English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Broadcast incidents and early Jena texts 0:30 I believe we're finally online together. Sorry for all these mishaps, but frankly, the expression "it's entirely independent of our will" is quite fitting and quite appropriate to the situation. We still don't know why our usual page, that of the Philosophy Association with Dominique Pagani, I mean the Facebook page, is not accessible, and I, who have never been much of a computer whiz, as you know, can't understand why.
1:19 On the other hand, some eminent computer experts, I mean, who are perfectly used to this kind of equipment and browsing, I'm thinking of Pierre-Alain and Philippe Mauro, whom you both know well, were kind enough to work on it last night, then this morning, Philippe called me at length, and it's still a mystery. Well, I won't bore you with that, we've sent a request for explanation to Facebook, we're waiting for the answer, that's it. I won't make up what doesn't exist, but for now, since we used to broadcast simultaneously on Facebook and YouTube, fortunately, first of all, there's still this possibility of broadcasting on YouTube, I'm very happy to be with you there and I thank you for it. And then, of course, there's my page, my personal page, not the SAUME's, well it's the one for my friends, I know you know it, most of you know it too and follow it, and that makes me glad, so the Dominique Pagani page and not "Philosophizing with," etc. There you go.
2:35 And thanks to which I was able to let you know that we'd meet up on YouTube. There you go. So, it's all the more unfortunate, these mishaps which I'll now set aside until there's something new, and if there's something new, you'll of course be the first informed. It's all the more unfortunate because I had planned for tonight some fairly dense content, taking up this concept so specifically Hegelian, found nowhere else, in no other philosopher, of the cunning of reason. Well, found only in commentators on Hegel, after him. And because of these mishaps and the time they took, I apologize in advance, but I won't say that I... Yes, well, I did somewhat botch it, if I may use a slightly strong word, but I wasn't able to prepare as much as I would have liked.
3:43 But essentially, thanks to our wizard Pierre-Alain, who managed to set up the texts we're going to work on and that we'll look at together. And before we move on, before we read these texts together, where for the first time in the history of philosophy it is a question of the tool as a concept. It came before, I don't know, before people spoke of man as the one who created tools.
4:15 But here, it's about seeing the impact of the tool in anthropology, that's the first time. I recall that part of these texts, I had already cited them some time ago, quite a while back, last year, in a video titled, significantly it seems, "A Text by Marx Written by Hegel." In fact, it was a text taken from the same work, the same works.
4:51 We're going to look at two early texts there, by Hegel, called "Philosophy of Spirit." These aren't titles by Hegel, all this, but well, it's not far off. It's his editors afterward, since his manuscripts, for the most part, weren't published at the time. So, hats off to those who worked, who tried to date them. This text is from "Philosophy of Spirit," there are two of them.
5:21 There's one, the very first "Philosophy of Spirit." You'll have the references, you'll see it, I sent the mock-up of the cover. From 1803-1804, written during the academic year 1803-1804. And then the later texts, during the year 1805, in other words the years immediately preceding the appearance of the Phenomenology of Spirit. So these are precisely the last great early texts of Hegel.
5:58 To be precise, we call the early texts the ones prior, from his student years up to but not including the Phenomenology. There you go. Which appears in 1807. You know the legend has it that he put the finishing touch to the Phenomenology at the moment Napoleon entered the city, in 1807, the Battle of Jena, the moment Napoleon entered the city. The man who was to found the philosophy of history writes this, mind you, puts the final period at the moment history comes knocking at his door with cannon fire.
Ratio, logos, ration: the meanings of the word reason 6:31 So, let's set that aside for now, we'll get into the details of the texts, but let's first come back to the title itself. What does it mean, the cunning of reason, and — this is the whole program for tonight — in what sense can I say that we may consider the world, in this Hegelian logic, as the product of a cunning of reason. So it's not a minor matter.
7:04 First, look at the phrase "cunning of reason." So, reason. In Latin, ratio. I say this to lead into "rational." Obviously, back when everyone studied Latin, there was no need to waste time explaining that the notion of rational, rationality, rationalism, all of that, had a connection to reason. It's the translation of the Latin word ratio, reason.
7:34 But, first remark, I'll come back to reason, of course, but that doesn't mean it only means that. In philosophy, ratio is reason. But in mathematics, "ratios," which are the Latin translation of the Greek logoi, that is, logos in the plural, mean relations in the mathematical sense of fractions. There is in particular the great mathematician, one of the peaks of ancient mathematics, Eudoxus of Cnidus, who was the first to leave us a theory of proportions, that is, A over B equals C over D, the equality of two ratios, of two fractions, if you like.
8:23 Relations, fractions, they call them logoi. And it's true that logos is indeed what puts us in relation, in connection. That's one meaning of logoi, because when we spell out what logos means, we always talk about everything around language, and rightly so, that's the first meaning, of course. Language, discourse, definition, all that, these are statements, they are logoi. But it also means fraction, relation, ratio. And you find it again when you share a cake, and you have to distribute it equally to everyone, well, "you'll give each one at the rate of," we say "at the rate of," one hazelnut per slice, right, if it's a hazelnut cake, or a strawberry or a raspberry, so that no one gets chocolate without raspberry, per person.
9:15 And indeed, everyone thus receives their ration. There you go, I'm not taking detours, we're looking at the rich connotations of the term reason. Because otherwise, we'll turn reason into something purely intellectual. Ideas I have in my head. When I speak to you, that too is of the order of reason, because we put ourselves in relation, ratio, logos, even if we're talking nonsense and saying nothing of substance.
9:54 So, now that we've seen that ratio, rational, rationalism, are connected to reason, you'll tell me, well yes, after all, what could be more rational than a machine? Because we can clearly see there's reason in it, there's logic. That's where the problems begin. You see, I'm raising all these preliminary questions about the notion of reason before talking about reason, so there's no misunderstanding, because that would add to the difficulties we're going to encounter. We haven't seen anything yet.
10:24 Yes, a machine is rational. So, let me ask you now, between us, as a convention, you know that the philosopher, as I've said for so long, has a relationship to both mathematicians and poets. It's not the same exercise, because mathematics and poetry are not the same thing. But the philosopher wants the rigor of the mathematician, while also wanting to give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe.
Understanding and reason: knowing and doing 10:56 So, if I keep the notion of "rational" in its everyday sense — oh, this computer, that's rational — I'm not saying it's a misunderstanding, but it misses the point of reason. And that's where a distinction established by Kant will be extremely valuable to us. That between reason and understanding. No, no, no, don't worry. Yes, it's a bit more complicated, but it's not difficult at all. We'll see difficult things later, when we talk about the cunning of reason.
11:28 But for now, it's not complicated. Reason in the sense of what is scientific, what is rational, what is mechanical, I don't know, everything people call logic. When you read Hegel's Logic, it doesn't have much to do with what's called logic in everyday language. But rather, it has above all a connection to language. There's even, in the preface to the Great Logic, this crucial passage, which is not on the program tonight — the Great Logic, don't worry.
12:05 Fortunately, because it's the most difficult thing ever written, along with certain dialogues of Plato. In this preface, Hegel says at one point that language is what must be kept most in mind in logic. If Hegel needed to remind us of that, at a time when machines were still in their infancy, barely beginning, and we weren't living in today's world of technology, then all the more so now, right? One shouldn't think that because — you know, I have nothing against machines, we'll see later, on the contrary — nîme doesn't sulk at anything technical.
12:37 But, contrary to today's dominant ideology, as you might guess — the program is heavy today, but current, we wouldn't put it that way. There is nothing concrete except through the abstract; one must take a detour through the abstract in order to grasp what is concrete around us, and what is current. Not just real, but current. So, understanding is the logic at work in "if... then."
13:11 If Pierre is Paul's brother, then Paul is Pierre's brother. That's rational, but rational in a quasi-scientific sense, you see. It's logic, it's that if A equals B, B equals A. Or A equals B implies B equals A, as mathematicians say, without speaking, just with a sign. It's the double arrow. The double-line arrow.
13:41 So, if everything we call logic, rational, machine, etc., scientific — if you say that's not really it, that it doesn't contradict reason, but that reason is also something else — then what is it? Essentially, it's not that. That is understanding, the intellect, intellectus. For those who know German, I'll remind you that understanding is "Verstand" and reason is "Vernunft." These are indeed two different signifiers.
14:13 So let's say that, to go quickly, since it's not our subject tonight to do epistemology, but still, I mean, understanding is what is at work in our attempt to know the world around us, around humanity — not the people around me, that's humanity. But when we have astronomy, geology, botany, zoology, the study of everything around us apart from man, the material, natural world, if you like for now — there, nothing has been as effective as the work of understanding.
14:54 On the other hand, when it comes to reasoning about the ends to pursue, is it better to do this or that? You'll agree that science doesn't deal with good and evil, but with true and false. We come back to distinctions we saw at the very start of our introduction to philosophy. Remember the immense service Kant rendered to all schoolchildren, students, or amateurs wanting to take an interest in philosophy, by saying that we can reduce all the paths of the philosopher to an attempt to answer three fundamental questions.
15:31 I'll leave the third one aside for now, but the first two, which relate to what I was saying and on which I'm going to continue. The first is: What can I know? What can I know? And the second: What must I do? I'm making important reminders. It's not enough to say something is important for it to actually be received as such. So I need you to really pay attention, and I need to make myself understood so that you're truly attentive to these distinctions.
16:01 First, look at these two questions. What can I know? What must I do? It's simple, quite familiar. There you have the great division between the philosophy of knowledge — what can I know, know — and the philosophy of action — do. On one side, what is around us? On the other, not what is, but what ought to be? To do. Doing — we're no longer in science there.
16:31 I mean that science's problem is fundamentally true and false — that's for understanding — whereas for reason, it's good and evil, or just and unjust, values. You see, now you understand better why reason must not be reduced to understanding. Reason must live up to understanding, that is, contain nothing irrational in the ordinary sense, that is, no contradictions, no illogicalities, etc. But that's necessary, it's not sufficient.
17:03 For it to really be a matter of reason and not merely understanding, it must also apply to the world of values. And you know I've been striving, since I began publishing these talks, and thanks to those who help me do it, starting with you — before signifying anything, every word signifies for someone, and that someone is you, I thank you, never enough — this is where it must be recalled how important this distinction is. I've been trying, since the beginning of my publications, to bring out a rigor and a logic in domains that are not those of the so-called hard and natural sciences — it can be in literature, it can be in morality, it can concern mores, morès, morals, not just moralizing, tut-tutting, when one studies, say, the fact that in such-and-such African society,
18:13 or Asian society, there's polygamy, and elsewhere, monogamy — it's the study of mores, so it's moral in that sense, quite concrete and objective and without value judgment. So, I'd say, reflecting on ends, to use Kantian vocabulary, ends — this is what lies behind all the goals we pursue, what justifies them in some way and gives them meaning; the word "meaning" itself, moreover, all this belongs to the order of reason. There you go. So, for those who want to dig a bit into the terminology, because it may seem a bit abstract, I'll remind you, staying with Kantian vocabulary — I'm not locking myself into it, but it's convenient at this level — what I called understanding, at work in the hard sciences, is what Kant calls theoretical reason, the reason at work to answer the question "what can I know," the theoretical detour to leave behind café-counter opinion and arrive at knowledge, and reason in the strict sense, the one that goes beyond understanding,
19:23 in order to ask not the questions of true or false, but of just and unjust, of good and evil, or of meaning. Are we free or determined, for example? That's a question belonging to practical reason, no longer theoretical. Because free from what? If it's... Freedom isn't a faculty one has or doesn't have, is it? Like limestone having the property of fizzing with acids, of bubbling when you pour... when you pour drops of acid onto it — no, no, no, no.
19:56 So it's always the freedom to do this or to do that, or not to do this or that. It's when I reflect on the domain of action and no longer merely of knowledge. There you go, I... First preliminary. So, you see, reason... Now we'll make an important transition. We're going to get into difficult things, but they'll be less so if you've paid attention to what I've just said.
The end is what is not there: teleology and essence 20:26 If reason is the faculty of ends, of meaning, and not of causes — causes belong to physics, chemistry, biology. That's not my domain. That's not the domain of philosophy. Philosophy should of course try to stay abreast of it. Otherwise, it's a return to barbarism. But I mean, it's not my domain. If I'm asked to settle a dispute between glaciologists over a dating, I don't know, it's not up to me to settle it, well, it's not the philosopher, it's not just me personally, who should decide.
20:59 It's the glaciologist, the climatologist, the physicist, the geologist, all of that, which is somewhat interconnected after all. There you go. But, if reason is thus the faculty of ends, well, the end is what is not there. The end is everything that has the prefix "tele" in everyday language. That's already more familiar to everyone. Television, teleportation in sci-fi movies, right?
21:30 Distance teaching, distance education, telework, these recent times — I'm digressing, because there's a lot to say, but that's another subject. "Tele" always means the goal is far off, at a distance, which is why the branch of philosophy that reflects on ends, and is therefore properly rational, well, that tries precisely to reflect on ends in the name of reason, is called teleology — not theology, teleo, T-E-L-E-O, teleology.
22:13 Telos means the end. But if you want to understand why the end is what is not there, the simplest way is to picture in your mind, to imagine, something very familiar to each of us, a road sign giving advance warning. "Stop in 150 meters." If this sign signals to me, it's to warn me of what is not there, and to alert me that a bit further on, there, it will be there, the sign.
22:44 But for now, for now, it's over there, tele, at a distance. You understand why they called the device "television" — it lets you see, I don't know, a volcano erupting in Iceland while I'm in Paris. I say this because there's a very beautiful eruption happening in Iceland right now.
23:14 I wanted to make this preliminary point. So, if reason — if what is not there — you'll understand better now why reason is indeed the truth of what surrounds us. Because, to explain the tides, right, the movement of the tides, before, it was divinities by which climatic phenomena were explained — rain, tides, storms, the return of fine weather, droughts or, on the contrary, floods — these were the vengeance of the gods.
23:51 From the moment Newton established a link between the rotation of the Moon around the Earth and the movement of the tides, he established a relation that was rational in the ordinary sense, this time, between phenomena that had seemed independent of one another. In other words, there is a hidden truth that is not obvious to everyone. It took a long time before anyone saw that there was a connection between the movement of the lunar mass and the movement of the tides.
24:29 Reason is the truth of what appears, but which does not itself appear. It is what is not there. You see? "Stop in 150 meters," but not here. Not here and now. It's less empirical, right, than understanding, which always works in collaboration with experience. If a railroad rail expands, it's because it's been left in the sun, especially these days. It's the same as heat expanding bodies. There you go. That is there.
24:59 Understanding can reflect starting from something there, something that exists and is provided by experience. That's not the case with reason. Are we free or determined? Ah, that. Go ahead and do experiments about that. Should I put my grandmother out of her misery to shorten her suffering? It's been 20 years since I lost my grandmother, unfortunately. This is an impersonal "I." Should I euthanize a loved one, or ask that it be done, to shorten their suffering in an illness that never ends, at a very advanced age?
25:38 Do you have the answer? I don't. Well, I have it in the morning; by evening, I'm no longer quite so sure. Because these are problems. It's not there. You see? There, these are values. So, we've just seen that reason is not existence, but essence. It is the truth of what appears, of what exists — Newton's law of the tides. I'll go back and finish with this example, borrowed from the natural sciences, so as not to complicate things too much.
26:08 I mean, the law, you don't see it, but it's what explains what you see. Because the tide that suddenly comes galloping in the evening or the morning, I have no idea. There you go. Go and see that at Mont-Saint-Michel. So, remember this. If you forget everything else, remember at least this. Reason is essence. It's what we mean when we say the essence of things, meaning the truth, but which doesn't appear, which is somewhat not visible.
Knowledge of the general, existence of the individual 26:41 In that sense, I can also take it with its connotations in everyday language, without much harm. But now, you can see clearly, I haven't yet talked about ruse, we're on the edge of it. So, reason, if it doesn't exist, how can it enter into existence? Before Hegel, it's quite simple, it's God. But as Spinoza says, God must not be the asylum of ignorance.
27:12 God deserves better if he exists, in any case, or for those who believe in him. I'm not examining whether he exists or not. But, whether one believes in him or not, the least homage we can pay him is not to reduce him to being merely the explanation we invoke when we're a bit quickly out of breath. When there's something we can't manage to explain, it's God, that's it. Yes, it's the asylum of ignorance, as Spinoza admirably puts it, and he was steeped in God, he wasn't an atheist.
27:44 It's the essence. Essence is reason, it's essence. I'm summing everything up. Essence is the truth of what appears. Ah, I'm going to bring in a new notion. It's the truth of what appears. It's the truth of reality. We see reality, but we must rise up to reason to understand the essence, the truth of that reality.
28:16 But that's it, now, that's what we've seen. You see, I'm paying homage to reason. It's almost a religious sacredness, almost mystical. It's what doesn't appear, but which is the truth of what appears. Yes, ta-ra-ta-ta. Its great handicap is precisely that it lacks one small detail, it lacks existence. And there we arrive at the Hegelian concept, because so far, everything I've just said has been familiar to philosophers since antiquity.
28:46 When Aristotle says—and yes, every time I'm about to get to the ruse, I go back further. It's to make it easier for you, you'll see. When Aristotle says, there is science only of the universal, of knowledge—the exact phrase is, there is knowledge only of the general—he says exactly, and existence only of the individual—what does that mean? It means that, to the question, what is Socrates?
29:16 He's a man, a Greek, living in such-and-such a period, etc., in Athens. So I classify him into sets. He's a man, he's an Athenian, he's a Greek, he's a philosopher. Right? There is knowledge only of the general. What are felines? They are mammals with retractable claws. Aristotle, who nonetheless created the first general logic, what he calls the Organon, the tool—you can see where this is going.
29:48 Aristotle rightly said that I don't shake the hand of man in general. I shake the hand of Socrates, of Peter, of Paul, but not of man in general. There is knowledge only of the general and existence only of the individual. I'm going to hit you with some abstractions here. Now, put that in reverse, keeping the meaning, right? Put it in the negative mode, as we say in grammar.
30:19 What does that mean? The individual is unknowable, and the general does not exist. And we come back to reason, which indeed has essence but not existence. There is knowledge only of the general, I quote Aristotle again, and existence only of the individual. We can know man, the species, classify him among mammals, whatever you like. On the other hand, all these generalities—let me take an even simpler example—the color yellow.
30:53 It's a general. It's something general because it's common to the chick, to a notebook cover, to a sweater, to a flower, to a buttercup, to whatever you like. It's what is common to all yellow things. And that's why, like all adjectives, it doesn't exist. Unless there's something that makes it exist, a subject, a substance—do you see what's underneath? It's the yellow of a sweater. There, a sweater, that exists.
31:25 And the color of the sweater is an attribute of the substance. You didn't learn that in grammar class. The sweater is yellow. Yellow is an attribute. There's no yellow floating in the air that would be the yellow of no subject. Oh, but sometimes I see yellow vapors. Yes, yes, but then that means the air is yellow, the vapor is yellow, or there's chlorine in the air—watch out—or there's the Sahara wind with an ochre color. But that means there's sand, there's something that is yellow.
31:55 But there's no yellow without something yellow. There is knowledge only of the general and existence only of the individual. I come back to reason. Reason doesn't exist. And yet, I'm telling you the title of tonight's session, the world—and the world did not begin with Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel.
The world as a product of the cunning of reason 32:25 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. I don't know. Born in 1770 and died in Berlin in the first third—at the end of the first third—of the 19th century. A cholera epidemic. Schopenhauer fled Berlin and died because of it. Schopenhauer, who himself believed in eternal life, in Buddhism, etc. He cleared out. He who despised the body, which is only an illusion.
32:56 Yes, that's not my subject, Schopenhauer. It's a little dig at my friend Sébastien. We'll recognize ourselves. I especially hold it against Schopenhauer when he called the police to report the rioters, the barricades, they're there in 1848, in Germany. Anyway, since it's often fashionable among teenagers, I'm warning about what that led to, all that.
33:27 That's not our subject. So, it didn't begin with Hegel, reason, and therefore the ruse of reason. Now, I say that the world has only existed since the ruse of reason unfolded itself. The world as the ruse of reason. But yes, I go that far. Up to that point, there was the Earth, the cosmos, the universe, physics, chemistry, biology—well, the objects of physics, chemistry, biology, zoology.
33:57 There were animals from which we descend and which we largely remain every time I'm hungry. That's not a human creation, hunger. It's an animal part in us that is hungry. On the other hand, the way of satisfying hunger, at certain hours, with forks here, chopsticks there—I won't repeat myself, I've said it often—the way of satisfying it is historical, it's not so much natural. It's cultural, as we'd say elsewhere. For now, it's not that I'm mocking these differences, but you can see they go on the same side.
34:32 It's cultural. Hegel says it's spirit and not nature. We can clearly see that spirit, for him, is anything but some little mystical or immaterial vapor. No, there's nothing more material than spirit in Hegel. He goes so far as to say that it's nobler for man to make a hammer than to make a child. To make a child, it's enough to be a mammal; to make a hammer is a creation, it doesn't grow on trees. Hammers, even less so, particle accelerators or scalpels that save lives.
35:06 Or with the same blade—sorry for that slip—to plant it in the heart of my rival with whom we covet the same woman. There, I've personified it. Reason doesn't exist. So how could it have produced the world? And there, that's how Hegel answers this question by saying: because reason knew how to use ruse. Like everything that is weak, that lacks existence, is weak.
35:39 To make a place for itself, it must come to terms with what already exists. I'm showing you that there's something materialist in the notion of the ruse of reason. And yes, it's the philosopher considered the most idealist. And we will never stop recalling that Lenin is one of the very rare excellent readers who, reading Hegel's Logic and arriving at the last part, to which Hegel gives the title the Absolute Idea, seems to be further from materialism and right in the middle of idealism, the absolute idea.
36:17 The end point of every quest, for an idealist, is God, it's the absolute, whatever you like, it's the end, it's the Grail. Lenin's comment—this passage on the absolute idea, I quote him word for word—is 'extremely remarkable.' It's in his Philosophical Notebooks. 'It's the most materialist and most idealist passage in Hegel.' And Lenin adds—it's not me—'it's contradictory, but it's a fact.'
Napoleon, unconscious instrument of the modern state 36:54 For now, I'm emphasizing the materialist side. We understand better here what Lenin means. If reason uses ruse, it's because it lacks existence. To enter into existence, it must use ruse, something that is already there. Now, the example usually taken to explain Hegel's ruse of reason, I'll bring it out since it's the most common example. But I won't stay on it long, even though it concerns my own origins, since it's about Napoleon. Well, I mean, the connection is Corsica.
37:26 Reason in history. Napoleon, the French Revolution, same period. Napoleon was born in '69, in 1769. Hegel, Schelling, Hölderlin, Beethoven—no less—were born in 1770. All of them belong to the generation that was 20 years old at the time of the storming of the Bastille.
37:56 It's this hinge generation. Neither the Old Regime nor the new one. It's the enormous upheavals that occurred between the Old Regime and the one we live in. So, I've told you several times that it's not a revolutionary regime nor a counter-revolutionary one, but the permanent conflict of revolution and counter-revolution. We've seen quite a few things with the ruse of reason. So, the modern state is searching for itself at that time, the modern state in the contemporary sense, civil society, industrialism, all of that is embryonic in Hegel's and Napoleon's era.
38:39 It's in the process of being put in place, it's more advanced in England than elsewhere, and it's starting to spread, you know, on the continent. But it's not just an economic matter, the modern world. Political institutions must follow too. Well, there's this little Corsican fellow. He exists. We've come to the crux of tonight's reflection.
39:09 He exists. His problem isn't essence, existence, reason, truth, reality. His problem is that he got a scholarship, you know, at the time—it was the time of Louis XV and soon Louis XVI. He got a scholarship from the Kingdom of France to study on the mainland. There, he specialized in artillery, he was a lieutenant of artillery exactly. He was extremely excellent at mathematics.
39:42 Artillery matters—curves and ballistics. And so he... Now, we could take up again, you know, the very negative portrait that a Guillemin gives of Napoleon. I really like Guillemin's lectures on Pétain, they're excellent, and on Rousseau and so many others, and on Robespierre. Well, on Napoleon, he only sees the negative because precisely, that's not Hegel, he doesn't see the significance of Napoleon.
40:15 But as Spinoza says, it's not about laughing or crying, it's about understanding. That's what we're trying to do. In what way is Napoleon the illustration of what Hegel calls the ruse of reason. Reason, the modern state, doesn't yet exist for it to come into existence. For now, it's a goal. All the philosophers of the Enlightenment dreamed of a constitutional monarchy or, for the boldest, outright a parliamentary republic, etc. But it doesn't exist. It's not in being, it's in ought-to-be.
40:46 There's this vain, greedy and ambitious little Corsican, to speak like Guillemin. I'm summarizing, roughly, that's what he says. But on the other hand, an excellent military strategist. He's going to be used to build the modern state. And when he did it—it's not me, the Bank of France, the grandes écoles, it's the legacy of the Revolution, the metric system, all of that is bound up in it.
41:17 And that is a creation among the greatest governments France ever had, the Convention. But once Napoleon has brought all this into existence, and not only in France—so much legislation was inspired by the Napoleonic codes—reason takes him and throws him in the trash, I mean, sends him to Saint Helena. There's the example traditionally used for the ruse of reason.
41:48 Reason enters into existence and for that, it needs something that already exists before it. That's what makes it materialist. Reason didn't fall from the sky, from the Platonic sky of ideas. That's a somewhat naive way of representing Platonism. But let's stay with the imagery for now. In any case, in Plato, the world of ideas is still more transcendent than what we're seeing here. Here, reason isn't only transcendent. It can enter reality, into immanence, here, and into the here and now.
Reason as freedom: one, some, all 42:19 But for that, it must use the movements that are already present in being, in matter. So what am I in the process of saying? I'm in the process of... let me just tell you so as not to make a detective novel out of it with endless suspense. If you translate—there's nothing more Hegelian, I give you my word, ask any Hegelian, find out for yourselves—if you understand that in Hegel, reason is freedom.
42:52 Ah, now things start to become clearer, everything I've just said. Freedom isn't there, it doesn't exist, but it's the meaning of history for Hegel. First, is it certain that history has a meaning? Isn't it rather a kind of madness of history, a permanent nonsense made of power struggles? Isn't it totalitarian to absolutely want that, whether in China, in Africa, or deep in the Amazon, as soon as one enters human history, one moves toward the same ends?
43:33 If that end is freedom, you'd have to be pretty twisted to call it totalitarian to set freedom as the main value. When Hegel says—now I'm explaining how reason and freedom relate—the ancients, you know, I've already quoted them, a very famous phrase of Hegel's, the Orientals knew that only one is free.
44:06 That's the beginning of history, there's a post-history too, we're not dealing with that here. The Orientals—we're no longer among the Australopithecines, we're certainly talking about men here. The Orientals knew that only one is free, the Emperor of China. You see, it's not about Orientals of today, it's not geographical with these notions, it's historical. There are Iraqis who are nuclear engineers, who know far more about technological modernity than I do.
44:36 So the Orientals, in the historical sense, the ancients, knew that only one is free. The Emperor of China, the Pharaoh in Egypt, the King of Kings in Persia. The one who holds all the records for titles, you know, I always cite him, is the Emperor of Ethiopia, the Negus, King of Kings, Lion of the Tribe of Judah, descendant of Prester John. That really impresses. There you go, and all the others are his subjects.
45:08 The Orientals knew that only one is free. The Greeks, next stage, knew that some are free. Ah yes, Greece, there we go, the meaning of democracy. Yes, democracy for barely less than 20% of the population of Athens, that is, those who weren't slaves. But it's true that there's progress compared to the society where only one is free, in that within that 20%, what gets decided, who has power, all that, is no longer decided by force alone, it's decided by having to convince through speech, it's decided in Parliament, in the Agora, at the Pnyx.
45:50 The Greeks even put fresh paint on election days, you see, voting days, fresh paint around the Pnyx, where people came to vote, to point out those who arrived late. And it was very civic-minded, there are paint stains, whoever arrived late trying to sneak in between the cords. There you go. The Orientals knew that only one is free—imperfect.
46:22 The Greeks knew—it's simple—that some are free. Third stage, ours, from the moment Christianity abolishes slavery, historically, chronologically, the moderns know that all are free. Of course, potentially. Afterward, there are degrees of freedom, of course.
46:52 But I'm not saying this to determine whether it's good or whatever, that everyone is free, but to show that, in Hegel, the direction of progress is indeed toward more and more freedom. So, trying to make me believe it's totalitarian to wish for more and more freedom is a bit twisted. There are some for whom what Hegel says must be worrying, isn't that so? Freedom for all, and no longer only for a few. So, for now, I want us to remember this.
47:27 Only, there's the story of Napoleon. It's useful for understanding the mechanism of the ruse of reason. Reason not existing, freedom not yet being here and now, but being the goal, so that the goal isn't just a daydream in my head, a utopia, but that it one day passes into reality, one must use what is already there. This executing agent, Napoleon, is completely unaware that he is in the service of reason, of freedom, and of history.
Memory, language, tool; a reading of the "night of the world" 47:59 He is well aware, at his post, Napoleon, that he has a historical importance, but he doesn't know that it is the essential thing, and that it is outside of his head, all the same. But the notion of the cunning of reason, the second stage now, appears in Hegel well before the passages where he cites the example of Napoleon, which are his last texts, the so-called Berlin texts, the old Hegel who is a professor in Berlin in the 1820s and 1830s if you prefer.
48:29 And now we're going to move on to some texts. What struck a philosopher who, for the first time, is going to speak of... It's difficult, so I'm going a bit fast again. I must first specify that the texts we're going to look at will speak a lot about the tool, technique, and the instrument. We're no longer talking about Napoleon. Now, the notion of cunning appears in Hegel as soon as he speaks of the instrument and technique.
49:00 Praxis, in the Marxist sense of the term, in Hegel, is the effect of cunning. It is the cunning by which man uses—we'll see this, I'm putting it for now in a general and abstract way—uses the laws of nature in order to reverse them. Rivers that flow according to Newton's law, that is, that always go lower toward the sea, like that, toward the center of the earth, from top to bottom, from upstream to downstream.
49:32 All of a sudden, man can build a dam to stop the water from flowing and irrigate an immense region. So, I'm going to ask Pierre-Alain to present to us. It's quite solemn. A text where a philosopher says, in a work called Philosophy of Spirit—spirit is, after all, something other than the hammer, the split flint, the tool, the instrument, technique, all of that, that's material.
50:06 How do they put it, those who don't know much about matter? Basely material, as if they themselves were up above, whereas everything that is up above with them, they owe it to 10,000 years of material effort. We'll come back to that. Rather, we're in the process of getting there. What compels a philosopher to say that spirit would never have appeared if there hadn't been... I'm telling you what we're not going to see, what the chapter before the passages we'll read is about.
50:36 A triad, three elements in order. Memory, language, the tool. The instrument, there it is. Memory, language, the tool. And here I'm skipping the passages on memory and language. If I quote one, it's because it's so extraordinary that I can't help passing it on to you, because I know some of you will make use of it, and for some it will fertilize research.
51:08 The passage I'm going to read quickly. But for now, yes, thank you Pierre-Alain, but for now, I'm reading a text that is in the same work, but which is not among the texts we'll analyze together, but which comes just before the appearance of the tool, when there is—all right? It's an anthropological construction of Hegel's, isn't it? Language is already there, and so man can close his eyes and say 'game animal' in his head.
51:45 So he has something in his head that is not before his senses, isn't that so? something he wouldn't have seen if he hadn't seen it in some other file. But you see, imagination, the word, it's there, in the head, but what he says about it is quite an incredible text, judge for yourselves. I'm going to ask you to do a little exercise: I'll read you a few lines, and you count how many times the word night, la nuit, in the sense opposed to day, appears in the lines I'm about to read.
52:20 This text is on page 13 of—I believe we can see it there, yes—the Philosophy of Spirit of 1805, which I've had since my final year of school, it's a bit battered, the body of the book is there, it's just a cover, which has seen quite a few different continents and journeys. 1805, whereas we're going to start with a text from 1803-1804, it's the same period, the so-called Jena period, no doubt the most fruitful in the constitution of the Hegelian system, and which, as I told you earlier, I'll say it again, will be crowned in 1807 by the Phenomenology of Spirit, his first very great work—not simply his first publication, his first major publication was The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems, but let's not digress—in 1807 he publishes the Phenomenology, which is the first work of his maturity and no longer just of his youth.
53:14 There we are. But here, we're in 1805, two years before the appearance of the Phenomenology, so the system is taking more and more shape, but before arriving at the tool, let's say this is the passage I'm going to read to you. I won't hide from you that it doesn't advance what we need to know about cunning and all that, well, not in any obvious way, but I won't hide from you that it's because this text is fascinating. I know there are excellent listeners, I can see it through the comments, who see very well the connections there are in these things that apparently have no connection with one another.
53:54 So here, then, is this famous text which, in this edition, in the Épiméthée collection at Presses universitaires de France, PUF, is on pages 12 and 13, but especially 13. Fateful numbers. Let's not overdo it, the text is quite fantastic. Well then, this text is strange, I'll give it to you raw.
54:30 So let's say that in the stages we've followed, we've finally arrived at the level of the image. I close my eyes and so, there, it's not an image. I see the computer, there, I have the computer screen in front of me. That's a sensation, a perception. Whereas if I close my eyes and think of the computer, I have an image. It's simple. It's simple, except that to manage to keep the computer, even when it's no longer before my eyes, the image, that took tens of thousands of years to achieve. So, let's suppose we've reached the stage of the image.
55:03 Text: this image belongs to spirit. Spirit is in possession of it. It is master of it. The image is preserved in the treasury—the word is underlined—of spirit. In the night, first occurrence. Night is underlined, in italics actually. The image is preserved in the treasury of spirit, comma, in the night of spirit. It is unconscious, in italics. I think of those fools who think this began with Freud.
55:35 With Freud, he brought out a conception of the unconscious—those aren't fools, who know Freud's text well. No, no. But I mean, I won't name him, a philosopher who met a tragic fate, so I won't kick a man when he's down, who thought it was with Freud that the notion of the unconscious first appeared. I repeat and continue. This image belongs to spirit. The image of the television I have in my head, for example, the screen, sorry, it's a computer, spirit is in possession of it.
56:10 It is master of it. The image is preserved in the treasury of spirit, in the night of spirit. I close my eyes. It's no longer the world of day lit by light, it's the interior. I see someone in the dream. In the dream, when I sleep, my eyes are closed. And I suddenly see Jean-Michel arriving. I'm just saying anything. Or Nicole. Or both arriving together. Or a devil, or a serpent, it doesn't matter. But I see things, and yet my eyes are closed.
56:42 That's not daylight, that. That's it. Man. So this image, as I was saying, is unconscious, I go on, that is, it doesn't have to be exhibited as an object before representation. Man—listen carefully—is this night. It's no longer just that man is in the night, there, when closing his eyes. Man is the night. It's a privilege. He can interiorize the whole external world within his interiority. Man is this night.
57:13 This empty nothingness which contains everything in the simplicity of this night. Third occurrence, isn't it? Well, count for me. A wealth of representations—I'll talk about dreams—of indefinitely multiple images, none of which precisely comes to mind, or which are not present as such. It is night. I'm not the one jumping ahead. It's the sequence itself. It is night.
57:43 The interior of nature that exists here. The interior of nature. Man is this being who interiorizes what is external. It is night. The interior of nature that exists here. Pure self amid phantasmagoric representations. It is night all around. It comes back like an obsession. This text is fascinating. Here, here then, is not outside, here in the universe I represent to myself, in the world I represent to myself.
58:20 It's starting to come. Here, there suddenly arises a bloody head. I was speaking of dream, now it's nightmare. There, another white silhouette, strange. Red and white. The colors of Japan, of Switzerland, of Poland. The colors, remember, I made a whole video of more than two and a half hours on the drops of blood on the snow in Chrétien de Troyes's Perceval, the Welshman, the fascination exerted on the young knight, on Perceval, by the three drops of blood from the little bird he had wounded and which had flown off again.
58:58 It wasn't a serious wound. He forgot to chase after it. Parsifal is stopped by the image of those three red spots on the white. For it was on a winter's day, not far from where King Arthur's court was camped on the snowy moor. He stays there for hours, hours. Here there suddenly arises a bloody head. There, another white silhouette. And they vanish likewise.
59:28 You see the whole oneiric world. Very contemporary with German Romanticism. It is night all around. It keeps coming back. Here, sorry, excuse me. And they vanish likewise. It is this night one discovers when one looks a man in the eyes. There we understand better what he called nothingness and the negative. One plunges one's gaze into a night when looking a man in the eyes.
59:59 One plunges one's gaze into a night that becomes—the word is underlined, in italics—dreadful. It is the night of the world that advances here to meet each person. I'm trying to make sure this evening that the night of the world goes forth to meet you. And this night of the world presupposes this interiorization of the external world.
Material is not natural; Hölderlin at the carpenter's 1:00:29 It is in this night that being has returned. So, let's not complicate things. There, I wanted to read that as a preamble to show this extraordinary work that is the Philosophy of Spirit of 1805, also known as—I say this because there's a very fine seminar currently taking place at the École normale supérieure on Hegel's thought, his work. And I recall that some of Hegel's earliest editors grouped these works of his youth, that of 1805, under the title Jenenser Realphilosophie, real philosophy—implying, as opposed to the logic, that it's concrete, especially since we're now going to talk about the tool—and since it's the Jena period, Jenenser, meaning 'of Jena,' the adjective, Realphilosophie, I say this for those who want to dig deeper.
1:01:33 So now we come to this same set of youthful texts where the Hegelian system, which is going to spring forth like Athena from the head of Jupiter—Jupiter sometimes made beings spring from his head, sometimes from his thigh, depending—hence the expression 'you weren't born from Jupiter's thigh,' Jupiter's body being full of gods.
1:02:03 Before springing forth, like that, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, with all its coherence, there, it begins to take shape, the system. And in the 1803-1804 version, so a year, a year and a half before what I just read to you, still at Jena, a very fruitful period. I'm also saying this for those of you following more closely, I told you this evening we have dense material. The Jena period follows the Frankfurt period.
1:02:35 And yes, German philosophers, often, we divide their journey by city names because it's not like France, where there's the provinces and Paris. All these cities, Jena, Frankfurt, Munich, Bamberg, Nuremberg—Hegel was a professor in each of the cities I just mentioned. It's a bit of an obstacle course. Germany is not unified, centralized like the big nations, as the Germans used to say, like that great nation which is France—no, it's fragmented into several small political entities.
1:03:11 Sometimes a few kilometers and two hours of walking are enough to change the political territory. It's not exactly a border. So, Jena, in 1803-1804, first Philosophy of Spirit, this time the very first one, that's the one I was introducing earlier when I said that for the first time a philosopher was going to say that spirit would never have appeared without memory, language.
1:03:43 That, we didn't have to wait for Hegel for—language and the great inner activities, fine. Man and the child, that's fine, we suspected as much. Look at the importance of Mnemosyne, I've made videos about it, if you look closely, Mnemosyne, pronounced, if you like, in the snobbish Greek way, the Greeks don't say it with 'eu' like the Germans do by the way, who was memory and of language, you see, Hegel didn't come up with that arbitrarily. That, we didn't have to wait for Hegel for, but the third term, memory, language and the tool, how spirit needs the tool in order to appear, you see, that's where cunning comes back.
1:04:25 What seems most immaterial passed through what is most material—because, as I'm showing you, one must not confuse material and natural. The epithet 'material'—this is material—has a far greater extension than that of 'natural,' for natural covers everything natural plus everything that isn't, everything that is—what do you oppose to natural? Think of artificial flowers.
1:04:59 A cave is a natural habitat. Our ancestors knew how to make use of a house on stilts, in the Mousterian era, I believe, or Cro-Magnon, whichever you like. Ah, that's already more elaborate. That presupposes, doesn't it, that trees were cut down, that logs of wood were made, stilts—that's complicated. There, we've left nature behind, we're starting to enter history.
1:05:35 But what is more material than wood? It's so material, at a time when there was not yet the industrial revolution and the importance of metallurgy, which was embryonic, especially for weapons, but by contrast, I mean, metallurgy hadn't taken over as it has now—how do you think there could be planes, trains, boats, and people getting by without metallurgy, without the steel industry, that is, without steel? Where am I going with this? Ah no, no, this isn't a digression.
1:06:06 We're staying right at the heart of the matter. Wood was the most widespread material, apart from a few desert countries, and even then. Wood was the material most manufactured objects were made from. Many towns were built of wood, many keeps, castles that we now see, were made of wood, which have disappeared in fires. It's much more perishable, isn't it, than stone. So how do you say wood? In Portuguese, it was 'madeira,' matter.
1:06:40 You see? Because it's matter at its origin. It's what is, it's the object of the craftsman's labor. With tools, carpentry. 'To you I shall tell my secret. From the forest you have the genius'—sorry—'of Daedalus, you have the genius and the forest.' I don't know, I've only quoted this once. But it's an answer that Hölderlin gives to the man who had taken him in, who had gotten him out of the psychiatric clinic, where he had become a poor wretch, with scenes of raving madness.
1:07:23 He became completely calm for 37 years in the house, in the family, of this carpenter, where he was neither a curiosity, as with those who came from all over Germany to see him and who didn't recognize him, nor an object of pity either. He was a companion, as they say in carpentry. Yes, and the one who had taken Hölderlin in was a carpenter, a woodworker. That's it, I'm lingering a bit. Who took in Hölderlin, not the poor Hölderlin as they say nowadays, but the one who was truly unhappy when he was in the clinic, and who stayed for 37 years in that tower.
1:08:00 Go visit it, it's one of the most beautiful spots in Europe, Hölderlin's Tower on the banks of the Neckar. Here I pay tribute again to Sébastien Michéa—he's a namesake of the philosopher Sébastien Michéa—who had the immense kindness to take me there in his car, with his mother and his son. I won't forget those holidays last summer, in those places I no longer thought I'd be able to see again, given the state of my arteries and my finances.
1:08:36 There, I wanted to mark the occasion. There you go, this tower on the banks of the Neckar. Hölderlin, as the carpenter tells it, comes down the stairs from a room on the first floor, which overlooks the scenery, the landscape, the bank of the Neckar. And he sees an engraving on the stairs, an engraving hanging on the wall, depicting—it was fashionable at the time—a Greek temple.
1:09:13 And he says to the carpenter, you should make one like that. The carpenter replies that he already has enough trouble feeding his family and doesn't have the leisure to live in philosophical repose like him. He said, that's true. And he writes these few lines which I quote to you: 'To you, my friend, I shall tell my secret. From Daedalus, the engineer.'
Ulysses and Daedalus: escape into failure and the engineer 1:09:43 Remember, there is the engineer Ulysses and the engineer Daedalus. The one who doesn't content himself with escaping like Ulysses, who each time, isn't that so, tries unconsciously to avoid the carnage. This is a modeling construction I'm proposing to you. He started from a carnage, the sack of Troy, and he will end up in a carnage, the massacre of the suitors upon finally returning to his homeland, twenty years later, ten years of war and ten years of wandering.
1:10:13 In the Empire of Poseidon, the god of the seas, isn't that so, the sea god. And each time, he tries to escape his fate, the carnage. That's us, that's man, that's the West too, Ulysses, the first hero, a great Western hero after all, of the journey. Each time there's an island, I'll be able to make a detour while waiting to get home. We have time, an island, a haven, a woman, a parenthesis, Calypso, Circe, I'm forgetting one there, Nausicaa, etc.
1:11:02 And then, each time, he is driven from that island by the violence that returns, right up to the final carnage. But that's not what concerns me now. That's Ulysses, escape. Escape in failure, because the carnage will catch up with him in the end, even though he is its author. And the suitors and victims, the repetition—I had done that to illustrate the Freudian principle of repetition. Daedalus, on the other hand, who was a slave at the court of King Minos in mythology, who was a slave in the underground chambers, whom Minos told, 'Make me the Minotaur, build me the labyrinth'—already an architect, isn't he, the labyrinth, in Crete.
1:11:51 The countryside of Crete offers Phaedra's son a rich retreat. Yes, but Phaedra is the half-sister, like Ariadne, her sister. "Ariadne, my sister, wounded by what love, you died on the shores where you were wounded." But yes, all this comes back, because the two daughters, the two sisters, Ariadne, the two sisters of Minos, king of the underworld, and of Pasiphaë, his wife, have a half-brother who shares the same mother, Pasiphaë, except that she conceived him with a bull.
1:12:23 Ah, it's not me who invented this, I'm sorry, I mean, I'm only restoring the tradition. And yes, if you don't know this detail, which everyone among cultured people knew at the time — when Racine staged Phèdre at Versailles, everyone knew that Pasiphaë had gone with a bull — but, sparing you the details, you can't understand a line like when Phaedra says, "O hatred of Venus, O fatal wrath, into what wanderings love cast my mother."
1:12:56 Everyone understood — this is where I'm getting at — that this monster, this hybrid, the fruit of a woman and a bull, this monster so un-Greek, still stuck in oriental antiquity with gods with animal heads, right? In Egypt, there are plenty of them, it's magnificent, I don't know how to value it, the Egyptian has a mysterious fascination that has no equivalent. But there's a god with an ibis head, the patron of intellectuals, because with the ibis's beak it's the pen with which one writes, Thoth, there are gods with jackal heads, Anubis, so important in the judgment of the dead, the jackal shines, like hyenas, etc.
1:13:46 Or on the contrary, animals with human heads — look at the Sphinx with its lion's body and human head, it's a mixed blend, so un-Greek, Greek statuary is the human body, and not gigantic or overwhelming, no, about the size of a man, an idealized man, it's not a Christ writhing in pain on a cross, we're not there yet, it's not yet the reality of the human condition, but it's closer to human reality — Greek statuary — than a god with an ibis head, than a human body with a bird's head, sorry, there — are we drifting off topic?
1:14:34 No, no, to hide this monster, to hide himself, Minos, king of the underworld, says to his slave, to the engineer — not the ingenious one, the engineer, we're not far from the tool, we'll come back to that, we haven't read it yet — he says to Daedalus, build me the labyrinth, which will become the labyrinth, this underground palace which will be the domain of the Minotaur, in which he has no access to daylight, but he needs, every year, 14 young people coming from Athens — this is no doubt a memory of the time when the Greeks were, historically, this is no longer mythology, subjected to the maritime power of Crete and Phoenicia, the sea peoples, a few centuries before the rise of the Greek city — and so Theseus, somewhat the liberating hero, the fact that he killed the Minotaur, well, so yes, every year, 7 young men and 7 young women are needed that the Minotaur
1:15:46 must devour, right, in order to affirm the sovereignty of the Cretans over the Greeks — except that Daedalus manages to escape, but it's not a negative escape, not an escape in failure, it's one of the rare mythological characters whose life ends well, which is very rare in Greek mythology; generally they all make a misstep, a hubris as we say, an excess that makes them victims of a tragedy meant to purge that excess which the Greeks found so displeasing — what excess, to mate with a bull no less.
1:16:27 And so, since Daedalus is an engineer, he makes — we know the rest — springs, wings, mechanisms, with tools, and he makes wings with glue, etc., and he flies off with his son Icarus, the two of them freeing themselves from the slavery of the labyrinth, free, frail, flying through the air, except that the son has less sense of measure than the father, than the engineer, right?
1:17:04 He flies too high, the excess, the sun melts the wax, he loses his wings, you know the rest, there's a magnificent painting by Bruegel, it's strange, you see a wheat harvest of peasants, it's Flanders, and then you see two little legs on the surface of the sea, it's Icarus falling. So, there, I dwelt on the engineer because it brings us back to the tool, and now we're going to tackle the text, where for the first time, a philosopher — ah, that's kind, Pierre Alain, honestly, I wasn't expecting that, but I'm quite moved.
1:17:47 Sorry, but I was there with — I told you — with Sébastien Michéa, a great scholar, whom we'll see tomorrow with Étienne, by the way, who is passing through Paris right now, since he lives in the Philippines — sorry, sorry to talk behind his back, Sébastien, but it's really to express my gratitude for having brought me back there, which I thought I'd never see again. The first time, I went hitchhiking, I was a student.
1:18:17 But I mention it because his mother was arriving there — there's a little path where all the students, the couples, come in the evening, there, the tower, she stayed there for 37 years, that's the carpenter's house. Behind it there's a small pedestrian street, and the roof you always see, the highest one up there, that's the famous Stift, the foundation, meaning the theology faculty where Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin were students together. Places like that don't just get invented.
1:18:47 The two greatest philosophers of the time, and some say the greatest poet of all time — that doesn't mean much. But still, in the same little rooms up there, as boarders — I visited the Stift, we went there with Sébastien and his mother, and his mother said the place she preferred was the little walk that leads right up to Hölderlin's tower on the bank of the Neckar, peacefully, the Neckar flows.
1:19:21 It's a fragment from the period of his madness. You see, he saw it every day from his window, there, on the first floor, peacefully, the Neckar flows, but there, there, let me quote it, there, the hall. "Let there shout that brightness may not, or you, god of joy, and let the day of feast be that day." Thank you very much for the image. So, for the first time, we're going to see — they've barely left this faculty — that Hegel, for the first time, a thinker, is going to associate spirit with the sickle, the hammer, the tool.
The instrument, an existing and rational middle term 1:20:04 So, the instrument — we just saw language, memory, I skipped ahead, I mentioned it briefly — and the third term, the instrument, is the existing rational middle term, ratio, reason, the existing universality of the practical process. Ah, I understand nothing of that, Hegel. Honestly, it's not that difficult, it's the language of German idealism. The instrument is the middle term.
1:20:36 The middle — you know what that is, the hub of a wheel, it's what's in the middle, at the center. That implies there are two extremes. Already, if you understand that, you understand two-thirds of Hegelianism. It's the image that comes up most often — well, let's not drift off. What are the extremes? The worker and the object of his work. Say, a sculptor working a block of marble.
1:21:08 The two extremes are the sculptor and the block of marble. The middle term is the chisel and the sculptor. The chisel, the tool, the hammer, everything with which he imposes a form on matter. He informs matter. So the tool is what is in the middle, it's the means by which I am in contact with the object being worked.
1:21:39 It doesn't matter, it could be the plow that stands between the peasant and his field and the land he owns, if you prefer. It could be the axe that stands between the tree and the woodcutter. Yes, that's much simpler already. So, we agree, we all understand, we agree with Hegel that — let me reread — the instrument is the middle term, it's what is in the middle, existing. You're not going to tell me that an axe is immaterial. That's where it becomes original.
1:22:11 A logical term, the middle term that has existed since Aristotle. When we say "all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal." The extremes are "all men," the universal. The other extreme is the singular, Socrates. And between the two, there must be a mediation, it's "all men are mortal, Socrates is a man." The middle term that allows the first statement to be linked to the third, to carry it over.
1:22:41 So, to do what is called in set-theoretic mathematics a transitivity. There. And yes, a transitivity. The instrument — I have a form in my head. I, I, I. The artisan, the one who uses the tool, the worker, artisan, artist, for now let's not distinguish, let's do as the Greeks did. The Greeks, to say art, had the word "techné." It would have made us laugh, us, oh but that's just technique, meaning I'm a creator, I'm an artist, poor fool.
1:23:16 Isn't that so? Meanwhile, a musician who gets everyone to agree — I'm talking about musicians among themselves, who all say Bach is the boss, he's the dream, whether it's Beethoven, Schumann, but even the Romantics, they all say that Bach used to say, "I worked a great deal, I applied myself well." There aren't many quotes like that; in Bach's time, people didn't think of themselves as great geniuses, so they didn't say, oh, I was on a mountain, and suddenly I thought of God, I had an inspiration — no, he says, I worked a great deal, and I applied myself well.
1:23:48 Ah, but that's not all, here's the even more staggering part: "whoever applies himself as I did will achieve as much." There's a transitivity for you, he passes the thing on to you. All right, so, the form that I have there, if I don't have the tool, it remains a form, I stay in Plato's world of ideas, the cosmos noetos, I'm not in the cosmos aisthetos, the one that appears in the sensible world, before my senses, here and now.
1:24:18 And yes, anesthesia, you see, that means — it's what cuts me off, no wait, it's what is before my eyes, it's what makes me close my eyes. It's not that complicated. So, the instrument is the middle term, if we all agree now, between the worker and the object worked, it's an existing, rational object, why? Because it makes the goal pass through — you understand, everything we saw earlier which seemed a bit abstract. Reason doesn't exist, but like everything that is a goal, it's what is over there.
1:24:51 It's reminiscent of the advance warning road sign. And yes, I hear some of you thinking, my goodness, that's Marx's line. Those people, they follow, they see the coherence across several sessions. And it pleases me, I see it more and more in the comments. Yes, when Marx says what immediately distinguishes the clumsiest architect from the most skilled of bees — because bees are excellent masons, they build very beautiful hexagonal cells.
1:25:22 What immediately distinguishes the clumsiest of architects from the most skilled of bees is that the architect has his house in his head before producing it in reality. It's that "before" which doesn't exist, it only exists in my head. In my head, that's "in," you agree, it's not "ex," by definition. It's the image Hegel was talking about earlier, it's when I close my eyes, I see a tree — no, that's a sensation.
1:25:57 I close my eyes, I represent that tree to myself, that's in my head, it's no longer an existence, it's an image. It's not with the tree I have in my head when I close my eyes that I'm going to heat myself, that I'm going to put in the fireplace, to warm myself, to light myself. So, existing — I'll dwell on this, we'll dwell less afterward because we'll be used to it — the instrument is the existing, rational middle term, because it makes the end pass through — you see the transitivity — from the first extreme, the worker, into the raw matter, into the object worked.
1:26:42 And the form emerges from matter, but not by magic. Difficult, laborious, and often painful work. Think of the potter. It, the instrument, appears on the side of what is active with regard to what is passive. In relation to the object worked — I go back to my example — in relation to the block of marble, the instrument is active, but it is itself passive; it is passive and active — passive when considered from the side of the worker, since it's the worker who manipulates it, and active with regard to the object worked.
The tool, that in which labor has its permanence 1:27:21 You saw the density of this text. "It is that in which labor has its permanence." What a key phrase! Everything passes on earth, everything flows, everything disappears. If you've seen what a rainy season is like in Ivory Coast — I'll speak of Ivory Coast, it's a much rainier and much more fertile country for the land than the poor countries of the Sahel, poor agriculturally, which have terrible droughts, being on the edge of the great desert, the Sahara.
1:27:51 But at every rainy season, how many houses disappear, villages, thatched huts swept away, everything disappears. But the tool — and you understand why tools are deified in every culture, why people are buried with their tools, with their weapons, weapons being a category of tools, with the blade of their plow, sometimes they're buried with it. Because it's a way of recognizing what is spiritual, non-natural, yet material.
1:28:23 Ah, you see, if you understand, if you draw the conclusion from what we're doing tonight, of no longer confusing the material and the natural, we will already have made immense progress against the dominant ideology. You're not going to make me believe that an axe is less material than a tree? That it's less natural? Ah yes, I know, hardly at all, except for the matter. The handle is wood, the blade is steel.
1:28:55 Now it might be a composite material, let's leave that aside, even a laser axe. And yes, "matter remains and form is lost." That's a line from Ronsard to show that everything passes. It's tragic, it's for women. One must yield to seduction because afterward, you'll say, it will be too late, everything passes, including youth, beauty — "gather ye rosebuds while ye may" — when you're very old in the evening by candlelight. There.
1:29:26 And he concludes, this magnificent line, "matter remains and form is lost." Oh! Except thanks to the tool. Look, the opposite of form that is lost, of evanescence, of vanishing. "It is that in which labor has its permanence." You understand, many people hang these things in the homes of their ancestors. These aren't objects that are too big. Here, let me show you one.
1:29:56 I apologize for stepping out of frame. Three seconds. This is something I've borrowed from sub-Saharan African culture. You see? This kind of ritual spoon that you find — I'm showing you the inside of the spoon, the handle.
1:30:29 So, how? It's material. Yes, it's material, it's utilitarian. Ah no, you don't eat with that, they're much too big, right? But look how decorated they are, look at the fineness of the elephant, look at the little tusks here, there. You see? The molding, the plasticity of the elephant's body, the stylization of the trunk, none of that is necessary at the vital biological level for feeding oneself. But it's because, given all the services this object has rendered, the object of ritual spoons, it's worth paying it homage.
1:31:08 These are ritual spoons, sacred ones, which are only brought out for ceremonies or feast days. You see? So, precisely to convey the work that is there, becoming, passage, movement within permanence. Generally, permanence is rather on the side of what is religious, divine, eternal life, etc., and here, thanks to what is the most material — how did he put it, fools call it basely material.
1:31:44 Right? It's this tool that is the pillar of everything that will deserve the epithets of transcendent. Right? So, "it is that in which labor has its permanence" — but let me set aside "transcendent," let's stay with the text for now. "It is the only thing that remains" — look at this crucial sentence, a turning point — "of the worker and of the object worked." Marx will remember this when he says that, of course, the object of labor, the block of marble, disappears in the sculptor's work.
1:32:19 The tree disappears in the woodcutter's work, and even more in the carpenter's. The tree turns into something else, right? The object of labor is the first to disappear. By dint of working with his tool, the worker wears himself out and eventually dies. But what remains for his descendants afterward is still — "labor has its permanence" — you understand better now why culture, history, technical progress need something that survives the generation that has disappeared.
1:32:58 "It is the only thing that remains of the worker and of the object worked." My goodness! The beginning of history, I mean, at the time of polished stone, we're not going to go back to chipped stone. Because children of the polished-stone age, or children of the bronze age, at birth already have millennia behind them that have pushed them forward, even just to reach metallurgy — I'll stick with the bronze age as an example — they're not going to start from zero.
1:33:31 Whereas, in the biological world, in the animal world, which we are too, the embryo, at birth, starts back at zero, a zero relative to its species. At the cultural level, no, there is an accumulation. The children of the bronze age will have at their disposal tools that their ancestors of the polished-stone age did not have, and even less those of chipped stone or knapped flint.
1:34:03 So the tool is transmitted — let me repeat, this is the crucial passage, very dense. "It is that in which labor has its permanence. It is the only thing that remains of the worker and of the object worked, as well as that in which their contingent being perpetuates itself." A contingent being, one not condemned to exist eternally, but it is that in which their contingent being obtains a duration greater than it would have had without the tool — it perpetuates itself.
1:34:42 It is passed down through traditions. All these sentences repeat somewhat the same thing. Something escapes the fact that "matter remains and form is lost." The form that continues, that continues — the arrowhead. When you're in the Sahara and you see thousands of arrows on the sand dunes, it only takes a few days of sandstorm and suddenly it clears away the sand, revealing treasures from the Neolithic, admirably crafted arrowheads, sometimes with little serrations.
1:35:21 This is an even more advanced stage, which was of course fixed onto a wooden shaft, bound or mounted. But this form will then, with the appearance of metal, become a metal point, and so on. That's the tool, that's the means. We're not in the realm of morality here. The means increases our power. The arrow with a metal point is more deadly than the one made of stone.
Restrained labor and the detour of cunning 1:35:54 So, I'll feed myself better, more easily feed myself. But I can also more easily kill my fellow man. We're not in the realm of morality here. Technology increases our power. It doesn't tell us in the service of which value we should place this power. I say this because there are still people who like to pass themselves off as profound philosophers. I'm thinking of the posterity of Heidegger, who kept putting technology on trial.
1:36:26 As if, when someone was killed with a knife, we thought it was the knife that needed to be sent to prison to console the families. And its descendants. The tool is passed down through traditions, since he who desires as well as what is desired only subsists and disappears as an individual. Society continues. Labor is an act of annihilation; the woodcutter is going to annihilate a tree, held in check by necessity.
1:37:01 That is to say, this annihilation is held back by necessity, by resistance. That is, by something absolutely external. The freedom of consciousness suppresses this necessity. We build a dam, for example, to protect ourselves from floods or to irrigate, as I said earlier, or to have a fish reserve. I've seen this every time, on site. The freedom of consciousness suppresses this necessity, this total passivity in relation to natural phenomena, whereas a termite mound, when there's a flood, all the termite mounds disappear at once, drowned.
1:37:45 That's why the two sexes—excuse me—the freedom of consciousness suppresses this necessity and by itself restrains the annihilation of the object in enjoyment. Yes, while I'm building the tool, I'm not enjoying myself. It's to prepare for another enjoyment. So you need an animal that takes a detour. You see the ruse. The ruse. Here, I intervene, now I do this. You see? It's a curve.
1:38:17 If I had omnipotence, I'd go straight ahead, I wouldn't need to make a detour, I wouldn't need to use cunning. A rhinoceros, if something moves, charges straight at it. Force does not accomplish cunning; only one who is not in a position of strength does. And here I make a theological detour, if only to pay homage to Rimbaud, who was anything but a holy-water-font frog, yet who said, "Theology is serious."
1:38:48 He had understood that. It doesn't mean God exists or doesn't exist. That's another debate. But theology is serious when it says that the devil is the sly one, that is, the cunning one—implying he is weaker than God. Because if he were the almighty, as they say both in Islam and in Christianity, in the religions of the Book, as in Judaism, if he were the almighty, he wouldn't need to make detours and tricks. So you see, it's been several sessions now that we've been seeing that the notion of worldliness is ambivalent, that the world can be the worst thing there is.
1:39:28 Or else the most superficial thing. "I'm going out into society tonight," into the bling-bling. But it can also be the world of harvest, of sowing, of technical progress, of space conquest, the world of Egyptian architecture. The world could be the Inca city, the Aztec, with their values, with their terrifying side, their sublime side.
1:40:06 So, we find the world here again. For cunning is what reason and freedom use to make a place for themselves in history. This isn't over. We'll need to see the consequences of what we're saying here, and to what extent it resolves all sorts of aporias, as we say in philosophy, difficulties that seem insurmountable, between determinism, freedom, etc. But I mean, cunning can also be used for a negative, wicked end.
1:40:49 But it's always a mark of weakness to take a detour. But you see, this is what I didn't have time for—I announced it to you in previous sessions, but I didn't have time—it's this weakness that interests me. Man is the animal who has made a strength out of his weakness. And here you guess that I'm thinking of the myth of Prometheus. Do you remember? I'll first recall what everyone knows in order to say some lesser-known things about Prometheus, which are at the heart of our reflection on the cunning of reason.
Prometheus, Epimetheus, and destitute man 1:41:26 Do you remember? Prometheus's brother, Epimetheus—which in Greek, I'm not a distinguished Hellenist, but according to my information, means he whose mind is not quite well organized, who isn't very sharp, as we say colloquially. You see this book, it's the Épiméthée collection at Presses Universitaires de France. It's a proof of humility on the part of those who created this collection. They didn't think of themselves as little geniuses.
1:41:58 Everything progressed. So, Zeus had asked—here's the myth—Epimetheus to distribute advantages and disadvantages to all living species in a balanced way, so that each would have its chance. To the bird you will give speed, flight, agility; to the elephant you give strength, but the elephant can't fly away to escape danger. And the bird can fly away, but it doesn't have the strength. There you go. Epimetheus, since he had an imperfect mind, distributed so generously to all the animal species that by the time he got to man, he had nothing left to distribute.
1:42:35 And so man has no scales, no fur, no fur like a bear. He doesn't have a physiological equipment. Don't tell me, "but the brain"—don't mistake the result for the origin. Measurements have been done on feral children, those children who, for family reasons or from the countryside, etc., not going into the stories, were raised like animals on farms.
1:43:09 We've seen, we've observed that the less an individual is in relation with others—for example, has no access to language, etc.—the fewer synapses, the fewer connections there are in the brain. Don't say "but yes, how, there's a human equipment superior to animals, it's the brain." No, no, the brain is a result of the tool. Don't say the opposite.
1:43:39 This, which we are seeing now—look at the great works of Leroi-Gourhan, who showed that, well, the brain and the hand, over millennia, of course. So, here I insist on this minus, this weakness, that's where I was. You see, man is weak. The badger, at birth, has its claws that will allow it to make its burrow, to build its den.
1:44:11 He's not obliged to cut down trees like man, to build stilts, etc. The beaver, they're builders. But there's no progress, they've been making the same lodges since forever, they haven't gone from underwater cabins to a four-room villa with a pool and a view of the sea, or the mountains, or both, like in Corsica.
1:44:41 There you go. It's passed down through generations. We saw that earlier. That's why I'm talking again about progress, without which there is no history and no anthropology. It would be permanent standstill. So, look at that. The freedom, the weakness of man who has neither scales nor claws, who doesn't have the claws of the lion, doesn't have the teeth of the panther, can't hang from trees with his feet like the quadrumana do.
1:45:15 That means there are four hands. Some monkeys, you know, can grasp with their tail, like the monkeys of South America, for example. And so, very embarrassed, he's afraid of getting yelled at by the boss, by Zeus. He goes to see his brother, and there we arrive at Prometheus. Prometheus, you know the rest. He performs the decisive act. With a kick of the heel—no, that's my addition—he leaps into the higher world.
1:45:46 He goes to the gods to steal from them. Yes, cunning. Cunning—he stole fire. And man subjected all the animals and nature. God gave Adam the power to name the creatures, says the Bible, but not only to name them—instead of exterminating cattle as was done in prehistory, he suddenly learned to raise livestock. He became master of nature.
1:46:21 Ah, well, this isn't fashionable, everything I'm saying now. Anti-humanism. That's how it starts, the gravest moments of history. When we place nature above, when we demonize man and deify nature—the first nature protection reserves were created in the Third Reich, look it up, in Thuringia exactly, that beautiful and magnificent province, the region of Jena and Weimar, and the mountains between Weimar and the Czech border.
1:46:55 Very beautiful. This weakness, I linger on it still, a minus, the negative—you see how it holds together. It's this weakness that made man's strength. For fire, in the literal sense and in the figurative sense. It's fire that allows metals to be forged, in the literal sense, which will make technology leap forward, right? It's not just like the seagull that takes a shell and flies up a few meters so it falls back and shatters on the rocks under gravity, so it can eat what's inside.
1:47:32 Because it didn't have a hammer to do that on the ground. No, no. Metallurgy will appear and bring the passage from prehistory to history, soon the end of the Neolithic, as they say. I remind you that this is an extraordinary progress in many respects, but I understand you might be skeptical since you haven't lived in poor countries.
1:48:03 What it's like to walk miles and miles every morning to fetch water, instead of just turning on a tap. Well, we'll come back to that another time. But we still need to think about it here since we're talking about the tool, right? The tool can still be the chipped flint, the primordial stage of the tool, chronologically speaking, but it can also be a particle accelerator or a laser scalpel.
Surplus value and premature birth: a minus that makes a plus 1:48:37 So, I stay on this minus. You think... No, no, we're not done. The heart of Marxian theory, of Marxian analysis of modern production, is surplus value—well, of general production and especially of production in the industrial world and in bourgeois civil society, to make a sort of pleonasm, since "civil society" is said in German as "bourgeois society," bürgerliche Gesellschaft, Bürger meaning here inhabitant of the town, of the cities, of the city, as opposed to the peasantry of the countryside.
1:49:12 What does he say? The heart that explains the production of value is surplus value. Surplus value, in Marx, doesn't come from a "plus," exactly, as the word might suggest. It's naive to believe that the capitalist is someone who always wants a bigger margin, not a bigger profit. Well yes, he can always multiply the price of his product by four to increase his profit, except that he won't sell any, because the capitalist has one great misfortune.
1:49:47 Well yes, he doesn't have everything going for him, he still has a handicap, which is that he's not the only capitalist on the market. He has competitors, so he mustn't sell too expensively either, otherwise he'll sell nothing at equal terms. So the calculation of the price is going to happen on a sliding scale that tries to push the price as high as possible, but which also pulls it down to account for competition.
1:50:19 That's the theory of value. Except, the secret that Marx saw in capitalism is that surplus value is obtained—surplus value, not profit, which is one of its many aspects, nor rent—Marx says that all of this, profits, rent, are species of surplus value. That's the generic concept that was missing before Marx. It comes from a part of the working time, of the time devoted by the worker employed by the one who uses him, from a part of this working time that is not remunerated.
1:51:00 It comes from a minus. Because if labor were paid at its full value, it would be a null operation. Come on, very quickly, because I don't want to dwell too long, given the time you've kindly granted to some rather difficult abstractions at times. A ton of cotton in the form of raw cotton is worth—I'm just making up a figure—1000 francs.
1:51:32 Sorry, I'm a bit old-fashioned. 1000 euros. And I'm making this up, it depends on the year, the market prices, the places, and the crises. The same ton—I'll assume there are no scraps, no losses, it's a bit abstract—in the form of a shirt, the same cotton in the form of a shirt, is worth 1500 or 2000, whatever. 1500, let's say, to simplify the calculation, 1500 euros. You're not stupid, you've guessed that the passage from raw cotton to cotton shirt requires labor, and therefore workers.
1:52:10 This requires a transformation. What is the value of this labor? You tell me right away, it's 500 euros. Well, listen, I, the capitalist, bought my ton of cotton for 1000 francs from Egypt, from the cotton producers—it's a bit further south than us. Cotton needs to have its feet in water and its head roasted by the sun, that's it. Egypt is great for that, with the Nile. It's the cotton irrigation region. The dry, hot, irrigated region.
1:52:41 I paid 1000 francs for my ton of raw cotton. I gave 500 francs, its value, to the worker, since that's what he added as value. Why did I go to all this trouble? It's a null operation, it doesn't hold up. If I give the worker the full price of his labor, if I give him a remuneration equivalent to the value he produced, to the surplus value he produced, I make no margin at all.
1:53:12 It's a subtraction. Promethean man, who has less than other animals, who is less specialized, fortunately, because he's not condemned to live either in the forest, or at the North Pole, or here, like the polar bear. The polar bear of the Amazon doesn't last long because it's spotted quickly. When it's surrounded by ice, man can live at the pole, even in space capsules, in the forest, in the desert, in temperate zones, and soon on other planets.
1:53:45 That's where we see that he's not hyper-specialized. He's specialized in the sense where I want to get to. The weakness I've been insisting on for a good while, his strength, is that it's going to pass through the tool in order to reinforce itself.
1:54:15 And here we see the common point. I'll show you with surplus value in Marx, okay? But not only that. Cunning, earlier, you see, it all holds together now. I use cunning because I am weaker. It's starting from a minus that science, technology, the cunning of reason appears.
1:54:46 So we can say that everything man has added to the animal he was at the start, and which he remains in part until the end of his life—in fact, feeding himself, needing water, etc., people move on, and sugar and salt, and reproducing as a species—the human animal has been able to produce a trans-animal world, properly anthropological and not merely zoological.
1:55:17 Not only, he is also zoological, man. But he is zoon politikon, as Aristotle says. He's the social animal. We say the political animal. It's a bit of a stretch, a bit forced, Aristotle's text. That is, the animal that lives in society. So think carefully about what we're seeing here. It's the ruse by which man was able to survive, for he is not viable at the start. Man, at birth—again, theology had foreseen it: 'in pain you shall bring forth children.'
1:55:51 Even if it attributes this to sin, with religious alienation, that's another matter. But it remains scientifically demonstrated that the human species is premature, is, so to speak, a preterm birth. Now, of course some are more premature than others, the ones we call premature, those born before nine months, but nine months is already a bit short compared to what was originally intended at the natural level when we were quadrupeds. And the transition to upright bipedal posture, by narrowing the pelvic bones, caused an obstetric catastrophe, making childbirth much more complex in the human species than in the vast majority of the animal world.
1:56:35 And you see how long it takes a little human to try to stand on his legs and walk, whereas I've really seen, in the African savanna, little wildebeest calves, little gazelles, ready within a few hours, a few days, to flee with the herd and a danger on their little legs and little hooves. So, completed much faster, if you will. And so you see how it all holds together, this minus, this weakness has made the life of relation central and essential to man, without which he would not have been viable.
1:57:12 I said it earlier: if the Bronze Age child hadn't benefited from a higher stage of technological development than that of stone, he would have disappeared faster. So it's this weakness that makes strength. What a dialectic! It's this minus that makes the plus. So let's think about it, right?
1:57:45 Every time we talk about negativity, it's to produce a plus, whereas the sign for negative is minus. There you go. I've tired you out a bit with this constant back and forth from the abstract to the concrete—that's why I've taken many examples, so it wouldn't remain too abstract either. But you see that I'm not exaggerating when I say the world—not the earth, the earth, man has nothing to do with it. But on the other hand, what man has made of it, the Egyptian world, the world of the monarchy, of the classical age, the feudal world, the world of the Brazilian peasant, the extraordinary universe of the Australian Aboriginal and his vision of the cosmos and of the Dreaming—that, on the other hand, is no longer within the biological programs.
1:58:37 Without biology, none of this would exist. But if there were only biology, it wouldn't exist either. If we weren't hungry, if there were no instinct for hunger, which owes nothing to human specificity, which exists not only in the animal world but throughout the living world—plants too need to feed themselves—if there were no hunger, there would be no meals, I agree. If there were no hunger instinct, there would be no institution of meals. But the institution of meals cannot be explained by hunger alone.
1:59:11 For hunger, I can satisfy it just as well with chopsticks as with forks, just as well with a nice tablecloth on Sunday as by eating quickly what I bought at a fast-food place on a public bench. You see, matter remains and form is lost. It's form, it's the form that man gives, as soon as he can, to the world around him. It's in this form that the ends he pursues are legible.
1:59:41 And if I put out an embroidered tablecloth, a bit nicer, to treat myself on Sunday to celebrate my son's or my wife's birthday, and so on, and I invite friends, all these rituals have no biological reason at all. The steak isn't better or more nourishing on a nice tablecloth than on oilcloth, or even with no tablecloth at all. This is important, what we're seeing here.
Collective surplus value and private vampirization 2:00:12 There we go. I've taken quite a bit of time since it's past 11pm. I'd like to know if there are any comments for now. I'm going to anyway... Ah well, excuse me, it jumps out at me. There is a part of surplus value, says Geoffrey, whom I'm always glad to see again, that it is necessary to extort from labor in order to finance progress. A null operation only allows you to reproduce the same thing.
2:00:43 Very good question. Even if it appears to some as a critique of Marxism. No. Marx saw very well what's intelligent in the question. He saw it in particular in one of his masterpieces, the famous Critique of the Gotha Programme, and Erfurt too. Gotha and Erfurt are cities where the German working class had gathered during the first Internationals. And Marx had allowed himself to revisit certain points, certain decisions of the workers' International, saying that one must be careful.
2:01:20 For example, and here I'm answering Geoffrey's question, when it was said that the worker must be given back the entire product of his labor without anything being extorted from him. We agree on that, Geoffrey? Ah yes, in that case, what are we going to give to someone who doesn't work — to the child, to the elderly, to retirees? How are we going to renew the tools of production if we don't save anything? So it is not exploitation at all not to pay for labor in full.
2:01:55 The whole point is whether this part that's set aside is kept private, with whoever extorts it doing whatever he wants with it — buying himself an island in the Bahamas, and there are those who even have several islands. Or whether it becomes public wealth, reinvested so that there is progress in medical research, because labor never stops at that level.
2:02:29 The magnificent chorus of Sophocles' Antigone about this marvel that is man, deinotaton — dein, the same root as in dinosaur. Not great. Hegel's text, fascinating, said there's something terrible when you look man in the eye with this negativity, and that here, it remains as it is, empty, capable of doing the worst as well as the best. Well, deinotaton, this marvel that is man — that's usually how it's translated, to say marvelous, it's along the same lines as prodigy, miraculous — it's the text from Sophocles' Antigone: he tamed the oceans, he tamed, he appropriated the earth, and he broke horses to his will — only against death he has found no remedy.
2:03:18 So medicine still has a lot of progress to make, doesn't it? There we are — death is the one thing for which no remedy has been found, but still, with developed medicine, one has more — life expectancy in the last African country I lived in, in Niger, is 44 years. And yes, in countries without industry, in case anyone thinks they're dying because of fine particulate matter — that's how I answer Geoffrey. Yes, it is necessary, but it's not extortion — it's necessary to levy, with democratic control over what's done with it, so that it goes back to the community, and then this minus becomes a plus.
2:03:59 Exactly like the very first farmers, who didn't eat everything but kept some seeds, didn't they, to sow again, once they'd understood that instead of migrating every day until exhausting themselves and dying on the move, they could plant the field and have food at hand, so to speak, at the cost of quite a bit of effort.
2:04:29 There you go. Thank you for the question, Geoffrey, which let us distinguish collective surplus value, which goes in the direction of the general will, from the extortion of surplus value and its vampirization for the benefit of private interests. What we have been living through since, let's say — I don't want to name too many names — since Giscard, roughly speaking, chronologically, that's when the beginning of the end, the beginning of the decline began, that is, everything that was reversed — it took 50 million dead for pay-as-you-go pensions, social security, everything that is levied in the collective interest, to exist — there we clearly see what that means.
2:05:15 As for me, all my heart medications — I go to the pharmacy, I pay nothing. Full reimbursement. Many countries are stunned to see that in France. It took struggles to get that. It's important here to distinguish this levy for the benefit of the general will from the vampirization that begins around the end of the 1960s, roughly, and which accelerates prodigiously under Mitterrand, then afterward — I don't even count anymore — Hollande, Sarkozy, and Macron.
2:05:58 I say this because I'm tired of seeing so many people think that if Macron goes, that's it, our problems are solved. Do you think those who pulled Macron out of their sleeve, the world of finance, won't find another one? You're not going to turn Macron into a Mozart, someone irreplaceable. Come on! I say Mozart, or Charlie Parker, whatever — that gets me. Come on! There you go. So there are indeed several ways of levying.
2:06:28 Laurent Angot. Good evening Laurent. We should see each other again. Sorry, excuse me, I'm not playing favorites. I like Laurent a lot because he has an unusual literary culture, even though he has a scientific background. He himself says he's a thwarted man of letters. I'm drawing a bit on your thinking here, Laurent, but we understand each other. And here, you see, he gives me this magnificent quote from Kafka, from his diary.
2:06:58 "In your struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world," says Kafka, "support the world." Thank you, Laurent. And thanks also for the Balzac and following on to Elie/Aragon. The thing in itself — I delight every time I read the developments on "la chose en soi" on YouTube. What can be said about all of modern economics, which claims to challenge value based on labor time in order to replace it with the idea that value rests on utility?
2:07:36 Ah, good heavens, it does one good sometimes to go against the dominant ideology. Bravo to La Chose en Soi for this work of resistance. I'm serious. Questioning pragmatism is an act of resistance. And yes, I say it in English, I'm not racist. There are things I admire in the American world, in the English world — there are even irreplaceable things. But precisely not pragmatism. And even Althusser, whom I often criticize, I'll give him this point — I don't give it often, but I give it to him here — when he mocks the most common formula, a popular British expression, by which pragmatism is illustrated to mock philosophers, those who reflect, who are intellectuals, who seek meaning, significance, reason, value.
2:08:31 What is truth? You know the English answer: the proof of the pudding is in the eating. That's pragmatism. The truth of a thing is what it's used for. What's it doing here? It serves a purpose in there. But he says marvelously — yes, he says — it remains to be seen whether what's being served to me really is pudding, and not a cooked elephant in a bain-marie. End of quote. Some people think they're being served music.
Cybernetics, the raw and the cooked, the third term between two contraries 2:09:01 For my part, I'm willing — for your gleaning children, as the saying goes. There we go. Thank you very much, La Chose en Soi, and until my next reading of your productions, which are so many episodes of intellectual resistance. Emy. Good evening, Emy. I'm getting senile, so I'm afraid I might forget that we've already seen this, but I don't think so.
2:09:32 What is cybernetics, which speaks of a third term, tertium datur, namely information, which is neither mind nor matter, and which affects the classical boundaries between subject and object. I've always, I always have sympathy — I'm choosing very cautious terms that don't commit to much — for anything that goes beyond what is one-sided, "einseitig," as Hegel says.
2:10:02 "Seite" is "côté," "side" in English, what is only on one side. Materialism against idealism, idealism against materialism, spiritualism against the crudely material — what matters is precisely what is neither above nor below, neither left nor right, but where they meet. Where matter becomes interiorized — we saw earlier the image, I close my eyes and the tree becomes a representation.
2:10:34 Or the project that the architect has, as Marx speaks of, who has his house in his head before producing it in reality, who has his plan — even if, once again, that doesn't protect you from the rain, you don't live in a house made of paper. That's the essence. But for the house to enter into existence, you need the worker, the engineer, the contractor, not just the architect. So yes, everything important lies between the two — even someone like Lévi-Strauss, who is extremely subtle on this point, who spent almost his whole body of work distinguishing, opposing nature and culture, and yet when he speaks of all the myths of the origin of fire among the Amazonian Indians — even though they had no contact with each other, being in regions sometimes kilometers apart — it is always the jaguar in this mythology that is the main predator, the main beast of prey, so to speak, of the Amazon jungle.
2:11:30 There aren't many large animals in the forest, especially since it teems with small ones, believe me, it's a nightmare. Small creatures — the leading causes of death in the world are malaria and mosquitoes. On the other hand, there are giants among the small creatures in the forest — I'm not straying off topic, but there are the biggest snakes, the biggest insects, etc. But still, buffalo herds, elephants, they prefer the savanna. There is a small forest elephant, a bit more reddish, but smaller, because in the forest, movement is difficult.
2:12:02 So, after this zoological digression, excuse me — it's the jaguar in Indian myths who supposedly taught man to use fire for cooking food. Extraordinary. What intelligence! The Savage Mind is a title by Lévi-Strauss. It's the animal par excellence that eats raw. The jaguar, who in mythology — it's reversed — teaches man the cooking of food, the art of cooking, fire, and so on.
2:12:34 In short, it plays somewhat the role of Prometheus. Except, you see the dichotomy — that famous title by Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked — the role these two states of food play in anthropology. Very early on, men appreciated grilled meat. The raw and the cooked.
2:13:07 Between the two, there is something that, as Emy says here, is neither mind nor matter, long before computing existed. What is a marinade in cooking? It's cooked, but without fire. It's cooked and raw. So it's not the raw. You see why I don't like one-sided things. What's most interesting is always what is at the meeting point, what is fermented, what is marinated, what is moldy.
2:13:40 What do you mean, moldy? What, don't you like Roquefort? It's one of the most fabulous cheeses in the world. But yes, it's moldy for sure. Little green pockets — I won't even go as far as Corsican cheese, I'll get into trouble with my fellow countrymen again, but that's how it is, they know it well. And they themselves like to play tricks on visitors. And sometimes the cheese is so ripe that there are worms — worms that were born in sheep's milk and have known nothing but sheep's milk for their few days of life.
2:14:12 It's fine, it's not an infection. It provides protein. No, but what's interesting, comical, is that these cheeses are nicknamed "housing project cheeses" because there's a little head wiggling at every window, at every hole. But without going that far, the ripening of cheese is that you let it, not really rot, but ferment. What is booze? What is alcohol? You let wine go to a point where, if you leave it further, it becomes undrinkable.
2:14:42 So there's a threshold between raw and cooked, between cooked by fire, mechanically cooked, chemically cooked — Tahitian-style fish. You know, all night the fish is left to marinate in lemon, in herbs. The lemon attacks it. So bravo, Emy, for drawing our attention to what is neither A nor non-A, this excluded middle rejected by classical mathematical logic, isn't that so?
2:15:12 It's A or non-A. This is a mobile phone, or it isn't a mobile phone. There's nothing in between, there's no "you're my friend, we can discuss it, I'll give you a good price." No. That's classical logic. Well, yes there is. Yes, yes. There are foods that are at once raw in some ways — they haven't been through cooking, through fire, through heat — but they are cooked by acid, they're marinated. It takes a bit more time, but how good it is.
2:15:42 There we go. Thank you, Amy. Well, I haven't talked about onboard computing because that's not my field and I'm afraid of saying nonsense, but it's good to talk about cybernetics and to recall that it comes from a Greek root, "governing," which you find in "government" and which means control over things. If only the feedback — the simple fact that a radiator is designed such that beyond a certain heat, it stops heating and cools back down, it self-regulates.
2:16:17 It's extraordinary — it's already cybernetics without electricity, if you think about it. There you go. Thank you very much, Amy, in any case, for helping us see, for preparing us for dialectics — that's what interests me, that is, the place where the two opposites meet, and so either they annihilate each other, or they create a movement in which both disappear.
2:16:47 And I'll conclude my answer to Amy's question. I see a little red logo on her icon. That's what makes me think of this beautiful line by Nerval: "Release the crimson flowers to the current of the streams." Don't hold on, don't hold on — there isn't what is mine here and then what I throw into the river and which is no longer mine and goes away and doesn't come back. You have to know how to give fire its due, and water its due.
Colonization as a cunning of reason 2:17:18 "Release the crimson flowers to the current of the streams." Reconcile, doesn't it, the temporal and the permanent. Thank you very much, Amy. I think that... Louis Charles, greetings Louis Charles. Those are names not far from Napoleon — it's Napoleon's father who was named Charles. On the theme of the cunning of reason, if Napoleon can be considered an instrument, is the same true of colonization?
2:17:52 There are a billion examples of the cunning of reason. I'll answer your question more precisely. Now, I'm not going to dodge it — I was born under colonization. I was born in Vietnam, I grew up in Africa during the last years of colonization. I was in class with the son of the last governor of Dahomey. I'm so old, so ancient, that it wasn't yet called Benin, was it? It was still called the kingdom of Dan, Dan Homé. I'm not straying off topic because the history is very interesting.
2:18:22 But Louis Charles's question combines and connects beautifully with a remark, a comment made to me last time. I'm sorry, I'm forgetting the name, it'll come back to me, but I don't have it immediately in mind, though I forget others too. I mean, there are things concerning me, believe me — I'd love to have more memory, but with age it's hard to keep hold of everything.
2:18:55 So maybe I've released too many flowers to the current of the streams. There was a comment saying that those who went — this was when I commented on Cheikh Hamidou Kane's text, where the Grande Royale of the Diallobé, who is the most hostile to the arrival of the whites, decides — I'm starting to answer Louis Charles's question — in order to fight them, to send the African children to the new school, the one the whites bring with their baggage, because she saw that their power lies not in their cannons but in what is behind the cannons, in their knowledge, in science, in technique, in cunning.
2:19:33 Because in hand-to-hand combat, believe me, even the French colonial armies, to stick to those, had a terrible time with the famous Amazons of Béhanzin. Yes, Béhanzin had a battalion of Amazons who were fearsome warriors. Well, that's not my subject — I'm answering Louis Charles's question and this comment from a friend from the Maghreb, whose name I've forgotten because I'm afraid of confusing him with someone else, so I won't specify too much, who had said: "This is the moment to recall that the greatest revolutionary leaders who were the spearhead of their country's independence and the anticolonial struggle..."
2:20:25 Ben Bella, I had mentioned him, or Ho Chi Minh — Ben Bella for the Algerian war, Ho Chi Minh for the Indochina war, not the Vietnam war, that came later with the Americans — poor country, which spent two generations fighting against the two greatest imperialisms of the time. English imperialism was already beginning to decline. So, I'm getting to the heart of the answer to Louis Charles. Those who played a vanguard role in the struggle for their country's independence were those who knew how to use, who had been excellent students at the colonial school.
2:21:03 So, in that sense, yes — a very fine example, Louis Charles, thank you very much — the colony builds schools not because it absolutely wants Africans to become independent; originally it's because personnel are needed. Clerks are needed in the offices, to type up reports, to do the cleaning, this and that, people have to be employed. And then afterward, somewhat more sophisticated skills are needed. So, I don't know, nurses are needed at the hospital, to assist the French doctor who is there, the cooperation doctor, or the colonel doctor, since at first these were military doctors, to whom I owe part of my survival.
2:21:47 So it's very important — Richard's question lets us see the complete unconscious side there is, not unconscious in the sense of something I repress, that I don't want to know, but materially, outside of my head, so to speak. That is, it was not at all intended by those who established the colonial school that Ben Bella, on one side, or Ho Chi Minh, on the other, would use that knowledge to drive the French — I was about to say out of France, no, that's the Hundred Years' War, that's the English — to drive the colonizer out.
2:22:30 And it's a long story, since as far as Mali and Burkina Faso are concerned, it's only now that people are getting out of it. I mentioned in this regard, continuing to answer his question, that I experienced archaeo-colonialism, colonialism if you like, the colony in the historical sense, but I also experienced neocolonialism, the kind that came after independence. When we installed whatever governments we wanted, when a head of state didn't suit us, we staged a military coup — and the first leaders, to continue answering the question, Modibo Keïta in Mali — I pay tribute to him, everyone has forgotten that at the time Mali had a relationship with the Soviet Union, but yes, a great revolutionary leader, Modibo Keïta, who wanted to go beyond his borders, to form a regional union with Senegal.
2:23:20 The Sankaras, much later, the Moup, what's his name, who was assassinated in Congo, one of the greatest leaders, Lumumba, Patrice Lumumba, isn't that right? After torturing him, they told him, you can go, he walked off staggering and they shot him in the back. It was the Belgians who orchestrated all of that by setting Africans at war with each other, isn't that right?
2:23:52 Just as they are now setting Slavs at war with each other, right? Down to the last Ukrainian, while they're at it. I'm right in the middle of answering the question. Why did I quote Ben Bella twice? Let me remind you, for those who weren't there. Because he's a hero of the war against the Germans. He was in the French army, enlisted, and distinguished himself at Monte Cassino. He received the Croix de Guerre. Monte Cassino, which was a terrible battle, wasn't it?
2:24:23 The hardest, no doubt, of the Italian campaign, after the Allied landing in Italy. Returning to his little village in Algeria at the end of the war, he wasn't thinking of capitalizing on it, that's saying a lot, but I mean, he didn't have excessive ambition, he asked for a position as village warden in his village. He was sent packing. No, but have you looked at yourself, no, oh, village warden, that's not for you. That's for Hernandez, Pagani, well, because there were Italians, Spaniards, among the pieds-noirs.
2:24:58 Well, he took to the maquis, and we know how that ended. As for Ho Chi Minh, he worked in Paris in a print shop, he was a founding member of the Congress of Tours, which founded the Communist Party. He's not just the Vietnamese peasant, but he's the one who was recognized by the Vietnamese peasants. That one is one of ours. The one who said there is nothing more precious than independence and freedom.
2:25:28 There you go, so yes, yes, well if there's a fine example of the cunning of reason, that is, of something that comes about and was not at all in the minds of those who produced the material tool, it is indeed colonization. This is not to praise colonization, it's to praise its proper use by the colonized. Thank you very much, Louis-Charles.
2:26:01 I don't want to take up too much of your sleeping time, but once again I ask, ending where I began, for your forgiveness, even though we're really not to blame, for the mishaps of this evening where we're broadcasting only on YouTube and not simultaneously on YouTube and Facebook, but we've sent a request for an explanation to Facebook, and we'll no doubt get an explanation.
2:26:33 So let me tell you right away that I started getting paranoid, I thought we were being censored, what's going on? Not at all, because the page is accessible. I'm going to check the Philosophie économique par Pagani page. But we, who were administrators, that's how I noticed it wasn't working anymore, we can no longer write anything on it, we can't post. There you go. We won't go into detail, but I couldn't anyway because we're trying to get to the bottom of it and if people as qualified as Pierre-Alain and Philippe are themselves puzzled, but active, it's not being puzzled with your mouth hanging open waiting for it to pass, we'll have news soon and you'll be kept informed.
2:27:15 In any case, I'm so happy to have been able to keep this going, just when we're starting to regain some regularity, it would have broken my heart. It's not about using this incident as an excuse to cancel this evening's session. Thank you all. Thank you Pierre-Alain. Thank you Philippe Moreau. And until the next session. I hope very soon. I can tell you right away that we'll soon have new live readings, readings on the fly. There you go.
2:27:46 Have a very good rest of your evening, and thank you again from the bottom of my heart.
