English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
French by stock and Corsican identity 0:18 "French born and bred" — you know the expression; if you understand it, you're lucky. As for me, who am not only of Corsican origin — I have two Corsican parents, well, they've passed away of course, but both of them, both were Corsican — and unless you're going to realize the dream of the Italian fascists, that is, to give Corsica back to Italy, for now Corsica has been French for quite a long time. There are some who would prefer it to be Corsican, neither Italian nor French — that can be argued too. And even philosophers as far from negligible as Rousseau were consulted — that's saying it well, since he did work that today would fall under what's called consulting, which is a crook's trade — I've done it, I can allow myself to say so, sorry to those who do it
1:29 seriously, but — his famous draft constitution for Corsica followed a request from the authorities of the newly freed Corsican republic, which had just freed itself from the Genoese yoke at the time, and which set up a government headed of course by the great Pascal Paoli. I'll note in passing that there are quite a few towns in the United States called Paoli, in homage to Pascal Paoli — we'll come back to that. Paoli's archives are in London; the Anglo-Saxons had well understood what advantage could be drawn from this enemy of the Bonapartes. Anyway, I'm not going to redo Corsican history because we'd never get out of it, but well, we already have an identity problem, don't we, and Rousseau was consulted for a draft constitution and acquitted himself well, except that it remained unfinished because between the moment Corsica freed itself from the Genoese yoke — all
2:46 that's the end of the 18th century, mid to late 18th century — and the moment when the Genoese, to pay off their debts, sold Corsica — well, that wouldn't be the worst of it, but they sold the Corsicans along with it, the people of Corsica, to the King of France, and Corsica became French. So the war started again, but this time with the French, who of course crushed the Corsican resistance, which, after the heroic battle where they were wiped out down to almost the last man at Ponte Novu, on the road from Bastia to Ajaccio — that battle is commemorated by the ruins of a magnificent bridge — well, you don't write a constitution for a people that no longer has independence or sovereignty. So I started from "franchouillard" [a mocking term for stereotypical Frenchness] — what's the connection, right, for those for whom identities matter a great deal, which seems to be what the word franchouillard covers. As for me, I'm a real Frenchman
The elusive stock and a former student's message 3:59 born and bred — you hear this expression, what is the "root stock"? It's Alsace, it's Brittany, it's Auvergne, it's Asterix, it's Brittany resisting the Romans — we always go looking for it as if the Celts... well, few people know that the notion of the Celt is a creation of German anthropologists at the start of the 20th century. But that would require a long development — the Romans do speak of the Celts, but it referred very precisely to a small part of Auvergne. So, all this is quite complicated. So why am I suddenly talking about identity? Because I was, how would you say, scotché — is that how you say it — bluffed, scotché, both at once, by a voice message from one of my former students at the Center for Musical Training and Promotion in Niamey, Niger, funded at the time by the European Union — well, the European Commission, we still say it that way now, it's not — well it is still, but
5:14 at the time, the one representing the authorities in Brussels, the country's main funder, and of many other countries in the region too, thanks to your taxes — I was never paid so well, dare I say it, right — and in that country which is often said to be the poorest in the world — well, that's not very precise, there are 10 or 12 that could compete for that sad title, if I may say so, quite a few in the Sahel actually, the neighboring countries, Burkina, Mali, Chad — but let's stick with Niger. So in the 80s and 90s I ran this center, and I'll skip over — well, it did have three essential functions. One function as a music school, well, and I'll skip over — oh, that's original! Well, but you're lucky, you're in France, and there's a neighborhood conservatory in every district, in every borough in Paris
6:27 and district conservatories, national conservatories — there's no shortage of them. I'm only talking here about conservatories — imagine, private music schools didn't exist in Africa, they didn't need them, "the negroes have music in their blood" — I heard that, I heard it where I grew up as a child, among the whites of Africa, the ones who say we should never have brought them all that, actually they were happier without electricity, without cars, without running water — and by the way they still don't have electricity. Why, in Niger? You know that our electricity consumption owes to the nuclear share something that's unique in the world, and the essential part — not exclusive but essential — of that nuclear energy came, not so long ago, a bit less now, 80% from Niger — yes, a major uranium producer. Except that 83% of Nigeriens don't have power at home. "Well, they were happier without all that" — I heard that, but I won't tell you who said it
7:43 there were thousands who said it — that was the usual line, if you want, sorry — that was the usual discourse. I think — I think in my head like Africans now, because they say "tu" to mean "one" — "if you were doing well, your children" — meaning, when we were doing well, the children. And why do I cite that line three times, "I was happier without"? Because it was the people of the far right — a quiet far right there, they weren't threatened, they were the majority there, they weren't threatened by unions, by a left, by demands — I'm not saying by the "great replacement" because that's recent, at least the phrase is — but why am I talking about this? Because you hear that they didn't need it — except that now it's coming from people who think of themselves as on the left, from certain kinds of ecologists — ecologists, there are serious ecological problems, I'm not conflating things, I'm not talking about the serious ecological ones, it's not the frogs getting run over on the roads
A fast-moving present and enduring constants 8:53 why not an activist movement about that, why not, it's not ill-intentioned — but the fact that they're indifferent to the war, to the slaughter happening not far from our borders, right, in Europe — where does that take us? We started from "franchouillard," from "French born and bred," let's continue. You realize I start with all this because I hear it often said around me these days, you must hear it too — it's a bit the most obvious thing in current events, that things are moving so fast right now, barely have you started to find your bearings when there's an event, a decision, a decree, a statement that turns everything upside down. The National Front, that's the far right, the far right marked by antisemitism — but quick, don't hesitate, I'll qualify that, exactly, exactly — and now here are Marine Le Pen and Bardella invited to Israel, guests of honor — go figure that one out, doesn't it move fast
10:09 the daughter of a father who talked about "Durafour crématoire" [a pun on a minister's name meaning "crematorium oven"] — that was a minister under Giscard who made puns in his own style, named Durafour, "Durafour crématoire." The right has always been anti-Russian, anti-Soviet, anti-Russian in an obsessive way. Now there are many right-wing people who have sympathy for Putin because he's supposed to be tough, authoritarian, and that at home he doesn't have... it's complicated — no, I'll get back to that student who convinced me to choose this topic for tonight's session, and it struck me so much — what did I say earlier — I was so favorably impressed: light comes to us from the south, or if you prefer, Herodotus, nearly 2300 years ago, said Africa will always astonish. I'll come back to this student during the talk — out of discretion for him, I haven't yet gotten
11:28 his permission for now to use his voice, his statement, because it was a voice message on a WhatsApp group of former students of the music school I mentioned earlier, which you fund thanks to your taxes, since the European Union — it's your taxes that make up its budget, so thank you, I was never paid so well, I'll talk about that again. But yes, I moved on — while mentioning his message, I moved on to the incredible upheaval happening today, but at the same time with its opposite — see how complicated it is — with constants, things that don't change. What doesn't change is that the Slavs — whether Ukrainian or Russian, or Russian — are the negroes of whiteness. Yes, that's a somewhat violent thing to say, but I say it on purpose, because the traditional relationship of Germans — well, a young German today, luckily, some remain like that, but still — the spontaneous relationship of Germans to
The Slavs, the East of the East, and Count Westwest 12:42 Poles is the same as the relationship of right-wing Israelis to Arabs, roughly speaking, more or less, and it's the same relationship that Poles have toward Russians, because there's always someone further east, and then in the end, at the very bottom, it's the negro. I use the word negro on purpose, because it's associated with slavery, right — those who have visited Venice remember there's a magnificent quay, and running like a beggar on the marble quays — I chase the thought — I think of the Riva degli Schiavoni in Venice, that's where, throughout the Middle Ages and a bit beyond, mostly in the Middle Ages, cargoes of slaves arrived, coming from the countries of the... the countries of the Slavs, those countries there — at the time, Ukraine, which was never a nation-state until a very recent period — and in the name itself, the word itself, most of you know, I believe, it means
13:55 simply limit, border, that's all — the very opposite of an identity, that is, the place where one thing is and another thing begins, where the field ends and the forest begins, where the forest ends and the field begins. And in between — and the representations of spirits in traditional African culture, in African villages — I'm talking about sub-Saharan Africa, black Africa of course — the masks and statuettes representing the spirits are always at the edge of the village, at the point where human action stops in the face of nature and vice versa. Among the Dogon, the tombs, the ancestors are right up on the cliffs, overlooking the Dogon villages below. The Riva degli Schiavoni, yes — there's always contempt for the very bottom, right, for the one who is furthest east, the one who is the opposite of the owner of the castle — Kafka's, right? That's pure Pagani, you never know
15:05 how to find your way — of course. And yes, Kafka's castle, his final novel, his masterpiece, which I've cited on other occasions for other topics, in particular twice I cited two excerpts from The Castle in videos I recommend — generally I don't like seeing myself, I see this old crazy person fidgeting on the screen, full of tics, I say to myself, surely I haven't become that — well, no, seriously, Kafka, I did it in the series that we baptized in cahoots with our dear Philippe Moraux, the "analytic reveries," which is somewhat of an oxymoron in itself — either you dream or you analyze — but I stick to it, this series of videos we made under that heading, Analytic Reveries. The first one is called "Mignon, or The Sound of Silence" — twice I cite The Castle. So, not to confuse you, I was saying the Slavs, those to the east, that's it, my son, and so by metaphor they end up becoming what is most often associated with the color, with
16:22 black skin, right — the slaves — it's not a metaphor, they really were, for real, until a fairly recent period — I remember, no, this isn't a digression, I'm illustrating why the enslavement of Slavs, or quasi-Slavs, are — I'll say — countries that are at the edge of the Germanic world, of the good Slavs, between eastern Germany, Poland, regions that until not so long ago, and still now, were called Pomerania — Pommern in German — Mecklenburg — these regions distant in every sense. Wilhelm II, the one who led Germany into the war of 1914, Wilhelm II, who wasn't known for being very sharp, well anyway, made a statement — this one, I tell you, it's a beauty — he said: if one day the end of the world is announced, I'll retire to Mecklenburg, because there, he went on, everything happens later, and it's remote in space
17:34 and in time. Well, these countries, long disputed — when you look at the etymology of the toponyms, the city names in what was East Germany, all the specialists know that they're former non-Slavic — Polish, for example — even the Berlin region is not — so what's the connection with Kafka's castle? Well, I told you, because it's exactly the opposite, as proof that there is indeed an east of the east, and so on all the way to Russia, all the way to Vladivostok where it stops — there's also a west of the west. And yes, that's The Castle — very quickly, the pitch, sorry, the pitch — story, plot, however you want to call it, this last, ultimate novel of Kafka, the most pared-down even though it's unfinished, like most of his major works — it's a man who arrives, at nightfall, in a remote village in the
18:49 back of beyond, far away, a village, and he shows up at the inn — there are two inns in the village, one down below, called the peasants' inn, and one up above, the gentlemen's inn, for those who are officials of the castle. He arrives a bit late, they look at him — that's not good, in the German world, someone arriving like that from outside, from abroad — believe me I'm exaggerating, those who listen to me know I'm very Germanophile in culture, but very attentive to their flaws — their flaw is having geraniums on the windows and the lime tree on the square, the fountain murmuring during the long June evenings, and that nothing ever changes. There, why not, I'm not making a value judgment for now, but anyway, in this... my dear, what does he come to do? Well, he's been hired by the castle as a land surveyor, and we quickly see that the peasants don't concern themselves with the castle, they're busy with their daily tasks, which is already tough enough, no one thinks of getting closer to the castle. At the castle, we quickly understand that it
19:59 doesn't symbolize step by step in the sense that Kafka makes a list — like, when I say the castle, that symbolizes this, when I say no no no, the village symbolizes that — no, but broadly it's transcendence, it's what the judge was in The Trial, one of his previous novels — the judge whom you never see, whom you never see, "I'm accused, I have a trial, I never see the one handling my case," the judge is always beyond — well, that's the castle. And already he can't manage to approach the 84th under-porter of the castle. You see, the castle does have a lord, an owner, the one who reigns over this little corner of the Reich, and you know what he's called — and you'll believe — I'd lost my thread — Count Westwest. The Count of West-West, literally — those who think of themselves as Westerners — it's true, I've always criticized this notion, not the people it designates, I'm one myself, I thought — I'm a Westerner, I put that together with my Corsican side, for some right-wing people, why not, I put myself in the same boat — but the Count of West, you'd say he's "out west" [off track], well him, he's west of the west
21:13 so there you go, yes, there's an inverse of the... and he's at the top of the pyramid. Let's finish with the novel — the surveyor wants to get closer to his employer, he'll never manage it throughout the novel — I'll go fast — but the villagers are surprised at this fellow who always wants to get closer to transcendence, instead of wisely sticking to daily life in the village, so that the main character of the novel, named K — not even Joseph K like in The Trial, but simply K, the first letter — the main character spends his time being neither in the village nor in the castle, but in perpetual back-and-forth — I'm not losing my thread — the shuttling back and forth is the opposite of residing. Ah, but there you go, yes — the great replacement, the migrants — that's not what we call it, the Bedouins, as they say elsewhere too, you know — the Bedouins wander in the desert — what do you want to do in the desert, you're not going to stay where you are with three goats and four or five sheep — the Bedouins, that's not
Man is a migrant by essence 22:31 an ethnicity, it's a function. Ibn Khaldun, a great writer, speaks of the Arabs, but for him the Arabs aren't an ethnicity, aren't a people, aren't an identity — that's my subject tonight — it's not an identity, it's a function, it's the one at the very bottom of the basket, who is in the bled in the truest, harshest sense, who is in the desert with his animals. Abraham grazed his flocks on a boundless land, as Hegel says in his early theological writings, for it is the land of the unlimited. When one is not a resident — well yes, listen, man is a migrant by essence. I know this scandalizes many of the dominant modes of thought, but well, what have you learned about the origins of humanity, from when they weren't yet men, still apes, not yet anthropos — afterward we play with words, you know verbal magic — pithecanthropus means ape-man, we manage as best we can — when our animal ancestors, our ancestors were still animals, they were apes frolicking in
23:44 the canopy of the great forest, today Congolese, broadly speaking of Central Africa — the forest's equivalent would be the Amazon in South America — up there, in the canopy, they were somewhat more sheltered from certain predators. It's by coming down from the trees, following a change of climate, venturing for the first time into the savanna, that we went from quadrupeds to bipeds, because in the savanna, you know, the grass was — how much higher than you, you have to lift your head to see where the danger is coming from. All this that I've just said takes millions of years as evolution goes, but it means that man is a migrant — when man begins, that's the start of a migration. You've learned that it first comes from Africa, then it goes from the forest to the savanna, then it migrates from the African savanna to the Mediterranean, then it branches off — some go toward what will give rise to the Cro-Magnons and other so-called Western Homo sapiens, in this case in French territory, but just as well, right, elsewhere
24:56 cousins of homo sapiens, the Neanderthals, who, as the name indicates, comes from a German valley — tal means valley — from the village of Neanderthal, and then now the Denisovans in a more eastern Europe, but this is a migration that perhaps hasn't finished, so it's essentially anthropological to be a migrant, what do we have against migrants, you see the two extremes, migration on one side, on the other side the geraniums in the windows for eternity and the murmuring fountain, I'm not speaking of it ironically, I'm speaking of it severely, but not ironically, because it gave rise to extraordinary works of art, in particular the second act of Wagner's Meistersinger — yes, there are those who believe Wagner is boom boom boom, as Nietzsche says when he made the break, saying later that he had never encountered its equal as music — yes, second act of the Meistersingers, the serenade during June 21st, it's June 21st, in cold countries that's celebrated, so why
The debate among former students: Arabs and Black people 26:11 I've already done quite a few things on identity and difference, I'm not going back, even if I always say a bit the same thing in a spiral, I can't bore you, you're familiar with it, and why am I coming back to it today — because of this student's intervention, I'm going back to the beginning of my thread. It turns out that my former students are now friends, they were students at my music school, they realized I wasn't dead and I was very happy, and they founded an alumni association which conferred on me the role of honorary president, which touched me very much, and I don't intervene much in the group they've formed because it's mostly among themselves — in particular, we've just come out of Ramadan, of course may Allah's peace be upon you, it's a Muslim country, 96%, the wall, like almost all the Sahel countries, so that's it, the least discretion, I don't intervene in these debates, except — for once, not a habit — that's the case tonight
27:23 it's that in their little internal debate, a student — since I didn't have time and I didn't manage to reach him before tonight to ask his permission to quote him explicitly, I'll give you his first name, Ma man, Mamania, Mamania Mohammed — sub-Saharan Africa tends to soften the guttural side of Arabic by adding vowels, thus Daoud in Arabic, which gives us our David, you know that u and v permute, sorry, so Daoud becomes Daouda by adding a vowel, you see, Mohammed becomes Mamadou, Ahmed becomes Amadou, that's it, one would say — but here it's Mamane who intervenes in a debate that wasn't started by him but by another one called Ali, I'm only giving first names, who says the Arabs don't like Black people, it's not among themselves, the Arabs look down on us, it's them, it's the Muslims
28:35 superior, we're — because historically it revolves around this but it's never made explicit because it's taboo — but for centuries, I mean what's called the Arabs, people from the north, could be people from the Maghreb, could be people from Sudan, came to carry out what are literally called razzias in sub-Saharan Africa to supply what needed slaves, either in the Maghreb or especially also in the Middle East, you see it's not as disjointed as all that, tonight's topic — so the debate between them was about that, Arabs don't like Black people, and that's when Mamane intervenes — I'm talking to you about boys who didn't go to school, you can't imagine the journey these boys make — it's already, when I was a teacher, I'm stepping back a little again, already when I was a teacher in Ivory Coast, a teacher in secondary school, I'm going to
29:45 say a philosophy teacher, I had students who, in terms of language, speak first, like everyone, like all the children of the world, the mother tongue, that of the ethnic group, because the further south you go, the further you descend from the Sahel sand toward the moist green humidity of the forest, the humid jungle, on the contrary the more there is a proliferation of languages, let's say the forest is a factor of isolation — when you're in the virgin forest you do this, you can't even see your own hand — and so they first learn the mother tongue, that of the ethnic group, but since it's only understood within a very small perimeter, afterward they take up an African language but one understood over a larger area, for example in Ivory Coast that would be Dioula — no, I don't know, an ethnic group, don't look for it, there's no people called the Dioula, it means merchant in Bambara, you see, these are functions, I replace identity — 'it's always been like that, it's in the genes' — ah, that phrase annoys me now, even for a business executive, 'it's not in our genes'
Substance and relation 30:56 of this biologism — we thought that since the Third Reich all that was over, good grief — I'm not talking about biology, I wouldn't be alive if I weren't, nor am I talking about biology, no no, I'm talking about biologism, about deriving everything from something already-there — come on, we're in philosophy, this is what's called identity in ordinary language, it's the category of substance, you know, sub stare, that which stands underneath, stare, underneath, beneath everything that appears to move, the flower — that's substance in Aristotle, that's it, that's the thing I'm talking about, the flower — then, here's what I say about it, I move from subject to predicate: the flower is beautiful, the flower is wilted, the flower is in bloom, the flower is expensive, the flower matches, etc., etc. — those are the attributes, they don't weigh much, but fortunately there's a pot underneath to hold all that, underneath, substance — that substance, it's really much ado about nothing
32:08 the thing is, if I say yellow, yellow of what — a sweater, a pencil, the sun? What is yellow? It doesn't exist, yellow in itself, it has to be in something — a sweater, someone's skin whose liver is in very bad shape, or such a flag — it needs a substance underneath to sustain it. You know, like the Virgin bears the child, one feels it falling, Stabat Mater dolorosa, everyone, pendebat filius — the mother stood there in sorrow while the son hung. So I come back from this rather abstract detour, but still, the category of substance, we see it often, it's everything that's essential, that's been there since always, basically, that's not due to the path one has taken, to the relation to others — so I'm staying a bit more in my abstract detour, but we need to work through it a bit
33:23 the antonym of substance, its most complete opposite, is relation — here's an important dichotomy throughout the history of thought, what is substantial and what is relational. For example, the words left, right, north, south — I'm not talking about left and right in politics, though that's part of it too, but left and right in the spatial sense: the right is here, you see, this is my right arm, and left — I turn around, it's reversed. These are not things that exist, there's no place that is 'the right,' there's a place that is on the left, it's like east-west since we've known the earth is round — I've said it a thousand times, that's why I don't like the word 'Occident,' word for word it means those who are in the west, the Westerners, right? And so Poland — it's west of Russia, it's east of Germany, so where is it? Careful — it's better, when reading about the politics of 'the Westerners,' Atlanticist imperialism, there it's clear, that's clear, it long meant colonialism, then imperialism, the two greatest carnages in human history, and no one could say anything about it the whole time — it's in Scripture that this world is called a vale of tears
34:35 moreover, the most recent anthropology, thanks to dating methods and very fine analyses of food remains from our ancestors, notes that there were wars of extermination already in prehistory — but the greatest carnage of all time, the two greatest, the two world wars, both came from that charming place called the Occident — isn't that right, superior to the others? We must never forget that — Napoleon and Hitler invaded Russia, but yes, I say to myself, the danger has always come from the west, mustn't reverse it — well, still, there were the Huns, stopped by Saint Genevieve — the Huns didn't come to invade us, they were fleeing, they were being chased, when the Chinese got rid of them — it's a bit long, but look into the relations between the Chinese and the Mongols — so I seem to be taking a while to get to quoting my student, but the precise point my student makes, it's worth its weight in gold
Listening to the voice message 35:55 so here we are — precisely him, a bit annoyed by these identities, these substances, the Blacks, the Arabs, invites his comrades — they're friends, former students of the music training center — and he tells them, let's listen, because on top of that he has a voice, he should be a radio announcer, that would be a nice change from what we usually get — we're going to start the beginning of his remarks, it's a voice message on the alumni group of the Niger center for musical training and promotion — assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu, I hope everyone is well, if you'll allow me I'd like to react to the little debate, in relation to the video posted by my friend Ali Garba — well, Arabs don't like Black people, but we mustn't generalize, the Prophet, peace be upon him, loved Bilal
37:06 he had loved, in the end, Wahshi too — both of these at least are among the elect of Paradise. There's a story about one of the companions of the Prophet, peace be upon him, called Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, one of the great companions of the Prophet, peace be upon him, who transmitted many hadiths, proof that he had remained a long time at the Prophet's side. One day he had called Bilal 'Ibn al-Sawda,' 'son of a Black woman,' that's what it meant, and word of it reached the Prophet's ears, he called him over, he said, 'Abu Dharr, is it you who said such and such about Bilal?' He lowered his head. He said, 'Despite your Islam, despite your devoutness, there remains in you something of the Jahiliyya, of ignorance, of obscurantism.' And Abu Dharr began to weep, and then Bilal arrives
38:18 Abu Dharr lay down on the ground, put his beard, put his cheek against the ground, took Bilal's foot, rubbed it hard against his cheek, rubbed his face in the dust, said, 'Walk on me, walk on me, I don't deserve dignity, I'm not worthy' — he was making his mea culpa, right? And so, to say that it's true, Arabs don't like Black people, but it's not only the Arabs — do Black people love themselves, among themselves? Look at all the countries of Africa, look at Rwanda, the Hutus and the Tutsis, they have the same language, only some are farmers, others are herders, that's all that distinguishes them, they speak the same language but — please — there were a million people killed by machete. Does the Black man love himself? Look at Nigeria, look at Togo, look at every country in Africa
39:29 they say the army is such-and-such an ethnic group, this one is such-and-such an ethnic group — even here at home, in Niger, there are people, when you go somewhere and speak one language, no one looks at you; when you go elsewhere and speak another language, no one looks at you either — is that love? Yet it's him speaking that language there and we don't even listen to him — yet those who refuse to listen to him understand what he's saying, but simply because they don't speak their own language, that's love? It's easy to accuse others, and I've read somewhere, 'before God we're all the same' — that's not true, we're not the same, what does Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala say?
40:20 'Ya ayyuha an-nas, inna khalaqnakum min dhakarin wa untha, wa ja'alnakum shu'uban wa qaba'ila li ta'arafu, inna akramakum 'inda Allahi atqakum' — that's it: O mankind, He addresses all men, I created you from a single male and a single female, and I made of you tribes and nations so that you might come to know one another, but the best among you is the one who fears Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, the most. We are not the same, the best in Allah's sight, subhanahu wa ta'ala, is the one who fears Him most — if you speak, you don't lie; if you promise, you keep your promise; if you commit, you honor your commitment; if something is entrusted to you, you give it back; you don't betray, you don't curse, you don't slander, you don't defame, you're not full of hatred, you're not envious, you don't feel jealousy — that's it, let each one look at themselves, do some introspection — are we really like that?
41:24 and it's easy to accuse others — the best among you in Allah's sight, subhanahu wa ta'ala, is the one who fears Him most, and the Prophet said Islam is a universal religion, you were sent for all of humanity, to be a herald of good news for those who fear Allah, and a warner of His punishment for those who stray from the right path. And he says finally: the Arab is not superior to the Black, nor the Black superior to the Arab, that's it — he said he heard Bilal's footsteps in Paradise, the call to prayer — you know what that means in Islam?
42:18 and yet it was to a Black man that this was entrusted — moreover Moses wasn't white, Musa wasn't white, in Egypt they knew at the time they weren't white people — Jesus wasn't white, that's clear, isn't it? Luqman, whom they say was Black — okay, so Arabs don't like Black people — maybe white people don't like Black people — maybe Black people don't like Black people, that's for sure. In the United States they elected Obama, but here you refuse to vote for someone because he's not fair, he's not from your region or from your ethnic group — these are ethnic votes in Africa, and even the children — is that normal?
43:17 it's not normal, is it healthy? You want the president of the republic to be from your ethnic group, not from another's, even if over there there's competence, you don't want it — let's be a bit honest with ourselves, let's love ourselves first — if you don't love yourself, who's going to love you? Who's going to love you? Black people were reduced to slavery because of what? Whose fault? The fault of other Black people, there was a very large complicity, a very great cowardice, they were corrupted, that's the truth, the result gave what it gave — some say that when the white men came, they hadn't come with that goal, they didn't even know what was on the other side of the ocean because at the time there wasn't all this equipment for scanning the universe, they didn't even know what was on the other side of the universe, okay?
44:24 they took their boat, they said, 'let's go see what's there' — you know, white people are like that, 'let's go see what's on the other side of the sea' — they sailed and sailed and sailed, they came to Africa, they found a formidable continent with formidable nature, but also there were able-bodied arms, there were able-bodied arms — it's when they went back that they organized themselves to say, 'hey, this could be useful to us,' and they hadn't come back as warriors, they came with little trinkets, they came back with little trinkets that they gave to the king — a simple mirror, they'd give you a hundred slaves, a little necklace, they'd say, 'take what you want' — Kunta Kinte, we know the story of how he was taken, Kunta Kinte — what a lesson, what a lesson, and it has to come to us from the poorest country in the world, one of the poorest in the world, which has the highest birth rate in the world
Birth rate, the lean season, and migrations: the real problems 45:34 that doesn't mean anything — who was that TV host? A popular channel — sorry, popular, I have nothing against 'people,' 'people' is the opposite of popular, it reeks of money, that celebrity stuff, anyway — who said that Black people should be cut off, they have too many children. Well, the one that breaks all the birth-rate records is Niger, it's not rare to see between 7 and 10 children in families, and you know why?
46:05 there are some who, no doubt — it's because four-fifths die between the ages of 0 and 5, they have 10 to keep 3, it's possible — boys, but no, this has nothing to do with the war of the sexes, I'm not talking about bobos here, I'm talking about people who have real problems, I'm not talking about battered women, that's a real problem, I'm talking about bobos, those who say 'you say that because I'm a woman,' those who — African-American women I believe protested that a white woman dared translate a book written by a Black woman — no, listen, no no, I'm talking about my students, they have other problems, believe me, especially during the lean season, you know, when there's not much left in the granaries and the rains are late, and the first rains of the season, that's around May-June, May-June, the first rains are slow to come, and then it's real anguish — are they going to bother themselves with Sandrine Rousseau?
47:10 They set up everything that manipulates the real problem but manipulates it in order to transform it into terms of identity, man and woman, patriarchy. I'll extend this reflection: in villages in Niger there are periods of the year when you see only old people and children — sorry, women, very young children, and elderly people too old to travel — because those who can move have left. It's the dry season that has driven them out; there's nothing left. So they go down south, to Ghana, Ivory Coast, Togo, Benin, to sell or rent out their arms and legs on the rich cocoa and coffee plantations — well, rich for those who run the trade, because for those who produce it, if you saw the hundredth of what it costs per kilo here, you'd see... I'm talking about those people. They have 10 children to keep 3, and I was talking about the boys — I'll come back to that.
48:22 Once I asked an old Malian woman why it was looked down on for a woman to have only daughters. She said: when I'm old, who will feed me? You see, the son is precisely the one who leaves, who goes to rent out his arms and legs, who works hard — the daughters work too, over there, I should say — but the son is the one who does the heavy labor, he's the one who'll be able to feed his old mother. We don't frame the problems that way here — it's patriarchal dictatorship, the poor guy, the poor wretch who leaves his village, who goes into exile, who becomes an immigrant, an immigrant who's going to generate problems like here, of racism and contempt between — I dare not name the countries involved, though I named a few just now — well, such-and-such a country in the south, well-watered in the meteorological sense — it's not contempt for these people coming starving from the Sahel.
Evil: seeing substance where there is relation 49:32 So you see, I'm in the process of correcting what we take to be substances: white, black, the African mentality, the Western mentality, as if these were things. I'm replacing substance with its old antonym, relation — that which exists only through something else, which is the case with up and down, with left and right. You know what we call "down" — yes, I do it like this, like you would, to point downward. Except that if I dig down, I end up in New Zealand, at the antipodes, and there's a guy over there explaining the very same thing to his students, doing this — except his finger, for us, points up and meets ours. You see, these words mean nothing: up, down, left, right, even hot and cold mean nothing — science has swept all that away. Science says: it's 18 degrees. Is that hot or cold? I don't know — ask a Russian or a Chadian, you won't get the same answer. Because what we call hot or cold in everyday life isn't a property intrinsic to the thing, like iron having such-and-such a density — that's proper to iron.
50:45 No, it expresses the relation to our own temperature. There you have substance and relation. The more courage you have to convert something into relation, the more complicated it gets, because you need to know: in relation to whom, to what. The more you convert what presents itself in the mode of substance in our thinking into a relational category, the further you move away from... — I lost the thread from where we left off, it's been a long time, I'm glad to find you again. That's evil — evil is not... it's seeing substance everywhere when there is relation. Pure Aryan, you know, in the Third Reich, the blond with blue eyes, which neither Hitler nor Göring nor Goebbels were — they were people with complexes, that left its mark, people with complexes.
52:00 "Men are for the most part wicked and unhappy." Only Spinoza knows how to open a book addressing the greatest difficulties of philosophy with things so simple and so apt — implying: they are wicked because they are unhappy. I say this because there are those who want to devour fascism — I don't want to dissuade them, but still, don't forget that these are also unhappy people, there you go. So I really wanted to raise this problem of identity again through the case of my student — watch closely now, because I didn't want to interrupt his remarks earlier; now I go back to the beginning of his remarks to analyze them. It's admirable — it even surprised me, coming from someone with such a hugely erratic schooling. Right, just as I was about to analyze a passage, I'm again doing something that looks like a digression: I'm telling you about one of my students, not from central Niger, this goes back much further, to when I was a teacher in secondary school in Ivory Coast! I'm examining the oral baccalaureate.
Anecdotes about African schooling 53:10 I'm a philosophy teacher — I only had boys — examining the oral bac of a young high schooler from Abidjan, who answers rather well, and at the end of his performance he says to me: "Sir, I'm going to find out my grade." I tell him: no, I give it to no one, so there's no reason to make exceptions, don't worry too much — if you fail the bac, it won't be because of philosophy, but I wish you success. He says: "Thank you, Mr. Pagani, you know me." Because — yes, I hadn't told you — the bac isn't taken where you live but in distant districts, to prevent cheating schemes. So there I was in the north, in a place called Korhogo, where they make that famous cloth — the cloths familiar to all the expatriates who brought some back and hung them on their walls, right, the Korhogo cloths, from the Senufo people, which inspired the faces in Modigliani's paintings — no, I'm not making anything up — but I'm digressing too much. So I'm examining the bac, and we know each other — I knew no one in Korhogo, so I was puzzled.
54:20 He tells me: "Yes, we were together in tenth grade." I said, sorry? Look — we were together in tenth grade, him and me, years before, and then his parents died, and he, the eldest brother, felt responsible for his younger brothers and sisters. He became a young head of household, had to suspend his schooling, and here he was, ten years later, coming back to sit his bac. You can imagine that at the jury deliberations, I gave him the points he needed. Africa will always surprise you — we were together in tenth grade. One last anecdote about African schooling: I was in Togo, I was younger, and it was in '57, the year of independence in Togo, precisely — Ablodé, I remember how you say it in the Mina or Ewe language, as you like — Ablodé, well, that's full independence.
55:30 From my window, from the window of my parents' villa, which was air-conditioned — normal for most expatriates — in '57, I see students at the same level as me, but not from the same school, cramming their lessons by the light of the street lamp outside, because they had no electricity at home. Yes — that's the student I'm telling you about, whom I quoted, whose intervention I didn't want to interrupt, especially since he articulates admirably, and his French is on the whole better, despite all the turbulence in his schooling, far better than the average of our media presenters. I'll go back to the beginning of his remarks, when he says: you have to be careful.
From Rwanda to Ukraine and the Khmer Rouge 56:40 It's not the Blacks and the Arabs — it may well be true that Arabs don't like Blacks, but it also happens that Blacks don't like Blacks. And he gives a long development on the example of Rwanda — I can't get over it, because that's the very example I always use to show how absurd the ethnic reference is. You know, "oh, it's ethnic wars, they'll always be at each other's throats" — between Hutu and Tutsi, between Russians and Ukrainians. What was the first decision of the coup government — which now claims to be a democracy, a coup backed by Ms. Nuland, number two at the U.S. State Department — you know I don't go on about Americans, I go on about Atlanticism, and here we're right in the thick of it — who was handing out chocolate croissants during the Maidan riots while bullets were crackling, killing police officers — yes, from the rooftops, from the rooftops.
57:55 The first decision of the Nazis who enabled the coup — no, they're not Nazis, oh, there are a few hotheads, sure, with swastikas here and there, you'll say, well there are some everywhere, guys like that, even in the French Foreign Legion, fine, but still, we're getting there — yes, the old guard from Germany and all, they've done their share against the Vietnamese, they clean it up afterward, but yes, they're Westerners — I'm a Westerner myself, but I'm not one of those. I still haven't told you what the first decision was — do you know? To abolish the Russian language in regions where it has always existed, in the east of present-day Ukraine, the oblasts, as they're called, Donetsk, Luhansk, etc.
58:53 So you see, identity begins with wars of identity — you have to give an identity to a country whose very name, at the limit, means two identities: Ukraine, "Kreis," that's the circle, the line — because German, the German language, is more marked by these eastern words than others, which is normal — thus, to say "border," in German you say Grenze, G-R-E-N-Z-E, Grentz — the Z isn't a Z, it's a TS, Grentz — and how do you say it in Russian?
59:44 You see, it's close, once you know it. So, these are regions where Russian has always been spoken, as it has, in fact, throughout Ukraine, except that in the rest of Ukraine, especially in what's called western Ukraine, more marked by the Holy Roman Empire, by the Austrian Empire if you prefer, you learn Russian when you're in the city — you've left the countryside — because in the countryside, in the village, there's a dialect that became the Ukrainian language. Why not?
1:00:24 To abolish it — that's serious, what we're witnessing. You see, in Alsace, you walk into a bakery, a woman comes in, an Alsatian woman: "a méchant pain," please — there's a mix of German and French words — I don't know, is that forbidden here too? Oh well, the Nazis, that's serious anyway — wait, the SS, and yes, the SS in Russia — Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union at that time — the SS were no softies, even among the Nazis they were the extremists. Yes, and the German SS were themselves stunned by the cruelty — there are historical sources, look it up, all of it, how many times do I have to tell you I don't like gurus, I don't like being taken at my word — verify: "Pagani's talking nonsense," let's check — that pleases me, and you'll see every time, and I repeat this too, not only am I not exaggerating, but I fall well short of the truth. But since I'm not a voyeur, let's leave it there.
1:01:34 But anyway, there you go — no, it's not trivial: the government, this time, it's not a few hotheads in the army, no, it's not those who executed, assassinated 15,000 Ukrainians, including an enormous number of children — nobody ever tells you about that, before the Russians intervened. I need to clarify this too — there, another Putinophile, right? No, no — but Putin is the opposite of my political camp, he's an anti-communist, but listen to him, he says all this is Lenin's fault, who gave Ukraine its independence — that's the Bolsheviks and the communists, listen. Ah yes, but if you follow my videos, you start to understand one of the rare phrases of Nietzsche I endorse 150%: watch out for me, my name is nuance — because it's easy to be pro-Russian, therefore pro-Putin, therefore for one side, or pro-Ukrainian, therefore pro-American, therefore pro-British, etc.
1:02:41 I'm not talking about Macron, let's leave the trivial aside — well, trivial, if our children are called up to war against the most advanced nuclear technology in the world — I don't mean the most powerful in numbers but the most technologically advanced — that's where it stops being trivial. The trivial ones are those who bring about the greatest catastrophes. But yes, the first thing was to call into question, to try to abolish Russian identity — what is that, then?
1:03:32 So my student takes the example of Rwanda, Russia-Ukraine — I go back to Hutu-Tutsi, the largest genocide of the postwar period, the bloodiest, by machete — there were some willing to pay money, the victims' own money, to the killers to have them executed outright rather than hacked to pieces — well, I'm not a voyeur, so I'll stop there for the details anyway. In any case, you have over a million dead — we left off on my remarks about the Khmer Rouge, whom your humble servant calls the Khmer Green, because their first decision — in Ukraine, the first decision was to abolish, to forbid Russian identity in all its forms — the first decision of the so-called Khmer Rouge, and you'll understand why it's better to call them Green: it's to massacre the reds first, because before massacring their own people and carrying out the genocide that is the largest of the postwar era alongside Rwanda — I haven't lost my thread — it's to massacre the pro-Soviet Vietnamese who were there at the time, no, but above all, their first decision regarding their own people—
1:04:43 —was to tell them: you leave the city and go to the countryside — that's where they were going to be massacred — you're going, they say, to grow rice. The Germans didn't say "we're going to put you in the gas chambers," they said "we're going to have you take showers, we're going to clean you up," they were going to strip you literally. So you see, and here's my student, who up to this point — you heard his remarks — cites the Qur'an, a good Nigerien — that's not Islamism, over there they're Muslims, meaning the main victims of Islamism in the countries where it exists, most often financed — like the Taliban in Afghanistan, who were funded by the United States to chase out the "Popovs" — yes or no?
1:05:38 Do you think I'm making this up? In the name of Allah, Allah, Allah, they chased them out and installed the new regime in Syria, the bearded ones — you saw the massacre there? It hasn't even been a month — a thousand dead in one day — families ran, rushed to the Russian base nearby, at Latakia, to ask to be sheltered. We're seeing things happening today, things are moving so fast I feel I can't understand anything anymore — yet there are logics that persist, there are constants amid all these variables. So he takes the example of Rwanda and says: there, it's Blacks who massacred Blacks! Why go looking for Arabs to blame?
Cleaning house at home 1:06:42 What lesson do they give? You see — don't spit on the other simply because he's other, but first clean your own house. If this were an evangelical term, we'd cite the well-known passage: don't try to remove the speck in your neighbor's eye before removing the beam in your own. You see — know thyself first, and clean house, there's plenty to do there. Let me be clear: I'm not saying there are those who've cleaned house, me, I'm among the good guys, and you're all scum — no, we start becoming scum when we substantialize, when we say "I'm going to be wary of the Chinese." I watch the reports, I can't believe my eyes, I say, no, this must be staged, it's not possible — the Shenzhen metro — but then you come back and say we're in the Third World here, or that we've gone back to the Middle Ages — it's not possible, the Shenzhen metro, do you really believe subways like that exist?
1:07:53 The metro is for the mass of the population — I'm not talking about the Grand Mughal's palace. There you go, I wanted to pass on this message from Africa today, I don't want to be too long — I should have started, I was afraid it would run too long, by apologizing for the long break we had, but I turned 80 last February, as you know — I had announced it, well, I hadn't announced the exact date — I'm getting more and more tired, more and more dysfunctional, so it's a bit harder for me to keep a regular pace. And then, fortunately, when things get better, I've been invited to give talks out in the provinces, so I've somewhat let you down, but reading your Facebook pages from time to time, I see — well, that's not your case — I'm very touched by everyone's loyalty.
1:09:07 To one and all, and so I'll say see you next time — but I almost feel like — I'm not a priest, but like a priest at the end of confession who'd say, "well, listen, say 15 Hail Marys to atone for your sins" — well here, I feel like telling you: reread, or rather listen again, some twenty times, to this student's remarks, and replace the proper names with those that seem more current to us — Ukraine, Russia, the trade war, customs tariffs — you'd be amazed. Thank you for your attention, and I thank Pierre-Alain, who between two flights crosses the whole Paris region to come reconnect with you, to help me reconnect with you, and I'll say see you next time — we won't delay in setting the date. Thank you for your attention.
Excerpt from an interview with Nelson Mandela 1:11:12 to Gaddafi or to Arafat — future president of South Africa. "One of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think that their enemies should be our enemies."
1:11:45 "That we can and we will never do. We have our own struggle which we are conducting. We are grateful to the world for supporting our struggle."
1:12:16 "But nevertheless we are an independent organization with its own policy. And the attitude of every country towards our attitude — towards any country — is determined by the attitude of that country to our struggle. Thank you." Yasser Arafat, Colonel Gaddafi, Fidel Castro — support our struggle to the hilt.
1:13:05 "There is no reason whatsoever why we should have any hesitation about hailing their commitment to human rights, as they are being demanded in South Africa. Our attitude is based solely on the fact that they fully support the anti-apartheid struggle."
1:13:38 "They do not support it only in rhetoric. They are placing resources at our disposal for us to win the struggle."
