English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Foucault and Lévi-Strauss's ethnological model 0:30 ...through the work of historians, or through the work of sociologists. We try to grasp as an object, as a thing that would be there before us, our own culture. But historians essentially study economic phenomena. Sociologists, what do they study? Well, they study affective behavior, political behavior, sexual behavior. I believe that, until now, our own knowledge has never been considered as a phenomenon foreign to ourselves.
1:00 The list they just made, sociologists, historians—none of them would fail to recognize themselves in those definitions. To say that sociologists don't study sexuality... sociology begins, I think, with Durkheim, because that's when we start treating social facts as things. I mean, I'm a nice, calm guy—that's not me, it's an imaginary figure—calm, almost lymphatic, and suddenly I'm unhinged.
1:30 And I become furious in a stadium when a goal is about to be scored, because there, in society, my behavior is different than when I'm alone. Sociology isn't psychology, there you go. So that's a bit lightweight. And what I tried to do was to treat as if it were something standing there before us, as if it were a phenomenon as foreign and distant as the culture of the Nambikwara or the Arapesh, all this Western knowledge that has taken shape since the depths of the Greek age—it's this ethnological situation of our own knowledge that I wanted to reconstruct.
2:10 It's a bit like looking at yourself in a mirror, as if you were a stranger to yourself. As if you were a stranger to yourself. I waited for the reference to come up twice—the reference to ethnology. At the time people still didn't say anthropology, as has become common since. In fact, since Lévi-Strauss—that's where I wanted to get to.
2:40 People still said ethnology at the time. Even Foucault, who is nonetheless one of the most illustrious representatives of what develops out of the Lévi-Straussian initiative, precisely. It's from Lévi-Strauss. The first sentence of Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques is: "We should start by killing all the explorers." The white man's dream has always been to be the only white man wherever he is.
3:12 It's François de Negroni, the great Africanist, who points that out—someone who has great respect for Lévi-Strauss otherwise, but still, I mean, it's so typical of the white man on a jaunt, wanting to exterminate all the other white men who spoil the landscape for him. And to end up being like—you can guess who? There were still white patches on the map of Africa at the time. There were unexplored places.
3:44 And people sought to get to the great forests of central Congo, there. The Belgian Congo—they tried at the time. It's a kind of African Amazon, there. And it was thought that by going into these unexplored places, you'd eventually stumble on the "missing link," as the Anglo-Saxons say. The missing link between ape and man, that thing that would create a discontinuity in evolution. A kind of yeti, but of the jungle, not of the snowy wastes.
4:17 And indeed, by going deep into the jungle, we did find primeval man. He's a German, Johnny Weissmuller. And that gives rise to the series of Tarzan films. It's extraordinary—Western mythology. There you go. And I note—I was talking about extermination, that's where I started from—that in all the films built around the Tarzan theme, so to speak, there are always porters.
4:48 Two or three of them first get devoured by crocodiles at the start, then afterward they fall into chasms with their baggage. So then, we're rid of the natives, there's only two or three white men left to reach the elephants' graveyard. There you go. Fine. So there, Lévi-Strauss had founded anthropology in order to distance himself from everything that had been ethnology up to that point. And Foucault, so, I'm waiting for him to make the second reference so he lets slip this blunder.
The tic of the radical break 5:20 Foucault, what a mind—the most intelligent, most cultivated men of this century, that's not the question. But Paris is full of subtle, cultivated men. That's not the point. And Lévi-Strauss has one of the finest musical cultures in Paris. Ideological blindness has nothing to do with the level of culture and knowledge, unfortunately. That goes for me too, but it's not for me to notice that. So, no, I don't have the level of knowledge and culture...
5:55 I'm not sure I have even half the level of, say, a Lévi-Strauss. But the reference to ethnology—why do I dwell on it? Because he says, we must turn it back on ourselves. That has never been done. So it's this "never been done" that will, it seems to me, come back. It must be... I'm afraid to say it... nearly forty years since I last watched this video. But I had seen it long ago. And I remember being struck by all the moments where he draws a break with everything that came before him.
6:25 So, he doesn't say "me." He's subtle, well-mannered, French, courteous. He says "up to Sartre," that is, just before him. Yes. And I can't help but think of Hegel, who had already seen, in the preface—in his political testament, the preface to the Philosophy of Right—where he takes a swipe at the leftists of the time, that is, the Romantics. "Leftists" doesn't mean men of the left here. On the contrary, they were counter-revolutionaries.
6:56 They hated the French Revolution. In fact, they were libertarians, as we'd say today. And that can be misleading. And Hegel tells them, they all share one tic—he doesn't say tic, but well, one common reflex—which is that they always say: it is precisely now that the world has been waiting to be thought in a radical, new way. It's now, and he adds, and this "now" keeps renewing itself indefinitely.
7:27 There you go. You know—much closer to your generation—a famous French president who said, "Change is now." Well, there we are, we're witnessing something like that. It may look like I'm overstating things. I'm not saying ironically that he's intelligent and cultivated—it's true. Someone like Foucault, it's not Onfray after all, it's serious stuff. I'd love to see his knowledge of painting, for instance. Even though on music he doesn't say much, a bit like Heidegger. But I don't think there are coincidences at that level.
8:00 But still, when one claims Nietzsche as a reference, it's a bit odd, because Nietzsche is an idol for him. Nietzsche is the author of Twilight of the Idols. Nietzsche had said, without music, life would be a mistake. Yet nonetheless, he often comes back to that side. On the other hand, I'm not at all inattentive to what he says about doing an ethnology of ourselves, of our customs.
8:30 That is, looking at ourselves with a bit of objectivity—not like insects, but almost, why not, it wouldn't bother me, including myself in the crowd, at night, my behavior in cafés, at the beach, on vacation, at work, in courtship—it's an impersonal game. And where he completely misses the mark, and I allow myself to say this because he knows it perfectly well if he thinks about it for a second—again, I'm pointing here to a blindness, not a blindness in the sense of incapacity.
9:02 This has, in fact, practically always been done, quite the contrary. What is the great tradition known as the French moralists? It has little to do with moralizing morality, with "moraline," to speak as Nietzsche would. Those who study manners—La Rochefoucauld, Pascal—they look at us; when Pascal says all our reasoning comes down to yielding to feeling, as early as the 17th century, that's quite something to come out with. For one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, what courage, and what self-humiliation of the intellect.
9:36 All our reasoning comes down to yielding to feeling, as if we had reasonings of perfect rigor, but in the last millisecond, what wins out is still a feeling. That's a moralist observation, La Rochefoucauld. I know some who would never have fallen in love if they hadn't heard love spoken of. That's already the whole program of structuralism, of which Foucault is part—namely, that it's the signifier that is determinant. It's language—I don't want to bring out all my Lacan. All their Lacan. Well, there you go. The initiator of that is still Lévi-Strauss.
10:07 I'm speaking of the term "structure," since Lévi-Strauss's first major publication is Structural Anthropology. There you go. I don't want to give a whole lecture, but it's to recall all these preliminaries anyway. I mean, why not, for me? It's very good to turn the spotlight on the spotlight itself. Even though Auguste Comte had already said in the 19th century, before that, that one cannot be both on the balcony and watch oneself walk by in the street. But it's a fine methodology.
10:39 And then he brings up recent things. The human sciences haven't existed for very long, when Foucault is speaking. They've existed since before the war, though. And I think of a founder of sociology like Durkheim. It seems to me he alludes to him somewhere in this video, in this interview. I knew him on the radio, I didn't know him visually at the time. And it seems to me he... Now, Durkheim does say that for sociology to exist, for it to be a discipline in its own right absorbed by neither of the two extremes—biology, behavior explained the way cognitive science does today, by stimulus, reflex, enzymes...
11:22 Or else, at the other extreme, by history, for example. One must treat—I'm quoting now—"social facts as things." That's exactly what he prescribes. And there, methodologically, it's very good, I agree with that. But there, I want to point out right away this tic of wanting to make people believe it's being done for the first time. You have to be careful when you say things like that. Since I know you have a great cinephile culture...
Who is this "we"? Greece and Christianity 11:56 In Children of Paradise, at the beginning, when Baptiste's father, in the Théâtre des Funambules, says to the audience, they always want novelty, novelty. As old as the world, that novelty. There you go. Let's give the floor back to structuralism. There's a difficulty here that is obviously very great, since after all, with what can we know ourselves?
12:26 If not with our own knowledge. That is to say, it's all our mental frameworks, all our categories of knowledge, that will allow us to know ourselves. And if we want to know precisely these categories of knowledge, we find ourselves in a situation that is obviously very complex. Our reason has to undergo a whole twisting upon itself in order to manage to grasp itself in this way, as a phenomenon foreign to it. It has to pass outside of itself. In a way, it would have to be turned inside out like a glove. And it's this effort, well, it's the beginning of this effort that I undertook.
13:00 What would be the ideal ethnologist for this? I mean, of what race, what nationality should he be? Well, one could say this: that the good ethnologist of our own culture would be a Chinese person, or an Arapesh, or a Nambikwara. That's twice now that they repeat the same series—ethnologically, an Iroquois, an Arapesh, a Nambikwara. These are of course peoples studied by Lévi-Strauss. Well, there's a lineage there, that's very good.
13:30 But I mean, he places himself there, within what was already, at the time, becoming a more important tradition. When he says "we"—who is this "we"? Well, he said a word earlier, "we, the Westerners." He even went so far as to define what we are, dating from Greece. Now, that bothers me enormously too. Why? Because—I'll take a detour to make this clear—when there was the project for a European constitution, which was rejected by the French, and that's why it's being imposed on us anyway, in 2005, well, by the majority of the French, there had been an attempt to inscribe the Christian reference in the European constitution.
14:20 It's Giscard, who knows his right-wing electorate, well. There you go, I'm not for it, I'm not against it, that's not the underlying issue. What bothers me is that one reference is put in and not the other. We cannot understand our—well, what he calls "our"—I'm commenting on the "we," on what the "we" designates in this: the modern hates modernity, the Western hates the West. I'm summing up a bit what I'm going to say, so that the trees don't hide the forest.
14:52 That's why we love baroque music so much, because modernity hates modernity. So we like to go back to the Ancien Régime. In short: "we, the Greeks"—well, or else, one insists on the Christian root and neglects the Greek root, which is huge in us too—democracy, I don't know, Plato—you look at Versailles, almost the entire aesthetic is inspired by classical art, the art of classical Greece. And not only the colonnades, the statues, whatever you like.
15:23 You just have to take a walk in the park of Versailles. I'm not even talking about literature—I mean, take away Greek mythology and there's almost nothing left of Racine's plays, or Roman mythology. And so one cannot leave that out and say Christianity is our essence. Conversely, one cannot say it's Greece. And there, we sense the reference to his idol Nietzsche, the reference to Greece which I don't dispute. But I don't want to leave out our schizophrenia, our profound schizophrenia. That is, we have one Greek leg and one Christian leg.
15:55 We have to deal with it. And what frightens me—that's why I'm saying it in advance, so it's clear—with the things that are about to pour down on us, I'll say it right away, gratuitously for now, we'll have occasion to come back to it after the interview—the great counter-revolutionary phase that is currently brewing its claws, I mean, two years before '68—this is '66, I believe, this interview. I remember it well. One of the things that characterizes it is no doubt—because the counter-revolution is counter-Marxism at the time, let's be clear—at the Liberation, still, you couldn't really badmouth Marxism.
1966, a pivotal date of the counter-revolution 16:38 There had been 50 million dead, there had been 30 million Soviets who had died so that we could be freed from the Nazi jackboot, to the point that the Americans landed when the Soviets were already in Berlin, so that Europe wouldn't become communist. We need to set the record straight. I'm going to insist on many things that explain the date we're at, in '66. De Gaulle—not for much longer. De Gaulle was, on the right, the one who bothered the Americans. And on the left, there were the communists. Both decline starting in '68.
17:08 These are things one has to understand. That's measurable, it's not an opinion. You take statistics and look at which forces decline starting in '68, of which Foucault is a thinker, an emblematic reference—for the '68ers, I mean, it's him, Deleuze, a bit later, Derrida. I don't lack for value, why not? But you have to know that this cleared away everything that was in the way—I'm not budging from the American side, things are very good in the United States—but everything that was in the way of Atlanticism, which is not the same thing.
17:39 First, not all Atlanticists are American—the proof, Macron, Giscard, Mitterrand, all those who brought us back into what's called the integrated command, that is, where the Americans decide on a whim—Trump, there, to wage nuclear war—we're in it, which is what De Gaulle had wanted to avoid. I voted against De Gaulle my whole life, so I can acknowledge, as people used to say back then, a few positive points in the general's foreign policy: his opposition to the Vietnam War, things like that which still deserve to be saluted, and France's withdrawal from NATO, from the alliance—well, from the integrated command; he never withdrew France, a loyal ally of the Atlantic Alliance.
18:18 He showed it when there was the crisis and the United States was prepared to stand alongside the United States. But, why am I taking this long detour? Because it's precisely these forces that prevailed at the Liberation that are now turning around. In that era, everything Vichyist kept a low profile. From 1945 until 1968. Kept a low profile. For a tenth of what is said now, almost on every TV panel or every blog on the internet, there would have been a million people in the streets thirty years ago, saying fascism shall not pass.
18:57 Now this banalization—let's move on. On the far right, obviously, but also very often in what happens on the left. On the other hand, that's precisely what's now being reversed. '66 is a pivotal date. And a fundamental theme of this counter-revolution will be precisely to designate, in this way, arbitrarily, an accursed referent, a "West."
19:35 which is a triangle, and there, we're not far from the triangle, what I call the accursed triangle—I won't repeat myself, but I'll say, a triangle whose three angles are humanism, universalism, and progress, progressivism, which are going to start declining from that period on, which are going to come under attack. Foucault is one of the principal architects of the discredit cast on what will be called historicism—even when it's history and not historicism—because the notion of structure is much more timeless, of course, and moreover he will soon say outright that he prefers deployment in space, geography, over the historical reference that had taken millennia to try to obtain.
20:24 There you go. All that to comment on the "we." Who is this "we"? Well, for some it was the Christian West, and I'll wrap up on that before giving him back the floor. It's very well known—that's why this video is very good, because it's exhaustive on this point—that the favorite and recurring targets of Foucault, but not only Foucault, of Deleuze—there are differences between Foucault and Deleuze, but what they have in common, that's why I call them the '68 thinkers, broadly speaking, the references, not to mention Derrida—the references, I'm not talking about the positive references to Nietzsche, Spinoza, all that, but the negative references, the targets of their attack, are almost always Cartesianism, Platonism, Christianity.
21:14 Now, I don't want to conflate things, but when you get acquainted with much lesser-known philosophers—too bad, they should be taught in elementary schools, not to embrace them, but to show where that kind of thinking leads—a philosopher like Bäumler, a philosopher whom Hitler installed in German universities at the time, in order to rid German philosophy of every trace of Hegelianism, of progressivism, not to mention Marxism, which wasn't even spoken of then in the universities.
21:47 So this Bäumler had as his targets Christianity, Platonism, Cartesianism. When it's all three at once, that's strange. I myself have plenty of reservations, I don't know, about Plato, about Descartes, but all three at once—it's like someone telling me they're anti-Gaullist. I say, that's convenient, so am I—I always voted against him, social policy. Yes, I'm anti-Gaullist because I'm for French Algeria and he gave independence to the Arabs.
22:18 There's a misunderstanding there, I mean, one can share the same opposition for entirely opposite reasons. So I understand one can be anti-Gaullist. I understand one can be anti-communist. There are very honorable reasons to be anti-communist—spirituality, I don't know, etc. Fine, why not. When you're both at once, both anti-Gaullist and anti-communist, that's the Vichy program. And resistant, and Gaullist, and communist.
22:48 There weren't many others. As individuals, yes, there were even royalists in the Resistance—there was a bit of everything. But as mass organizations, there were only two. Those are the ones. One on the right, the other on the left. So, there you go. The generalized attack on rationalism, Plato, Descartes. There you go. I won't hold the floor much longer, but I can't help quoting Goethe, a German, a good German—there are some—who, when people spoke of "Deutschtum," because at the time there were the first stirrings of German national sentiment in German student organizations—Germanness, I don't know how to put it...
The ideal ethnologist and the trial of universalism 23:29 The Deutschtum, he said Deutschdumm, dumm means stupid, in German, German stupidity. In short, a good German. And he said, if you despise, it's Mephistopheles who says this in Faust, if you despise, sorry, it's God who says it, if you despise science and reason, the highest names of humanity, you give yourself over to the devil and you are lost. As if Goethe had had a glimpse of Germany's destiny. There you go. Only, after all, with what category, with what framework of thought could this Chinese man or this Arapesh know us ourselves, except with the mental frameworks that are our own.
24:07 Which means that it might still be us who would succeed best if we could twist ourselves around like that and look at ourselves in a mirror, it might be us who would after all be best able to do this work and undertake this ethnology of our own culture. One could obviously dream of a Martian, a Martian whose thought would manage to grasp ours entirely. It's this Martian who could no doubt know us best, but that, no doubt, is not possible, since as far as I know, Martians do not exist.
24:44 — A fascinating sequence. Fascinating to me, the whole complexity and ambivalence — I don't mean ambiguity, that's not the same thing — the ambivalence of what he's saying. He starts out with ethnology as his reference point, the ethnological approach to our own culture, considering ourselves as if we were a foreign culture. That's very good. I won't repeat once again that this is what Lévi-Strauss meant when he claimed me for sociology, treating social facts as things that can be observed in a laboratory.
25:18 There you go. And not racking your brains, introspection. That's very good. But then the other person asks the question, so what would the ideal demystifier be at this level? He answers, quite logically, still with the ethnological model in mind, it would be a Chinese man, a Nambikwara. And then, all of a sudden, he says, but that's not possible because he'd have to do it with our categories. In that case, only I, Foucault, can do it.
25:50 Someone who belongs to our culture, but who, by some miracle, is the only one not determined by the frameworks of our culture, but who can get out of them. It's a very interesting sequence. It's not an effect of grace, all the same. There you go. Very curious. And besides, this too, quickly: one senses a permanent trial of universalism. The implication being, as long as we don't understand that what we, Westerners, believe to be universal is in fact particular to our culture, well the Bantu don't think like that at all.
26:28 I'm not caricaturing, there are many who think that, it's called relativism. Here again, this isn't an amalgam, but it's the dream of the MEDEF [French employers' federation]. I mean, after all, Marx's Communist Manifesto ends with a famous phrase: workers of all countries, unite. He'd have his work cut out, but no, it means stop fighting each other between Hutu and Tutsi, between Corsican and French, between gay and straight, between Quadra and Kaira, between Jews and Arabs, between everything that is identity, everything that is the catastrophe of the world we live in, all the possible and imaginary oppositions, provided it's not social classes, because those aren't imaginary entities.
27:15 That is measurable, it's not about qualities. It's quantitative. That's important. So, workers of all countries, unite. I think of that yellow vest called Bachir who was interviewed, I saw it in an interview. And there he said — someone asked, aren't there some fascist types among you? He said, maybe, there are fascists, there are lefties, there are blacks, there are whites. He said, we don't care. And that "we don't care" was liberating for me. I said, something is happening here that gets us out of '68.
27:46 There, we're moving beyond identities. Because these Hutu and Tutsi stories caused millions of deaths. That's why we're commemorating — well, it's not really something to celebrate, commemorating the Rwandan genocide today. Precisely, which began on April 7th. The largest of the postwar period along with that of the Khmer Rouge. When we say they were red, but they were actually green. They had to empty the city to go to the countryside. They were survivalists. So this universalism, I mean, delights those who benefit from dividing us.
28:20 That's why I quoted Marx. Because capital has no interest whatsoever in us being unified. Because that would be dangerous for it if we silenced our identity quarrels — men, women, young, old, Corsicans. And if Corsica becomes independent tomorrow, there will be a struggle between Bastia and Ajaccio over which is the authentic Corsica. Neither, actually, it's Bonifacio. It goes on forever. When it's the imaginary, there's no stopping it. Precisely because we never find in reality what corresponds to the imaginary. This is well illustrated by the Greek myth of Procrustes. So, we need to understand clearly that this relativism, which we believe to be progress in thought, is useful for those who are obtuse dogmatists, but generally speaking, it can be exploited in a formidable way by capital.
The end of philosophy, an old parricide 29:08 As long as you oppose each other, I mean, we sit back and twiddle our thumbs. It's not workers of all countries, unite, it's workers of all countries, tear each other apart. That's today's slogan. Is this attitude a philosopher's attitude, or is it the opposite? It's very hard, actually, to define what philosophy currently is; for a very long time, I think one could say, in fact until Sartre — Sartre included — philosophy was an autonomous discipline, closed in on itself, I'd say.
29:43 Foucault, like... the thinkers of his time, wants to show that starting from them there's a radical break with what came before. Now he's in the process of liquidating Sartre. I have the right — I'm not defending this. But there's nothing older in the history of philosophy than what's called parricide. Socrates begins by... he had been a disciple of Parmenides, then he contradicts Parmenides, he kills Parmenides. Then Aristotle kills Plato, assassinates Plato.
30:16 And then it's Spinoza who liquidates Descartes, or Kant who liquidates both — Spinoza as much as Descartes — dogmatism. Then it's Hegel who criticizes Kant, and Marx who criticizes Hegel. Because Marx's first publication is the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. So parricide is the most recurrent thing in the history of philosophy. That's how you fail — I'm going to make a break, and the first thing I do is exactly what every other philosopher has done since their origins. It's funny.
30:47 If I may say so. It wouldn't be that, because philosophy has always reflected on cultural objects that were, in a way, offered to it from elsewhere. It reflected on God because theology offered it to philosophy. It reflected on science because the whole system of our knowledge offered it this object. Philosophy was therefore an open discipline, but it was a discipline that had its own methods, its own forms of reasoning, its own particular deductions.
31:17 It seems to me that philosophy is now disappearing. When I say it's disappearing, I don't mean that we're arriving at an age where ultimately all knowledge becomes positive. I think philosophy is dissolving and dissipating into a whole series of activities of thought about which it is hard to say whether they are properly scientific or properly philosophical. We're arriving at an age that may be that of pure thought, of thought in action, and after all a discipline as abstract and general as linguistics, a discipline as fundamental as logic, an activity like literature since Joyce for example — well, all these activities are probably activities of thought, and they stand in for philosophy, not that they take philosophy's place, but in a way they are the very unfolding of what philosophy used to be.
32:18 Philosophy was — a formerly, that's the word I just heard. From when? From me, from me, Foucault, since Sartre was still within philosophy. Sartre is alive when he's speaking to him there. Amazing, all the same. Well of course, I'm not settling this on substance. We need to agree on the words, that's even the object of philosophy since Socrates began, in the streets of Athens, saying: what do you call this, what do you call that, what do you call wisdom, what do you call gymnastics, what do you call music, and so on.
32:54 And not what is it, but what do you call it. Philosophy begins when — there were profound thoughts well before Socrates, Hindu-Chinese thought, we didn't wait for the birth of philosophy in Athens to unfold profound thoughts, but these are thoughts, sometimes religions, sometimes spiritualities, sometimes mysticisms, whatever you like, but they are thoughts. What's specifically philosophical, starting with Socrates — so we need to recall this specificity to see if it's dying, why not.
33:30 It's from the moment when the problem is not the thing being spoken of, but the word that designates it. Rightly or wrongly, perhaps philosophy wastes time splitting hairs over words, but when, in Plato's Gorgias for example, Socrates — whose subject is the art of oratory, I said how important that was, you can't attain political power unless there's an orator who has taught you how — we'd say today a Séguéla — how to do PR and all that in order to convince the crowds and thus get elected.
34:02 That's important in a culture which — and this is a democratic advance — decided that it's not force that makes power, it's speech, the parliament, the Pnyx, the agora — after all, that's progress, it's better. And for that you need to know how to speak. And the sophists charged very high fees for it. So Socrates, for free, asks the question to one of the most illustrious of the time, to Gorgias, an orator who really existed: what is the art of oratory? The other begins by answering: it's by far the most beautiful of things. We say, you haven't yet told me what it is, you've already told me it's the best of things.
34:34 Yes, I mean, it's the art of persuading. Very well, so you're a geometer. But how, what's the connection? When you see a demonstration in geometry, that's persuading too. But no, it's not that kind of persuading. There, we're making progress. And we find out in the end that it's not the most beautiful thing, but a sordid one. Because the big difference between geometry and oratory is — let's think of a crooked lawyer, as we say in French, a lawyer who defends his client, even if he's the worst scum, doesn't matter, it's his job.
35:05 It's that in geometry, one demonstrates in order to arrive at a truth. Whereas in oratory, one demonstrates in order to arrive — it doesn't matter whether it's true or false — provided the others are convinced. So it's sordid. There you go. So reflecting on the word is not at all about splitting hairs and being far from the concrete. It's quite the opposite. There's a beautiful reflection on this in a very curious piece of writing by Hegel, a humorous one — some think it was written for a society entertainment, like charades — called Who Thinks Abstractly. We assume it's the philosopher, especially the German philosophers of the time, and then they show that no, it's the man in the street who thinks abstractly.
35:40 Since precisely, he doesn't ask himself about the words he uses. So, when we see the specificity of philosophy, I don't know whether it's dead. The work Foucault does, often admirably — it's one of his best sides — is the archaeologist's side. It's about seeing from when, I don't know, people spoke of sovereign, of sovereignty at a certain time. He studied that shift.
36:12 And all of a sudden, we speak of population, of the people. These shifts in meaning and words, he was very attentive to that. In that sense, this kind of philosophy is not dead. I say this because the dream of every philosopher is to put an end to philosophy. But that doesn't date from Foucault. Hegel had already said that philosophy — he put the final full stop to it. Right? Spinoza builds a system of demonstration which, in principle, I mean, closes off the problems.
The dream of ending philosophy: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud 36:45 Descartes: "those long chains of reasoning, all simple and easy, which geometers commonly use to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations, had given me occasion to imagine that all things which can fall within human knowledge follow on from one another in the same way, and that, provided only that we refrain from accepting any as true which is not, and always observe the necessary order in deducing one from another, there can be nothing so remote that we cannot reach it, nor so hidden that we cannot discover it." Like discovering, there, a woman who's in a bed. Cut! Musketeer, draw back, careful!
37:17 There, so this is true of every philosopher, saying: with me, philosophy is finished, that's it, philosophia, the love of wisdom, hence desire, hence I don't have it — it's over since now I have it. The late Plato, likewise — it's been noted that in the Laws, his last dialogue, it's only Socrates who speaks, there's hardly any dialogue left, it's teaching, like that. It's one of the least dramatized of his dialogues. So, why shouldn't philosophy have come to an end?
37:48 I'll finish on one specific point: the three thinkers — I'm using the term broadly, to cover both a philosopher and someone who isn't one; he mentioned linguists, a very, very — I mean writers, Joyce — in the world there's a bit of everything, but there's a novel of philosophy, of poetry, of metaphysics, of religion, of psychoanalysis, as in Proust — but the three thinkers who have spilled the most philosophical ink, that is, who have most inspired the reflection of philosophers, in the academic or common sense of the term — I'll take them in chronological order for that period — Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, very different from one another, are precisely such that none of the three recognizes himself as a philosopher.
38:34 Marx writes The Poverty of Philosophy — it's clear, philosophy is part of ideology; Marx founded the science of history, of which philosophy is the fantasized reflection — I'll go quickly. Nietzsche mocks philosophers who do nothing but play word games and get taken in by the wills to power inscribed in language, in ways of expressing oneself. And as for Freud, need I say more.
39:07 So none of the three — Freud had medical training, not philosophical training — none of the three wished to situate himself within philosophy; each of the three posited philosophy as something surpassed, and at the same time, there has never been as much philosophical reflection as in the commentaries on each of these three. There, I'm pointing out this interesting paradox. And it's confirmed for Foucault, because ever since Foucault said that philosophy, as he's just said, is a thing of the past, in every philosophy syllabus, people now talk about Foucault far more than any other philosopher.
Man, an invention of the 19th century? 39:47 I believe, statistically, this is still true: he's the most cited author of the human sciences worldwide. The French Doctor, as they say in California. What idea of man do you have? Well, I believe that man has been, if not a bad dream, a nightmare, at least a very particular figure, very determined, historically situated within our culture.
40:19 You mean that man is an invention? Man is an invention. In the 19th century, and throughout the first half of the 20th as well, we believed that man was, deep down, the fundamental reality that we could be interested in. We had the impression that it was the search for truth about man that had, since the depths of the Greek age, animated all research — perhaps of science, certainly of morality, and surely of philosophy.
40:49 When we look at things more closely, we can wonder whether this idea that man had always existed and was there, as it were waiting to be taken up by a science or a philosophy or a morality — we can wonder whether this idea isn't an illusion, an illusion peculiar to the 19th century. In truth, until the end of the 18th century, roughly until the French Revolution, no one ever concerned themselves with man as such.
41:19 I'm not going back to the 18th century, I'm going back 2000 years. Terence, the Latin writer of the imperial era, who is well known — I'm not breaking any news here, he knows it well, Foucault. But apparently he doesn't want to know it. Terence is the one who spoke the famous phrase, homo sum, nihil humani a me alienum puto — I am a man, and nothing human is foreign to me. It's even been said that this foreshadowed Christianity, which was soon to establish itself in Rome, this universality.
41:52 For it's well known, it's written in the Bible, that no one is a prophet in his own country. Christianity had far more success outside its place of origin. There you go. But no, we shouldn't exaggerate either. We shouldn't have to wait for the 19th century to speak of man in a generic way. It's still rather curious that the notion of humanism, which we attribute to the Renaissance — the notion of humanism is a very recent notion; open the Littré dictionary, you won't find the word humanism. Because the word humanism is an invention of the 19th century, of the late 19th century.
42:24 Before the 19th century, one could say that man did not exist. What existed was a certain number of problems, a certain number of forms of knowledge and reflection where there was a question of nature, a question of truth, a question of movement, a question of order, a question of imagination, a question of representation, etc. But there was not, properly speaking, a question of man. At first he stated a historical accuracy — I speak precisely, I don't even claim it as a virtue, it's simply accurate — that the word itself did not exist, or was very rarely used.
42:59 Man, humanism, man spoken of in a general way like that. Now, he says, there was no question of it. So all the questions he's just raised — God, truth, nature, etc. — I don't see what animal poses them, apart from man. Man is a figure that took shape toward the end of the 18th century, at the beginning of the 19th, and that gave rise to what has been called, what is still called, the human sciences.
43:29 Man, this brand-new man thus invented at the end of the 18th century, also gave rise to all this humanism, this humanism of which Marxism and existentialism are, currently, the most visible testimony. It's curious that he only goes after progressive strands of thought. I mean, there's been a trial of man before Foucault, and it took place during the Third Reich, where it was clear that all the Nazi theorists — I'm thinking of Rosenberg, of Krieck, when you read them — these are people we should know a bit better, because it would put certain people on guard who believe they have new ideas today, and who are very close to what I'm illustrating here.
44:11 Baeumler, whom I've mentioned elsewhere, spent his time criticizing people like Goethe, like Hegel — why? Because for them, it's the humanism of Weimar. I remind you that Weimar is the pinnacle of German culture of that era, but it's also, two centuries later, the Weimar Republic that the Nazis fought against to seize power. There you go. So we need to be careful about these things. There is a precedent to the liquidation of humanism, and it's called the Third Reich.
44:44 I never said that Foucault would have rejoiced and enlisted in the SS. I mean, is he himself aware of the way this sort of drift can be exploited? I don't even want to know, that's not the question. What matters, from the victims' point of view, regardless of whether it's intentional or not — what matters is that it goes in the same direction, the direction in which, at that moment, there was a need to shift gears with respect to — precisely, since I'm speaking of the Third Reich — with respect to everything that had politically emerged from the horrors of the war, and everything that had appeared with the Liberation.
45:24 That is, I repeat, I say it again: Gaullism on the right and Communism on the left, which, despite their opposition, had nonetheless distinguished themselves historically through something called the Resistance, which we've become so ashamed of that the word no longer exists. No, we're absolutely being trained to use the word resilience instead, just so as not to say resistance anymore. Why has resistance become embarrassing? That dates from that '68 — not the workers' '68. But I believe that, paradoxically, the development of the human sciences now leads us much more toward a disappearance of man than toward an apotheosis of man.
Human sciences, discontinuity and the unity of myths 46:05 Indeed, what's happening currently with the human sciences? Well, the human sciences do not at all discover the concrete, individual, positive core, so to speak, of human existence. Quite the contrary, what we see when we study, for example, behaviors, family structures — as Lévi-Strauss did — or when we study the great Indo-European myths, as Dumézil did.
46:35 Or again, when we study, precisely, the very history of our knowledge, we notice that what we discover is not man in his truth, man in whatever positivity he may have, but rather what we discover are kinds of great systems of thought, great formal organizations, which are, in a way, like the ground on which historical individualities appear. So that thought today, reflection, is being entirely reversed compared to what it was just a few years ago.
47:10 We should note in passing this notion of historical individuality, the historical individuality that the Indians of Mato Grosso represent and which supposedly has nothing to do with the historical individuality of the Indo-Europeans studied by Dumézil. So there is a kind of archipelago where pieces of humanity are isolated from one another without communication. It's well known, it's the rehabilitation by Foucault and his followers at that time of discontinuity as opposed to a historical continuity that would exist in Marxism, with the history of modes of production, for example from chipped stone to polished stone, from bronze to iron - there we have continuity.
47:49 And even progress, not in the sense of value judgment, but progress in an objective, measurable sense. That is, the time it takes to make this table might be two minutes now with a machine, whereas before you had to spend two whole days on it. That's the only way to speak of progress in objective terms. And afterwards everyone can make whatever value judgments they want on top of that. So it's a way of introducing the discontinuous and the discrete into societies. In fact all these themes overlap; it's a way of separating humanity into entities that don't come together, and thus of dividing those who might have common interests in remaining united.
48:31 It's very telling - the more you scrutinize man, the less you see there is, and curiously they say positive - actually I don't know, does that mean positive on a moral level, etc.? No, the human sciences, if they exist - I'm not at all sure there is such a thing as the human sciences in the sense of hard sciences; in any case there aren't many anthropologists who agree with each other, there aren't many - well, in short, fortunately man is not the object of those sciences, because otherwise that would mean man is determined exactly as the movement of the planets or the chemistry of carbon is determined. There is an edifice of human sciences that remains to be built, but as I keep repeating Clouscard's quip - the human sciences developed not so much to bring out precisely what constitutes human universality, but to lock down, to quote Clouscard, the nascent Marxism - we're going in circles.
49:41 And so indeed he has an easy time afterward saying that we only have rough sketches - here, with Lévi-Strauss we have an identity that is that of the Amazonian Indians, and with Dumézil we have the Indo-Europeans. When you look closely, you notice that the myths all tell the same thing, whether African - I'll give one example to finish, I mean to move on to something else, but to make people think - when you see the role of the smith in the Germanic epic of the Nibelungen, which Wagner used to make the Ring, but I can say it's much earlier than him, as it's described in the Scandinavian Eddas, the smith-god, the hammer-god Thor in Viking mythology - when you see the smith-god who plays a fundamental role, who forges the weapon that grants invulnerability, you find that again in the Mandingo epic of the African Sahel, for those who know it - there aren't many, but among African schoolchildren, yes, French-speaking ones, but it's less known here - the young Sundiata Keïta, who is a bit the Achilles of this African Iliad.
50:51 which is the Mandingo, Malinké epic - in Malinké you find written 'Mali', if you look closely - it was an immense empire from the 11th to the 14th century especially, which reached its height before being overtaken by the Songhai. It's the same thing, the smith who forges the weapon that will make Sundiata Keïta invulnerable and thus allow him to achieve his role as founder of the epic - whereas apparently there's nothing in common. The Nazis would have been furious if I said there was a point in common between the Germanic Nibelungen affair and the African smith - well, after all, he already used to say that the French were white negroes. So I'm not sure that all this is separated like - his example is good - like archipelagos or mountain peaks with no bridge and no possible communication between the populations that occupy them. I believe we are currently living through the great break with the 19th century, with this whole beginning of the 20th century - this break, deep down we experience it not as a refusal
Sartre surpassed, formal systems and neo-Kantianism 52:02 nor a rejection, but as the distance taken with respect to Sartre. I believe that Sartre, who is a very great philosopher - Sartre is still a man of the 19th century. I'd rather take on the role of the outdated progressive than that of the trendy reactionary. He's reproaching Sartre for being a man of the past - that's not an argument, that doesn't mean he's right or wrong from a philosophical, let alone scientific, point of view. It means: you're talking to young people, you say the guy is a bit old, he's out of date, he listens to New Orleans jazz - not Sartre, though he didn't listen to any other jazz - Sartre, well anyway, let's move on, I'll say: he's still stuck on Beethoven's symphonies. That's the best way to be dissuasive on a worldly level. It's like when someone tells you 'it's more complicated than that' - ah well, obviously, you have complexity and you have simplism vis-à-vis the crowds - the does watching the stags fight, it's quickly seen: the guy who's into simplism doesn't have the standing. These are the arguments Clouscard used to recall, it's his fundamental category - worldliness. Why?
53:13 Well, because Sartre's whole enterprise was to want to make man in a way adequate to his own meaning. Sartre's whole enterprise consists in wanting to recover what is absolutely authentic in human existence. He wanted to bring man back to himself, to make him the owner of the meanings that might escape him, and it is nonetheless within a philosophy of alienation - and of alienation to be overcome - that Sartre's thought is situated. Whereas we want to do exactly the opposite: we want, on the contrary, to show that what is individual, what is singular, what is properly lived in man, is only a kind of surface glimmer above great formal systems, and that thought must now reconstitute these formal systems, above which the foam and image of proper existence float from time to time. I'm commenting on 'formal system' because it's not very clear, I mean this isn't a criticism or praise.
54:23 I mean it's not very interesting to criticize or praise, it's about trying to see clearly into all this. He says clearly what it no longer is, but when he says what's going to replace it - what we want is that, instead of this surface glimmer, to use these expressions, we show that in place of man there are formal systems. It's not very clear, but from the point of view of the code between philosophers it's much clearer. To come back now to his preface to Lévi-Strauss, it's in The Raw and the Cooked that you find all this, of course, and in this preface - this book marked by music - where Lévi-Strauss says linguistics was my model, like all structuralists, but for some time now it's music that has helped me understand how to listen to myths. It's interesting, there's a relation to time, and at one point he says in it: Mr. Ricoeur said my system was a Kantianism without a transcendental subject - I admit, I agree with that description. So Lévi-Strauss himself ratifies his attachment to Kantianism, except he says that the fact
55:33 that there is no transcendental subject is, for me, an advantage and not a drawback - there you have it, without any... Why did I make this whole development, and now I'm saying it, because Clouscard says that the common genre, the theme common to all counter-revolutionary thought from that period on, is neo-Kantianism - not Kant, Kant was at the cutting edge of the thought of his time, quite the opposite of someone going backward - but a neo-Kantianism that will use Kant to lock down the advances made since the French Revolution. To go very quickly - so, in case that seems confused, I'll clarify it with the extraordinary correspondence of the three young men at the theology seminary where they grew up, because at the time they didn't have much choice - Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin, the two greatest philosophers of the time and the greatest poet, some say of all time, in the same room - I would have loved to be a little mouse in the corner sometimes. And in their correspondence, at the moment they start leaving school and teaching, as tutors and so on, they write to each other a lot, and they say
56:43 when he wasn't even dead yet, he was still old but alive, and they say the priests are busy reclaiming all of Kant's teaching for themselves - to clearly distinguish between a critique of Kant and a critique of the recuperation of Kant for the benefit of counter-revolutionary thought. At the time, in Greece, it was to fight against what were called 'French ideas', that is, of course, revolutionary ones. So, all this regarding Kantianism, his transcendental subject - I won't close this long parenthesis, since we're properly in philosophy here, without recalling what Lévi-Strauss himself says to make explicit what Foucault says in a relatively transparent way once you're aware of all this, when he speaks of these formal constraints, these formal fields in which we are immersed without knowing it, and which are like a Kantian term, a priori with respect to my thought, which I believe to be sovereign, independent and autonomous. And Lévi-Strauss goes so far as to say: I am not trying to say what men think in myths, or to demonstrate what they think in myths, but how myths think themselves through men.
57:53 And why not go one step further: how myths think themselves among each other. Let me give an example of what he just said, that myths think themselves among each other. When, in the myth of the Tower of Babel for instance, humanity is punished for having tried to make itself equal to the gods - because that's what the Tower of Babel is - punished not this time by the punishment of fire, Sodom and Gomorrah, nor by the punishment of water, the Flood, but much more cleverly than all that, by the confusion of languages: God decides that from then on all those working on the site - understood, until then humanity knew only one language - and there the languages get scrambled, wonderfully, and so people no longer understand each other, so it's a brawl - when you don't understand each other, that's exactly what it means literally and figuratively - and so the construction site begins to be, as it still is now, the eternally unfinished construction site of humanity. Well, fine, I'll set that aside. I take Greek philosophy, which all these people oppose completely - they're Nietzschean, Greece owes nothing to the Orient nor to the Semites nor to any of that - the myth of Prometheus
59:06 what is it? It's the same thing: Prometheus punished for having wanted to go fetch from the gods something to make man equal to the gods - fire. Myths think themselves among each other. There, I'm finishing my long parenthesis, to grant that Foucault is right in the framework of structural thought, that indeed - and this is one of Kant's great advances, I believe - for example, I look at what I want... no, space has to be given, because if space is not given I cannot see this glass, I cannot see anything at all. And my knowledge of space does not come from my vision - I am not an empiricist here, he breaks with the Anglo-Saxon tradition - I am not an empiricist, on the contrary, for me to be able to have an experience, space must be given first, otherwise how could I see the slightest thing? If space - we'll see it's even more obvious for time - is not given... So, to check if I've understood correctly, I don't quite see how, consequently, a raising of consciousness or a political attitude could follow from your working approach - of course, that's probably the question one asks of all forms of reflection that are in the process of destroying a myth and have not yet
Death of God, death of man, philosophy as daughter of crisis 1:00:16 reconstituted a new mythology. For example, for a very long time philosophy maintained such a kinship with theology that it was philosophy's role to define what morality or what politics one should and could deduce from the existence of God. When philosophy - when the whole of Western culture discovered that God was dead, immediately people said: well, if God is dead, everything is permitted; if God is dead, there is no morality possible anymore; if God is dead, what politics should we adopt? Well, I'll interrupt there because it illustrates the earlier point - the reference to Nietzsche is transparent here, of course, God is dead - except I'll take the opportunity to say that modern, post-modern thought - since this is the beginning of post-modernity, all that - which even holds a grudge against modernity, by the way, against the movements that unfolded since the French Revolution, which is perhaps even a form of revenge, even, horribile dictu - it's a reproach Nietzsche makes - a resentment
1:01:26 against modernity. Resentful thought piles up corpses. The 18th century settles its score with metaphysics, that's the Enlightenment; afterward, you can no longer do metaphysics as before without suspecting you're caught in illusion, so metaphysics is dead. With Nietzsche, God is dead. With Foucault, man is dead - it's interesting, now it's a genre. Now, experience has shown that moral reflection, political reflection, had never been more alive, never been stronger, never been more abundant than from the moment we knew God was dead. The human figure was there, man was there, the master of meaning - and now that man is disappearing, we're being asked the same question that used to be asked of those who proclaimed that God was dead. We're told: if man is dead, then everything is possible, or more precisely, we'll be told everything is necessary. There are plenty of excellent things in all these developments - that's what I appreciate the most.
1:02:36 But paradoxically it's when he rejoins the very thoughts he otherwise rejects, because what is he actually saying? That what we believe to be an obstacle to reflection, to philosophy - because if you remove God, you remove morality, you remove... - it's a Dostoevsky vision, it's in Crime and Punishment that the hero says - or in The Brothers Karamazov, I hesitate, but I believe it's Ivan Karamazov - if God does not exist, everything is permitted. And Foucault says, very well, but no, quite the contrary, it's the beginning of a new reflection. When Kant says 'I have limited knowledge in order to make room for faith,' that says exactly what it means. Well, I mean, the fact of no longer drawing the laws of one's action, one's morality, one's principles from a pre-established religion, from a revelation or whatever, but of deciding among men, as has been done since the French Revolution, and democratically, how this should be done - it's a field of new, very fruitful, very interesting problems. But, but precisely, that
1:03:47 that rejoins the great thesis - that's why it makes me laugh - of Hegel, whom he otherwise detests, or rather rejects - that's not quite the word, it shifts, it's not quite... but which he rejects as being one of those grand narratives, a continuity he keeps rejecting all the time - it's that for Hegel, reflection, philosophy, is always fertilized by crisis, and that's exactly what he's saying here. I really like the passage where Foucault says: when something - the pillar on which the fundamental value on which a culture was based has just collapsed, and we don't yet have a new one, in the in-between, this state where, as Rilke says, what was has disappeared and what is to come has not yet arrived - arriving too late in a world too... arriving too soon in a world too old - it's a bit the same theme. Indeed, these are the most fruitful periods, but that's Hegel's thesis, that philosophy is always the daughter of crisis - it's the collapse of the Greek city that sends a Socrates into the streets asking questions, it's the decline of the Ancien Régime at the end of the 18th century
1:04:57 that unfolds the Enlightenment and, up to Rousseau, breaks like the Rousseauian break - Kant said he was the Newton of morality, after all. So, there you have it, it's precisely at the moment something disappears that a whole new field of problems appears. It's clear that during centuries of monarchy and feudalism - monarchical feudalism, to be complete - it was, in Marxian terms, the struggle of peasants against landowners, against lords, against feudal lords. From the Industrial Revolution on, that collapses completely and it becomes the struggle of workers against bosses - which is very different from employees, to take a more extensive term. So yes, that's very fruitful, but after all it's not a particularly new idea either. What the death of God revealed, what this great absence of the supreme being revealed, was the space of freedom. What the disappearance of man now reveals, in this thin gap left by man
The reign of necessity against freedom 1:06:07 now erased, what we see emerging is the fabric of a kind of necessity, the great network of systems to which we belong, and we're told: then everything is necessary. Well, it's probable that just as, in the space of freedom left by the death of God, the great political systems, the great moral systems - Marxism, Nietzsche, existentialism - were able to be built, in the same way, above this fabric of necessities that we're now trying to traverse, we will see great systems emerge, great political options, great moral options, colder ones no doubt. And I must say that even if we don't see any emerge - because after all we can't prejudge the future - if we don't see any emerge, it's not very serious. We discovered fifty years ago that literature was no longer made to entertain, nor music to give visceral sensations, and I wonder whether we might not discover that thought has something else entirely
1:07:17 to do than to prescribe to men what they must do. It would already be quite something if thought managed to think itself entirely, if thought could discover what is unconscious in the very thickness of what we think. Thank you. Curious claim - we've discovered in the last fifty years, he says, that literature can do something other than entertain, perhaps to support the idea that I, the modern man, I, Foucault in this case, am unfolding a radically new sequence - I'm forced to reduce the past a bit - but really, who's going to believe that the adventure as, say, a Rimbaud offered it to us - Rimbaud doesn't tell us that poetry is there to entertain us, all the same - it's quite reductive with respect to the past, that's not how things happened in literature. As for Racine, Madame de Maintenon told him he had to write plays for the moral education of the young girls of Saint-Cyr - Saint-Cyr is an orphanage
1:08:28 there were girls of high society there who were supposed to be moralized by this scoundrel - Racine, that's beside the point - to moralize these young girls, he wrote Esther and Athalie, which are the most terrifying plays - when you see the dream in Athalie, you'd need a great filmmaker to stage the dream of Athalie: bones that dogs fought over, dragging through the mud, this happened during the horror of a deep night - well, he's exaggerating a bit, but what's interesting in his fall is that it relativizes things. To come back to the grand sequence, he's right to say that when God died, people thought it was the end of philosophy, when in many respects it was a beginning, and an important break - and it's funny that this appears in everything he said, but without development - he said very well that what appears since the death of man is the establishment
1:09:38 of a necessity. You don't need to be a great scholar in the history of thought to know that necessity has traditionally been opposed to freedom in philosophical dichotomies - it belongs to determinism, to necessity, it's Y equals F of X in the sciences, I mean the moon revolves around the earth, it's compelled to. The moon doesn't say to itself, 'I'm fed up, I'm going to revolve around Saturn for a change' - it has no choice, there's a law, gravitation, etc., see Newton, which makes it determined - it's necessary, that's the complete opposite of free, agreed?
1:10:14 Now, it's paradoxical, this rehabilitation of necessity - the death of man implies the reign of the necessary. I find that very worrying: there's no more man, necessity reigns; necessity means there's no freedom. Now, all of justice consisted precisely in - there's a crime, for instance, and we try to find out whether the guy did it deliberately or whether it's an accident, or whether there were mitigating circumstances, agreed?
1:10:44 If we think that there's a whole web of determinations that left him no choice but to kill, there's no more justice possible - 'defendant, rise' - 'excuse me your honor, but I was born this way, with a gene that makes me compelled to kill my fellow man' - well, there's no possible justice anymore. It's very - it's at once very worrying because it's very coherent - it's coherent to say there's no more man, there's no more freedom - freedom is one of those values we believed in in the 19th century among Marxists, it's really extraordinary. I mean, there are indeed many worrying things today, like the dissolution of man, who is no longer one - there's now only one genre, the animal genre, many say now, and man is one species among the animal genera. I'm the last person to say there's nothing animal in man - I mean until the end of my life the proposition 'you must eat to live' remains valid, so there's an animal part - it wasn't man who decided that - but what makes us human is precisely everything that isn't included in this program, it's when I say
Institution against instinct: man the migrant 1:11:56 'please, help yourself first' - which never happens among dogs. So it's when we take some distance from what nature imposes precisely - instinct belongs to the order of necessity, it's biochemical, whatever you like - the institution, no, the institution of marriage runs counter to spontaneous sexuality - the Bible says 'be fruitful and multiply,' monogamous marriage isn't exactly a tool serving 'be fruitful and multiply' - I'm not criticizing monogamous marriage, I mean I'm noting that institution always runs in the opposite direction from instinct - and at meals I don't pounce on the dish as soon as it arrives, I say to the lady next to me, because we were raised that way, I don't want to come across as a boor, otherwise I couldn't flirt with her - 'please, help yourself first' - even though, well, I'm hungry. So it's this inverse relation of necessity to freedom, of nature to culture, on which the interview ends, which is really an almost worrying confirmation, as if we were happy
1:13:07 to close a page that was progressivism, universalism and humanism, which were quite recent, because in historical terms the French Revolution isn't old. What we call modernity, in historical terms - I'm not talking about the post-modernity we're struggling in now, but modernity, if we're not to make it a vague term, this will be my conclusion, but to try to give a few chronological markers - it begins for us with the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution, that is, roughly the end of the 18th century, all packed into a tight chronological span. So it's not that old, industrial society and all that, it's not that old - we're so immersed in it that we get the impression that... well, I mean, you just have to travel around the world to see it's not that old. And this will be my conclusion: I have the impression we're now tempted by a neo-localism, a neo-medievalism - the unit is no longer the nation-state, it's the fief, that's why I'm thinking of a neo-feudalism - the fief, that is, an entity of proximity. Maybe, because, you know, I was born here, I grew up elsewhere
1:14:17 and I still reside in a third entity - I like the wandering-Jew side of things, the ghost-ship side, the fact that man originally is one immense migration coming from the African jungles that then ends up in the glaciers of northern Europe with Neanderthal, or in Asia with Peking Man, after all, or Pithecanthropus Erectus, the Java Man - man is a migrator, and in my opinion that's what's most profound in him, and that's why he isn't about to disappear - it's precisely because he has no essence. You can clearly see he hates Sartre, but Sartre indeed said that if we could define man, that is, give him an essence - like saying it's in the essence of lead to melt at, I don't know, 500 degrees I think, roughly, and to be heavier than water and not float like cork or whatever you like - if we could define man like that, man would be finished, defined and determined, he would be finite, the opposite of free. What is proper to man is precisely to reject, every time we try to lock him into an essence, he goes beyond it. So people say man hasn't invented anything
1:15:27 you hear that a lot in today's naturalistic discourse - look at fireflies, they invented the LED lamp, or the badger, I don't know, invented excavators, machines, with its claws digging - but it turns out the badger only knows how to do that, and the polar bear can only live where it is fit for, that is, in the polar ice - in the Amazon it would quickly be done for, poor thing. What's proper to man is to be able to live in Greenland if he feels like it, in the Amazon rainforest, in the desert like the Tuareg, or in an American base in Antarctica, American or Chilean, doesn't matter - it's precisely not being specific, and this is human restlessness in the proper sense, the fact of never being satisfied - hence nomadism, which is a metaphor and at the same time it's in the literal sense - man has moved geographically since his appearance, but it's also a metaphor, that is, even if he doesn't move place, even if he doesn't go into space, he is never satisfied with what he is, and that's exactly what makes his greatness, it's his indetermination, his infinitude. There, and I don't believe, I don't believe that this is close to being
1:16:37 over, this aspect of man. On the other hand, there can be great, terrifying historical temptations to want to animalize, to re-naturalize man, to turn him into something that would be a little bit like a new species, a kind of society of termites or bees, why not. There, I don't think that's the case for the young lovers of today, I hope. There, that will be my conclusion.
