English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, a reminder of internal determination 1:15 ...and unimaginable God.
1:59 [Chanting: ti-ti-ti...] Do not compel me to proclaim him. I am old, leave me be, let me tend my sheep.
3:00 Happy New Year to everyone. It's such a pleasure to say it again. We've already wished each other a happy new year, but I'm decidedly not someone who writes things down. Wrongly, no doubt. I offer you, out of necessity turned into virtue, the excuse that I follow the Socratic patronage, which left nothing in writing—in fact it's a handicap. That's why I'm so glad to tell you this live, I missed it. I especially thank those who responded to the greetings I posted collectively.
3:42 on our Facebook page, who answered me individually. I'll say, in no particular order, Myriam, Sébastien, Fred, Frédéric. And I'm forgetting some, but that's because I'm always a bit haunted by timing when speaking French. Anyway, happy new year to you. And how much...
4:15 I'm happy to be with you again in 2024. We really need to come together given the dark times—not that we ourselves are going through, but that the most unfortunate people on this earth are going through right now, aren't we? I started with an excerpt from Moses and Aaron. I made a small omission—I didn't want to make the opening credits too long—so I'm going to move forward a bit; I didn't want to miss anything of this extraordinary beginning, I'll tell you right away, of Arnold Schoenberg's opera Moses and Aaron.
5:10 His only great opera, since he wrote quite a few short lyrical pieces that usually come before it. But Moses and Aaron is a monument, it lasts about two and a half hours, two hours forty-five, half of one of Wagner's music dramas roughly—about as long as a Mozart opera. And it's the very beginning where, against this backdrop of darkness, we simply see Moses. It's a musical setting of what is probably the most familiar scene, even to those who are atheists—believers, that has nothing to do with it here.
5:56 It concerns Moses at Sinai, that is, the man who sees God, who is in direct contact with God. Let me explain the title Moses and Aaron very quickly. Moses is in contact with God—that's not given to everyone. I'm speaking of the biblical account. He knows how to speak to God, but when he wants to convey God's word to men, he comes down. He comes back down from Sinai, and he finds them all worked up, the men, the Jewish people, he finds them worked up around the golden calf. And there Aaron steps in, his brother-in-law, and says to him, 'You know how to speak to God, you don't know how to speak to men, let me do it, I'll go.'
6:47 You see, there it is—two characters, two personalities, one who is in the absolute and the other who is in communication, you see, but not necessarily in a pejorative sense. It's also important to fight the enemy on his own ground; we mustn't leave communication to those who do harm. And these are the two characters—I'll move on quickly because it would take us away, well it's not quite at the center of our debate—we're continuing our approach to the problem of internal determination, essentially dialectical, as I recall, internal determination. What determines us as subject and not merely as object, like the fact that when I bring my finger close to a flame, it burns me—that's not an internal determination, I do feel it in my body, of course, but the cause, the determination...
7:54 The 'of' here, in determination—I am finite, I am determined by 'from,' it's the 'of' of origin, it comes from outside, doesn't it? That's the complete opposite of the internal determination of the autonomous act of voting, for instance, or of the social contract. There, we're going to come back to this so much that I'll move past it now and we won't have to revisit it in six months—we'll talk about it very soon.
8:26 No, but what I'd like to insist on here, at the start of this session, is the fact that I know this is a difficult series, strictly from a philosophical point of view. So tonight we're going to try to put flesh and blood on these fundamental notions—I repeat, identity, put like that it's abstract. Identity, indetermination, the opposite of identity, isn't it?
Mignon in Wilhelm Meister, a novel of the prose of the world 9:05 Question mark, answer: indeterminate identity. And for this, I'm first going to use a reference that should be familiar to those who follow us, those who follow us. It's in the series we've called 'Analytic Reveries.' A kind of antiphrasis, isn't it? Because in principle, there's nothing less analytic than reverie, nothing less dreamy than analysis, is there?
9:37 But remember, the one that opened this cycle was Mignon. I had borrowed the title from this character. Well, we're going to talk about her because she's quite hard to characterize, to give an identity to. And I'm not going to replay my video for you, it would be tedious to watch myself talking to you. I'm going to go back over the texts of those I had invoked, in particular this excellent study—originally it's a writer who had studied the relationship between modern sensibility and the Germans, particularly toward Italy.
10:32 You see novels like Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, going from France to Germany. And of course, the character of Mignon. So, Mignon—the author in question situates her for us right away. We find her, these are reminders, so I'm not analyzing every comma, in—it's a title by Goethe—Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. Already the title makes us think of a novel of education, the journey of a young man, just as Flaubert shows a bit the journey of Moreau, doesn't he, in Sentimental Education, which goes from a somewhat naive mentality to a disillusioned bitterness. Wilhelm Meister is the opposite of the romantic hero.
11:35 That's why I took Flaubert as a comparison, isn't it? That is, he's supposed to belong to the post-romantic current, to realism, but let's leave that aside. These are just reminders. Yes, the opposite—why? Because it's not Faust, Goethe's great work; it's Faust that never ceased to obsess Romantic creators, not just writers but musicians too—look at the operas, Gounod, the Faust Overture by Wagner, the Mephisto Waltz by Liszt, a masterpiece of piano writing.
12:12 And I'll skip others—there's Berlioz's Damnation of Faust, of course, which is his masterpiece, on a libretto by Gérard de Nerval, by the way. There it is, he's especially known for Faust. But here, it's the opposite. It's about how the young German bourgeois, Wilhelm Meister, ends up trying to integrate into the world, into the society in which he lives. The Romantic, as I mentioned, is a bit scandalized by this sacrifice of high poetry to what is called in Hegelian philosophy the prose of the world. And this would truly be a turning point if it weren't for this character of Mignon, precisely in the work that is apparently the most prosaic, the least poetic in intent, by Goethe.
13:21 Let me give the floor to the one who admirably illustrated this incident. In the Apprenticeship years, the full title, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, there appears an enigmatic character, an identity that begins to lose its outline, which will haunt musicians and poets for decades. The number of lieder—you know lieder, that musical genre which is no doubt the most dense secret garden of German Romanticism.
13:56 A lied means a song originally, set to a poetic text in principle. A lied is a miniature, condensed opera, a few seconds sometimes. Look at Schubert's Erlking, that fantastic nocturnal ride with the father clutching his son and their voices disputing—the voice of the Erlking, the father's voice, but no, it's just the sound of the wind in the trees, the terrified child, but Papa, don't you hear the Erlking's voice, he's drawing me in, etc.
14:28 And when they finally arrive at the courtyard of the inn, the child was dead. It's a condensed drama. The number of lieder that were inspired by the song Mignon is supposed to sing in the novel Wilhelm Meister—but let's continue with her portrait. If we can manage it, since in a portrait, in principle, you see identity burst forth on the canvas. See, look carefully: Goethe hesitated for a long time before giving her a sex.
Undetermined sex and warbling: from babble to Babel 15:10 The fools who believe it all starts with their own era, that the beginning is now. Transgender people and so on—these things are as old as the world. Ah well, Goethe hesitated for a long time before giving her a sex. That's a determination, sex, an identity card, a male sex, a female sex. Then he decided—now pay attention to the sentence that follows—after deciding that this sexless being, well, we're rid of the problem by surgery, who dresses as a boy—the name, here come the sexes again—would be a girl.
15:50 Go on, see if you can make sense of it, I'm perplexed myself, I've reread this sentence often. Go on, I'll read it again at least once. Goethe hesitated for a long time before giving her a sex, then decided that this sexless being who dresses as a boy would be a girl. She speaks, or rather warbles, some vague German. Not only does sexual identity blur, but linguistic identity too. Linguistic—that's... Vague German, what does that mean?
16:21 Does she speak or does she warble? If babies babble, that well-known stage of infant babbling that child psychologists know well, especially parents of young children. This stage that is a second phase after the cries, the grunts of a small animal, whether from pain, discomfort, or hunger. And then suddenly there's a period when, if you listen from a distance, you'd think it's talking, it's very articulate, pleasant to hear—except it means the child has finally found the channel.
16:59 He masters the channel of voice, of speech, but he has the channel, not the code. There isn't a single sentence, a single word. I had mentioned that the longest work in the history of so-called Western art—that word irritates me, especially these days, when it's made to mean everything and its opposite—the longest work, the one that lasts four days, Richard Wagner's Ring, or its full title, The Ring of the Nibelung, a trilogy in three acts introduced by a prologue, which makes four—in three parts, sorry—three operas preceded by The Rhinegold, which is somewhat their prologue, lasting four days all together.
17:52 A tradition going back to the Greeks, the Greeks who brought food with them onto the tiers of the amphitheater. Why do I mention this? Because in the very first bars where we hear a voice—at the start there's an orchestral prelude, as is often the case with opera, even if this isn't quite an opera anymore, it's a music drama—starting with The Rhinegold, as soon as the curtain rises, we hear the babbling of the Rhinemaidens.
18:25 You see, it's not so far off, frankly. Babbling is characteristic of that childish gurgling I was talking about with babies. Babbling, Babel—and Babylon rises gigantic in the shadow of ruined Babel. The confusion of tongues, the meaning of words fading, the same words no longer conveying, no longer carrying the same meaning for one person as for another, and men quarrel, and the construction site, right up to the day, up to the very minute I'm speaking to you, remains unfinished.
19:13 Man's construction site. So, indeterminate sex, at best equivocal mode of communication, isn't it? Multivocal. She speaks, or rather warbles vaguely. She knows nothing of the world. We won't go over 'the world' again, we've done a lot of development on worldliness and being mundane. The world is relation to the other, it's maturity—she struggles to read and write.
A pre-social, semi-bohemian character 19:54 So here again, she's always, if you will, on a borderline between limits—between masculine and feminine, isn't she? Between German and I don't know what unknown tongue, childhood and maturity—childhood which knows neither how to read nor write. She knows nothing of the world, struggles to read and write, is incapable of learning social life. Wilhelm Meister, on the contrary, whose whole novel is about showing how he ends up integrating into the bourgeois world around him—I take 'bourgeois' here in the sociological sense, city dweller rather than countryman, the modern world, such as Wilhelm—Bürger, that's citizen, be careful not to confuse it, even if of course one can always draw connections between these meanings.
20:58 Just as Wilhelm Meister is precisely in the process of doing, integrating into society. It takes time, but in the end, he manages it. Mignon is a pre-social character in whom socialization proves impossible—not merely difficult, as it is for everyone—because she belongs entirely to the raw world of what is least Goethean: primitive emotions. Goethe is not a Romantic. Goethe, though he initiates the Romantic period with his Faust, is careful not to plunge into the abyss. I've told you a thousand times how much of a bloodbath Romanticism was, the number of people driven mad, suicidal—both, or at best neurotic—for she belongs entirely to the raw world of primitive emotions.
21:49 She presents herself as a semi-gypsy. That reminds me of something—you too, doesn't it, tonight, because what's happening here? I was in Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron, the Bible, the Old Testament, and now I'm in a German novel from the early nineteenth century. Wait, don't you see the continuity? What does Moses say to God? No, I don't want to be your prophet, it's too hard, let me go back to tending my flocks. Nomads, in the desert—what do you want to make of that? A fine early text by Hegel, isn't it? Written after leaving the theological seminary where he studied with Schelling and Hölderlin.
22:41 Which is grouped under the title 'The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,' a reflection with an incredible sense of distance—neither critical nor, even less, mystical—about what? About the figure of Moses, the figure of Abraham from the Old Testament. And he says, 'Abraham grazed his flocks on a boundless land.' No, that's not the Nivernais, that's not the Norman bocage, that's not the banks of the Loire and the Seine.
23:21 'If you went, Madame, to the true land of glory, along the banks of the Seine or the green Loire, beautiful, worthy of adorning our ancient manors'—no, that's not it. It's the infinite, the horizontal infinite of the desert, the vertical infinite of the sky. That's where he comes from, the one common to Muslims, Jews, and Christians—Ibrahim, Abraham, Brahima, call it whatever you like.
23:53 These are variations on the same theme. The one who came from Ur of the Chaldees—everything begins there. It's neither Palestine, nor Egypt, nor Ur of the Chaldees. It's where Mesopotamia reaches the sea. Abraham grazed his flocks on a boundless land. And Hegel—she presents herself as a semi-gypsy. My goodness, what they have in common is nomadism.
24:28 I have to stop myself because apparently there are people nowadays calling immigrants nomads. There are so many of them I don't need to name any. The category—'needing another force to raise itself to the level of the individual and earn a name.' No, it's a category, this sort that speaks of nomads, but pejoratively.
24:59 Yes, Abraham is a nomad. Gypsies, Roma, as they're called, whom Wilhelm Meister met—he, the son of a bourgeois—meets in Italy. Dreamlike bodies near the Borromean Islands and the great Italian lakes, he meets this character, Mignon. She presents herself as a semi-gypsy, decidedly. Even to say 'gypsy' would already be, after all, an identity.
25:29 'The prophetic tribe with the burning eyes,' as Baudelaire says in a poem titled 'Bohemians Traveling.' But a semi-gypsy—there's always half of her that eludes us—more or less associated with a troupe of acrobats. So one day they're in one town, the next in another, which mistreats her and from whom Wilhelm buys her.
"Do you know the land?" and the child who is not one 26:00 She dances and does tricks like a trained monkey. She also sings. I developed the musical side of Mignon so extensively in the video I referred you to, whose link you'll find below once the video is edited, that I'll go rather quickly here. I skipped a fourth screenshot for you—we're at the second one now, there are three screen captures I made from the past video, I know I created a fourth one, we'll end with the third, which begins with WM, Wilhelm Meister, but for the fourth, I'll tell you orally, since it deals with her relationship to music, so I'll go quickly.
26:51 She moves Wilhelm, but by making him hear a melody that every German today still knows by heart. It may well be the most famous poem among schoolboys, and so well known even beyond Germany's borders that French composers made operas of it, whose main aria is 'Knowest thou the land where the lemon tree blooms.'
27:22 Once again, are we in Germany, are we in Italy, where are we? We're listening to a German invoking Italy. You'd think there was a Holy Roman Empire in this story. And you see, there's already this Drang—Drang means impulse, I find my Drang—this north-south Drang, this drive toward the south. I laugh because I think of, with the development of tourism, the busloads of German tourists, Europabus, pouring into Corsica, Italy, Spain.
28:00 'What am I saying?' Everyone knows this song, which is haunting, because the question keeps coming back. And the number of musicians who tried their hand at setting it to music—even Beethoven, who isn't a great vocal composer, everyone knows a bit of the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony, but well, there's the opera Fidelio, he had to write one opera. He wrote a few songs, including one on Goethe's poem, Mignon. 'Knowest thou the land?' etc. 'Kennst du das Land?' Schubert, of course, and for once—because generally it's Schubert who brings the lied to perfection, even if Schumann's are incredibly beautiful, more entrancing, no, I'd say more nocturnal, without Schubert's transparency—but no...
29:01 A little less known to the general public, the one who best succeeded in setting Kennst du das Land, Knowest thou the land, to music is Hugo Wolf. I played it in the opening credits. I referred you to the 'Mignon' video in the analytic reveries series, and you'll get a glimpse of it there. Otherwise, search 'Mignon's Romance' or 'Hugo Wolf' and add 'Elisabeth Schwarzkopf,' please.
29:33 That will spare you many a dreadful interpretation, or at least ones so much inferior. Schwarzkopf, black head. So, let's return to Mignon. She loves Wilhelm Meister, the one who has just bought her back from the gypsies, who were making her work against her will. She loves Wilhelm Meister, who saves her and attaches herself to him the way a dog would, absolutely and unreasoningly.
30:08 I'm obliged, there's a blank there, to fill that blank with black. Because it's not a detective story, I can tell you that. Wilhelm Meister is going to be fascinated by her, and it's not that he wouldn't be fascinated by a character like that. Except that he's a boy like you, like me — well, like you, I'm addressing the male listener. And someone once said, "We know their faults, they are fickle. I loved you fickle, what would I have done had you been faithful?" That cry uttered by Roxane in Racine's Bajazet, that overwhelming cry.
30:44 "I already loved you when you were fickle and chased after women — what would I have done if you had been faithful? I loved you fickle, what would I have done had you been faithful?" And no, men aren't like that for the most part — for the most part, gentlemen, I'll grant whatever exceptions you like. So I tell you, he's going to be fascinated by her, and then he'll move on to something else. He is on his own path of formation, in his progression, and she will die of it.
31:15 Grief. She fascinates Wilhelm, who feels irresistibly drawn to the mystery emanating from her. Her features are striking. Her expression is a mixture of ingenuousness and character. And here we go again with indeterminacy, the elusive identity. Is she a child or an adult? A mixture of ingenuousness and character. Now, character — well, already her dark complexion suggests an exotic origin. Meaning what? Is she black? Is she mixed-race? Is she oriental? Is she Greek? Is she a métèque?
31:52 My Corsican compatriots, yes, we have the honor of being métèques. You'll tell me, nomadism in Corsica is limited, it's true, the space is a bit narrow, and so on, the main activity throughout the centuries of pastoral Corsican life is transhumance, precisely, with the flocks. The Bretons escaped poverty through the sea, the Corsicans turned their backs on the sea, which was a source of insecurity, attacks, or disease, the malaria-ridden plains, and escaped instead through the mountains.
32:34 Otherwise these are two granite countries with a strong identity. "Her dark complexion suggests an exotic origin. She is a child without quite being one." It's exasperating in the end, you can't manage to pin her down. "She is a child without quite being one." Is Wilhelm a pedophile? No, but she isn't quite a child either. Something points beneath the picturesque that hints at a secret life.
33:09 Yet no one knows who she is, or where she comes from. There, I wanted to make this reminder in order to come back to some notions — I know, I'm thinking of Laurent Melito, who had the courage — I really appreciate it, someone said, "I don't understand." I don't understand this notion of dialectic that's present everywhere here. We are this and its opposite at the same time.
33:40 We can sense that it's linked to dialectic, but what exactly is dialectic? Let's approach it that way, through concrete cases. Afterward we can draw abstract conclusions, but what a difference, what a gulf there is between the initial abstraction, which hasn't yet engaged with the seriousness of life, and the abstraction of the final summing-up. Abstraction downstream rather than upstream. Synthesis. So now I'll move on to the antithesis, deliberately. But before moving on to the antithesis, I'll take a second text, also by Goethe as it happens, meant to illustrate no longer the question of identity, but the other abstraction.
The prologue of Faust: God wagers on freedom 34:32 It's a question that keeps coming back whenever I talk about the cycle we're working on, about the internal determination that is negativity. Because for now it's just a word, but it's a bit vague. So I'm choosing precisely the prologue of Faust. Faust is a work that, as you know, Goethe spent his whole life working on, but for now this is the early Goethe, so to speak, when he's still young.
35:03 And the story of Faust himself, the scholar in his gloomy study, as the saying goes, who sees Mephistopheles appear — well, anyway, we're not there yet. There's a prologue that takes place in heaven, with a marvelous dialogue between them — to borrow a title from Sartre, one of his best plays, The Devil and the Good Lord. But yes, yes, yes, yes, there's a discussion in paradise between the devil and the good Lord. Well, the Lord, it's a play — "Have you nothing more to tell us? Will you never come but to complain? Is there, in your view, nothing good on earth?"
35:43 Well, he's quite topical, this Mephistopheles. "It was better before," what an age of desolation, children don't learn anything at school anymore, so much war, so much violence. Mephistopheles: "Nothing, Lord, nothing good, everything's going perfectly badly, as always." It's topical, but there must be something else that characterizes our current age, because this apparently has always been the case, look, it's glaring. In the last years of the 18th or the early 19th century — "Men make me pity them in their days of misery, to the point that I have qualms about tormenting this poor species myself."
36:25 And here, for the first time, the name of this play's hero appears: "Do you know Faust?" "Faust, do I know him?" "He may not be like the others." "The doctor, the scholar, my servant." "Indeed, that one serves you in a strange way. In that madman, nothing is earthly, not even eating and drinking." Well, there you go, the Romantic hero. "His spirit always rides through the spaces." That's not exactly square and tidy.
36:56 It's not yet the German's apartment in the center of town, near the fountain, under the lime trees, with geraniums on the windowsills. Nor is it nomadism, it's not that complicated, we keep circling the same themes. "His spirit always rides through the spaces, and he himself is only half aware of his own madness. He demands of heaven its most beautiful stars, and of earth its most sublime joys."
37:26 How can I say a word about the prince whose illumination I often quote, called "Conte," an admirable prose poem? The prince wanted to see the hour of desire and of essential satisfaction, even if it were an aberration of piety — that's what he wanted. Faust is a bit like that: he demands of heaven its most beautiful stars, and of earth its most sublime joys. There's no limit to his desires. "But nothing, near or far, suffices to calm the storm of his desires." That's man. Man is the animal that gets bored, that grows weary.
38:06 The Lord: "He seeks me ardently in the darkness, and soon I shall lead him to the light." But he seeks me — that's what Mephistopheles doesn't see. It's because he seeks God that he has found God. I'm paraphrasing Pascal, I know some of you have already brought up that reference. "You would not seek me if you had not already found me." That's what Jesus says to the soul in the famous Mystery of Jesus, which you find in the only complete edition of Pascal, but you can also find it on Wikisource, Pascal, Mystery of Jesus.
38:45 A dialogue between the soul and Jesus, who is in agony. The soul feels it will never manage to live up to what Christianity demands, roughly speaking, and is aware of its abominations, its sins. And then, all of a sudden, there's this almost reassuring word from Jesus, who says, "Be comforted, you would not seek me if you had not found me — if you seek me, it is because you have found me."
39:16 I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here regarding the other textual reference that will come after Goethe. I'm thinking of Péguy, whom I won't quote often, but there are admirable texts that will come up quickly, denouncing the one who feels no need to seek, who is content with what he is, with his daily routine... You see what I mean anyway. Let me pick back up without interrupting. The Lord: "He seeks me ardently in the darkness, I shall soon lead him to the light. In the sapling that turns green, the gardener already discerns the flowers and fruits that will develop in the coming season."
39:55 "Will you wager that you'll lose him too?" "But leave me the choice of means to gently lead him along my paths." The devil knows about temptation, should he wish to make this just man that Faust seems to be, in his quest, stumble. He has borne witness, the devil, or his earthly incarnation, who is Mephistopheles. The Lord: "As long as he lives on earth, you are permitted to lead him into temptation." So God does not oppose the devil leading Faust into temptation.
40:43 "Any man who walks can go astray." In other words, God isn't betting on goodness being wholly good, etc. That's theology, that's not our subject. No, we're doing philosophy. God is betting on freedom. Freedom is not the good, it's the possibility of doing good. And evil, in a sense, is even superior to the good. It's the small missing point in that summit of ancient Greek, Hellenic consciousness that was Platonism. I'm thinking of course of Book Six of the Republic.
The unrepresentable God and the happy fault 41:17 And of the sun, image of the Good. We know that there is also a black sun. So he grants him permission: "As long as he lives, he is permitted to lead him into temptation." You'll tell me, "But that's easy, that's just Goethe taking liberties with the sacred texts, how, how, how?" What happens in the Garden of Eden? How does original sin arise? The God who created Adam and Eve, isn't he said to be all-powerful? How does the book of Moses begin?
41:59 I chose — you'll look again at the introduction, look at the words surrounding it, there aren't many. It begins by affirming the identity of God, an identity that belongs only to God, unique — "einzig," unique. Then it's not "unsichtbar," invisible. Well now, we thought we were grasping the invisible identity. "Unvorstellbar," unrepresentable, as with the religions of transcendence — Islam is the most radical on this point, and Christianity the least radical, because, through the figure of the Son and the Incarnation, one can represent God, since God pushed charity so far as to take human form. That's the human condition, if you prefer. But right down into the negative — that's what I'd like to illustrate. I'm thinking of Jesus on the Mount of Olives.
43:03 No, he doesn't go to his torment saying, "It's just a few bad moments to get through, after that I'll be famous for thousands of years, happy ending." No. What does Jesus say? In the text of the Gospel, this isn't Goethe. "My Father, if you can take this cup away, take it away from me." He balks at his mission. "But let your will be done, I will not oppose your will, but if only you could spare me the torment..."
43:35 In other words, God embraces the human condition down to metaphysical anguish, down to atheism. I'm deliberately laying it on a bit thick. We are never closer to man than when we begin to doubt everything, and to be on the road to despair without being despairing, discouraged.
44:08 Well now, you see that it wasn't Goethe who invented this. I mean, if sin appeared in the garden that was the property, created by an Almighty, that didn't happen behind God's back. There's nothing behind God's back, nothing against his will, since he's all-powerful. So God willed it. That the apple be bitten, like the fruit. It's nowhere specified that it's an apple.
44:38 In theology, there's even talk of felix culpa, the happy fault, which allowed man to leave animality, which meant one was no longer ashamed to be naked. When God calls Adam in the garden, after the apple has been bitten, Adam says, "I do not show myself." "Because I am naked." "Ah, so you have tasted the apple." Because up until then, being naked hadn't been a problem for millions of years of animality. But yes, theology is serious, as Heimbault would say. Theology is serious. It's not a bigot's business, this Heimbault, you know, who says that.
45:14 Maybe she doesn't know how right she is. But there you go. And then, there's no labor. The monkeys pick fruit up in the canopy, and when there's none left, they go elsewhere. That's the maximum of their productive activity, moving around. Whereas here, "you shall earn your bread by the sweat of your brow." Everything's going to change, and everything will make the one who was an animal in earthly paradise resemble more and more us, man.
45:45 "You shall not know, you shall bring forth children in pain." So there you have it, all this is to comment that it's not scandalous for God to allow the devil to tempt man. Especially this man. Any man who walks can go astray, is free to do good as well as evil. Mephistopheles: "I thank you, I like dealing with the living, I like fresh, full cheeks, I am like the cat that cares little for dead mice."
46:15 The Lord: "I know well, I permit it. Draw this spirit away from its source and lead him along your path, if you can. But be confounded if you must acknowledge that a good man, amid the confused promptings of his reason, knows how to discern and follow the narrow path of the Lord." "Agreed. He won't follow it for long, and my wager has nothing to fear. If I succeed, you'll allow me to gloat at my leisure. I want him to eat the dust with delight, like the serpent, my cousin." The serpent crawls on the ground, it bites the dust.
Mephistopheles, the spirit that negates, companion of man 46:58 The Lord — listen carefully, because it's especially for what follows that I chose this text, and why I situated it first in what precedes. And here, it's to illustrate this famous negativity. No, I'm not losing my thread. Abstract negativity — we'll see it better here. Let me remind you, before reading what follows, that when Mephistopheles first appears to Faust and begins a bit of his seduction operation, and Faust says to him, "Who are you?" — there he declares his identity. It's clear: "I am the spirit that denies." From the verb "to deny." Nothingness is never anything but the present participle of the act of denying, isn't it?
47:44 All right, let's get to it now, the strong passage. "You may always present yourself here freely. I have never hated your kind, I have never hated devils. Among the spirits that deny, that's the evil, the spirit of mischief and malice" — there's "mal" in "malice" — "displeases me the least of all." What he discussed — he was great friends with Hegel — was the cunning, the cunning of reason.
48:14 The passage, the most important one philosophically and anthropologically. "Man's activity too easily slackens." The opposite of Mignon, the opposite of Faust, the opposite of restless mobility, the opposite of desire never satisfied, of the need for the infinite. "It too easily slackens, he is inclined to laziness." That's not nomadism. "And I like to give him an active, restless companion," the devil, "who can even create, if need be, like the devil himself."
48:50 So you see, negativity — God thinks it's necessary so that man doesn't fall back into inertia and into the animality from which he had such trouble escaping. There you go, I'm addressing this in particular to Laurent Melito, and of course to all of you, but who had the kindness and the presence of mind to want to learn more about dialectic. What could be more opposed than the devil and the good Lord? And here they are merging in the same collaboration — for whose benefit? For ours, for anthropology's. It takes a lot of negation to arrive at affirmation.
49:37 There, I wanted to not skip over this extraordinary text, let me reread it quickly, without interrupting, the Lord saying to the devil: "You, devil, you may always present yourself here freely. I have never hated your kind. Among the spirits that deny, the spirit of mischief and malice displeases me the least of all. Man's activity too easily slackens, he is inclined to laziness. I like to give him an active, restless companion, who can even create, if need be, like the devil." There. After that, it's the end of the scene. The prologue ends, the curtain falls, and the play begins.
50:21 Now let's look at the antithesis. But the antithesis denounced here, which does not leave the framework of identity, the opposite of negation, is identitarian affirmation. It's drawn from a very fine text available as a PDF, by Péguy, a reference of the first order in the Catholic world, though not only there.
Péguy against decent people 50:58 Not all Catholics are like Péguy — well, I take him. Judge for yourselves, you'll see what follows. Or rather, let's reverse it, sorry Pierre-Alain, let's take the text by Péguy that comes right after, which will shed light on the sentences that follow it. There, thank you. So this is Péguy here — he isn't speaking in aphorisms, in proverbs, but developing what he has to say about habit, about inertia, what the good Lord was denouncing in the text of Faust. Man slackens, softens in the daily grind.
51:43 The worst thing is to have a soul hardened by habit. This is a Catholic speaking. "On a habituated soul, grace can do nothing. It slides off it like water off an oily cloth." Great writer, immense poet. "Honest people do not moisten with grace." He doesn't seem to think very highly of honest people. That's because precisely the most honest people — they know their Latin, forgive me, a small linguistic aside, but students often mistranslate the Latin "boni homines," translating it as "good men," men who are in the good. No, that's a mistranslation, it's men who have goods, wealth.
52:32 It's a bit like the establishment, today we'd say the elites. It's precisely that the most honest people, or simply the honest people, or rather those who are called such — wrongly so, quite rightly — and who love to call themselves such, that's for sure, have no fault themselves in their armor. What this immense Catholic author, Christian in any case, reproaches these honest people for, is that there is no fault. That's not beautiful, that.
53:02 You see how the negative, the demand for negativity, reintroduces itself into a positivity that is visibly turning into mere animality. "They are not wounded, no faults, no wounds." You know that "défaut" has a double meaning: it's the opposite of quality, it's doing something wrong, but it's also lacking, being missing, the lack. So it revives infinite desire. "They are not wounded, their moral skin, constantly intact, gives them a hide and an armor without fault."
53:40 I'm thinking of the parable of the rich young man in the Gospel, the one who comes before Jesus, because he's begun to hear that Jesus has a reputation, that he gives good advice. He says to him, "Well, I follow the ten commandments, I keep them, I'm a righteous man in Jewish society. What more must I do to gain paradise?" Jesus says to him, "Leave your possessions and follow me." The conclusion is magnificent: the young man went away very sad, for he had great wealth.
54:11 There's an honest man who has passed by. "Their moral skin, constantly intact, gives them a hide and an armor without fault. They do not present that openness" — the opposite of armor, isn't it? The opposite of "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott"! I'm deliberately recalling this, to show that we don't jump from one subject to another. In my videos, I hope, we keep going over the same thing, but like variations on a single theme. You'll recall the title of a Luther psalm — well, a cantata, a chorale, thank you — the quintessential Protestant musical form, a chorale written by Luther himself, who said that music was the greatest divine service right after theology, Frau Musica, Lady Music.
54:57 And the title of his most famous chorale, which Bach used, quoting it, varying it, complexifying it, is "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott," "A mighty fortress is our God." The armor, the breastplate, as Péguy puts it here. "Their moral skin, constantly intact, gives them a hide and an armor, without fault. They do not present that opening which makes for a dreadful wound." One cannot help but think here — and this too is Christian literature — of the Arthurian romances, with the Fisher King.
55:35 The one whom Chrétien called Perceval, the Welshman, the only one who will reach the Grail, not precisely because he saw the wound. A dreadful wound, an unforgettable distress, an invincible regret, a suture eternally ill-joined, eternally ill-joined. What great writing this is, Péguy's. A mortal disquiet, an invisible ulterior motive, a secret bitterness, a perpetually masked collapse, a scar eternally ill-closed.
56:21 Some people find it irritating, but Péguy makes fascinating use of haunting repetition. He does not present this entry into grace which is essentially sin. Sin is an entry into grace. Because they are not wounded, they are not vulnerable. If you understand, too bad for them. Because he lacks nothing—listen to this magnificent sentence—because he lacks nothing, nothing is brought to him.
56:51 They are not overwhelmed by charity, because they are never its object, because he lacks nothing, one does not bring him what is everything. A piece of bread, the man from the Auvergne—it was nothing but a bit of wood at first, because it's cold this season. But it warmed my body, and in my soul it still burns like a bonfire of joy. It was nothing but a piece of bread, but it warmed my body, and in my soul it still burns like a great feast.
57:26 How could someone who has everything know the happiness of eating that bread, the bread given by the man from the Auvergne? Because he lacks nothing, one does not bring him what is everything. You see that on the side of that everything, of positive value, it isn't negative, but it is the ransom of the negative—it's always on the side of lack, of aspiration.
57:58 Even God's charity does not bandage, does not tend to someone who has no wounds. Indeed, whoever has no wounds will never see God apply his balms to him. It's because a man was lying on the ground that the Samaritan picked him up. Obviously there were no events in Gaza at the time—I've taken up other texts—but still, don't you think?
Dead wood and dead soul, too weighed down by the past 58:29 It's because Jesus's face was dirty that Veronica wiped it with a cloth. Now, whoever has not fallen will never be picked up, and whoever is not dirty will not be wiped clean. And now we can return to the aphorisms—forgive this vertical gymnastics, Péguy—which sum up the same ideas more tersely, as so many aphorisms in short sentences.
59:02 Dead wood is habituated wood. A dead soul is an extremely habituated soul. Dead wood is wood that organically remembers too much, that is burdened by its memory, too turned toward the past, that no longer confronts the unknown, what lies ahead, the future. Remember Baudelaire—yes, you think I keep jumping from one thing to another. I'm illustrating in multiple ways thanks to the millennia of our historical heritage, which is our true wealth. I'm illustrating, I'm trying to illustrate points that without this would touch no one because they're too abstract.
59:51 Hegel takes as an example: if I say "all animals," these few words are not the equivalent of a zoology in several volumes, even though they mean the same thing. Yes, Baudelaire's poem. A tender heart, in "Harmonie du soir" [Harmony of the Evening], if you recall, one who sees the twilight, somewhat melancholic as twilight always is, but who sees nothingness, night, coming.
1:00:27 A tender heart that hates the vast black nothingness of the past, gathers up every luminous vestige, turns its back on the dimension of the future, and turns toward the past. Something Proust will take up throughout that gigantic work spanning an entire life, In Search of Lost Time. This simply means that one has stopped confronting what is coming by endlessly rehashing what has come and fled.
1:00:59 Even if it's true one can draw a benefit from it, for the only true paradises are those we have lost. That, of course, is a quotation from Proust. So a dead soul is a soul that remembers too much, organically and psychologically. Dead wood, let us repeat, is wood habituated to the limit. Because habit, ingrained habit, reaches a limit, which is death. A dead soul is a soul habituated to the limit.
1:01:34 Dead wood is wood too stuffed with its past; a dead soul is a soul too stuffed with its past. Dead wood is residual wood at the limit; a dead soul is a residual soul at the limit. No, I don't regret the repetitions—some may find them irritating, but they have the merit of clarifying our point more and more. Don't leave this antithesis, which shows us what the opposite gives of indetermination, of an identity that is always fleeting, elusive.
1:02:16 It is neither sex, nor age, nor whether it's a man, nor whether it's a woman, nor whether it's an adult, nor whether it's a child, nor where they reside, because there's a name, a first name, an address—that's identity, address, domicile. A caravan. I refer you, in the series of Analytical Reveries, not "mignon," but rather what followed a series of readings of Nerval's last completed text, "Promenades et souvenirs."
1:02:51 Which has—in two parts—and the problem, precisely, is the very first sentence: Promenades et souvenirs, "It is truly becoming difficult to find lodging in Paris," and thus begins a quest for a dwelling, a nomadism. So I don't want to leave this critique that Péguy makes of habit without also defending habit.
Habit, a moment of a process 1:03:22 And here I think again—I address you all, but once more more specifically Laurent Melito, who sees better and better what dialectic is. So, if you replace the parts of a whole with the moments of a process—the parts of a whole are in space. I see a house there in space: there's the attic, there's the cellar, there's the foundations, there's the living room, there's the entrance hall, whatever. Those are the parts in space, all at the same time, simultaneous. There isn't a cellar where it's 4 o'clock and then an attic where it's 7 o'clock.
1:03:59 On the other hand, the moments in time, of a process—there we are in time. First the seed, then the bud, then the bud that bursts and in bursting produces the flowering, for unless the grain dies it bears no fruit. Then the flower, then the fruit—these are moments. Well, habit—I'm speaking to Laurent, to all of you, and I think we're now grasping the problem of dialectic.
1:04:32 If we pose it in terms of moment, there is a moment for habit. It's not a matter of saying that a child, from birth, should be thrown into a canoe, come what may, at the mercy of the waves, as was done with Moses. Fortunately he was rescued and grew up in a palace, in a residence, after all.
1:05:02 So, out of intellectual honesty, I wanted us to denounce here an excess of entrenchment. That's the moment when one no longer sees. But here I must dwell, because I remain, not in resentment, which is a very bad feeling, but in my anger against those who speak contemptuously of others as nomads. Look at my house.
1:05:34 I spoke to you earlier about Schubert, who produced among the collections of Lieder some of the most overwhelming ever made. Schubert is naive, he's not someone as cultivated as Schumann or Wolf. He takes texts that inspired him just like that, sometimes by minor poets, and turns them into incredible musical masterpieces. He's a Viennese, like Mozart, Melody—I'm not going to give a whole lecture on Schubert, but among these song cycles, one of the last, one of the very final ones, is the Winterreise, the winter journey.
1:06:10 There is nothing left but a man walking in the snow. At the beginning, he is still among houses, because he is leaving his village—one senses there's a sorrow, something. The first poem is called Gute Nacht, or rather the first Lied, the first song on the text, is called Gute Nacht, and at one point, as night falls, he says, he is a solitary man.
1:06:41 Everyone is snugly tucked away at home with the Wintergarten, the winter gardens behind the windowpanes, as they say in Germany, isn't that so? Especially at Christmas, needless to say—one senses the Christmas lights glowing in the windows while the blizzard rages in the street, through which the traveler of the Winterreise, the winter journey, wanders, and he says this line, I'm getting to it: "Let your dogs howl in front of your masters' houses."
1:07:12 So that's the excess of entrenchment. But what I would now like to recall—I am in the seriousness of philosophy and anthropology, I'm generalizing to the human sciences, plural—is that man is the nomadic animal. The history of man begins with a migration that is not finished. How can I say that the migrant is the other? Migration has its starting point in the trees of the canopy, when we were still more pithecine than anthropos, more ape than man. And then there was the savanna and bipedalism, but we didn't stay there, we crossed the immense African continent whose dimensions become staggering as soon as you look at a globe instead of the moments reduced on flat maps for reasons of projection. And then suddenly man passes into Europe, then into Asia.
1:08:11 It's incredible, this migration! I'm very happy to live in my 18 square meters without a shower. My cat, sometimes he takes up half of it, but since it's winter he stays by the radiator. But it's a transit. I've had many homes. It's an impersonal "I." I'm speaking to people who have had several homes, I'm sure.
1:08:43 Let's avoid believing that a transit is the final stage of life. Let's remain in transit. So there you have it, I wanted to make clear that I'm not putting habit on trial. Look, at the pedagogical level, how important it is to do exercises, to "practice," as the Anglo-Saxons say, to do scales at the piano. Because there are those who say "no, you have to let the child be." Yes, but then it's the piano that imposes its laws, because the children who do that all end up producing the same things the piano imposes on them. But the one who, through practice, through getting used to doing hours every day—when they told Mozart he was gifted, he said, "I've been at it since I was three years old."
1:09:29 That doesn't mean he wasn't gifted, it means I wouldn't be where I am otherwise. You become a better musician by working since the age of three, several hours a day, without being gifted, than by being gifted and not working. And yes, that would be a bit too simple—you know those parents who say to the teacher, "Yes, I know he doesn't work, it's a shame because he's very intelligent, but he's going to end up an idiot, madam."
1:10:00 Intelligence is like a muscle—if you don't exercise it, it atrophies. So, I do defend habit, but as a moment, one that should not be the definitive horizon, our horizon. That's what I wanted to affirm. And so, I insist on this migration, because I'm summing up a bit everything we've seen, but emphasizing what's essential, this—if I may risk the barbarism—this nomadicity immanent to anthropology.
Leibniz's Unruhe and man as an existing concept 1:10:43 There is a very fine text by Leibniz, a rather conservative philosopher, in science. In science, he created infinitesimal calculus at roughly the same time as Newton, and schoolchildren don't know, high schoolers, middle schoolers, that every time they write delta x over delta y, which is the first formula of infinitesimal calculus, the calculation of the derivative before that of the primitive, and so on, the integrals—Leibniz is the author of this formulation. On the other hand, in politics, in values, religiously, all that—well, religiously he tried to reconcile everyone, he was greatly troubled by dreadful periods, the wars of religion that bloodied Europe in an unimaginable way.
1:11:31 Here I'm speaking of the conflict between Protestants and Catholics, but anyway, there you have it. So, trying to bring everyone into agreement with a kind of ecumenism avant la lettre—he's a great mind of prodigious documentation. Documentation, erudition—that's not what interests me; what interests me is that there's a passage where he notes something very modern for the time: that in the German language, disquiet is called Unruhe. Ruhe is rest.
1:12:02 And the equivalent of rest in English, R-U-H-E, R-U-H-E—that's rest, un-Ruhe, non-rest, disquiet. He says it's the same word in our language for the movement of the clock's tick-tock. And that is anxiety, that is time, that is time passing.
1:12:32 Which makes Baudelaire say, in the poem "L'Horloge," a sinister and greedy god, as Baudelaire puts it: "Three thousand six hundred times an hour, the Second whispers, Remember! and with its insect voice sucks your life with its filthy proboscis." The power of Baudelaire. Well, this disquiet, this Unruhe, is of the very essence of time, the tick-tock of the clock. That's anthropology. I'm returning to philosophy after my detours through literary examples.
1:13:09 Those who follow closely and are not afraid to return to abstractions after having gone through the detour through the concrete, just as science arrives at the concrete by way of a detour through the abstract, through equations. This double movement of culture is interesting. Let me perhaps point out that there are two predicates—sorry, there is the same predicate for two different subjects in Hegel.
1:13:42 For man and for time, precisely. I'm making the connection between the two. Now, it's the same predicate. Hegel says, as if defining man: man is the concept itself existing. Let's not elaborate, it sounds complicated, but it's the concept itself, not the concept in my head as an idea—it's the concept itself existing, man. There is no man unless he produces, in the external world, the world in which he lives. It is not a world found, it is a world produced.
1:14:14 The bird builds its nest and the bear its den, and that's where it stops. Afterward, they do the same thing every year when winter approaches. Not man. Man produces, and he never stops modifying. His production is to enrich it. And his disquiet is precisely that—it is creative, isn't it? This share of negativity, of suppressing, of going beyond the result I had arrived at. So don't say I'm justifying someone who always wants more money. No, because he's actually on the wrong track. Because he believes that's where it happens, in money.
1:14:51 He remains stuck. In this habit, that's not good. Money spares me from thinking about what I want, because I can do whatever I want with money, I don't need to ask myself the question of a determinate will—how do we get back to that? So, I'm still on the theme of nomadism to say that I began with Moses, who says to God, "I don't want to be a prophet, it's too heavy a burden, let me tend my flocks."
The desert, cradle of the religions of transcendence 1:15:32 He who will not see the promised land, who led his people to the promised land but died before setting foot on it. He remained a nomad to the very end, one who does not defend a territory but defends disquiet. Now, this began with Abraham, remember, Abraham went forth from Ur of the Chaldees, he grazed his flocks on a boundless land.
1:16:04 But what you may notice—I began with Moses—affirming what is common to the three religions of transcendence: the one God, eternal, omnipresent, that for his positivity, and for his negativity, invisible, unrepresentable, immortal, and so on. These three monotheistic religions all appeared within a geographical handkerchief called the desert.
1:16:43 What can you do in the desert, if not migrate? Mokhtar import-export, as one often sees in Muslim countries, isn't that right? The little shop. Well yes, you can produce on the fertile chernozem lands of Russia and Ukraine, in the rich river plains of China or Vietnam, the rice paddies, the Yangtze, the Nile Valley. But what could one do in the desert? Nothing but live off what passes by—the caravan.
1:17:17 Well, that's where the three religions of transcendence come from, because in the setting of the desert—and all those who have been there, not because I've been there, some have gone as tourists and seen nothing, isn't that so?—who did not see precisely that, the revelation that it is nothingness, that one must not expect salvation from nature, that if salvation exists, it is beyond what is there. In the desert, there is nothing. It is death. It's not Tahiti where I crack open a coconut, drink, eat, nourish myself.
1:17:56 And then afterward I squeeze coconut juice to cook the fish I've caught. No! The desert—Mokhtar, import-export. Now mathematics would never have developed the way it did without zero. Zero is not an Arab creation. The Arabs themselves know this very well in their own history, at least those who know—it's a creation of the Hindus, but one that Arab nomadism, the caravans, transmitted to the West. Adding to it, of course, algebra, which is an Arabic word meaning a dislocated limb that has been set back—the members of equations. So, I'm a bit exasperated by the way people say "the nomads."
1:18:40 As if there were Muslims on one side, Christians on the other. But no, it's the same people, the same demand for transcendence. Abraham—yes, yes, we are all children of Abraham, Jews, Christians, or Muslims. But there are foreign powers, foreign to this geography, foreign to the desert, powers that come from afar, who have an interest in setting Arabs, Jews, and Christians against one another. Forgive me, Arabs, Jews, and Christians—I should say Muslims, Jews, and Christians, keeping to a religious distinction, since "Arab" is not an ethnicity.
1:19:15 No, no, no, no—Ibn Khaldun, the greatest writers in the Arabic language do not consider themselves Arab. The Arab is the one out in the bled with three goats and two sheep in the desert. That's the bottom of the social basket. So, I'm going to ask Pierre-Alain, or rather I'll check whether the questions are showing up.
Question: imagining the negating force 1:19:45 I'm glad to find Geoffrey Joux back in 2024. Such loyalty! How exactly can we imagine the negating force against which, at the hour of the silence of the slippers, the well-entertained masses in France - that sounds like Péguy - would be forced to revolve? Sorry for the naivety. No, no, no, it's not naive. How exactly can we imagine the negating force against which?
1:20:19 I'm going to focus, in Geoffrey Gio's question, on the word "imagine." Imagination in power - doesn't that ring a bell? That was a May '68 slogan, something like that. Imagination in power. Imagination was in power well before May '68. Look at the ceremonies at Nuremberg in the 1930s, look at the torches at night with the uniforms, the imperial eagles.
1:20:52 That knew how to work on people's imagination. In power there was imagination, and there was only imagination, the opposite of the reasonable, of reason and of the rational. I'm not saying this against Geoffrey Jouard, he takes "imagine" here. But I said we must stop imagining and we must produce unity between people who are tearing each other apart. It's difficult. And stop what Clouscard denounces in capitalism. "Capitalism will end up bringing civil war among the poor," Clouscard used to say.
1:21:29 One of his phrases... one of the most current. Civil war among the poor. Obviously, when the rich get involved and use one poor man who is there to strike down another poor man they don't like, when war is waged without any [visible] corpses, because there will always be a way to "yellow" the corpses - I pointed this out to you back at the time of the Vietnam War, didn't I? American public opinion began to worry about seeing so many coffins, the boys, coming back in coffins.
1:22:08 The American political authorities understood that they had to - I'm quoting the expression of the time, which is theirs, not mine - "yellow" the war. They had to have the South Vietnamese army do the fighting, an army that was completely corrupt, with thousands of pairs of shoes belonging to Madame Nhu, in fact - let's leave that obscene story aside. So that Vietnamese would kill Vietnamese, that Slavs would kill Slavs. Ah yes, does that remind you of current events? Well, yes.
1:22:41 All you have to do is give them as many weapons as they want. And if a lot of them die, you give them more weapons, because there are still more of them alive to kill. And yes, I'm being dark here. Thank you, Jo. Yes, so, opposing that means starting by trying to unify what is opposed. There, sorry, my answer is a bit abstract, but at the hour of the silence of the slippers. That said, it's a bit unfair, Geoffrey, because I find there are a lot of worried people. I'm struck, looking at the past. People are worried about false problems. There has never been so much security. I know that's shocking. But look at the figures, don't just believe me.
1:23:25 The figures are not [as bad as] the judicial figures of the 1920s, 30s, 40s, compared to today. Yes, of course. Of course there are atrocious wars going on right now, but much less deadly than the one that pitted Iran against Iraq - but nobody cared about that one. It's the deadliest of the postwar wars. And I broadcast a video where an official from one of the biggest American think tanks was boasting that the Americans were quite right to sell weapons to both sides.
1:24:03 He says it very clearly, with a lot of lucidity: it's not very moral but it's effective. You think I'm exaggerating, but I always tell you that I fall short of the truth. But I'm doing a series of workshops on the cycle of what we don't want to know, on the subject who opposes himself. My narcissism can't bear being told that I'm a monster. Well yes, what do you want me to say? Well, it's a shame monsters turn up in cases like that. That's why I don't like the word "the West."
1:24:36 We act as if it were a geography - as long as I'm in France, I'm part of the West, so I have to carry on my shoulders all the turpitudes committed by a handful. That's why I denounce Atlanticism, not even America - Atlanticism. You know, the Baltic, Polish and Ukrainian governments, they're not American. So what are they? Atlanticist. There, thank you Geoffrey, it's a good question.
Questions: Levinas, Bosch's hell, Job 1:25:12 Julien Belmond, yes - I repeat myself, I'm always too happy to find you again, I'm always afraid it'll be a one-time thing and then people leave. Do you sometimes use Levinas's ethics of the face to ground your relationship to otherness? Is that a philosophy that speaks to you? We cannot skip over a philosopher like Levinas, I'm answering Julien here. And I talked a lot about it with Jewish comrades - at one point I never discussed so much with Israeli Jews, which is rather strange, as I was deep in the African jungle, I was on a local contract, as they say, teacher, with the salary of the local inhabitants of the country in question, even though that country, a poor country relative to developed countries, didn't hesitate to pay me well.
1:26:03 And my wife, my children too. Travel there and back and housing, very nice housing, but there were other people on local contracts, people who were likewise teachers, content with a national salary from several countries. There were Israelis who were English or math teachers, we were in the same small bush town, not to hide anything from you, in Agboville, Mali - which was about 100 to 150 kilometers north of Abidjan, deep in the forest, in an Amazonian biotope. It's not the Sahel, it's not Niger and Mali.
1:26:42 So we talked a lot about Levinas, yes, about hands, about the face, it says a lot. But yes, it stays very cerebral, it's a bit phenomenological. That's not an insult, it's a great tradition. But I'm always surprised that when we say "phenomenology," without specifying, everyone thinks of Husserl and therefore of Levinas, of his disciples, of Merleau-Ponty, who is one of the most beautiful figures of that movement.
1:27:18 But still, the first one to write a phenomenology is Hegel, the dead dog of modern philosophy. I say that because, you know, Julien must know, that in the Age of Enlightenment, a German Enlightenment philosopher, a Jew, said that Spinoza had been treated like a dead dog. That's how Hegel is treated today. "Do you sometimes use the ethics of the face, from Levinas?" Yes and no. One must not skip it, one must read these admirable texts, but one must not stop there, because it's a bit confined.
1:27:59 You can't get a grip on the world from there. A philosophy - I've already said this, but I'll take this opportunity to repeat it thanks to Julien's fine question, a generous question in any case since it encourages us to read an interesting author - a philosophy that doesn't deal with evil is wasting its time, wasting time, one that doesn't deal, directly or indirectly, with evil. I'm not saying that every single time the lesson of the day will be "evil, lesson 27,223," no.
1:28:43 But one that doesn't aim, ultimately, at delivering us from evil. If not absolutely - I'm not doing metaphysics - then at least more and more, better and better. And for that, we need to be several. So it's good to raise, and it's precisely the bond that unites me to someone like Levinas or to others, it's indeed the relationship to otherness. That's how, to use Julien's terms, it's a philosophy that speaks to me, but that isn't enough for me, and that shouldn't be enough to lift the mortgages that are ravaging humanity.
1:29:27 In any case, there we go. Thank you very much Julien. Julien again: hell for actuality and chronos for repetition. Good grief, there are some who are... there's a bit of time in the synthesis. That's right. So, yes, because Julien knows this, maybe not everyone does, thank you Julien - Bosch's painting, that painting is terrifying, it's not just that we see on the left a horrifying painting, I did it on purpose because it's in opposition to identity, to "I know who I am, I am a man, a Frenchman, of such-and-such social class, such-and-such trade, such-and-such profession."
1:30:17 And that, you see, is Bosch's dismembered bodies. Everyone who has worked in a psychiatric asylum knows that a symptom that keeps recurring in schizophrenic or paranoid delusion, whichever - true, extremely serious psychotic delusion - is that of the fragmented body. It's amazing how the great painters, the great creators, sense that, the fragmented body. You saw that incredible image in Bosch's Hell, the painting on the left, of that male genital apparatus, visibly in three parts, with, in place of the phallus - I don't say the penis, the penis I'm no doctor, I don't know about that, that belongs to specialists of the body, of physiology, of anatomy - in the phallus.
1:31:14 That is, when the penis becomes symbolic - the scepter of kings, the bell towers of cathedrals, churches, mosques, the upward thrust - we say "erect" a monument. And with the verb "erect," we make a noun which is "erection." Well yes, I'm showing to what extent Julien's question is - even if he perhaps didn't think of all that, which doesn't at all contradict the fact that he might have thought of it - but it's to say that hell is for actuality and chronos is for repetition.
1:31:51 Personally I wouldn't say "for repetition," but with a partitive, "of" negation, with a noun complement. It's the repetition of negation, as I showed last time, that if I lift my finger right after pressing the key, the sound stops, it doesn't last in time. You see, for a few fractions of a second, you heard it. But for us, for our ear, it doesn't last. But if I leave my finger pressed down, that's chronos.
1:32:22 It's the repetition of the same sound. There it fades away; in the case with chronos it is maintained. I can even release my hand and press the pedal, so the sound is prolonged thanks to the feet. It's a nice, quite synthetic question. I had the impression - yes, hell for actuality, sorry - I had the impression of hearing the story of Job in everything you said. Mohamed, that's very gratifying, it's not a question, it's a statement, but I thank you for it, it's very gratifying. To be honest, I tell you I wasn't specifically thinking of Job.
1:33:11 I wasn't thinking of Job, but where you have a good nose, if I may say so, is the fact that every time I think about these problems, almost invariably, I think of Job. And here I recommend a philosopher, a bit like I recommend to those who don't know Levinas to dive into him, right? There is another, more contemporary philosopher, more current to today's era, if you will - I'm thinking of René Girard, of Jean... the Jewish tradition, the Christian tradition - who wrote a small booklet, apart from his famous books, but which is a masterpiece of philosophical density and quality of reading the texts.
1:34:04 It's precisely the texts of Scripture. The title is "Job, the Victim of His People" ["Sur la route des hommes pervers"]. It's not long, it's not expensive. It's so dense - it's about all those who surround Job. It's the establishment, it's the "honest people" Péguy spoke of, who are there around Job, who is on his dung heap with his wounds, he who was a notable, who used to reign in a fine villa with servants, herds, wives.
1:34:38 They said, "Come on, admit you did something wrong" - it's not put quite like that, but it means that all the time, it's relentless - "admit you did evil, otherwise God wouldn't have unleashed himself against you." And Job keeps protesting. As if they didn't rule out that it might be a trial, so that they'd say, "My God is a bastard, I've done nothing, I'm innocent, and here he is crushing me with afflictions, it's not worth it being a servant of God." Thank you, Mohamed.
1:35:15 I had the impression - in your Job story - I'm happy to tell Mohamed he should know it's more than an impression. Thank you very much. Job's destitution. The questions aren't numerous, but apparently they're rich in content. You see, I have the impression, with a subject like this, that of internal determination - let me sum it up one last time - that's the subject occupying us.
What men have made, they can unmake 1:35:57 What determines us - and this isn't bad news - is things that come from us, that we can therefore change. That's not yet the limit. Freedom, but between the physico-chemical, biological determinism in which those who - not the hard sciences, the hard sciences rightly deal with galaxies, don't they, with the rotation of the amoeba when you shine a light beam on it, whatever, no, or with the roots of a trinomial, no, that's not what's at stake - want to lock us in.
1:36:34 But when it's a matter of... I criticize those who take this model from the natural sciences to study man, which is very different. Whereas man is precisely a negation of that order, and man only begins - if only when he first shatters pebbles, I don't know - only begins by putting the given of nature into question. From the cave to the house on stilts, millions of years ago.
1:37:14 And so, I return to my story about lodging, before getting to the fine palace Job lived in - let's say the fine dwelling Job lived in before the hand of God struck him down, and then raised him up again at the end. It's a very fine example. I thank Mohamed very much for that. I insist on the determination that comes from us, and I repeat to you that it's good news. I'll tell you right away by whom, by what, and which passage inspired it in me. It's a passage I quote elsewhere too, for other things, for education, work - I'm thinking of an excerpt from Rousseau's Émile.
1:37:56 When he insists, before the mother of his pupil, who is an aristocrat, as you know, that it's fine for his pupil to be a child whose mother is aristocratic, therefore full of prejudices - that's the key term at the time. And it's the famous passage where the mother says, "But how, aristocracy, there's no question of him working, not just with his hands, even a trade prescribed by Voltaire, like commerce or the activity of free enterprise, if you will."
1:38:30 Voltaire is much closer to the coming liberal world than Rousseau. He has the economic hand, Rousseau has the political hand. Manual labor, no less - I quote: "'My friend, my son a craftsman? Sir, are you thinking straight?' 'I am thinking better than you, madam, who would only ever make of him a lord, a marquis, and perhaps one day less than nothing. As for me, I want to give him a rank he cannot lose. I want to raise him to the estate of man. And whatever you may say, he will have fewer equals at that rank than at any rank he holds from you.'"
1:39:06 You see, this is not a man with a given nature. He speaks in the future tense. He will have fewer equals at that rank. If you make a man of him, it will be rarer to find his counterparts. It's not just about finding marquises, princes - those you find by the dozen. "I am going to raise him to the estate of man, which so few men know how to fill. And whatever you may say, he will have fewer equals at that rank than at all those he holds from you. You trust in the present order of society, without thinking that this order is subject to inevitable revolutions."
1:39:37 He writes that. There isn't even half a generation before the Revolution. "Without thinking that this order is subject to inevitable revolutions, and that it is impossible for you to foresee the one that may affect your children. The great becomes small, the monarch becomes a subject, the rich man becomes poor - are the blows of fate so rare?" That's the text - "that you can count on being exempt from them, admire it as much as you like, the defeated king who wants to bury himself under the debris of his throne" - you see how Harpagon clings to his cash box, or Uncle Scrooge to his treasures, that king clinging to his throne at the moment of a sweeping revolution - "admire it as much as you like, that defeated king who furiously buries himself under the debris of his throne, I despise him; I see that he is king only by his crown, and that he is nothing without it; but he who loses it and does without it is then above it."
1:40:35 Listen to the sentence that follows: "than the rank of king" - the summit in the given social hierarchy of servitude and domination. "Than the rank of king, which a coward, a fool, a villain can fill as well as another; he who loses his crown and does without it rises then" - he passes to the estate of man, which so few men know how to fill. It's not about a ready-made, given human nature that one merely has to enjoy.
1:41:06 "I was born human, therefore I am a man." No, not yet. I am a squalling animal. The animal subsists, man ends up existing, by projecting himself outward through his production. So I come to the most important point. Let me remind you of the good news: everything men have made - this is what follows - men can destroy. Nothing is indelible except what nature imprints. And nature makes neither the rich man, nor the prince, nor the great lord.
1:41:47 It's these determinations that I've been talking to you about, the ones we don't want to know. But no, is everything really due to class problems? I'm willing to grant that. But if we started by taking stock of everything that comes from society's division from birth into different, opposing destinies because of the social division of labor, then maybe we could start talking about equality or inequality - this time, insurmountable inequality.
1:42:20 I'm comparing jumpers, in the Olympic sense. I say this because I don't know much about it, but I've talked a lot with great athletes - Michel Clouscard, René Comer, François de Negroni - who all said that the jump is one of the most technical events. Of course there's a part that's a gift - I'll grant that, what's called spring, some people have spring, Brumel, the extraordinary Brumel, the Soviet jumper - it was long a Russian specialty, the jump - would land his foot from below vertically on the basketball hoop, that's spring.
1:43:02 But the man with the best spring in the world, who doesn't train, - I'll come back to the piano story in a moment - will be surpassed in height by the one who trains like crazy. Who does 1.50m, 1.60m, 1.70m. So, to know who's gifted and who isn't, let's start by giving everyone the same conditions, and we'll see what real hierarchies of value there are. We're far from that. There, that's good news. Let's deal with the determinations we can change, that is, the ones that come from within us.
1:43:40 I suffer from what I don't want to know. Remember President Schreber, one of Freud's great psychoanalyses - the one who says that God chose him to save the world, on condition that he agree to turn into a woman, that God demands it, and that he serve as God's female, since God is the sun - I'm talking about President Schreber's delusion, who really existed, an honorable doctor of German science - and that if he agrees to transform into God's female, God, through each of his rays, will penetrate him where you're thinking.
1:44:21 And the president adds, "It's scandalous that God uses me this way." Yes, he doesn't want to know that it comes from him; it's God, from outside, it's never him that's in question. We have to own our determinations - what paralyzes us, but because of us, since we also have constraints for which we bear no responsibility. If I put my hand on the flame, on the gas, it's certain it will burn. But I'm not talking about those kinds of determinations.
1:44:54 We'll continue this fascinating exploration of these determinations through specific cases next time. I thank Pierre-Alain once again, and I thank you for being so loyal. And I look forward to seeing you again, probably in about two weeks, a bit more, a bit less. And once again, a very good start to 2024.
