English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
From knowledge to action: the proper field of philosophy 2:54 For the devil's sake, there. So I'm taking up the problematic again, but today we're going to focus on a particular kind, within the genus of evil, a well-determined species, singularly suited to the philosophical approach.
3:25 And so I wanted to send you the links to two videos in which I drew on several texts, including two in particular that we're going to take up again today. It's about "The Cracked Bell" by Baudelaire, the sonnet, which of course is taken from The Flowers of Evil, and an excerpt from a small collection by Kafka called "The Great Wall of China," which contains several very short stories — I say micro because some are only a page, a page and a bit — an excerpt from "The Great Wall of China" I had chosen, called "An Imperial Message."
4:17 So "The Cracked Bell," "An Imperial Message." And let me recall a bit the context in which I had chosen these texts. First, "The Cracked Bell" is the first literary text I relied on to develop a philosophical analysis. Again, it wasn't a matter of doing a commentary in the literary sense — that's another discipline, which I of course respect. Here, it was a matter of doing a philosophical commentary.
4:47 And I recall that it was the first text because we had just finished the cycle of what is conventionally called the philosophy of knowledge, the stages one goes through, you know, to answer the question "what can I know?" We start, like everyone, by opening our eyes and ears, etc., onto what surrounds us, believing we're going to pick up reality, so to speak, in the gutter.
5:17 So, empiricism, then rationalism, then determinism. And I won't go back over it, since we've seen it 36 times, and once we reach determinism, there's a crisis, which closes that great arc of the philosophy of knowledge. A crisis for the philosopher, not for the physicist or the mathematician, and which makes us pass from the philosophy of knowledge, the answer to the question "what can I know?," to the philosophy of action, the second point: "what must I do?"
5:58 I'm borrowing this great division from Kant, but well, I mean, we find it at all the important moments in the history of thought. So, what does this have to do with evil? Well, these texts help me relate the problem of evil to the very essence — I would even say the very possibility — of philosophy. The matter is quite serious.
6:29 I had already mentioned this, but a long time ago, a few years back, so now I'm digging into what I had mentioned, that is, I had gone a bit quickly — I did point it out, since I know some of you are very attentive — and what had I mentioned? What had I brought up? I had brought up the following, as a conclusion to the way we had tried to define a domain proper to the philosophical field.
7:07 It is never so urgent to define the specificity of any given field — art, theology, politics, whatever — it's never so urgent to define the specificity of each of these fields as when there's a risk of confusing them with another. In other words, it's in relation to what resembles it that difficulties arise. As I've already said, you're rarely going to confuse a ladybug with an elephant.
7:38 On the other hand, an Asian elephant with an African elephant — that takes some knowledge. You see, it's when things resemble each other that you have to insist most on what characterizes each one. Philosophy is often drowned in rather vast things, like, I don't know, the pursuit of knowledge — but that's scientific research, the CNRS, the National Center for Scientific Research, that means, doesn't it, an institution whose goal is also to know.
8:12 It's not only the philosopher who asks the question "what can I know?" The biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the mathematician, the astrophysicist all ask it too. On the other hand, we had shown that it's not just any kind of knowledge the philosopher seeks, but rather he seeks to know whether there's a way to answer, as rigorously as scientists do in their domain — which is not ours — the question "what must I do?"
8:45 And that's the reverse — it's a question essential to philosophers — these are reminders, that's why I'm going a bit fast — essential to philosophers, and not at all specific to science. I didn't say a scientist never asks himself what he must do. He can ask it as a man, of course, as a father, as a lover, as a husband, as a citizen, of course. But there, his scientific training is of no use to him.
9:15 That's where we see the difference, isn't it, between knowledge and action. I mean by this that if I have to decide whether to disconnect the machine keeping one of my relatives alive through a very serious illness, in terrible suffering, if I'm asked whether to switch off the system — in other words, to perform euthanasia — or to let her live, well, it's not a training in physics, mathematics, biology, etc., that will give me the right answer, the fairest, the most appropriate, the most human one.
9:58 Of course, the physicist will help me figure out how to connect or disconnect the machine, but that's something else, that's instrumental. So there, those are the reminders I'm giving to go quickly. Afterwards I'll slow down when we get to the relation with the problem of evil. We're getting there. I told you, what is properly philosophical is the question "what must I do?" And here, so as not to confuse it yet again with something else — because often people say "what must I do when I have a toothache?" You don't need to be a philosopher for that, better to go to the dentist.
The two senses of the verb "must" 10:31 No, I had focused the spotlight on the two verbs that distinguish the two questions. In fact, there are four verbs. "What can I know?" There are already two verbs there, aren't there? There's "to be able" and "to know." And the other question is "what must I do?" You see? So, the first two are "can" and "to know," and "must." The question "what must I do" comes from the verb "must."
11:03 Now, and here's where I pose the problem so you can see what's at stake: when I say "I must eat to live" and when I say "I must obey the red light," each and every one of you will readily grant me that the verb "must" is not being used in quite the same way. I wouldn't even say that when I say "I must eat to live," I'm expressing a material necessity. I have no choice at all, there. It doesn't depend on me.
11:33 It's not culture, or history, or man that decided it was necessary to eat to live. It's imposed on him from birth. And even before. Even for the embryo. Whereas, "I must obey the red light" — that's no longer a physical necessity, it's a moral obligation. I'm trying to speak simply, but you can see clearly, each of you sees the difference.
12:03 But we don't always see the importance of what's at stake in this difference. It's that, in the first case, the opposite is impossible. I cannot live without eating. And it's not a personal "I." It's an "I" that applies just as much to the earthworm, doesn't it? To the wolf, the polar bear, and the fly. I cannot live without eating. The living being needs another living being, doesn't it? Especially the animal, moreover. Because plants can just about manage, can't they?
12:35 To grow by drawing mineral salts from the soil. But the animal needs an already-there living thing, an already-there animal thing, doesn't it? Or plant thing, for that matter, in order to live. Another living being, in order to live. You see, we still haven't said the word "evil." But you can feel it's not far off. With all this business of devouring. So, I must eat to live — physical necessity.
13:12 The opposite is impossible. I must obey the red light. And that's where I see the abyss between these two uses of the verb "must": I can run the red light. There's the difference. There, the opposite is possible. Two in the morning, no cops, left, right. No, no, you should never do it. That's friendly advice. You have nothing on me, by the way. You know it's extremely serious. You always think you're safe. And an accident happens so quickly.
13:42 Yes, I can run it, but I must not. There, we see that the verb "must" is properly used. It's when I have a choice between several possibilities that suddenly the question arises of knowing which one I must choose. And in the name of which value. That's important. So, what can I know? What must I do? When I say "what must I do now," let's retain this.
Freedom, postulate of practical reason 14:13 Here, the verb "must" is taken in the strong sense, the sense specific to philosophical inquiry, that is, when it's a matter of a choice of value. So, from there, I had recalled — and it's a difficulty specific to philosophy that we see as soon as we try to give it a proper field — I had said that what we just said presupposes that philosophy itself presupposes a certain degree of freedom.
14:55 In other words, the discussion between someone who says everything is determined, that freedom doesn't exist, that there's an implacable necessity called determinism, that discourse — determinism opposed to freedom — that discussion is not one problem among others, like an opposition, of which there are so many in philosophy, like rationalism versus empiricism, or mechanism versus finalism. No — that one decides the very fate of philosophy.
15:25 Why? Because if I am not free, there's no point in asking myself "what must I do?" That means I'm not in a position to do anything at all. In other words, the verb "to do" itself implies the notion of freedom. And here, I remind those of you who are a bit surprised, of a very simple example I had used: the expression "The wind shakes the trees."
15:58 The wind shakes the trees. What is the subject of "shakes"? It's the wind. Our schoolteachers taught us that the subject is what answers the question "who is it that shakes the trees?" The wind. So the wind is the subject. No — the wind is a subject poetically speaking, metaphorically speaking, but the wind is no more active than the branches. The wind is itself an effect, not only a cause, of differences in temperature, in pressure. That's not my field, so I'll go quickly.
16:28 There. But there's no choice, for the wind either, is there? And here I'll point out that I'm giving an example of a more general statement, namely that there is no action in nature. The verb "to do" only has meaning for a subject. That is, for someone who is, as Spinoza would say, "causa sui" — cause of itself. Which Spinoza, of course, grants only to God.
17:01 You see the problems that arise from words that seem so simple, like "knowing" and "doing." And I'm asking you for an effort of abstraction here, to continue, but the problem of evil deserves that we dig a little into this kind of dichotomy. So I insist and repeat, and I'll now translate it into Kantian terms, because that has the advantage — Kant — of having fairly precise vocabulary. Kant says that freedom is a postulate of practical reason.
17:35 So, let me translate into plain French. Postulate — you know what a postulate is? It comes from the demonstrative sciences, from logic, from mathematics. A postulate is a statement that isn't demonstrated, but that serves to demonstrate all the others. Isn't that so? There have to be, at the outset, certain things everyone agrees on, and from there, we then try to increase our knowledge. We start first with things everyone must accept. And "postulate" or "axiom" — the word used more and more often in mathematics.
18:08 So, a postulate of practical reason. Practical reason, in Kant, is reason when it answers the question "what must I do?" and not the question "what can I know?" because that's knowledge, the sciences — that's something else again. So it's a somewhat more learned way of recalling — what use is it to me to know what I must do, let's even grant that, by miracle, by illumination of the Holy Spirit, I finally know what deserves to be done, what I must do, among all the possibilities open to me, what is worth most, what most deserves to be done — what use is it to me to know that?
18:53 If I'm incapable of doing it because I'm determined, because it's not me who decides, because it's physics, chemistry, biology within me, the enzymes, the stimuli — go ask the neurosciences, which decide in my place. That's of no use to me. So, pursuing the answer to the question "what must I do?" implies that whoever asks it is free.
19:24 And I had added — and this is the most serious part, now I'm getting to today's stakes — that doesn't mean freedom exists. When I say "an angel is a supernatural being" with a human figure and wings on its back, I'm not saying that an angel exists. I'm making statements about what the notion of angel implies. If I say that a castle with 1,500,000 rooms has an odd number of rooms — well, I mean, a castle like that doesn't exist.
20:11 But the statement is perfectly rigorous. In the same way, it's not because philosophical inquiry presupposes freedom that freedom exists. I told you it was serious — I don't have the answer to that question. So, that's what I'm going to dig into a bit today, because there are those who think — and I'm speaking frankly to you, I've already said several times recently — that revolutionary thought, in general, Marxist thought in particular, that is, the will to change the political status quo, for instance, presupposes that it's possible.
Neopositivism and the rational theory of the eternal return 21:08 And I had said that the traditional opposition between materialism — Marxist materialism among others — and idealism is no longer very relevant today. The dominant ideology, the one that most needs to be fought today, the one that most threatens philosophical reflection in general, and — let's move from reflection to action — political action in particular, is what I call neopositivism, isn't it? That is, the right, used in the human sciences, among others history, politics, etc., to apply the principles that have proven themselves in the natural sciences, and everything else is dismissed as outdated discourse, as metaphysics, as philosophy, as old-fashioned, as not rigorous — that's the dominant discourse.
21:59 So, we can't just brush it aside either. So I'm going to play devil's advocate. That is, I'm going to present to you — for the first time this time — I'm going to present to you a way of justifying absolute determinism. And therefore, the impossibility of any progress. I'm setting in opposition, you see, a linear movement and a circular movement.
22:34 Apparent progress, but one that comes back to the starting point — well, you can guess, especially since it's part of the dominant ideology, I often allude to Nietzsche, don't I, who was used to de-Marxify the university during the Cold War, wasn't he, and not only the university, the intelligentsia in general, since even someone who never studied is fascinated by Nietzsche, and, or Schopenhauer — well, it's more or less the same cycle — what am I alluding to? There's a fundamental idea in Nietzsche, that of the eternal return.
23:07 Yes, there's a coherence there. The eternal return. You'll find it in Zarathustra — those who have read the book seriously, it does happen — will come to a chapter called "The Vision and the Riddle." Zarathustra is next to a dwarf, like that, and he's standing in front of a gateway, and he says there's a road that leads out from this gateway, and this road stretches back for an eternity, but that to arrive at this road, an eternity was also needed.
23:43 So we're right in the middle of a circular path, and since that seems a bit — I don't want to confuse you — but a bit muddled, today I'm presenting to you, I'm laying out for you today, a rational theory of the eternal return. Because there are those who say that what I'm doing right now, speaking, addressing you, having this screen in front of me — that's already happened, I'm only repeating it, it's only the return of an event that has already happened an infinite number of times in the past, and that will happen again later.
24:25 It's possible. Well, here's the demonstration. You'll see that nothing external is brought in — we remain apparently materialist. There's an infinity of atoms, for an eternity, so all the combinations have already occurred. Paper, excrement, love, the landscape — all of that is combinations of atoms, according to the discourse in question, the positivist discourse.
25:01 So everything has already happened and everything will happen again. Given the time it takes — you know, eternity has all the time, by definition. Why not? That's coherent. Yes, but then one must accept a consequence. And here now I make the antithesis. That means Auschwitz will return, Gaza will return, suffering will return. One must accept this — but that's precisely what they don't say, those who start from the eternal return.
25:32 Nietzsche a bit more than the others — he accepts the cruelty. Doesn't he? I think I have... So, where am I... I had it right here. Thank you. There, just so. Thank you very much. So, let me give you an example here. And, my God, how helpless I am without my glasses.
Reading of "On the Vision and the Riddle" from Zarathustra 26:03 Thank you. There. Sorry for these unruly movements, you see. I'm right in the middle of it. Let's leave the staging aside for now.
26:42 For now, that's excellent, that's not the question, but we mustn't get confused. He's out on a nocturnal walk with a dwarf beside him on a rocky path. Stop, dwarf, I say. Is it me or is it you. But I am the stronger of the two of us. You don't know this thought that came to me. He's talking about eternal recurrence. This thought as deep as the abyss. Underline "it" — the thought of eternal recurrence. You could not bear it.
27:14 Then it happened, which made me lighter, for the dwarf, the curious one, jumped from my shoulder, and crouched on a stone before me. In fact, the dwarf, for those who know a bit of Nietzsche, represents what Nietzsche hates most, the spirit of gravity. Right? The one who prevents us from dancing, from being Dionysian. There. It's not the same problem. And he crouched on a stone before me. There was, right there, a gateway leading to a gate. We stopped there. "See this gateway, dwarf," I continued, "it has two faces."
27:46 Two paths meet here. No one has yet followed them to the end. This long lane backward, the one we have just crossed to reach this gateway, this long lane backward lasts an eternity. And this long lane forward, beyond the gateway, another eternity. These roads contradict each other. They butt against one another. And it is here, near this gate, that they meet. The name of the gateway is inscribed above.
28:19 The name of the gateway, you guess it, is "the moment." The moment in which I am speaking to you — there is an eternity before this moment, since the origin of the past, if indeed there is one, and there will be an eternity after the present moment, right? So it's the moment, each time, that stands as the gateway between two eternities. This reminds me a bit, you know, of the passage from Pascal applying this to space, right? A circle whose center is everywhere, its circumference nowhere.
28:51 What is man? A nothing in relation to the all, an all in relation to nothingness, a middle between nothing and all. The moment is somewhat this middle between nothing and all. So this long lane backward lasts an eternity and this long lane forward lasts another eternity. These roads contradict each other, they butt against one another, and it is here, near this gate, that they meet. The name of the gateway is inscribed above, "moment" is that name. But whoever were to follow one of these roads and go further, ever further — do you believe, dwarf, that these roads will eternally contradict each other?
29:26 "Look," I continued, "from this moment named 'the moment,' a long eternal lane runs backward." Behind us stretches an eternity. Must it not be — and here is eternal recurrence — that everything capable of running has already run along this lane? Must not everything that can happen have already happened once? Everything that can happen, so everything that happens to us, which we think to be new, has already happened — and, implicitly, several times, even an infinite number of times.
30:01 It's a bit dizzying, we'll come back to it. Must not everything that can happen have already happened once? And if everything has already been, what do you think, dwarf — must not this city gate, too, have already been? And are not all things so firmly bound together that this moment draws all things to come behind it? There, and this spider crawling in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and you and I near the city gate whispering together, searching together about eternal things — must we not all have already been?
30:40 This is the dizzying thought that is eternal recurrence. Now, I'm not going to discuss whether it's true or false. This isn't something I can settle in five minutes like that. I did lay out for you the theory of large numbers, though. If there is an infinite number of atoms that has existed for an infinite amount of time, all combinations have already occurred and can therefore only repeat. That's roughly the application to the theory of eternal recurrence of the law of large numbers, which is a mathematical theory.
31:10 But this is not the moment for me to disprove or confirm it. What's at stake in what I'm telling you? It's that one must accept the consequences. That means that suffering — never mind, it has already happened, it will come back, but you have to accept it. So when you have an interlocutor who acts clever by defending eternal recurrence against linear progress, then, well, the death camps start again.
The return of the unbearable and shared truth 31:44 That's not serious. It's eternal recurrence. It's also the return of the unbearable. That's what needs to be recalled. Now you see the connection with the problem of evil. So I return to the implications of this problem for the very possibility of the philosophical project. That's why I asked you to watch the videos for which I had sent links, recalling that philosophy presupposes that one can try to answer the question "what must I do," and that once one has the answer, one can try to do it, that is, to put it into practice, to bring it into existence.
32:31 So now it's not just in my head, in essences — to bring into existence the changes that are called for. But for that, what I think to be the truth, the right answer to the question "what must I do," I have to be able to transmit it, and that's where the two texts come in. You see, I had sent them like that a few years ago to raise the problem, but today I'm digging into it, right?
33:05 In what way does the cracked bell seem to make this communication impossible? Because for a political project, for example, it must by definition be shared. It's not like someone who withdraws to a desert island, or like an ascetic who withdraws alone into the mountains or the forest to contemplate the sky or the stars. You see, he's not a stylite. "Stylite" comes from the old Greek word "stylos," the word for column.
33:37 You know, in antiquity there were, so to speak, sages who lived atop a column, exposed to the weather, the rain, the hail, and were fed by the local people with a rope. Well, that's the solitary relation to truth. We're going over this again today. Remember, Merleau-Ponty said: either we go toward truth with others, or it is not toward truth that we are going.
34:08 Well, so I set aside, with respect, anyone who pursues a solitary search for truth or who thinks there can be a solitary possession of truth. I respect that, but it's outside philosophy, it's religion, it's wisdom, it's certain religions too. There. It's yoga on the mountains of the Himalayas, why not? But here, from the standpoint of the political project, collective par excellence, I mean, I have to be able to communicate, give instructions, or simply consult with others, I don't know, without there being one person who is the sole holder of truth.
The Cracked Bell by Baudelaire 34:53 And that's where I recall the problem of the difficulty of getting out of the subject so that one subject can communicate with another subject. And I recall the text of the bell — I chose it also because it's short and I can say it to you orally. I remind you, it's a sonnet by Baudelaire, "It is bitter and sweet during..." Let me say it first without interruption. It is bitter and sweet, on winter nights, to listen, by the fire that flickers and smokes, to distant memories slowly rising to the sound of chimes that sing in the mist.
35:30 Happy the bell with a vigorous throat which, despite its age, alert and in good health, faithfully casts forth its religious cry, like an old soldier keeping watch under his tent. As for me, my soul is cracked. And when, in its weariness, it wants to fill the cold night air with its songs, it often happens that its weakened voice resembles the thick rattle of a wounded man forgotten at the edge of a lake of blood, beneath a great heap of the dead, who dies motionless amid immense efforts.
36:08 Strange text. Strange way of speaking. It seems rather pleasant at first. "It is bitter and sweet on a winter night to listen by the fire that flickers and smokes." And then, in 14 lines — it's very short, a sonnet, in 14 lines, two quatrains, two tercets, tercets, not "tiercés" [horse-race bets] — suddenly we plunge into nightmare. We were comfortable there by the fire with the bell ringing as usual. What happened?
36:38 It's when he stopped talking about the happy bell. "Happy the bell with a vigorous throat" — the throat, that's indeed our instrument of communication, the one I'm using with you right now. Happy the bell with a vigorous throat which, despite its age, alert and in good health, faithfully casts forth its religious cry — I don't say "religious" to be snobbish, but so there are twelve syllables in the line, otherwise it's no longer poetry, it's cacophony. "Faithfully casts forth," 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, "its religious cry," 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 if you prefer, "like an old soldier keeping watch under his tent."
37:17 Sleep, good people, all is well, all is well. There's the Church and the army protecting you. The army protects you from physical, material dangers, and... what am I saying, the army or the Church? The army, right? And the Church protects you from the devil. Look, frankly, your body and your soul are protected. Your body by the army and your soul by the Church. The sword and the aspergillum, as they used to say in old France, right?
37:47 The alliance of the clergy. And of feudalism. And of the sword, right? Sleep, all is well. The hours slip by, the days repeat themselves. Where's the problem? Is anyone suffering here? And there you go, yes. Full stop. That was the first two quatrains, right? The happy bell. New line. "As for me, my soul is cracked." And there, suddenly, it begins with "me," the subject. The "I."
38:19 Now, there are those who would be tempted to say, no, but that's because Baudelaire is a neurotic, a poor guy, an anxious man. No, he's talking about all of us here. He's talking about all of us. "As for me, my soul is cracked." It has happened to you to feel, in a dream, a terrible danger, a nightmare, you know, during a nightmare, a danger, an anguish so bad it seems impossible, you try to call for help and then no voice comes out. That's what Baudelaire is talking about. "As for me, my soul is cracked."
38:49 It's a bell that is cracked. It's no longer heard very far. Even if it is heard, its function is nullified. Its function is to resound far away, the bell, right? Over the whole parish and even beyond. But if it's cracked — I go back, I take up the text again but this time digging deeper. And "ennui" here has the sense from the classical period, which Baudelaire knows well, from the 17th century, where "ennui" is a very strong word. It's not "I'm boring." It's not "I don't know what to do, boredom, I'd like to do something more fun."
39:20 No. "Ennui" is anguish. "And when, in its ennui, it wants," my soul, "to fill the cold night air with its songs" — we're no longer by the fire during the winter nights. "It often happens that its weakened voice" — watch the crescendo into horror — "resembles the thick rattle." What is the rattle? It's the sound made by someone who is dying. "Resembles the thick rattle of a wounded man forgotten." The comrades move away, right, in the battle, on the battlefield, and I am there.
39:53 Where? Now, look closely. "There is a wounded man forgotten at the edge of a lake of blood, beneath a great heap of the dead, who dies motionless" although he makes efforts to free himself, "amid immense efforts." How could I not think, by the end of "The Cracked Bell," do you believe I'm in poetry, in Baudelaire, in literature? How could I not think of the thousands of children, women, elderly people who are right now being crushed by thousands of tons of concrete in Lebanon, in Gaza, and soon elsewhere if we let it happen, if we keep supplying weapons?
40:43 "And who dies motionless amid immense efforts." Do you think I was being abstract? It hurt me. So there, it's a voice that cannot manage to be heard. So much for the cracked bell. I still have a lot to say, but we've covered the essential of what interests us: the impossibility, for a message that is nothing if not urgent — a cry for help — to get through. The language is wonderful. We say "to deliver a message."
41:14 Because for now, the voice is a prisoner in the throat. It can't manage to get out. Whereas earlier — I'll make one last brief return to the cracked bell — the good bell, the one valid for small closed communities, not society as a whole, but communities. "Happy the bell with a vigorous throat." A throat that is not cracked. Good, now I move on to "An Imperial Message."
An Imperial Message by Kafka 41:45 I don't know. "An Imperial Message." It's in a collection of fairly short texts, as I told you, with the overall title "The Great Wall of China." I mention this because it speaks of the emperor, so you might picture the Emperor of China. But it could just as well be an emperor, a pharaoh, it could be the king of kings, the Negus, more or less an absolute sovereign. And here's the text. It's short, I reassure you. Now this is no longer poetry, it's prose — though Kafka's prose...
42:17 The Emperor, so it is said, has sent to you — to you being me speaking. It's not specified, it's up to the reader. The Emperor, so it is said, has sent — so it is said, is it certain? Because you'll see, receiving a message from the Emperor, that's not possible. Even by my own standards, I'm not that far gone. The Emperor, so it is said, has sent to you, to you in particular, to you, a pitiful subject, small shadow before the imperial sun, meanly cowering in the furthest distance — imagine a peasant at the other end of vast China, right?
42:56 Treading human manure with his feet into the rice paddies. The Emperor, so it is said, has sent to you, to you in particular, to you, a pitiful subject, a shadow before the imperial sun, meanly cowering in the furthest distance — to you precisely, the Emperor, from his deathbed, has sent a message. That's not possible. I, the Emperor's very being, and moreover the Emperor at the moment of his death, so a message, perhaps the most important message the Emperor has ever delivered.
43:29 We'll see if the message really manages to be delivered and reaches what is called — it's not in the mail — the recipient. Whether it reaches its destination is not a given. The messenger — the Emperor made him kneel by the bed to whisper the message to him. Imagine the Emperor with a weakened voice, it resembles Baudelaire. "It often happens that... my soul," that his weakened voice resembles the thick rattle of a wounded man forgotten.
44:03 The Emperor, from his deathbed, has sent a message. The messenger — he made him kneel by the bed to whisper the message to him. And the Emperor cared so much about his message that he had him repeat it back into his ear. Before dying, he wants to be sure it is indeed what he said and not something distorted. Those who work in computing and information theory know there is always a signal-to-noise ratio — there's the signal, that's the message, but there is often noise that intervenes.
44:35 "What did you say? I didn't quite hear on the phone," it happens, right? There's already interference. So he had him repeat it back into his ear. With his head, he nodded that it was indeed correct. He no longer even has the strength to speak, you see, after his last message. With his head, he nodded that it was indeed what he had said. And before all those watching him die, he dies in front of the court, you see. All the walls that hinder, that hinder the messenger who must leave, all the hindering walls are torn down.
45:07 Well, that's good news, and on the vast steps rising boldly stand, in a circle, the great ones of the Empire. Before them all, he has dispatched the messenger. Now not — the messenger set off immediately. A vigorous man, well, like the bell's throat in Baudelaire. They're not related — Baudelaire never knew him, it's not the same period, it's much earlier.
45:37 The messenger set off immediately. A vigorous man, tireless, pushing alternately with one arm and the other, he cuts his way through. I'm reading it on purpose because some of you have already heard it a very long time ago, quite a while back, and I'm glad of it — for those newly arrived in the community, in the space of reflection we form together. He cuts his way with one elbow and then the other, he cuts his way through the crowd.
46:07 If he meets resistance, he points to his chest, where the sign of the sun is. Sacred, right? He advances easily like no one else. Good, that's good, the message will get through soon, but the crowd is vast and it goes on and on, filling everything without end. If the space opened up before him, how the messenger would fly! Rimbaud said that to understand my word, it must flee and fly.
46:40 It's a metaphor. The messenger, if there were no obstacle, would fly. And that makes one think of speech, which is airy, which is in the air, which floats in the air. If the space opened up before him, how the messenger would fly, and soon you — the same "you" as at the beginning, you, me, him, her, right, each one of us — and soon you would hear the magnificent knocking of his fists at your door.
47:12 But alas, his efforts remain in vain, and he is still forcing his way through the chambers of the innermost palace. He was supposed to arrive in a flash at his destination, and in fact, he is still within the inner palace. Never will he get through them. And even if he overcame these obstacles — granted, by miracle, right? — and even if he overcame these obstacles, he would be no further along.
47:43 On the way down the stairs he would still have to struggle. And if he made it down to the bottom, he would be no further along. He would still have to cross the courtyards. Picture the Forbidden City. The courtyards, and after the courtyards, the second palace surrounding them. And again, stairs and towers. The difficulties of life, right? And again, and again, another palace. And so on, listen carefully, for centuries upon centuries.
48:16 You see? The text turns fantastical. It's no longer a matter of an eternity to arrive at the moment. No — for the merest message, and despite this vigorous messenger bearing the sign of the sun on his chest, which is supposed to make everyone step aside — yes, but there is always more people replacing everyone else. And if at last, if I make myself understood, if he finally managed to get out of the imperial palace — we're at that point, right?
48:47 And if at last — excuse me, there — and if at last he rushed through the final gate — this time, that's it, this time I'm getting out of the palace, right — through the final gate — dash — but this could never, ever happen, but let's suppose it, let's suppose it — at best, what would he find before him, and here there's a capital V, I tell you in advance, he would find before him the imperial city, no longer the palace but worse, the imperial city, the center of the world, the city that has piled up mountains of its own silt, its own mud, if you like — no one penetrates there, not even with the message of a dead man, but through the ultimate — why are you reading us this, it's despairing, it's unbearable, it's almost sadistic — there's a line and a half left — but you, you are sitting at your window, so the "you" from the beginning, you, me, him,
49:57 ...she, but you, you are sitting, you are seated, you can hear, but you, you are sitting at your window, and in your dream, you call out the message when evening comes, but you, you are sitting at your window, and in your dream, you call out the message when evening comes, there, the final point, this text — I raised my voice a bit because I got a comment from someone who very kindly told me he really likes my talks, which flatters my vanity, but he said, it's a shame that sometimes we can hear you clearly, and then other times you mumble into your beard, and we'd really like to hear what you're saying, we can barely hear it, you see, so I'm trying to take what he told me into account, and I thank him for it, that's a very positive kind of criticism — but you, you are sitting at your window and in your dream, the message when evening comes. Yes, but I'm not saying all this to leave you in despair. The fall, the last line and a half — what does it tell us?
Pascal, hope, and the pessimism of Ecclesiastes 51:06 That the message — perhaps the messenger — will never arrive; that, we've understood, he doesn't even manage to get out of the palace. But someone, somewhere — how does he put it — calls out the message when evening comes; there is someone waiting for the message, so a connection is established somewhere, you see. You can guess that here Kafka is very close to one of the most mysterious sentences in Pascal, and the proof that it's mysterious is that it's in a text titled The Mystery of Jesus — that's the famous posthumous text of Pascal, which is a dialogue between the soul — the soul of the sinner who judges himself beneath everything, who despairs of ever being able to be forgiven for all his ignominies — that's you and me, it's not a specially wicked person, it's the abyss of evil, it's our subject, evil, which can exist in each and every one of us, at least potentially, and alas, often enough actually.
52:13 So, who is in dialogue, who is tormented, you see, saying that he is not worthy of grace, and then Jesus answers him, and it's an extremely famous line: "Console yourself, you would not seek me." Like the messenger who tries to push people aside and deliver the message — "You would not seek me if you had not already found me." In other words, "If you are seeking me, it's because you had already found me."
52:46 You see there is hope there. You might say to me, "Yeah, but you're going off into pious nonsense there." Why doesn't he call? Why doesn't she call? You know, text messages, the love relationship, the one who believes themselves abandoned because they're waiting, waiting, they were promised a message and it doesn't come, it no longer comes. Right? But the one from whom she's waiting for it, the one from whom he's waiting for it — if that person suddenly learns that the other one is waiting for their message, don't you think that does them good?
53:26 So the fact that, in the last line, "but you, you are sitting at your window, and in your dream you call out the message when evening comes," there is a glimmer of hope in all that nightmare of the two texts, the cracked bell and the imperial message. It's that there is always a subject for another subject. I wanted to come back to that, but at the same time come back to the difficulty we saw, over which I dwelt a bit too long in the introduction: is philosophy possible?
54:04 Can the philosophical message be delivered? Or is it futile, useless — if everything is determined, what's the point of trying to free oneself? Freedom is impossible if everything is determined. There. Isn't it? And I haven't settled the question, but I said that for those who settle it by saying freedom must be given up, everything is determined — and everything has always been determined, therefore everything is cyclical and everything will return, don't look for progress, for change.
54:39 Yes — there are some among you who know the sacred texts: in the Old Testament there is the most pessimistic text of all religious texts. You think religion is the solution to all problems? No. There is a text so pessimistic that at times certain theologians — it's not for me to decide, that would be sacrilege — even doubt it has a place in the Bible. It's Ecclesiastes. Look it up, put it on Wikipedia, on whatever you like, not Google — Ecclesiastes, this text.
55:17 This is the text that spends its time saying "there is a time for war, there is a time for peace, there is a time to sow, there is a time to reap." You see, that's not linear, it's cyclical, like the seasons. And the refrain, the rather despairing refrain, is "there is nothing new under the sun." That's in the Old Testament. There is no good news. Do you know how you say "good news" in Greek? Well, in slightly distorted Greek, "gospel." No, that's not the New Testament.
55:48 We're seeing quite a lot today, about evil — you see, one has to row hard to try to find one's way through a problem like this. Things are serious. So today we've seen that there is a relationship between the relation of evil to good and the relation of communication that is possible or impossible. It's not a matter of message granted or message refused. I'd like here to allude to another cycle I did — I'm sure most of you remember it — on memory, anamnesis, forgetting.
Memory, forgetting, and narcissism 56:29 What's the connection, you ask? The connection was the conclusion we drew. Because some of you say, "Yes, but you keep hooking us onto new cycles like this, and you never finish." Well, actually I do, because each time I take up the same cycle again under different titles. It's the same thing. I had concluded that cycle on memory and forgetting — they go together — with the idea that perhaps the subject has no interest in going all the way to the end of their memories, in order to keep the good image they have of themselves.
57:07 That has a name, it's called narcissism, what I'm in the process of stating. That may be it. It may be one of the figures of absolute evil. The share of narcissism — I reassure you, I'm not pointing at evil, the wicked one — the share of narcissism that exists in each and every one of us. That is, our positive relation to ourselves, but as though it had always existed. Let me give you an excerpt from a film — a film by Bertrand Blier.
57:52 All I know is that it had Depardieu and Dewaere, the same pair as in Going Places. The title will come back to me before I finish talking. Depardieu has a wife who's a bit depressed, and he tasks someone he doesn't know — whom he met in a café, that's Dewaere — with trying to make her happy: make love with her if you want, here, take this, he puts fifty euros in his pocket.
58:22 There, be kind, gentle with her, all I want is for her to be happy. Anyway. And in fact we notice that the woman goes from attempt to attempt with different lovers each time, trying to get her to smile, and it's hard — I won't tell you the ending — but at one point Dewaere, who had agreed at one point, says to him, but I don't understand, it's been two days and two nights we've spent together with your wife, I've put all my books, all my records at her disposal, nothing interests her.
58:59 "Let me make a hypothesis — I'm sorry to say this — but isn't she maybe a bit dumb?" Excuse me, that's the text, it's not me, it's the film's dialogue. And Depardieu answers — I was talking about narcissism, like father like son — Depardieu answers, and this magnificently narcissistic reply: he thinks for a second, then says, no, that's not possible. A man like me could not, without knowing it, marry a stupid woman. That's narcissism. It's a certain image one has of oneself, on which one rests a little.
59:29 It's the opposite of depression. Depression is when — there, on the contrary, one runs oneself down: anyway, with me, it's always the same, I've never had any luck with men, with women, with this, with work, with love, with money, it's my fault because I'm a loser, I'm worthless. Both are just as mad as each other, I reassure you, but still. Narcissism. We're seeing important things here, aren't we?
1:00:04 The subject needs the oracle of Delphi to tell him, know thyself — implying, if the oracle tells him that, it's because it knows that the subject, that is, consciousness, the conscious subject, the visible tip of the iceberg that exists in each and every one of us, is full of certainties, but that these certainties are a long way from the truth. To take up again a pairing I've tried to familiarize you with, there is a long way from certainty to truth.
Zelenka, Wagner, and antisemitism 1:00:37 There, I don't want to go too far beyond today, but otherwise to make a bit... I've finished, not with the subject — this is only the beginning of our cycle — but since these two texts were very dense, and rather dark, I'd like to tell you why I chose, as an opening, I asked Pierre-Alain to play this beautiful music you heard at the beginning, composed by — not very well known to the general public — someone called Zelenka, Z-E-L-E-N-K-A, a Czech who composed at the junction of the 17th and 18th centuries, so a contemporary of Bach — Bach knew him at one point and even admired him — and I played you the Miserere for you, not "misère," but in Latin, everything with the root "miser" is misfortune — you see the connection with our subject.
1:01:48 But why did I choose that piece? Because the composer's name is Zelenka, you'll ask me? Well, I knew a Zelenka — I don't know what became of him, I would be very happy to learn he's alive, because we'd drifted apart a bit, though without ever having quarreled, far from it — I met him in Africa. He was, as they say, a local-contract worker — a French expatriate there, but not a cooperant, meaning he wasn't paid like the teachers of the Ivorian civil service, he had a direct contract with the Ivorian state, not with the French Ministry of Cooperation. He was a Jew — that's why I'm mentioning this.
1:02:34 Roland Zelenka, if by chance he's listening to me — he might have one chance in ten thousand, mightn't he — I would be very happy about that. Why am I bringing him up? And why did I think of playing his composer namesake? Because he had an admirable knowledge of music — you see, the salary of an Ivorian teacher in the 1970s, as an expatriate in Abidjan, where life is so expensive, he wasn't rolling in money, he came from a very working-class background, Jews from the "sentier" district, as they say, people who pushed carts of textiles in the Marais.
1:03:17 He had an extraordinary musical culture; he was a Spanish teacher, that's all, giving his little classes, not even in the capital, in Bingerville — forgive me, I'm paying him tribute, but no, this isn't to change the subject — he had an admirable knowledge of music, for instance he listened to a huge amount of contemporary music, which is quite rare, it grates on the ears of those who aren't familiar with it, who aren't used to it, you see, music from, let's say, after the post-Debussy period, twelve-tone music — well, anyway — and he also had a particular fondness for opera, if you prefer, and he'd pointed out to me that in Siegfried — I remember I did a cycle on the Ring, didn't I —
1:04:12 In Siegfried, Siegfried was raised in the forest, he was found there crying as a baby, his mother is dead, though he doesn't know it yet, and he was raised by the dwarf — there, another dwarf, like in Nietzsche — by a Nibelung, who had become, how do we put it now, a free agent — well, that's a colloquial expression — but who had gone independent, so to speak, to use a contemporary metaphor, a dwarf who was one of the slaves, under the whip of Alberich, the king of the elves — Alberich, king of the elves, the black elves, the elves of darkness, of the underground world, the world of the proletariat, that's why they're smaller, you see, they're dirty, they stink, it's all in the text — Clouscard takes up this dichotomy in Refondation progressiste. He had asked me to give him the original text of Siegfried; he was astonished to see how much there was a class relationship between the underground world, Nibelheim — Nibel is what gives "nebulous" in French, you know—
1:05:22 it's an old Germanic root, it's everything that is the opposite of light — the gods are in the light, Olympus among the Greeks, Valhalla among the Germans, at the top of a mountain — whereas the dwarves are below, and in between there are the giants, on the back of the earth. There are the three races, to speak as Wagner does. And he told me that when the dwarf is forced to confess to Siegfried, whom he's led to believe since birth that he's his father, when he's only his adoptive father — he found the child, he raises him so that one day, when Siegfried becomes an adult, with the strength the boy will grow into and which he, the dwarf, lacks, he can use him one day to kill the dragon, then afterward kill Siegfried with poison, once he's killed the dragon, and seize the Rhine gold, the Nibelung treasure — there, I'm going on a bit — except that at one point, under Siegfried's threat, who says "I don't resemble you, you're not my father, I looked at myself," — he's a wild child living in the forest,
1:06:32 he's never seen human beings, like you and me — he was raised by a dwarf; dwarves, giants, gods — that's not the world of men, another point — men will appear in the Valkyrie — "I looked at myself in the mirror of the water and I saw that I didn't resemble you, whereas all the animals, I saw, resembled their forebears, their young" — and so, under threat, the dwarf who found him is forced to confess, "I found you in the forest, a stone's throw from the dragon's lair," etc. — I'll skip ahead — my son told me once, he was 12, they had lapped up all of Wagner because he had just seen The Lord of the Rings — it's always more or less the same Germanic stories. Hitler had himself shown Snow White several times a day — it's an excellent film, I'm not saying anything bad about Snow White, but it's so Germanic it would drive you mad.
1:07:27 Yes, the dwarves, all that — well, these would be other subjects, seeing how much white America is German, Germanic in any case. Eisenhower, Kissinger, Bush... Except that Siegfried, in the end, manages to get the confession that this isn't really his father, doesn't he?
1:08:06 But what's the connection with the Zelenka I was talking about, whom I knew in the lagoons and forests of the Ivory Coast? I'll tell you right away: Roland told me — and for me it was a revelation — that when he was a child, in his family, there were traditional Jewish songs sung in the courtyards of the buildings. He said, when I listen to the music of that fierce antisemite Wagner — pathologically antisemitic even, because the whole German middle bourgeoisie was more or less antisemitic, not only in Germany but especially there, because there were many ghettos — he said, when Mime says, "but Siegfried, I nursed you, I raised you," he said, the whining and the complaint reminded me incredibly of Jewish songs.
1:08:59 So this antisemite Wagner, his unconscious, without meaning to, had him express, through traditional Jewish music, the misfortunes of Mime. I say, for those interested, I'll conclude here my detour through Zelenka — I haven't finished the main point about him, but it's coming soon — but I'll finish the musicological part by recalling that Wagner never knew his father, who died very young when he was a baby; his father was a police official in Leipzig, and his mother remarried a man of the theater — you see how Wagner entered show business, not yet musical, but theatrical — a man named Geyer, which means "vulture" in German.
1:09:52 You think I'm wandering off? He was a Jew, and this stepfather adored little Richard, to the point that some say it was a kind of admission that he was the natural father — I won't settle that, we'll never know — and Richard adored him too as a child. Hence the conclusion that perhaps one of the greatest antisemites in the history of music was fighting against himself — you see how we get back to narcissism that refuses to admit itself, don't we?
1:10:29 And I'll close this both musicological and family-related parenthesis with a remark by Nietzsche — Nietzsche, who is well known, and the Wagner family, whom he frequented for a time before they fell out, as everyone knows, forever, alas — it's he who says "alas," Nietzsche, and Wagner too, for that matter, since Wagner said to Nietzsche's sister, "tell your brother that since he left me I am alone."
1:11:02 Star friendship, as stars drift apart from one another. And indeed, Nietzsche says in a passage: when one is not capable of being an Adler, one can always try to be a Geyer. So, translating for you: when one is not capable of being an Adler — in German that means an eagle — one can always try to be a Geyer, meaning a vulture. And when you consider the vulture's beak in relation to the image the antisemite has of the Jewish nose, you understand that it's Nietzsche's spiteful way of saying — he decides outright — that Wagner is antisemitic precisely because he has Jewish origins.
1:11:41 But now I'm being serious — I was serious there, these aren't secondhand rumors, I checked them for you — but what's serious is the contemporary stakes. I'm tired of having to fight against those who say Israel has the right to defend itself, and of fighting against those who take advantage of the discredit fortunately cast on the ignoble executive currently running the State of Israel in order to indulge antisemitism.
1:12:11 Ah! Evil is easy; the narrow path between the two is much harder. There, I'd like to leave it there for today — it's a bit shorter than usual, but I'm skipping the episode of answering questions or comments, or commenting on the comments, because of how dense the subjects are that we're working through in this cycle. And so as not to muddle everything, it's already complicated enough as it is.
1:12:42 On the other hand, I promise you that our next session will be devoted entirely, right from the start, to answering your comments and questions. So, I'll say see you very soon, and once again, you know I hate gurus — don't take anything I've said on trust, check the sources. Thank you in advance, and I'll see you next time.
