English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
A call for teamwork around a testamentary book 1:00 Without transition, as they say on the radio and in the media, the presentation of the work, I won't say more, but which justifies a rather long presentation, and I presume Dominique is going to hasten to explain to us why.
1:30 If they invite me to be long on top of that, well then, we'll really have to shorten things. That's to be excused, that's clear. Thank you very much Dominique. I too am going to take a bit of soul-searching. Before starting, I'm going to begin by quoting my predecessor. Which can only flatter his legendary vanity. I know I'm putting you in an awkward spot. So here it is, Éditions Delga, yes, on the second-to-last point, Sartre had said 'very fine work,' but still, there is a hubris — that's Sartre's word — hubris, in wanting to do it all alone, it takes teamwork, collective work.
2:05 And Clouscard, when he reported this to me, said to me, 'Let them send me the teams, that's all I ask, I'm all alone.' Well, that's all I ask. And so I now quote Edmond Janssen in the preface, which I believe you have in your hands, who says 'Éditions Delga can only align themselves with these two eminent endorsers' — I'll just note that, I don't know what I'm saying — 'and likewise call for their wish for teamwork around the present text.' I wanted to start there, because that's what I invite you to do. It's up to you to carry on this work that alienation and ideological struggle — well, this ideological struggle forced Clouscard to live in a solitude one can hardly imagine, not solitude in the psychological sense, he was surrounded by excellent friends, etc.
2:55 and not only philosophers, believe me, he loved talking with the fishermen of Calvi. 'That's you, Michel!' Well, he had become a figure, you see, and he didn't talk to them about transcendental dialectics. So, but he was ontologically alone, if I may say so, which fits well for this book. And especially at a time when the formidable counter-revolution was beginning, of which he alone gave a rational model, if I may say so, which begins at the end of the 1960s, the beginning of the 1970s, as you like.
3:33 I say that because it's much more global than what concerns us here, it's not only on the ideological level. In the 1970s, we saw the dollar cease to be convertible into gold. Those are the same breaks, all that. We saw the end of the period when the effects of the Marshall Plan reached a mass dimension. Because it takes time before, even in... No. In the Nivernais countryside, you see the effects of the Marshall Plan. And all these...
4:03 I'm talking about the Marshall Plan because Clouscard's readers can clearly see, it's in his seizures [insights], that this poisoned gift induced effects in other societies. And so he was... He could not have been more badly placed because he was at the beginning of the sequence that would consist in entirely de-Marxifying the intellectual field. But well, a brutality, as we've said. It's not the same brutality that now makes us say, how did that happen.
4:33 What is this business of a referendum? I mean, if we mix the people into our affairs now, what happens? I'm talking about Greece, of course, currently. But the violence, the reaction because a people, a referendum. So, this preamble being established, I'll get a bit in medias res into the content of the device, I was going to say, when I look at this book. It's a thing, a device, I don't know what to call it, but it's...
5:03 'Calm block fallen here below from an obscure disaster.' It's like the Mallarmé quote for Edgar Poe's tomb, since it has the shape of a large rock with a statue on top. There, imagine it was a meteorite that had fallen. Calm block fallen here below from an obscure disaster. Why? This seems anti-promotional, what I've said when I call this thing a device, etc. Because there's a contextual element I'm gliding over out of courtesy for our friend. It's that Michel Clouscard began writing this work at the moment when the illness was starting to unfold its first symptoms.
5:39 It was Parkinson's that would end up taking him. And you can feel in it a struggle against time. That's what I mean. A struggle against the inability to deploy, to develop, exhaustively. What? Precisely a work that he had set out to write his whole life, and in this one the realization of this old design, if I may say so, which had lasted — since I had known him — since the mid-1960s. Namely, to one day make explicit all the theoretical requisites, presuppositions, as you like, or the axioms necessary for the elaboration of what, precisely, the Marxist model.
Philosophy in the strict sense and dialectic 6:26 When we talk a lot about philosophy today, regarding an author who places himself in the wake of Marx, who wrote 'The Poverty of Philosophy.' We really need to take all this head on. As for this apparent contradiction, I'll move quickly, so quickly, this won't settle the question, if indeed it can be settled, it's a question there, but still, to put it on more constructive grounds, those we keep rehashing elsewhere, namely, you take philosophy in the strict sense, which is inscribed, starting from the Socratic wake, in the chronology, and which ends roughly with Hegel.
7:14 I'm not saying Hegel closed the history of philosophy in how it thought itself, I'm saying that what counts afterward in philosophy — I say this in no particular order, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud — are people who do not situate themselves within the philosophical field. It's of that we must become aware. So philosophy in the strict sense was complete. It's important to define the genre in which we're going to speak and in which this book expresses itself. As for me, if there is one, I'll say it right away so as not to keep the suspense going, we mustn't muddy the waters before getting into the detail of the thing.
7:45 I mean, it's the dialectic that, for me, sends back to back the opposition between philosophy and the human sciences, that opposition which made up the execution of the 1960s. The neo-positivism of the human sciences had decided that philosophy was a survival of metaphysics. There you have it. On the other hand, if you take philosophy in a broader sense, and if you make it answer to the response that every philosophical project, in general, is the response to the Pythian imperative inscribed on the pediment at Delphi, which Socrates quotes — that's why I allow myself to recall it — gnôthi seauton, know thyself, at that point.
8:26 We can say that, for example, in Freud, I don't know, discovering that consciousness is not the entirety of the subject, is a deepening in self-knowledge. In Marx — I'm deliberately jumping chronologies — in Marx, I would say, consciousness retains very little of all that class determination and, well, historical determination, etc. So I mean, and Nietzsche says that behind each of our egos, hidden behind good sentiments, there would be a will to power which, itself, is not burdened by moraline.
9:05 So I mean, in all three cases, you see, I'm not making a value judgment about any of the three, but in all three cases, what has mattered in the history of philosophy since — imagine the number of pages inspired by the advances of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche in modernity, that's a great deal. They don't come from three people officially claiming to be philosophers. So Clouscard likewise remains within Marxist orthodoxy while seeming to be doing philosophy, whereas he's doing dialectics.
9:37 In other words, these oppositions I'm raising, philosophical, human-scientific, are null and void the moment one places oneself on dialectical ground. The young Marx had believed — when he was still ecological, Feuerbachian, naturalist, a bit anarchizing at the edges, which is quite fine when you're young and have shaken up the milieu you've lived in. And so the young Marx had not yet become aware of what he reveals to us starting with the Theses on Feuerbach. The great turning point is there, Theses on Feuerbach, alongside The German Ideology.
10:14 You see, that's from a chronological point of view, I'm not the only one to make this cut, but I especially insist on this Feuerbach, or this Hegel, that the young Marx had assailed, I was going to say, on the orders of our friend Feuerbach. 'Stream of fire,' that's what it means in German. I say that because there's a play on words: they say Marx had to pass through the fiery torrent of Feuerbach's materialism before arriving at historical materialism. So it's in the fourth Thesis on Feuerbach especially that Marx says — sorry, I'm inserting things into my sentence — and he takes up the substance of it in the letter he sends to the French translator of Capital.
11:03 I don't think it's the young Marx, where Marx says watch out, watch out with your translation. You see, we're back to the problem of translation. He says, for my thought, he says, is the confluence — so he acknowledges three debts — of English political economy, French political thought, and the German theoretical tradition. Right? Well, in the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx says, although they had neglected the vulgar materialists as they call them — we don't yet say mechanistic materialists, that comes later, as opposed to dialectical materialism.
11:41 We mustn't stop, we mustn't take these words in a fetishistic way in order to change them, to replace them with others. We've come out of the structuralist terrorism of the signifier which one mustn't touch by a single micro-atom. I say that because you'll find the word 'ontic' often coming from Clouscard's pen regarding Heidegger in this work, but also 'idiotist,' especially from him, who had a certain offhandedness precisely, on purpose, to take the opposite stance from those who take their nominal classification so seriously.
Transcendental irony and Clouscard's style 12:18 There is moreover an expression in this work which is very important for understanding the form, the tone, and the style. This is secondary, what I'm saying, in relation to the content. No, you are grown girls and grown boys, you know well that it's not so easily separable. Style is the man — that's the first line of Lacan's writings, it's from Buffon. So, he says, several times in the book, he talks about his own transcendental irony.
12:49 rarely would Clouscard have been, if this is permitted to this degree, freeing up that vein he had orally, which everyone knows, and which is incomparable in its wit and phrasing. 'Beneath the cobblestones, Le Pen.' Forty years ago, 'beneath the cobblestones, Le Pen.' You'd think he had turned spy, or had taken a time machine forward, come to our era, taken notes, and gone back great distances in time.
13:21 Anyway, so, transcendental irony means that this work, once again — I'll take up now, without inserting anything, so that this is quite clear, the essence of this introduction to the contextualization of the work — struggle against time, struggle against death, struggle against illness. So inevitably, plenty of passages with ellipses, brutal shortcuts. Maybe in ten years people will still be asking what he meant. But conversely, you'll find developments that are deep, thorough, and exhaustive like I've never seen in any of his earlier works.
13:54 And precisely on certain questions and sensitive points that his earlier works raised. In this sense, this work is irreplaceable. I mean, for those interested in Clouscard's work and its possible coherence — I'm not imposing this, it's up to you to decide. So I wanted to begin with this introduction because, on the other hand, I come back to transcendental irony, that is, it's not so serious that the book has this apparent disorder.
14:25 I do say apparent, because if there is a line of reasoning — I'll say almost diabolically, I don't know quite how to put it, but really constructed, stone by stone, fiber by fiber, or woven, as you like, if you prefer other metaphors. In Africa, we often oppose the blacksmith's work to that of the weaver. And 'web,' an expression your generation uses all the time. 'Web' comes verbally from 'weben,' which means 'to weave.'
14:57 'To weave.' 'Webisch mein weben' as the bird says in Siegfried. There, so it's interesting to see that it comes from there. Yes, to weave, the weave, the loom, or the weft, whatever it's called. That gives 'spider web' in English. Exactly. Yes, exactly. And we now say 'the Web,' as an abbreviation. Transcendental irony allows him precisely to do, in his earlier works this could be felt in fits and starts, but here it's more systematic, I mean, an apparently solemn development that takes up the great themes of metaphysics — determination, necessity, substance.
15:35 and then all of a sudden, I mean, with a quote from Charles Trenet, you see, from a Charles Trenet song, right next to it. So when he speaks of transcendental irony, he's serious. And also, don't let yourselves be too impressed by his vocabulary, because he takes a mischievous pleasure in borrowing his opponent's formulas in order to turn them back against him. Implying that the formula wasn't bad in itself, and even that it proves that the author of the formula had every means of seeing, and not of shutting himself into the ideology that stifles him.
16:15 So on these matters, apparently formal and stylistic, I mean, I want to draw your attention, because, well, I'll say it frankly, we often hear, especially, some fine minds say — I say this neither particularly ironically nor of course admiringly, but as what was designated in classical times, a 'bel esprit.' The fine minds, snobs, [find] Clouscard's writing not to their taste, it's craggy, it's rough-hewn, it's interesting, sometimes hard to read.
16:45 He's interested in this thematic. Now, it's true there is a staggering indifference in Clouscard to problems of expression — oh, problems of expression — and yet, all those who know his work see it, this side of raw, unfinished expression — I used to say often, you write, you, like the guy who gets on his bulldozer, turns the key, clears the way, boom, there it is, and rides beside it, alongside elaborate passages on a poetic level, I don't just mean literary, poetic in the sense of the Prague Circle, with a sense of metaphor, of resonance, I mean, but which are unmatched, and a sense of the well-turned phrase — I quoted one earlier, but there are others.
17:32 And so, I mean, there is a legend we need to get rid of, there is a posture that was already present in his earlier works, a way of expressing his transcendental irony, it was his hostile indifference that so preoccupied — you see, you imagine, the style of Lacan, of a returned Mallarmé, and Foucault, since he knows painting well, we're marvelous, we're among aesthetes, we're among cultured people, and well, there you have it, and our Huron, to borrow Voltaire's image, the Huron at court, because I've always thought that Clouscard, arriving in Paris at the beginning of the 1960s, I mean, always makes me think of Rousseau arriving from Geneva.
The worldly: the world is not the Earth 18:23 I mean, this has already been noted, but it's so striking. Rousseau bursts into the Parisian salons at a moment when wit, quickness, the vivacity of witty remarks reach an ease, a brilliance that has not been matched since, and the other one, he arrives with his Swiss accent, he understands the jokes three hours after everyone else, and this Rousseau in question was off to a bad start — on what level? I'm not talking philosophy, what am I talking about? I'm talking about a fundamental Clouscardian concept on the worldly [mondain] plane.
18:58 Rousseau was off to a bad start, except on the worldly plane. And this term 'mondain' [worldly], for those familiar with Clouscard's earlier work, which runs diagonally through his entire oeuvre, is perhaps the Clouscardian category par excellence — I'm not saying it's the one he himself attached the most importance to, because he attached importance to recognition, but that's the concept for his warriors, etc. But a properly Clouscardian concept, isn't it? The 'mondain' [the worldly one], rather than worldliness ['mondanité']. Worldliness is connoted differently again, it's part of 'the world.' But, I recall, there's 'mondain' in the ordinary sense — say, you're well dressed, you're going out into the world [society] tonight.
19:31 Well, worldly affairs. And at the other extreme, Maundy Thursday, Christ's last conversation with the apostles before the Passion, so before he's handed over ['mondané' — a play on words], there is an allusion to the essence of evil, hence to the devil. And he is called, with his typically Christian periphrasis, I mean strictly speaking, since 'my kingdom is not of this world,' the devil is called the prince of this world.
20:01 'The prince of this world is coming, but he is already defeated, for his essence is lies.' You see, there's a use of 'the world' as a theological notion, where we're far from the frivolous connotation, apparently frivolous. And we're not just anywhere here, since we're speaking of an author who wrote 'Le frivole et le sérieux' [The Frivolous and the Serious]. And why? Because the world is not the Earth. There, another thing to remind our environmentalist friends of.
20:32 Now we must save the Earth. No, no, we must save the world. That's not the same thing. The Earth couldn't care less about man, about what's on it, about animals, it swallowed up the dinosaurs without batting an eye. The Earth has no ethical value. Fortunately the dinosaurs disappeared when man wasn't around yet, because otherwise people would have said it's his fault, we would have found a way to blame him. But anyway, I mean, it has no feelings. The Earth is an astronomical notion, let's say, astrophysical.
21:02 The world presupposes an organization on Earth of a world. And you know this well, when we say, still, it's a world, you see, and we say, I don't know, the world of Amazonian hunter-gatherers is not the world of the Vietnamese farmer, etc. I mean, each time, you clearly see that there's a plurality brought back to unity. The notion of world — a plurality, a diversity, but not the skeptic's kind, in which one gets lost, but rather one brought back to unity.
Rehabilitating totality against the notion of totalitarianism 21:38 Which rehabilitates a word that has been enormously combated by liberal ideology, and especially since the initiative of the pupil of the most Nazi of philosophers — you can guess who I mean, I mean Hannah Arendt — who forged this abject notion of totalitarianism. I'm going to rehabilitate for a few seconds the notion of totality, which will help understand what follows. It's obvious I'm not at all defending the historical periods labeled totalitarian. And on one side and the other, it's not the same indictment of Stalinism as the anticommunists make — I mean, quite a few comrades who died under it.
22:16 On the other hand, what is characteristic of these harsh periods in contemporary history, in terms of criminality, for instance, is not the fact that the whole directs the part. That would be a good thing if it were the case. The totality — that's you, that's him, that's me. If the totality being in power were a good thing, wouldn't it be? That is, you would be part of it too. No one would be left out.
22:47 What do they have against totality, the odd ones? Because everything is inverted. No, contrary to the refrain of the dominant discourse, still current, of the France Culture discourse, they say it's the individual who is crushed by society. No! It's a race that crushes the rest of humanity, the chosen race — it's unique, it's a single party that oppresses society, it's, nowadays, single thought, single currency, however you like. There. So that's a small parenthesis where I rehabilitate totality as a guarantee of democracy.
23:20 Totality in power is precisely the only regime that ensures no one is left out. Because, let me recall, and I come back to it, I'll make some more technically philosophical considerations, totality — you find this in Kant's table of categories — is the synthesis of unity, thesis, and of the antithesis, plurality. Isn't it? A pebble, singularity, a pile of pebbles, plurality, but a pile of pebbles is not a totality. I have never finished/completed a pile of pebbles.
23:50 You add one, it stays a pile; you take one away, it stays a pile. These aren't defined notions the way a plant is, the way a cat, living, etc. is. I immediately take organic beings, and you see right away the notion of totality, because — as I said — you can take a pebble out of a pile and it stays a pile, but take my brain out of me, nothing of me remains. The difference is the relation of the whole to the parts. Precisely, the parts are... each part has its function and its necessity within the totality. There, I'll close that.
24:20 still, I mean, good evening, and I still note, and this will be decisive for what follows, that to find your way through, so once again, it may look a bit labyrinthine and indigestible at first sight. I'm not betraying anything by saying that was a bit your first reaction. Not at all. No, yes, of course. It's a bit, a lot of material.
Lévi-Strauss and Heidegger, then Heidegger facing Plato 24:50 Well, listen, if you take the beginning of the first book, so, right from the first pages, the first 30 pages or so, you have effects of what I mentioned earlier as anomalies linked to context, namely, there's a sentence, then the following paragraph picks up more or less the same words. We see a bit, a bit like Proust who searched for a long time, the incipit, as they say, the first words with which the search was supposed to begin.
25:20 He found it only at the end, after years, by the way. So, you sense someone who is trying themselves out, as they say, in the strict sense, who is trying, who is reworking their sentence. But, in terms of content, the problematic is set from the start. What is the most current problematic for you, for us? It's the danger of re-fascization. It has never disappeared. So, let me get into the matter now.
25:52 Who are the two figures who appear right from the beginning of the work, you see, Clouscard's text starts on page 16. Yes, that's right. So, right from page 19, when I tell you we're at the beginning, two names are set opposite each other that everything seems to oppose in the history of contemporary thought. I mean Lévi-Strauss and Heidegger.
26:23 And, throughout the volume, Clouscard not only cites them, but moreover, far from opposing them as the common representation does, he will show, in fact, that somehow they are complicit in the same restitution of a denial of praxis, to put it quickly, because we'll have time to go into detail on that. But that's not what interests me here. I mentioned fascism. One would say that with Heidegger... Well, let's look at how the two are presented.
27:00 I'll skip over the pages, I'm telling you it's the same thing, the two of them, the opposition — we'd have all the time to see it. On one side, transcendental formalism, you can guess it designates structuralism in general, and specifically Lévi-Strauss, transcendental formalism, there you go, whereas transcendental ontology on Heidegger's side amounts to more or less the same thing. But what interests me is that he moves quickly past this parallel, after having repeated it, and suddenly presents two new figures.
27:40 So, this time, no longer two figures like Lévi-Strauss and Heidegger, not two pillars of contemporary ideology supposedly opposed to each other and to which Clouscard actually assigns a common ideological foundation, but now, suddenly, from page 26 on, you have two figures — Heidegger is still there, but it's no longer Lévi-Strauss, no longer an accomplice who's there, it's the antidote, and it's Plato.
28:15 But what does this have to do with fascism? I'll tell you right away. You see? If — let me take, at random, page 59 — Heidegger proposes a restoration that can only be fascistic. I'm not speaking behind Clouscard's back. And moreover he is very, much more circumspect, you see, than in his sweeping, humorous formulas — here he is precise: a restoration that can only be fascistic.
28:46 There's a restoration. There's latent fascism, there's the process of becoming fascist, and then there's fascism in act, I'd say, once it's a bit late. So he is the modern resolution of an ancient problematic. Heidegger is the modern resolution of an ancient problematic, hence the presence of Plato — as reactionary philosophy, he is the anti-Plato. And there we notice that Clouscard opposes a philosophy of counter-revolution to a philosophy of revolution.
The century of revolutions and the long counter-revolution 29:21 These words don't seem like much to you, they seem to have undergone a bit of the classical treatment, as they say. Yet, from a strictly historical point of view, we always speak of the French Revolution as if it lasted, but how long were we actually in a revolutionary period? A few years. At the moment of the greatest government France ever had, in my opinion, that is, at the time of the Convention. The greatest government along with that of the Liberation, perhaps, no doubt. I'm speaking in terms of results. The whole world still uses the metric system from the Convention.
29:55 How long does it last? Not very long, then Thermidor, Bonaparte. Always a Corsican messing things up. Not for long. Thank you, I'm being kind. And after that, dead calm, nothing at all. They try to bring back Louis XVIII, 1830, you know, then the Glorious [Revolution]. There, a more presentable king is back. Bam, '48! The century of revolutions. Every century has a nickname.
30:26 There's the Renaissance, the 16th century, the Age of Enlightenment, the Grand Siècle. There were some — maybe too recent, it doesn't have one. We propose the century of revolutions. It doesn't stop. It runs from '89 to '17, to 1917. Look closely. We're going to make concrete divisions. So, what are we saying? That the restoration, the counter-revolution, lasted much longer in temporal latency than the revolution. What revolutions would there be after '89? Those attempts at revolution, 1830-1848, some of which succeeded, which brought about a change of regime.
31:03 I'm not counting the Paris Commune, for which I won't hide my admiration, but, to be honest, it's an immense revolt. I mean, it failed, strictly speaking. It didn't revolutionize the political regime of the time. But still, it shows well that it really is the century of revolutions. So we would have to wait for the Liberation, 50 million dead, before we started getting pay-as-you-go pensions. I tell myself, when that gets called into question, to see where it came from — we would never have had it without the Red Army.
31:38 I say that even though I'm one of those who says I would probably have been shot under Stalin for my chattering. So I measure my words. We are not under the Nazi boot today thanks to the Red Army. I pay immense tribute to all the kids who fell on the beaches of Normandy, the poor guys, I don't know, and their courage. I even think they should have been sent in earlier. The Soviet government had been asking for a second front for years, hadn't it? We had to wait until '44, that is, when the Soviets were at the gates of Berlin, because Europe still mustn't become red.
32:13 Because, better Hitler than the Popular Front — well, the poor guys, it's quite different indeed. Anyway. So, let's not stray, or rather let's try not to stray from this, that is, I've often heard this same reasoning. Someone told me once: they only had our street once, the fascists — that was the Red Army. There, they didn't boast about it. They got hammered. Yes, well there you go. There, they got it. I think that's what they want. So, you see, this introduction with Plato and Hegel.
Hegel as reader of Plato's Republic 32:47 Plato — let me clarify his role a bit. But what is Plato doing in the Revolution? Didn't Mr. Popper, in his Open Society, show us Plato as the emblematic example — to borrow a journalistic term — of closed, sealed, totalizing and totalitarian thought? Precisely, isn't that so? Isn't the Republic the first anticipation of the gulag? Well, yes. Now, by setting the fascistic counter-revolution of the '16 approach opposite the revolution initiated by Plato, Clouscard is simply placing himself within an old lineage.
33:30 I have a quotation, then, taken from the preface to Hegel's Philosophy of Right, that is, from the old man's political testament, as Marx and Engels put it, which says the following — I mean the preface, not the detailed text — and Hegel says this at one point, and it's curious how, at the two extremities of the history of philosophy, at its origin and at its end, Plato and Hegel somehow salute each other.
34:07 In the course of this work, I have indicated that Plato's Republic itself, which is the proverbial image of an empty ideal, of utopia, essentially grasps nothing other than the nature of Greek ethos. He has just given long developments in Hegel on the fact that it's no use dealing in ought-to-be when it comes to politics. As if all you had to do was... and it should be this, it should be that, and should, and governments... Political courage, as they say.
34:37 We'll need to have some. Hegel says that reason must comprehend what is, like science moreover — what is, not what ought to be. That's the thinking of the flatterer, in short, and above all of the imprecator. And he says there's a counter-example: that would be Plato, who says, here's what must be done, what should be done — if I did what I wanted, in the city, I would do as in the Republic. He says this: In the course of this work, I have indicated that Plato's Republic itself, which is the proverbial image of an empty ideal, essentially grasps nothing other — unbeknownst to it — than the nature of Greek ethos.
35:10 That means that Plato's Republic perfectly expresses the reality of his world. In what way? We're getting there. He had an awareness of a deeper principle that was making a breach in that morality. He alludes to the progressive appearance of individualistic symptoms within the organic unity of the city, manifested through currents like skepticism or the sophists or things like that, which coincided with an economic and commercial development that meant fortunes were starting to appear in the city, in particular the oil trade, in which Heraclitus was very much invested, in every sense, with Asia Minor, and which meant that...
35:45 It's a classic process that Marx studied well, isn't it? And which means that, for example, the Inuit have two mythologies, one for winter, one for summer. You can imagine that the summer one is individualistic, tales of exploits, heroes, harpoons, and so on, with the seals. And the winter one is collective, because there, indeed, people come closer together, they need each other. There you go. So, along the same lines, he alludes to this appearance of subjectivity which will of course blossom with the modern world, Christianity, Romanticism, etc.
36:15 So, he had an awareness of a deeper principle — this is my aside on subjectivity — which was making a breach in that ethos, but which, at that historical moment, could only appear as a principle of corruption. When the individual subject manifests itself within a patriarchal or traditional society, it is said to be an element of danger, of corruption, of moral subversion. Plato, moved by this aspiration, sought a remedy for it, but since the help could only come down from above, he could only seek it, at first, in an external, particular form of that morality.
36:54 In other words, there is an infinite subjectivity that is beginning to appear, which will give you and me the modern world. I'm not going to define what's infinite here, but roughly, if you look at the soaring spires of Chartres or of Christian cathedrals compared to the Greek temple, you immediately see an aspiration, an unlimitedness, as in Eastern religions and transcendent transcendence, isn't that so? Which doesn't give quite the same aesthetic as measure. Metron, well — it's almost a safeguard against hubris. So, and Plato, according to Hegel, sought a remedy for this, he could only seek it at first in an external, particular form of that morality.
37:36 He alludes to Plato's fight against the sophists, who are merely a form of this subjectivity that is beginning to assert itself there. This abstract subjectivity, believing it could thus master corruption, but succeeding only in inwardly wounding what was most profound in it, its pinnacle — free infinite personality. A notion completely unknown in Greek antiquity — the citizen does not exist as a free infinite personality. We move very fast here, you will never know whether Achilles had a beauty mark on his left nostril, or whether he liked potatoes with bacon, or whether Antigone preferred Vivement Dimanche as a TV series over...
38:16 No, we'll never know. But everything is concentrated on the character each one is embodying. Whereas, you find all those details in Balzac, in the modern world. That is, Balzac will tell you everything there is on a mantelpiece, every detail, even before the novel begins. There, to give a bit of meaning to what he calls infinite free subjectivity, which presupposes an era later than Plato's, and which Plato merely sees emerging. So, a classic failure.
38:46 And yet, he proved he was a great mind, because precisely the principle around which what is decisive in his idea turns is the very pivot around which the world revolution then being prepared would turn — colon, new line: What is rational is real, and what is real is rational. You see that Clouscard, despite the overloaded, chaotic, elliptical appearance, or on the contrary sometimes almost too deeply dug, given the exuberant richness of this exceptional work, follows an order of clockwork precision somewhere.
The Seventh Letter and the reign of the rational 39:29 So we shouldn't be too surprised that there is this great diptych at the beginning. And why precisely Plato and Aristotle? After all, there are countless others. First, because of what I just said, this filiation. Hegel saw clearly that what was revolutionary in Plato was not the goals he stated — I repeat myself — had he not suffered a political trauma in Sicily, our philosopher, like any well-born young Athenian, would have had a fine career, especially since he had all the talent of a writer, he would have had a fine political career, I mean.
40:08 But the adventure with Dionysius in Sicily, isn't that so, and he says it very well, is important for the relation between politics and philosophy from the outset, a principio, in the double sense of the principle, both as logical beginning and as chronological beginning — namely, this text is a letter, and we have very few correspondences from antiquity. We've already lost the fundamental works of most authors, so imagine who kept correspondence at the time — but there was such a cult of Plato that fortunately some of his letters were preserved, and there is the famous seventh letter, well known.
40:45 ...to specialists, as they say, and in the seventh letter, which he writes to his friends precisely to recount his political adventure in Sicily and his failure. And he says this, to show the articulation between philosophy and politics — we quickly come back to Marx — 'and while my eyes were still fixed on politics, I was as if compelled to turn toward philosophy.'
41:16 And when he says 'compelled,' he uses the term 'ananke' in Greek, which means something almost like religious damnation. I say that because this political Plato is often overshadowed by another Plato who also exists. Plato is also an immense artist, a neo-Platonist, mystical, mysterious, theorized, and Pythagoras too — there's also that in Plato, especially in neo-Platonism. But Hegel saw the distinction very clearly in his history of thought. He is harsh toward the neo-Platonist in relation to Plato. But the great Plato, the one who says what?
41:46 Who says: listen, Euclid and I are almost contemporaries, that's over, my opinion, which I impose on you, you who impose yours on me — it's the rational that must rule. That means you must be in agreement with yourself first. I am in agreement with myself before we even speak. I'm not asking you to agree with me, I'm asking you to agree with yourself. That's coherence, that's identity, non-contradiction — that's all of what rational and real mean when they appear. That's civilization. There you go. So this initial diptych governs the whole work a little, because for Michel Clouscard, Plato and Heidegger both share, even if in opposite directions — one in the revolutionary direction, the other, as Clouscard reads it, in the reactionary direction — the fact that both of them enacted the ontological crisis of the West.
Ontology: being as being in Aristotle 42:37 Well, that's the second, third time I say 'ontological.' Edmond used the term in his introduction and we should dwell on it a bit, not to give you a whole course on ontology, that's not even the subject. Despite the risk of drifting into the question — but it's not that I don't find it perfectly appropriate — it's the ontological foundation of Marxism. Well, I said earlier, let me start by applying it to myself: we mustn't let ourselves be bluffed by words.
43:07 'On' is being, it's the verb 'to be' in Greek, period. And as Hegel says, what child doesn't have the word 'being' on their lips? Not even that. Only, ontology becomes a relatively autonomous discipline, as they say, within philosophical reflection itself, starting with the Athenian school of Plato and Aristotle. And there, I move from Plato to Aristotle, because they have this in common as against the sophists.
43:42 And there, I'll take Aristotle rather, because he's not caught up in myth with the subtlety of Plato, but it's much clearer from a didactic point of view. We should reserve the term ontology for what Aristotle calls being qua being. You have the assertion of being qua being. This too is a well-known passage for Genise Bessiès earlier, or for those cramming for their program, isn't it, for their master's or whatever. Namely, the fourth book of Aristotle's Metaphysics, or Book Gamma, as you wish.
44:15 The previous three, we haven't yet gotten to the heart of the matter, insofar as he only summarized the ideas of his predecessors on the subject. He's one of the first historians of philosophy, Aristotle. It's very precious for us because he gives us quotations from Democritus whose work we've lost. You see, these little quotations are like a trace of the corpus he's alluding to. And there, the fourth book, suddenly, we get to it, which begins with this solemn assertion, precisely about being: there is a science — implied, one single science. There is a science that studies being qua being.
44:47 Not qua mobile being — that's physics. I'm speaking like Aristotle here. Not qua mobile being endowed with life — that's psychology or biology, it's the same thing for the Greeks, which he will develop in his De Anima. Because in Aristotle's time, there is a single discipline, philosophy. Philosophical imperialism, as there will later be a scientific imperialism in the age of positivism, perfectly symmetrical. Totalitarianism. Yes, we'll get to a peaceful coexistence, which I try to establish, which I respect.
45:18 So, what is a philosophy? It's that all the other disciplines are parts of philosophy. Physics, biology, they're parts of philosophy. There you go — if it's not about that, because you know what happened when there was imperialism: a war of independence. I was born in an American zone in Vietnam, in Hanoi. So, a war of independence — the first to clear off, to put it colloquially, is mathematics, Euclid: no need for philosophers to validate our assertions.
45:49 Then physics becomes autonomous with Galileo, you know all that by heart. Great moment, the Galilean-Cartesian moment, the great moment when ancient finalism collapses before the mechanism of the moderns, and — I'm about to lose my thread here. Ontology, being qua being. Yes, that's it. So, physics emancipates itself, chemistry with Lavoisier, biology — well, what's left?
46:22 One wonders why we still talk philosophy today. Me, I'm classified as a philosopher, that's my official occupation, I sell hot air, I keep it short, I just blow — like consultants. What is it? Not serious, is it. Everything serious, sure and certain, has been taken care of by the sciences next door — what do you even do. You see the misunderstanding, as if the goal of philosophy were to try to find out — if that were all it was, it would be at the CNRS. Isn't that so? Of course. But you know, you're educated, you know that when we, with that great phrase, sum up the philosophy syllabus in two fundamental questions: what can I know?
46:56 That one we share with scientific researchers, who also seek to know. And what must I do? That's not a physics problem. So, I'm not going to give a course on the origins of philosophy here, I'm just quickly recalling that what is properly philosophical is to pose the question 'what must I do,' which is the only one that asks it while awaiting an epistemic answer. That is, not to answer it the way one would at the corner café, which I like a lot, by the way, to find out whether it's Bastia or Marseille or whatever else. Talking football, with friends, showing off, flirting, strutting.
47:27 I'm not talking about that. It's an impersonal game. And so, but it's not the place favorable to the emergence of truth. There you go. You recognize that I've spoken of the back of the cave, of what the Greeks call doxa, opinion — that's it, commerce, in its own dignity, somehow, but still, it's not of the order of truth. So, I insist a lot on this. When we ask ourselves the question 'what must I do,' here too we're not the only ones — my grandmother asked herself that all the time — but we're supposed to answer it not in the mode of opinion, but in the mode of science.
48:09 That is to say, it's very important to see that Euclid appeared before philosophy, even though it is mathematics. That is to say, now, against the opportunism of those in power, today we would say the media, those who fish in troubled waters, the sophists, as they were called at the time, against opportunism—because they're not idiots, they're people who know how to answer questions, to slip through the mesh of the net—against opportunism, one must precisely lay claim to something indubitable.
48:40 Now, mathematics had just appeared, so if you say A equals B implies B equals A, that's fine, it imposes itself on everyone, I'm not imposing a personal opinion. This is very important, what I'm summarizing. And second characteristic, I come back to my reading of Aristotle, book four, where he presents being as being, hence the origin of ontology, he indeed says that it is up to the philosopher, and to him alone, to study, unlike the physicist, being as being. Afterwards, he thinks about the definition of being, that's interesting, I think, matter, that's the physicist's domain.
If the question of being appears, it is because it is lost 49:14 What interests me in what we've just said through The Paths of Praxis is that—and Clouscard says it, I'll quote the sentence for you, it's on page 26—"we shall see that if the problematic of being appears, it is because it is already lost." When this question is asked, it's already too late to resolve it. We shall see that if the problematic of being appears, it is because it is already lost. And there again, you see, there's a mnemonic effect.
49:47 I say this, I don't want to reduce Clouscard to being an epigone of Hegel, that's not at all what he is. There are things between Hegel and Clouscard called Marx. But I'm showing you to what extent one cannot understand his thought if one doesn't refer back to everything that is Hegelian in itself for Marx—but which isn't for today's readers, who have been taught to decouple Marx and Hegel, I'm thinking especially of Althusser. That's why I insist so much on this. Now, you have, let me take a second, page 34, this conclusion of a chapter where he says it is then necessary to reconsider the relations between philosophy, knowledge, consciousness, and being.
50:29 Good grief, what a program! That's practically the whole program of philosophy. So this is not a small passing detail. It's a new light cast on the Yalta of the Cogito—that's an expression referring to the Yalta of the Cogito, the division, power, staging, starting from Husserl. "Our approach seeks to be a contribution to Hegelian philosophy." Never has Clouscard been as clear as in this testament of a book. "Our approach seeks to be a contribution to Hegelian philosophy," thereby escaping the accusation of philosophism—because Clouscard belongs to a generation, mine too, where, to be a sociologist, you first had to have a degree, a master's, in philosophy.
51:11 There was no such thing, a sociology degree, let alone the agrégation. Now you have the sociology degree, the agrégation—there wasn't one. So all the Lévi-Strausses, the Gurvitches, people of that generation, had a training in philosophy. They're all agrégés in philosophy, Bourdieu, thank you, very good example, who then specialized in sociology afterward. Which is of course not the case for sociologists who came later. So... Sorry?
51:43 Ah, well now, we're going far, into entropy—between the two, there's structuralism and the new philosophers. Well, how hard the fall will be! The fact that he says this—so I come back now to my parallel. If the question of being is posed, it's because it is lost—that too rings a bell for me. Always the same preface. The Philosophy of Right, which is Hegel's political testament. He's going to turn the page, I mean, it's the end of his preface, you can feel this last weariness of an old man, he's tired, you can tell, the tone is a bit...
52:23 He lived through the Restoration—I'm going to talk to you about revolution against revolution. Hegel, Schelling, Hölderlin, the three friends at the Tübingen seminary, plant a tree of liberty on July 14, 1790, in the courtyard of their Stift, their faculty of theology, in Tübingen. A provocation to the authorities of the time. How so? Just being an admirer of French ideas was already subversion. And by the time he writes this, all of that has long been over. And Waterloo—which was made to seem like our victory over Nazism, May 9th, Moscow.
53:02 Still, to take note—I told you earlier, just as I paid tribute to the young American who fell at Omaha Beach, I'm not... going to belittle that carnage which he consented to in order to free us, good grief. But on the other hand, we did have a deputy minister, not even a head of state, at Waterloo. That's interesting. Waterloo is the date from which your world, ours, begins to exist. It's the world in which the Anglo-Saxons are the dominant powers. Roughly speaking. A historic turning point, perhaps for better, perhaps for worse. I don't want to make too much of a value judgment.
53:32 Look at the rationality of all this, just like that, since I have nothing else. Now, here's what Hegel says, so right in the middle of Metternich, if you like, right in the middle of NATO. No, they didn't say NATO. I'm doing this on purpose. They said the organization of Europe to lock down the French Revolution. Come on, you know it. The geopolitical organization. The Holy Alliance. Ah, there we go. Alright, no joking. To say one more word about the pretension of teaching how the world ought to be.
54:04 You see Hegel's irony toward thoughts of the ought-to-be. It makes me think of my brother. You know, the one who says the communists were collaborators and that the OAS, the traitor, was a member of the Resistance. To say one more word about the pretension of teaching how the world ought to be: we note that in any case, philosophy always comes too late. Bang! Same statement. If the question of being is posed, it's because it is lost. Philosophy always comes too late. As thought of the world, it appears only once reality—now we're no longer in thought—has completed and finished its process of formation.
54:43 A reality—the Greek world, the Roman world—what the concept teaches, understood as addressed to the philosopher, history shows with the same necessity. It is in the maturity of beings that the ideal appears opposite the real and, after having grasped this same world in its substance, rebuilds it in the form of an empire of ideas. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a manifestation of life has finished growing old. One can begin to see it clearly precisely because it is practically over—the thing doesn't fall apart.
55:14 One cannot make it young again by painting grey on grey, but only come to know it. Colon—another famous formula: it is only at the falling of the dusk that the owl of Minerva takes its flight. So, we're arriving a bit late for some sunbathing. You see, it's the beginning of dusk. So, Michel Clouscard situates himself, courageously, within a tradition, you see, as opposed to a mechanistic Marxism where well-intentioned militants were accused of philosophist deviations at certain periods.
