English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Excerpt: Clouscard versus Séguéla on the advertising dream 0:00 Capitalism has an excellent brand image. It has deceptive powers. Like Séguéla. Like Séguéla. Because dreaming is deceptive. Because we know that dreaming is deceiving. Of course, obviously. But I feel sorry for you, my dear fellow. But do you realize the gravity of what you're saying, this assault on life? There's an enormous confusion.
0:31 You want to deprive people of dreams. You want to kill cinema, you want to kill literature, you want to kill TV, you want to kill all these enormous dreams. The dream you're proposing is cheap trash. There's a dream that is authentic. The dream, the Western myth, dreaming of Tristan, the prelude to Tristan, you know it. That's serious. That's the dream. Why is that more serious than a great advertising film? Because it's a moment—museums, one and the other. Because it's a moment, nothing. It's not the same at all. They're not on the same level. One is at the level of the everyday, the other at the level of the extraordinary. That's real life. The dream is permanent. I follow the first steps of the dream. I'm there so that permanently, I read. Watch out, you have a cigarette, you're John Wayne.
1:02 Does your literature lead to Tristan und Isolde? It opens the mind. I'm sure that the child sitting there in front of his television, captivated by my advertising spots—well, if they have talent, if they're in the imaginary, if all of Hollywood is there on the screen, well, I'm going to open little windows of dream for him. Of course. You condition him completely. No. You condition him completely toward the imaginary. I condition him toward the pleasure of living. Of course. I condition him toward life. The pleasure of living and the capitalists. Instead of conditioning him like you do, toward the concentration camps of shame.
1:34 Ah, there you go. But after all, I'm conditioning him toward life. But after all... And so, as a reminder of the previous episode, Bernard Bourgeois, another great Hegelian, from the right, but no less extremely interesting and above all of an irreproachable philological rigor, spoke last time, it's a theme we had discussed together, about the refusal of totality.
Sartre on the jury: a totalization under way 2:23 We always see at best a totalization, a will toward totalization that never ends. So why am I talking about this? Because, precisely, Being and the Code is credited by Sartre, who was on Michel Clouscard's thesis jury, with a will toward totalization in progress. Quote, a long quote, well, a short quote here.
2:53 His great merit lies in saying that the best conditions for history to reveal itself concretely for what it is, a totalization in progress. In the very slight preface I composed, in the absence of our principal expert on Michel Clouscard, who is Dominique Pagani, who prefers to express himself orally, I still wanted to recall a number of things to explain the context, and in particular reproduced in full Sartre's commentary, which is at least more than a page, as you can see, in this large format.
3:27 It is nothing less, I add, I quote again, than showing history in the form of a genetic totalization. The author wants to try to restore the process of production of a pre-capitalist ensemble. "This ensemble is none other than the hexagon that constitutes itself as a nation over the course of the process." And he says that precisely, while recalling that he had gotten this from a number of sources, at the same time he says that it is the immense merit of this book, precisely to have wanted to place itself from the point of view of a great ensemble, of a great totality.
4:03 So the paradox of this book is that it's called Being and the Code. Being and the Code is a provocation with respect to Sartre's Being and Nothingness. It's a jab at Sartre, Clouscard's great adversary. I believe it's in Critique of Libertarian Liberalism, if I remember correctly. He says that the two greatest representatives of neo-Kantianism—neo-Kantianism being a set that he redefined, going beyond strict academic neo-Kantianism, much broader, in fact the whole of bourgeois philosophy, let's say, from the contemporary era onward.
4:38 The two representatives are Husserl—the most important for him are Husserl and Sartre. So how does it come about that there's such a trajectory that leads Sartre not only to be on his thesis jury, but in a certain way to approve of Clouscard's approach? All the more so since he doesn't speak at all about what lies beyond this will toward totalization, namely accounting for a process of production of the pre-capitalist ensemble, of the hexagon constituting itself as a nation.
5:09 How is it that he doesn't speak at all about their epistemological, gnoseological divergence, about their model? I've tried to ask myself this question. I think it's ultimately an enigma in the history of thought. But in my opinion, the reason is that Sartre himself had evolved. This thesis was not supervised by Sartre, it was supervised by Henri Lefebvre.
5:39 Now, Henri Lefebvre—Sartre praises him some time before, in Search for a Method. Search for a Method was published in 1960, but the work dates from 1957. It was first published in a journal in Poland, then it became a book. So, in Search for a Method, Sartre quotes Lefebvre on methodology. I quote to be precise. The descriptive phase, observation, but with a gaze informed by experience and by a general theory, that's the first phase.
6:17 Second phase, the analytic-regressive phase, analysis of reality, an effort to date it precisely. That's the effort, so rich and so clear, of a valid method, as Sartre says, of the historical-genetic phase. Now, what came before, in Search for a Method? The great book that had marked minds was The Hidden God by Lucien Goldmann, in 1955, and we know that Lucien Goldmann was going to polemicize against structuralism by speaking of genetic structuralism—that is, yes, to account for great structures being put in place, but let's not forget the engendering of these structures, starting precisely from the notion of totality.
7:00 So, let's remember that Sartre is in search. When you look at the preface to Aden Arabie, I believe it's there that he says of the left, that great corpse lying on its back, he had abandoned his canonical existentialism, which is what Sartre—sorry, Clouscard—was going to aim his arrows at. So this will to account for great structures that mutually self-engender each other, and Clouscard is going to redefine his project in a rather limpid way by saying, the self-engendering of praxis and the psyche, how the process of production creates the psyche—meaning not only a sensibility, but also a gnoseology, a form of scientificity.
7:53 All of that was in the air of the times; Clouscard's strength was going to be to push the field of observation into a properly constitutive reality, which is the substrate, the national substrate before the arrival of capitalism. In a sense, he says it very clearly, he's responding to Reading Capital by Althusser, saying precisely that you cannot read Capital if you don't see what came before, that is, the substrate, thought within a Hegelian perspective, which in any case allows for the emergence of this mode of production.
8:30 So, it seems to me—maybe I'm pushing it a bit far—but Sartre had understood this method so well that beyond a certain number of things, it's always his will to try to find, always—I read—always to uphold Kierkegaard's point of view against Hegel's, always trying to find the point of view, how shall I say, the legitimacy of the individual with respect to structures.
9:00 Nevertheless, for Sartre it's a matter of finding precisely how the individual emerges in a context that he himself has defined as insurmountable—it should be recalled that Sartre said Marxism was the insurmountable horizon of our time. And this is going to be, in my opinion, in a great historical-genetic perspective, this is going to be The Family Idiot. That's 2,800 pages written on Corydrane, to which he devoted his last strength.
9:30 It seems to me there are common points in the method. Simply, it's not at all the same object. But at the same time, Clouscard's hubris—that is, studying a system over at least perhaps more than a millennium—was not a perspective displeasing to Sartre. Only, afterward, perhaps we see their great difference again, and it's true that God knows they had that, beyond this epistemological problem, they were poles apart in terms of lifestyle. Someone who spoke about it best, I believe, is François de Negroni in his work called The Intellectual's Savoir-Vivre.
Neo-kantianism, an ideal type, not a history of France 10:09 And indeed, in the end, Sartre produces a theory of the bourgeoisie. So it's remarkable. And we can also recall the terms. But he tries, while being careful with the psychoanalytic apparatus, he tries to make a theory of the bourgeoisie and its engendering at a given moment, taking Flaubert as an example, avoiding precisely the pitfalls that are inevitable when you have such a vast perspective, where necessarily you make a certain number of...
10:44 let's say, you put yourself at risk with respect to a much more historicist view where obviously many historians can find fault when you define great figures. But in any case, in my opinion, compared to a reproach that certain proponents of empirical sciences can make of them—we recently found a dialogue with Moria at the PCF in the 1980s. It doesn't matter whether it's... it's not necessarily... it's hard to write a history of France without being absolutely accurate all the time, or precise on this or that passage, or without disappointing this or that...
11:22 specialist in the field. But nevertheless, what Clouscard is looking for is an ideal type within ideology, that is, what he calls neo-Kantianism, and how this gnoseology is put in place over the course of the era. So it ultimately doesn't matter how many authors he brackets off each time, let's say, as representatives of a kind of mechanism that interests him—he's acting as a philosopher, it's not a history of France.
11:53 It's not a matter of... which would necessarily be contestable and, I would say, always perfectible each time. In which respect, precisely, it is not superseded in a certain way, in the sense that—of course the comparison is, how to say, a glorious one—but in the sense that Marx's Capital is not superseded, is that we reach a certain concept. The concept is that of neo-Kantianism. Because, just as I've shown how Clouscard partakes of his era—we spoke of Goldmann, we spoke of Lefebvre—likewise what he forged as a theoretical tool, which is neo-Kantianism, I repeat, giving of meaning without the antepredicative, giving of meaning according to the signifier, dichotomy of noumenon and phenomenon, dichotomy of empiricism and formalism—so what precisely exceeds traditional neo-Kantianism—this schema still applies today, and I would say more than ever.
Derrida, Badiou and post-structuralist marxism 12:50 Why more than ever? I've brought you a contemporary text, a contemporary text called Writing and Difference by Derrida. There, we've moved to another stage that Clouscard could not analyze because it's what was going to mark the following era, it's post-structuralism. You know there's a Marxist who calls himself a post-structuralist and in the end, it's all those we hear, all those who hold the people in a certain way. That is... They're post-Marxist. Yes, there you go. In a way, they're post-Marxist. Why? Because they de-ontologize Marxism.
13:22 What is post-structuralism? It's considering... I'm going to give you a quote from the text. It's Structure, Sign, and Play. In my opinion, everything in post-structuralism starts from there. It can't be given first name here. He's commenting on Lévi-Strauss. "And if totalization then has no meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite gaze or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field—namely, language, and a finite language—excludes totalization."
14:01 "This field is in effect that of play, that is, of infinite substitution within the closure of a finite ensemble. This field permits these infinite substitutions only because it is finite—that is, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, it lacks something, namely a center that arrests and grounds the play of substitutions. One could say, using this word rigorously, whose scandalous signification we always erase in French, that this movement of play permitted by the lack, the absence of center or origin, is the movement of supplementarity."
14:34 we already have Badiou, in a way, in Being and Event, a certain number of great chains where the non-subject enters into a scene of signifying threads and waits for something to supplement itself. Which allows them to... And you know that Derrida is going to define... We've lost the center, we've lost totalization. We already had, and Clouscard analyzed this well, that is, Husserlian egology and structuralism, structure giving meaning even before the emergence of a subject, even before any production.
15:12 Giving of meaning without the antepredicative, giving of meaning prior to all discourse. And Derrida, for his part, is going to flatly develop the concept of khôra. The khôra is... It goes back to Plato, it's the space even before the... Yes, he stays within the... There you go. But in Plato, it has the meaning... the space even before the demiurge fills it. It's in the name of this that he's going to... Already with Husserl, we were losing the subject-object distinction, in a certain way.
15:44 That's Husserlian egology. That's what it was. With Lacan, we lose the referent. And the real, in Lacan, ends up being defined only negatively. It's what resists all symbolization. I remind you of that. And we're going to go even further into this antepredicative with post-structuralism. So from this point of view, what I wanted to say with Clouscard's concept of neo-Kantianism is that it remains valid for explaining the subsequent evolutions of Marxism.
16:18 I have my colleague who's here and who tried to make... he deserves credit because he tried to summarize Being and the Code in one page, and moreover I find that in a way he succeeded. And he recalls this radical realism, in order to refer economy back, to extend class struggle to the epistemological level, even within the Marxist family itself. Because since then, we've developed a post-structuralist Marxism, a Marxism... I would say, Derrida, what does he continue with? Ontology. Ontology—you know, he makes a play on words, as only he knows how, in Specters of Marx, on this ontology that haunts this uninhabitable place.
17:00 It's Badiou who describes Marxism as an uninhabitable place, in the sense that, empirically, it would be refuted. But simply, what would remain true is fidelity to the event, it's the revolutionary act. And for Derrida, Marxism would present itself in a spectral form, in the form of something that haunts us, because it's always the idea of justice that haunts us, but Marxism would be, let's say, finished as knowledge. It would no longer carry... It might still carry a form of truth, but no longer an empirical knowledge.
17:32 So, what I mean is that I've taken these examples, but we could talk about Laclau, who tried to apply... You know this has modern applications in politics today, or Žižek—all these people are characterized precisely by this post-structuralist will to refuse this totalization in progress. That is, even what Sartre, at least, was trying to foresee in a way, on the mode of nostalgia, a certain...
18:03 at least, a will to tend, to tend toward this will to totality, to think ultimately... I very much liked Bernard Bourgeois's distinction last time between thinking according to the concept and thinking according to meaning. Living according to the concept is trying to renounce personal incursions into the immanent rhythm of the concept, it's trying to live under the gaze of totality and see how it structures itself. It's the philosophical act par excellence. Whereas living according to meaning, this kind of hermeneutics that is going to, in my opinion, triumph after this period, and it comes to us perhaps straight from Schleiermacher, that I believe...
18:38 I've read Bernard Bourgeois's texts that speak about this. A polemic against psycho-pedagogy in relation to that, saying that we lose the content of pedagogy. We've replaced it precisely with an attention, an endless hermeneutics. The field of signifiers that never stops dividing without ever speaking of referents, of contents. And in a way it's the philosophical approach itself that has changed. We look for one signifier to drag along another. At no point do we lose the referent, we lose the regime of production, we lose the need for totality.
19:13 That's why what I'm clumsily trying to make you understand is to what extent the stakes were not internal to Marxism. Because we managed to create a post-structuralist Marxism, we managed to create a de-ontologized Marxism. It was at the heart of Hegelianism. It was at the heart of this will, and it really was the bugbear of those years. It had begun with Althusser in a certain way, where there's an attempt to move toward Spinoza. But that's still too much because there's already...
19:43 one still thinks in terms of a certain notion of totality in Spinoza, insufficiently dialecticized compared to Hegel. Of course, it's not a matter of comparing them, because that would be absurd in itself. But that was only the beginning. The other move was toward wiping the slate clean entirely and going back completely to the antepredicative and representing the emergence of... we're no longer in the interaction between subject and structures. We're in the meaning that appears in a process open to the event.
20:14 So in a certain way, for the workers' movement, all capacity to structure itself is lost. That's why I wanted to insist on this, to show that both Being and the Code fit within the Marxism of its era, which had reached a point, I would say, of concrescence, which forged a tool—a tool for which I mentioned Sartre, Goldmann—but of course this succession of great figures owes a great deal to Hegel, owes a great deal to the Phenomenology of Spirit.
20:47 But precisely this Phenomenology of Spirit—Bernard Bourgeois recalled this well last time. Bernard Bourgeois—I open a small parenthesis—we obviously don't read the same newspapers, we won't agree on the empirical assessment of reality as it is, but we can at least say we speak the same language, since he speaks it in a totally native way and I as an amateur, but we'll agree on that point at least. But this Hegelian phenomenology of spirit is completely opposed to the Husserlian phenomenological approach that triumphs today, in this kind of giving of meaning, this infinite search for meaning where we try to multiply experiences and Erlebnisse without ever trying to account for things, to place oneself under the gaze of the concept, under the gaze of the search for truth and for how the world structures itself.
21:33 So from this point of view, it seems to me Clouscard remains a milestone, it's not simply a book that's now maybe 50 years old, roughly fifty years—it's also an Ernst Bloch fighting, I'm in obscure stars, because indeed what we saw afterward was a counter-revolution, but it was the summit of its era; but perhaps in a certain way what we saw afterward was an involution. There you go, and I'll pass the floor to Dominique Pagani, all the more so since I know from experience—no one can contest this—that the concept of neo-Kantianism was forged in collaboration between Clouscard and him.
The human sciences as a way of locking down marxism 22:12 There you go, as a transition, we can of course talk about other things if he wants. There you go, it'll come around to the same thing anyway. Thank you Aymeric for this recentering of this monument, in these last 30 years of philosophical, indeed ideological, current affairs, in a more expansive manner—there you go, a book that must be the despair of booksellers—no, I'm not thinking of you, Dominique, you're not representative of the majority of booksellers—no but seriously, even very motivated, very very organized booksellers—but where do I put it? I'm not talking about buying it but where to place it in the merchandising—I put it in sociology, I put it in economics, I put it in history—that's the problem I'm raising—in philosophy I put myself last, I'm the youngest at home so there you go, that poses a problem, you know I'm a bit obsessed with the question of genres.
23:22 there you go, but it's not to indulge my personal whims, it's that I remind you of the rather pitiful state in which what we're used to calling the set of sciences—sometimes human, sometimes social, that's disputed at that level—finds itself, but still, there's nothing to be proud of. You know Bachelard used to say that at physics conferences we're in hard science, whereas here we're in the butchery of nature—exactly, I'm not a structuralist, neither are you, genetic Clouscard cured us of structuralist terrorism of the signifier, watch your words—yes, we watch our words more than the structuralists, thank you—and so it's no accident that I bring up this proliferation of disciplines, because I have no legitimacy whatsoever, as such, to speak about Clouscard, I say this to set things straight—people have kindly called me a specialist again, just now, right here—I'm a specialist in nothing, except—it was Auguste Comte who said that the philosopher is a specialist in generalities—but anyway, I mean, I'm neither a Rousseauian, nor a Hegelian, nor a Clouscardian.
24:32 but I received an irreplaceable contribution from these three, for example, isn't that so, and I had the inestimable good fortune to spend time with Clouscard day to day, which didn't make me any less a legitimate addressee—otherwise the best commentator on Kafka would be Max Brod—but still, I wanted to, since I was on the proliferation of the human sciences, don't think I'm losing my thread—he said to me once, some of you have already heard this quote, the human sciences were invented to lock down nascent Marxism. If you look at the chronology, the synchronology of Marx's posterity, it's much more foolish than observing a frog before and after—you see, the term sociology comes from Auguste Comte, but the discipline doesn't exist afterward, it exists with Durkheim, you know that, so much so that—better than me, some don't exist—Durkheim, Weber, who were Marcel Mauss, and later Marcel Mauss of course, the whole French school—we'd never finish.
25:42 But we're already beyond that - I'm speaking of the immediate posterity of Marx, at a time when Marxism should have spread, all of a sudden people stopped talking about it, they started talking about sociology instead, and I belong to a generation where there was a little war between philosophers and sociologists - some remember it very well - between philosophy and the human sciences in general, and in particular the queen of the human sciences, sociology. I'm not here to settle the matter, I don't know, I claim allegiance to Marx, I'm not a specialist, I'm not - I'm not saying Marx is the last word, but I don't know an author as relevant today as the line running roughly from Rousseau to Lenin, passing through Hegel and Marx - roughly speaking, we'll go fast, so philosophically I'm talking about Lenin as a reader of Hegel, the rest isn't really my field either, but anyway I'll stick to philosophy here. And yet Marx, since I claim him as my reference, did write The Poverty of Philosophy. I'm not here to assert philosophy against sociology - we ought to feel guilty about still doing philosophy after Marx if we're Marxists, frankly we should start doing something else.
26:53 Doing what? Doing what the human sciences have locked away: the science of history. Because sociology, social psychology, structural or non-structural anthropology, ethnology, etc., presuppose that we've moved from nature to history - so to evacuate, let's say, anthropology for example, that way we get a vision of man that is ahistorical, which is very fashionable now with environmentalism - I'm very concerned about my environment, but I detest environmentalist discourse, I'm not talking about realities, this is serious. So again, I mean, anthropology is fine, it's a way of talking about man outside of history, and it's from Lévi-Strauss onward that we replace the term ethnology - you know this as well as I do - with anthropology; at the time these were serious battles, now it makes us laugh a little, all these word debates, because we're always served the same old reheated soup, just changing the words - namely, and Lévi-Strauss says it very well, especially in - excuse me - the rules...
28:03 in The Elementary Structures of Kinship, which is his doctoral thesis, and even more in The Raw and the Cooked, which opens the mythological series, he says very clearly - I am a specialist, he says, in societies without history. That's a nice phrase - no, but he's a subtle and cultured man, mind you, I'm not saying Lévi-Strauss is an idiot - there are plenty of idiots among Marx's posterity and among the anti-Marxists, but that's not the case with Lévi-Strauss, and the malice - Lévi-Strauss is an intelligence, and a very cultured one, one of the finest musical cultures in Paris at the time. So when Lévi-Strauss speaks of cultures without history, it's a double play on words: it means cultures where there's no world war, no palaver, as they say in Africa - men don't go looking for trouble (histoires) - in sub-Saharan Africa people call Cameroonians 'the historians' because they're always making histoires - there, I'm borrowing African humor - they don't take responsibility - excellent, if only there were more of them I'd be delighted, remarkable intellectual effervescence among Cameroonians - but there, making histoires in that sense. And then it also means societies that have not attained history - does that remind you of someone?
29:13 Who even does that - the debate, yes. So anthropology serves that purpose, history has been evacuated, everything is set up so that - well, let's not even get into it now, soon it will be only the animal that has a history and man who is natural, while we're at it. It's art, yes, it's art - we've surpassed the animal already. When I used to listen to students, sometimes the poor things, they were victims of TV talk shows, in the end you'd start thinking that the animal thinks and that man is guided only by elementary instincts - the inversion - man must be handed over to cognitive science, stimulus-response, brain imaging, whereas the animal, and even the plant, thinks. I'm coming back - not against the plant, which is against the animal, I can't say what I haven't said - I'm not coming back against the Church either, which forbade for centuries that animals be buried - maybe they had no soul, that can be defended too. There are people who get very worked up - the SS sometimes fell into depression after having, say, twenty prisoners shot in a day, just a little something to work up an appetite, and they'd be depressed.
The result and its becoming; the unconscious of the unconscious 30:23 if a dog was mistreated - I'm saying this because it's very topical. So, history - locking up history: Michel Clouscard spent his life trying to restore that history to us - your history, our history, that famous result of which Hegel says that the result is nothing without its becoming. The result is you, it's me, it's especially you, actually, because I'm somewhat relegated to becoming now, you see what I mean - it's important, the result is nothing without its becoming. If you take the bare result, it's a slice you cut out of time, you know - there's been a fair amount of work on this question - that's where he understood nothing of Hegel, when he said that the Hegelian totality is a totalitarian totality. Of course, because when you cut a slice into it - say, into the 18th century in Hegelian history, or the 19th, or the world of the Greeks, doesn't matter - all the instances, the art of that period, the religion of that period, the life of that period, are co-present and simultaneous, agreed. He proves he's ignorant, but he admits it at the end of his life - I won't allow myself, I'm really making ad hominem arguments, one has to feel sorry for him.
31:33 Poor Althusser, who spent his life being treated by Lacan at Sainte-Anne - but after having strangled his wife. Clouscard used to tell me - I don't know if it was on purpose - Clouscard told me: he strangled the old woman; if he'd been a worker he'd have gotten the death penalty, since there was still capital punishment at the time, whereas for him, the whole Parisian intelligentsia turned the crime into a suicide, because at first they made it look like a suicide - I'll close the parenthesis - he helped his wife commit suicide, right. So I mean, Althusser, who for - I'll say centuries, my slip of thought - constituted the very essence of Marxist orthodoxy and of the renewal of Marxism, admits at the end of his life that he himself had never really read Marx - he had issues with his father while using Marx - and that he hadn't understood anything of Marx, including the terrible theory of value, which he found unthinkable, and in his correspondence with Sève it shows he didn't even know the Grundrisse, since when Sève brings it up he says 'the Grundrisse, which immediately precedes Capital and which in fact refutes the epistemological break' - so, when I tell you that Clouscard...
32:43 had to fight in his day to restore a history, you have trouble believing me - well, history is a discipline taught in universities, that's over now. Yes, yes, you have guys who know everything about the Burgundian vineyard in the 11th century but don't know whether Erasmus comes before or after Jesus Christ, and don't know who were the first men with writing to cross the Sahara to discover sub-Saharan Africa - I'm thinking of Ibn Battuta, wasn't it the 14th century - all of that has been hidden, there's no more chronology. You know what chronologies are for old fools like me? It's stupid, I told you earlier, it's really no more stupid than saying 3 comes after 2 and 4 comes after 3. Well, so when I tell you restoring history is important, it's because it's the most hidden thing of all - and why, in your opinion, why is it the repressed par excellence? Ah, I'm using a Freudian word here to talk about an author who wasn't gentle with psychoanalysis - his pen wasn't gentle with psychoanalysis, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, I'm not mistaken - but who made great use of Freudian advances, of what's reversible in Freud, like the notion of repression that he uses all the time, as well as that of displacement.
33:53 Except that for him, what is repressed is not the individual unconscious, or sexuality playing the role it plays in Freud, or - well, I mean all that is familiar, even what is well known, because 'what is well known is not for that reason known,' says Hegel - but for him it's precisely the historical unconscious in Clouscard, what he himself called, coining the phrase, 'the unconscious of the unconscious' - perhaps one of his deepest concepts, what is even more repressed, and that's saying something, because 'the unconscious' already says a lot - it's the historical unconscious, it's my class unconscious, it's my positioning within the class struggle and within historical continuity. That, you see - take a very accessible work by Clouscard like Refondation progressiste - as is often the case, his clearest books are the ones where he was in dialogue with someone who was interviewing him; I'm thinking here of Marie-Antoine - a parenthesis on this person who interviewed him, she was a philosophy teacher in Toulouse, you know she was never recognized by her own, and Clouscard took a long time to be recognized in his own region.
35:03 He still is, if he still is - he's a prophet in his own land, as he used to tell me - and Marie-Antoine is the exception; she was a philosophy teacher and came across Clouscard's books, and he wrote to her saying: listen - she was at the Mirail, you know, the rough suburb of Toulouse, and it's no joke - he said everything, he said something like, the burettes have found the right to be sentimental again, because there were guys who said - Philippe Sollers, was it - you have to screw sentiment, that's bourgeois nonsense, etc. - I'll leave feeling to him, with a France Culture journalist, and off to Ireland with - there, that's Clouscard, all that historical thickness that restores things to us.
36:14 Now I come back to this because earlier Aymeric Monville said it's not a history book of France - that's true, but it is also that, it wouldn't be less than that, and it would be a misreading to present it as a work of history in any strict sense, without judging - because you made this point well - it's certainly, it's certainly less rich in information about the Burgundian vineyard in the ancien régime than the specialist I mentioned earlier who knows nothing else in history, you see. On the other hand, here you have the mode of production of a pre-capitalist ensemble - that is, the book stops right at the moment our world begins, our modern world if you will, the one engendered by those two revolutionary ruptures, the English industrial revolution chronologically first, and the French political revolution, within the space of a handkerchief called the 18th century - a handkerchief on the historical scale. We are still within these ruptures, ruptures like the ones that happen every twenty centuries, within the effects produced by this double rupture we are still within the psyche...
From the early Middle Ages to the double rupture; slavery 37:24 initiated by Romanticism, which will be the first expression at the superstructural level of this rupture, and which Clouscard is going to analyze at the level of what he calls the psyche - the slow formation of the psyche. Psyche - I don't know, it's the soul; the first treatise on psychology, on the science of the psyche, of the science of the soul, literally - it's Aristotle who wrote Peri Psychēs, I turn to someone better than me here - and it's the first time - but the soul, for the Greeks at the time, I don't want to dwell on this, it's not my subject - they could just as well have called it a manual of biology, because the Greeks don't speak, as we do - ours is a civilization derived from Christianity - of the body and the soul; so in Aristotle, the body is the living thing, there's the vegetative soul, there's the animal soul, I'll skip ahead - there had long been reflection on this - but the psyche was something new, and for him the psyche is produced by that slow evolution running from the high Middle Ages - to speak empirically now, using a common reference point for everyone - a truly high Middle Ages, that of Charlemagne, really the early Middle Ages, when a monk takes Charlemagne's thumb and makes him sign a cross on a document - Charlemagne was illiterate, the greatest emperor of the West.
38:34 The first, he's the roundest, before my compatriot - any world - an illiterate man who, all credit to him, is said to have multiplied schools - I don't know if it's true, but that's what France Gall says - yes, that's what I was saying, no but it's true that it started developing at that point - and then the role that this early Middle Ages played, running all the way up to the industrial revolution, to the bourgeois world we live in, up to and including the blossoming of modernity - you have this extraordinary fresco, but not as a historian; he's not going to dwell on the Battle of Fontenoy, he doesn't mention it at all - you know, 'Gentlemen the English, fire first,' which they love, when we lost Canada and joked about it because everything ended in songs back then, it ended up in games of blind man's buff at the Trianon - it's not that I'm a colonialist, that I regret it, but I mean I regret that it was the Anglo-Saxon world that inherited it, because it still governs us - don't forget we are governed by a world that appeared at the time of Waterloo, and that the world that is Clouscard's disappears just before the Revolution; in this book, between the two, there's a kind of...
39:44 ...intermission running roughly from Robespierre to Waterloo, which is fabulous, where the dice haven't been cast yet, we don't know how it's going to end - now, you know, it's a world dominated by the Anglo-Saxons, for better or worse - that's a value judgment, I don't know, judge for yourselves - it's going to end in two enormous world massacres, all the same, I should point that out in passing. So up to that point it wasn't so bad, but still, we hadn't gotten there yet, and yes, these are serious things, grave matters we're raising here. If we need to go back to this history where nothing was yet decided, this history that stops with - with the author who may be the greatest reference among those who preceded him - Rousseau, I'm alluding here to another book that Éditions Delga deserves credit for, and which they ought to reissue - it came out a few years back, and by changing the somewhat enigmatic title that Clouscard had liked, called Rousseau or Sartre of Modernity - right, Aymeric Monville's introduction showed that Clouscard had scores to settle with Sartre, and indeed, to sum it up roughly, he'd say, oh you bloody idiot, in his southern accent - we went and looked at Rousseau, what were we even doing there, frankly, when we have a revolutionary...
40:55 of that caliber, someone who says: if there have been slaves - if there are slaves by nature, that's fashionable now, people talk about slaves by nature - it's because there have been slaves against nature: force made the first slaves, their cowardice perpetuated them. You see there, Rousseau restores history, he does what Clouscard does - people believe it's in the genes, ah, he was born that way, he's a servant, whereas me, I'm not a loser, I'm a winner - you hear that, that's topical, there are losers, no - Rousseau, he restores, for the first time - he's not a historian at all, Rousseau, not in the way Voltaire was with the admirable Siècle de Louis XIV, which is a work of history in the empirical sense - I'm not talking about that kind of history, I'm talking about Marxist history, of historical materialism, of recalling that the genesis...
42:07 we arrive at Being and the Code - history's code lies first in the productive forces, and the productive force that reigned over all humanity until the end of antiquity was called the slave, apart from the animal, and the donkey that turned the millstone - when it wasn't a donkey, it was a slave - and it continued afterward, even when the Christian era put an end to slavery, it didn't happen at midnight on December 31st, it was very gradual, don't believe otherwise - because the beginnings of Christianity, as you know, took place in the cities, and especially among slave populations who found there something that echoed their own misfortune, and so Nietzsche is perfectly right to say it's a slave religion - except that for him this was pejorative, because he imagined that had he lived back then he'd have been among the masters - poor fool. Well no, one has to feel sorry for Nietzsche, poor boy, whom they turned into a great demystifier - and so I'm dwelling a bit on slavery because it's becoming topical again, we talked about this earlier - you know, they talk to you about immigration so as to no longer have to talk about slavery.
43:18 It's frightening what's happening - it's not just because I spent almost half my life in sub-Saharan Africa, but still, I mean, it's incredible that people are drowning there in the Mediterranean, as I speak, how many dozens are drowning right now, because the labor force needs to be renewed - it's you and me, we're bastards, we fought to get rights, wages, and now all that has to be taken back to zero because there are no more communists to oppose it, that's all over, neither on the inside - excuse me, there's a recent French Communist Party - nor on the outside, we're not talking about that anymore, the Berlin Wall has fallen. There's a great friend of Clouscard's, René Comer, whom those who've read François de Negroni's admirable biography surely know - the great Sartrean - yes, yes, that was his torment - but who was more Clouscardian than Sartrean, and who assisted Clouscard until his final moments, and who said: the fall of the Berlin Wall is not a failure of communism, it's a great step backward for humanity - and he was one of those, like me, who thought there were plenty of things that needed changing. So we haven't dealt with things - I come back to slavery, you see, there was the end of slavery, I'm giving you a chronology...
44:28 very quickly, of what precedes Clouscard's period - yes, it's the Middle Ages, which is where he starts, and I'm talking to you about all of Antiquity leading up to the Middle Ages - it was, above all, slavery in Antiquity in Europe; when it began to disappear thanks to Christian civilization, it continued in what - is that even Europe? Here's a current question: is Russia in Europe? Tell me - I know young people who tell us - no? Ah really? I think Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy aren't American authors or African musicians as far as I know, they're right in the heart of Europe, you see - we've already expelled Russia from Europe by reducing Europe to the little Europe of Brussels, which is actually an appendage of the United States, since if you look at the constitution that was imposed on us despite your vote - I'm not inventing anything, I'm not making things up here, I'm actually falling short of the truth - everything concerning foreign policy in that constitution is: we follow NATO, period. Yes, I'm talking about a Europe, and well, in that eastern Europe, throughout the Middle Ages, you'd go to Venice, you'd visit the admirable Riva degli Schiavoni - I say admirable because the place is very pretty now, but that's where they used to unload by the thousands...
45:38 ...the slaves - the Riva degli Schiavoni, that is, of the Slavs, whom they'd go and capture in Ukraine, in Russia - at the time it wasn't called that, but there were other names - because it had been suppressed there, in Western Europe we were evolving, but it continued in Eastern Europe, and even up until the end of the 19th century, and even in Germany - you see, I'm not going very far east - in Germany, the former East Germany, the GDR if you like, but the old eastern Germany, the region of the great landed estates, the latifundists, the Junkers, the young lords, the young masters as teachers - well yes, they had slaves, that's why they were called die Herren - it's not - and I witnessed a discussion in East Germany at the time, I was on vacation, between two East Germans joking about the advantages and drawbacks of their very free country, and one told me, yes, we're all carried along, well, except for the potholes in the roads, he was against the regime, he had every right to be - and his neighbor said, yes, but before the regime, your father was the master and mine was his slave in the fields of Pomerania, over there in the border region with Poland - this went on for a long time, this story, and it's completely hidden.
The myth of the ring and the Paulette edict 46:49 That's the unconscious about which we can no longer know anything - and why did I mention Refondation progressiste earlier? No, no, I haven't lost my thread - it's because Clouscard alludes to a Germanic myth used by Wagner in the Ring cycle, the myth of the ring - my son, when he saw The Lord of the Rings, said they stole everything from Wagner - no, it's Germanic mythology, it's the same way white Americans are an appendage of Germania, if you think about it a bit historically and geographically - if you look at the history of American immigration, ask Domenico Losurdo, who knows this admirably well, you'll understand what that means. Now in this story, the whole Ring cycle - the whole cycle begins - it's a work, the longest in the history of art, it lasts four days, inspired by the Greeks, it begins with a prologue where the dwarf emerges from the depths, gnomes - the same dwarves as in Snow White, you know what they do, what do they do all day in Snow White, the dwarves? They go to the mine - ah, well there you go, they're proles, they're miners, no, we're not inventing anything, they go 'heigh-ho, heigh-ho,' and seem all gay like that, but that's the American version - otherwise, they're miners, the symbolism still stands, right, they're underground, they're small, they're dwarves, yes.
47:59 It's the men who eat well who are tall - you know, in Rwanda - jumping from one thing to another - the Hutus and Tutsis, one of the greatest genocides of the postwar era - for once, well, people tell you it's ethnic wars, it's dreadful, Africa, it's ethnic wars - for once it's the same language, except the Tutsis remained herders, so they drink lots of milk from their cows, like the Maasai, and blood from their herds, that's mostly what they eat, whereas the Hutus were farmers - the Tutsis kept 40 cm more in height, the masters are always taller. I say this because apparently the Japanese gained 40 cm - the average height went up over the last 80 years with the rise in standard of living - well yes, your generations drink fruit juice, and thank goodness, and dairy products - when I was a teenager there was only lemonade, like for kids, and cheap beer. What am I saying - the Nibelung emerges from the depths to try to fondle the Rhinemaidens, that's Wagner's plot, that's the given of the myth, which he reworks - a myth that he studied closely.
49:09 And Lévi-Strauss says that Wagner is the father of the structural analysis of myths, and he's small, he smells of fish, he's dirty - yes, that's the one who produces our daily life, what do you expect, so he has to be given the most repulsive features possible - that's all what Clouscard retraces, the productive forces, that's it, only it's much more complex than what I've just schematized, and than what the myth captures, as you can imagine, there are fabulous mediations. Here you have the whole history - I've mainly talked about praxis, you see, about the productive forces, but you need to see the extraordinary edifice that Clouscard - you cited it earlier - calls the psyche, which that praxis produced. And to show that he's not - well, some would like to make him into what's called a mechanistic Marxist, when they want to belittle someone - look, I'm quoting page 351, for those who'll have the excellent idea of getting hold of the book, right - he studies the robe nobility in the 17th century, and a resounding event occurs, a silent event we're rarely told about, but one that has an enormous historical impact.
50:20 To stick to the history of France, it's the Edict of the Paulette, so called because it was drafted by a certain Monsieur Paulet - I think at the end of Henri IV's reign, 1610 - P-A-U-L-E-T, Paulet - it doesn't sound like much, but it's from this edict, a royal text authorizing what came to be called the venality of offices - you could sell, and therefore buy, a title of nobility, implying that up until then you had to be born noble to be noble - being, with a circumflex accent, à la Heidegger, believing itself eternal - no, that's over with the Edict of the Paulette; that kind of being - before, you had to be born to be a man, now you can become one, all you have to do is pay up, you can buy it. And since it was the bourgeoisie who had the money, you see how the evolution unfolded that led to the years 1780, when the king found himself face to face with a bourgeoisie that had grown in power, while the nobility weakened it because it didn't work - and when you don't work, you don't get rich, you let the bourgeoisie get rich in your place. Inevitably, there's a terrible standoff between the king and the bourgeoisie - you know how it ended, well...
51:30 the bourgeoisie found itself face to face with the proletariat - that's still not over - it's this proto-history of our bourgeois world that's restored here. The Edict of the Paulette allows offices to be bought, so it creates a whole new set of social strata - as Clouscard often says, it's more nuanced than social classes, it's a subdivision within classes, these social strata - the robe nobility, the first president of the Parlement of Dijon, I'm just making this up, right, the notary handling the transfer of properties in Montauban, the quasi-adventurer writer - I'm thinking of Beaumarchais, you know, arms trafficking at the same time he wrote The Marriage of Figaro, not The Marriage - that's Mozart. All this new bourgeoisie, robe nobility and bourgeoisie, since it comes from the bourgeoisie, served, yet another French expression, to 'regild the coat of arms' - and yes, if I were a broke nobleman with a pretty daughter, or not even pretty, I'd try to find a rich nobleman - no, a rich bourgeois - to marry her, that was called regilding the coat of arms, or the other way round, it's extremely complex.
52:44 Now let me sum this up quickly, I'm watching the time - so, page 351, he talks about superstructures, a term he borrows from Marx, right? You know, 'infra' means below, underneath, 'supra' means above - it's spatial, all empirical - you look at a house, there are the foundations, then there's the roof - so roughly, the superstructure is supposed to be what's in our head and was produced, in Marxist terms, by everything that's - I don't know - in our belly, so to speak, what's lower down - not that low, though. So here's what Clouscard says about superstructures: the robe nobility can be considered a social class according to several criteria - it represents the culmination, the promotion of the chrematistic, that is, work that is not manual, financial activity, the autarchy of moneyed bourgeoisie; it is the site of integration of the most heterogeneous contributions; and finally it forges the ideology constituted by the whole bourgeoisie; it holds a monopoly on a profession and on culture. He's not saying anything bad about it here.
53:54 On the contrary, he says it's a great step forward compared to the throat-cutters who existed before, the feudal lords - you know, a guy like Condé - Condé is a great warrior, he cuts throats on the battlefield, but on the other hand he'd burst into tears watching a performance of Corneille's Cinna, he was very sentimental, you might say. So he says this, on page 351: in a first moment, the superstructure is, as in Marx, the outcome, right, at the top, of a whole process coming from below - but in a second moment, I'm quoting now, I'm not speaking behind Clouscard's back - in a second moment, the superstructure becomes causal. You see, well before writing Les Chemins de la praxis, there's already this extraordinary complexity in Clouscard's continuation of Marx. Because I'd like - I won't monopolize the floor - to finish on this point: in my chronology I focused on chronology throughout my talk. Marx, as far as I know - I'm not a specialist, so don't just take my word for it, check, read Marx and Clouscard, among others, on this subject - is in any case the first Marxist to put Marx to work. There are plenty of other Marxists...
From the Song of Roland to Racine: the psyche becomes interiorized 55:05 I'm thinking of Althusser, who spend their time asking, 'what did Marx mean?' Ah well, meanwhile we can't apply it because we're not even sure what he said - that's convenient, isn't it, you suspend the whole passage from theory to practice, that's not a bad trick - whereas Clouscard applies Marxism to the emergence of courtly love. I'll finish with this example because you'll see just how concrete this is - this logic of the concrete, not a mere dialectic of the concrete. Compare the Song of Roland with the Arthurian romances - you have both here, as in any good bookshop. Well, in the Song of Roland, there aren't many women - I mean, the sexy fun side, the roses, doesn't show up much - there's the fair Aude waiting for Roland, we hear that she's waiting, and that's it, she's not part of the action - meanwhile there's fighting on every side, it's admirable as such, I'm not glorifying myself as a language, mind you - it's the first of the great epic romances, but I mean, if you're looking for what the French call, we have a whole set of euphemisms for it...
56:15 which are marvelous - don't look for that in the Song of Roland. On the other hand, a generation later, a few generations later, all of a sudden you have the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, courtly love, Tristan and Iseut, Perceval, Blanchefleur with roses and lilies on her cheeks - what happened? I mean, the pacification of the kingdom - when it's war of everyone against everyone, fief A against fief B, there's no room to give in to the psyche, to feeling, you need a sword that I - you see my build - I couldn't have held it for more than five minutes, you need to hold it all day and even all year, the rapier, and try to split the adversary's skull, or his shield, or his helmet with it. But once that's over, it's the court that reigns, it's no longer the battlefield - what do you do at court?
57:10 You pay court - and that's where courtly literature takes over from epic and warlike literature, lyric literature. And, I'll finish on this, exactly the same thing happens in the 17th century - a shortcut this time - Louis XIII, Louis XIV. The sequence seems simple: Louis XIII, terrible political instability, you know, the League, the Fronde, royal power contested, the new bourgeoisie in revolt, Louis XIII - XIV, sorry - is forced to flee through a hidden door and narrowly escapes massacre, historians can correct me, and he never forgot it. And then, when he takes power, Louis XIV's reign is, quite the opposite, the most stable, the longest in French history - no executive, presidential, monarchical, or republican, has lasted as long as Louis XIV's. You have two very contrasting periods, and, you see, you move from Descartes making man master and possessor of nature, a relationship to the world that is positive, ambitious, humanist, and perhaps even the last great flash of Renaissance humanist thought before it's locked down by the era of Louis XIV...
58:20 and it resumes afterward in the 18th century - I'll go quickly - then you have Pascal, that is, when you're at court, problems become internalized. You said, that's finished, politics, the state, that's me - it was Louis XIV who said that, no? You're not going to dispute power with me, that's over, fighting in the provinces - I build a château, I extend the wings - the aesthetes who say that Versailles isn't - the wall here is a bit too long relative to its height - that's not my problem, we're not doing aesthetics here, I'd say - let's get back to the point - so I extend the wings, I give you some Molière, some Lully, some Racine, you're not going to make war, we're doing fine here, I've given you plenty, and that's me. And in that case, what do you do, you internalize the problems - it's Racine, it's love, and no longer, as in Corneille, honor - honor is on the battlefield, Le Cid ends in victory over the dead, or else honor in the micro-sociological sense, the family - I first have to avenge my father, in Le Cid, that's it, it's not internal there - I'm Corsican, I had cousins who told me, we have to go avenge our cousin, she got knocked up, well, anyway, I wondered - I've said too much, I don't know how...
59:30 I'll say - throw everything to the wind with them - honor, honor is always external, the problem isn't in my own feeling, even if I'm not personally involved, I am involved because the same blood runs in me, that's the family bond, it's sacred in the archaic world, Antigone - and then there's honor at the collective level, then you must defend the homeland regardless - it's the same, that's the Cid at the time, right, Le Cid, that's it. The great rivalry in the Mediterranean world - there, the problems are external, he's going to go do it. Well, with Racine it's the complete opposite: it's sovereigns, guys who hold political power and who abandon all their honor for the first skirt that passes by - it's admirable in both cases, I'm not doing aesthetic criticism here - I'll just take the example of Pyrrhus in Andromaque, who is, after all, the son of Achilles - his father settled Hector's fate, he sacked Troy, mind you, these are throat-cutters, these are warriors - and there he brings back his captives like everyone else, his spoils, and among his captives, Andromaque, he falls in love with his own captive - Racine's heroes are possessed by their possession, that's how it is - and he has the nerve...
1:00:40 to say to his captive: 'I have made unfortunates, certainly, and a hundred times Phrygia has seen my hand redden with your blood, but your eyes have exercised their power over me so well that they have sold me dear the tears they've shed.' In the end he puts on the same level a woman's suffering, who lost her whole homeland, her family who was wiped out, right, and the skirt that passes by - I mean, all the same, it's been internalized, it's admirable in both cases. Clouscard studies this - this transition isn't enigmatic, this passage from political instability under Louis XIII to the longest reign in French history. I'll stop here on this pause of great French tragedy - there you have it, it's a novel I'm offering you here, an immense novel and one of the finest ever written. We're going to hand the floor over to the audience, but I simply note one omission - fortunately Dominique made reference to it, that explains a lot of misunderstandings regarding Clouscard - I said it wasn't...
A history of our country; Simon Verdun's thesis; Althusser and Sève 1:01:50 a history of France, precisely to say that it is a history of France - you understand me - that is, it's our history in a certain way, we'll agree - it's not a history of France in the sense that it could be superseded by a later one, but it's at the same time an understanding of our country before capitalism, and of what in it resists capitalism, that's why you need to seize hold of it - it's not the publisher speaking, allow me to speak as a patriot - he speaks of the resistance of old France - often Clouscard means by 'old France' - and I know there might be some neo-Pétainist undertones in his work - I've seen old France as arising from the Resistance in that case, and I've also seen it in Rousseau's writings on old France - when he says 'old France,' in fact it's polemical, but it means that substrate that has formed, which is going to be undermined precisely by pre-globalization in a certain way, by this mode of production, this capitalist mode of production, by the icy waters of egotistical calculation - but this is not - that's the difference with people who drag it to the right - it's not Sismondi...
1:03:00 it's not the economic romanticism described by Lenin - there's a text by Lenin that's very important for characterizing economic romanticism, a text not well enough known - it's not nostalgia for the feudal era, because precisely, in the ancien régime there is everything, there's not only that in the ancien régime, there's Rousseau, and Rousseau is himself the fruit of an evolution, and he shows this well - that is, you already have, in a way, the myth that formed in the Middle Ages, the myth of Tristan and Iseut, degraded into chivalric romance, degraded into the romanesque, degraded into libertinism, and refounded by Rousseau in a certain way, with a new sensibility, both in the psyche and in politics, with Jacobinism, and that's what's going to resist this capitalism that isn't there yet. I'm thinking, moreover, of a fine book - we've said a lot of bad things about Althusser, but it's written by an Althusserian, and precisely, maybe because it doesn't talk about Althusser it's a very good book, which we published - it's Yves Vargas's book on Rousseau, where he says Rousseau, aborter of capitalism, because Rousseau saw capitalism, he foresaw it in a way, studying Mandeville...
1:04:10 for example, the Fable of the Bees, and from that point of view there's a convergence, and there's an example of applied Marxism - how exactly can it help our current struggle. I really liked that mention Dominique made - I'm currently reading a thesis on Michel Clouscard, because there's a thesis by Simon Verdun, defended at the École normale supérieure with highest honors, I believe, a week ago - he was kind enough to send it - it's absolutely remarkable, and for once, precisely that - sorry to interrupt you, just to note the reference, because I hope it will get published - it's called Neo-Kantianism in the Work of Michel Clouscard, by Simon Verdun - it's absolutely remarkable, and what's also fantastic is that we're precisely no longer going to be able to - yes, yes, so I even asked if he was, unfortunately he wasn't available today and he's going to travel for a year, so we'll have to wait a year, but I'll do like this, Jean-Baptiste will come, he'll come, because it's important that many people take hold of this, including to pay tribute to the workshops working through the paths of praxis...
1:05:20 otherwise probably they're working on L'Être et le Code - it's not confirmed yet, but I'll say a word about it next year, there - sorry, I just want to add, before finishing with Simon Verdun, that this is the first time there's been a recognition of Michel Clouscard within the holy of holies, namely the École normale supérieure, not even the Sorbonne - he got highest honors, you know, that's a battle there, I know about the questions he was asked, he had a tough jury, and because his work is remarkable he came through it well - which means that Clouscard's approach is validated, there, on neo-Kantianism, on the epistemological core - well, the epistemological heart, which concerns the École normale more directly, I mean - of all the aspects of Clouscard, that was the one you were most sensitive to - so, he got highest honors, and that's a considerable advance. We don't fetishize the university, there are risks afterward of academicizing this, but for now we're so far from that that at least having this possibility to be able to discuss it in that setting, and to come back a bit to these questions of applied Marxism, because there, you were quite right, there was the appearance of that correspondence with Althusser - it's not necessarily stupid, you can clearly see there's a complicity between the two of them in their...
1:06:22 it's very interesting, Althusser and Lucien Sève, who was, let's say, the most important thinker of the French Communist Party, and they had a complicity - they were supposed to be adversaries - there, yes, but they had a strong complicity, you can see it clearly, against Garaudy, that is, against the reduction of Marxism to a catch-all word of humanism, of the era's brand of humanism, to today's 'human first' - and what they wanted, Althusser at least, we have to give him this much credit, he provided a bad answer, but the very fact of raising questions about the conditions of validity of dialectics isn't shameful, since dialectics had been used in a self-justifying way with those famous 'laws' - so we didn't even understand the concept of a law, whereas in fact, thinking about it, you have texts by Stalin where he says nature sometimes makes leaps, so being a Bolshevik means favoring leaps, and in his text on linguistics he says, on the contrary, no, languages evolve gradually - so I mean, there was a problem in the very conception of dialectics, it needed to be reworked, it seems to me...
1:07:32 that Sève worked, including with scientists, and his work was carried forward in this sense by Georges Gastaud, by the way, credit should also be given to him - there's a whole vein of research on Marxist ontology, concretely, with scientists getting organized - but there, precisely, we went back into applied Marxism, epistemological questions were raised, but we tried to - whereas indeed, it seems to me, starting from Althusser we never stopped drifting from structuralist Marxism toward this post-structuralist Marxism - there may be, at the same time between us, when I say post-structuralist, it's even worse, that is, the signifier drifts even further away, if with post-structuralism we move from the master signifier, the signifier that forgets its reference, this chain of signifiers, we move to the chora, that is, this kind of place, this pure indeterminate place - yes, I didn't want to interrupt earlier, there, I'll interrupt you for a second, just a small point, since he alluded to Plato - indeed, it's a very important concept in Plato, a concept that troubled both Plato and Aristotle, the place - what is it, the place, there's this notebook, it's in a place, I remove it, what's the place, good grief, I don't see anything anymore, yes, that was...
1:08:42 the Eleatics, yes, of course, of course - no, but that's not - no, I mean it was the theory of place, it was the whole philosophy of the time, ontology was marked by this problem, of course, but since it's something that resists knowledge - you're going to laugh - Plato, like Aristotle, says place has something feminine about it, it doesn't let itself be penetrated by intelligence - extraordinary. There, the place of the ponds - no, I'll finish just on Simon Verdun, what I liked in his thesis is that whole story about applied Marxism, he was saying - and I think he was picking up an anecdote here about the fact that Sève - Sève wrote The Theory of Personality, and Clouscard often used sports metaphors, of course, Michel Clouscard was a finalist in the 200 meters in '48, yes, and he said Sève is someone who always sets his marks and never sets off, he always looks at the conditions of production and never does what he actually meant to do - that is, so these are simply two different approaches, because we also need to pay tribute to this work precisely of approaching the conditions of validity of dialectics, or of how...
1:09:52 personality emerges - that's perhaps the conceptual core of Marxism, ultimately, the particular, and even of Hegelianism, the particular reflecting on itself and thereby rising to the universal - this work also had to be done, but all this is complementary, there are the conditions of production of Marxism and of applied Marxism, but precisely in that Althusserian lineage which has never stopped degrading, because at the start it was a Spinozist Marx, which was still more or less acceptable, right up to today where we wait for the Event like a kind of epiphany, and we consider that Marxism is uninhabitable - I'm just paraphrasing Badiou - that seems to be the culmination of the evolution, because it's the same Althusserian school in a way, we've lost a content, so, there, the content, it remains there in a way - I don't think so, that's the key word, because it's backward-looking, brandishing the book that's 50 years old, I mean, what have we done since - if you remove history, you remove the content, there you go, and that's precisely because it's our history - but it is our history, it's not a finished history, it's our history, thought through, reconceptualized, replayed in today's stakes, and that's also what we can lean on to resist right now this indifferentiation...
Question from the audience: a change of code? Clouscard's posterities 1:11:03 that today's relations of production impose on us - and there, we're going to hand the floor over to the audience. Ah yes, that's right, to follow up on what Aymeric was saying - so, while staying connected to the evening's topic, it was to point out, on the one hand, that we're going to continue the Ateliers de la praxis, that is, a seminar where we do a running reading - it was Les Chemins de la praxis by Michel Clouscard before, and it will be L'Être et le Code, so starting probably in early February 2019 - it's in partnership with the CGT, the PCF, and the Université coopérative de Paris - so in a way we try to wrestle with the texts, sometimes floundering, and likewise, we follow along, we trail the text closely with our own limits, and that produces, how should I say, workshops that we've also put online.
1:12:14 On the internet, that's good, you go to Atelier de la Praxis, I'll look that up on YouTube, Atelier de la Praxis — and I had a small question, how... oh yes, good question. It takes place at the Centre Suzanne de Maçon, so CGT, in the 12th arrondissement, near Nation, and it happens once every two weeks. And what's true is that it's a format that I find quite interesting — a four-hour format, meaning, and oddly enough, after each four hours we have to kick the guys out of the room because we're not that many, well quite a lot actually — if you forget the address it's given again in every video. But still, let's say there's plenty of material — so, the Chemins de la Praxis series — there's material, and this one, there's even more material still. So, I just wanted to ask a small question, I'll read it because that'll save us — she's small, it's not the whole sheet — no, no, no. So I'll read it, the question I'm asking, and that I'm asking myself,
1:13:24 is the question of the unity of Clouscard's work through its various detours — Being and Code, then the triptych Capitalism of Seduction, the Wild Beast, Critique of Libertarian Liberalism — because in a video, in a France Culture broadcast that was recently replayed as part of the workshops, he described civil society as rotting and never done rotting — 'never done rotting,' that's rather good I find. So it's this triptych, in the end, that speaks of all this, and finally the Chemins de la Praxis, the paths of praxis — hoping it returns to growth — doesn't Clouscard suggest something like a change of code that would be on the agenda today? I'd have a small reservation regarding your position: you said that Being and Nothingness is somewhat a counterpart
1:14:35 to Being and Code — I'd tend to take the notion of code very seriously, without having a unified view of it, far from it, but I think it still has to be taken seriously; he didn't bilateralize the code by chance — ah no, I never said that, no, I didn't say that — but you see, it's precisely a refusal, the code means something, and so, being very reductive, from the transcendent code of feudalism to the transcendent code of the bourgeoisie — this is a quote from Clouscard that his friend Bernard Scha passed on to me, he used to say often: I think, therefore I am — the irreversible conquest — I think, therefore I am. So what he criticizes is the second one, so he criticizes the 'I think, therefore I am' which he identifies with the transcendental code of the emerging bourgeoisie — so wouldn't the conditions for a new code be on the agenda? A change
1:15:46 of code, certainly, isn't decreed, of course — it's the logic of production that operates — but as Clouscard used to say, we're already in communism, he said this often — serial production, mass consumption, but we don't know it — it would just take actualizing, it's all in the 'it would just take.' So the question, a small question, is there: is it that code — well, let me finish, I have two more points to conclude — and among other things, the last piece of the puzzle or of the riddle, wouldn't the Chemins de la Praxis bring out some leads for this potential change of code? Good question — that was the second or third question, but so, who's answering? I have something to say about the whole set of problems that have just been raised, because the question — it's been raised quite a bit — I said earlier that I claim no legitimacy to any succession to Clouscard other than an informal one, because I knew him, because we discussed almost every day what's in these books, either directly
1:16:57 or remotely by phone, and during school terms as well as during holidays. That said, I'm appalled by Clouscard's posterity, or rather posterities, which are squabbling with each other — I have to address the problem: Clouscard is claimed by a spectrum ranging from the far right to the far left — well, by people who situate themselves on the far right, and also on the far left, but who claim allegiance to the most Stalinist or neo-Stalinist far left, and to the most... neo-Stalinist far right as well, actually, I notice — I mean, there's also a neo-Clouscardism in relation to which people like Negroni — we are a few survivors, I'm sorry, it's a matter of age — are considered dinosaurs of historical Clouscardism, the historical wing, and why not me — I mean, I don't claim any legitimacy, but I would like to restate the current state of the debate — and beyond these extremes I've just mentioned, dressing it up on the right is fairly easy, it's a rhetorical game — there's also a Clouscard recuperated by a social-democratic deviation, by environmentalists, there you go
1:18:08 I'll remind you that Clouscard wouldn't recognize his own here — he would find some of our debates rather strange. He was someone extremely concrete, who could decode everyday life with a lot of humor, without staying stuck in big problems formulated in an abstract way. He's forced to proceed, like all great theoretical thinkers, with abstract divisions in his written works — in his spoken everyday life, I can guarantee you it was much more concrete than that, and accessible to everyone. So, just a small parenthesis — I haven't really answered the substance of the important question about reformulating things a bit differently regarding the change of code, but I don't want — and this is what worries me a little, just at the end — that there's a work, the Chemins de la Praxis, from which point everything becomes different, and that would relegate — it would relegate, yes, but it would relegate a bit into the shadows everything that came before in Clouscard — no, no, that's not your position, but you know very well that some people do hold that position. I even recently read someone who frequents the Trois Tropiques and who even frequents — well, who frequents a bit of everything, passing through the PRCF and its opposite — and who was saying
1:19:18 that in the Chemins de la Praxis there's nothing Marxist left anymore, just like that, simply — and just as the far right has evacuated everything Marxist, and Clouscard, curiously, it coincides, because that guy places himself on the far left — that's interesting, Dominique, I'm recalling important things. Clouscard is — Clouscard belongs to whom? Clouscard's work belongs to its readers, male and female — period. Another way of rephrasing, I think, the same question, or in any case a very connected one, very briefly — we had a discussion where you told me, actually it's exactly what Edmond was talking about — Clouscard's conclusion was that code precedes being — of course — could you develop that, because in my opinion that would be the best answer to give to the question. I'm very glad about the question, thank you — no but it's true, we hadn't prepared anything for that, well we prepared, but not that — no, it's because there was a small exchange about the title — no but it's very interesting — I agree with Edmond that the title isn't just a passing nod to Sartre, I agree with Aymeric that the way it's phrased, he was thinking of Sartre, that's quite clear, well
The code precedes being, history precedes nature 1:20:28 one doesn't rule out the other. On the other hand, what's certain is that Clouscard's answer to this title — what did you mean to say, if we set aside all the detail, and God knows there's plenty in there — is that code precedes being. Code has 'co' in it, it's the Latin 'cum,' convention, code, composition — you need to be together to make a code. The relation between subjects precedes the relation to the thing. Some would now like to put us back into the relation to the thing, you know, like animals — right, that's important — code precedes being means that we're influenced by our social class before we even have access to being. We're not born like Moses in the waters of the Nile, we're not born like Siegfried in the forest near the dragon's lair, or like Oedipus with pierced feet — that's literally what Oedipus means, isn't it — thrown out into nature like that so the prophecy wouldn't come true. We are born with a pram, a house, a praxis — well yes, through a praxical takeover of the natural given — and that's been true since Neanderthal times, you know, it doesn't date from today
1:21:38 There you go — in Being and Code he often associates the word code or being with the word 'reduce,' meaning that code is the reduction of being — through transformation, of course — but the word 'reduce' itself is very loaded, especially at that time, the eidetic reduction. And then a small parallel to perhaps fix the idea a bit further, on a term that's fairly close to code, which he doesn't use in that book but in Capitalism of Seduction, which seems to me fairly connected — an anthropologist's word — mana. Let's say that's actually very fashionable at the time, the era of Malinowski etc., and of Frazer — mana, which in a way enveloped the Melanesian tribes — it's the soul in Oceania, well, that would be a bit like code, isn't it. Among the multiple ways of seeing it — what I mean, and there I'm answering Dominique's question now in an even more current way — code precedes being in the same way that, for Clouscard, and for me too, I claim it — we have at least that in common — history precedes nature. And you jump, I can hear you jumping, but listen, this is serious — I didn't say history precedes matter
1:22:48 I claim allegiance to Marx, I told you, I'm not stupid, I'm not that idealistic — but there's a natural matter, which is the reason we have to eat to live, and then there's a historical matter — and when I drop natural flowers and artificial flowers from the fourth floor and they fall according to the same law, Newton's law, that means that this law isn't a law of nature, it's a law of matter, which is sometimes natural and sometimes artificial — what do you want me to say? It's a small reminder I'm making because we now use the word 'nature' at every turn, whereas we should say 'matter' — historical materialism, dialectical materialism, it's not a naturalism. Marx becomes Marx when he breaks with the naturalism of his youth, with Feuerbach, who was immense, who did an enormous amount of work to free us from religious alienation, but to the benefit of nature, not to the benefit of history. There you go — with history, and we always come back to Being and Code — we restore the subject's activity starting from Marx, from the Theses on Feuerbach in particular. So when Clouscard says, at the risk of making people jump, that history precedes nature, it's not madness — it means you have to have come out of nature to be able to utter the notion of nature, to have the awareness that nature gives you, to say, hey, these flowers are natural — that presupposes that you know
Kant between Newton and Rousseau 1:23:59 that there can be artificial flowers — that's what I mean, in that sense only, it's ontological, it's not logical, I'm not stupid, and he isn't stupid either. And this overlaps a bit with what Hegel said, and it still makes people jump today — you get almost lynched nowadays if you bring this up — in his Aesthetics, nature is a copy of art. I'll stop there because I won't multiply the provocations too much — but it's not from me. So, next question — there aren't many, it seems — well still, could one of you summarize, for those trying to discover Clouscard, notably through the difficult text Being and Code, the notion of neo-Kantianism, to introduce a notion that hasn't really been addressed head-on, I find that Aymeric summed up quite a few aspects of it regarding formalism — maybe just a sentence as a preamble, remember Foucault's phrase, 'we are all neo-Kantians' — I'll hand it back to you — yes, first, neo-Kantianism isn't just a return to Kant, it's a return to something lower than Kant
1:25:09 in Clouscard's own writing, you understand — Clouscard actually credits Kant more than he credits neo-Kantianism, hence the paradox that the whole movement of Being and Code leads to the Rousseau-Kant era — that's interesting, by the way, just one thing, because it was a joke I made, because obviously Foucauldian 'neo-Kantianism' had nothing to do with the actual neo-Kantians, that's one of Foucault's many impostures — you'd get almost nothing out of it, it was an imposture — it's inferior to Kant. Now this tradition of giving a pejorative meaning to the designation 'neo-Kantianism' begins while Kant is still alive, in his final years — the three young friends, Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin, in the same student lodging in theology at Tübingen, exchange letters that are available to you — it's the correspondence in the Tel collection at Gallimard, in French at least — where they say, watch out, the priests are recuperating Kant — it was already starting, because thanks to Kant one could say, philosophy is over, rationalism, all that, you see, it's all a matter of faith. So Kant showed us that we no longer need to use reason
1:26:21 for the problems that concern reason — we only apply it, moreover Kant told us so himself, to nature. There again they confuse what Kant never did — reason and understanding, physics and chemistry, biology — that's very serious, but that's understanding, not reason. Reason, I come back to it, is what concerns us together, among subjects, who don't have a relation to nature as object. We need understanding to make man master and possessor of nature — Descartes' great project — but among ourselves, it's freedom that is a value, and not determination, the y equals f(x) that reigns in nature, which makes heat expand bodies, or the moon condemned to revolve around the earth because one mass is more powerful, greater than the other. So there you go, that's very important, what we're recalling here: when we talk about neo-Kantianism, first — I haven't yet said what it is, but what's certain is that it's more pejorative than Kantianism under Clouscard's pen — first, that it's a regression relative to Kant, it's a step backward, whereas Kant moves forward from Rousseau — second, it's a generic term, which I think Aymeric showed well earlier, meaning it applies to seemingly very different, even conflicting, currents of thought. Althusser is not
1:27:32 Lévi-Strauss — Althusser sees himself as a thinker of history in Marx's wake, whereas Lévi-Strauss, as I said earlier, says himself that he only wants to apply his thought to societies without history. But they have in common — and this is perhaps one of the rare things missing from the lists you made, one could multiply them — the split between the logical and the ontological, that's what's characteristic, and it's into this split that neo-Kantianism will very quickly rush. I'd like to wrap up, I don't want to monopolize the answer to your question, which is crucial, because neo-Kantianism runs through all of Clouscard's work — as Aymeric said very well, it's the generic term by which he designates bourgeois ideology broadly — except that neo-Kantianism can be the best as well as the worst within the limits of bourgeois ideology, meaning it can give the best of bourgeois ideology — that's the case of Kant — but it can also give the worst. So that's what we'll try to see a bit more clearly now. In Kant's time, the great split is between Newton and Rousseau — there you go, that's what Kant inherits — I have Newton, Kant, I have Newton in my left hand, telling me there's no freedom, everything is determined, y equals f(x), that's it, there you go
1:28:42 everything else is nonsense — this is now taken up by cognitive science, not Kant — it speaks like Newton — Newton only spoke about nature, cognitive science wants to apply this to love, to cinema. And then there's Rousseau, who sets as the fundamental value not the law — the physical law, the natural law, the opposite of freedom — I put it this way because the law of falling bodies — no, that's not freedom, freedom is Rousseau. Hegel said that with Rousseau, man starts walking on his head — it's his free will, general will, not caprice, that's not what Rousseau means — the general will suddenly becomes the basis of all human relations, the contract — you find the 'con' again as in 'code.' So I have the two — only Kant, and that's his limit, the upper limit of bourgeois thought — I pay homage to him, and at the same time I show his limit — that there's an insurmountable abyss, I quote Kant, between the two — you can't move from one to the other, you can't use scientific rigor, which Kant only confirms and elaborates, to demonstrate anything at all
1:29:52 in answering the question 'what must I do' — values — that supposes another world, which Rousseau initiated, and according to Kant there's no passage from one to the other — that's not — and so at the end of his life, Kant, in writing his third critique, the Critique of Judgment, tries to throw a frail bridge over what he had up to then, in good conscience, called the insurmountable abyss — and that gave us Kant's aesthetics. I don't want to drag on, I don't want to become abstract, I'll become very concrete — when a student was lost in philosophy — everything went through this, I reassure you, this can still happen to me tomorrow morning — a student came to see Hegel saying, I don't understand anything anymore, what you're saying, everything's getting blurred — Hegel said, start everything over from the Critique of Judgment — in philosophy, you have to start with the Critique of Judgment. So, next question — no, sorry, I wanted to add: neo-Kantianism goes from a cognitive neo-Kantianism — the one I was talking about, which spends its time trying to separate the logical from the ontological, meaning there can be no science of values, we're all in our own bubble — for liberalism, that's paradise
Cognitive neo-kantianism, moral neo-kantianism and naive ontologism 1:31:02 we're all sent back to our own bubbles — while we agree on how to calculate a satellite's trajectory, the sciences of nature, we agree the world over, there's no Chinese position on the electron's velocity opposed to a Californian one — on the other hand, when it comes to how societies should be governed, and men and women, that's quite different. As Aristotle said, who had seen the problem very well: mathematics unites men, politics divides them — that's the split. And then there's a moral neo-Kantianism — Sartre, who opposes psychoanalysis — he's perfectly entitled to, as Clouscard also opposes it, but not at all for the same reasons — it's because, oh it's easy to say 'it's not me, it's my unconscious,' that takes away my freedom — there's a Kantian voluntarism there, you see. Neo-Kantianism runs from cognitive neo-Kantianism — the limitation of knowledge to nature, to phenomena — to moral neo-Kantianism — Sartre. There, I'll hand it over to Aymeric — just one clarification, you ended with what seems to me the most important point for newcomers and current generations — we talk about the moral left, about political correctness — these are typical products of 'moralin,' because
1:32:12 including with Foucault, neo-Kantianism becomes above all morality, because knowledge, science, is 'epistemes,' everything is relative at bottom — which isn't at all what Kant says, that's why it has nothing to do with neo-Kantianism really. And so what counts is me, my dick, my Prozac, etc., but then I have a morality that's my own, I have values, without transcendence moreover, because that would have to be shared, and that doesn't work. So to put it more crudely, it's still the most prevalent, most hegemonic — as we say now, it's fashionable — the most pervasive aspect of the ideology massively spread among our ruling class and its ideologues, academics, journalists, authors, or essayists — it's this kind of bullshit morality that replaces everything and suits everyone within a liberal logic. I'll hand it back to you — yes, we mustn't forget that what Sartre reproached Marxism with — and one has to give him credit for it because right after the war there was the most fruitful dialogue, in a certain way, of bourgeois intelligence
1:33:22 with Marxism — it's also a power relation, without falling into determinism — is that Marxism would be pre-critical, in the pre-conscious sense — Marxism wouldn't even have reached Kant, so it wouldn't be — and in a way, that's the reproach, that Marxism would have fallen into a kind of naive ontologism, and it's true that there are certain classic texts of canonical Marxist presentation within the workers' movement at the time that gave this impression of a naive ontologism, where there would be laws of... naturalization — that's true, if you don't take into account that there's a dialectic of nature, but also a dialectic of the historical process, and also a dialectic of the process of knowledge — you lose that, and Marxism can be critical or not — if it isn't self-critical — we took Engels without flaw, a somewhat unfortunate formulation from Anti-Dühring that gives the impression that no, sorry, from Feuerbach — because it's a summary text — whereas he's much clearer in Anti-Dühring, as if precisely these people were acting as if Marx hadn't paid homage, in the first thesis on Feuerbach, to the active character of knowledge that idealism contributed — all of that is a false trial
1:34:33 but indeed, that's why, when Dominique spoke of a risk of Stalinization of an interpretation of Clouscard, actually confusing — he attributed a political party affiliation to a person we know well, whereas in fact it's rather the one who was praised who's actually in that organization — so as if it mattered, it's not the point — but where I want to reassure him is that no, Clouscard belongs precisely to this will not to fall into that naive ontologism which may have marked that moment — yes, but which also marked the Second International, and marked the Third — but it's even for that reason that, in a certain way, the questions raised against Althusser at that time were justified — what exactly do you call naive ontologism? It's thinking that the real can be stated independently of the subject's action — thinking that one can 'be' — that it, well, it formalizes itself — without, there you go, without the subject's action, without a historical process, without dialectics — that's Marx before that, Theses on Feuerbach — exactly. So there you go, there are a number of comrades — and I'm one of them, because I also assume my editorial line — who have revisited certain things
1:35:45 about the history of the workers' movement, because we're a bit tired of having the history of the communist world explained to us through the Black Book of Communism, and each time it gets worse if we don't put a stop to certain propaganda. But regarding — I think everyone pretty much agrees on today's ideological tasks, well, I've been called Stalinist my whole life, I fully accept it, that doesn't trouble me at all — but it's true that, as Clouscard put it, 'methodological anti-Stalinism,' for that period — yes, that's true, that's exact — well, back then, it was one of the many forms of anti-communism, to put it simply — yes but that's precisely, I think today he might phrase it differently — today it's such a password, such a password to justify all anti-communism, we no longer talk about anti-Stalinism, it doesn't have much reason to exist anymore because it's hard to spot Stalinists anymore, but we still talk about anti-Stalinism. So there's a question here, two questions — the first, if I understood correctly, I don't know, actually I find you talk about it a bit, but if the production of the psyche has to do with the formation
Question from the audience: is the psyche bourgeois? 1:36:56 of the bourgeoisie, does that mean that feeling — well, feeling as we know it — is tied to bourgeois society, and that there could be another psyche in another society? And my second question was about the word 'code' — actually I suppose it comes from 'codex,' but I was wondering why he chose that word rather than another, which sounds a bit computer-related, that doesn't really appeal to me a priori — we have to remember we're in a period fully dominated ideologically by structuralism and the notion of structure. I'll allow myself to answer right away the first part of the question, about the psyche and the bourgeoisie — I'll start by saying that it's the most Clouscardian question of the evening, so you say you don't know him but you're right in the thick of it — some people have read him 36 times and are no more Clouscardian than you. But yes, we're at the heart of the problem — no, the psyche isn't tied only to bourgeois passion, since Clouscard talks about the psyche also for Tristan, who is in the full feudal era for example, and he wasn't unaware — we had plenty of discussions about this — of everything the West owes to the East, in particular
1:38:06 to the Arab East, regarding the psyche — we mustn't forget we're talking about courtly literature, and courtly theory, starting with the counts of Toulouse, that is, where Spain, which at the time was Arab, isn't it, and which was closer — at a time when we were barbarians knocking each other's heads in to move quickly, I mean there was something much more refined in the world of Granada — I don't know, the republic, you see my slip — the Andalusian kingdom, no doubt one of the most tolerant toward all communities of gender, sex, race and religion that old Europe has ever seen. So that's to tell you, the psyche is inherent, so to speak, roughly, in man, but it's true that it crosses a very important threshold with the European bourgeoisie. I come back to what's very pertinent in your question — simply because — and here Rousseau is the turning point — I'll try to answer very precisely to finish, otherwise it's a question that would need enormous developments in Clouscard — you have those developments throughout the whole first part of the Critique of Libertarian Liberalism, which was originally titled
1:39:16 'Rousseau or Sartre' — so where I'm getting at with Rousseau is that Rousseau is the only one — and that's why Clouscard used to say we had Rousseau because we were going to fetch Sartre — who holds both ends, praxis and psyche. He's the only author who writes both The Social Contract and La Nouvelle Héloïse, that is, the love novel that's one of the most unbridled ever seen. He's the only one who writes both the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and the Reveries of a Solitary Walker — you see, you have to carry both together — if you privilege one or the other, you're not — one can claim not to have the monopoly of Marx, I don't — but you're certainly not within the Clouscardian retrieval of Marx that traces back to Rousseau. And to my knowledge, Marx, every other page, quotes either Shakespeare or the Bible — you can't say he forbids himself references to the psyche either. So there, I've answered your question a bit quickly, but I maintain it's at the heart of things. I'll hand it back to you, maybe to be a bit more, I'd say, pedagogical and closer to what we know — can we bring up
1:40:26 one of two things — maybe you think it's beside the point, but I suggest it to you, from the standpoint precisely of representations — the surrealist tradition, which means, for instance, that Buñuel, at the end of his career, makes a film on this very theme of the bourgeois psyche, called The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie — first example, which, if you've seen the film, I invite you to — oh yes, I remember, with the package at the end, right — and second, to get back to Clouscard's work, in the same book you're citing, which you know I love a lot — there's the first chapter, and there's the second one, which I love even more, which describes not the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie, and thus what would truly be class psyche and how it evolves in history, but the phenomenology of the bourgeoisie, precisely with the concept of the 'romanesque' — could you connect these two things, because in my opinion they might shed some light on each other — you're one of the few who saw the stakes here. So, right, you're making me — I'll finish answering the gentleman first, sorry, I say 'sir,'
1:41:36 I don't know your name — as to why it's from Rousseau alone that this happens — I said that's why he's the only one to have done both, but I didn't justify why he does it — I referred earlier to those great upheavals, the English Industrial Revolution which had just happened before Rousseau, already the first factories, and soon the French political revolution which Rousseau announces when he says, we're approaching a state of crisis, the century of revolutions all the same, in Émile — if anyone was ever a prophet — why is this related to your question? Because man had to wait until he had the means, industrial means in particular, to feel reassured against the threat that nature represented — up until then he couldn't afford himself the psyche, couldn't look, say, at the world around him — I'm thinking of the Alps, I don't have my bag here, but the poetry of the mountain begins with Rousseau, a century before Madame — the one who used to shout at her daughter in Grignan, Madame de Sévigné — her daughter was in Grignan in the Drôme, and passing through Paris, she crossed the Alps to go back to Paris — when she crossed the Alps
1:42:46 she'd draw the curtains, it was horrible, the Alps — whereas now it's one of the greatest tourist regions in the world, isn't it — there you go — because the mountain is less threatening since we learned to dominate nature, since, thanks to what Descartes set in motion, man has progressively become master and possessor. You see, I'm not very much an environmentalist — I don't mean I have no concern for my environment, don't worry — but the environment is not nature. I myself love the Poitou bocage, Corsica, whatever it may be — but in the Poitou bocage, nature — well, it's been 10,000 years since it disappeared there, it's been landscaped. The 'romanesque' — I'm getting there — it took all this for sensibility to reach what will be called, in literary history, of course you're better placed than me to speak of this, the 'romanesque,' the French tradition of psychological analysis — you read from The Princess of Clèves to today — we're talking today, you see this better than me, let's stay cautious, but Flaubert for example, or Julien Gracq if you want to continue, or even Nabokov if you want to take people outside French literature — I mean there's a novelistic tradition — I deliberately pick reactionary figures, Flaubert and Nabokov
1:43:56 but you know that Marx preferred a thousand times the reactionary, the monarchist Balzac, isn't it, over the man of the left, Zola — so there, I mean, it took this retreat of the natural threat on man for the interior part, the soul, the psyche, to finally be able to develop. As we speak, there are Australian aboriginals doing eight exhausting days in nothingness, in the Australian desert, one of the harshest in the world, searching for a root that will let them eat for a week — how do you expect there to be time for psyche and the 'romanesque' in that? I'll answer the gentleman, and to answer you as well regarding the other point — just one aside, one last one, I'll hand the floor right back to you, I promise — in the chapter I invite you to read, 'Phenomenology of the Bourgeoisie,' Clouscard introduces into the relationship, including the family relationship — anthropological, we'd say now — into social being, history, genealogy at the level of the family cell, within a class relation — and it's the dialectic of being and having. I'll hand it back to you — I have the impression
Naive ontologism, criticism, and the exclusion of the chivalric 1:45:06 that you answered too quickly about what naive ontologism actually is — because I didn't quite understand what it meant — yes but I say, so it's precisely what ruined German idealism, that is, criticism, precisely that critical spirit, that's reason — but what does that have to do with ontology? No, there is a relation to ontology — why call it ontologism, then? Yes, precisely because one cannot state the categories of the real independently of the fact that it is us who think it according to our own categories — and obviously it's a subject, not just the transcendental subject, it's a class subject, a historical subject, it's a production, it's the same collective subject — and this is what I was thinking about, because the gentleman was asking about the psyche, about various psyches, but it's the same thing — reason measuring its own powers, but psyches measuring their own strength, from this point of view, that's the legacy of the Kantian — in the sense there of German idealism — which persisted in Hegelianism, which persisted in Marxism, and that's precisely why there's a difference between Kantianism and neo-Kantianism — so the critical aspect, precisely, Marxists were reproached with being insufficiently critical, saying Marxism was an error, that's an illegitimate leap, thinking that Marxism was non-critical — there's a way of evacuating
1:46:17 this rich legacy, but that's not at all Clouscard's point — and precisely if he does this self-genesis of praxis and psyche, and if he historicizes all these psyches, it's precisely because he wants to develop somewhere this Kantian intuition, which is a sort of critique not only internal, precisely, to psyches, but a historico-genetic critique. There's perhaps a quote from Being and Code that answers your question very well — if we let him speak, he's in the Middle Ages, he talks about moments when the chivalrous, the knightly, is losing its grip in relation to the development of the economy of the communes, of the towns — he says this: it's in subjectivity, therefore the psyche, that chivalric virtue assumes its exclusion from praxis — it had to be knocked down, because there's an era when the lord's aim was to ensure the security of the fief — from the moment things become a bit more pacified, when the communes create wealth, the lord — this is going to lead to Don Quixote, you know that story as well as I do — the lord, as he says, assumes his exclusion from praxis by taking refuge in subjectivity — that's not
1:47:27 a regression, it's also a progression, there you go. Thank you very much for your question, in any case, and the stakes with respect to naive ontologism are to come back today, to move toward what Hegel calls the ontological scope of the process of knowledge — one must move toward ontology, that is, reproduce an ontology, so not forget precisely this applied Marxism — and that's precisely why, in Being and Code, we're talking about ontology — there's still the word 'being' in it — in what sense precisely does the code reduce being — but that being, we can also call it the substrate, that is, it's still — but simply, this substrate is a historical production, there you go, and he had — well then it would be the subject — but there you go, and precisely today, when you see Badiou reducing ontology to what, you know, to mathematics — fantastic, in fact — who translates the idea of the good, in his translation of the Republic, by the idea of the true — at the same time it can be rich, one can have a real dialogue — he doesn't want to defend Badiou, but there's no misunderstanding, because he's not talking about exactly the same thing — that's why I was wondering why you were bringing up ontologism — but he talks about it in the classical tradition of ontology, that is, being without predicate, without anything — what can we say, what can thought
Conclusion: Clouscard finds his readership 1:48:38 produce about being — well, one can think whatever one wants about it, he says what thought is capable of producing on that is mathematics, it's mathematics that tells us, that's it, that's what he says — it's not at all the same approach as the way you situated what you call naive ontologism, the one that's discredited — there you go, that would be discredited through — so, the critique, it's ontology in the middle — I do the criticism on that basis. Right, on that note, if there are no other questions, since time is running out before dinner, I'm going to invite you both to give a small conclusion — a conclusion that will be optimistic, if I judge by the interest aroused, the growing number of people, both numerous and young, who therefore have not taken into account the recent reviews by our contemporary neo-Kantians — I won't name those who passed damning judgments when they had the chance to discover Clouscard — to condemn him to the underworld. So, conclusion, a priori optimistic, in whichever
1:49:48 order you like — I'll go very quickly. Clouscard is finally finding his readership — this is somewhat intuitive, what I'm saying, how could it not be, it's so current that I probably lack the hindsight to give an ostensive demonstration of it, a rigorous demonstration — but in any case what's certain is that this dead dog — you know, it's the expression used in the 18th century about the way Spinoza was treated, like a dead dog — then it was Hegel, the dead dog of ideology in the sixties — and now it's Clouscard, the most eminent dead dog of the entire postwar French ideology. But thanks to you, it seems to me — I'll be a bit demagogic toward youth, it's not really my style, but still, I'll say, I notice — I'm more a man of transmission, I'm not a creator — there's a demand for Clouscardism in all the requests I get, whether it concerns philosophy, history, or literature — it all converges toward Clouscard's answers. So Clouscard is finding his readership, in the same way that a certain dominant ideology
1:50:58 — and you can see it well — current events are starting to become shaky, the Cold War is starting to pass the baton a little — even though some say it's coming back, but no, not at all in the same way, with a defensive position of capital, which is rather new, I think. There, I'll finish with a little geopolitical overview, but I mean, that's probably why Clouscard is starting to get the chance to finally find his readership, and his readership corresponds to your demand not to be cut in two, to have the right to praxis and to psyche, and to have the right — excuse me, I have a frog in my throat — as Berret, whom their philosophy teacher used to talk about, said, to be sentimental — we'll stop there, we're going to announce next Saturday's session, because the other word to sum up what neo-Kantianism is in Clouscard — one could give an inverse definition — it's anti-Hegelianism in a way — precisely this need — Dominique ends on a need not to be cut in two — that's good — what a fine praise of absolute knowledge, of the need for totality properly understood in the Hegelian sense, which doesn't mean
1:52:08 exhaustive knowledge, but knowledge reflecting on itself — and precisely, we'll pay tribute to a great Hegelian, very much on the left in his historical-political positions, that doesn't matter much, but in any case, care for Hegel weighs heavily on him, and the bridges are, in my view, obvious — I've always read them side by side — it's Domenico Losurdo. So it will be Saturday at 7:30 pm, and his friend Bernard Bourgeois will be there, who isn't just a friend in the ordinary sense but rather his sort of counterpart, the Hegelian of the right — because what finer debate than a debate within Hegelianism itself, perhaps the most interesting debate there is, that is, about totalitarianism
1:53:18 that's the risk you're taking, including by being here tonight — so it's better than mutilation. There you go, on that note, thank you, bravo, thank you.
