only concerned with dallying with his little mistress in the châteaux.
44:25 I have nothing against it, I'm not moralizing. But I mean, the Court no longer exerts the attraction it had in the great century. And at that point, as it happens, we start hearing about salons and cafés. Look at your literature textbooks. The Enlightenment philosophers prepared the Revolution in the salons and cafés. Yes indeed, coffee was the weed of the era. I'm not joking. There's something subversive about coffee. I'm playing on the word.
44:57 Coffee, the product, but also the place where you drink coffee. Right? That comes to us from the Orient. Well, not everyone knows that. We know it comes from the Oriental world, from the Arabs, right? It actually comes from Ethiopia. It's not the Arab world. Well, Mocha, import-export. The Arabs shuttled it back and forth, didn't they? Thanks to the Arabs, Ethiopian coffee arrived in Europe, and first, at the gateway to the Orient, in Europe, that's Venice. And the first café is the Café Florian, in Venice.
45:27 Why am I taking this detour about coffee? Because at the start, the imams in the Arab world wanted to ban coffee. Whereas now, Arabs without coffee is like a summer without sun. You see? So there you have it. So culture is in the salons and cafés, and that's where the Revolution was prepared—the cafés, I'm thinking of the Café Procope in Paris, where Diderot and Rousseau went, there were quite a few also around the garden of the Palais-Royal. You see? There it is.
45:57 A decentralized culture. So the précieuses won't quite claim all the credit. But still, I mean, we've caught a bit of modernity at the moment when it's just barely beginning to invade the middle class—that doesn't mean much at the time, but it's starting to soften a little the stiffness there was at court. There you go. So, next step, I'm staying in the seventeenth century, the text of Cyrano with which we began was written, of course, in the nineteenth century, as you know, but the action is supposed to take place precisely under Louis XIII, in the era of the précieuses, right?
Les Femmes savantes: soul and body 46:39 Besides, there are episodes in Cyrano that allude to the war that the Kingdom of France is waging at that time against Spain, or against Austria, that very kingdom, at the time. Since indeed Christian is wounded at the siege of Arras. "When the Spanish give back Arras, the mice will eat the rats." Yes indeed, it's the Bakhmut of the era. So now we're back in the seventeenth century, but the other seventeenth century, the one that follows, the one after the précieuses.
47:12 But the feminine movement has a new avatar. It's no longer préciosité, it's the learned women, les femmes savantes. That is, there had been a scientific revolution that preceded the industrial revolution, late sixteenth, early seventeenth century, Galileo, which will culminate—which culminates with Newton, you see, in the eighteenth century. Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And for a long time, we would have to wait for Einstein and relativity for there to be anything new again in physics.
47:42 We might mention electromagnetism a bit too. But anyway, that's not our subject. So, in the seventeenth century, here again there is a threat to what had until then been a balance—of genders, of sexes, call it what you like. We have—it's the occasion for Molière, who is thus, this time, fully in the classical century, and no longer, as under Louis XIII, a period one might call baroque, unstable, much more complex, in the end.
48:25 Where the alexandrine, the twelve feet of the French verse line, will reach, no doubt, its peak. You have The Learned Ladies. So, one might say, ah yes, that's it, Molière, in the end, is just some macho idiot who can't stand women doing mathematics. Sounds like you've been listening to Caroline Fourest. Or, no, that's rather old already, it's Sandrine Rousseau now, isn't it?
48:55 Well, I'm sorry to give free publicity to people who don't deserve it. But anyway, I said I don't like ad hominem attacks, even less ad feminam ones. So what I mean is, you'll see, Molière's point of view, as often, is much more complex and subtle to pin down. Because there are the learned women, whom Molière ridicules, and there's also the reverse, namely the husband of the chief learned woman, the lady of the house, Philaminte, the mother of the other daughters—the husband, Chrysale, to whom Molière does not give the good part.
49:39 At one point he has him say, "In this house we know how the moon, Mars, shooting stars move, and no one takes care of my stew, which I need." It's a bit reductive, isn't it, to limit the woman to taking care of the stew. You see, that makes the audience laugh too—brilliant, isn't it. I even had a teacher, a little aside, who was annoyed when we always put the word "brilliant" [génial] into our teenage reactions, our enthusiasms, and to temper our ardor he'd say, stop using that word, there IS a genius, Molière.
50:12 One of Philaminte's daughters, one of the learned women, Armande, who was, as we learn during the play, before the play begins, long courted by the play's positive hero, who represents this balanced point of view. Since it's not the passage I'm going to read, I'll tell you beforehand. When he says precisely to Henriette, the only one of the daughters of the house, of Philaminte's daughters, who is normal, who wants a marriage, children, a husband—we're going to see that this doesn't go over so well among the learned women, that it's already seen as a degradation, where there are traits of a certain bourgeois feminism of today, if you look closely.
50:56 So, at one point, Clitandre explains himself, he's very clear, he says, "I consent that a woman have insight into everything," you see, he's not a boor, not an iconoclast, "I consent that a woman have insight into everything, but I do not want in her that shocking passion for making herself learned merely in order to be learned. And I like that often, to questions put to her, she can respond, in matters she knows, without citing authors, without using grand words, without nailing wit onto her slightest remarks. I greatly respect your mother, Madame"—since he's speaking to one of the daughters, with whom he shares a mutual love, we're not in Racine here—"but I cannot at all approve of her fancy, nor become the echo of the things she says, of the incense she burns to her hero of wit."
51:43 Her hero of wit is the famous Trissotin, who is the society figure of the time, the poet who says whatever nonsense in the salons, as long as he has something to eat, who comes to sponge off good households a bit. "To the incense she burns to her hero of wit, her Monsieur Trissotin grieves me, sickens me. And I rage to see that she esteems such a man, a fool everywhere hissed at for his writings, a pedant whose prolific pen"—meaning he churns out an awful lot—"supplies the whole marketplace with obliging papers."
52:14 There, I'll stop there. So, from there, I pick up my thread. Armande was known, courted for a long time by Clitandre—in plain English, we'd say she sent him packing. She played the coquette. And now Armande has just learned that Clitandre has consoled himself with her sister, Henriette, the only normal one in the house, I remind you. A mutual love. And now she's furious. But she doesn't say so, she's too proud. She's a coquette, isn't she?
52:45 And she resents her sister for wanting to marry. She goes so far as to say, "You don't see how disgusting that word is, to which such bravado applies so well. What I see is a husband, children, a household." Ah, can one bear it? You see, this puritanism—curious, it comes back today. Puritanism, ecology, feminism, bourgeois feminism. Personally, I think there's still a lot to be done so that women earn as much as men for the same jobs.
53:16 careful, one mustn't mix up the feminisms. Here I'm coming back to these excesses, well, these deviations, this pretext. Because in fact she would have liked to go on being courted, even at the cost of sending Clitandre packing. But there it is. Still, when she learns that he's ready to marry her little sister, well then, suddenly, she's ready to accept—though it's a bit late—granting her favors to Clitandre.
53:56 So he answers her—I won't speak in his place. It's admirably performed in productions by the Comédie-Française, which you can find online, by the way. And we're going to play the excerpt of Clitandre's answer to Armande, who really should have made her move a bit sooner. Here it is: "Do you call it, sir, opposing your wishes, to strip them of what is vulgar in them, and to wish to reduce them to that purity in which the beauty of perfect love consists?"
54:29 "You could not, for my sake, keep your thoughts free and clear of the commerce of the senses. And you taste nothing, among these sweeter charms, of that union of hearts where bodies have no part. You can only love with a gross kind of love, with all the trappings of bonds, of matter. And to nourish the fires you produce, you need a marriage and all that goes with it."
55:04 "Oh! What a strange love, and how far beautiful souls are from burning with such earthly flames. The senses have no part at all in their ardors, and this fine fire wishes to unite only hearts. As an unworthy thing, it leaves the rest aside. It is a pure and clean fire. Like celestial fire, with it one utters only honest sighs, and one does not incline toward filthy desires."
55:34 "Nothing impure mingles with the goal one sets. One loves for love's sake and for no other reason. It is to the spirit alone that all raptures go. One never notices that one is a body." — "As for me, unfortunately, Madame, I do notice—forgive me—that I have a body just as I have a soul."
56:06 "I feel it matters too much to me to set it aside. Of such detachments I know nothing of the art. Heaven has denied me this philosophy, and my soul and my body walk together. Nothing is more beautiful, as you have said, than those purified vows aimed only at the spirit, those unions of heart and those tender thoughts so well cleansed of the commerce of the senses. But such loves, for me, are too refined. I am a bit coarse, as you accuse me of being."
56:36 "I love with my whole self, and the love given to me wants, I confess, the whole person. It's no great crime, and without wronging your fine sentiments, I see that in the world most people follow my method, and that marriage is quite fashionable, passing for a bond honest and sweet enough for one to have wished to see me become your husband, without the freedom of such a thought needing to give you grounds to seem offended." — "Well, sir, well, since without listening to me your brutal feelings insist on being satisfied, since to reduce you to faithful ardors, bonds of flesh, bodily chains are required, if my mother wishes it, I resolve my mind to consent, for you, to what is in question."
57:27 "It is no longer time, Madame. Another has taken the place, and by such a turnabout I would ill repay the kindness of the refuge where I have taken shelter from all your disdain." — "But indeed, sir, do you count on my approval when you promise yourself this other marriage, and in your visions? Do you know, if you please, that I have another husband very nearly arranged for Henriette?" — "Ah, Madame, look at your choice, I beg you, spare me at least the disgrace, and do not reduce me to the unworthy fate of seeing myself the rival of Monsieur Trissotin. The love of fine wits, which in your house is set against me, could not have opposed me to a less noble adversary."
57:57 "There are, and quite a few, whom for their supposed wit the bad taste of the age has managed to bring into fashion. But Monsieur Trissotin has fooled no one, and everyone gives due justice to the writings he offers us. Outside these walls, he is valued everywhere at his true worth. And what has twenty times astonished me is to see you exalt to the skies foolish trifles that you yourself would disown had you written them. If you judge him quite differently from the rest of us, it's because we see him with different eyes than yours." A labyrinth of feelings. That's where things stood in the era of the précieuses, wasn't it? Then, the learned women—what is common to each case?
Time is needed to reach enjoyment 58:31 It's that it takes time to arrive at pleasure. That's it. I don't leap, you see, like a panther onto a monkey, in the bush, in a fraction of a second, after having schemed, hidden myself, advanced with feline steps. No, it takes time. It even happens to me, when you also read the admirable courtly romances of the Middle Ages, I don't know.
59:01 There's the period of the Song of Roland where the hero is an epic warrior, etc., where trifles, love, don't play a very big role. There is indeed the fair Aude who waits for Roland, but we see her appear a little, from a window, from time to time. After that it's fighting, admirable, the verses of the Guinard—that's not the point. But anyway, I mean, for what concerns us, pleasure and happiness, we must wait for this literary revolution that has been called, you know, the matter of Brittany, the courtly romances.
59:31 as the word itself says well, when the kingdom is pacified, war is no longer at the center of concerns. What are you going to do at court since we no longer make war but we make love? That's courtliness. We must not forget also. Woman is again at the center—of woman. There is love. Only, here's the thing, what's the connection with this business about it taking time. Like Roxane who said, yes, fine, I love you, I adore you, that's a bit short. And even worse, when he tells her, your nape of the neck, I would like to kiss it.
1:00:06 So, it's too short, it's too fast. I say, in the Middle Ages, sometimes, the shortest path to go from the knight to the lady for whom he sighs was to go on crusade to Jerusalem and come back victorious. Gombault, I feel you're ready for the ultimate mission that might win you my heart and my bed. Oh, my dear, I can't take it anymore. Tell me the task is not too laborious to accomplish. Calm down, knight. I'm speaking of the cup from which Christ drank at his last supper and in which his blood flowed, his side pierced by the Roman soldier's lance.
1:00:44 Bring me back the Grail. If you succeed, you will have my heart and everything that comes with it. You will receive immortality and find again the center of the world, for the Grail is the source of sources, and to do this you must imitate the king of salmon. No, no, but this is an extreme case, but it's to show you the importance of the detour, of time, of temporal thickness, isn't it? Time is money. Myself, I rather believe money is time.
1:01:16 You see? To understand economics, you have to see the time that was spent producing value, and under what conditions. And that is the business of history, and that would take us far. Although we'll dive back into it, you'll see. Since here, we move on to the Age of Enlightenment, we're going to see an example—not yet happiness, but the search for pleasure. Isn't that so? So we are at the height of what is called libertinage.
1:01:48 Libertinage is almost this movement. I'm speaking of libertinage at the level of morals. I'm not speaking of the thought, the philosophy of the libertines, which is much more serious, which is quite another thing, and which was even present in dotted form, even during the century of Louis XIV—not everything had been extinguished between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment taking over from the Renaissance, which was blocked during the flowering of the absolute monarchy—this movement of questioning, just as the Renaissance had questioned centuries of the Middle Ages, of ecclesiastical authority, or even the Reformation, isn't it, in northern Europe, and the Renaissance in the south, in Italy—Machiavelli, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo, to name a few.
1:02:37 In the same way, the 18th century too is a questioning of the feudal edifice that would lead to the French Revolution. You see, it's as if there were two parallel lines, the 16th century and the 18th century, the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, and between the two, the power of the longest century, of the longest reign in the history of France, which for the time being blocks the forces of demand. And so here we are in the 18th century. I told you earlier, royalty no longer has the same power of attraction it had in the Grand Siècle.
1:03:12 Culture returns to the salons and cafés, and of course libertinage is the main activity of society, of the establishment as we'd say today, isn't it? because it was out of the question for a woman to be able to divorce at the time—there was no divorce, it was forbidden by the Church. But a king could divorce. Oh yes, Henry VIII, he divorced—it was forbidden by the pope, but no matter, I'll abandon the Catholic religion, I'll found the Anglican religion.
1:03:47 Anne Boleyn is well worth a Mass. I'm paraphrasing Henry IV there. There you go. So we're going to see the search for pleasure of the—you contradict it? We understood well that worldliness, society, has a necessary relation to happiness, and now you're talking to me again about pleasure, which is too quick. Not so quick as that. Let's not take libertines for idiots—we're going to see now. Yes, jouissance is quick, but the path leading to jouissance—well, jouissance—will be all the more intense the longer the path to reach it has been.
Les Liaisons dangereuses: pleasure through obstacle 1:04:23 That's what we're going to see. I can't. Madame. What is this Monsieur de Valmont? All his life, Monsieur de Valmont has been and is a master of the art of seduction. He has charmed his female victims by designing every gesture, every word, every smile with only one end in view: to destroy a woman's honor. Are you in love with Monsieur de Valmont? Oh, certainly not. For those accustomed to reading Casanova's memoirs, you see, it's tiring at times, even.
1:05:00 Silk ladders at night to climb up to the balcony. But here, you see, it's not quite the same obstacles. You'll see, it concerns the principal male hero of one of the summits of our literature in terms of quality of writing. Dangerous Liaisons is one of the best-written texts in the French language, written by someone who spent more time in fortresses as an officer, isn't that so, than Choderlos de Laclos.
1:05:32 And here, the hero Valmont, who is the principal male hero, writes to a libertine woman who is his accomplice, his confidante and his accomplice at the same time, who does as much with men in matters of seduction as he does with women—he explains to her the charm he finds precisely in the woman least ready to yield to the schemes of a seducer, of a libertine. A very prudish woman, very religious, very caught up in traditional constraints, let's say.
1:06:07 It concerns Madame de Tourvel. But what am I saying? Madame de Tourvel—so he writes to his accomplice, Madame de Merteuil: Does Madame de Tourvel need illusion? No, to be adorable, it suffices for her to be herself. You reproach her for dressing badly—se mettre means to dress, of course, referring to finery, to elegance. I believe it indeed, all finery harms her, all that hides her disfigures her.
1:06:37 it is in the abandon of undress that she is truly ravishing; thanks to the oppressive heat we are experiencing—meaning it was visibly hot—a simple linen negligee lets me see her round, supple waist. You see the cynicism of the libertine, who—while she believes she is speaking with him of culture, religion and elevation—is looking at her round, supple waist. A single muslin covers her bosom.
1:07:13 And my furtive but penetrating glances have already grasped its enchanting forms. Her face, you say, has no expression. Does Madame de Merteuil have a touch of jealousy? I don't know, but anyway, I'll say, what do you find in her? She's a bigot who smells of holy water rather than rosewater. Fine. And what would she express, she who has no expression at all, in the moments when nothing speaks to her heart? Implying: before meeting me, one speaks to her soul, to her brain, to everything she has—her wit—but one never speaks to her heart.
1:07:48 No, doubtless, she does not have, like our coquettish women, that lying look that sometimes seduces and always deceives. She doesn't know how to cover the emptiness of a phrase with a studied smile—she's not with it. Let's be clear. And in African French, I say it to you because it is thanks to francophone Africa that French remains a living language. And yes, there are words like that beginning to come in.
1:08:19 I often hear people say 'une go' now. You see, meaning a girl, it's a contraction from Anglophone Africa, 'girl.' Well, I'm not here to give a course in African linguistics, but there's a term some people know because rappers often use it, the term 'gaou.' The gaou is the one who is never with it. Who isn't dressed properly. Who's very clumsy with girls at a party. So, and even if she had the most beautiful teeth in the world, which was very rare, you know, for a woman past thirty to still have all her teeth and be beautiful.
1:08:58 So, and even though she has the most beautiful teeth in the world, she laughs only at those who amuse her. But you have to see, as in playful games, she offers the image of a naive and frank gaiety. You see, we see the predator delighted to see a woman who expects anything except to be attacked by—we spoke about it—libido today. As with an unfortunate person she hastens to help, her gaze announces pure joy and compassionate goodness.
1:09:28 One must see especially, at the slightest word of praise or flattery, how touching embarrassment paints itself on her celestial face. You see, when he barely offers her a compliment, it's to obtain what? This touching embarrassment of a modesty that is not at all feigned. That means: I am tired of society women where everything is artificial, where even modesty is affected. It makes me think of Nerval returning to the park of Ermenonville, built at the end of the 18th century, who says: I find there at the same time the traces of an era where even naturalness itself was affected.
1:10:11 Superb. She is prudish and devout and from that you judge her cold and lifeless. The implication is a bit quick, understood as: I think quite differently. What astonishing sensibility must one have to spread it even onto her husband, and to always love a being who is always absent? The proof that she is not cold is that she remains faithful inwardly to her husband even when he is off on distant duties.
1:10:41 What stronger proof could you wish for? The question sounds rhetorical—and yet I managed to procure another one. I directed her walk so that a ditch was found to cross. He's really a calculator. So at one point a woman hesitates to cross—we wouldn't want to get dirty like that in the mud. So, and though quite nimble, she is even more timid—you can judge that a prude fears jumping the ditch.
1:11:14 She had to trust herself to me. I held this modest woman in my arms. Our preparations, and the passing of my old aunt, had made the playful devout woman burst out laughing. But as soon as I seized her by an adroit clumsiness, our arms intertwined with each other. I pressed her bosom against mine, and in that brief interval I felt her heart beat faster. A pleasant blush came to color her face, roses and lilies.
1:11:45 At the time a beautiful woman was a woman who had white skin, meaning she was not a peasant, otherwise she would have skin tanned by the sun since working at the time meant working in the fields—not yet the industrial revolution—but on this whiteness she would not have had the same allure if from time to time a blush had not come to appear, expressing desire and pleasure—roses and lilies. But yes, snow white. You look at Snow White's lips, you can look for the white.
1:12:20 Well then, the pleasant blush came to color her face, and her modest embarrassment taught me enough that her heart had throbbed with love and not with fear. My aunt taught me enough—sorry, my aunt however was mistaken about it, as you were, and started to say the child was afraid, but the charming candor of the child did not allow her to lie; she answered naively, oh no. But that single word enlightened me; from that moment sweet hope replaced cruel anxiety; I will have this woman, I will steal her from the husband who profanes her—it's the world upside down, it's not him who profanes her with his libertinage, that's cynical—it's her legitimate husband; I will dare to snatch her even from the god she adores—yes, again the sacrilegious side found at the time in the most illustrious libertine, Don Juan, you see, who defies God, the figure of the Commander, isn't it—I will dare to snatch her.
1:13:31 from the very god she adores. What a delight to be in turn the object and the conqueror of her remorse. How gallantly these things are turned. Far from me the idea of destroying the prejudices that beset her—you see, he seeks the obstacle, he seeks the duration, the time it takes to overcome these obstacles, he will draw all the more pleasure from it—so far from me the idea of destroying the prejudices that beset her, they will add to my happiness and my glory that she believes in virtue but sacrifices it to me—meaning that she transgresses virtue only with me, isn't it—and for the first time that these faults terrify her without being able to stop her, and that, agitated by a thousand terrors, she can only forget them, overcome them, in my arms—that then, I consent, may they tell me: I adore you—it's curious how we come back to Roxane and Christian earlier, except that here, you see, we haven't started—it's the end of a long process.
The idyll of Thoune in the Confessions: the encounter 1:14:41 of an obstacle course—she alone among all women will be worthy of pronouncing that word, I will truly be the god she will have preferred. There you have it. Then you'll tell me, listen, this is fairly banal, these stories, it's true that love needs obstacles, etc., to overcome. Yes, but I'm not concerned here only with this text; I have a theme I'm pursuing about worldliness and its complexity, and we're going to see, from a text by Rousseau of which one might say he pillaged that one or the reverse, it doesn't matter which, which seems to echo Laclos's text and yet draws from it a completely opposite lesson—not a lesson in pleasure but, this time, a lesson in happiness. So it concerns a text taken from the Confessions, so it's not the final period but anyway an already fairly advanced period of Rousseau's, who already has a well-established literary glory, which doesn't stop him from keeping his rather wild-child side and keeping his motto—it's not Vitam impendere vero, to make one's life dependent on truth—I mean he received visits, for example.
1:15:51 on rue Plâtrière as it was called at the time and which is now called rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the Marais—all of Europe came to visit him, he received practically no one, but there was a marquis coming from Prussia when he wasn't in the mood—yes, well, anyway, his glory as a writer is well established, and the greatest print run of the time in bookshops was La Nouvelle Héloïse, his novel, along with Voltaire's Candide, those are the two greatest bookshop successes, if you will, of the time—but here it concerns the Confessions, and here a memory comes back to him in the Confessions—that's right, it's the memoirs, isn't it—of an episode that happened to him when he was relatively young—let me tell you the context before we get to the text anyway: it's a summer morning that started out to be scorching, so he walks along a river with vegetation, a shadier, cooler path, and then near the river he hears sounds, sounds of splashing water, he says, and at the same time women's laughter.
1:17:01 He comes closer to see, and then someone calls him by his name, one of the women calls him by his name, and he in fact comes upon a pair of ladies he had known very vaguely at Madame de Warens's in Chambéry—two people from well-established society, Mademoiselle de Galley and Mademoiselle de Graffenried, we are in Switzerland—who are out roaming, the mother isn't there, she's off on a walk, and now their horses are a little frightened by crossing the river and they are quite at a loss; they told me they were going to Thoune, an old castle—that's T-H-U-N, today it's written T-U-N-E here—an old castle belonging to Madame Galley; they begged—here they begged for my help to get their horses across, not being able to manage it alone; I wanted to whip the horses but they feared kicks for me and jolts for themselves; I resort to another expedient, I took Mademoiselle Galley's horse by the bridle, then pulling it.
1:18:11 after me, I crossed the stream, with water up to mid-leg, and the other horse followed without difficulty; that done, I wanted to greet these young ladies and go on my way like a simpleton—ah, that's not, that's not the Valmont we just heard—they said a few words to each other quietly, and Mademoiselle de Graffenried, addressing me, said: no, she said to me, you don't get away like that, you got wet in our service and we must in conscience take care to dry you off; you must please come with us, we are taking you prisoner. My heart was pounding, I looked at Mademoiselle Galley. Yes, yes, she added, laughing at my startled look, prisoner of war, mount behind her, we want to be accountable for you. But mademoiselle, I do not have the honor of being known to your mother—that wasn't done at the time, it's not done as they'd say among the caillera crowd today, but here we are not among the caillera crowd all the same.
1:19:21 I don't know the mother, it's this gentleman who is coming, a bachelor, I imagine at the time, but mademoiselle, I do not have the honor of being known to your mother, what will she say when she sees me arrive? Her mother, replied Mademoiselle de Graffenried, is not at Thoune, we are alone, we're coming back this evening, and you will come back with us. The effect of electricity, one might say, was new then—it was all new, electricity, the works of Lavater and Mesmer were very recent—the effect of electricity is no greater than what these words produced on me; leaping onto Mademoiselle de Graffenried's horse, I trembled with joy, and when I had to embrace her, literally, isn't it, to take her by the waist to hold on, my heart beat so hard that she noticed—just now we saw in Laclos's text, it's as if, I don't know, one of the texts were watching over the other, isn't it, of course each is unaware of it, but the parallels are all the more pertinent—just now the heart was beating.
1:20:31 it was he who had provoked that by an adroit movement, he had managed to embrace her in order to help her cross the ditch, in those cases it wasn't planned at all, isn't it, it's the real emotion lived, it's not calculation, it's quite the opposite even—he's simply embarrassed, embarrassed and ravished, literally, you know where 'ravi' comes from—what a 'ravi' is, an aircraft has wings, an avicole farm is a poultry, guinea-fowl farm, Ganymede, he was so beautiful, a shepherd, that he was 'ravished'—you see what 'ravi' originally meant, lifted up to heaven by Jupiter, who had him carried off by an eagle so that he might serve drinks to the god on Olympus, there where he is a god, you know, man, woman, they don't make a fuss about it, they're the Greeks—so, and when I had to embrace her to hold on, my heart beat so hard that she noticed it; she told me that hers was beating too, but from fear of falling—that was almost, in my position, an invitation to check the matter—not that he would go there.
1:21:42 hands practically on her chest, I never dared, and throughout the journey my two arms served as her belt, very tightly indeed, but—forgive me, but Rousseau makes me laugh—without moving for a moment, such a woman who reads this will slap me, would gladly slap me, and would not be wrong—it's true that many women have found that I was a bit slow to fire, to let go. So the gaiety of the trip and the chatter of these girls sharpened mine so much that until evening, and as long as we were together, we did not stop chattering for a moment—forgive this digression on the word 'babille,' but what can I say, that's where we see the difference with Rousseau, and this is what we just saw: Rousseau inscribes himself in the symbolic order with a modern force we won't find again until the symbolism of Baudelaire—I say this for those who know what I'm talking about, and for the others, now's the time to understand.
Babble and the symbolic order 1:22:52 what is meant here by the symbolic order, through an example, all the same, you see, babil, baby, Babel, the confusion of tongues—you know, all those who have had young children don't need to be an encyclopedia to know that there's a stage where the young child doesn't yet have the code to speak, but begins to articulate, to babble, you see, it's no longer moans, cries, tears—it's starting to be speech that you'd hear from afar without understanding what it says, even up close it remains incomprehensible—he has the channel, he's beginning to master the channel like a nightingale, but he doesn't yet have the code of language—that's babbling. Now remember, when I did the series on Wagner's Ring, remember that work, perhaps the longest in the history of so-called Western art, since it lasts four days—the first scene begins, when the curtain rises, in the Rhine gold, with the three daughters of the Rhine making their babble ring out, precisely.
1:24:02 but literally, that is, the first words she says, the first words of this piece—there will be words over the course of these four days—the first words are not words, it's Weia! Waga! Woge, du Welle—these are alliterations, it's babbling, it flows like water, isn't it, and at the same time you know very well that women at the washhouse, the washerwomen at the river, I saw it in Africa too, it's not exclusive to Europe, it's everywhere—they are among themselves, they speak more freely than in the village where curtains are drawn across windows to see who's talking with whom, I don't know, because it's a bit removed from the center of the village, where the laundry is washed, and then the river, you see—so there is a link between women's speech, the babble—I've never known a woman who doesn't sing in the shower, forgive the detail, but anyway statistically it's easy to verify—there you have it, there is a link between the flow of song and the flow of water, and moving water, that's what I'm saying.
1:25:12 that is of the symbolic order because the link is not at all physical, it's not scientific in the sense of the hard sciences, but it is rigorous within the symbolic order—if you want to be convinced of it, I'll give you a lead, I take one example, I'll take another as counterpoint, I refer you to an Illumination by Rimbaud, it's convenient, the Illuminations, it seems a bit complicated—how does he put it—I alone have the key to this savage parade; to understand my word one must let it have evolved—well, when you read it, it's actually quite clear, and I'm speaking of the one called Barbare. What relation to babble? Long after the days and the seasons, and the beings and the countries, the bleeding pennant on the silk of the seas and the arctic flowers—the arctic flowers, he adds, they don't exist, there are no flowers at the pole—oh well, he repeats, I'll move on, and it's about half a page, it's not long, go read Barbare, Rimbaud, Illuminations, Barbare, you won't be disappointed—and there, the sweats, the heads of hair, the white boiling swirling tears, and the feminine voice coming from the depths of arctic caves.
1:26:23 there is indeed a symbolic order, and then of course, I already pointed this out in another context, all German schoolchildren know the legend of the Lorelei; everyone knows Heinrich Heine's poem—who appreciated Marx and whom Marx appreciated, which is rather rare among poets, that Marx should point out a passage—and his most famous poem, almost taught in schools, the Lorelei, that fairy supposed to sing on a rock at the edge of the Rhine, whose voice is so bewitching, a bit like Homer's sirens, isn't it, except here we're not talking about sirens but about undines, since it's fresh water, isn't it—back to the river, here it had started like that when the two women meet, sounds of splashing water and high-pitched women's voices—the Lorelei sang a song so bewitching that boatmen lost their bearings and were dashed on the rocks, as with the sirens—you see, there is indeed a symbolic order of what Rimbaud calls the feminine voice.
A dinner without wine: sensuality and orality 1:27:33 arriving at the depths of the arctic caves—she had put me so much at ease that my tongue spoke as much as my eyes did, though they did not say the same things. Only for a few moments, when I found myself alone with one or the other, the conversation grew a little embarrassed, but the absence returned quickly enough, not leaving time to clear up this embarrassment—you notice the difference again, the resemblance and the difference with Laclos's text, you see the conjunctions and disjunctions: the other does everything to have a moment of intimacy with Madame de Tourvel, whereas here it's no worse if the three of them are together, because they get along so well, all three, that it would be a shame to spoil it, even by an affair—that will become clearer a bit further on, otherwise I wouldn't say it, I'm not doing the interpreting, you'll find it in the text—arrived at Thoune and myself well dried—don't forget he's soaked to the waist—he had said, we then had lunch, then it was necessary to proceed to the important business of preparing.
1:28:43 dinner—notice the difference between lunch and dinner, that's already something, one real meal a day, the real meal is dinner—the two young ladies, while cooking, kissed the farmer's-wife's children from time to time—so there is staff here, keeping the château's staff—and the poor kitchen-boy watched, champing at the bit, but this refers to young Rousseau, isn't it, who is helping a little in the kitchen, so he's a kitchen boy; provisions had been sent from town, and there was enough to make a very good dinner, especially in delicacies, but unfortunately wine had been forgotten—Rousseau was rather fond of the bottle, the gifts of Father Lyaeus, as he says in La Nouvelle Héloïse, look at the grape-harvest festival in La Nouvelle Héloïse—this oversight was not surprising, the forgetting of wine was not surprising for girls who scarcely drank any, but I was quite annoyed, I had rather counted on that help to embolden myself, you see, to overcome my timidity—we're in a Calvinist country, one doesn't go so easily from puritanism.
1:29:54 to brilliance without a little booster—it wasn't weed, it was wine. So they were annoyed too, for the same reason perhaps, but I don't believe it at all—you see, it keeps hesitating the whole time between the libertine temptation, as with Laclos, and at the same time the fear of spoiling the miracle of happiness that is settling in on this day, this unique company—a simpleton, a clumsy fellow, two well-bred young women, cheerful without being flirtatious, isn't it—you see, in the sense at least of Madame de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons, without danger—their lively and charming gaiety was innocence itself, and besides, what would they have done with me between the two of them?—I know many who would have an answer, but we're not in the Marquis de Sade, we're in—so you'll tell me we're in less, we'll see that we're in much more—more happiness, I'm getting there, or rather it's Rousseau who's getting there—they sent someone to fetch.
1:31:05 wine everywhere in the area, none to be found — very sociologically interesting, I won't dwell on it, but nowadays you go anywhere and you find wine at some bistro, in Switzerland it was a luxury. Glücklich wie Gott in Frankreich, the Germans say, happy as God in France — and yes, in France there are pretty curly-haired women, there are excellent wines in almost every region, wine which is also central, Dionysus, pleasure, Bacchus — it was already quite something, the feast days when one could taste a good wine. None was to be found, so sober and poor were the peasants of that canton, or always very attentive, you know, to social differences, as they noticed my chagrin. I told them not to worry so much about it and that they had no need of wine to intoxicate me — that was the only piece of gallantry. You see this permanent oscillation between the gallant, libertine — courtly, if you like, temptation, in the sense I mentioned earlier, of love made at court. One must do more useful things, but I think the rascals could see quite well that this gallantry
1:32:15 was a truth. We dined in the farmwoman's kitchen, the two friends sitting on benches on the two sides of the long table, and their host — Rousseau himself — between the two of them on a three-legged stool. What a dinner! Nothing happened. What a charming memory. How, being able at so little cost to taste such pure and true pleasures, could one want to seek others? Never did a supper in the petites maisons — you know he did lead a libertine life like everyone of his century, in Venice, the famous passages, with a half-prostitute in Venice, then in Paris he speaks of the petites maisons, which were something like houses of prostitution — never did a supper in the petites maisons of Paris come close to that meal. I'm not just talking about the gaiety, the sweet joy, that goes without saying, but I'm talking about sensuality — on Rousseau, that's rarely discussed.
1:33:25 And here I'm sure there are some who make the connection, inasmuch as I keep insisting that Clouscard is not some kind of killjoy, and that when he criticizes worldliness he is not a scorner — he doesn't despise pleasures, far from it. When I say I've known few beings so given to enjoyment, so given to jouissance, as Clouscard, I'm taking up what Rousseau says here — he'll come back to it again, you'll see, toward the end of the text; it's a crescendo that keeps rising from pleasure toward happiness. That's why I insist: he says clearly that never did a supper in the petites maisons of Paris come close to that meal. One might understand that to mean — well, it's less nerve-wracking, less feverish, there's no worldly tension — but still, in terms of pleasure, of sensuality, it could hardly compete, since nothing much happens there. And that's when he says: I don't say this only for the gaiety, for the sweet joy, but I say it for the sensuality — and you'll see, all the senses.
1:34:35 After dinner we made an economy: instead of drinking the coffee left over from lunch, we kept it — coffee was precious at the time — we kept it to enjoy with Swiss cream and cakes they had brought. There is an oral sensuality that runs through the text. I'll also point out that the passages where Rousseau reaches what he considers the height of possible bliss in this world — that is, in the fifth walk, when the waters of the lake, through a kind of hypnosis, plunge him into a reverie — what does he say?
1:35:21 Delicious — it's always an oral metaphor with Rousseau. It's interesting to see that. I don't want to do psychoanalysis, you understand, but still, this insistence on orality in him, which we find again in different contexts, as in that extraordinary passage in the Reveries where he tells how he comes out of a fainting spell after that accident where he was struck by the dog in Paris and nearly lost his life — since he fell, at a very advanced age, over sixty at the time, that was a lot — falling on his jaw on the Parisian pavement. And when he comes to, he sees just three stars, a bouquet, a piece of sky, and he says: that moment was delicious — the same word comes to his mind, you see. So, taken literally, if we take it literally, it's a term that comes from orality, and well, there is something, isn't there, almost prenatal, you see, of the infant's relation to the mother — don't forget that this is fundamental in Rousseau — and indeed when he speaks of the lake's waters he uses the word
1:36:31 to rock, which plunges him into this hypnosis — the ebb and flow of that water, its continuous sound, but swelling at intervals, striking my ear without pause; my eyes supplementing the inner movement which the reverie was extinguishing in me, and sufficing to make me feel my existence with pleasure, without taking the trouble to think. But soon these light impressions themselves faded into the uniformity — that's where I almost think of the fetus — into the uniformity of the continuous movement that rocked me. I insist, you see, on these passages, on Rousseau's richness in the symbolic order — just by paying attention to his semantics, which is not due to chance, of course; I say this behind his back, I don't think he's aware at that moment that he's thinking of infantile suckling. So I return to this remark, and to keep our appetite whetted, we go into the orchard to finish our dessert with cherries — but the oral libido isn't over. I remember
The cherries, decency, and the green paradise 1:37:42 an exam for the agrégation in literature, the so-called comparative literature paper, where the theme that year was the tale in literature, and Snow White was discussed among other tales. The professor — excellent lecture, by the way — showed that there were tales that came from trades: some came from seamstresses, others from basket-weavers, another from charcoal-burners, no matter. And as for Snow White, which comes from the basket-weavers, those who weave willow — you know, to make baskets — remember, the tale says that when she goes into the forest to her grandmother's, instead of taking the normal road, she takes a shortcut through the forest, and it's the so-called road of the red fruits — very Germanic, that's the importance of red and white, we already saw it earlier in Snow White in general, not just in particular the story of the red fruits — if you look closely at all the raspberry, cherry, strawberry tarts, it's very much a Nordic country thing.
1:38:52 The greatest Scandinavian filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, made that magnificent film called Wild Strawberries — yes, it's in the crops of those regions, and real mountains of raspberries out there. But here, it's cherries — and yes, the time of cherries, the time of happiness, if you look at the song. We go into the orchard to finish our dessert with cherries; I climbed up the tree and threw them bunches, in return for which they threw me back the pits through the branches — playing like children, if you look closely. Once, Mademoiselle Galley, holding out her apron and drawing back her head, presented herself so well, and I aimed so accurately, that I made a bunch fall into her bosom — again, you see, we're always on the borderline between the libertine temptation, which we don't cross into, and yet the sensuality that is always being provoked.
1:40:02 And laughing, I said to myself: are not my lips cherries too? How gladly would I throw them to them likewise! If I were a swallow, my beauty, how well I know how to fly, on your bosom, my beauty, I would go and perch — this is a song reported by Nerval in Chansons et légendes du Valois. The day passed in this way, frolicking with the greatest freedom and always with the greatest decency — not one equivocal word, not one risky joke — and this decency we did not impose on ourselves at all, it came by itself; we took the tone our hearts gave us. In short, my modesty — others will say my foolishness — was such that the greatest liberty I allowed myself was to kiss Mademoiselle Galley's hand once. We'll skip the next paragraph now since nothing much else happens. Well, she remembered that we should not wait for nightfall to enter the town, and that we had only the time needed to get there by day, and we hurried to leave, going our separate ways as we had come — on horses again. If I had dared
1:41:12 I would have reversed that order, for Mademoiselle Galley's look had stirred my heart deeply, but I dared not say anything, and it wasn't for her to propose it. As we walked, we said that the day was wrong to end — again this relation to time, you see; if it had been so boring, this kind of thing, he would do everything for it to be over. No, no, quite the opposite: as we walked we said the day was wrong to end, but far from complaining that it had been short, we found that we had had the secret of making it long through all the amusements with which we had known how to fill it. I left her at about the same spot — you know, the river, the horses — where she had picked me up. With what regret did we part, with what pleasure did we plan to meet again! Twelve hours spent together were worth to us centuries of familiarity. The sweet memory of that day cost nothing to those charming girls; the tender union that reigned between us was worth livelier pleasures
1:42:22 — and again he insists that the happiness and pleasure he felt on that day was never approached by the pleasures he had known, as any man would, especially in his century, where he was not stingy with them. Livelier pleasures could not have subsisted with them; we loved each other without mystery and without shame, and we wanted to love each other always thus. The innocence of morals has its own voluptuousness, which is quite equal to the other — you see, someone like Baudelaire, who is not known, isn't he, for the most innocent loves. I prefer to opium, to Constance, to nights — those are the Nuits Saint-Georges, mind you, not the other kind of nights — the elixir flowing from your mouth where love shows off; toward you my desires set out in caravan; your eyes are the cistern where my cares drink. That's a man addressed to Baudelaire — then a woman: you would put the whole universe in your alley, impure woman — you see, it's not, it's the opposite context. And yet Baudelaire evoked, like no one else, the green paradise of childhood loves, in that famous poem
1:43:33 called L'Irréparable — a strange poem. Can we smother the old, the long remorse that lives, stirs, and writhes, and feeds on us like the worm on the dead — not "the dead man," guilt, very modern, like Kafka. I'm skipping stanzas, since this is a digression. Tell it, beautiful sorceress, tell it if you know, to this spirit filled with anguish that the horse's hoof crushes, that threatens the wounded — can one light up a muddy black sky, a poem that seems desperate — without morning and without evening, without a funereal flash of lightning — the green paradise of childhood loves, where is it, the innocent paradise full of furtive pleasure — that's the word Rousseau used, furtive — is it already farther off than India and China? And when Proust writes In Search of Lost Time, what he spends the most time — I'm looking at the order of the volumes — the most time writing, he finishes after struggling against death, you know he had always thought, Proust,
1:44:43 that he would never be a writer, that he was a failed writer in advance, that everything had already been said, and so much better, by others before him. It took death setting its foot on his chest, it took him being gravely ill, for him to engage in a race against death and leave us this unique work, which plunges, as the title so aptly indicates, into the search for lost time and which will end with time regained. Now, what he wrote last is what we read first: childhood, the green paradise of loves, the innocence Rousseau speaks of here, those days one would have wished longer — and it's even truer in memory, isn't it, that we passed too quickly by all of that. So I give the floor back to Rousseau, who says it so much better, but things had to be put in relation. The innocence of morals has its own voluptuousness, which is quite equal to the other — he doesn't say to its advantages, to its nobility, to its dignity — its voluptuousness, that's a strong word in terms of pleasure — its voluptuousness, which is quite equal to the other,
1:45:53 because it has no interval and acts continually — our quest for happiness, there we go, it bounces back, you said it: happiness requires repetition, an extension in time that evanescent jouissance does not have, as the ancients already said: post coitum omne animal triste, every animal is sad after coitus — it doesn't last long. As for me, I know that the memory of so beautiful a day touches me more, charms me more — now, in this hour when I am, in my old age, writing my Confessions on rue Plâtrière, today called rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, tormented by the stone disease. As for me, I know that the memory of so beautiful a day touches me more, charms me more, returns more to my heart, three times more, than that of any pleasure I have tasted in my life. This is someone who is a man of enjoyment, that's him indeed — to return to the parallel with Michel Clouscard. I did not quite know what I wanted
The indeterminate object of desire: Rousseau and Le Voyage 1:47:04 toward these two charming persons — again, in the symbolic order, I had to stop on this a little. I did not quite know — the object that procures the most happiness is the object of desire that remains undetermined. Remember, in Baudelaire's prose poems, the traveler asked whether he loves this or that — he loves nothing, that's the mal du siècle — he would love anywhere, provided it be out of this world; all that is familiar. But then what do you love, traveler, if you love neither the sea nor the mountain, nor love, nor riches? The clouds over there, the marvelous clouds — that's precise; don't think that because it's cloud it's vague, it's quite the opposite. The cloud, precisely because it has no determinate, defined contours, always sends our desire back to some future date, allows us always to bounce back into an undetermined quest, so that
1:48:14 when he places, at the end of the poem The Voyage — that skin of the air, that skin of death — when he places his foot on our spine, we will be able to hope to cry "Forward!" as we once set out for China, eyes fixed on the open sea and hair in the wind. I'll end again with an extract from the poem The Voyage because it's exactly what Rousseau says — it sums up everything that's coming about the expression of the summits, literary expression, and the relevance of an undetermined object of desire. When Baudelaire, at the beginning of that poem — there are some who travel to escape this, to escape that, the exiles, some joyful to flee an infamous homeland, others the horror of their cradle, a few astrologers drowned in a woman's eyes, the tyrannical Circe with the dangerous perfume — in order not to be turned into a beast, he gets drunk on sun, on light, on blazing skies; the ice that bites them, the sun that bronzes them, slowly erases the mark of kisses. There you have it — but the true travelers, all that
1:49:24 those are people who have a determinate object for traveling, a determinate reason. But the true travelers are only those who leave for the sake of leaving, light of heart, like balloons, never straying from their fate, and without knowing why — look at what Rousseau says: I did not quite know what I wanted toward these two charming persons — and without knowing why they always say "Onward." Listen carefully, because this sums up everything: those whose desires take the shape of clouds — again, of clouds — and who dream, as a conscript dreams of the cannon, of what?
1:50:00 of vast, changing, unknown voluptuousnesses, of which the human mind has never known the name. That is what Rousseau initiates at the dawn of literary modernity — you can see it clearly, leaping right over — I don't like it when people say Rousseau is merely a forerunner of Romanticism. A forerunner is someone who does a little of what successors will do a lot; here he leaps even beyond Romanticism, in depth, and he announces, doesn't he, the avant-garde poets of the end of the 19th century. I did not quite know what I wanted toward these two charming persons, but they interested me a great deal, both of them. I don't say that if I had been master of my arrangements, if I could have done what I wanted, my heart would have been divided — I felt a slight preference: I would have made my happiness by having Mademoiselle de Graffenried for a mistress, but given the choice, I think I would have loved her better as a confidante — you see the hesitation, you see the importance, in the New Héloïse, of the two female figures, Julie and Claire. Be that as it may, it seemed to me, in leaving them, that I could no longer live — even though they had spent only twelve hours amusing themselves — I could no longer live
1:51:11 without the one or the other. Who would have told me that I would never see them again in my life, and that there would end our ephemeral loves — our ephemeral loves, twelve hours, so he said a little earlier that it was an eternity. Those who read this will not fail to laugh at my gallant adventures — this is a moment I hear through the microphone and beyond, on the internet, the laughter of certain — well, it's not — someone has just died, I won't attack Sollers, that guy who used to say "one must screw, well," as if we'd been waiting for that, as if that were the most ancient thing in the history of humanity — fine. Those who read this will not fail to laugh at my gallant adventures, noting that after many preliminaries, the most advanced end up kissing a hand. Oh, my readers, do not be mistaken: I may have had more pleasure in my loves, ending with that kissed hand, than you will ever have in yours, beginning at least from there. Beautiful text.
Cherubino and happiness, a new idea 1:52:25 So, otherwise, in the same vein — we're still with Rousseau, a still-adolescent Rousseau, even younger than the one we just saw, who is only beginning to be at the throes of what a marvelous title by Marivaux, of the 18th century, will make famous — the game of love and chance — and you're thinking of Mozart, so am I. Yes, I said that — why?
1:52:56 Because I made, you see, a podcast thanks to Aliocha — I think it's been commented on enough — but there was one called "Mozart, Polymorphous Pervert." Some thought, "how could Pagani sully Mozart," but no — "polymorphous pervert" is a term from child psychology, it means what all children are; it means that children pass from one object of enjoyment to another just like that, without dwelling, you see, and it's this mobility of the object of desire where we find — I'm making the connection — with the preceding text, the indeterminacy. We think there's an enormous investment in one object, and then it's a rattle that gets set aside, then suddenly it's a comfort toy that becomes the favorite, you see — I'm saying anything now, going back to early childhood — but here he's at the age, since we're among references between Marivaux and Mozart and Beaumarchais, I would say, of Chérubin — you know, that incredible character who sows — I'll speak French — who sows the mess, sorry for this colloquial French, but why?
1:54:07 Because he's between two ages, between two sexes, still undetermined, Chérubin — you know the passage where the Countess and Suzanne dress him up as a girl, saying he's even more troubling as a girl than as a boy. You see, that's very 18th century — this century thirsty for happiness, and this century that will end in the French Revolution, one of whose principal heroes — in both spellings, mind you — I'm thinking of Saint-Just — will say happiness is a new idea. It took all these texts for happiness to become a new idea, doesn't it — well, it didn't just take texts, it took reality itself transforming every day, and man's mastery over nature, thanks to the industrial revolution that had just occurred and was beginning to spread — that's when the notion of comfort, which comes from the English, begins to appear, you see, for instance. So why am I saying all this? Because I'm going to take a text where we're at this stage,
1:55:17 a Chérubinesque stage, if I had to coin a barbarism, where he moves a little from one crush to another — everyone has known that, there's a wonderful age for it. Except that here he doesn't leave it, as I just said, in the psychological field, or even the biological one, the stage of adolescence — no, with its social relevance, absolutely unique for its time: he sees the class relations, what would come to be called, from Marx onward, class relations. It's not that social classes appear before Marx — what is properly Marxian, and what only begins with Marx, is that this is determining. So you'd say, yes, it's determining for property, for the way of dressing, perhaps — no, no, it goes much further, you'll see, into what is most intimate, into interiority, apparently the furthest removed
1:56:29 from economic or social constraints. But judge for yourself: he's going to inform us about his tastes, and the rest is so clear that I'll let him speak. This is an excerpt from the Confessions. "I took great pleasure among all these girls" — these girls with whom he flits about like Chérubin at that age — "whether to pay court to Mademoiselle Giraud or for my own sake, all of them made a fuss over me eagerly" — a bit like Chérubin, who makes the gardener's daughter, the Countess, Suzanne fall for him — that's Chérubin — "I would always find this cursed page in my way, as the furious Count says. I saw nothing in all that but friendship" — this continues, prolongs a little, the text we just saw. "I have thought since that it depended only on me to see more in it, but I did not think of it, I did not consider it at all." And that's where the text I'd like to draw your attention to begins — he'll be more precise about what the object of his quest is.
"I needed young ladies": Rousseau's triangle 1:57:39 feminine — of the seamstresses, chambermaids, little shopkeepers, none tempted me much; I needed young ladies of quality. And in the code of the time, a "demoiselle" is not just an unmarried woman — you'd say, today, the who's who of the establishment, we'd say the crème de la crème of the establishment. What is this Rousseau, who has barely emerged from the petty artisan trade of Geneva, who runs away, who is a vagabond on the roads, who plays truant — and now he needs young ladies of quality! But precisely — remember, when I was in the garden of the Tropiques bookshop, for which I still thank Dominique Mazuet, in that series titled What To Do, I had already broached what has since become known as Rousseau's triangle — what I call, thanks to Nerval, Rousseau's triangle. Nerval, approaching Rousseau's tomb at Ermenonville in his rambling walk of Angélique, suddenly arrives near the tower of the beautiful Gabrielle — Gabrielle d'Estrées, the favorite
1:58:49 of Henri IV, so three kilometers from Rousseau's tomb — and there the gardener's son, a local peasant, who was showing us around, says: here is the tower of the beautiful Gabrielle, every evening Rousseau came to strum his guitar under her window, and the king, who was jealous, ended up having him killed. Nerval does like you and me — he laughs, he chuckles at this peasant mixing up, across three centuries, Henri IV, Rousseau, and then he goes on: this remark is perhaps truer than one thinks, he adds. Rousseau, by refusing Madame de Pompadour's hundred louis — he'd had a success, we'd say today a "celebrity" success, with an opera that wasn't groundbreaking — it's not Rameau, it's not Mozart, but still a pleasant pastoral, not bad — he had success, he could have continued in that vein, he'd have had easy money, and Madame de Pompadour did what the aristocracy did at the time: a pension, to reward him for having appreciated at the opera the ariettes of Le Devin du village.
1:59:59 That was the title of this pastoral. Rousseau refused, and Nerval goes on: Rousseau, by refusing Madame de Pompadour's hundred louis, ruined the edifice founded by Henri, first of the Bourbons; everything collapsed, his immortal image stands upright over the ruins. And there, Rousseau suddenly becomes a figure, a colossus rising over the ruins of the ancien régime, and there we find again his motto: make one's life depend on truth and not on other people's money. "Freedom consists," Rousseau magnificently says, "less in doing what one wants than in doing what pleases us" — which is not the same thing — "freedom consists less in doing what pleases us than in not depending on someone else's labor." The peasant says "every evening Rousseau" — one can imagine, it's true one feels like laughing, picturing Rousseau climbing the silk ladder to go steal the king's favorite. Look at the symbolic order: it's false from a historical point of view, it's a delusion, but it's true in the order of the symbol — what does that mean?
2:01:02 That the object of desire — one must not resign oneself to the women of one's own milieu, to the chambermaids, the maidservants — the enjoyment experienced by the privileged of this world must not remain the privilege of a few. So I'll challenge — pardon the barbarism — I'll go seek out what is highest in erotic pleasure: the favorite, the prince's favorite, the one who can do whatever he wants in matters of love. You see, in the symbolic order, this triangle — Rousseau, the king, the favorite — as if the favorite were there only to illustrate centuries upon centuries of extraction of surplus value, in Marxist terms, that is, the accumulation of wealth, and thus of the instant: I desire something, I have the means to get it. "Besides, seamstresses, chambermaids, little shopkeepers hardly tempted me; I needed young ladies. Everyone has their fancies, this has always been mine. I don't think like Horace" on that point
2:02:12 — it's still not at all the vanity of rank that attracts me — rank, at the time, meant social class, think of the Third Estate — one spoke rather of trade than of social class, but there's still a link between the two; one said "he is a charcoal-burner by trade," "he is a carpenter by trade," you see. So he says: it's still not at all the vanity of rank and station that attracts me — and here the enumeration begins, look at the impact of social rank on physical qualities and elements of seduction — "it's a better-preserved complexion, more beautiful hands, more graceful adornment, an air of delicacy and cleanliness" — sorry, cleanliness — "about the whole person, more taste in the manner of dressing, of expressing oneself." You see, cleanliness makes it clear this isn't natural — it's not as if girls are just born that way, with perfumed white skin, no — it implies cleanliness, it implies a whole domestic service to bring
2:03:22 pitchers, to draw a bath, ointments — cleanliness about the whole person, more taste in the manner of dressing and of expressing oneself, a finer, better-made dress, a daintier shoe, ribbons, lace — ribbons, lace, well, one gets the impression we're heading toward what's lightest, most superficial, we'd even go toward what's most reactive in worldliness — not bling-bling exactly, because here it's almost in intimacy — but still, I mean, it seems quite superficial, and then: "a daintier shoe, ribbons, lace, better-arranged hair, I would always prefer the less pretty one who had more of all that" — the sentence is complex, less and more — "I would always prefer the less pretty one, having more of all that" — no, it's not the physical data that counts, it's her attributes, all that — and here
2:04:33 I think of a text by Nerval that I quoted to you in another context, I believe, where he's in Vienna, recounting a bit of his social life there, where he's passing through, at a social gathering on New Year's Eve where there are three women, and he gives an account of his evening to a friend — certainly Théophile Gautier — "and your friend is there, he has fine clothes, he's talking, he's a wit, he makes paradoxes, unfashionable back home but still effective here in Vienna" — and then, skipping passages, he finds himself facing a woman who's not exactly "of a certain age," I don't know how to say it, but who's no longer very young, yet who has all these attributes Rousseau speaks of, lace, frills, and he says: one doesn't quite know what's underneath all that — the same expression, "all that," which is never defined — one could enumerate it, lace, well yes, the list could go far — one doesn't leave much room in the middle of all that, but all that is so well arranged. I would always prefer
Baudelaire against naturalism; two meanings of the word nature 2:05:43 the less pretty one having more of all that. I find this preference quite ridiculous myself, but my heart gives it in spite of me. We began with Cyrano de Bergerac, a dramatic story set in the time of Louis XIII, at the start of the 17th century, and now here we are entering the second half of the 19th century — Romanticism has gone out of fashion, there has been the great upheaval of realism in the novel, I'm thinking of Stendhal, of Flaubert, no matter here, of Balzac of course, and in poetry there has been, sorry, the Parnasse, a return to verses crafted with care that are not content with just having feelings, enthusiasms, as romantic subjectivity did — there, I'll leave that aside, we're not in a literature class, you'll tell me — and politically what one would call a reactionary, even the far right
2:06:53 today wouldn't dare say what he says in an article: "There is good in the city only in the poet, the priest, and the soldier." Frankly — well, Baudelaire is someone who has great fits of anger and quips at the same time, you know; you have to read "The Death of the Poor" in Flowers of Evil, it's not about the goal of death, that's where one can both eat and sleep and sit down; there's a great quest — look at the cuckoo — there's a great quest for fraternity in Baudelaire, and he's disgusted, isn't he, by a certain very current-day left — all this, a certain left that uses self-pity as a pretext, that acts as if it's just too bad that one is rich and another poor, that it's unjust — whereas Rousseau had already shown, as early as the end of the 18th century, unjust or not, it's untenable, isn't it, that it's a permanent breach of the contract — the contract isn't something that would need to be implemented the day we seize power, no, it has always existed, but continually being violated
2:08:03 — that, we see. It's in that continuity that I'll use this Baudelaire, even though I don't share his political ideas, except one thing I share with him: the exasperation at the vogue of naturalism. I don't mean ecology — I don't know ecology, I'm not a scientist, these are scientific disciplines, though for me they're only serious when kept strictly within a specific domain — climatology, glaciology, I don't know, meteorology, that is — there are specialties, that's not my field. So I'm attacking the discourse that uses reality as revealed by these disciplines as a pretext, twisting it to their own taste, to make — to give as supreme value — not the environment. Do you know many people who say "I'm for a bad environment, I want to live in a bad environment"?
2:09:13 Do you know any? I've never seen one — so these are false battles, this "I'm for defending the environment against everything that threatens it," because we're all in agreement on that, aren't we — but the environment is not nature. Where is nature? You'll tell me it's in my room — yes, but across the way I have magnificent trees — yes, but it's a park, I can go for a walk without being devoured by mosquitoes and without plunging my feet into mud and marshes. I've lived too much in countries where nature is powerful and where people come to take refuge from nature in the village or in the city — unlike the Greeks, for whom the city was a refuge, a place of measure against the chaos threatening them from outside. So I won't develop this in the abstract, since Baudelaire is going to be as concrete as can be in this diatribe — you'll see, because he has great fits of anger, he's not Nerval — Nerval is the gentle Gérard, by allusion, by small touches, compared to Baudelaire — watch out, he pounds on the table. So there, the rest is so clear
2:10:23 that I'll go straight to Baudelaire's words. "There is a song so trivial and inept that one can hardly cite it in a work with any pretension to seriousness, but which translates very well, in vaudeville style, the aesthetics of people who do not think" — nature embellishes beauty, it's underlined, that's a phrase in italics — "it is presumable that the poet, if he had known how to speak French" — meaning, it's badly put — "would have said: simplicity embellishes beauty. Those who see this truth of an entirely unexpected kind — nothing embellishes what is" — most errors relating to beauty are born of the false conception, from the 18th century, relating to morality — you see his reactionary side again — the Enlightenment, what appealed to him about it had passed, that is, its progressivism, its demand for social justice in Rousseau, its critique of religion by Voltaire — you see, he was closer, at that level, to Pascal than to Voltaire — indeed he wrote a poem that begins with "Pascal had his abyss"
2:11:33 — with him this movement — "nature was taken, at that time," so, of the 18th century, "as the basis, source, and type of every possible good, of every possible beauty." Now, Baudelaire isn't a philosopher, so I won't hold this confusion against him. I want to be clear on a capital point — I really come back here to the properly philosophical element, which is the interrogation of words which, wanting to mean everything, end up meaning nothing. It's true that in the 18th century one talks about nature all the time, one opposes natural law to positive law, for instance, you see — and one must not confuse nature as the object of physics — physis, physical, physics comes from physis, which means "nature" in Greek — so nature in that sense, the objective, scientific, serious sense, one must ask the physicist, that's not my field, I don't know — but that's not what 18th-century people are talking about. When one says "it's natural for me to go to the cinema on Saturday night," there's nothing natural about the cinema, there's nothing natural about the Saturday tradition, the weekend
2:12:43 all that is convention among men — not at all to diminish their value, I know, quite the contrary — but it means, it means "leave me alone, I'm free." In the 18th century, "natural" means what is free with respect to feudal, ecclesiastical constraint. That's what it means — it's not natural law in the sense of the right that is in every man, which is opposed to positive law, the one that says such-and-such punishment of the wheel will be given to whoever commits a crime of lèse-majesté, I don't know — but anyway, all of that presupposes laws and enacting a code that only maintains the violence of the dominant. So you see, I'm drawing a distinction that is never mentioned, even though we've never talked about nature as much as today, more than since the 18th century. I can't walk past a pharmacy, whatever it is, without there being "natural product," "trace elements," "organic" — you see, a confusion between organic, green, and natural — whereas in nature there's much more ammonia and nuclear explosion in the galaxies, believe me, than green.
2:13:54 Green, as far as I know, only exists around us on earth — there must be some elsewhere, in terms of probability, the law of large numbers, but so far away that before we get there, you know — so nature, green, is not the rule, and neither is the biological: ammonia is inert, hydrogen too. So you see, one must clearly distinguish nature in the sense of the object of physics — there, one speaks of it seriously, and especially by questioning physicists if possible, and don't trust me in that domain — and then there's nature in the polemical sense, that's the 18th-century sense: nature meaning what is free as opposed to what is constrained, natural law as opposed to positive law, natural religion — Rousseau, Voltaire, none of them is truly an atheist, each claims some natural religion, some feeling one has that makes one want to do good rather than evil, etc. There, the feeling of compassion toward another's suffering — for them, all of that means "let me have the religion,
2:15:04 the God I want," and not have to worry about whether one should drink alcohol or not, eat pork or not, fast at Easter or not. That's simply, here, equivalent to "free," meaning "leave me alone, we're in a republic" — I'm adding that myself — well, this prepared, didn't it, this healthy reaction one often sees from ordinary people saying "oh, oh, oh, we're republicans, enough," at a time when, really, ideology was in fashion, each more punitive than the last. It's worth recalling that "natural" in the 18th century doesn't mean the object of physics, doesn't mean making an apology for cholera, nor for the greatest cause of mortality in the world, which is the mosquito, the anopheles that carries malaria, and which I guarantee you is organic, not a creation of human industry. So Baudelaire defends artificialism against naturalism — he's an artist.
Artificialism, techné, and constraining nature 2:16:15 Well yes, we forget - you want to distinguish clearly between artificial flowers and natural flowers, today we'd say artificial breasts and natural breasts. Well yes, artificialism has the same root as - look, there's "art," A-R-T, in artifice and in artisan. Among the Greeks the word techné designates - well, in French it gives us both the word technique and, for them, it also meant art, but art in the sense of the art of tending one's garden, the Art of Fugue as Bach says, with great humility, while making one of the greatest masterpieces of all time. So, I'll give the floor back to Baudelaire: nature was taken at that time, in the nineteenth century, as the basis, source, and model of all possible good and beauty - the negation of original sin - so Baudelaire, a good Catholic, says it's a regression to have denied original sin - was not, was not for nothing, in the general blindness
2:17:25 of that era, if however we agree to refer simply to the visible fact, to the experience of all ages, and to the police gazette, we will see that nature teaches nothing, or almost nothing - that is, it constrains - you see any right-wing man, however right-wing he may be, he too defends himself, he too is irritated by constraint - leave me alone, I'm afraid of being misunderstood, given the power of the dominant ideology, since after all it's worldliness, the continuity of my talks at the moment - there is such pressure from the world for "nature" to be taken in a laudatory sense that I - I'll give you an example - I would often ask, at the oral baccalaureate exam, a student who had worked well, who had written a good essay in the written exam, who had done well, so to try for the top grade, you see, I'd ask him a slightly unexpected question, I'd say: are we freer in society or in nature? knowing full well that we're in nature, of course - and this was well before the ecological vogue - well yes
2:18:35 "nature," he says, "I can go left, right." I say to him, "yes, but you'll never go hungry." "Oh yes" - nature shouldn't be seen only externally, going left or right; it's also hunger, it's also the natural constraints from which we've been freed by techné precisely, for thousands of years. You really have to completely deny a multi-millennial work of the human collectivity to believe that if I were in nature I wouldn't get very far - that's what I'm saying, I wouldn't get very far. Nature is force, and that's not a reproach at all - the animal is quite right to use the advantage it has, which is force - as long as it can exercise it, it does neither evil nor good, it does what it can, it does neither what it wants nor what it must - those terms have no meaning - Rousseau showed this well - it's only in civil society, so yes, here Baudelaire underlines the word "constrains" - what he reproaches nature for is that it constrains man to sleep, to drink, to eat - he's lucid, he knows well that nature is also this set of constraints - obviously those who are used
2:19:45 to eating their fill don't notice that hunger is a constraint, and so nature is exonerated - and yes, that is, it constrains man to sleep, to drink, to eat, to protect himself as best he can against the hostilities of the atmosphere - it is also nature that pushes man to kill his fellow man, to eat him - I remind you he doesn't like Rousseau, you might doubt it, Baudelaire - but curiously, an objective convergence between the two: the first pages of The Social Contract develop, insistently and tirelessly, the idea that force cannot found political legitimacy - force reigns in the state of nature, not in civil society, where it must be replaced by right, according to the contract - moreover the term "contract" is itself a legal term - so this is important - people, especially the young, children even more so, are horrified when I say that in the savanna - you see - I've seen hyenas trying to devour a gazelle fetus that's coming out of the womb while its mother runs
2:20:55 yes, yes, it's terrible - well, I mean, she's not being cruel, she has young to feed in her den, she does what she can, she exercises her force as long as she can, and afterward she lies down on the ground and rots - the animal subsists; man, on the other hand, wants to exist, not just subsist - I refer you to existentialism, which didn't say only nonsense on this point - so you see, it's also nature that pushes man to kill his fellow man, to eat him, to imprison him, to torture him, for as soon as we leave the order of necessities and needs to enter that of luxury and pleasures, we see that nature can only counsel crime - now there he doesn't have Rousseau's clarity, he's not a philosopher, Baudelaire - it's not a diatribe against nature, you see, he extends the relation of force which is indeed the key to the animal world, but he says it grows even more exasperated in pleasures, in luxury - no, there we're no longer in nature, precisely, we're no longer there, it's no longer nature that's acting, and there he lacks Rousseau's lucidity, who says
2:22:08 where Rousseau clearly states all the advantages - in agreement with Baudelaire for now - of the passage from the state of nature to civil society: although in that state he deprives himself of several advantages he holds from nature, he gains such great ones - his faculties are exercised and developed, his passions become ennobled, his whole soul is elevated - to such a point that up to here everything is gained - except - and here Baudelaire didn't understand this - if the abuses of this new condition, of civil society, often degrade him below the state he came from, below the beast - that's the evil that Baudelaire denounces here; for Rousseau, this evil precisely does not come from nature, because in nature we don't do good, since we don't do evil either, because we don't know how to do good - it's a relation of force, not a relation of right - no one is going to tell the hyena, "that's not nice what you're doing," for feeding her young - so, it's religion that commands us to feed poor and infirm parents - yes, that's true in the Gospel - yes, but here he's exaggerating, because it's good that the church
2:23:18 it hasn't been - you know, when in the middle of a medieval battle the feudal lord fighting says, "oh dear, I no longer know, in such a melee, who are ours and who are the enemies," and the bishop replies, "kill them all, God will recognize his own" - that's not quite - that's not the charity Baudelaire is talking about - but on the other hand, what is in the texts - here one must distinguish carefully - one can be anti-Catholic, anti-Protestant, whatever you like, but Christianity is quite another thing - I've often alluded to liberation theology, so I won't insist, I refer you to that - everything that is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation; crime, of which the human animal has drawn the taste in its mother's womb - no, in the mother's womb there is - yes - the relation of force - I've read that with wild dogs, when there are twins, one kills the other already in the maternal womb - Baudelaire isn't saying just anything, but that's not monstrous, it's that or disappearance, because there isn't yet society, precisely, coming to give the weak
Artificial virtue and adornment 2:24:28 to someone with fragile health the possibility of being the equal of those who are strong - virtue, on the contrary, is artificial; crime, I repeat, of which the human animal has drawn the taste in its mother's womb, is originally natural - no, in the mother's womb there is violence, if you like, but there is no crime - crime is a moral notion - virtue, on the contrary, is artificial, supernatural, and that's what pleases Baudelaire, since it has taken, in every age and among every nation, gods and prophets to teach it to animalized humanity, and man alone - understood, without God, without grace - would have been powerless to discover it. This business of "man alone," underlined, reminds me of a very beautiful formula by Sainte-Beuve, the nineteenth-century literary critic who was also a great friend of Baudelaire's, who said of Montaigne this magnificent formula: Montaigne is nature in its entirety, without grace - it's almost the beginning of secularism, if you look closely. I'm skipping some passages, but evil is done
2:25:38 naturally, by fatality; good is always the product of an art. In fact Baudelaire is not defending good against evil, or, like Rousseau, justice against the right of the strongest - he's defending art, so to speak, against the prose of the world, as they say elsewhere - evil is done without effort, naturally, by fatality; good is always the product of an art. Everything I say about nature as a bad counselor in matters of morality, and about reason as a true redeemer and reformer, can be transposed into the order of the beautiful. I am thus led to regard adornment - all this to talk about what seems to us the most artificial, not fashion, the most bling-bling, the most lightweight - I am thus led to regard adornment as one of the signs of the primitive nobility of the human soul. The races that our confused and perverted civilization readily calls savage he regarded - like the reactionary Baudelaire suddenly becoming fraternal with peoples less economically developed - economically less developed peoples can be morally and aesthetically developed - the proof: I know of no place in the world like Black Africa where man
2:26:50 in the sense of the male, that is, of the masculine, has as much concern for bodily decoration - except perhaps the Papuans, but they're not far off, since we're talking about the region of the Papuans, Melanesia, land of black peoples - so I am thus led to regard adornment as one of the signs of the primitive nobility of the human soul. There are some who believe that clothing - you know, naturalist theories of the kind used to explain the origin of our society - that at the origin of clothing there is the need to protect oneself against the cold - no, no, in Tahiti there are clothes, I'm not talking about clothes brought by the Europeans - and the first item of clothing is not the coat against the cold, it's the loincloth - it's not purely utilitarian, you see - again I insist on the symbolic order, which doesn't eliminate the other, natural causality, but which must not only not be neglected but is determinant in human relations - why am I talking about this precisely here - because he speaks precisely of "races"
2:28:00 that was very much the word of the time - he doesn't say "classes" - it was - never has there been so much talk of races, believe me, as in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries - let's note in passing - the races that our confused and perverted civilization readily calls savage, with a pride and a conceit that are quite laughable, understand just as well as the child the lofty spirituality of the toilette - it's not about the washbasin, the toilette meaning the appearance one must give oneself to appear before others - it's not that the savage and the baby testify, through their naive aspiration toward the shiny, toward brightly colored plumage - they must have been thinking more of Indians at the time, of Native Americans, before people talked so much about Black Africans - there wasn't yet, well not quite yet, the African art that would influence twentieth-century painters - look at everything Modigliani owes to Senufo art - put "Senufo" into Google, S-E-N-O-U-F-O, it's an ethnic group in northern Ivory Coast, and you'll be surprised to find Modigliani's ornaments and reclining nudes there
Make-up, a reformation of nature 2:29:10 in short, woe to him who, like Louis XV, who was not the product of a true civilization but of a recurrence of barbarism, pushes depravity so far as to appreciate nothing but simple nature - he's alluding to the farm, Marie-Antoinette raised ducks, etc., which is extremely topical, isn't it - well but not at all, when I talk about permaculture that's not a duchess's amusement - okay, agreed, curious as a comparison - fashion must therefore be considered a symptom of the taste for the ideal floating above the coarseness accumulated in the human brain - it's been noted there's a certain neo-Platonism immanent to Baudelaire's thought - I'm talking about his thought, even his poetry sometimes - the taste for the ideal, ideas floating in the human brain above everything that natural life accumulates there of the coarse, as if there were a vague memory, among the prisoners of Plato's cave, of models, of paradigms, which are the truth of what appears in everything our brain accumulates there of the coarse
2:30:20 of the earthly and the vile, as a sublime deformation of nature, or rather as a permanent and successive attempt at reformation of nature. There's an old memory here, not of Plato but of Aristotle, who in his Poetics says that art sometimes imitates nature, sometimes accomplishes what nature by itself is not capable of completing - a very famous passage that has given rise to much commentary, I refer you to it, in the Poetics. Woman is quite right - since we're talking about coquetry, about dress, about fashion, of course we find woman at the center again, as we did at the start of my talk on worldliness - woman is quite right, and even performs a kind of duty, in striving to appear magical and supernatural. So he doesn't condemn worldliness and the quest for beauty, which every society pursues, even in prehistory, and superb reproductions
2:31:30 the quantity of jewelry found even in the Paleolithic era - I'm not even saying Neolithic - I'm not talking about bone jewelry, one must, with shells - she must astonish, must charm; idol that she is, she must gild herself to be adored. She must therefore borrow from all the arts the means of rising above nature the better to subjugate hearts and strike minds. It matters very little that the trick - the cunning of reason, which is at the origin of technique, curious as a comparison - it matters very little that the trick and the artifice be known to all, if the success is certain and the effect always irresistible - no need to think about it, meaning: it's intuitive. It is in these considerations that the artist-philosopher - a mixture of intuition and concept - will easily find the justification for all the practices employed in every age by women to consolidate and, so to speak, deify their fragile beauty. Here he should be more in continuity
2:32:40 with what he had said before, namely that - I didn't say this earlier - men are at least as coquettish as women, and that's still the case - try putting "the Papuans" into Google - the Papuans barely master the technique of making fire, but the art of body painting has no equivalent in human cultures - red and black represent life, but a life - this I'm adding - you see, because one might say, "there, he's gone all natural" - no, a supernatural and excessive life - this black frame makes the gaze deeper and more distinctive - I don't know if he's talking about mascara, I don't know - or kohl gives the eye a more decided appearance of windows opened onto the infinite - let life in - thank you, Claude Gallier, we'll come back to that - thank you, Aragon, Elsa - the red - that was the black - the red that inflames the cheekbone further increases the brightness of the pupil
2:33:50 and adds to a beautiful feminine face the mysterious passion of the priestess. Thus, if I am rightly understood, the painting of the face must not be used for the vulgar, unavowable purpose of imitating beautiful nature and competing with youth. It has moreover been observed that artifice does not embellish ugliness and can only serve beauty. Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature? I recall again Aristotle's formula, for the second time, in his Poetics: art sometimes imitates nature, sometimes accomplishes what nature by itself is not capable of completing - but for the Greeks, what is complete, what is not complete, what is indefinite, what is unfinished, is not beautiful. Makeup does not have to hide itself, to avoid being detected; it can, on the contrary, be displayed, if not with affectation, at least with a kind of candor. I readily permit myself - I gladly grant to those whose heavy gravity - here comes Nietzsche speaking of the spirit of gravity - prevents them from seeking beauty even in its most minute manifestations
2:35:00 to laugh at my reflections and accuse them of childish solemnity - their austere judgment does not touch me. I shall content myself with appealing to true artists and to women who received at birth a spark of that sacred fire with which they would like to illuminate themselves entirely. What a ladies' man Baudelaire is, all the same - good, so there, he talks about beauty, especially - it keeps coming back throughout his critical work. I'll finish with the end - but yes - no but Hegel says that at the end of every aesthetic cycle there arises humor, laughter, lightness - Musset - there's Musset - Musset: nothing makes us so great as a great sorrow, say what you will, that's not humor - the most desperate songs are the most beautiful songs, and I know some immortal ones that are pure sobs. All schoolchildren, up to a certain generation to which she doesn't belong, knew Musset's Nights by heart - every adolescent recognized himself in them - which made Baudelaire say that he was a languorous undertaker, and Rimbaud
Musset: "but I loved" 2:36:10 who was even more merciless: Musset, execrable fourteen times over. Good, Baudelaire also said all elegiac poets are scoundrels - but on the other hand, the Musset who writes an essay on his generation, The Confession of a Child of the Century, a masterpiece of analysis that today we'd call almost sociological, socio-historical if you like - and those delicious comedies, which are delicious and cruel, where there's the lucidity of an eighteenth-century writer combined with the suffering of the malady peculiar to the nineteenth century - so, I'd like, just briefly, to read the ending, Perdican's last words - a hero, happy or unhappy, judge for yourselves - the woman he loves finally enters a convent, and I'll give you the context in a nutshell - farewell, Camille, go back to your convent, and when they tell you those hideous tales that poisoned you, answer what I'm about to tell you: all men are liars, inconstant
2:37:21 false, talkative, hypocritical, proud or cowardly, contemptible and sensual; all women are perfidious, artful, vain, curious, and depraved. The world is nothing but a bottomless sewer where the most shapeless seals crawl and writhe upon mountains of mud - well, that's not the languorous undertaker anymore - but there is in the world one holy and sublime thing: the union of two of these so imperfect and dreadful beings - a seal and a sea lion, I'm adding that, excuse me - we are often deceived in love, often wounded, and often unhappy, but we love, and when we are on the edge of our grave, we turn to look back and say to ourselves: I have often suffered, I have deceived myself a few times, but I have loved. It is I who have lived, and not some artificial being created - I mean, created by my pride and my boredom. Last word, he exits. Thank you for your patience, and thank you especially, Amélie, for the excellent choice of text - thank you, Etienne, at the technical booth
2:38:31 That's a change from before, Alain, whom I greet, you're taking me by surprise - comrades and companions, today a friend of mine died, or rather he had already renounced life some time ago, and it's up to you to decide - let's talk about life, not death. The most common aspiration of all men, enshrined even in the texts of certain constitutions, is the pursuit of happiness, so to speak. But this individualism is the sudden product of the now-distant '68 - no, comrade, but also something more ancient - Leopardi wrote in 1821 that until now [this pursuit] had been applied to politics rather than to the science of nations, to that of the individual, of his change, of his happiness. But we, comrades, we also know that we must live as is correct.
2:39:44 So, today I am here to speak about my personal problem. To comment on it at home. But no, that can't be done. Yes, but... Yes, yes, yes. Yes, certainly, I will address the assembly in the form of a question, so I'll get through it quickly. So the question is to know, first, whether it is permissible for an old comrade like me to fall in love, as if he were still eighteen years old.
2:40:23 I am indeed in love, and loved in return, by a woman whom I will indicate only by her initial, G, because she is married. Second, would it be legitimate for me, in order to live with this woman, to abandon the companion with whom I have been united for thirty-five years, and who has therefore grown old with me, helping me, understanding me, forgiving me, and also consoling me for a certain marginalization within the party of which I feel myself a victim - though that's beside the point, let's set it aside.
2:41:04 Third. This hypothesized, certainly painful, abandonment - would it then be reconcilable with my wife's corresponding right to happiness? Yes, and here too I realize I'm making another paternalistic argument, as if a woman's identity depended solely on her marital status. But still, here's what I ask myself, this I do ask myself: is all this reconcilable with the equality of obligations, with the safeguarding of the collective over the individual, which you and I have always upheld for a better society, of free and equal people?
2:41:46 In short, is it permissible to be happy, even if this creates unhappiness? Comrades, I ask you for a yes or a no. Thank you.
