English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Clouscard's formula and neo-positivism 0:00 What is determinant, in the last instance, in the behavior of the human animal, is its relation to the other. A man? A little man? It is not enough to be born a man in order to be a man. The baby who comes into the world is first of all a being. Yes, yes, but precisely, it is not yet a human being.
0:44 From the rank of king, which a coward, a wicked man, a madman can fill just as well as another, he rises to the state of man that so few men know how to fill. I'm going straight to what raises the question in his question. In what way does the code predetermine being? He is alluding, of course, to — I often quote Clouscard — saying that the code precedes being.
1:17 I always add that perhaps Clouscard's most profound statements are found in his quips. Because it is still a quip when he says the code precedes being. That means you have to take the words in a certain sense for it to be indubitable. It's like the Gemelli who had angels who had a code and then suddenly, just like that, afterwards, the world appeared. That's not quite the style of the relentless materialist that Clouscard was. So, in what way does the code predetermine being? In what way are memes more determining than genes?
1:53 In what way is memetics more determining than genetics? By repeating his question three times, Darth shows how much trouble he has getting rid of positivism. Once again, I am not a relentless adversary of positivism. I even said that Auguste Comte represented an advance, and that everything in positivism that proceeds from the Enlightenment, for instance, benefits from that extraordinary advance which is the Age of Enlightenment. I'll take the opportunity to pay tribute to Michelet, the historian, who, taking the opposite view from most historians who, when they say "the great century," think of the century of Louis XIV, the 17th century, the century of Versailles, etc., said "the great century" — I mean, gentlemen, the 18th, yes, the century of the Enlightenment.
2:37 So that positivism, which takes note of the idle side, in every sense of the term — that is, only idlers are interested in it now, metaphysics — takes over from the 18th century. No, what is a regression and what I condemn is neo-positivism. Because positivism delivers the approach to the world that surrounds us — in other words, the natural sciences. The world that surrounds us is not our world. At your place, it's not…
The mountain, the wax, and "I am I" 3:08 At your place, it's your living room, it's your… the color of your pillowcase, your cat dozing or your dog in its bed. But it's not the trees of the forest across the way on the hill — that's not at your place. Nature is what surrounds us, it is not us. Now, we have trouble understanding that there could be a rigorous approach to a world that is not the natural world.
3:41 Because precisely, either one wants a positivist approach to it, saying, applied to the world that surrounds us, not the same methods that met the success we know of in the domain of nature — forgetting precisely, and this is where I extend the previous question, that nature is not dialectical, it does not oppose itself. Precisely because there is no sameness — I take up the word again — a mountain undergoing erosion, whose altitude might be 200 meters, 2000 meters, or 15,000 meters — there aren't any that high on Earth, there are on certain planets, and even higher — but which little by little, whose altitude decreases with erosion over time, and which after so many hundreds of thousands or millions of years ends up becoming a plain, what in geography is called a peneplain — that is, a plain that is a mountain that has flattened out.
4:48 There. When does it stop being a mountain? That means strictly nothing. The mountain has no identity. It is not more or less the mountain when it is 3500 meters than when it is 3200. It's a mountain. It's a problem of language, not a problem of natural science. The proof is that in the Russian language, there is no distinction as in our language to say hill and mountain. Why? Because the Russian plain is not Corsica.
5:18 They're flat, Siberia, the Himalayas, the Altai — if one day you don't know where to go on vacation, go spend your vacation in the Altai, it's fabulous. But generally speaking, it's mostly quite flat. So, I mean, in a flat world, the slightest little mound passes for a mountain. There is no difference between hill and mountain in those languages. There is no identity of the mountain.
5:48 We come back to the problems raised and thoroughly explored by Descartes in the piece of wax. Does the same wax remain after this change? You cannot say of a plain that it is a mountain. Yet one could just as well say that the wax was white, it became yellow, that it smelled of honey and now it smells burnt — one could say the mountain is a plain, it has become a plain. I'm telling you, you see the absurdity of this kind of statement.
6:20 Because at every moment of its change, it is its totality that is affected. Whereas when I say yesterday I was sick, today I am well, there a contradiction arises. Between what and what? Between what changes — my health, by definition, in the statement I just made, I'm taking a simple example to help understand the most difficult things — and then what does not vary, which is the word "I," you see clearly. I was sick, I am well.
6:50 Or I was well, this evening I have a fever. All right? So what is this "I," is that what man adds, this identity? What is designated by the word "same" here? There must be a fixed point for there to be movement. We've known that since Galileo. So let's drop it — we know very well that in nature it's useless to try to find a fixed point. So, if there is no identity, there is no absolute movement because there is no absolute identity.
7:25 So, it is only at the level of the appearance of self-consciousness, of man if you prefer, that there is a contradiction between what becomes and what remains, for as long as I think it. It's no longer the case when I'm dead. That's why we always forget that Descartes says: so that, thinking about it carefully, the proposition "I think, I am" — it's in the Meditations, it's at the moment he discovers the principle of the cogito.
8:01 There is no "therefore." He does not say "I think therefore I am." He is not making a reasoning like that, clearly. The proposition "I think, I am" is true every time I pronounce it or conceive it in my mind. In other words, it's an act to be renewed each time. This act of saying "you may try to bluff me that everything changes, I am I," which will lead Fichte later to say "ich bin ich." I am I, which is the foundation of the mathematical principle A equals A, of the principle of identity and non-contradiction without which we would not have mathematics and we would not have the hard sciences.
Code, relation to the other, precedes birth 8:40 There. So what am I saying? To answer the question, because I haven't answered the question: in what way does the code precede being? In "code," there is C.O., the Latin "cum." "Code" is the same word as in "convention," in "contract," in "connivance," in "composition" — placed together. "Copain" [pal], it's the same word, copain, those, the group of those who eat the same bread — that's its origin — who break the same loaf of bread together.
9:16 The code is my relation to the other. That's what I'm recalling with the prefix. It's a relation to the other and not yet to the thing. So, still abstract. All right? What does Clouscard mean? That what is determinant, in the last instance, in the behavior of the human animal, is its relation to the other.
9:53 That means that even food — clearly the relation to the thing par excellence for any animal — well, in every culture it has to be the object of a certain cuisine, a recipe, a way of cooking, for example. You shouldn't go looking for reasons like "oh, but they realized it kills microbes" — as if we really believe Cro-Magnon man knew about microbes. We mustn't commit anachronism.
10:23 Deep reasons that make man love to appropriate that upon which he has placed his own mark, that in which he has intervened. Even if a cave protects him from the wind or the cold or whatever, he likes to build his own house, to shape what will be his home. It's in this sense that the code precedes being. So one has to say, well, but still, I mean, still, the baby who comes into the world is first of all a being.
10:54 Yes, yes, but precisely, it is not yet a human being. I'm not settling the theological problem. There are those who say a human being from the mother's womb. Yes, from the animal point of view, it is part of the embryos of the human species — I don't want to deny that. But, as Hegel says, if the embryo is indeed in itself a man, it is not yet for itself. For itself, it is only as a cultivated being that has shaped itself. There's a very beautiful passage in the Preface, I'll get to it.
11:24 That's what I'm saying. That is, it is not enough to be born a man in order to be a man. The relation to the other, the code, is needed — then you'll tell me, I come back to it, yes but the code, fine, he has time, he'll go to school, he'll learn the language, but still, at the start, the child's being precedes the code. You're forgetting one thing: the human infant is born into a human world. So before his birth, we prepare his room, his stroller.
11:54 But yes, yes, everything that is agreed upon among men precedes the birth of the child. Fairy tales, children's tales, are not wrong to allude to fairies, good fairies and bad fairies — that is, those who pronounce over the child's cradle, when the parents are not there, blessings, good words that will do the child good. And those who cast curses, bad words — they are right.
12:28 Because there are many words around the child's cradle. And before his birth, and during pregnancy, and around the cradle, during birth. Look at everyone filing past, even if we say "shh, he's sleeping." The child hears a lot — voices, things, a world in which he senses that his whole being is suspended. There, so I'm trying to be concrete, so as not to turn this into an abstract debate.
Heredity and heritage, man as historical animal 13:04 In what way is memetics more determining than genetics? He has the merit at least of being clear and of showing well what is bothering him a bit. We must not confuse — since he speaks of genetics, he has the merit of being clear and putting us on the track — we must not confuse heredity, which is undeniable. Everything I owe to heredity, that is, like everyone else, like each one of us — this has been studied, Morgan's laws, etc. — we must not confuse that with inheritance. What is more determining for me, heredity or inheritance?
13:35 That's what matters. Is it the important color, the color of the skin, for example? Or rather what I have acquired through inheritance. There, that's how I answer that. That's what the code is. I have shown that in the human species, yes, the code precedes being, because man is a historical animal, in the broad sense, historical — not history in the strict sense of the discipline, of historical science, if you prefer, as it exists for the moment in a certain proliferation, let's say.
14:13 I prefer to say discipline rather than science, you know, when we're no longer in the hard sciences, out of caution — we make history begin with the appearance of writing. I say, I extend that to anthropology in general, that is, history in the sense that the negation of nature begins with the chipped flint, the cooking of food, etc. And what do we call the burial of the dead?
14:43 Everything that will later be called culture, right? But it's there, it precedes nature. It precedes nature for the human infant — I haven't said materially — and I'm glad a follower tells me it will be very important for him to understand that history, spirit, history in Marx's sense, spirit in Hegel's sense, is a historical matter opposed to a natural matter.
15:17 A field is a suppressed forest or a drained, dried-up marsh. We are so used to this naturalist positivism for ideological reasons — because I don't want to know anything about my negative part, my negating part. Of course I'll come back to it — no, I maintain the distinction, that's where the essential lies. But on the other hand, the reasons why, and the content of the negation, which is called repression in psychoanalysis or ideology in Marx, that I don't want to know.
15:54 I think in an alienated and fantasized mode, properly speaking. A fantasy is a representation, an image. One must understand, moreover, an image. You see, a monkey wanders in the forest, it comes across a photo of a banana, a little photo like that of a banana — it's not going to grab it and go into ecstasy over it. The image function is prevalent in man. If we want a striking illustration this time, for those who might doubt the importance of the relation to the other compared to the relation to the thing — because that's what raises the question in Darth Revan's question, and I thank him for it — it's the extraordinary example of what came to be called, as the files accumulated, the wild children.
Feral children and recognition in Hegel 16:47 The most famous is the one that gave rise to The Jungle Book, inspiring a very fictionalized version of The Jungle Book, Mowgli, etc. But actually, the examples are much more numerous than one thinks. I refer you here to a reference — in French there is a reference work that must be out of print now, but you'll find it, because the book had a great impact — in the 10-18 collection, the book by Lucien Malson. Yes, the very same Lucien Malson who is a jazz scholar and an excellent connoisseur of jazz and who hosted the excellent jazz program on France Musique during the 60s, roughly.
17:26 Lucien Malson, who had a background in anthropology, had written The Wild Children, a work that gathered the main files of all the children who were found to have grown up without the intervention of another historical human being. Well, the most famous are the wolf children, but I mean, there have also been bear children, in the Slavic world, and there's talk of a pig child in Poland. It happens once in a million, but by chance, a she-wolf loses her cubs, which have been devoured by a predator or by the male, as happens.
18:04 In any case, that's how it happens, and she has a rush of milk, and nipples that hurt a great deal, it's extremely painful, and it relieves her to see that this little baby she was about to devour, moving with the magnet toward her nipple instinctively, relieves her, and so she keeps it, and then afterward a bond forms. That's how some children were able to survive. What is certain is that we were never able to make men of them.
18:35 It's that there is — this has been studied, it's not my field, I leave it to the hard sciences — in the evolution of the brain, of cerebral functions, there are activities like language or others which, if they have not been acquired at a certain stage, afterward it's irreversible, it's too late to acquire them. When I say it's not enough to be born a man in order to be a man, the intervention of another man is needed. I like using the example of wild children as a very concrete illustration of an apparently incomprehensibly abstract sentence, which is of course Hegel's: a self-consciousness is in itself and for itself only when it is in itself and for itself for another self-consciousness.
19:18 That is, I like the "das heißt" — Hegel realizes it's a bit abstract, that he needs to explain himself, that is, insofar as it is recognized. It's to the extent that another man recognizes him as a man — a man that I, in turn, recognize as human, rightly or wrongly, that's another problem — recognizes me as human, that I am integrated into the human community, and not only through genes. There you have it — one can come from human parentage and remain a little animal. A great responsibility falls on educators most of the time, on parents, but not only on them, later on.
Rousseau: man is not an origin but a process 19:55 There, thank you very much to Darth Revan for his question, which we'll come back to — well, you'll make me come back to it, you're fascinated by this question, you're afraid of being men. All right, I'll finish definitively now, for today — I never close the debate in terms of content, but in terms of formulation — with this magnificent formula of Rousseau, when he insists on the fact that his pupil must learn a manual trade in Émile: the tutor, explaining Rousseau's thought, says that, by making himself master of the real world through labor, from the rank of king, which a coward, a wicked man, a madman can fill just as well as another, he rises to the state of man that so few men know how to fill.
20:48 A magnificent distinction by Rousseau of man as possibility: I was born of human parents, so I have the possibility of becoming a man, which is not possible for an amoeba, but I am not yet a man in act, I am a man in potential. He rises from the rank of king to the state of man — he rises to the state of man that so few men know how to fill. So, you see, man is not an origin, he is a process that is not finished at the moment I speak of it.
21:18 There's my conclusion. Your mission is to push further. Off you go, big rugged one.
