English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Neither indictment nor apology of the world 5:08 I believe we are live. Good evening everyone. Very glad to be with you again. Thanks to everyone, thanks especially to Pierre-Alain. There's plenty else he could be doing, frankly. And I'll remind you that if you happen to visit an exhibition whose title is "Noir au féminin," don't miss this immersive show, you won't regret it. But I've already mentioned that.
5:50 So I'll go on, first of all to thank you for being faithful to every session. Well, there was a slight shift from Thursday to today. And I'm all the more grateful that you're still here this Sunday. We're continuing our series—to use series-speak—on Clouscard's concept of "mondanité" (worldliness).
6:21 But rather than rushing straight ahead in a somewhat linear sequence, I'd like to make sure we haven't already piled up misunderstandings. Even though I've done everything from the start, throughout this series, to tell you: I am not putting the world on trial. I'm not a prophet of doom. I'm alluding here—Tintin fans will know what I mean, or Tintinologists, whichever you prefer—to The Shooting Star, where there's Philippulus the prophet, you know, who bangs a gong in the street shouting to everyone, "Repent, the kingdom of heaven is near, you will die of bubonic plague and cholera."
7:10 That was written in the 1940s, but well, I mean, prophets of catastrophe have rather multiplied since then, haven't they? No, no, I am not putting the world on trial, in either direction. There is nothing more beautiful than the world, and nothing more vile, in a way. It's this ambivalence that our cursor has kept shifting along since the start of this series. I want to make that clear at this stage. I hope, for your sake, that the essential points established since the beginning of this series remain present in your minds. For example: the world is anything you like, except the Earth.
7:59 The Earth, first of all—I'm no specialist, there are geologists for that, there are astrophysicists, because there's also an origin of the Earth within the solar system, that's part of it. The world is not the Earth. The Earth existed for billions of years before a world began to emerge. And a world is more about relations between men, isn't it, than about what is inhuman prior to and outside of man. It's still important to recall that.
8:32 So you might say to me: that's not putting the world on trial—you quoted the Gospel where it says "the prince of this world is coming, and his essence is falsehood." Yes, that's one vision of the world, it's one polarity. It's not the world as the place of falsehood, of perdition. That's why I'm going to begin—man in ambiguity—not with a text that opposes the Christian vision, which says whoever wants to save his life will lose it, my kingdom is not of this world.
9:12 You see all these negative statements about the world, which are at the same time unavoidable staples of Christian discourse. I say "discourse" rather than "word," moreover, seen from a bit further off. There. So I don't want to do something that opposes to that hedonism—that is, the apologia for earthly pleasure in a Nietzschean sauce, which is so fashionable nowadays, in an almost obscene way.
9:49 I'm thinking of a draft letter by the author of the first text we're going to look at—it's Baudelaire. He had drafted a letter to Jules Janin, one of his contemporaries, whom Nerval knew well, by the way, and who had had the misfortune to say, "Yes, we've had enough of all these morose, morbid, spleen-ridden, melancholic poets"—said at a time when people spoke of the "mal du siècle," you see? And Baudelaire wrote him a furious reply, so angry that he didn't dare send it—it's a draft letter.
10:19 But I recommend you refer to this text, "Draft letter to Jules Janin," J-A-N-I-N, by Baudelaire. You'll find some gems in the style: "You are happy, sir, but I do not congratulate you." And he says this—he quotes something about Nerval that sums up his thinking well, because he says, "under your reign of those who don't want there to be any negativity, we'll get there, won't we?" There's no room for the negative.
10:52 It's a bit like all those who cross the Mediterranean and drown along the way, weapons, luggage, children, the elderly, and above all women. It's as if we ought to lecture them, saying, "But no, it's not so bad, life is beautiful." Anyway, you shouldn't have only sad thoughts, you know. I even heard Macron say that. So, since I'm neither in one camp nor the other, neither in the apologia for the world nor in its denigration, I'm going to show you that this ambivalence has existed for a long time, through a poem by Baudelaire that I'll ask Pierre-Alain to bring up, which you'll find in Les Fleurs du Mal,
Baudelaire's "La Voix": two uses of the world 11:36 and which is called "The Voice." I'll read it first without commentary. It's not Mallarmé, it's not Hölderlin, that's clear. So I'll just read it. "The Voice. My cradle leaned against the bookcase, a dark Babel, where novels, sciences, fables, everything, Latin ash and Greek dust, mingled together. I was as tall as a folio," as a volume, you see.
12:08 "Two voices spoke to me." You'll see our two aspects of the world here. "Two voices spoke to me. One, insidious and firm, said: The earth is a cake full of sweetness; I can—and your pleasure would then be endless—give you an appetite of equal size." I mentioned hedonism. "And the other, the other voice, said: Come travel in dreams, beyond the possible, beyond the known."
12:40 "And that one sang like the wind upon the shores, wailing ghosts, come from who knows where, which caress the ear, and yet frighten it. I answered you: Yes, sweet voice." It's from then that dates what one might, alas, call my wound and my fate. Behind the scenery, I distinctly see singular worlds. That's why I titled tonight's session "The Clash of Worlds"—because they are quite different.
13:11 "And victim of my ecstatic clairvoyance, I drag serpents that bite at my shoes." And it's since that time, since I said yes to the voice that comes to travel in dreams, beyond the possible, beyond the known, isn't it? And it's since that time that, like the prophet, "I love so tenderly the desert and the sea." Notice that these are the two places furthest from the world, two deserts, one liquid and one terrestrial. "I love so tenderly the desert and the sea that I laugh at funerals and weep at feasts, and find a sweet taste in the bitterest wine."
13:51 I remind you that this century—well, the modernity of this century, which inaugurates our modernity—was formed from the moment melancholy itself became sweet, so to speak. Starting with Rousseau above all. I always recall the passage where, in the third letter to Malesherbes, after saying he had an aspiration to... "had all my dreams turned into realities, it would not have satisfied me, I would have dreamed, imagined, desired still more."
14:23 I just quoted that word for word. I felt the need for an enjoyment, you see, that lies beyond anything finite, determined. We'll come back to that. And so "I find a taste..." And Rousseau concludes—and this is the great turning point of modernity—"even that itself was enjoyment, sir, for I was so penetrated by so keen a pleasure that I would not have wished not to have had it."
14:56 "It's since that time that I laugh at funerals and weep at feasts, and find a sweet taste in the bitterest wine, that I very often take facts for lies, and that, my eyes turned to the sky, I fall into holes. I am finished." But the voice consoles me and says—this is the closing line—"Keep your dreams; the wise have none as beautiful as those of fools." So there you have it, yes—still two worlds, there was a choice, there was one voice that said, "The world is a cake full of sweetness, I can, and your pleasure would then be endless, give you an appetite of equal size."
15:35 Let's not forget that this is the devil's voice. That is to say, if it were true, I personally wouldn't ask for anything better—but it's generally right there that catastrophes begin. You know Pascal's formula: "Man is neither angel nor beast." That's good, it sends back to back both the public prosecutor of man and his unconditional defender. But Pascal adds what follows: "But the trouble is that whoever wants to play the angel plays the beast."
16:13 So I'll go back a little to some points of detail. When he says "my eyes turned to the sky, I fall into holes," that's an allusion everyone understood at the time. In the age of what was called humanist culture—I say this because on the right people say all that no longer exists, that education no longer exists, that all students are worthless, etc.—it's true that at the time this great humanist culture was reserved for less than 6%
16:44 of the population. I mean, when I was 30, I wasn't born under Vercingetorix either, but when I was 30, only 5% of our members of parliament were of working-class or peasant origin. I recall that. So yes, this is a transparent allusion to Thales, of whom an anecdote from antiquity—there's always something true in legends—tells that while contemplating the stars—there was no philosophy yet at the time, it was a mix, they were scholars, philosophers, in fact they were called physicists, the pre-Socratics, I'm doing a bit of revision—they all wrote a book, which is why they're called physicists, called Peri phuseos, On Nature, on nature.
17:34 And since nature is phusis in Greek, they're called physicists—science, philosophy, sometimes poetry too, I'm thinking of Parmenides' poem—and it's said that Thales, while looking at the stars, questioning the cosmos and its origins, fell into a well. There you can sense a bit of the eternal attitude of public opinion, which would rather like to see the intellectual fall flat on his face, wouldn't you say?
18:04 That's nothing new either, is it? But still, the most advanced of our scholars today began by learning the theorems of Pythagoras and Thales, so they weren't complete dreamers either. "But the voice consoles me and says, 'Keep your dreams; the wise have none as beautiful as those of fools.'" So, I began with this text which shows that there's a choice between the two, two uses of the world—well, whether choice exists, I don't know, but at any rate the narrator of this poem imagines this scenario where a choice had to be made between the world as a place of enjoyment and what we saw last time, that is, reaching the positive through the crossing of the negative.
The morning of the West in the land of the Diallobé 18:54 That's what we saw last time. We'll have occasions to come back to it, but for now I was just noting it's still fresh in your minds. Now, we're going to make a geographic shift, and for a change from the Baudelaires, the Hölderlins, the Nervals, etc., I'd like to turn to an author we'll be seeing again before long—if I'm going to talk about him now, let me make a parenthesis, if you'll allow, just so it's clear: it's an African author, from francophone Africa, Senegalese.
19:30 It's Cheikh Hamidou Kane, who has since died, of course, but who wrote a book that every African schoolchild knows well, and from which we'll see substantial excerpts—a novel you can find in paperback in any good bookshop, called Ambiguous Adventure.
20:04 it seems that you appreciated—it's not for me to judge—the first episodes of what we called "Lecture à vie" (Reading for Life), you know, texts I commented on, prose or poetry. There were some... one by Mallarmé, "Class Struggle on the Lawn," and some by Aragon too. And there I devoted a textual commentary to the piece we're about to see.
20:34 But this time it's not for a textual commentary, it's to continue questioning the movement of this cursor that swings from a glorification of the world to its condemnation, through this author. So let me give you the quick pitch: the book was published in '61, and it is set in a much earlier period, when the first white men land in Black Africa, here in Senegal—one of the countries most anciently approached by invaders like us, first the Portuguese, in the 7th century [as spoken], then very quickly the French.
21:26 And the author doesn't say Senegal—it wasn't called that yet, there was no French administrative designation yet—he calls the country the land of the Diallobé. I should specify here, since you saw it at the start of the text, that in West Africa the ending -bé invariably designates countries speaking the Fulani, Pulaar language, which some of you are more familiar with, under the name of the Peul.
22:03 They are above all nomads originally, even though historically they have tended to settle—people speak of sedentarized Peuls, sedentarized nomads. So they're somewhat the equivalent of what the Maasai are in East Africa: herders. Their skin color is a bit more ochre-red than the regional average. I mention this because in the Bible, written by Semites—whether Jews or Arabs, both the Quran and the Bible were written by Semites—it says there are three races, three colors.
22:41 There are the Whites, that is, the Arabs and the Jews, the Blacks, and the Reds. You see? It's a bit like these ethnic groups—and the Hottentots too, if you look at southern Africa, the Hottentots, the Bushmen, they have an ochre-russet color. There. So these are herders without a clearly defined territory, like all herders, they're nomads. Transhumance—when the dry season comes, they have to migrate entirely, go far away, wherever the grass keeps growing.
23:15 There, I won't give a geography lesson on West Africa, but well, these are familiar things. Without further delay, we're going to look at four excerpts from this novel. Without further delay, to an excerpt not far from the beginning, it was on page 59, you see. So, as I was saying, -bé indicates that we're among the Peul, who are very numerous in Senegal but who move throughout all the countries of the region.
23:48 And Diallo is like Smith in England or Martin in France, etc. When you say Diallo, there's... Mr. Diallo, you can be sure he's a Peul. It can be a surname, a first name, the distinction isn't relevant there. It's like in Semitic languages, isn't it? When you say Suleymane Ben Daoud, Solomon, son of David—it's a first name, son of a first name. There. "The land of the Diallobé was not the only one that a great clamor had awakened one morning."
24:24 "The whole black continent had had its morning of clamor." It's interesting to see that the arrival of the white men is experienced as a form of clamor, of noise. "Strange dawn. The morning of the West in Black Africa was studded..." I note in passing that he says "Black Africa." He doesn't say "Afro-American" or "Afro-Franco" Africa. No. Africans do say "the Whites." They don't say "Euro-Caucasians." There's none of the hypocrisy of political correctness.
24:55 I give the floor back to our Senegalese author. "The morning of the West in Black Africa was studded with smiles, cannon fire, and glittering glass beads." You see how fast it moves, it's elliptical. "Those who had no history met those who carried the world on their shoulders." We might say: but on what basis? It's the Sarkozys of the world. How could Africa have no history?
25:25 One can write a history of Africa. Your humble servant, when working for the Hachette group in West African school publishing, asked his employers, for the sake of African students' purchasing power, to adopt in paperback form Ki-Zerbo's Magnificent History of Africa, the great Burkinabé historian. And so you have a history of Africa in paperback, sponsored by UNESCO, a collective work, with many different authors.
26:04 One can write a history of Africa, but Africans at the time had an oral memory. It wasn't writing. So they don't have that long-term history, so to speak, that constitutes them. They don't say, like any 18th-century petty nobleman, "My ancestors go back to Saint Louis!" So: "Those who had no history met those who carried the world on their shoulders. It was a morning of labor and birth."
26:35 "The known world grew richer by a birth that took place in mud and blood." Let me comment a bit on "a morning of gésine." That's what gésine is. Ci-gît, from the verb gésir, a defective verb used practically only in cemeteries, in the third person present. Sometimes in the imperfect: "he lay there, without a word." And then practically never in other tenses and moods.
27:05 "It was a morning." But above all, when taken as a noun like that, gésine means childbirth, delivery, coming into the world. "The known world grew richer by a birth that took place in mud and blood." A birth of what? You see, that's why I called this "the clash of worlds." There was a world that was there. The world is extraordinarily rich in cultural determinations, the sub-Saharan world, the world of Black Africa.
27:35 But here it is, suddenly collided with by the arrival of those we're about to see in what follows. "Out of shock, some did not fight. They were without a past, and thus without memory. Those who landed were white and frenetic. Nothing like it had ever been known." When I note that they were "white and frenetic," underlining a little the speed, the swiftness, which is striking here—the way the natives see the invaders—I can't help but...
28:12 This will make you laugh, but still, there's never any humor by chance among Africans. I know no one, in fact, where humor is well regarded. But let me give you a good line of the Africans, when speaking to the Whites: "You have the watch, we have the time." There, so "those who landed were white and frenetic." You don't have time. "Nothing like it had ever been known. The fact accomplished itself before one even became aware of what was happening"—you see, all these passages showing the surprises.
28:44 "Some, like the Diallobé, brandished their shields, aimed their spears, or readied their rifles." These are trade guns, as they're called—long single-shot rifles, reloaded with a fresh charge for each cartridge. Anyway. "Some, like the Diallobé, brandished their shields, aimed their spears, or readied their rifles. They were allowed to approach, then the cannon was fired. The vanquished did not understand. Others wanted to parley. They were offered the choice of friendship or war."
29:18 Very sensibly, they chose friendship. They had no experience. Yet the result was the same everywhere. Those who had fought and those who had surrendered, those who had compromised and those who had held firm, found themselves, when the day came, counted, distributed, classified, labeled, conscripted, administered. I could just stop there and say to myself, "Oh, that's fine, that's the classic indictment of the colonial world." Yes, yes, yes.
29:48 But first of all, seen by a citizen of a country concerned, all the same, but above all, look at the fall of this first excerpt. It began in the black continent. Sorry, excuse me. Because those who had come knew not only how to fight. They were strange. Because, in general, one stops at what precedes. "Listen, cannon, then define a balance of power. What do you want to do?" They were strange. If they knew how to kill with efficiency, they also knew how to heal with the same art.
30:22 There will soon be mass vaccination. Or they had brought disorder and stirred up a new order. They destroyed and they built. In the black continent one began to understand that their true power resided, of course, not so much in the cannons of that first morning, but in what followed those cannons. Thus, behind the gunboats, the clear gaze of one of the main characters of the novel, the cousin of the king of the Diallobé, the clear gaze of the Grande Royale of the Diallobé, had seen the new school.
31:06 behind the gunboats, the clear, lucid gaze of the Grande Royale of the Diallobé had seen where the strength of the Whites came from — from what was taught in their school, the new school. For in the colonial world, a great problem was about to begin, wasn't it? By instituting compulsory schooling, the Africans found themselves confronted, together with their traditional hierarchy, with the question: "Do we send our children to school or not?" It's not just a choice, you know, schooled or not schooled — that's not how it plays out in concrete terms. What is the Fulani herdsman going to do whose fourteen-year-old boy is busy bringing the cows to the river to drink, once a day in the evening in the dry season, when there's still water left in the river?
31:50 Children have functions. In the black continent one began to understand that their true power resided not in the cannons of that first morning — I take it up again and continue — but in what followed those cannons. Thus, behind the gunboats, the clear gaze of the Grande Royale of the Diallobé had seen the new school. Forgive this rather personal aside, but it strikes me strangely to read this, to read the dilemmas, the reflections of an African of that time wondering whether to send our children to the school of the Whites, the new school.
The Grande Royale and the foreign school 32:29 I, who learned to write my own language, French, our language, from African schoolteachers, at primary school in Benin — I close the parenthesis. So, I'll go on to the next text. I skipped some passages, but there is a great gathering among the Diallobé, the great assemblies, sent under the palaver tree with almost all the villages, and people even come from neighboring villages because the hour is grave.
33:01 And the hero of the novel, young Samba Diallo — I won't tell you the whole rest of the novel — Samba Diallo, arriving like everyone else at the meeting that had summoned the whole people, was surprised, on arriving, to see that the women were present in numbers as great as the men. It was truly the first time they had seen such a thing. The assembly formed a great square several rows deep, the women occupying two of the sides and the men the other two.
33:33 The assembly murmured quietly, and this made a great murmur like the voice of the wind. Suddenly the murmur died down. One side of the square opened and the Grande Royale entered the arena. I can't help — these aren't transitions, but I try to pass on what I can — but let me point out that in the word "arena" there's a root meaning sand. You understand, we speak of arenas in bullfighting. And Punta Arenas, way down south in Chile, near Tierra del Fuego, where there's nothing left but sandy beaches stretching to infinity, that means "the point of the sands," Punta Arenas.
34:13 The Grande Royale entered the arena. "People of the Diallobé," she said amid deep silence, "I greet you." Woman has a far more important role in the world of black Africa than in what I'd call the Mediterranean world — of which I am part, being Corsican, I must say so — where women are far more closely watched than in the Arab, Maghrebi, Middle Eastern world compared to black Africa. Proof of it: look at the Grande Royale.
34:43 "People of the Diallobé," she said amid deep silence, "I greet you." A diffuse, powerful murmur answered her. She continued: "I have done a thing that does not please us and that is not in our customs. I asked the women to come today to this gathering. We Diallobé detest that, and rightly so, it is tradition, for we believe woman must remain in the home. But increasingly, we shall have to do things that we detest and that are not in our customs."
35:21 I think we understand better and better what I call the clash of worlds. "It is to urge you to do one of these things, these things that we detest, that I asked to meet you today. I have come to tell you this. I, the Grande Royale, do not like the foreign school. I hate it. My opinion, nonetheless, is that we must send our children there."
35:51 Excerpt number 3. I'll skip a few passages. Here she details what makes her hate this school. "The school to which I am pushing our children will kill in them what today we love." It's tragic. "The school to which I am pushing our children will kill in them what today we love and rightly preserve with care. Perhaps even our memory itself will die in them."
36:22 "When they come back to us from school, there will be some who will not recognize us. What I propose is that we accept to die in our children, and that the strangers who defeated us take within them all the room that we shall have left free." She fell silent again. You see these silences that punctuate this harangue, even though no murmur had interrupted it.
36:52 Samba Diallo noticed someone sniffling near him. He raised his head and saw large tears running down the face, down the rugged face of the master of the Diallobé. Forgive me, a word is missing there. In fact, the novel had begun with a terrible lesson in which the master — that is, the one who forms, who instructs the children and teaches them, for example, to recite the Koran by heart with great severity, without a single mistake — it is he who is now streaming with tears.
"Teach him to stop the outside" 37:26 And now, I tell you in advance, we find ourselves in the presence of the hero's father, Samba Diallo's father, a notable of traditional society, cousin of the Grande Royale of the Diallobé, visiting Monsieur Lacroix — the Frenchman posted there in Dakar, probably, or in Saint-Louis — at the moment of twilight. I quoted four pages to you; it pains me to have cut them down, but about those kinds of twilights — they are not long in that region of the world for geographical reasons, they are not long, especially there, right now, in June, when our twilights never stop ending and the seas keep stretching them out until night has nearly fallen — but there, it's more sudden, yet cataclysmic; you should see the colors, the blaze, really.
38:26 And it's four or five pages that I skipped, so I take it up at the end of the twilight; the two men are there, at Monsieur Lacroix's, and a dialogue begins. Outside, the evening drama, since everything is the color of blood, the sun setting over there, had come to an end, the sun had fallen; behind it, an imposing mass of scarlet clouds finished collapsing in its wake like a monstrous trail of coagulated blood; the red glow of the air had gradually softened under the slow invasion of shadow.
39:00 "Strange," Lacroix thought — he says this in petto, as they say at the opera, that is, he thinks it silently — "strange, this fascination with nothingness among those who have nothing. Their nothingness, they call it the absolute; he turns his back to the light, but he stares fixedly at the shadow. Could it be that this man" — he's speaking of the father, his host sitting across from him — "is not sensitive to his poverty?" At that moment the knight's voice rose. I skipped a long discussion between the two of them, or rather let me sum it up in three words: what the discussion was about is that the white man is stunned by this cosmic sunset, he says, "It looks like the end of the world," and the knight — what's called the knight, Diallo's father — answers him, "Rest assured, I guarantee you a peaceful night."
39:59 "You don't believe in the end of the world?" "Yes, on the contrary, I do believe in it, certainly — we Africans believe in it firmly. Why don't you believe in it?" he says to the white man, and the white man answers, "I don't mean the earth could be pulverized by a meteorite." He says, "No, I'm not speaking of that contingent end, which ends nothing. I'm speaking of the end of meaning." And so, the classic discourse between someone speaking from a tradition, of values, and the other speaking from a scientific, objective world.
40:37 And so, up to this point, the knight has only shown Monsieur Lacroix how important, certainly, the world of the Whites is, but still, it's a world that sees only surfaces — that sees only, as he often repeats the word, "evidence." I remind you that in the French word "évidence" there's the same root as in "vidéo," surface. So, there's the classic discussion, which I won't dwell on, which could go on for a long time, but at that moment the knight's voice rose.
41:09 It was low and meditative, as though he were speaking to himself. "I wanted to tell you, nevertheless" — he hesitated. "What do you mean, sir?" "I wanted to tell you that it is I myself, after all, who enrolled my son in your school." You see, the Grande Royale of the Diallobé has won her case. "In turn, you give me great joy."
41:39 "I enrolled my son in your school and I prayed to God to save us all, you and us. He will save us, if he exists. I enrolled my son in school because" — here I'd like us to listen closely, wouldn't we, because here it becomes relevant. What a shame, degrowth, frankly, the ideology of degrowth. "I enrolled my son in school because the outside world that you have mastered was slowly invading and destroying us."
42:12 "Teach him, teach my son, in your new school, teach him to master the outside world." Technology is not European, it isn't — chipped flint stone, isn't it, and the smelting of metals began well before Europe existed. No. And so it's worth recalling this value of universality that the royal Diallobé is invoking here.
42:45 "Teach him to master the outside. We have mastered it. The outside world, what is now called nature, is aggressive. If man does not conquer it, it destroys man and makes him a victim of tragedy. A wound that is neglected does not heal but becomes infected until it turns to gangrene. A child..." Let me open a parenthesis, because there are some who will say, "But how? What is this? Nature? We've sacrificed it enough already."
43:17 "It's nature rather that needs protecting." That's not the debate here. I'm talking about — I'm commenting on "a wound that is neglected does not heal but..." It's because it's a world that can't manage to stop the aggression of the outside — gangrene, for example, malaria. The world's leading cause of death, inoculated by a mosquito, and there's antibiotic resistance. I saw, small parenthesis, in Ivory Coast, in a forest region, at a post in Agboville, for those who know it, 100 kilometers from Abidjan, in an Amazon-like biotope, roughly speaking.
43:52 This isn't the Sahel. There, if anything, there's too much rain rather than not enough. So, a man arrived at the hospital — because there isn't one for a long distance around — at the hospital of that provincial capital, that district seat, that department, carrying his wife on his back, fourteen kilometers through the forest, carrying his wife on his back, because of a difficult childbirth. He arrived at the hospital where the woman died of tetanus, because for ritual reasons, earth had been placed on the umbilical cord after it was cut.
44:35 I take up the text again: "A wound that is neglected does not heal but becomes infected until it turns to gangrene. A child who is not educated regresses. A society that is not governed destroys itself. The West erects science against this invading chaos." It erects it like a barricade. He who up until then had criticized what was despairing in the Western world — the indeterminate progress with no end in view, to the detriment of meaning, the cult of causes, that's the world of the sciences, to the detriment of the recognition of meaning.
45:15 You see? We're revising some things here. Suddenly he sees what must be taken from it. "The West" — this is why the Grande Royale was right to say we must save our children, we must send them to the new school — "the West erects science against this invading chaos. It erects it as a barricade." There, I'm sure this rings a bell for some of you, I hope.
Faust's pact and the spirit of negativity 45:48 I'm thinking of a most famous work, one that couldn't be more Western, since it's one of those that inaugurated our modernity, in the wake of Rousseau — I'm thinking of Goethe's Faust, who sees far ahead, you know — it's not the passage I'm going to comment on, but when, in Goethe's Faust, in the Prologue in Heaven, God says to Mephistopheles: "If you scorn science and reason, the highest gifts of humanity, you give yourself to the devil and you are lost."
46:21 That man, that man, saw the future of Germany coming. "If you scorn science and reason, the highest gifts of humanity" — look at the way Nazi philosophy fought against Cartesianism — "you give yourself to the devil and you are lost." That man sensed it coming, warned the Germans against their own abyss. Now, why am I bringing this up here? What's the connection? What is he saying?
46:51 "The West is against this invading chaos. It erects it as a barricade." It's that, you know, what the deal of Faust is. I repeat it, I've already said it, but for my greater happiness, the happiness of passing it on. I mean, there are new ears joining our association and our audience, quite simply.
47:24 I repeat, or point out for their sake, that the deal between the devil and Faust, which will govern everything, is originally a play — the primitive version, the Urfaust as they say in Germany, the first Faust. The deal is always the same, on the devil's side, it's not complicated, you can guess it. What the devil wants each time is the soul. The devil is waging a war.
47:54 So, to reinforce his battalions, he needs the soul of the sinner, doesn't he? Before it can be recovered by the angels and by God. There you have it. And Faust, who is a scholar, since the first scene of Faust is exactly that — he takes stock of everything he has learned from books, sciences, philosophy, medicine, law, in short — "I've learned all that and I find myself back at square one, no further along than before," isn't that right?
48:28 "What good is all that I've learned going to do me?" You see this isn't far from the problem in Cheikh Hamidou Kane's novel, is it? And in order to bring about a radical change, he decides to summon the infernal powers. That's one of the rare things he had never tried. So he summons the devil, the devil appears to him. Think back to our last session, because when Faust asks the devil, "Who are you? What am I to call you?" the devil answers, "I am the spirit that always denies."
48:59 The devil asserts himself as negativity. So one might say, you see, the world, negativity, all that — the Gospel is right to say that it's the world of evil, of the prince of this world, of Satan. Yes, except that the scene, this Prologue in Heaven of Faust that I'm summing up for you quickly, ends with God alone — the devil has left, with a bit of humor, saying, "How generous of the good Lord, to converse with a poor devil like me."
49:30 When God is alone, he says, "I rather like this spirit of negation" — it's God speaking — "without him, man would grow slack." Do you remember Baudelaire, just now? He says, "Yes, to what voice? To the voice that says to him, 'Come, travel among dreams, beyond the possible, beyond the known.'" That means: everything that presents itself before me, the positive — a good meal, this or that — pleases me for a moment, but ends up boring me. I won't go through the whole argument again, the extraordinary Pascalian indictment of diversion.
50:08 Which I'll sum up with this quotation, from Pascal's Pensées: "When I have set myself to consider men" — well yes, a Marxist has the right to quote a great Christian author, especially when it goes in the same direction — "when I have set myself to consider men, I have found that all their unhappiness comes from one thing only, that they are unable to remain quietly in a room." I'd add: for five minutes. Even if he's the king, even surrounded by gold, by the most beautiful women, whatever.
50:38 After a certain time, which passes rather quickly, comes boredom. The poem The Flowers of Evil opens right on that theme, I won't dwell on it, these are well-known motifs. And so God says: without this restlessness, this unease that characterizes the human animal among all other animal species, which makes it never satisfied with a determinate, precise, finite goal or desire — except in the short term.
51:11 You know, I won't go back over the demonstration, or simply the illustration — two teenagers talking in their final year of high school. "So why are you studying so hard?" Sorry, "Why are you going home to work?" "Because I have my exam in a month." "And why do you want to pass the exam?" "Well, to have a career." "And why do you want a career?" "To make money." "And why do you want money?"
Money in Hegel and the indeterminacy of desire 51:41 Because that's where it starts getting complicated. Up to this point, everyone would agree, more or less. You see? Up to this point. "What are you going to do with the money?" There, opinions start to diverge. And when Hegel, in the first Philosophy of Spirit, 1803, in that extraordinary chapter which I quoted at length in another talk — one whose title was, "a text by Marx written by Hegel," meaning that if we didn't know it was Hegel, everyone would swear Marx had written it — speaks of the factory, the English model, pin manufacturing, all that.
52:21 In short, Hegel comes to the subject of money. Money in the modern world, in what today we call civil society, the industrial world. And he says — this is in the chapter that ends with the famous expression "the wild beast" — liberal society, if it is not muzzled, I quote, "is tamed only with severity," is a wild beast. He too sensed it coming, even though he only knew it in its earliest beginnings — he writes this in 1803 — I don't know if you realize, the beast had barely begun to show its monstrous side before Hegel gives this predicate of money — I won't say definition, that would be pretentious — but he says of money that money is the form of all things of need.
53:16 And that's what makes money drive you crazy, it's precisely that when I get my pay at the end of the month and I have the money in my pocket, I don't yet know right away whether I'm going to treat myself to a good meal, buy the jacket, that's a personal example, excuse me, I'm a bit flat, the jacket, book opera tickets, that spends too, and that's what makes me drunk, a bit, you know, that kind of quick intoxication, because by the 10th of the month there's not much left already, but for most people, so there's a kind of intoxication because I have the desire, I know it's possible, I have tons of possibilities, it's the possible.
53:56 Money is the form of the ideal possibility of the things of need, but a possibility not yet realized, so desire hasn't had time to invest itself in a specific thing, what I want is to buy old man Martin's field, because there, and so it's sheltered from any disappointment. I'm dwelling on the indeterminate side that is proper to human desire, which has nothing to do with instinct or physical need, which is very determinate, you know, when you're walking in a great heatwave, that's the season coming up, in a place where there's no water, you feel a very determinate need for water, but once all those needs are met, have been met since well before Neanderthal, if that alone could let us do without man, I mean.
54:47 No, what did Rousseau say, I quoted him to you earlier, but even if all my dreams were turned into reality, it wouldn't have been enough for me, I would have dreamed, imagined and desired still more. That infinity, awareness of which has always existed within humanity, but which has only become conscious as such since these texts of Rousseau, which are roughly the first expressions of what will soon be called the mal du siècle, this fact that one is never satisfied, you see, this indeterminacy of human desire, don't think what I'm saying is complicated, I'm just doing translations, replacing one word with another, with your agreement.
55:31 Determinate means finite. Indeterminate means indefinite. Infinite, which has no end, which is not determinate. There is no end, which is not finite, which has no outline. It's impressionist modernity that will begin to blur, I mean that literally, I'll gesture it on purpose, the outlines of things in impressionist painting.
56:02 And it's Mallarmé, at the same period impressionist painting appears, who will say that naming a thing, giving it its well-defined name, this is a calf, this is a cup, this is a lamp, will say that naming a thing takes away three quarters of the pleasure it gives. As soon as the thing is determinate, isn't it? And so, I insist on this indeterminate side. I haven't finished with my Faust.
56:36 The play can begin, the deal is clear on the devil's side. I haven't told you what is agreed on Faust's side. Faust says, I'll give you my soul. It's hard, I give my soul to the devil, but only if, we come back to our story, you make me feel such a happiness that I could, so I'll tell you very quickly, stop time before it gets complicated, that I could say at that instant, 'Verweile doch, du bist so schön, stay a while, you are so beautiful.'
57:13 In short, that I might see myself through an eternity without getting bored, which Pascal and all the moralists have known for a long time is not possible. I'm not talking about the professors of moralizing, the people who say 'you just have to do this, don't do that, don't throw plastics in the wrong bins.' No, no, I'm not into moralizing. I'm not into the punitive. When I say moralist, it's a literary genre, the French moralists, reflections on the mores of man, mores from the root of moral custom, without judging them.
57:47 Everyone plays God by judging, says Pascal, that's impious. And in Holy Scripture it says 'judge not, that you be not judged.' No, but it's not me who is amoral or immoral. And yes, God's morality isn't quite the priest's morality. I mean, the Gospels aren't quite the morality of the Apostolic, Catholic and Roman Church. I still haven't told you the connection between what I'm telling you about Faust and, I repeat, what fascinates Diallobé in what is coming there, in the school of the whites, is that their science erects, against the encroaching outside, something like a barricade.
58:35 So, the play can begin, the devil struggles like mad to provide. Listen, if anyone knows how to provide pleasures, it's certainly the devil. Each time it works a bit with... Faust takes pleasure for a moment in this, in that. The devil, even Mephistopheles, goes so far as to resurrect Helen of Troy, he has so much power, the most beautiful woman of all time, according to the texts. everyone sees his own Medea, for whom he still had ten years of war, then ten years of wandering on the seas, 20 years before returning, before...
59:14 and well before Monteverdi in the 16th century could write that beautiful opera, The Return of Ulysses to His Homeland. No, seriously, he goes so far as to resurrect Helen of Troy to give her in marriage to Faust. Faust enjoys her for a moment, then she disappears like a vapor, like smoke, Faust is a modern man like you and me. And there, that's a definition that puts him even further ahead. I keep dwelling on this indeterminate side, I multiply references on purpose so that it's concrete, so it's not just an abstract idea.
Baudelaire's Le Voyage: desires shaped like clouds 59:52 So, you see, I'm playing the texts off each other, I'm suspending things again, because I haven't told you how Faust ends. That's where we'll find the barricade again. But we have time, that same Baudelaire, whose poem I read to open tonight's session, in Le Voyage, you know, the poem that closes The Flowers of Evil, the longest poem, the one that closes off the vast edifice of The Flowers of Evil, about which Hugo said—the only thing I'd reproach you for, no, Alfred de Vigny, sorry, to whom Baudelaire had sent the book, had said, the only thing I'd reproach you for is that you should have called it The Flowers of Good.
1:00:37 Hugo, for his part, commented that Baudelaire had created a new shiver. But the poem that closes this new shiver, Le Voyage, at the start, Baudelaire does what we might call a typology of those who leave, the different reasons for leaving. And now I'll let Baudelaire speak. 'Some, joyful to flee an infamous homeland, exile freely chosen, others the horror of their cradle, a terrible childhood, others the horror of their cradle, some, astrologers drowned in a woman's eyes, so the sorrow, the tyrannical Circe with her dangerous perfume, so as not to be turned into a beast'—as Circe had done with Ulysses' companions whom she turned into swine, and the allusions—'so as not to be turned into a beast, they, the travelers, get drunk on sky, on light, on blazing heavens.'
1:01:43 I'm dwelling on this a little because we're at the heart of what I'd like to show you here. Yes, the images—sky, light, blazing heavens—there's nothing determinate about them. It's not a pear, a banana, it's not a square or a diamond. It's the clouds up there, the marvelous clouds, as Baudelaire says in a prose poem. I'll continue the text. He gets drunk on sky, on light and on blazing heavens. The ice that bites them, the sun that coppers them, slowly erases the mark of kisses.
1:02:16 There, we set off for that, to forget. All that concerns all the travelers who have a determinate reason to leave. And that's where it begins. But the true travelers are those alone who leave to leave. From their fate, they never stray. Sorry, light hearts like balloons, from their fate they never stray. And without knowing why, always say 'let's go!', those whose desires, listen carefully, have the shape of clouds, that is, no shape at all.
1:02:55 Have you ever seen a cloud? As soon as you've seen its shape, it has already changed. A slight breeze, and it has already changed. Those whose desires have the shape of clouds, exactly at the time when painting begins to dissolve the outlines of objects, of what will be called in painting the subject. Those whose desires have the shape of clouds and who dream, like a conscript dreams of the cannon. Of what? We'll finally know. That contradicts Pagani, a determinate object, who dreams of vast, changing, unknown pleasures, whose name the human mind has never known.
1:03:34 Tonight, I hope many of you will understand that determination, definition, and language have never known its name. You cannot give a name, that is, give a determination, this is an ox and not a donkey, if the thing is indeterminate. You can at most give a proper name, as the Greeks did, for what existed at the origin of everything, chaos, chaos, the indeterminate, where there is neither up nor down, neither left nor right, no determination at all.
The dike in Faust: living free on a free land 1:04:10 So, we've always talked about the barricade. So, in any case, I believe I've sufficiently illustrated, but we can go back to it, sufficiently illustrated the fact that it's this infinity of human desire that I'm trying to illustrate through several of its references. And it's this infinity of human desire that means the devil, with all the means he has to procure pleasures, is thought to satisfy the individual Faust.
1:04:46 And in fact, no. And here at the end, so I'm skipping almost the whole play, Faust is old, he has gone blind, he keeps walking with Mephistopheles trailing behind him, flattering him, and there's one occasion for him to finally provide him that pleasure which would let him stop time, wouldn't it, by wallowing in that pleasure for eternity. And here he is blind, and he hears it, since that's all he has left, hearing, not sight, he hears it.
1:05:25 Finally, they have arrived in Holland and in the Netherlands. And Faust hears—because Freud cites this passage—hears that the Dutch are doing what they often do, they are building not a barricade but, you guess it, against the sea, a dike. Dam. The Hoover Dam in the United States, one of the biggest dams in the world, isn't it?
1:05:55 Amsterdam, Rotterdam, isn't it? The dam. And there, Faust says to himself, I think here I have found the goal of my quest. One must do like this people. Yes, I have a German phrase in my head there. I'll translate it live: 'live free on a free land.' This freedom is not the freedom of the fox in the henhouse or the wolf in the sheepfold, is it?
1:06:29 It's not the freedom to devour one's neighbor. It's not the freedom of the Franks. And yes, because Franks means the free ones. Free from what? It's the one who, in battle, wasn't slaughtered, but slaughtered the other. The barbarism that ceased, that ceased from the moment—let me continue my digression on Clovis—I was talking about the slaughterers.
1:07:00 How, how—but Clovis, who is the origin of the name Louis for the kings of France, one mustn't blaspheme. Yes, it's only—Clovis really became Clovis, the true founder of the kingdom of France, only from the moment he fell in love with the beautiful Clotilde, didn't he? He was a barbarian, couldn't care less about Christianity. That is, the beautiful Clotilde whom he desired told him, I'm willing, but only if you convert to Christianity, if you want to marry me. And he, who was after all a warrior, told her, I'm willing to accept your God, if he gives me victory—well, since he won the next battle, he agreed to go get baptized at Reims, you know the rest.
1:07:43 Remigius, the bishop of Reims, I don't know, poured the vial on him, and even now, I don't know, even now, I mean, no king of France, even in modern times, was truly king unless he was anointed with the oil that is at Reims. There's quite a bit of fetishism sometimes in Christianity, not just any oil, but that one. Well, let's leave that. There's the very fine opera by Rossini, Le Voyage à Reims, for the coronation of Charles X.
1:08:16 Let's stay with our story. Faust says 'live free, live free, on a free land,' and there the devil cries out in despair, because he feels he has lost the game. For Faust says, it's only now that I can say to the instant, stay, you are so beautiful. When I understood that the goal, the only goal that is not a determinate goal, because it demands indefinite progress, is to live free, on a free land.
1:08:51 That's why, I told you, it's not the freedom of the wolf in the sheepfold. Let me finish with Clovis. Today it's probably not true word for word, all this, but when legends persist across several centuries, there's still some truth at the bottom of it. The bishop, it's said, told him at the moment of pouring the oil on his forehead, 'Bow your head, proud Sicambrian'—that was one of the Frankish tribes—'burn what you have worshipped'—burn the idols, you see, up to that point he was pagan—'and worship what you have burned.'
1:09:22 because he had spent his time pillaging churches, in churches there's gold, there you go. No, not that freedom, not the freedom of the fox in the henhouse, the wolf in the sheepfold, a freedom—think of Rousseau—that is obtained through work, collective work. Live free on a free land. But wait, that land, as they say, and I come back to the Ambiguous Adventure, requires a technique that has gone through the detour of science, hence a technology, against this encroaching chaos.
The crucible where the world fuses 1:10:01 At that moment, Lacroix, the Frenchman, had to fight against the overwhelming temptation to flip the switch, because he lets the darkness of the end of the day settle into the room. He even says that the Diallobé's white boubou turns violet, which is very well observed when you see the light over there. The electric switch, within reach of his hand, he would have liked to scrutinize the shadowed face of that motionless man before him. He perceived in his voice a tone that intrigued him and that he would have liked to relate to the expression of his face. But also, he thought, if I turn on the light, this man might fall silent.
1:10:33 He's not speaking to me, he's speaking to himself. He listened to him. So the Diallobé resumes speaking. Every passing hour brings a further ignition, you see, consumption, ignition, to the crucible where the world is fusing. That's indeed our subject, isn't it? At that moment, it's not Satan. We have not had the same past, you and we, but we shall have, quite exactly, the same future.
1:11:03 the era of singular destinies is over. In that sense, the end of the world has indeed come for each of us. So this clash of worlds is at the same time an end of the world. In that sense, the end of the world has indeed come for each of us, for none can any longer live by mere self-preservation alone. This was written in 1961. There was no talk of globalization then. And those who speak of globalization today only speak of Atlanticist globalization, don't they?
1:11:33 They're furious that another one is being put in place and is galloping ahead. I thank Pierre-Alain for having chosen this magnificent photo which illustrates the backdrop of my whole talk tonight. Between... All right, I'll share a confidence with you. I don't know if... I'm speaking behind Pierre-Alain's back, because it's he himself who told me, but I don't know if he authorizes me to repeat it. But anyway. He has just spent a month in the United States, I think you mentioned it, exhibiting, and he had great success in New York.
1:12:07 And it's a country he knows well, where he has gone several times for personal and professional reasons. And there, what does he tell me? He tells me, Dominique, I didn't recognize New York. He says clearly, I didn't recognize it, it's not a metaphor. I mean, there's such a change, miles of homeless people, like here, isn't it? He showed me a photo of a naked man, just steps from the village, from the Latin Quarter of New York, the Village Vanguard.
1:12:43 a naked man scraping in the gutter for something supposed to feed him, in the gutter. And for miles—afterward it intrigued me, I looked into it, I said, my God, it's true it's moving at some speed. I was watching on YouTube and I saw that there are Americans filming what has become—but I couldn't get over it. You tell me, yeah, fine, Detroit, Cleveland, the industrial regions that took a hit.
1:13:15 Well, there's other wealth now, things have changed, it's the tertiary world, it's California. But images of San Francisco, of Los Angeles, if you had shown them to me, I wouldn't have—you wouldn't have believed it. and even Vancouver in Canada, and to think I dreamed for years of one day visiting one of the most beautiful bays in the world, Vancouver, isn't it, with square miles of homeless people in the residential downtown. Anyway, so in the photo, the caption, as they say, that introduces tonight's video and our conversation, I'm pleased, because in parallel, I've been watching construction projects happening in remote corners of China, there too, I can't believe my eyes, but in the other direction, I mean, when I think that when I was 20, my father—it was during Vietnam, I was 6—told me that while we were talking, there were millions of Chinese stamping human manure into the ground with their feet to make the rice grow.
1:14:25 And there, machines, such that I didn't even know that could exist, bridges next to which, well, anyway, let's move on, otherwise people will say I'm doing propaganda paid for by China—I'd love that, frankly, in any case, if they're listening, I'm available. Even though I've already told you that if I lived in Russia, and if—Russia weren't surrounded by nuclear guns, and if—it's not certain I'd vote for Putin; if I lived in China, maybe I'd be in the opposition, but it wouldn't be the kind that criticizes China here, I tell you, quite the opposite.
Mud, blood and the breath of the spirit 1:15:02 So, in that sense, the Diallobé continues, the end of the world has indeed come for each of us, for none can any longer live by mere self-preservation, but by our long, manifold ripening together. A son is going to be born into the world. You see this metaphor of birth, since the first text, let me remind you of the first text, the whites' first morning in black Africa was studded with smiles, glass beads, and cannon shots.
1:15:36 The known world was enriched by a birth that took place in mud, in blood. This is the metaphor that runs through all these excerpts, isn't it? In mud, in blood. In mud, in blood. But yes, the red mud, throughout sub-Saharan Africa, almost throughout all of Africa, what is called in scientific terms laterite, iron oxide. It's a continent of iron, Africa.
1:16:06 And the Amazon too, you know that they were two continents that were joined together. Look at the bulge of West Africa, how it fits, doesn't it? Into the Gulf of Mexico, we'd understand each other. But there, you see, mud, blood. But yes, that's the Old Testament. What does God make man from? Adama. In Hebrew that means mud, the clay that was there, the Nile, when it withdraws, when it returns to its original bed, there is muddy clay, in short, with which you can make modeling paste.
1:16:51 And it's with this modeling paste that God makes a little statue of man in his own image. Here again, I must dwell on this. No, it's not a detour within a detour. I've been circling around the center this whole time. What does it mean, God created man in his image? People say, who cares, I'm an atheist. I'm not asking whether it exists or not. I'm asking what it means. Does it mean that those who wrote this thought God had hairs in his nose and beauty marks on his eyebrows?
1:17:30 I'll stop there. You clearly see that no. Because there are some who look for the two legs, the two arms, the two legs of man in the image of God. No, a man could come back from war without arms and without legs. He remains a man. He remains an image of God. So what does it mean? Well, he fashions this little statue from red mud, the mud and the blood, you see, that's what left me.
1:18:01 Adama means mud. Hawa is water. With mud and water, you make clay. Adam and Eve, Adama and Hawa. Ah yes, it's rather that way round than Adam and Eve. That's fine. But that doesn't yet make a man. I'm speaking of the sacred text here. I mean, for now, God still needs to breathe into it.
1:18:31 Blow on the statuette so that suddenly, man appears. This breath. The wind blows. In the Gospel, they ask Jesus, what is the spirit? Well, the Father, we have some idea. God, that's an old story. The Son, look, we see him, he has more or less a form like us, but the spirit, what is that? It's not obvious, this thing. They don't put it quite like that. Anyway, that's it. And Jesus answers, you hear the wind.
1:19:03 It's a Hebrew word that means both breath and wind. You don't know where it comes from, nor where it goes. So it is with the things of the spirit. It's clear that this means freedom. I'm not interpreting. You don't know where it comes from, nor where it goes. It is indeterminate. We come back to my earlier core point, you thought I had wandered off. Remember Baudelaire, those who, among the desires of true travelers, in the shape of clouds, and who dream, like a conscript dreams of the cannon, of vast, changing pleasures, unknown as the wind is, and whose name the human spirit has never known.
1:19:44 So he blows to make him into a man. I wanted to point out that when we say "image of God," think rather of potential freedom. Freedom to do good as well as evil. Freedom to fail as well as to accomplish, as Hölderlin magnificently says in a passage, to fail as well as to accomplish the most perilous of goods, speech given to man. You can do the worst with speech, you can do the best. Let's try to go from one to the other.
The city of the future and the awkwardness of the underdeveloped 1:20:17 I come back to the dialogue. A son will be born into the world, the first son of the earth, the only one too. So that's you, that's your generations. Lacroix felt him turning slightly in the shadow toward him. Mister Lacroix, this future, I accept it, even though we've seen with the Grande Royale that it is the destruction of his traditional world. My son is the pledge of it. He will help build it.
1:20:48 I want him to contribute to it, no longer as a stranger come from afar, but as an artisan responsible for the destinies of the city. He will teach us the secrets of shadow. He will reveal to us — it's Mister Lacroix speaking again. Yes, they're all souls right away. He will reveal to us the springs where your youth drinks. Don't force yourself, Mister Lacroix. I know you don't believe in shadow.
1:21:19 As at the beginning, Lacroix doesn't believe in the end of the world, he doesn't believe in shadow. I know you don't believe in shadow, nor in the end. What you don't see does not exist. The instant, like a raft, carries you over the luminous face of its round disc, and you deny all the abyss surrounding you. Well, well, the return of the negative. The city of the future, thanks to my son, will open its bays onto the abyss instead of repressing it, from which great gusts of the abyss of shadow will come upon our parched bodies, upon our thirsting brows.
1:21:58 I wish for this opening with all my soul. In the nascent city — good, the text is frozen there. Such must be our work, all of us, Hindus, Chinese, South Americans, Blacks, Arabs, all of us, gangling and pitiful. We, the underdeveloped, who feel awkward in a world of perfect mechanical adjustments.
1:22:40 I wish for all of you listening to me tonight to feel a bit Diallobé, that is, to rediscover that awkwardness without which there is no progress in the world around us. But above all, for that, not to skip over the progress that this mechanical world gives us against the chaos that would overwhelm us. There. I'm sure there are some comments.
1:23:10 Well, magic of technology, which is in the process of erecting not a barricade between you and me, but on the contrary, isn't it, of putting us in relation — miracle of technology that dialectizes people with one another. It sets up, in any case, a barrier and a barricade against the geographical distance that would want to separate us, and which it allows us to overcome. So, "Hello, Estavisky, how I love loyalty" — would the Grande Royale be right today to push her children toward school?
School, science and atlanticist propaganda 1:23:48 What barricade do the Americans promise to erect for us? Ah, that smells of the right, no, Estavisky, we know each other. But I don't want this to be understood the way the right understands it, the right that never stops putting the school on trial — but of course, since the Revolution, the school has been put on trial, come on, get that into your heads. Compulsory, secular, and free school, that's the nightmare, isn't it, of the old regime. But of course.
1:24:21 No, it's not the Americans who are building a barricade, they're not building any more. The homeless litter the streets of New York. No, you want to see barricades in China, what's the connection? In what's at stake for the future, and not those who say it's the catastrophe, we're all going to die, fine particles, degrowth, there's a term for that, yes, for the catastrophe, in short, collapse.
1:24:56 Collapsology. Yes, collapsology, you see, nice for our children. There's only one system, ours, that of America, isn't there? Well, America's is the model. It's not perfect, but all the others are worse. We're heading into the wall, but that's the only direction. But really, that's nice for the youth. We have to get out of that. We have to get out of it. No, don't confuse the world, technology and science, with the American world. Really, it's incredible.
1:25:27 Technology is what came out of the long detour taken by technique from its origins, that of the chipped flint stone, which groped along, and which took a prodigious acceleration in medicine, in discipline, from the moment technique made a detour through theory. In this case, for example, science, mathematics, here. Right? But wait, algebra is an Arab creation.
1:25:59 What does America have to do with that? It's even an Arabic word, al-jabr, which means a dislocated limb that has been set back in place. You find equations there, limbs. The whole theory of the second degree was created between Aleppo, Baghdad, and Basra, at the time, in the Levant, Syria, and Iraq, between the 11th and 13th centuries. That has nothing — stop, because we're right in the middle of Atlanticist propaganda that wants to claim the monopoly, as if progress, technique — and that's why people are unhappy.
1:26:37 You're right to be unhappy about progress, about technology, because it's a world heading to its ruin. Do you see the equation, the trap? No. It's been a long time since that stopped being progress. So, there, I answer in a vehement way because I sense them multiplying, you see, those who profit from people's unhappiness so that discontent cannot be expressed.
1:27:11 And there, you find what's currently happening in the European elections, where the right, even the far right, is directing Italy right now. Which party has just strengthened itself in the Spanish elections? There, I'm talking about the far right. The far right in Sweden, in all the Scandinavian countries, where there isn't a single government that could function without the support of far-right votes, Germany.
1:27:42 They're not in government yet. Germany, when I was 20, the German far right was between 0.5 and 1.2% at its best moments. It's now at 20%. Ah yes, from being unable any longer to hide the discontent, nor to remedy it either, well, the only way out for capital is to say that the fault for the discontent lies with the left — no, not the left, the leftist left, no, no, it's progress, science, reason, in short, it's the French Revolution.
1:28:18 You understand the trap into which — it's the same trial that was conducted in the 1930s in Germany. Read, read, look at the newspapers of the time, above all don't just take my word for such important things. Check it. How — but Nazism, on the contrary, is the cult of technology, and so on. It's not. Read carefully. I recommend among others an article, a magnificent article called "Hegel and German Fascism" by Lukács.
1:28:48 You bring up Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist. No, no, it's not his own ideas, otherwise obviously people would say he's a Marxist. No, no, what he does is quote, right there in the text, I don't know, whole passages from the philosophers whom Hitler had placed — well, whom the regime, what did it know about it — had placed in various German universities, Heidegger's contemporaries, the Baeumlers, the Kriecks, who defend German Romanticism against French rationality. But look, Lukács, quite different because he's a Marxist, but listen, without doubt the greatest living specialist in France, a historian, in any case, the one who knows the Nazi documentation best, I'm thinking of Chapoutot — of course he doesn't share my ideas, but I don't care, that's not the point, it's his historical competence that interests me.
1:29:43 He fought to gain access to archives, and he said how difficult it is in Germany to reach certain archives. And he shows that not only is there no cult of technology in the ideology, but — in practice, yes, they're not stupid — but in discourse, everything is done, as today, to discredit the notions of progress, science, rationality, and even — someone will say, but that's totalitarianism, it's the state crushing the individual — but not at all.
1:30:18 He shows you very well, Chapoutot, who knows his texts well, that the great Nazi leaders constantly delivered diatribes against the state. The state is a French, Jacobin creation, from the Revolution, etc. But yes, but yes, everything they tell you today about enterprise, liberalism, laissez-faire, laissez... pass, sorry. That was the doctrine, wasn't it, of the Nazis, moreover, of whom those who survived the Nuremberg trial went on to have magnificent careers in the most famous business schools of postwar Germany, of the Bundesrepublik.
1:30:54 I close my parenthesis there. So. That a reactionary executive, whether of the left or the right — well, of the left that proclaims itself left, and of the right that never proclaims itself right, or so rarely. Well, yes, no, because you say to yourselves, but what is it? What is it? The left, the left. Come on, let me quote Marx again: just as we don't judge an individual by the idea he has of himself, we don't judge an era by its self-consciousness.
1:31:32 Freud, you see, my slip — Marx is joining up with Freud there. It's not in people's heads, what I'm talking about here. I could even convince myself that I'm a man of the left and that whoever criticizes me is a far-right conspiracy theorist. Necessarily, since he doesn't agree, and since he's not Atlanticist, so he's a conspiracy theorist. You know, there's only one political system left. There's the one that governs us, and if you deviate from it by a millimeter, you're a conspiracy theorist. Try not agreeing with any NATO theme about the conflict in Ukraine.
1:32:06 Try publishing in the mainstream media, you'll see what happens. I come back to it. Just as we don't judge an individual by the idea he has of himself, we don't judge an era by its self-consciousness. So the right, the left, must actually be measured in deeds, not in thought. There. So I could dwell on this, I dream, and I won't lack the occasion because it's not over. But let me sum up the essence of my answer to Estavisky, whom I thank because he throws the stone into the pond, and that's what we needed.
1:32:44 Otherwise, how does he put it, the Diallobé character? If the wound is not treated, it turns into gangrene. Isn't that so? So let's seize the occasion, and the wound today is that those who wrecked the school are turning you against the school. Well, but of course, we must abolish national education and replace it with, as they say, offices, private agencies.
1:33:14 That's to bring you to that point. It's not that we wrecked the school. No, come on, stop looking to the United States, as if it were some golden era. I don't feast on Americans, how many times have I said, I feast on Atlanticism. You can be Atlanticist and Malian. There aren't many left. Or else they've emigrated to fine Parisian apartments. You can be Atlanticist and Taiwanese.
1:33:45 No, no, the United States is the flagship. But, I mean, conversely, there are many Americans who are not Atlanticist. There, so once again, let's stop looking at the side that's declining and look at the side that's rising. For our children, that's still a bit more motivating than telling them that every time they set foot outside, they're swallowing fine particles. Don't think I'm exaggerating, I'm just speaking the truth.
The far right and the working classes 1:34:19 There, next question. Many thanks to Estavisky. Geoffrey Jo: far-right votes are the votes of the working classes. No, there aren't 15-20% of fascists who are knowingly anti-republican. So Geoffrey Jo, first of all, I'm glad to see him again, to hear him again, but I don't know if I understand — far-right votes are the votes of the working classes. No. Well, it's good to ask the question, at least for the sake of raising it. Yes, it's good to remember that belonging to the working classes isn't enough to make you left-wing.
1:34:56 That's very good. Yes, there were also workers who voted for Hitler. Especially since, once Germany had plundered every country it occupied and the wealth came flowing into Germany, workers started being paid better, but they didn't disavow it for that. But these stories end badly. They end badly for Germany's enemies, and for Germany itself, let's not even talk about it. No, unless it's raised from its ruins by NATO, of course, which needed to erect a barricade not against the chaos overwhelming us but against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
1:35:34 That's how America created the German miracle. No, there aren't that many, that's it, I don't understand, there aren't many right-wingers who are knowingly so. Yes, I presume he's picking up on what I said earlier, that someone can think of themselves as left-wing and be far-right without even realizing it. For example, all those who — I've seen young people who think of themselves as left-wing who say that man is the ulcer of nature, that the human species must be eliminated to save nature.
1:36:09 It's not "liquidate the Jews" or the Bolsheviks or the Judeo-Bolsheviks, there it goes even further, it's all of humanity. You see? That means the Nazis are still far from the mark. And he thought he was on the left, the poor kid. He was afraid to hold his phone to his temple because he said it caused leukemia. Spiritual merchants of death, that's how it starts. I don't know where the question is or what's at issue. But we can't say that it's the working classes that make up the far right.
1:36:42 On the other hand, when the left is in the state of desolation we see it in in our country, and practically throughout Western Europe, where everything has been done since the Berlin Wall fell, since there have been powerful Marxist parties — there's no more left. Let's be clear about that. So wait, I'm not settling the matter, I'm being honest. Maybe that's for the best. Not for me, but I mean, I understand that some say "that was what was cluttering the landscape." But then, don't complain about the state the school is in now, right?
1:37:17 There, and besides, enough of saying it's the left that has run things. No, no. I mean, what is this legend that Marxism ruled over the university up until some certain date? I remember when I was a student in the 1960s, studying philosophy in Paris, at the Sorbonne, you could get your agrégation in philosophy without ever having heard of Marx or having read a single line of him. What are these legends? I'd like to devote, one day, a whole series of lectures — I'm not far from Geoffrey here — to the need felt by this kind of person, the more dangerous politically, to pass themselves off as rebels while being the very pillar of what's wrong.
1:38:05 They know very well that to seduce the generosity of youth, you have to pass yourself off as someone who's contesting, right? Cohn-Bendit, Onfray — Onfray, who denigrates the whole history of philosophy in favor of a few philosophers nobody had read because they were censored, apparently — no, what we're seeing is serious. The right has always — look, the new climate, Macron the first says there are two camps, there are the conservatives and then there are the progressives, and he puts himself among the progressives.
1:38:45 Progress is breaking the hospital, breaking the school, breaking the high schools, isn't it? Strengthening police repression, oh yes, and getting kicked out of Francophone Africa. Well, yes, it can happen that there is real progress. There, I think we'll come back to that because we always drift a bit that way, even in the following comment. Mounir Boubmati, good evening Mounir.
The end of the dollar and the concept of the West 1:39:15 Does the announced end of the dollar's monopoly announce the end of the determined desire to protect, by every means, the interests of Uncle Sam? The end of the determined desire to... Ah yes, yes, there, I presume he's alluding to the non-American West, but aligned with the Americans, if I've understood correctly. The end of... Well, it's interesting to see that this announced end of the dollar, we're not there yet, but I notice it's moving at a speed that I, at least, hadn't even suspected.
1:39:52 When I see a country like Saudi Arabia, which is an American creation — do people know that? No, not the territory, not its religion, not its cultural traditions, but the country as a nation — Saudi Arabia did not exist. There were tribes squabbling in the desert, reread the story of Lawrence of Arabia, who was tasked as a spy for His Majesty's British government, wasn't he, with going to unite the Arab tribes so they'd join together and form a power to counterbalance England's real enemy at the time, which was the Ottoman Empire.
1:40:25 And you'll see that Saudi Arabia is an American creation that served as the policeman of the whole region, wasn't it, sharing that role with Israel against any subversive and anti-Atlanticist movement in the Middle East, against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, against Iran, against Nasser's Egypt, etc. Verify it: Saudi Arabia itself is now ready to do without the dollar and accept Chinese yuan for the purchase of its oil.
1:41:06 The BRICS are meeting — originally BRICS, Brazil, Russia, that's already a lot of the world — are now ready to come together around the creation of a common currency. That's because America has now become so punitive. If a country doesn't agree with American policy and imperialism, isn't that right?
1:41:36 It's forbidden from existing economically. Sanctions on it multiply. So, if the country isn't very — has only just emerged from underdevelopment, that can be fatal for it. With Russia, on the contrary, isn't it, it strengthened it. Does the end of the dollar's monopoly announce the end of the determined desire to protect by every means? That's a very good question because indeed there's a lot of attachment to the United States, and once again, I don't feast on — I'm speaking crudely on purpose — I don't feast on Americans, I feast on Atlanticism.
1:42:11 There's a lot in the United States, and not just Charlie Chaplin and Clifford Brown and Kubrick, I mean, or Faulkner. There's a lot that I even like in the way the American world functions. But, first, for a long time, the ability to make people dream, even if the dream turns into a nightmare. But, once again, I'm putting Atlanticism on trial rather than anything else, but it's true that a lot of the sympathy for the United States comes from fear, comes from the fact of drawing closer to the most powerful, which is a feeling one can understand—more powerful—but at that point, in order to perpetuate its domination, NATO has to... I say NATO so as not to keep saying the United States all the time, there's not only the United States in it, NATO... you see I'm not saying "the West"; the day we replace "Westerners" with "Atlanticists," we'll have made great progress.
1:43:16 I remind the newcomers that "the West" is a problematic concept—I seem to be obsessing over it, but I'm not anti-Western, I'm against the use of the word Western. If you take it literally, it means the West. On a round earth—which we now know is round—it no longer means anything. I already showed you last time that the West of America, if you will, is Russia. Place yourself in Alaska and you'll quickly understand what I mean. Russia isn't even 10 kilometers to the west.
1:43:50 But yes, the islands of Little Diomede and Big Diomede, where Americans and Russians watch each other with binoculars. Well, that's not "the West." It no longer means anything, "the West." Poland is the West of Russia, it's the East of Germany. What are these notions? Ah, you don't get it, Pinassé, Pagani—it means, well, it means the European countries, you know that. Well, I thought the leader was the United States of America. Oh darn, that's true, it's not in Europe, this thing is getting more and more problematic.
1:44:23 But yes, but yes, it's the industrialized countries, along with Japan—that's "the West." Well, but that's the Far East, maybe it's changed. You see we're getting nowhere with this word. When a word is like that, it's not made to say something but to keep quiet about something—so as not to say Atlanticism, capitalism in economics and Atlanticism in foreign policy. It means: you'll swallow capitalism or we'll destroy you. That's how I answer the question.
1:44:54 And it's true, and this is what interests me in Mounir's question, is that there are increasingly large masses in—how did he put it, remind me for a moment—the text, the last text by Cheikh Hamidou Kane. I'll say, the countries of what used to be called the Third World, look how he refers to them. "In the emerging city, such must be our work, all of us together, Hindus, Chinese, South Americans, Blacks, Arabs, we, the ungainly, the pitiful, we, the underdeveloped who feel awkward in a world of perfect mechanical adjustment."
1:45:28 And it's true, thank you Mounir, that in that world, which is the most numerous, the last African country I lived in was Niger. It holds the world record for birth rate. Ah yes, those countries, that's a lot of people, isn't it? And already, it's not just about the world in terms of number of inhabitants. After all, in terms of number of inhabitants, you could flatten them with atomic bombs—some people think about that. During the Korean War, when things were turning sour for the Americans, General MacArthur, the glorious MacArthur, you know, with his Ray-Bans.
1:46:02 The cap and the Ray-Bans. He wanted to drop the atomic bomb on China. Oh no, but I'm serious. The free world, when it takes itself seriously, I tell you, is the freedom of the throat-slitter or the atomizer, depending on the era. Anyway, let me get back to it. What's interesting in Mounir's question is being attentive to the changes currently taking place.
1:46:36 Things are happening in French-speaking Africa—if you'd told me this six months ago, I would have said, oh, it's not April Fool's Day, you must be pulling my leg. It's moving very fast. Thank you, Mounir. And my answer, broadly, is yes to the question. Yes, and thank you. Thank you, yes. Maxime Bratanov, good evening. In your view, what are the errors of the integral sovereigntist thinking that claims national liberation struggle is the corollary of sovereignty over labor?
The left-right divide is historical 1:47:08 And the consequence, I presume, so the corollary. All right. So, I'm trying not to stray from the meaning of your questions, not to misinterpret them. What are, in your view, the errors of integral sovereigntist thinking? Ah yes! So for you, Maxime, it's an error on the part of the integral sovereigntists—I'm not quite sure what that means, but well, we'll see—who claim that the struggle for national liberation is the corollary of sovereignty over labor. That's the part I'm not sure I understand. I'll come back to it in three minutes if you send me a couple of words to clarify a bit what you meant.
1:47:46 Because I sense that this is important in the current debate, so thank you for shining the spotlight on this question—but there are still a few dark spots in the spotlight. Otherwise, ah, there we go, thank you very much Maxime. For you, there is a left-right divide, that much was certain. There, I didn't dare say it, but in my interpretation, that's why some communists claim, without it being written on the rooftops, that they are especially not on the left.
1:48:16 So I don't know which communists you're talking about who say they're especially not on the left. If you're talking about the left associated with the name Mitterrand, for example—Mitterrand, isn't that the one... look at the photo, he's beaming when Marshal Pétain is introduced to him, Mitterrand, who wanted the "foreigners" kicked out before the war, but that won't stop him from creating Harlem Désir a generation later. They came after that kind of left. Just as one doesn't judge an individual by the idea he has of himself, still less by the idea he'd like others to have of him.
1:48:49 You don't judge an era by its self-consciousness. That's not the left. That's the anti-communist left created by NATO. Don't take my word for it, read the Americans who created Force Ouvrière. I'm not making this up. The unions in France—there were two most dangerous countries in Western Europe, France and Italy, each with a communist party in which one citizen in four was enrolled. How do you expect to put up with something like that? Yes, that bastard to whom we owe the fact that you get reimbursed for your medications, your medical care, and that you have paid vacations, that bastard.
1:49:35 To break that up, I'll give you the reference—it's written in his memoirs how the CIA created Force Ouvrière. I'm not saying that the people in Force Ouvrière—there are very sincere people in there who don't know any of this. But as an organization, it was created so that the CGT wouldn't become too powerful. And then afterward, it was the CFDT that took over—you know the rest.
1:50:08 So, don't mix things up, all right? I don't know which communism—for example, me, yes, I maintain and I own it, I know it's going over worse and worse, that there is a left and there is a right. And when I hear someone tell me that this opposition is outdated, I know he's on the right. He himself, maybe, doesn't know it. He'll say, I'm not on the left, but what I keep telling you, Pagani, and you won't understand, is that left and right don't mean anything anymore.
1:50:38 Earlier, I mean, progress—the Diallobé who said "I want a child for the world"—I don't know that this means the fusion of different cultures. Yes indeed, this is not the terror of the "great replacement," what the Diallobé said. It's that the world must be enriched, how did he put it, by our multiple ripenings. You say that, but the right doesn't agree. So it does exist, the left and the right.
1:51:10 Yes indeed, throughout Europe, governments hold on only because there's a far right facing them that serves as a foil. Understand well what's happening. So the current governments, which some seem to criticize or even sincerely do criticize, have an interest in making people talk about immigration, as if that were the only real problem... Ah, but come on! Don't you understand that this is what's paralyzing political discourse?
1:51:44 Ah, may the time of cherries come again. Especially when they've ripened well in plain sight. There you go. "For you, there is a left-right divide." No, not for me. It's historical, I can't help it. If I listened to myself spontaneously, I'd sometimes have right-wing temptations. Given my background, my upbringing, there you go. And to be aware of it and fight against it—that starts, doesn't it, with the idea that all our misfortune comes from the French Revolution, from the Industrial Revolution—how many times have I told you that.
1:52:17 What's typical of unhappy modernity is being against modernity. What's typical of those who have benefited most from progress is being against progress. And wanting the man who walked 14 kilometers carrying his wife on his back—I told you earlier about it through the Ivorian jungle—well, that maybe he's the one with true wisdom and true happiness, because the paved roads and all that, through which he could have brought his wife to a hospital in 20 minutes, is the beginning of the end.
1:52:50 Come now. Yes, I told you earlier about the GTM marveling at what is currently happening in the way China keeps multiplying its infrastructure, by which it is gradually pulling itself out of nothingness. Yes, that's not popular, because apparently you have to be against technical progress, since that's supposedly the source of all our misfortunes. Look, put yourself in the shoes of the MEDEF [French employers' federation]. The MEDEF thinks there aren't enough unemployed people yet, so if you're for degrowth, we're made to get along.
1:53:25 But don't you understand the equation? It's not complicated. But it's so huge, so huge. But we're told the opposite so relentlessly. When you said—it's not me, it's Alain before the war who said—when a man says he is neither of the left nor of the right, and that he is of the right, what do you expect. I didn't invent it, so don't attribute it to me. In the Nazi era, that was common. "Come on, those divides are finished. Now it's the new order." That's what they said in the Nazi era, the new order. Besides, "we're socialist, we're even National Socialists."
1:53:56 That's what he said, isn't it? You see. All right, I'll close my answer to your question with Goethe's line, the line God says to Mephistopheles: if you despise science and reason—so, progress—the highest gifts of humanity, you give yourself to the devil and you are lost. There, I've just spoken to a man of the left. There may be other questions. Amei Bourba, I'm sorry, I'm old and tired.
The colonial school and the cadres of liberation movements 1:54:29 "Many leaders of African or Asian liberation movements." I don't think I know him, but I distrust my failing memory. I think I'm glad, I'm glad it's new. "Many leaders of African or Asian liberation movements of the 20th century were among the rare children of colonized people who managed to access the colonial education system." Ah, good grief, that's a relief. I tell you, I who learned to read and write, and even to learn my own language and my own culture, thanks to Beninese and Togolese schoolteachers, to be more precise—I'm illustrating what he says first, because there are some who say he's talking nonsense, but how is it nonsense?
1:55:10 Ben Bella, you know, the one who led the FLN at the time of Algerian independence. He was at the Battle of Monte Cassino, the Stalingrad of Southern Europe. He conducted himself so well there that he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Imagine this little Algerian, nothing much socially speaking, who comes back to his country with the Croix de Guerre and thus believes himself entitled to timidly request in his département, guess what?
1:55:48 A post as a rural policeman. He wasn't talking about independence. He wasn't talking about... No. They tell him, no, have you looked at yourself, you "bougnoul," that's not going to happen. No, no, but the position is taken by Hernández—Pagani, since there are also quite a few Italian names—which isn't Tunisia, I don't know anything. More likely Paganini, actually, or Paganelli. There. Let me take the opportunity to answer someone who asked me, is your name of Corsican or Italian origin?
1:56:18 Pagani means, in Italian, "the pagans." Well, in Latin. Paganus in the singular, Pagani in the plural. In fact, originally, it means the peasants. Pagus is the pasture, the most primitive thing there is, where animals graze, before there's even any cultivation of fields yet. There, that's it. So it's really the bottom of the barrel, socially speaking. I don't know—people used to say "three men and a shepherd" at one time. And since Christianity spread first among slave populations, so in the cities, and paganism, the old religion, remained for a long time in the countryside, "peasants" ended up meaning "pagans," quite simply.
1:57:03 There. I'll close that parenthesis, but it's a fairly rare name in Corsica—though, I mean, it's not a dichotomy of "not Italian, not Corsican"; most Corsican names are of Italian origin. Most of them. There are quite a few names ending in -a, Baratta, Costa, some of which, some names in -a, are said to come from the Iberian Peninsula—I'm no specialist, I won't say anything foolish. Let me get back to it. So, Ben Bella asks for a post as a rural policeman.
1:57:35 He says: "many cases of African or Asian liberation movements." Ah, but. So let me move from Africa to Asia. Come on, the two biggest, our two biggest conflicts of decolonization: Indochina. Chronologically, we should start with Indochina. Ho Chi Minh, the leader—the leader of the Viet Minh, I don't know—and then, later, of the Viet Cong, against the Americans.
1:58:06 But yes, that's it exactly, two wars against the two greatest imperialisms—French imperialism, the Indochina War, then American imperialism, the Vietnam War. No, no, it didn't just change its name. It's not exactly the same thing. Indochina included, besides present-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. There. Sorry, it's a concern for transmission. I can't help but leave a few little pebbles along the way. So, Ho Chi Minh, what was he asking for?
1:58:36 But I'm asking you the same question as with Ben Bella. He wasn't asking for Edgar Faure—sorry, I mean petty things. He was asking whether Vietnam should become a French département or whether to speak of independence. But yes, he had been to France. He was one of the founding members of the French Communist Party—not Vietnamese. He was a member, he was present at the Congress of Tours. And he said to himself: here's what we need back home. It's a communist party. But for that, we shouldn't be a colony where parties are banned or this or that.
1:59:07 We'd need to have the same setup. In short, to be a département. And there, likewise, they sent him rifles and torture. And he won the two great wars, didn't he? Against French imperialism, then American imperialism. Of course, Japan said it's the one who attacked. Of course, we're 10,000 kilometers from home, but it's always the others who attack us. It's scandalous for Russia to police its own borders, but it's not at all scandalous that the Americans caused millions of deaths 10,000 kilometers from home.
1:59:43 In Korea, in Vietnam, in the Middle East, in passing. I'm not even talking about the bloodbath in Latin America and the dictatorships that were maintained there. There, thank you for bringing that up. Yes, of course, of course. And that's why I read that passage. It takes an African author to remind us of how important the new school was, the school brought by the invader. And now we come to the concept I wanted to discuss with you last time.
The cunning of reason in Hegel 2:00:17 I didn't have time. I wanted to do it this time. I don't know. It won't be next time either, but I'll tell you now. Perhaps Hegel's most profound concept, the cunning of reason. So, let me quickly sum up the gist of it. About what time is it? It's almost 11 o'clock. Thank you. So, quickly, I don't want to eat into your sleep. Reason is the essence.
2:00:47 It's the truth. Oh, there are some big words. You're right. Those are big words, because I don't know if it's the most important thing. The essence is the truth, the essential. The essential, by definition, is what matters most. Yes, wait. Essence as such, that is, deprived of existence. If the truth is in my head, but it never becomes realized in the world around me, it's not worth much. So, essence—I'm saying this because Hegel gets caricatured—according to Hegel, there would supposedly be a reason that fulfills itself in history like a computer program made by God.
2:01:27 All right? So, it doesn't matter, there are millions, billions of deaths, all that. Hegel doesn't care, he's a cynic like all totalitarians. I'm barely exaggerating what's been written for about 50 years now about Hegel. It's not a providence, a totalitarianism, a holism, the rule of the whole over the part. No, it's exactly the opposite—it's a materialism that insinuates itself into Hegel's work through this concept of the cunning of reason, because it is a concept.
2:02:02 Reason being the truth, but the truth lacking reality—I'm getting to it, it's important, I'm making a clear point tonight—lacking reality. If I say, for example, the truth is that women and men should have the same rights, for millennia that was a truth, but one that had no reality. Yes, for the truth to pass into reality, either you're not a materialist, and so you wait for God to send you His grace, or you work with what already exists—that's where you're a materialist.
2:02:42 Now, what exists? This is the example always cited to make people understand the cunning of reason in Hegel, so I'll start with that one, though we'll see it's more complicated than that. What exists in Hegel's time? A greedy and vain little Corsican. But yes, but good heavens, what talent he has on a battlefield, that one, and as an administrator too, my goodness—the grandes écoles, the Banque de France—he can help reason enter into existence by building the modern state.
2:03:15 That's what the cunning of reason is: using what it has—the ambitions of an individual who isn't even aware that he's working for reason. That is, working for freedom when reason passes into existence. And yes, reason is not mathematics, physics, chemistry. There's reason in there. But that kind of reason—I refer you back to Kant, we're reviewing here—that's the understanding, not reason. That's the "if, then." It's crucial—earlier I said that's not it, that we're threatened by the chaos invading us.
2:03:46 I don't forget what the father of the Diallobé says. But if there's only that, if there's only technology—there were immense scientists who were also Nazis, who had sympathies for the regime; I'm thinking of one of the greatest physicists of the whole modern era, Heisenberg, one of the pillars behind the emergence of quantum theory. So, there you have it, I mean, reason—reason is not reason if there is no freedom. I'll come back to this, because it would take too long if I develop it now, but I told you that perhaps, I was about to say, the essential thing is the passage of essence into existence.
2:04:26 And for that, there already needs to be a material given-there, made up of men and women pursuing goals they believe are important to them. And what matters is not what they wanted at the outset, it's the result. It's what they actually did. And when Napoleon contributed to creating the modern state, reason in history can take him and throw him onto Saint Helena. Next. In any case, thank you for your questions. Amé comes back—since I really liked his question, let me read it: "This dialectical reversal in which the master is deposed in the very language of his own teaching"—a beautiful expression, and a beautiful dialectical reversal—"doesn't it join up with the phrase 'what has been made of us'"
2:05:11 and "what has been made of what has been made of us." Thank you very much, Amé, that can serve as our conclusion. And I would say, like Herodotus—forgive me for still referring to a Greek, being Eurocentric, at least in this conclusion—Africa will always astonish. Have a very good evening, and I hope to see even more of you next time, thanking you a thousand, thousand times for your loyalty and for your comments, which touch me enormously. And thanks to the technical team, who are better than ever.
2:05:41 I'll just add a little note on the word at the end… And we can… finish like Beaumarchais, everything ends in songs. Hegel indeed said that humor was always the last stage of the great aesthetic sequences.
