English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The triangle of me, the other, the thing 1:59 Childhood, Ermenonville. Ah! I quite like seeing the figure of the triangle, because it's particularly appropriate to Rousseau. I'm not into number mysticism, nor Pythagoras, nor numerology, nor freemasonry. When I speak of the triangle, let's be clear, I'm speaking of intelligibility. It lets us get out of the binary that I was condemning earlier regarding musical consumption. Here we move on to three. What am I alluding to? I'll speak about it right now.
2:30 When I speak of the peace pipe that's exchanged, or the glass shared, the bottle shared between friends, the aperitif shared. And I'll radicalize this with the worker of Zola's time who, when payday comes—it's so meagre at the time, I'm deliberately taking this historical reference—he has to make choices. We can have both the necessary and the superfluous; he, at that time, cannot have both. So, if he were truly a determined animal, as we're being made to believe today in cognitive science, by what are called the neo-Spinozists, who have somewhat taken up Spinoza, at least in that sense, by conatus and by purely natural determinisms, he would immediately go straight to the local grocery store to buy the quantity of carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins he needs to reproduce the life he's losing by earning it.
3:20 So what does he do? Let's be scientific. It's a tiger, let's observe it, camera, tape recorder, let's record. He goes to the tavern, we know this well, he goes to drink with his mates. That is, caught between the superfluous and the necessary, a human being still... There, I'll give one last example, far from our worker, it's the guards I've seen, or even, in the middle of the desert, when you stop, you think you're alone—in the middle of the desert, you're never alone. From the rock a head emerges, two heads, with a little plastic jerrycan, asking us for water—nomads, small herds, three or four goats, two camels. They're thirsty.
3:53 They give them water; we hold out because we have wet t-shirts wrapped around our heads there in the car. They give water, and before drinking, they pour drops on the ground for the gods. Then they drink. It's a small silent struggle for recognition with the wealthy white man that I am in their eyes, equipped with my 4x4, etc. That means I might be... I have a knife to my throat, I am nothing, socially, economically. But I am a human being, I'll show it to you. I give water to the ground first, and only after do I take some. Or like the guards who do their prayer on a little cardboard mat.
4:24 But there is a sacred space, distinct from the profane space. There, I pay homage to those people who know something about consumption and about desire. So, thank you for the triangle, because it's not my relation to the thing that counts. That's where naturalism goes wrong. It's not only my relation to the other either. It's this triangle that initially unites me, the other, the thing. Of course, if he didn't have to eat to live, if there were no thing, I wouldn't be having a meal.
4:56 But I don't consume eating in order to satisfy hunger. I eat at a table, at certain hours, with dining companions. So I consume the other at the same time as I consume the thing. That's what I'm saying. And it's this triangle, just like language. The word is not merely a relation to the thing. When I say tree, there isn't just a relation between the word and the thing. I say it to you. Language isn't made to speak all by itself. There is me, the thing I'm speaking of, the tree, and the person I'm speaking to, you or someone else. That's the triangle. So thank you for the triangle.
Rousseau's childhood and Émile 5:26 And Rousseau never stopped placing himself inside this triangle. He set back to back the partisans of the Ancien Régime and the liberal libertarians of the Enlightenment era, if I may put it that way. He set them back to back in order to place himself on a third plane, that of the general will, already. So if I take the three E's, childhood, of course, I'll start with childhood. It's extraordinary, childhood compared to that of François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire. I said Arouet because his father held one of the most prominent notary offices in Paris at the time—born into wealth, and all the better for him.
6:02 He studied at the best school, Louis-le-Grand. Meanwhile Rousseau played truant, read as best he could the books he found in his uncle's cellar, where he'd been placed as an apprentice, and was more often on the roads than at school desks. And he gorged himself on what made up the bulk of popular culture at the time—which people said didn't excite desires—what were called at the time novels. Novels we no longer read, novels of the baroque era, novels with swordsmen who die five times only to rise again, cloak and dagger.
6:34 Well, lots of action, lots of love, the novels. That's Rousseau's childhood. I'll save the third E for later, but I want the second one, Émile. Émile, there we are. So how could one not think of Émile, since we're talking about childhood? Well, Émile is first of all a reprise of something that had been circulating since the Renaissance. Let's say since Rabelais, roughly. I say at the start of the Renaissance, because Montaigne will do the same thing, but the first is Rabelais. Namely that pedagogical discourse always has a political aim.
7:08 Good education is the one that shapes the future citizen or subject, if we speak in Rousseauian terms. Very important. Paideia, the old Greek notion of transmission to the child. Paideia is the pedagogical as the antechamber of the political. So already, Émile fits into this tradition. Into this tradition. So, with what novelty? Especially since it's addressed... First of all, it also inaugurates a literary genre that would flourish afterward, through Goethe, and up to the twentieth century—I'm thinking of Jean-Christophe—what's called the Bildungsroman in Germany, the novel of formation, where we follow a hero from his very early childhood all the way to his fulfillment.
7:51 Or to his decline, no matter. And so it's Émile, the first, that inaugurates this series. But it's addressed to the child of a different social class. To the child of an aristocrat. And that's no accident. There's a decision on Rousseau's part, which is that we'll still need... Not that this aristocratic kid has anything to atone for—he hasn't done anything. But when, to take an example I care about, he decides to tell Émile's mother that Émile now, at the stage he's at, must learn a manual trade—he's around eight or nine—a trade for my son, sir, do you really mean it, my son an artisan?
8:30 A reply from the narrator, expressing Rousseau's own thought: I think about it more than you do, madam, you who only ever wanted to make of him a lord, a marquis, a prince, and perhaps one day less than nothing. I am going to raise him to the rank of man. And whatever you may say, he will have fewer equals under that title than under all those who owe it to you. Already we're informed about what Rousseau calls man. One isn't born a man in order to be one—one must become one. There aren't many men, that means. He will have fewer equals under that title. But still, what audacity for the time. We can clearly see we're no longer in 1114—he would have been thrown into the Bastille at once.
9:00 But here, simply, from the rank of king, which a coward, a villain, a madman can fill just as well as anyone else, he rises to the rank of man, which so few men know how to fulfill. We see here that this is not mere pedagogism on Rousseau's part. It's not just about the best way to educate my child, etc. The child is inscribed within a political totality without which pedagogy has no meaning at all, if we fail to take that into account. And many aristocrats who had listened to this speech of Rousseau's were glad of it later, because once exiled to London at the Revolution, they were quite happy to have learned a little trade—one a locksmith like Louis XVI, another, I don't know, a carpenter—to provide for their needs.
The maternal island and the Île Saint-Pierre 9:40 They could no longer content themselves with collecting the harvest from their tenant farmers. So, Émile builds on this, and yet more, since we're getting close to Ermenonville, so the progression is necessary, from childhood to Émile—childhood remains present in Rousseau. There is what we might call a little bit of a fixation, but I say this just to situate it, I won't reduce him to that—there is a maternal fixation in Rousseau. And indeed, when we look at his biography, the fact that he called the first woman he was truly in love with, Madame de Warens, 'Maman,' I mean, there's the same significance, the famous passage about the pleasure he felt from being spanked, and so on, among other things.
10:22 But you're not asking me about that—the thread matters. Ermenonville, here we are. I even have a glance toward the island where Rousseau's tomb lies. It's an island. There, Rousseau finally has peace. He's isolated. As they say in Italian, 'isola.' An island is where one is isolated, sheltered. Even a fortress—the fact that it's surrounded by water has never stopped a castle from being taken by storm. But somehow, in the imagination, having water to cross to get somewhere is a much deeper separation.
10:55 The Egyptians indeed said that the dead's voyage to the sacred land of Punt, the world of the gods, was a navigation. The famous boats, the mystical vessels that carried them there. So where am I going with this? He is once again in the maternal womb, protected from everything. Like the fetus that is an island in the amniotic fluid. And this island follows Rousseau throughout his career.
11:25 I mean, already his somewhat isolated childhood, isolated from the Enlightenment movement too—which is natural given where he geographically appeared—but also isolated even from the ordinary, everyday life of his little playmates in Geneva, like a somewhat marginal child. Then, literally, the island of Saint-Pierre in Lake Biel, in the 1760s, where he took refuge, forced and constrained, because a warrant for his arrest had been issued, and where he lived a few weeks, too short for him—but it's very important to realize, and this answers your question well, that while he was there, he thought he was going to be condemned to stay there for the rest of his life.
12:00 So, island as exile. Like Ovid among the Dacians, except here it would be on an island, in a Swiss lake. Lake Biel. Where I myself made my first long hitchhiking journey to go to this marvelous place. And it's there, on that island, that he lived moments touching the absolute—I quote him himself—which he recounts much later, at the end of his life, in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, in a pre-Proustian mode of a search for lost time.
12:33 And he even attains time regained. So, I continue to see the importance of the island in Rousseau's life. The maternal island first, the very first one. It's the secret bond of the embryo to the body that carries it. The island of Saint-Pierre, in Lake Biel, where he attains that enjoyment—for Rousseau is no puritan, he does use the word enjoyment—'in what did this enjoyment I experienced on the island of Saint-Pierre consist, you will hear; I will let all the men of this century guess it.'
Corsica and the island as a figure of nature 13:04 And it's there that he says it consisted essentially of a precious dolce far niente. And thirdly—may my Corsican compatriots not hold it against me if I move on to dolce far niente in Corsica—which feeds a false imagery, one that Rousseau himself invites, indeed. But when he is contacted by emissaries of the young Corsican Republic—contacted following either a plot or, on the contrary, a genuine request, no matter—he receives this contact in which he's asked, as it were, for a consultation, doing consultant's work, to draw up a draft constitution for the very young Corsican Republic, which was the first to actually put into practice the program of the Enlightenment, before the United States, before France.
13:48 We mustn't forget, and Rousseau is enthusiastic, first because at the time Corsica was somewhat the Vietnam of its era, exciting intellectuals—it was the exemplary country that had just freed itself from a yoke, from an oppression, from a tyranny, by its own efforts. From the Genoese, only to fall back into another oppression, that of the King of France, of course. And it's right in between: France hasn't yet taken over the matter, so a constitution can be drawn up for this young independent Republic. And Rousseau, at first, is little interested in the project and only writes what we might call dilatory remarks—I'm too old, I'm tired, it's wonderful what you've done, it's a shame, but I'm no longer up to it.
14:24 And then, little by little, informing himself about the island, about the Corsican matter, as a conscientious consultant should, we see him getting more and more involved in the project, to the point of making this extraordinary declaration to his correspondent. There are four letters that have been preserved. A correspondent, a Monsieur Buttafoco, the best of the Buttafocos in fact, an emissary of Paoli's, to whom he says, 'Let's forget the constitutional project, let me go die on your island.' So when I speak of the island from the beginning of childhood, taking up the three E's, passing through the island up to Ermenonville, where he rests on an island, it is a symbol without which one cannot understand Rousseau.
14:58 I'll finish just with this sentence, since I wouldn't want it to seem, which would be paradoxical for a Marxist, like an apology for absolute solipsism—someone shut up in himself, in his bubble and on his island, with no bond to anyone else except with the sea, that is, someone who is generally dead and has disappeared. So I recall here that the island is a metonymy, an indirect way of speaking about the status—the famous status of nature, so dear to Rousseau—which we must settle once and for all.
15:28 Nature is this recourse I can always have at hand, when civil society has become unbearable, when, as he himself says, servitude and domination reign. That's where nature is the island. The island, refuge, exile, taking to the maquis on the island. There, with Corsica, he will have done both.
