English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Hegel's era and the young thinkers' tour of Germany 0:00 Last time, we sort of went around in circles, in the sense that reading a work as difficult as the Phenomenology of Spirit, if we... well, I'm quite willing, let me read you a passage, it's Chinese to you, but accessible, translatable, I reassure you.
0:38 But hello, so reading such a difficult work couldn't be done point-blank, and first some preliminaries were needed to contextualize Hegel's work a little, which is essentially what we did last time. Not to contextualize in too empirical a way, but in a way closer, let's say, to the currents of ideas that were stirring at the time, and God knows how much ideas were stirring at that time.
1:16 And Kostas Papaioannou, a name that's almost unpronounceable, is the Greek who wrote... Rarely has so much intelligence about Hegel been written in so few pages. I'll tell you, it's with better grace that I don't entirely share all of this author's positions, but it's remarkable. So Kostas Papaioannou says somewhere that this Phenomenology must be read against the backdrop of Napoleon's cannons and Beethoven's drums. You see, that shows well the turmoil of an era when Europe is being plowed by Napoleon's armies from Spain to Russia.
1:53 And where two upheavals occurred, whose effects we still have not, far from it, finished suffering—namely the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution. That's already a lot of upheavals in such a short time. This time we ended the first talk by committing to proceed differently today. Now, to the letter, Hegel's aphorism that I quoted last time: you cannot be more than your time, but at best you will be your time.
2:27 It's an epigram. At the time, at the end of the Frankfurt period, which is his formative period, the so-called youthful texts, the second-to-last stage—all this is very much punctuated, as critics of Hegel, readers of Hegel, well know. These are periods punctuated geographically: the Bamberg period, the Bern period, the Jena period, the Frankfurt period. You have to realize that this German intelligentsia moved from city to city, because unlike the centralized French tradition, all these cities had been small capitals.
2:58 There isn't in Germany the capital-province relationship as with us—it means nothing, 'provincial.' Take Munich, for example, it's a royal capital, it's not the provinces, with palaces, the palaces of the Wittelsbachs, patrons of the arts, a power that made the rest of Germany tremble at the end of the Middle Ages, for instance. And in a novel by, without doubt, the greatest novelist of German Romanticism—I smile because he's also known for his humor—Jean-Paul, that's how he's known in literature, but his real name is Friedrich Richter, who called himself Jean-Paul Richter out of love for Rousseau, Jean-Paul for Jean-Jacques.
3:39 And in one of his novels, his hero decides to go see a friend who's in Bayreuth—Bayreuth was not yet the site of the festival you know, it was a small town, a spa town as they say, known not for the Wagner festival but for a park that still exists, the Fantaisie park, which is admirable. And at first it's some two days' walk from the little village where he lives, and when he sets off in the morning, he says that after five minutes, when he arrived in the first foreign land—it strikes us as odd, as French people, that after five minutes of walking you're already in a foreign land—well, that shows you the fragmentation of Germany at the time, which was divided into nearly 400 small grand duchies, small duchies, principalities, etc.
4:29 So the grand tour of Germany was somewhat a required genre for the intelligentsia of the time; that's why, if we distinguish in Hegel's formation the Bern, Frankfurt, Jena periods, it's because it was a bit of an obstacle course for these young men—let me take the chance to give some reminders, as I did the first time—these young German thinkers, most of whom had gone through the faculty of theology, because the only way for them—we're not in France, there was no Enlightenment moment here, which came late in Germany, though it more than makes up for it with Kant, I reassure you, who is practically the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment's efforts, but in the strict sense of the term anyway—but the surest way for these petty bourgeois—I don't mean that at all pejoratively, but as a social affiliation—if they wanted to make a career in philosophical matters, the royal road, strictly professionally speaking, was to prepare for the pastorate,
5:40 and it's no accident that the two greatest philosophers of the age and the greatest poet of his time—that is, Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin—found themselves in the same digs, at the Stift, as it was called, the Tübingen foundation, that is, the Protestant theology seminary that was the most cutting-edge at that time, and that's where one could learn a bit of philosophy, and in any case, the philosophy that was at the center of debates at that moment, that is, all the debates that followed the Kantian initiative, of course—all these people spoke of Kant as of a god, including the young Hegel, of course.
6:17 There was a very beautiful—I recommend it to you—a very beautiful correspondence among the three friends, Hegel's Correspondence published by Gallimard. A very beautiful correspondence where at times Schelling compares Kant to a sunrise, just like that, even if there are still swamps and miasmas remaining in the valleys for a while yet, and all three have one thing in common: they are furious to see that the Kantian message, which for them extends—I'm paraphrasing them, I'm not adding my own thought, I'm making them speak—Kant, whose main interest is to extend, philosophically, the political initiative taken by Rousseau in the Social Contract—that these three young men were furious to see the religious recuperation, but in the bigoted sense, as we'd say in French, clerical and counter-revolutionary, whereby Kant's philosophy was being used to restore faith against knowledge, which is quite a strange manipulation of Kantian rationalism.
7:24 So there you have it, there are texts, at the start of this correspondence, you'll see, the Tübingen period is the most important period, that's where all three met, that's also where the last one would remain, 40 years later, when madness had set in, shut up in the tower—not shut up, he was free to go out, but anyway, in the tower—when he was taken in by that good carpenter. So, in this formative period, at a certain point, when he's in Frankfurt, he comes up with this aphorism: 'You will not be more than your time, but at best you will be your time.'
"You will be no more than your time": the present as limit 8:06 This is a statement that must be taken precisely. There's an inequation, so to speak, a mathematical one, in this statement—'at best you will be'—at most, at least than that, inequations and limits. It means that the present time is the limit of my thought, for Hegel. Now, that's not possible, you'll say, there are surely people who are ahead of others, and others who are more ignorant—yes, of course, says Hegel, but those who are... Hello, Jean, great philosopher, if I may. The present time starting over again, that's too perfect.
8:41 Allow me a parenthesis, on the occasion of Jean Salem's arrival, who is, like me, a Delga author, since our publisher, modestly, contemplates its two flock members. Jean Salem runs, with unmatched relentlessness, tenacity, and generosity—forgive me, Jean—a seminar on the relevance of Marx at the Sorbonne, believe me that it's a bit like being the fox in the henhouse, if I may say so, reversing the judgments one might pass on bourgeois freedom.
9:18 There. I'll redo the parenthesis. I didn't hear Jean. I'll go out and come back, because this is too good. I don't know. Thanks all of a sudden. That is, a beginning, then, there's the... No, no, I'm very honored that he's here. And very happy too. It's simply, yes, this epigram. He wrote it in one of his notebooks, at the time, since he's still in his para-romantic youth, let's say, to simplify.
9:52 One believes—he doesn't yet have the notion of system, he's still, it was fashionable in his day, at the stage of fragments, aphorisms. Nearly the entirety of the non-poetic or non-novelistic output of German Romanticism consists precisely of aphorisms. I say this because it's very fashionable. Over the last 40 years, people have brandished piecemeal thought, like that, variety-based, molecular, against system. You'd find this among the 'master thinkers' we're going to allude to in a moment.
10:26 So I was saying that this proposition, 'You can never be more than your time'—he's speaking to himself, it's reflexive—'but at best you will be your time,' takes the form of a mathematical inequation. That is, the present time is a limit. And if I am not in the true, it's not that I am in time, in error, in the present, but in error. It means I am in the past. I am not living up to the possibilities offered to me by my present. In this sense, it's very close to Marx when Marx says that men only ever set themselves problems from the moment they had the means to solve them.
11:06 That is, when the present time has finally allowed them to raise this kind of problem. So, I wanted to begin with this epigram, 'You can never be more than your time, but at best you will be your time,' to justify why today we are doing the opposite of last time: instead of being in the past, contextualizing the Phenomenology of Spirit in that turbulent passage of titanic upheaval between the 18th and 19th centuries, we are, on the contrary, going to start from the present time—precisely to try to be consistent, insofar as, thanks to Hegel, Marx dug even further into this aspect—when I believe once again that I'm plunging into the past and dialoguing on equal footing with Spinoza, Plato, or anticipating the future, in fact it is the determinations of my historical present that bend, that impose a tropism—tropos simply means curve, like heliotropes, those that bend toward the sun—that impose this tropism on my thought. There you go, my thought is bent by the historical present.
Natural determinism and human freedom 12:11 So you'll tell me, there, I see it coming, here it comes, we already sense the gulag coming, totalitarianism, so we would be determined, and not free. And yes, since my historical present determines me, me, an ineffable individual—there, you reduce me to being a curvature, a bit like in relativistic physics, isn't it, a moving body that thinks it wants to go straight and is curved by a mass nearby, like the light of Mercury, right, reaches us with a delay, because the straight line that should bring its light to us is curved by the sun, by the sun's mass—in the same way, well, thinking would be determined, as if by a gravitation.
12:56 But the difference, still, is that the determinism at work in the perihelion of Mercury is a determinism against which poor Mercury can do nothing. And the Moon may think whatever it wants—if indeed it thinks, I'm not saying we thought it thought, but if indeed it thinks, well, I don't know—it still has no choice over its trajectory; the Earth's mass forces it to revolve around it, because it's a matter of a balance of force in nature, the bigger mass, so to speak, making the smaller one fall toward it, to put it simply.
13:28 That determinism, indeed, is irremediable. But when it comes to human affairs, when it comes to historical matters, it's not quite the same determinism at work—I would even say the opposite, it's a determinism one can rid oneself of. And here I quote a sentence I quoted elsewhere when I gave a little talk on Rousseau, some of you remember, that admirable passage from Émile where Rousseau says: everything men have made, men can unmake. There is no ineffaceable character except what nature imprints—we just saw that with the law of gravitation—and nature makes neither the rich man, nor the prince, nor the great lord.
14:03 Let no one try to make us believe that the determination to be divided into classes is as inescapable, mind you, as the law of falling bodies, all the same. So, I bring you good news. Because the bad news would be to say, oh dear, either I am free or I am determined. Well, then, I'm in trouble. That was how the problem was posed before Hegel and in Kant's time. And credit must be given to Kant, who opened the way to a solution. Namely: I'm dealing with two discourses, I, a contemporary, modern intellectual—I have a scientific discourse, that of Newton, which shows that everything is determined.
14:37 And then at the same time, I have a moral requirement that nonetheless presupposes freedom. Because what's the point of the whole history of philosophy, which spends its time answering the question 'What must I do?' Here, it's no longer a matter of knowing. It's not 'What can I know?' You know, the three Kantian questions: 'What can I know? What must I do? What am I permitted to hope?' Excellent for a pedagogical breakdown. 'What can I know?' If philosophy only sought to know, its place would be at the CNRS. I remind you it's good to say that from time to time. But it also seeks wisdom. That is, what one ought to do, not only what one can know.
15:09 One can be a very great scholar and be a card-carrying Nazi. Think of Heisenberg or people like that. Conversely, one can be a wise man, deep in some African village, and give good advice to someone who wants to get married or take a rather long journey, without for all that knowing how many grains of sand there are in the Sahara or how many satellites orbit Jupiter. The two notions are disjoint: wisdom and knowledge. I'm not saying they're contradictory—far from it, all of philosophy is trying to reconcile them.
15:39 But in the Greek Sophia, philo-sophia, the pursuit of Sophia—I say it deliberately in Greek, not to be snobbish like Heidegger and to muddy the waters so they seem deep, but because, precisely, I can't find in the French language a single word that says both at once: knowledge and wisdom, and the two are indissolubly linked. So, in the classical age, let's say, I'm torn between determinism—and it works, predicting an eclipse, bang, the movements of the tides, Newton, it's effective, it's not just ideas, it's verified.
16:17 Well then, my freedom—whoosh, it's over. And at the same time, I need freedom, to speak like Kant, as a postulate of practical reason. Kant has the merit of expressing himself very precisely. It's said in a complicated way, but it's very simple once translated. When I ask the question 'what must I do,' there's no point asking it if I'm told that anyway, however much you ask it, since everything is determined, you couldn't do anything other than what you're doing now. So the question 'what must I do' presupposes—I didn't say proves, far from it—presupposes, rightly or wrongly, if you prefer, that freedom exists.
16:53 And so, that's how the problem was posed between determinism and freedom. I'm giving you good news today, let me pick up my thread again, thanks to Rousseau who opens a breach and leads Kant to say that Rousseau is the Newton of morality. Yes, how things line up—Newton, determinism, the law of falling, it goes downward, the law of heavy bodies as it was called back then—and Rousseau, who places freedom at the center of human relations. Upward, Promethean. And, or Icarian, if you prefer, upward.
17:24 No, not Icarian, Daedalian, excuse me. Icarus, too high. That's not the right measure. Daedalian. Let's be positive. So there is a symmetrical relation between determinism, this negation of freedom that is natural law, physical law—nature here in the only sense that is scientific, not the fantastical sense—and between natural law and freedom, this dichotomy.
17:57 And well, one can be both, there you go, the dialectic of determined and free—that happens in human affairs, when there is, if I may say so, human self-determination. When I find myself caught up in determinations that influence me—I come back to my tropisms—well, the difference between the Moon and us is that we, by becoming aware of these determinations, stand a much better chance of freeing ourselves from them than by remaining ignorant of them. This is what leads Hegel, following Spinoza, on this point—they fully agree on this conception of freedom as intellection of necessity—to say that the ignorant man is not free.
Realität and Wirklichkeit: two words for the real 18:35 And I don't think the two of them are thinking of the 'savage' when they say that. One can be a great intellectual and be totally ignorant of the causes determining one. So what is this imprisonment? I'll take it in two senses—literally, historically, historico-politically—in the sense of what is called in the French language, with precision, 'actuality' [actualité]—a term that would have pleased Hegel, I'm opening a small parenthesis here, my detours are meant to clarify, not to confuse you.
19:11 Hegel has two words to say 'the real'—to say many things, actually, because English, like German, has the choice of drawing sometimes on a Germanic root, sometimes on a root of Romance, French origin. For example, for reality, he has the word 'Realität,' which comes—it's not from Latin, but from 'res,' 'thing'—'reality,' and when he uses it, it's reality in the ordinary sense, empirical reality, the one around us; and 'Wirklichkeit,' which Hyppolite translates as 'effective reality,' but which could just as well be translated as 'actuality,' if that didn't lend itself to ambiguity, as it does in French anyway, because in 'Wirklichkeit,' you find, even for those who don't know German, you find 'Werk,' which gives the English 'work.'
20:01 There, there's work, action, involved. It's not a reality that you can simply pick up by opening your eyes or breathing through your nose. You don't grab much reality that way. The wider you open your eyes, the less the earth moves. Look, it's not moving. It's not with your eyes that you'll come to know that it moves nonetheless. It took a lot of equations to get there. One had to stop looking and start conceiving. You know, there's an anecdote that tells of Thales standing at the foot of the pyramid. No matter whether the anecdote is true—
20:31 What matters is that if it has traveled through the centuries down to us, it's because it has a deep significance. And that the Egyptians—a bit of national rivalry, the Egyptian and this Greek passing through—and the Egyptians say to Thales, 'You're so clever, go measure the pyramid, the height of the pyramid.' Imagine, the blazing heat, 50 degrees in the shade, Cheops—there are some, myself included, who'd have a heart attack before reaching the top. Thales replied, 'The shadow of Thales measures the pyramid.'
21:04 There's no need to go up there. He had found the theory of proportions, you know, Thales' theorem. The ratio of my shadow to myself—you don't need to go up there. Measuring the pyramid's shadow, it's the same thing. It's an equation with one unknown, it's easy. There. Thales had learned, as Bachelard says, to do as the gods do, to work without doing anything. To know before going to see. We're far from empiricism. Not all forms of empiricism are being criticized here, but that one—the empiricism of what Hegel calls immediate sense-certainty, which believes it grasps the whole of reality because it doesn't think.
21:39 It's the poorest of forms of knowledge, and the one that grasps the least reality. So, two words for 'the real' in Hegel: 'Realität,' empirical reality, and 'Wirklichkeit,' when it's a reality that can only be accessed by way of the concept, of abstraction, and of what he calls 'die Anstrengung des Begriffs,' 'the strenuous effort of the concept.' There we are. Now that this is settled, when I say that we must start from today's reality, I mean of course the 'Wirklichkeit,'
22:11 and I'll take it on two levels. A macro level, to speak a bit 'people-magazine,' that is, by recalling the historico-political situation in which our historical present moves; and a more micro level, that of the debate of ideas and how Hegel is received today in the debate of ideas. I'll start with the micro level, to recall then—where I had left off—that the present philosophical climate is not Hegelian, but is even violently anti-Hegelian.
A philosophical present violently anti-Hegelian 22:50 and it is even increasingly so as time goes on, I mean, within the French philosophical school that runs from Sartre to Derrida, for instance, or to Onfray today, it moves further and further away from Hegel. Sartre certainly uses him enormously, but taking huge... With Onfray, we've even stepped outside of philosophy altogether. Huge distances, yes. He's stretched the spectrum a bit too wide. I haven't gone that far myself, but well, I don't want to make an argument from authority, as they say, that would be dishonest.
23:22 I'm not doing what he does. But we'll get there. There are more precise things about Onfray in a moment. So, it's thought that Hegel is a rationalist: the real is rational, the rational is real—that's all that comes out of the rehashed Hegel. And I remind you all the same that Hegel said what is well known is, precisely because it's well known, not known. So when we think we know only that about Hegel, it means we still have a lot of work to do. It remains that contemporary thought wants, on the contrary, to be irrationalist, and gives great importance to desire.
23:56 And even when it speaks of desire—because Hegel speaks of it a lot too—it's a conception meant to be opposed to his. Here we must cite Deleuze in particular, who was extremely precise on this subject, especially in Anti-Oedipus, where Deleuze is furious that a whole tradition, which Hegel eminently exemplifies, defines desire first and foremost as lack. What lack? Not at all, desire is plenitude, it's affirmation, it's creation—you see, you know this better than I do, I was almost about to say. And, another example, a touchstone in contemporary thought, a shared reference among people who are otherwise quite different—Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and Onfray—is Nietzsche; that's their preferred reference, by far. There are others, there's Hegel, there's Tocqueville, and all over France Culture.
24:50 Well yes, you listen to the madonna of the libraries, the perverse canteen-lady, and you see that she has nothing but hyper-liberal authors on her lips—it's really extraordinary—from Benjamin Constant to Tocqueville. And so this line of thought, which claims Nietzsche as its own, precisely insists on a conception of desire as unlimited, infinite, one that has no need to confine itself to 'lost charities,' as Rimbaud put it somewhere, precisely in the Illuminations.
Reading the Phenomenology: self-consciousness is desire 25:20 And one may wonder, where is Hegel's relevance in all this? Well, listen, let me read you a passage from the Phenomenology, which is, four pages earlier, the most famous passage, the one that will unfold the famous dialectic of master and slave. And I'll read it to you first without interruption.
25:51 The simple self is this genus, or the simple universal, for which the differences are nothing. But it is only such when it is the negative essence of independent moments that have taken shape. Did you get that, Antoine? No. That's normal there, one understands nothing. No, but I'm doing it on purpose, slowly. Me, quickly, I'm going to make you understand. The simple self is this genus, or the simple universal, for which the differences are nothing. No, but he's an excellent reader, Antoine, that's why I use him. But it is only such when it is the negative essence of independent moments that have taken shape.
26:25 Thus self-consciousness is certain of itself. Let me put it a bit more concretely. Thus self-consciousness is certain of itself only through the suppression of this other. The other is the object of desire. Through the suppression of this other which presents itself to it as an independent life. It is desire. Consciousness doesn't have desires. Hegel says, it is desire. You see? It is desire, certain of the nullity of this other. I remember, when I was in Niger, a gecko—there were plenty of geckos, you know, over there, as abundant as sparrows. I'm talking about a gecko doing its push-ups, its little gymnastics, as the scientists call it.
26:57 And who was in front of a line of ants, the lucky thing. And then, the line of ants, over there, they're plentiful. The ants are plentiful. No, but there's no gecko here. No, but it was there, watching with its two eyes, it gobbles up one, then another. It had ten million of them. It had plenty in reserve. Desire is destructive. That's a fundamental thesis of Hegelianism. Desire is first of all destructive. When I desire a thing, it's on its way to being transformed. Not pejoratively either. There are transformations that are positive, after all.
27:28 Desire is destructive. It's scandalous when you can say that. Well, I desire my wife, I don't want to destroy her. There are people who thought they were making the other person happy, right? And we know how that often ends up. Well yes, sorry. I'm not saying it the way Hegel does, but not at the level of intentions, even if there's no intention. He doesn't say that the one who desires has destructive ideas in mind. Not at all. He says that whether one wants it or not, and even thinks the opposite, right? Insofar as one is desiring, there is a threat to the object of desire.
27:58 Especially when that object is a subject. So I'll repeat this paragraph. The simple self is this genus, or the simple universal, for which the differences are nothing. But it is only such when it is the negative essence of independent moments that have taken shape. Thus self-consciousness is certain of itself only through the suppression of this other which presents itself to it as an independent life. It is desire. This other which presents itself to it as an independent life—imagine an antelope presenting itself before a lion. Yes, if you don't understand. This other which presents itself to it as an independent life, it is desire.
28:32 Certain of the nullity of this other, it posits for itself this nullity as its own truth, annihilates the independent object, and thereby gives itself, by consuming it, the certainty of itself as true certainty. The certainty which has now come to be for it in objective form. Now, when I see that, I don't see any lack of relevance at all compared to the most modern problematic of desire. And when we see that what he calls the simple self, this independent genus, is abstract self-consciousness which has not yet realized itself in a character, in something determinate, which has not yet engaged with reality, which is a practical-theoretical consciousness, so to speak.
Abstract will and the freedom of the void 29:18 This abstract self, he gives a striking description of it. Yes, I told you it was a difficult passage. So we're going to spell it out through lectures, through the clearest lectures, the lectures he gives at the end of his life on the philosophy of right. There's a passage that takes up this account of abstract will in this way, asserting the self in its abstraction in a rather terrifying manner—but judge for yourselves. Now this is the complete opposite of the Phenomenology. We're not step by step following the evolution of a consciousness. We're in the lecture-course mode, firstly, secondly.
29:48 The will contains, little alpha, says Hegel. The will contains the element of pure indeterminacy. You see, our discussion earlier about determinism and freedom. Now this is the consciousness that refuses all determination. The element of pure indeterminacy, or the pure reflection of the self into itself. You see, he said the simple self, and now he says the pure reflection of the self into itself. It's very close. In which all limitation vanishes, all content given and determined either immediately by nature. One must eat to live.
30:18 That's a determination. I can't help it. That too, I can deny. But I can even deny it concretely by fasting during Lent or Ramadan. Hegel is serious. He took great interest in customs. He sees the profound significance of human behavior. It sometimes seems absurd to me that we mortify ourselves, that we impose sacrifices on ourselves, etc. But it's a way for man to affirm his freedom, including against nature which would want to impose on him—because it wasn't man who decided to eat to live. And when you're wandering around in Africa, and you're out in the middle of the desert, and you think you're alone—you're never alone in the desert—two or three figures suddenly emerge from behind a rock, often children herding flocks, little shepherds, young boys and girls, who see that it's a white person, so there's surely water in the four-wheel drive, and who come with an empty jerry can, thirsty, to ask you for water.
31:04 If they were beings of pure nature, they'd start by drinking greedily. No, they pour a few drops on the ground first, for the gods first. It's a way of showing me—who is in another sphere, I'm not speaking of myself personally but as a white person, economically, sociologically, in another sphere—that I too have my dignity as you do. I too can take a distance from my needs, from nature. I'm not a beast that just throws itself on its food after all. And Hegel would have called that a source of struggle for recognition, peaceful and superb.
31:35 So, here, the will contains the element of pure indeterminacy, or of the pure reflection of the self into itself, in which all limitation vanishes—that's anarchy, roughly speaking. All content given and determined either immediately by nature—I just spoke of that, needs, desires, instincts—or by some intermediary, the tropisms I was talking about earlier, right, the way the historical present influences our needs, desires and instincts, or by some intermediary, unlimited infinity of abstraction and absolute generality, the pure thought of oneself.
32:07 And he adds, no doubt, this aspect of will here defines this possibility—this absolute possibility of abstracting myself from every determination in which I find myself or in which I have placed myself—this flight from all content as from a restriction. Besides, we find it in the word 'determination' itself: what is determined is terminated, what is defined is finite. We must take language seriously. There's an admirable preface by Hegel to the Logic, the great Logic—a preface you don't find everywhere, when translations are available, this passage got cut out. It's quite extraordinary, it's one of Hegel's greatest passages, where he says—and it's very modern when you think of the linguistic vogue of the sixties—that human thought is deposited in language and that we think according to language, says Hegel, and he shows well that logic is nothing but the explicitation of forces at work in the fact that in the beginning was the Word, after all. So this flight from all content as from a restriction is what this will determines itself to be, which is what representation—you see, that's pejorative for Hegel, not the concept, the effort we make
33:17 to try to see things clearly—but what representation, what one pictures to oneself when there's a word—when I say to you 'proletariat,' 'freedom,' you have representations—that's what representation posits for itself as freedom, and it is thus, and that's what Hegel judges to be negative freedom or the freedom of the understanding. You see, we talked last time about the crucial distinction made by Kant, but which Hegel is going to dig into, between the understanding and reason. Here he qualifies this anarchizing freedom, if you will, calling on a familiar representation, freedom of the understanding, and he says it's the freedom of the void—the simple self, the simple universal, the abstract self, it's the void. Look at the plants in this garden—hello, Charmine—look at the plants in this garden, all their substance, so to speak, their vegetal substance, is made up of what they found underground, mineral salts, and above ground too, I'm thinking of sunlight, of oxygen, of everything you like. I mean, if you try to think the essence of the individual plant itself, but independently of all these materials it needed in order to grow, you're left with nothing at all—it's an abstract plant
34:29 which hasn't even attained existence. So such is the freedom of the will, excuse me—it's the freedom of the void, there we are. It can manifest itself—here we get to politics, watch out—as a real figure and become a passion; up to now it was theoretical. Here's what I think of myself: me, I'm not limited by anything, me who has called myself a magus or an angel, dispensed from all morality, brought down to earth with rough reality to embrace and a duty to seek. Doesn't that remind you of something?
34:59 Doesn't it remind you of anyone? It's a famous passage from a famous work by a famous author, after all. Oh dear, that's why I play the professor, taking the students away—no, that's not right, sorry? 'Me twice over who has called myself a magus or an angel'—dispensed from all morality, revolted against everything—come on, I'll help you: Rimbaud. Well, thank you. 'Brought down to earth,' Rimbaud the Hegelian, 'with rough reality to embrace and a duty to seek'—peasant, that's not me adding it, that's him. That's how he talks to himself when he thinks he's the indeterminate. So it's the freedom of the void, but for now it's theoretical—it's what I think, but it hasn't yet turned into practice, still less into collective, political practice—don't worry, unhappily you'll see what follows. So if it remains merely theoretical, it's religious fanaticism, for example the pure contemplation of Hinduism—me, me, the atman, the self, the self of the in-itself—I don't want to caricature, it's a very great tradition to which Hegel pays homage elsewhere in his history of philosophy—but well, these Western recoveries, bobo as I call it, bobo—
36:09 bourgeois-bohemian-buddhist-and-bonobo, that's not quite the same thing as the Buddha's teaching, it's not—uh, it is. So if it remains—I'm slowing down—if this attitude of the abstract self that defines itself as free from all determination remains merely theoretical, it's the religious fanaticism of pure Hindu contemplation; if it turns toward action, it's, in politics as in religion, the fanaticism of destroying every existing social order, and the excommunication of every individual suspected of wanting an order, and the annihilation of every organization trying to come into being. Terrifying!
36:51 Do you realize the argument that falls on us here? Because people say, but it's crazy to talk about Hegel, Hegel never knew the Industrial Revolution, well he never knew, uh, uh, uh, Romanticism—that's the most modern thing he knew in aesthetic matters, sure! He never knew what came after—realism in the novel, symbolism, or impressionism, whichever you like, depending on whether we're talking painting, literature, or music—it's the same thing, same reference, Debussy but in music, and poems by Verlaine—the tune, uh—never with the perfection that Duparc gave it, I say that for Anne-Marie, that's what I'm talking about, much less well known, but who brought to perfection the genre of the French mélodie, or the lied, as you like. I'm returning to the parenthesis: so Hegel never knew Surrealism, he never knew—let's leave the intellectual world—he never knew the Gulag, the concentration camps, well I mean, how can one say he's relevant, and yet here we have a theory of the extermination camp under Hegel's own pen, in the pen of the Philosophy of Right, starting from this abstract word, the excommunication of any order trying to come into being
38:01 a fury of destruction—excuse me, I'm on the wrong page—there we are, it's a fairly terrifying portrait, I repeat: if it turns toward action, it's, in politics as in religion, the fanaticism of destroying every existing social order, and the excommunication of every individual suspected of wanting an order, and the annihilation of every organization trying to come into being—and now we start philosophizing again—it is only by destroying that this negative will, this way we understand what the most Hegelian concept means, without spinning it all out, negativity—
38:36 this negative will has the feeling of its own existence. Do you realize—to have the feeling of existing, it needs to destroy—a great many things, a great deal of existence. It is only by destroying that this negative will has the feeling of its existence. It thinks it wants a positive state, for example that of universal equality—those are the anarchists Marx used to mock—or of universal religious life—Fourier, that was both, and Proudhon too, mixing the religious and the political side. But in fact it doesn't want positive reality at all, for that, whatever it may be, immediately introduces some order, some singular determination—I don't know, paying taxes for example—both of institutions and of individuals. Whereas it's precisely in negating this specification and this objective determination that this negative freedom becomes conscious of itself. Thus what it believes it wants—you see, he pays homage to its good faith, but we see the limits here of good faith—you know, language, and thus the people—I'm not talking about language and speech but the tongue, the popular tongue—knows full well that hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. Thus what it believes—what it believes it wants—can, for itself, be nothing but an abstract representation, and its realization can be nothing but a fury of destruction.
Rimbaud's "Conte," an illustration of the Hegelian theory of desire 39:46 Extraordinary dialectic here, of a contemplation, a contemplative thought that spills over into action, and of a frightful power of destruction. Now I was saying—well, he never knew modern poetry, he never knew Rimbaud, blah blah blah—what I've just read you is this form of will, of desire, which only becomes aware of itself insofar as it has things to suppress all the time. You'll find a superb summary of this—not in my book, sorry to use a book I wrote myself, but I reassure you, it's not to quote myself, it's to quote someone I quote in it, the best thing in my book is the authors that Lefebvre points to—and it's a text by Rimbaud, an excerpt from the Illuminations, fairly short, one page, a little page, which is going to relax us a bit, since it's titled 'Conte'—not the accounts you settle with the bailiff, don't worry, 'conte,' C-O-N-T-E. There we are, we're children and we're listening to a tale: 'A prince,' that's how it begins, a tale?
40:55 I remind you that this is to illustrate the theory of abstract, negative desire, the negative will. 'A prince was vexed at having never applied himself except to the perfection of vulgar generosities'—maybe that's just as hard as Hegel. Yes, okay: 'A prince was vexed at having never applied himself except to the perfection of vulgar generosities.' I have means, I'm a prince, so I have material means, so I can throw parties, all that, but after all every sovereign does that. Me, I want to do a bit more, a bit better than that. 'A prince was vexed at having never applied himself'—think of Caligula, roughly—'except to the perfection'—of vulgar generosities—'he foresaw astonishing revolutions of love and suspected his women of being capable of better than this complaisance embellished with sky and luxury'—that's not—yes, when you're a prince, do you think women just give themselves freely? I'm talking about the harem here, I'm not being macho, don't worry, that is to say, you can always find women to buy when you have the means, alas, for the women—and so this complaisance embellished with sky and luxury, the harem, he wanted to see—so he's fed up, he's fed up with being a sovereign like the others, he wants to do more, he has hubris as the Greeks would have said, go even further, I think of Caligula, you know he made his horse a consul—
42:06 he ate at the table—funny, Caligula, he went a bit beyond the average sovereign. 'He wanted to see the truth'—that's not uninteresting for a philosopher, this passage—'he wanted to see the truth,' colon—I'm the one adding the colon, there's a comma to make it explicit—is truth for Rimbaud the hour of desire, we're speaking of the subject—and of satisfaction, not desire without end, no no no no, this time I want a desire that is satisfied, no kidding—'the hour of desire and of essential satisfaction'—'whether or not it was an aberration of piety, he wanted'—not stupid, Rimbaud, not stupid in the least, this kid, remember this was written between the ages of 17 and 20, he must have lived in another time after this meteor—and so he knows very well that it's an aberration of piety to want to desire and be satisfied, he's read Pascal, he knows well that desire is infinite, that what we desire is not things but the desire of things, I won't dwell on that too much because these are familiar notions, the French moralists wrote admirable things about it, that's literature. So, well, he wants—he wanted, may it be an aberration of piety, he wanted—'he possessed at least'
43:16 'a fairly wide human power'—princes possess at least a fairly wide human power. All this passage I just read you, this introduction, is in the imperfect tense, if you noticed, as in fairy tales, 'once upon a time'—what follows shifts, 'all the women he had known were assassinated,' and we move into the simple past. That's it, he's putting his goal into action, to see something other than the humdrum routine of sovereigns, and it plunges exactly into what he calls, the gars, the fury of destruction: 'all the women he had known were assassinated'—you can, if you like, degender the problem, you can also take it the other way, I think of Catherine, the one who, it's said, threw her lovers out the window right after having had them—'all the women he had known were'—that's said too, Queen Margot I believe, well, since these are—yes, there we are, these are storytellers, well anyway, 'all the women he had known were assassinated'—'what a ravaging of the garden of beauty! Under the sabre, they blessed him'—there's something like a ruse, Hegel would say, the object of desire, instead of resisting this prince and saying, well, no, don't destroy me like that—
44:27 lets itself be done—what a ruse! The prince will finally be able to go all the way with his desire since nothing opposes it. 'What a ravaging of the garden of beauty! Under the sabre, they blessed him. He commanded no new ones—the women reappeared'—the object of desire, and that's the impasse of all desire, for Hegel, that lingers on pure exteriority—the object of desire renews itself. I said earlier, one must eat to live, well, I eat, I suppress the otherness, right, the apple which is outside becomes digested in my stomach, I've affirmed myself against the apple, I've made it penetrate into my—into my essence. But in this satisfaction—let me reread the Phenomenology—self-consciousness experiences the independence of its object, the independence of its object: tomorrow I'm hungry again, and besides there are always, always more objects in the universe than I could ever consume—I don't know if I'd come out ahead in that game. The desire and the certainty of self attained in the satisfaction of desire are conditioned by the object, and there where I believed in my freedom, I find nothing but my conditioning by the object once more. What a humiliation, indeed. Satisfaction takes place
45:37 through the suppression of this other; but for this suppression to be, this other must also be—how could you suppress an apple if it doesn't exist? Self-consciousness cannot therefore suppress the object through its negative relation to it alone. Then Hegel is going to progress and show that self-consciousness, when it finds itself no longer facing objects that let themselves be swallowed like the women Rimbaud speaks of, like the favorites, but when it finds itself facing a subject that resists it, that's going to be the clash of consciousnesses, and that's going to already be a stage more elevated in depth, when self-consciousness finds itself not before an object but before another subject, before another self-consciousness—but we're not there yet. So I'll go back a bit through the Rimbaud text to show you how much it resonates in harmony with the passage of the Phenomenology I was just reading you—reading you: 'What a ravaging of the garden of beauty! Under the sabre, they blessed him. He commanded no new ones, the women reappeared. He killed all those who followed him'—now it's no longer the women, it's all these malicious courtiers—'he killed all those who followed him'—that happened with Nero, Caligula, etc.
46:31 'He killed all those who followed him after the hunt or the libations'—all who followed him, what luck, nothing opposes him, all followed him—'he amused himself slaughtering luxury animals'—there's a small allusion here to the Roman emperors, this time more precisely, you know, the games of the circus, slaughtering luxury animals—generally it's rather the animals that slaughter the poor gladiators, no—because the Empire had reached such a degree of decadence that an emperor like Commodus—you may know him, it seems he's been, not popularized, but bipolarized recently in a film about gladiators, a mainstream film set in the time of Commodus—well, Commodus was so courageous as an emperor, and above all so vain and eager for glory, to be applauded by the public in the amphitheater and the circus, that he would go down into the arena himself to face the tigers—don't take him for a total idiot either—the geese, he'd go down into the arena and strangle geese carefully, because geese, that was better, they could peck at your calves—that was the great courage of Commodus. Well, I think there's a small allusion to that, Rimbaud knew his classical history well, he was first in Latin verse composition. The poet who most revolutionized
47:42 our language, in his time, is the one who imposed on himself most strictly the discipline of the classical arts and classical language—that's why he's the only one of that generation who attains the formal perfection of a Racine. 'He killed all those who followed him after the hunt or the libations, all followed him, he amused himself slaughtering luxury animals, he set the palaces ablaze, he rushed upon people and cut them to pieces'—you see there's an almost fantastic acceleration in the text—what Hegel called a fury of destruction: when abstraction turns toward the concrete, it becomes a fury of destruction. When Hegel analyzes the phenomenon, the phenomenon of the Terror during the French Revolution, he's going to see that there is, in the Terror too—and God knows he was treated as a Jacobin, and as a defender to his last breath, as a defender of the French Revolution—but he also saw its shortcomings and its impasses. He saw very well that there was, in the phenomenon of the Terror—when he says somewhere, 'heads were cut off the way you cut cabbages'—the abstraction, and there I can't help thinking, because he often refers back to a myth, to a Greek myth, the myth of Procrustes, you know, the table of Procrustes or the bed of Procrustes, depending on the translation. Procrustes was one of those bandits whom Theseus and Heracles, our companions, our comrades—
48:52 I say that in almost a revolutionary sense of the term—and for the earth-dwellers, Heracles and Theseus are those who purged the earth of the monsters that prevented man from inhabiting it, and they are positive heroes. And so, when Procrustes—his fantasy, monstrous as it was—was, the first passerby who arrived at his crossroads, he'd be lying in wait, he'd put them in a bed or on a table, doesn't matter, and it had to fit—you see the abstraction—exactly to the length of the table: if the person was too short, he stretched them, as if racking them, so to speak, and if they were too tall, he cut off whatever stuck out. It had to fit exactly to the length of the table—you know it never does, because if you've done physics, even those of you who've had a few physics classes in tenth grade, I don't know which year they start physics now, you did the little theory of measurement, you saw that no measurement is absolute, there's always—even if I measure this ashtray—there's always some little electron wandering around that means my length, or my diameter, is already, already revised. So you see the danger of formalism, of wanting to impose on reality something abstract without mediation, in an immediate way—the immediate abstract, because there's a good kind of abstract, the kind that made Lenin say there's nothing concrete except through the abstract, the kind that allows one to arrive at the concrete after many detours—
50:04 the abstract that goes all the way, that doesn't stop here, one-sidedly, halfway, in the abstraction of the self. So, 'he set the palaces ablaze, he rushed upon people and cut them to pieces, the crowd, the golden roofs, the beautiful beasts still existed'—that's exactly what Hegel says in the passage from the Phenomenology I just read you, isn't it? In this satisfaction, self-consciousness experiences the independence of its object—the object comes back, ironically, after every destruction, it renews itself. The desire and the certainty of self attained in the satisfaction of desire are conditioned by the object; satisfaction takes place through the suppression of this other, but for this suppression to be, this other must also be—and me who wanted to deny it, well, I'm affirming it every day and realizing its importance—I'm going to make progress after all. 'The crowd, the golden roofs, the beautiful beasts still existed'—can one revel in ecstasy in destruction?
50:59 A new obstacle that might restrain the prince's fury of destruction: public opinion. Rimbaud starts to give it a bit of a voice. 'Can one revel in ecstasy in destruction, rejuvenate oneself through cruelty? The people did not murmur'—yes, really, no obstacle, 'no one offered the support of his views'—so where are we going like this? Well, I'll tell you, it's almost over. 'One evening he was riding proudly'—back to the imperfect—'a genius appeared, of ineffable, even unavowable beauty'—I don't know what you picture as who's speaking, one of ineffable or unavowable beauty, but I note, to stick to the letter and avoid representations, being a good Hegelian, that it says a genius—what sex?
51:37 That's precisely not specified—a genius appeared, of ineffable, even unavowable beauty—'from his physiognomy and his bearing there emanated the promise of a multiple and complex love, of an indescribable, even unbearable happiness'—there we are, he's touching on what he was looking for at the start, remember, he wanted to see the truth, the hour of desire and satisfaction—there we are, he's touching an indescribable, even unbearable happiness—'the prince and the genius annihilated each other, probably, in essential health'—because this text is Hegelian right down to the vocabulary—'how could he not have died of it?'
52:10 'Together, therefore, they died'—you have, on the next line—these are the last three lines—'but this prince died in his palace, at an ordinary age'—it was a tale, the prince was the genius, the genius was the prince—and that's the ending, a bit more mysterious, I've commented on it other times—'learned music is lacking to our desire'—an illustration, line by line, word for word almost, of the Hegelian theory of desire, on the part of a poet who is often brandished as the very type of the avant-garde that Hegel could never have known—it's still quite disturbing to see a relevance popping back up every time we try to push it away. And to come back to the master-thinker I was alluding to earlier, Deleuze and Foucault—I'm using it as a metonymy, they have plenty of epigones, I'm not going after them, I never make ad hominem arguments, I have no personal quarrel with these people, and I'm thinking rather of the field of their thought—Heidegger, who has even more influence, or contemporary neo-Nietzscheanism, if you like—I say that out of generosity toward Nietzsche, not to be confused, neo-Nietzscheanism with Nietzsche—
Baeumler, or Nazi anti-Hegelianism 53:21 but still, who is a brilliant fool, poor old man, whom one can pass off as one of the four horsemen, who is an immense writer, but who, in philosophy, got a bit muddled, judge for yourselves. So I quote you this contemporary philosopher, well, of the 20th century since he's dead: 'The systematic critique of the idealist tradition is part of our future task'—there's a contemporary thought that's the opposite of Hegel, the critique—because Hegel is classified as, in his idealism, even an absolute idealism, I say this in a schoolbook way, you know we distinguish subjective idealism, Kant, Fichte, etc.
53:56 if you forget that, it's not a big deal—objective idealism in Schelling, who finds the realization of the Idea in nature, and absolute idealism, Hegel, who finds it rather in history than in nature. So idealism par excellence—'the systematic critique of the idealist tradition is part of our future task'—when Nietzsche—yes, here's someone claiming Nietzsche—'once again mocks the apotheosis of the State, he thinks with a sure instinct against the total Hegelian state as a state of culture'—yes, because with today's prevailing ecologism, nature is more of a value today than culture or history, isn't it, and so when he says 'with a sure instinct,' he opposes—Nietzsche—the total Hegelian state as a state of culture, yes indeed, the Hegelian state is a state of culture, except here it's an anti-value, it's the spirit of Weimar materialized—I'll come back to that—in the form of the State that Nietzsche fights against. Hegel is the thinker of classicism; is there someone who can rehabilitate the infinite desire of the Romantics? You'll see, we need to rehabilitate the German Romantics criticized by Hegel and give them their full place—sorry—'and we cannot give them their full place,' I quote, and I slow down—
55:06 'without destroying the tradition of the 19th century, that of the preponderant importance of Weimar classicism and the friendship between Goethe and Schiller'—and Goethe is a friend of Hegel's, and both shared a distrust of certain nocturnal aspects of Romanticism—'we cannot express our conception of the world philosophically without mastering, through critique, the intellectual evolution that leads from Kant to Nietzsche'—that's the reverse breakdown from mine, for me there's a trajectory that goes from Rousseau to Lenin, passing through Hegel and Marx, and here it's the opposite, from Kant to Nietzsche, at the first manifestation, or in any case the most popularized today, it's not the first, Schelling was there before, of irrationalism—'we can no longer learn our world with the formulations of Fichte and Hegel, whatever depth of understanding one may have of them, and yet nothing is more common than to assimilate our philosophy to that of Fichte'—'this would change nothing if the without-turns Hegel took its place'—but without-turns Fichte—do you have any idea who this is?
56:04 Fichte? No, no, the author of what I just read. So I continue, because he's also going after Descartes—'Hegel accomplishes in an unsurpassed way the consciousness of the West'—'in matters of the history of philosophy it is precisely through Hegel's historical tableau that Cartesianism achieved its lasting justification, after the battle against Cartesianism had been waged for centuries by the best forces of German philosophy; just as, conversely, the themes of the German history of worldviews were trivialized in Western philosophy through Hegel's universalist conception under the influence of Descartes, and for the most part buried for a century'—who could that be?
56:39 That could be a lot of people, right? All of them? Deleuze? Yes, it could be Deleuze. What they have in common is that here's someone opposed to Hegel, to Descartes, and I tell you, it's not present here in the text, but it's going to be present further on, to Christianity—one can be anti-Christian without adhering to the text that's here—but when you're anti-Christian, anti-rationalist, anti-Cartesian, and anti-Hegelian all at once—one can be anti-Gaullist, I'll make a little political detour, you know what I mean, me, I voted against De Gaulle my whole life—one can be anti-Gaullist, but when you're anti-Gaullist and anti-communist at the same time, why not?
57:16 One can be anti-communist for excellent reasons, I'm the first to think so, but when you're against both at once, there's a historical precedent called Pétain. So when someone tells me, 'me, I'm anti-Gaullist, sir,' very well, I want to see whether they're anti-Gaullist like me, because they find it not left-wing enough, why not—but if they're anti-Gaullist because he was the man of the Resistance, and the one who gave Algeria its independence, that bastard who drove us out of Bab el-Oued, etc., etc.—you see, familiar things—you see, I'm making this little detour to show that one can be anti-Gaullist, me it doesn't bother me—but you, anti-Gaullist, anti-Cartesian, anti-rationalist, and anti-Christian—that's a lot all at once—you say Deleuze, but this text is by Mr. Baeumler. Do you know Baeumler?
58:06 I recommend it to you frankly, that's a gap—you'll hear about Baeumler discussed fairly extensively in the big work that Jean-Pierre—Emmanuel Faye, sorry—devoted to the Heidegger imposture, right? And Baeumler is the philosopher who was appointed immediately upon, well he was calling for Hitler's arrival to power, to lock down everything ideological in the field of philosophy in German universities. But Lukács—who's going to talk about Lukács?
58:40 It's, it's—thank you—for talking about Lukács, because it's thanks to Lukács, of course, it's in a work by Lukács that I isolated this excerpt, but Faye quotes other extracts that are just as damning, besides, pure Baeumler. So, we've heard, among the Heideggerians, talk of the abyss, the unfathomable, everything that is the opposite, right, of the determinate, of reason, of what has a contour, of the concept, of the clarity of clear and distinct ideas—I quote Baeumler's teacher, Krieck, the one who was the mentor of Rosenberg, of Hitler—'the unfathomable is not, for German thought'—I can say that now—'is not, for German thought, the definition of a limit; on the contrary, it is a totally positive determination. The unfathomable runs through all our reality and governs it in the large and in the small. The unfathomable, as the indissoluble weave of our reality, in its inaccessible nature but not entirely unknown—we know it even if we cannot say it, it acts in our life'—and if Hegel meant by knowing it that one can say it—for Hegel, who spends his time saying that the true expresses itself, that the inner is truly inner only if it can externalize itself and lose itself by unfolding.
59:52 This devotion to the unfathomable constitutes the depth of the German conception of the world. You see, these ideas that people think are radical, rebellious, and that are made out to be not only left-wing but, in the 1960s, this was claimed at least by the far left—we've come back a bit from it with the crisis—you find them almost word for word in the most terrifying philosophers who ever practiced their profession within an institutional framework. You'll tell me, you should tell me, you don't dare, and you'd be wrong—I'll say: 'But Dominique, you're making an amalgam, that's a serious thing to do,' things like that. No, I'm not making an amalgam, I'm making conceptual connections, and I'll spell out the difference. Hegel mocked those who say we're making an amalgam as soon as we bring two things together in an effort to conceptualize and understand, saying, I don't know, that the Dachshund and the Saint Bernard are dogs—we're making an amalgam, after all we should never use the concept of dog except to say it doesn't bark.
Conceptual comparison and amalgam; the oppositions remain ours 1:01:03 Hegel compared this to a patient to whom a doctor had said, 'My poor friend, you're done for if you don't eat fruit,' and the patient dies because he was a nominalist skeptic like our friends, like those who are wary of amalgams, because, says Hegel, he finds nowhere any fruit but only figs, bananas, apples or pears or cherries, and you could go on to infinity—you know, empirical reality is accommodating, even if it takes cherries, you'd still have to distinguish morello cherries, pigeon hearts, bigarreaus, and so on. So when someone is incapable of rising to the genus, everything gets called an amalgam—obviously. Now obviously, if I had made just one connection, if I'd picked up a word here and there—but here, it's not one theme I've connected, it's a whole systematics, that is, a set of themes. Anti-Cartesianism, look, all of Foucault's History of Madness begins with that famous theme of the great confinement, which Descartes, Descartes's philosophy, supposedly sanctions the beginning of what he calls the great confinement—the prison being here, of course, reason. With Descartes, reason seizes power, and after that, well, let's go, the Gulag—we were in the middle of the Cold War at the time, you know.
1:02:16 I mean by that that I don't see why I should defend myself against the charge of amalgam when facing a line of thought that says: you know the Gulag? It was already in Lenin, and besides it was already in Marx, and besides, if it's in Marx, it's because it's in Hegel, and besides, it's already in Descartes—but I'm not joking, you can say that in... and I'll go further, it's in Plato. From the very origin of philosophy, those who find favor—well, it's the few stammerings of the pre-Socratics taken as prophetic, that Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida love to quote, Parmenides, Heraclitus—that's fine, we have stammerings, what Mallarmé would have called the primitive spellings, and to which you can make say the exact opposite, rather like the sayings of Nostradamus. I have immense respect for the pre-Socratics, one could make a more serious study of them than that, but precisely on condition of not treating them like that, as a purely aphoristic saying steeped in the unfathomable—there, in the unfathomable, as I say, with the advantage of the mists of time. I'm not going to justify myself against the charge of amalgam for people who lump together, into the Gulag, more or less the entire philosophical tradition from Plato down to us, culminating in Hegel. Well, anyway, I can't help it, I can't resist the temptation to read this to you, even if it dirties our mouths a bit with such remarks.
1:03:35 Here, here, here, here—you often hear this in eco-friendly programs. I have nothing against the environment, I'm against ecologism. I'm like everyone else, I care very much about my environment, don't worry, and I don't lie down under exhaust pipes to breathe in their fumes with delight—and besides, nobody does that, so these are empty debates. Here we go: facing Hegel and universal history, we believe there is no true universal history in the scientific sense, meaning there is no history according to which all peoples and all races would together be led toward a single, systematic fusion. That is exactly what contemporary thought reproaches Hegel with, saying he has a linear conception according to which all peoples should pass through the stages of Western rationalization, etc.
1:04:36 Quite apart from all the misreadings this involves, since Hegel spends his time saying that the absolute is present in each of its figures, even in the crudest and most barbaric ones—even, I should say, savage ones—I mean, even in the cultures of the most so-called savage peoples, the absolute is there, in the form of the totem. There's a very beautiful analysis by Hegel of the function of the totem in what are called societies without writing, if you prefer a more objective term than 'savage'—although 'savage,' I sense, etymologically, isn't pejorative, it's the one who saves himself, and believe me, when he sees the whites arriving, he has good reason to save himself, when you know the history. Hegel shows that identification with the totem is the first political self-consciousness in the history of humanity, and the first self-consciousness of objective spirit, as he puts it—I remind you, these are notions that may seem a bit abstract from a distance—so, we believe, on the contrary, according to which all peoples, all races would together be led to a single systematic fusion, according to which there would have to be a project of Christianizing all races—can you imagine?
1:05:38 The universal... those damned Jews bring us Christianity, rationalism, the universal—you find this again today, but not with the 'damned Jews,' quite the contrary, in fact I myself will be accused of anti-Semitism if I defend Hegel—it's really extraordinary—if I defend reason, will people say reason is totalizing, totalitarian, or not? So here is a text hostile to critique, written by a Nazi philosopher, card-carrying—there's not even a need, as with Heidegger, to ask whether he was one or not. In my opinion Heidegger is not a Nazi—there were plenty of minor Nazi philosophers at Heidegger's time, I admit, he isn't the only one—he is not a Nazi, Heidegger, he is the most Nazi of philosophers, which is very different. Bäumler, he is a Nazi, card-carrying, in my opinion, because he's known as a mediocre thinker otherwise—when you look at his other output—when he talks like this with a minimum of coherence in abjection, it was breathed into him by Heidegger, they were very close in any case; you see terms—for those who know Heidegger well—that are obviously simultaneous attacks against Cartesianism, against mechanism, against the machine, against industry, against the tool, against technology, against Christianity, in short, against the Jew.
1:06:50 I'll also remind you—this will bring us back to Marx via Hegel—that at the time, they didn't attack the Jew alone; most of the time he was paired with his comrade, they were after 'Judeo-Bolshevism.' Read the Nazi press of the period carefully, the adversary repeated obsessively—it's not the Jew or the communist, it's both at once, isn't it: Marx is a Jew, no? And Jesus is a Jew! These aren't very sophisticated thoughts. So, Judeo-Bolshevism, whose essential instruments are rationalization, mediocrity—you know the rest—so this idea that there should be a project of Christianizing all races, following which all this would serve the goal of humanizing so-called humanity—we believe, on the contrary, that the history of each people represents for it a vital sphere—I would say, in France, there are doors there—am I contradicting Anaïs?
1:07:50 The problem is that you find these very themes almost word for word throughout a whole strand of thought, sometimes even situated on the left—that's where I sound the alarm—which claims to be anti-Christian, ecologist, rehabilitating pagan gods and solar cults, in Brittany—I'm exaggerating a little, but even when I exaggerate I say so a little, but still, it's the same order, the same field, the same symbolic field, the return of the pagan gods. And so I'm noting, as I close this first part showing Hegel's relevance—if I start from today, and this will let me, as I sum up, announce the good news, which is that I'll take a break right after this, it lasts an hour and a half between two sessions—that we face today, as in Hegel's time, the same fundamental contradiction, and Hegel's merit is at least to have formulated it, as Hyppolite puts it so well—here, he also has rights, there, there, not that but yes, he left it before your eyes, wait, no, not that either, it's you who marked us Antoine, no, nothing—so there, the screen was screening.
1:09:01 Like all screens, it's a back-cover blurb. He wanted to reconcile—and Hyppolite will say it in my place—the fundamental contradiction in which we continue to struggle, and that of Hegel's era: he wanted to reconcile infinite Christian subjectivity—and we come back to the word 'abstract' from earlier—the infinite desire; look at the Parthenon, it's bounded; the cathedral, the minaret, of course reaches toward transcendence, it has no limit but technique, it will go ever higher—he wanted to reconcile infinite Christian subjectivity with the ideal of the ancient city, according to which the State—and for the citizens the State, that is, politics and not religion—is the final end of its world. He wanted to maintain, within the—understood Greek—State, modern bourgeois liberalism, while at the same time affirming that the State was above civil society. And he says—and I'd like to begin my break from this position, which seems to me the most honest, that of good old Hyppolite—no, admirable, these oppositions: that of Christianity and the earthly State, that of the private man and the citizen—where we speak of the veil, of secularism, you know how topical all that still is.
1:10:13 These oppositions—that of the religious and the earthly State, that of the private man and the citizen, of the economic world and the political State—are still our oppositions. One can debate the solutions Hegel gave them, but we will at least recognize, after the little sequence we've just finished before the break, that these remain our oppositions. Ten minutes' break, thanks to the Tropiques bookshop for making this space available to us, let's take our seats. A good hour left—there we go, it's starting. Second part, Pagani, 9 August 2012, it's 6:36 pm. That one I haven't plugged in because he's going to plug it in, so, Pagani 2012, it's 6:36 pm.
A question from the audience: the consumer baby and reclaimed anarchism 1:11:24 After the break, is that okay, Dominique? Is it okay? It's okay, that's good. Before continuing, I think we've gathered enough material together in the previous part—the previous part raises some questions, so I'd really like to gather some questions. There are several reasons to ask questions. The first and most pressing is about the method—that's a bare minimum motivation. Second reason: we've understood, but we'd like to know more. And third: we've understood, we'd like to know more, but we disagree and we have an argument. If it's not one of these reasons for asking questions—there, yes and no, sorry, it's not really a question, it's a bit to talk about, earlier, systematics.
1:12:38 When... but indeed, the Serangan games, I was recently reading a certain... [transcription noise: south south south south south south south south south south south south], dispenses—actually, it's rather coherent, this ties in with what you said, the text of life, etc. But how everything is coherent and everything comes together in the total inversion of values that these people...
1:13:14 That, in the sense that irrational reality appears as a drive somewhat less abstract than one thinks. Because in fact, for Deleuze, sadism is an excess of the superego, an excess of the father, an excess of the law, an excess of the State, ultimately, and an excess of the other. Of the other, that is, the other, my dad, the State... Whereas indeed, quite a few things show us today, if you like, that sadism is rather an excess of the ego, an excess of consumption, ultimately an excess of the consumer, ultimately an excess of the mother, rather than an excess of the father.
1:14:06 But you're leading us to the battle of the sexes, on a whim. No, no, no, but... No, but that fits very well, but you were about to follow up on that. The mother, in the sense that the mother, how, well, the baby's mother, absolute consumer, who needs its mother. The political stage is... I'm interrupting you to give you the floor right back. Good day, sir. Good day. Don't hesitate to sit down, huh. Yes, yes, no, I'm watching you, it's an emotive thing. The, the, the, the... Ah, it's a father of a daughter. Just before, you were saying, I interrupted you when you were talking about...
1:14:36 The father and the mother. Yes. The consumer baby. The absolute consumer baby. That's... That's Aymeric Monville speaking, who's the publisher of Jean Salem, who is here. And... And of myself as well. But above all the publisher who began by devoting a good part of his catalogue to reissuing—and believe me, it took courage—when you saw how he was treated like a mangy dog, poor Clouscard, Michel Clouscard. Who was, in my view, an immense thinker, no doubt the greatest of the postwar era in matters of...
1:15:09 ...Marxist thought, at any rate. And... Along with Lukács. And he often referred to him, by the way. And the notion of the consumer baby is a familiar concept to readers of Clouscard. There, that's just to make the point. I give you back the floor. Yes, no. It's a bit off. It's to say that in fact the whole... The coherence of these people's thinking, if you like, is total. Yes, quite so. On the social level as on the anthropological level, they ultimately invert...
1:15:41 Thank you from Paris. They invert everything. And so I'll go along a bit with what Clouscard says precisely about that. He shows, if you like, that... These people, in the end, haven't they remained stuck at the stage of a criticism of their own parasitic consumption? That is, they haven't reached the political stage, ultimately, of consumption of... as the prince would put it in a word.
1:16:11 There you go, absolutely. That is to say, they've remained stuck at the stage of the absolute consumer, that is, of the mother. They haven't moved on to the political stage, the stage of... Yes, except that the mother still offers resistance to the baby, she doesn't let herself be devoured easily. Yes, yes. And yet it's not for lack of loving her baby. It's a metaphor. It's a good upbringing that she gives her baby, weaning. There you go. But it's true that there is indeed a... a coherence at the social and anthropological level in these people's theses. No, no, but I'm not being ironic at all.
1:16:41 You do very well to raise the battle of the sexes, that's a jest. We're not going to speak in terms of war. But still, there is indeed a conflict—though not at all in the sense posed in certain excesses of today's feminist movement. You know, I was making a criticism. When Hegel speaks of the abstract self, of abstract negativity, of the self that posits itself as self at the cost of negating everything that is not self—that's negativity—but unfortunately negating it concretely, if it were only in his head, when it holds power...
1:17:15 So I was accusing it of anarchism. I would like here to pay tribute—let there be no misunderstanding—to a tradition of popular anarchism, quite simply, first and foremost, before any logical argument—it's rather rare for me to say that, it's not a matter for Hegel—because there is a blood bond. I don't know about it in the Spanish Civil War, but elsewhere, at the Paris Commune, between the anarchists and the workers' movement, there is a blood bond. That, I respect, that anarchism, of course. What I criticize is the conservative co-optation of anarchism, that of the American libertarian who waits for the tax man with a gun at his hip.
1:17:51 There are American sects like that, it's the individual in the absolute sense, I owe nothing to anyone—why not? Look at Rousseau's account. Rousseau in Émile: outside society, apart from it, the isolated individual has the right to live as he pleases. And indeed, when Rousseau was on the Île Saint-Pierre, in his isola, to speak Italian, he said that he had given himself over with delight to precious idleness—he has the right to do as he pleases. The isolated man has the right to live as he pleases.
1:18:23 But in society, says Rousseau—and here we have surely the most Marxist sentence Rousseau ever wrote—he necessarily lives at the expense of others. Here, Rousseau doesn't say that there are scoundrels who live at others' expense. He says that as human beings, we necessarily live at the expense of others. What am I doing? I'm using the French language—I didn't invent it, for heaven's sake, I use it. It existed before me, I couldn't communicate with you without the fabulous tools, like language in general, handed down to me by humanity, and the French language, handed down to me by a fraction of humanity, which allows me to communicate over a wide field.
1:19:01 That's one of a million examples I could give to say that the other is always present. And so Rousseau says—but in society where he lives at the expense of others—let me finish my sentence, the most important one—he owes them, in labor, the price of his keep. There you go: we have the right to live at others' expense when we give the equivalent in labor. I find that perhaps the most Marxist passage of Rousseau's Émile. It's the moment when Rousseau insists that his pupil learn a manual trade, and his mother, who is an aristocrat, is horrified to see her son—since a noble doesn't work, but on top of that, working like a noble at best—he says there were little workshops, fashionable at the end of the 18th century.
1:19:36 Montesquieu dabbled in chemistry, as with the Encyclopédie; Voltaire in physics; Rousseau in botany—it was the fashion. No, no, no, one must learn a manual trade, says Rousseau. He says clearly, I don't want him to be an artist or a book-binder-gilder, I want a trade that makes the hands work more than the head, you see—not an artist, not even an artisan touched by art, truly a manual trade. And the mother says to my son: 'My son a craftsman, sir, do you mean it?' I'm quoting, mind you. And the tutor, the narrator so to speak of Émile, replies: 'I mean it better than you, madam, you who want to make him nothing but a marquis, a lord, a prince, and perhaps one day less than nothing.'
1:20:15 'As for me, I will give him a rank he cannot lose. I will raise him to the estate of man. And whatever you may say, he will have fewer equals in that title than in all those he would hold from you.' He means the titles of nobility of the time. There. Some of Rousseau's peaks are among the summits of my French language. There's an 'as' in him too, in Rousseau, huh. And that's admirable. And so, you do very well to bring in this feminism business I was drawing back from. I'll extend my parenthesis, bringing it up to date, to properly understand the ideological world we live in and the dominant pressures it exerts, insofar as there's a right-wing co-optation, let's say, of anarchism for the benefit of individualism for its own sake, which won't answer to anyone, free enterprise, as I said earlier about the Robinsonades—those who were here a bit before the discussion started, I referred to what Marx called the Robinsonades.
1:21:06 As if they imagined that at the origin of humanity there were isolated individuals, each in his own place exactly, who then all of a sudden decided to associate, because after all it was more practical, technically speaking, for living. No, no, there is no isolated human being. Rousseau saw clearly that man only begins to exist in the civil state, not in the state of nature. In the state of nature, says Rousseau, in chapter 8 of the first book of the Social Contract, he is a stupid and limited animal. It's the passage to the civil state that makes him an intelligent being and a man. I'm quoting, not interpreting. So, this right-wing recuperation of anarchism, to which I pay tribute, which was a companion in the struggle for proletarian emancipation, I would say, as opposed to the bourgeois recuperation of anarchism for the benefit of the leftist thought we've known since May '68.
1:21:54 You know, everything is permitted. Like for Rimbaud's prince, the Nero figure there, everything is permitted. Well yes, everything is permitted—to which Clouscard added, it's even the title of the DVD devoted to him, made by two young people who produced an admirable film about his thought and his life. The DVD is for sale in this bookshop. It's not... it's called: everything is permitted, but nothing is possible. You know, since May '68, everything is permitted, but at the ATM. A nice trick, a nice recuperation of anarchism.
Antigone, a thread running through Hegel's whole work 1:22:27 What do you want, as long as you don't obstruct the implacable law of the market? The market and the competition of individuals, as you say, all that is very coherent. No! The remark—where it's providential, the question, well, your interjection, speaking of men and women, is that it brings us back to a real conflict between masculinity and femininity, analyzed by Hegel. That's where I'm getting to. Which is so far from marginal—the conflict I'm speaking of, man-woman as a concept, I don't mean male-female, that's in nature.
1:23:02 We're talking about man-woman, that only exists in culture and in history. There are females more virile than certain males, and vice versa. So let's not get lost in that, I wanted to note it in passing. This conflict is so far from marginal in Hegel's work that it runs diagonally through the whole of it. I'm speaking of the tragic conflict, when he analyzes it, for example, in his monumental four-volume Aesthetics, and when he comes to the tragic conflict, to Greek tragedy, the most classical tragedy there is, and to the great Greek tragedian, in particular Sophocles.
1:23:38 And in Sophocles, in particular in the tragedy of Antigone. There, that's where I get to femininity. You know, the current, ideological and right-wing version of Antigone would make her that little bourgeois girl who rebels, like an individual who doesn't want to pay taxes, against the State. She would be the symbol of the great revolt against the State, against power. Foucault—his enemy isn't capitalism, it's power. As Bachelard said, to be engaged is to be precise.
1:24:08 There isn't much commitment when you resent power in general. And in this case, Hegel is fascinated—I do mean fascinated, that's rather rare, it's a Hegelian word, for someone captured by an effort of rationalization rather than letting himself be hypnotized or fascinated or 'bluffed,' as we'd say today. There is a fascination running through his whole work: it's the conflict in Antigone. He translated it at fifteen, when he was still in secondary school, he wrote it in the sixth grade [Realschule].
1:24:38 We have a commentary. It serves as the backdrop to the most disturbing, most developed passage of the Phenomenology of Spirit, in its second volume—we're not there yet—when he reaches what he calls the ethical world. It's the first time that spirit becomes conscious of itself as a collectivity, as opposed to individual spirit, let's say—collective spirit. He uses the Greek world to illustrate it in the Phenomenology.
1:25:08 So, it serves as a backdrop, if you will, to the analyses Hegel makes of the tragic conflict in the Greek world. That's not all. At the end of his life, when he wrote the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, which is his political testament—it's not arid, it's not arid, austere, lacking the rich, concrete mediations of the Phenomenology, the figures of the beautiful soul, of the unhappy consciousness, of master and slave. It's much more abstract, it's the philosophy of right, but all the more striking for that, at a certain point, when he comes to the relation between what, in political philosophy, is called civil society and the State.
1:25:45 We seem far from Antigone now, we're right in the thick of it. All of a sudden he makes a remark in which he quotes the tragedy of Antigone. He says, of all the masterpieces... I'm going too fast. Let me set aside the Philosophy of Right, let me go back, I skipped a step—it's his monumental Aesthetics that you alluded to earlier. When he's dealing with the septic—[i.e., getting to it]—he comes to tragedy. Let me remind you, for those who've learned this, perhaps quickly, and all the more so for those who don't know it, that Hegel's Aesthetics presents an unfolding, there's an order, a hierarchy of the arts, which runs roughly from the plastic arts toward the arts of time—so you'll have poetry and music, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, etc.
1:26:24 So poetry at the summit, and within poetry, at the summit of poetry, dramatic poetry. I say dramatic and not tragic, this time so as to include comedy as well, dramatic art in general. And tragedy—for example, and Hölderlin—there was much discussion between the two of them at the seminary, at Tübingen and in Switzerland, I'm sure, I can almost hear them as if I were there—and in the Greek city, the mysterious summit of Greek art, for both of them, is indeed tragedy, even more than the statues of Apollo, of Phidias, and of the Parthenon, which mobilize everything else.
1:27:00 In tragedy you have the visual, the set, the plastic—it's the total work of art, as has been said about the Ninth [Symphony]. Plus poetry through text, plus dance, mime, everything is there. I come back to Antigone and to the conflict between the sexes. So, instead of accepting this anachronistic misreading, making her out to be someone who defends the individual against the totalitarianism of the city represented here by the man Creon, let me remind you very quickly of the plot: there's a war between Thebes and another city, purely political, war, a man's affair, especially at the time—apart from the Amazons—
1:27:39 And among the citizens, among the warriors of Thebes, there are two enemy brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, and one of the two brothers who quarrel—that's classic in family lines, it's Abel and Cain, it's Romulus and Remus, founding legends, and there's development of this in Freud. And you know how, in Freudian symbolism, how dreams represent collateral relatives—do you know the Freudian symbol?
1:28:13 What is the symbol used? To represent collateral relatives, to show that there's more than one blood line involved, vermin. When one dreams of insects, generally vermin swarming. Anyway, I'll leave you to judge. In short, conflict between Eteocles and Polynices. One of the two hates the other so much that he betrays the city, by collaborating, as we'd say today, with the enemy city. There, that's the plot, and it's so monstrous—there's nothing worse, in the world of Greek values, than betraying one's city. Creon, ruler of the city of Thebes, decides, as a political decision, purely political, that faced with such a monstrous crime as betraying one's city, it is forbidden to anyone whomsoever to offer burial to this renegade—and so Antigone, who is the sister, of the corpse in question, nonetheless rises up in the name of the laws of blood, and you know the rest, she will be condemned to be walled up alive for her crime.
Blood tie versus political tie: two one-sided positions 1:29:11 So Hegel says: not only is it not the individual against the totalitarian city, it's the opposite. She defends a collectivity, not the individual. A collectivity more natural than the city. Let me explain. In 'natural' [naturel], there is 'natal' [natal], N-A-T, there is birth in nature. It wasn't enough to be born, there was a time when it sufficed to be born noble in order to be noble, wasn't it? One was noble by nature, or else one wasn't. By birth, that means.
1:29:41 Until the moment of the Edict of the Paulette. Does that mean anything to you, the Edict of the Paulette, for those interested in history? It's called that because it was drawn up, under Louis XIII, by Paulet, a counselor, you know, in the Parlement of Paris, Paulet, P-A-U-L-E-T—there was the Edict of the Paulette. It's the edict that established what's called the venality of offices, starting from the Edict of the Paulette. Those are the great, silent turning points of history. Before, you had to be born noble to be noble. Now, no—I can become one, all I have to do is pay.
1:30:13 That's what was called at the time gilding one's coat of arms. The nobles were quite happy to find bourgeois who wanted to marry their daughters, to bring back a bit of money. In the noble families, they'd ruined themselves warring. When you don't work, money can only decrease. It can't increase. And that's how the bourgeoisie, the reason of the nobility, ended up beheading even the king. Let's leave this historical thriller aside and come back to Antigone. In the Aesthetics, when he gives his lectures, when he gets to this tragedy, there's this cry — what pride and at the same time what great pedagogical spirit is wrung from him because he's talking about Antigone, he has to say, he loses his composure.
1:30:48 He says this to his students, to his listeners: of all the masterpieces of Antiquity and the modern world — and I know them all, it's true he had extraordinary erudition, but still. And he adds, which tempers the vanity of the statement, each person can and must know them. That's where he's a great pedagogue. I don't have knowledge like that, reserved for a few initiates, the Church, no. All of that is here for me. That way it can be communicated, that is, transmitted, which is what he's doing. And each person can and must know them, of all the masterpieces of Antiquity and the modern world.
1:31:18 Not literary masterpieces, all the masterpieces of art. Literary, plastic, music — Antigone seems to him the most perfect, the most satisfying. And he adds, here is a conflict that still retains for us all its significance. So we no longer understand. I'll tell you why afterward, with my last example — so now, the Philosophy of Right, Berlin, the old Hegel, we come to the clash between civil society and the state, and he says, we find an illustration of this clash in the tragedy of Antigone. This tragedy embodies, I quote him, the supreme ethical opposition, the most highly tragic one.
1:31:54 In it, femininity and masculinity are individualized. There's a great deal at stake in this tragedy. What is opposed here is not the individual against society, against the city — that would be anachronistic, that belongs to a modern bourgeois society, to make a splash like that. It's progress, it's not pejorative. What is opposed is an archaic collectivity, that is, one whose bond is a natural bond, since it's a bond of blood, a bond of birth. Let me come back to my point. You know, I'm Corsican.
1:32:25 That's what vendettas are. Someone came to find me once when I was a student in Paris — forgive me for lapsing into anecdote, all the same it's substantial, as Hegel says. It's incredible what happens to you in substantial, archaic societies. I'm not in Corsica, I can speak freely. Someone came looking for me to go rough up someone who had supposedly dishonored one of my cousins whom I'd never seen except maybe at age 7, at a wedding, for 2 minutes. And I was supposed to go avenge the honor, since in my veins are supposedly flowing a few drops of common blood, of which I am objectively a stakeholder.
1:32:59 That's how it is, you see — when things were archaic, you had to rough people up. I got out of it by saying I was myself pursuing another vendetta, etc., without going into details. Me too, huh. Well, anyway, I see this is turning into an anecdote. The blood bond — that's how it was known at the time. And... And opposed to a bond that is not natural, there's the political bond, the bond of citizenship, embodied by Creon. So now I can see Hegel coming — he sides against poor Antigone because she's a woman, that's just his macho side.
1:33:35 I'm speaking like a Deleuzo-Foucauldian or Derridean reader. And... Onfrayian. All those monotonous readings when you take things theme by theme. And... He sides with Creon who defends, of course, the state, the state... Ah no, no, no, Hegel does not side with Creon. Hegel, who is a dialectician, shows that both are wrong. That both are 'einseitig,' as they say in German. 'Seite' is 'side' in English, that's the side. They are each on one side only, they are one-sided.
1:34:07 There's a deal, Hegel says, within the city. There's a deep and dialectical deal. The citizen belongs to the city. It made him a citizen. I spoke about feral children in the first session, last time, last Thursday, if you remember. And I remind you that it's not enough to be born a man — pardon, to be born of human ancestry — to be human oneself. An education, a transmission must take over, through a contribution from society — in this case from the family, from the parents — must relay millennia of history in order to humanize what would otherwise become a little monster, which is what a child is.
1:34:51 I'm wary of pedagogues who say children must be allowed to flourish. Not everything is about flourishing. I was a child myself. Everyone has, deep down, memories of impulses that would have been better off not flourishing. I'm telling you that. In short, when you've seen children with animals, you understand what I mean. The cuter it is, the more it gets tortured. I have no ambivalence about impulses. That's not my subject today. So, Antigone's attitude toward Creon — not only does Hegel not side with Creon against Antigone, as contemporaries rush to side with an Antigone disguised as a contemporary leftist against a totalitarian Creon, but he shows that both commit a fault.
1:35:33 I repeat, the citizen belongs to the city. The city sends him off to war against the Persians, whatever, he has duties. He understood the duty of life or death. But once he's dead, he belongs to the family. The family is in charge of the funeral rites. There's a magnificent page of analysis in the second volume — I gave too long a monologue on it, I'll spare you the citation — but which has been noted in anthropology. Ricœur in particular, among philosophers, noted how astonishingly Hegel anticipated, with striking relevance, the work of the most contemporary anthropology, in the way he interprets funeral rites in societies in general.
1:36:08 Man trying to have some part in death, so that death isn't merely an accident against which one can do nothing, trying to repeat death. You need only look at the Egyptian Book of the Dead or the Tibetan Book of the Dead to understand what we're saying here and what Hegel means. It's a way of acting as if man could somehow codify the uncodifiable. So once he's dead, it falls to the family — that's the deal that has always existed — it's up to the family to go take his body, to bury it according to the rites.
1:36:38 So Creon commits a fault too, Hegel says. He too commits a hubris like Antigone — she commits a hubris by standing up against the law of the city, which is the worst crime in the Greek world — but Creon also commits a crime by overstepping his field. His field is that of the city, the public world, not the private world. And that's precisely why your question is crucial. You see that femininity and masculinity — I'm stepping completely outside the pseudo-feminist chatter of today, a feminism I respect, the one that says equal work, equal pay, that's not the same thing.
1:37:08 There's an admirable book published by Éditions Delga called Les femmes de la CGT — you'll see the difference between real emancipation of women and the kind that consists of saying 'Madame la ministre' or 'Madame le ministre.' I don't know if that's an important feminism, but in any case, what I'm calling out is that it costs nothing, it's beneath capital, and capital adores it — that feminism. Think about it. When it's societal rather than social, capital adores it. You know, the societal is capital in fashionable dress. So I absolutely have to read you the passage — I wanted to summarize a bit first so it seems a little less abstract — where Hegel distributes these two roles.
Reading the ethical world: human law and divine law 1:38:06 Let me read a passage straight through without stopping; if there are obscurities, don't worry, they'll be clarified later in the passage. He's distinguishing two laws within the city — but let's picture the Greek city here, the one that saw this tragedy we're discussing come to birth. Two laws: what he calls divine law and human law. Divine law is Antigone's. Antigone says to Creon — I'm quoting Sophocles — you appeal to the law of the city, I appeal to an unwritten law, that of the gods below. I don't quite remember the rest.
1:38:41 Well, there it is. The law — in short, Creon is sacrilegious in not respecting what, from Neanderthal times to our own day, is nonetheless sacred: the burial of the dead. So divine law and human law — the one decided on the agora, clearly, in explicit articulation, not in the shadows of tradition, intuition, or feeling, but in the explicit articulation of laws formulated and debated where speech happens, that is, in Parliament, on the agora, in Rome, as they say. So now, within each of these laws too there are further distinctions and levels.
1:39:16 The community — that's Creon, the law from above — whose validity manifests itself in the light of day, its effective vitality in the government, for that is where it is individuated. The government — I'm not speaking of the state in general, but of the Greek city. The government is the effective spirit, reflected into itself. It is the simple self of the ethical substance of the city as a whole. Overall. It's true that this simple force allows the essence to extend itself into the organized members composing it. The state — even the Greek city — sometimes happens to be a bit liberal.
1:39:48 I repeat, I don't know if I'd call it liberal — it's true that this simple force, the government, allows the essence — the collective essence, civil society, as we'd say today — to extend into the organized members that compose it and to give each part its own subsistence and its own being-for-itself. In this, spirit has its reality. The fact that it unfolds into different parts — this social class, that milieu, this profession, that sect, whatever — in these parts, in this, spirit — replace 'spirit' with 'city' and you'll understand everything.
1:40:23 Spirit is at the same time — in this, spirit has its reality or its being-there. Dasein simply means existence. And the family is the element of this reality. Now here, a small question of vocabulary: in Hegelian language, 'element' is not at all meant in the atomist sense. It doesn't mean the simple elements you use to build a mechano-set, atoms making molecules and molecules making composite bodies — that's not it. 'Element' is meant in the sense of the marine element, that is, the surrounding medium without which the thing in question couldn't even survive.
1:40:53 When he says, for instance, that logic unfolds within the element of absolute knowledge, that means one must have gone through all the stages of the Phenomenology, ready to shed one's illusions one by one, in order finally to arrive within the element of knowledge. It's a bit funny. There you go. So here, the element is of course the element of the city, the political element. In this, spirit has its reality or its being-there, and the family is the element of this reality. Indeed, if it's true that the law from above, as he says, the law of the community embodied by men in the world of the city — fortunately now the two roles can be shared by all sexes.
1:41:35 Human law, as he says, attaches itself to what is manifest, explicit, in the light of day — and you'll notice, by contrast, that in Greek mythology everything on the women's side, Hecate, etc., is a dark world. Hecate, for instance, is the queen of poisons. Everything that shies away from the light of day, often, isn't that so? And Phaedra in the labyrinth, with you gone down — it would be, with you, found or lost.
1:42:05 No, I'll tell you — she's going to be walled up alive, poor Antigone, you see, how it all echoes. But when he says the family is the element of this reality — the city, to speak rigorously, gives citizens their essence as man, their essence as citizen. He's no longer a feral child, a Mowgli, a wolf-child. Thanks to the city, the little animal that was born, the animal becomes man. You remember that in the Preface he said that if the embryo is indeed in itself man, the embryo, the fetus, is not yet so for itself — it becomes so through education, through all the mediations, I won't go back over that.
1:42:44 So if it gives essence to man, it does not give him existence — the city, that is. That's woman's role. Here Hegel has clearly seen the two forces. Still, without the natural element — for I'm not saying woman is more natural than man, don't make me say what I haven't said, I'm saying that the process by which a woman brings a child into the world is not a cultural process. It's not something decided by man, purely anthropological, but exists in the organic world well before the appearance of man.
1:43:18 So it's a natural process. I'm talking about childbearing, not about woman as such — a bit of a child. But still, without woman, who here is cast into the shadow of an archaic society, the citizen would indeed have an essence thanks to the city, but what good is having an essence when there's still no existence. Woman still brings existence to the citizen. That's why he lives. He is the element of this Wirklichkeit when it is actualized. It's indeed Wirklichkeit, effective reality. But let's come back now to the government — spirit is at the same time the force of the whole which gathers its parts once more into the negative one.
1:43:53 We've become a bit warlike again. The negative one is the city, Creon, the government. And it gives them the feeling of their dependence, and holds their consciousness of their life only within the whole. You, citizen, will have your life only as a member of the city. Right. So, since this is a somewhat long development, let me find the passage where it's summed up best — the right of what's sanctified.
1:44:24 There. The community is the spirit that is for itself. I come back to this differentiation, back to Creon. It is spirit that is for itself when it maintains itself by being reflected into the individuals. The effective substance — this spirit is a people. As effective consciousness, it is a citizen of the people. This consciousness has its essence in the individual spirit, and its self-certainty in the effectiveness of this spirit throughout the whole people. And it immediately has, in this, also its truth.
1:44:55 Its truth, yes, but not its reality. Its reality is given to it by the family. You see, you're starting to see the two terms of the conflict. Thus, not in something that isn't effective, but in a spirit that has existence and validity. Such a spirit — the one Creon defends — can be called human law, because it exists essentially in the form of self-conscious effectiveness. What gets voted on in the agora. One speaks, thinks, deliberates, then makes the law. In the form of universality, it is publicly known law. So you see, the metaphor of the day, the law of daylight versus the nocturnal law embodied by Antigone, works both literally, since it happens on the agora, in daylight, and figuratively, in the sense of the Enlightenment.
1:45:35 That's where rational debate happens. So it is publicly known law, and customary morality, in the form of singularity and effective self-certainty. But — that's Creon — to its ethical powers, those of government, of the city, embodied at that time by man — I don't mean the male, male/female is natural, man/woman is cultural. But to this ethical power and to this manifestness — there, it's manifest, it's not hidden, it's not intimate, it's not domestic, it's not the family — but to this ethical power and this manifestness is opposed another power, the divine law.
1:46:14 Indeed, the ethical power, the power of the state, being the movement of explicitly conscious operation — that's underlined — finds its opposition in the simple and immediate essence. Consciousness is mediation, you have to reason it through; the most immediate is that of feeling, of ethical order. As effective universality, the power of the state is a force exerted against individual being-for-self, and as effectivity in general, the government finds, in the inward senses — the opposite of manifestness, of the light of day — in the inward senses, something else again than what it itself is.
1:46:47 And Creon's fault, Hegel says, is not recognizing the importance of this other — of the family, of the nocturnal world, and of femininity. It has already been mentioned that each of the opposed modes of existence of substance — woman as much as man, the private as much as the public, since that's what Hegel is developing, the family is the world of the private. Once the citizen is dead, it becomes an entirely private matter. Creon has no business meddling, no state has any business meddling. It is sacred. So if the community, then — yes, he's speaking of its modes of existence, the two we're contrasting — he says each contains the whole substance, I reassure you, he reassures you.
1:47:28 It has already been mentioned that each of the opposed modes of existence of substance — Antigone or Creon — contains it entirely and contains all the moments of its content. If then the community and the ethical substance, as the side of self-conscious effective operation — you recognize Creon there — the other side has the form of immediate substance, or substance posited in the element of being. We're no longer in essence, the citizen who has raised man to his essence. We have the element of being, more immediate. Ah yes, being — that matters too, it exists after all. In the element of being.
1:48:00 This, the inner essence, is thus on the one hand the inner concept or the universal possibility of the ethical order in general. Femininity is possibility, you see — the actual and the necessary would not exist without the possible first. There would be no tree without first the seed that gave birth to it. The possible. This is thus on the one hand the inner concept or universal possibility of ethical order in general, but on the other hand, equally present in it, the moment of self-consciousness. We're not talking about females among animals here, but about women, human women, and self-consciousness.
1:48:31 This moment, opposed to Creon's, this moment expressing ethical order within this element of immediacy or of being, or an immediate consciousness of self, both as essence and as this particular self in another — that is, a natural ethical community — is the family. So it is not an individual against society that makes Antigone, unforgettably, rise up in flames and rebel. It's in the name of a community that Hegel calls a natural ethical community, as opposed to the purely political ethical community of citizenship.
1:49:04 The family, as the unconscious concept — not yet Freud, but close — and which is still only inward, arises in the face of the effectiveness of the concept when it is explicitly conscious. As the element of the effectiveness of the people, it arises in the face of the people itself. We see clearly that he's thinking of Antigone, he never stopped thinking of her. As the immediate ethical being confronting the ethical order that shapes and preserves itself through labor for the universal. The Penates, you know, were the divinities presiding over domesticity, over the family, the little household gods. The Penates arise in the face of universal spirit, in the face of the city.
1:49:38 Yes, it's true, your question, Edmond, allowed us to anticipate this crucial passage titled, as a chapter in the Phenomenology, second volume, 'The Ethical World,' which is supposed to correspond, for all commentators — and I say so myself — to the Greek moment of history. But here I want to warn you, this is not a history textbook. There's a good deal of history we don't know, which Hegel knew very well. He became passionate about history very early on. He knows antiquity admirably, but also the English revolutions — he did extensive work on Cromwell — but anyway, let's move on.
Neither a history book nor a Bildungsroman 1:50:13 Let's just say he had roughly all the documentation one could reasonably have at that time, with the means of a somewhat exiled German professor, far away, without the Internet and so on. And he took this up in anthropology. So in this second volume, when he speaks of ethics and the city, it's not a history book, but a book that uses historical references familiar to us, known to us.
1:50:45 That is, the literary reference is among the best known of all, but in such a way that for him these are moments through which we — that is, consciousness — have passed, and without these stages we would not understand the result we are today. In fact, Hegel subscribes, like every philosopher, to the Pythian imperative, the one inscribed on the pediment of the Temple of Apollo when people came to consult the oracle: the famous 'gnôthi seauton,' know thyself. Of course Hegel subscribes to it, on condition that the 'self' not be too abstract.
1:51:18 It will take a great deal of time, centuries, even millennia, to see that within the self there are also all sorts of determinations coming to me from outside, from the collectivity, from history, etc. So it's not a history book, it's an almost cinematic projection — but I'll cover that next time, when we talk about what's clumsily called 'Hegel's method.' That's something Hegel avoided — separating method from content. He says so often; I could point to plenty of passages where he says you can't present the method first and then apply it afterward.
1:51:51 That's exactly the sin of formalism. Except for purely pedagogical purposes, and even then it can backfire. He says the method must reveal itself as the thing itself progresses. That's why he spends his time in the Preface saying — as I've told you, gratuitously, because for it to be necessary, it should coincide with what follows the Preface, after all. So next time, I intend to comment not on the Preface of the Phenomenology, but on the Introduction, because the Preface is followed by an Introduction which is fascinating. Because there Hegel defines the genre.
1:52:21 He answers the question we're asking ourselves: is it a history book? Is it a novel? Do you remember? The Phenomenology has often been understood as what's called in Germany a Bildungsroman, and in French a 'roman de formation' — but that's a German specialty. Even though, between France and Germany, it was a Swiss who first inaugurated the genre, with Émile. Isn't that so? Through Rousseau's mediation. Between French classicism, the Enlightenment, and German nocturnal romanticism — the Reveries. Reveries are intermediate between day and night. We're full of night.
1:52:55 It's between masculine and feminine, it's very Rousseau. What matters is seeing the answer to the question of genre. Genre — I've tried to develop this a bit elsewhere, but I'll sum it up here. It's not history. There is history as material. It's not a novel. There is novel in it. When Hegel says in his Preface, as I've quoted several times, but I repeat it, the aim of the Phenomenology — the aim, if there really is one summary, he hates summaries — is to bring philosophical consciousness, that of the intellectual, down to common consciousness, hence indeed a pedagogical aim, and conversely, to raise common consciousness to philosophical consciousness.
1:53:39 That comes from Rousseau, from Émile, and it continues with Goethe, Goethe's masterpiece — I won't repeat it, I said it last time — Wilhelm Meister, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, that's the exact title, where Goethe admirably shows, before Flaubert, the trajectory of the petty bourgeois who starts out with ideals, etc., and comes to terms with reality by reconciling himself with what he calls the prose of life. Goethe, a survivor of the novel, always kept a certain distance. You know, as for Goethe's last words — it's fairly well known — at the moment of his death, it's not very romantic.
1:54:14 The Romantics wrote the Hymns to the Night — that's the title, in Shadow, of Novalis, who seems the most romantic of the German Romantics. That's to guide you. When Goethe died — bravo — 'mehr Licht,' more light. Goethe is someone who claims descent from the Greeks, from classicism, etc., everything that the Nazi was condemning earlier, the Weimar classicism. Yes, I told you we'd come back to it, but here it's very quick, for historical purposes. When the Nazi was railing against Weimar earlier, some of you may not have understood why. He's deliberately conflating Weimar — of course, the Weimar Republic, you know that, that is to say the form of decadent bourgeoisie, ruined by the Judeo-Bolshevik from within, undermined without even realizing it.
1:54:54 In short, parliamentary democracy, roughly the last one Germany knew before the Third Reich — so, Weimar. But he's playing at the same time on something every cultivated German understands very well, which is that Weimar, if you know Germany a little, is a small town, as I told you — Germany isn't a capital where everything is concentrated, the opera, and so on. Every small state capital has its own opera, its own theater. Weimar is the great literary capital of Germany. That's where Goethe and Schiller reigned, so to speak; people came from all over Germany, intellectual Germany, to visit the gods.
1:55:27 They were gods. There's the statue of Goethe and Schiller hand in hand on the central square of Weimar — the gods of what we believe to be, we, Romanticism, because there's always a slight gap with the Germans, but which is their own classicism. It's their root, their Corneille — Goethe and Schiller. A gap of about a century, all the same. That's who 'we' are. I say this to show what the little Nazi is attacking — precisely the best of Germany, the one that was wary of what Lukács, the great Marxist philosopher, calls the operation of the destruction of reason, carried out by irrationalism, especially among the German counter-revolutionaries.
1:56:01 That's exactly what the little Nazi from earlier was attacking. And of course, Hegel is one of those who were wary as of the plague of what is supposedly deep, obscure German-ness, the abyss, the unfathomable, as the other one said earlier. And when people spoke to him of Deutschtum — if some of you know German, that roughly means German-T, Germanness, Deutschtum — Hegel would answer: yes, Deutschtum, yes — 'dumm,' that means stupid. Because there were already nationalist student demonstrations at the time, already German ones, etc.
1:56:32 Deutschtum. There's the good Germany — the good Germany, that doesn't mean being pro-German or pro-French. You know, there's the France of the Resistance and the France of collaboration. Those are the fence-sitters, so to speak. I showed it with de Gaulle earlier — one can be anti-Gaullist and still be a full-blown fascist. I'd even say one is all the more so for being a full-blown fascist. I render that justice to someone I've always voted against. So, this long detour, to recall that the question, the answer to the question of what genre we're in — I reject none of these contributions.
The problem of genre and the interior that expresses itself 1:57:04 There's history, there's the novel, but there's something even closer. Among genres — I'm speaking of literary genre — it's something that's always troubled me, but I'm not here to bother you with my personal quirks, because I believe there's a great objective problem that Nerval admirably developed in a novella called Angélique. The problem of genre — we've noted that humanity is divided by sex, psychoanalysis plunged into that; we've noted it was divided by class, that's Marxism. We shouldn't forget that the world of literary writing is divided by genre.
1:57:35 I could still say I'm amalgamating things that... But all the same, the common point among the three is that we don't choose the genre. We are chosen by genre every time we write, whether we know it or not. Writing to your fiancée to say 'I'm a soldier, it's over, I'm coming back' — since he's a soldier who's made promises to several — or to your boss to ask for a raise. We're in the epistolary genre. I mean, whether we want it or not, even when I write a letter, depending on whether I write it to my girlfriend, to a friend to tell a story, to a classmate to recount how I spent my vacation, to a boss to ask for a raise.
1:58:12 One could say I found something better that goes together elsewhere. Or to my parents to ask for their news. I don't use the same vocabulary. Yet it's apparently the same subject writing. I don't use the same syntax. I don't use the same tone. So, I'm not the sole author. Lacan saw this admirably when he says: 'Before signifying something, every word signifies for someone.' What makes a word have meaning isn't looking inside the head of the one who wrote it for what he meant to say, the intended meaning, some hidden thing beneath a stone.
1:58:43 No, no — in Freud, what is inner expresses itself. You might want to hide something from me, and you tell me everything in a slip that lasts a fraction of a second and is worth 40 pages of details all on its own. The inner expresses itself, and Hegel spends his time repeating: the depth of spirit is profound. I'm quoting a sentence from the preface to the Phenomenology: 'The depth of spirit is only as deep as it dares to spread itself out, to externalize itself, and to lose itself in unfolding.'
1:59:15 It's thoughts that lack depth that are afraid to externalize themselves and think it's richer to keep things to oneself, and that language, as soon as I express myself, will betray the depth of my thought. You know, there are students who tell you: 'Sir, what I said may be worthless, but what I thought was brilliant.' Well yes, but on the day of the exam, my friend, you'll be judged on what you said, not on what you thought. That's the problem. Between men, we express ourselves. Between human beings. And those who think their thought is a thousand times richer than anything words could say remind me of those who go scuba diving as a kid and are quite disappointed to be like a fish coming back up to the surface.
What is for consciousness and what is for us 1:59:49 Well yes, when you express yourself, what you thought was profound gets enriched — you come up with contradictions you would never have thought of alone. There you go. It does you good to go through the other in order to know yourself. So, I'm getting there. It's not history, it's not a novel, but it is a literary genre, and I'll say it — I won't keep you waiting — we are in the theater. I'm not Antigone.
2:00:19 All this in the wake of Edmond's intervention. We are in a theater. In the Phenomenology, not in Hegel's work in general. That's what makes the prodigious originality of this work. We are in a darkened room. The lights are dimmed. Wagner wanted total darkness in order to hypnotize his listeners. He invented total darkness at the opera. He invented cinema before the letter. And when the rehearsals for Parsifal took place — his testament, his masterpiece — when he arrived, he saw a conservatory student who had come to watch, hypnotized by the scene of the showing of the Grail in the first act.
2:00:58 He used the eye and the ear, hypnotized by the total spectacle. Wagner came up behind him and took off his glasses, saying 'Brille ab' — take off the glasses. So, we are in the theater, therefore in the sphere of representation. We should note — earlier he told us that Hegel's philosophy was an unceasing struggle against representation. Yes, yes, absolutely. But one must pass through representation in order to understand what is represented within the representation.
2:01:35 What matters is the 're' in that moment. I see my grandmother, I don't need to think of her since I see her, she's there, I'm talking to her. But if I close my eyes and represent her to myself, then, yes, she had to have been present in order to be re-presented again. We'll come back to this because it's important, the world of representation. In the philosophies of the last thirty years, there's been a lot of emphasis on the field of the imaginary. That's it, the world — well, we'll be told, the world of the dream. But yes, but yes, but yes. The world of the dream that Hegel's contemporaries wanted to push to the absolute — the Romantics, too.
2:02:05 That's what makes their depth and their limits. So, we are in the theater, within the theater. Sorry, I'm going too fast — there you have it, you've guessed it, we are in the theater, and within the theater, because there are subgenres within theater — tragedy, comedy, skit, sketch, impromptu, the Impromptu de Versailles, I'll tell you. The total work of art, a tetralogy that lasts four days and four minutes as in Wagner. No, no. Here we are in a specific genre, which is theater within theater. You know it, you've seen it in Corneille, L'Illusion comique. Theater within theater.
2:02:35 You see it in plenty of films. You see it in Shakespeare. What is Hamlet? It's, in a superb scene, the moment when he asks the actors to perform their play — their tragedy, rather — before his father's murderers, isn't it? There's theater within theater. And besides, it's Shakespeare who says 'All the world's a stage, and men and women merely players.' The whole world is nothing but a theatrical stage, the whole world is nothing but a representation in which men and women play their parts, more or less, more or less willingly.
2:03:06 Right now they willingly play the actors — I'm translating literally, and thus clumsily, forgive me — the players, the actors, the performers. And besides, Hegel very often takes up this metaphor of play/game when he constantly opposes, throughout the Phenomenology, 'Spiel' and 'Beispiel.' 'Spiel' is the game/play. 'Spiegel' is the mirror, reflection. 'Spiel' is the game. And 'example' is normally 'Beispiel.' And Hegel often says, playing on the two words — I have to say it in German or else the pun wouldn't be understood — that there is often an enormous stake, 'bei Spiel,'
2:03:41 within the game — 'Spiel,' isn't it — in the theatrical sense of play. We are in theater within theater, and I'll develop this further next time, but all the same he says very well that the consciousness we follow in the Phenomenology, which goes through all these stages, is like a spectator at the cinema — the word didn't exist at the time, but he says this sentence, he says one must understand well that what is for it must be distinguished from what is for us — we, the phenomenologists, when we read the text Hegel offers us, we have access to what is not for it. Not that this would be un-Hegelian, that we arrive with knowledge from outside that we impose on it, certainties it doesn't have, since in the Phenomenology there must be nothing other than what passes through the field of consciousness — but we have the memory of these stages, because consciousness, as we'll see, spends its time, when it moves to the next stage, forgetting the previous one. As if — you see the metaphor — the bud disappears in the bursting forth of the blossom, and the fruit takes the place of the flower as the true being-there of the plant. There are stages — bud, flower, fruit — and Hegel insists on saying that each of these stages is just as necessary to the plant as all the others. Very important — it's the opposite of totalitarian thought. Each part
2:04:51 absolutely necessary, and he even says that this equal necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole — the plant would not be a living being were it not for this equal necessity of each — not of its organs, but of its moments, which is very different: organs are distributed in space, moments unfold in time. There we are in the church — and when I tell you I compare this to cinema, he says what is for us he calls what is in itself; what is for us or in itself — it comes up often in the Phenomenology, what is for us, in itself, as opposed to what is for consciousness. Well, we are watching a Chaplin film — that's what I'm saying when we read the Phenomenology, that is, we see what is happening, we see the door opening, Charlie about to enter the room.
A participant's intervention: Polynices, Creon and Stalin 2:06:06 above all by keeping quiet, by not philosophizing, by not imposing Hegelian determinations on it that mean nothing at all, but by having the memory of what happens to it, because the great difference between us and Charlie is that we have the memory of all the previous sequences, and we don't have amnesia, as if the flower forgot the fruit, and the flower forgot the bud, and the fruit forgot the flower. There, I've answered your question at length because it seemed fundamental to me, it allowed me to get there — I think you have another one, yes, Jean, go ahead. It was burning my lips earlier, but if you give me two minutes I'll take it, I've got it — so, Émile and his shutters, thank you, great man, listen, thank you for your rhetorical, pedagogical talent — theoretical, that's it, you're getting your revenge, I'm like that no, no it's really because of this pleasure that I feel like showing off a little, so it's good for little comparative literature memories, like Sophocles' Antigone, which is, as you know, Racine's La Thébaïde, which takes up the same affair — quite so, the enemy brothers, under the title Les Frères ennemis — there, it wasn't staged for 300 years, but it's a bit
2:07:16 scandalously — Les Frères ennemis was staged again 30 years ago in Paris, revived since then, then there's Anouilh's Antigone. But then, one point of detail — you remember that in truth it isn't a war between Thebes and enemies, it's that a promise was made, a pact: two of Oedipus's sons, Eteocles and Polynices, are each to reign one year over the city of Thebes, and Eteocles reigned for a year and refuses to give up his place — hence the origin of the conflict, which is why Polynices is somewhat justified in taking up arms to claim a right that is normally his. Perfect — so what I want to say is that consequently it's very, very strong, because you showed it brilliantly — obviously these are two great one-sided figures, the man of power and the sister who bleeds for her dead brother — but she isn't merely nature, the nagging woman who comes to say that her brother matters above everything; she's defending a right, she's someone who is also defending something that isn't natural at all, which is the promise, a betrayed right that the other tried to reclaim. And conversely, Creon isn't merely a brute defending the social order
2:08:26 in the sense that — between us, let's not be shocked — Comrade Stalin, who committed every horror, who is worse than the devil and three Hitlers combined according to what we're told, but who was still also a great head of state — the Nazis offer to exchange his imprisoned son for, I believe, a small batch of about ten thousand German prisoners, for example, and it's obviously impossible for a leader with the dignity of a leader, who doesn't practice nepotism the way it's done today, to say yes. And consequently, Stalin — horrible as it is — lets his son be shot by the Germans, by the Nazis let's say more precisely. So there's something of that in Creon too — it's impossible, as you said, quoting Hegel yourself, to derogate from the law of the city by allowing someone who took up arms against the city to come, even posthumously, to stir up trouble, to make an exception. You can't make an exception if you're being asked to — that's normally a collaborator's move, there you go. Thank you — no, no, thank you for your intervention, because it's all the more
2:09:36 relevant — ultimately Stalin and his son would be more Cornelian than this, in a way, since we're in tragedy, but I thank you for having made clear that the woman didn't represent natural law in the biological sense of the term, because what's specified is that the funeral rites, over which the family presides, embodied in the figure of femininity, which reigns over the domestic world just as Creon reigns over law and government — those funeral rites, all of that, is, one might say today, anthropological, sociological, not natural. Precisely, animals do not bury their dead — precisely, there are no funeral rites; the animal merely subsists, it doesn't attain existence, to take up the problematics familiar in the '50s — there was existence, that's not the most outdated aspect of existentialism, at least this much can be retained: the animal merely subsists, only man attains existence, drawing on its own possibilities to subsist from; the animal lies down on the ground and rots without troubling its world, whereas there are archaic societies, I would say in the — writings, as one may call it,
2:10:46 and I know — if in the mouth, since I owe them enormously, and in itself anyway, independently of me, there is nothing pejorative in it, but nonetheless this is done in all cultures — I'm speaking of moments in humanity, not of places that would be extra-European — this is done within Europe, like European anthropophagy too, I'm speaking literally, in the extensive sense — financial anthropophagy is another matter, we can talk about that — there are societies where, when a chief dies, a tribal chief to simplify, he cannot die alone; many people must be killed, his servants, his wives, etc.,
2:11:25 and buried with him — well yes, it would be a bit silly, wouldn't it, to be in the afterlife without dying, that just wouldn't do — let's leave the chief aside, I don't want to stop here now, there you go — so, thank you for the intervention. I recall that when Hegel assigns to woman a natural community, the bond of blood, as opposed to the political community, that's not naturalism at all, because it's the city that assigned femininity this function — we do agree, it's not nature — and so you were right to say that the opposition here, the distinction man-woman, has nothing to do with some obscure struggle between male and female hormones, in a biologizing perspective, that's it. So thank you for your intervention — are there any other questions?
2:12:15 Apparently not, so that will be for — for next Thursday, all right, I've launched the program for next Thursday: we will delve deeper into this camera obscura — how do you say it — this dark chamber that is the Phenomenology, we will sit down in silence, we readers, to forget our ideas, our ideologies, our philosophies, and witness what happens to this Charlie Chaplin of consciousness, who doesn't know all the roof tiles that are about to fall on him. There you go, thank you, Dominique, thank you, everyone.
