English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Reunion and the immersive exhibition Noir at Beaubourg 2:13 How glad I am to be back with you, the interruption was a bit long, several factors combined to extend this break that I had wanted, but a little more than it should have. On the one hand, I had to have some health checks, I'll reassure you right away, I'll say, however much I complain, it seems there's nothing alarming, I'm delighted to confirm that to you.
2:57 And then, the Easter holidays got grafted onto that, and there you go, it had been a long time since I'd travelled, I won't have many more chances to travel, so I took a little trip to the provinces, and thirdly, just when I could be available again in Paris, Pierre-Alain was no longer available, and fortunately for us, and for him, but for us, because the exhibition I vaguely told you about has begun, it's open to the public at the Pompidou Centre, it's called Noir, ask at the front desk, N-O-I-R, since it's the story, the extraordinary story, of that African-American girl, you know, who refused, by refusing to give up her seat on the bus to white people at a time when the most unspeakable apartheid reigned, not in South Africa, but among the leaders of the free world, mind you, not so long ago, practically opened the sequence, sometimes painful and dramatic,
4:12 but magnificent, of the emancipation, of the struggle for rights, you know, one dare not even say the minority, it's so numerous, and it forms a people in itself, the African-American people, there you go. So it's a magnificent, but above all it's an exhibition, not of photos, of written documents, etc., but a holographic, hologrammic exhibition, I don't know how you're supposed to say it, immersive, you know, and I've seen a few on other subjects, astronomical and so on, but no comparison at all, here you're really inside it, it's extraordinary, well, I'm not going to advertise, I was almost going to say pro domo, since Pierre-Alain is, to me, a close friend, but bravo to the whole team, you know, and don't miss going to see the Noir exhibition, if you want to know more, go to the website of the company that Pierre-Alain runs around his holographic shows, called Novaya, N-O-V-A-Y-A, there you go, and you'll see a very beautiful, a very fine website, I'm going to make him blush, but I'll say,
The opening of The Marriage of Figaro: going into society 5:22 and beyond that, which will only encourage you even more, and better than I can, to go to this exhibition, but the thing is I wasn't going to ask him, in the midst of the throes of such an important event, to also come and take care of editing my videos, so all that made things drag on a bit, and I'm all the more glad to see you again, to see him again, to be together again. And yes, so, I'm plunging straight into this title, starting with the beginning of this video, that is, the introduction you just heard, well, the musical theme, as often happens to me, which was nothing other than the marvelous overture to Mozart's Marriage of Figaro.
6:22 A few small reminders, an overture, some people don't know this, I'm thinking especially of young people who aren't used to this repertoire, an overture in an opera is the part where nobody sings, it's before the curtain rises and we see stage action, it's the orchestra, so, a purely symphonic sequence, where the orchestra announces a bit the mood of what's going to happen when the curtain rises. And this mood introduces us to the theme we're going to deal with this evening.
6:55 One gets the impression that in this incredible overture, which has a feverishness, an alacrity that only Mozart deploys in music. You know, like children playing like crazy, but with a maturity of execution, of construction, that you rarely see even in childhood, that's the Mozart miracle, that's it. In short, it's as if Mozart, at least in the theme, is telling us, oh la la, it's marvelous, we're going out into society tonight.
Caring about the world rather than the earth 7:27 Well, we're going to the theatre. And what is theatre, if not the most worldly genre of literature? And yes, I'm beginning, you see, to unfold some meaning, some connotation of the concept that's going to occupy us. Worldliness, the world, the epithet worldly, all this revolves around a root which is the world. Excuse the expression. You've already heard me say that I care more about the world than about the earth.
8:03 And yes, this scandalizes the environmentalists. First of all, because I'm not paranoid, in paranoia there's still megalomania which is the main dimension of paranoia along with persecution delusion. Those are the two great symptoms that define the syndrome, the set of symptoms that allows one to diagnose paranoia when it's pronounced at a pathological level. Otherwise, we're all paranoid at times.
8:35 Why did I say I'm not a megalomaniac? By believing that I, myself, could care about the planet. But the planet, it will be there, even when all of humanity—because humanity is not eternal, well, on Earth, as it's currently developing—if it comes to that, it may only survive at the cost of emigrating to other planets. Forgive me for making fiction, sci-fi, whatever you want, you never know. There could be, there could be, you know, a meteorite, it's happened 36 times in the past, I don't see why all of a sudden—nature is much more merciless with itself than man is, mind you, I'm not talking about nature in general, there are plenty of cataclysms, don't forget that the biggest nuclear plant in our nearby suburbs is the sun, after all.
9:25 So, we can no longer denature the sun. We have no effect on the planet as such, it can change, there was a time when there were only volcanoes on the planet, only volcanoes, that could come back, there was a time when there was only ice, on the contrary there was an era when there were practically only deserts, there have been the worst extremes. You're going to say to yourselves, Pagani, I thought we were talking about worldliness, we started off nicely with Mozart, the wigs and all, and now here he is off on his anti-ecological rant.
10:00 No, I am never anti-ecological, I am anti-ecologist. That's about discourses, ecologism. Besides, there are realities, apart from discourses, that sometimes pose genuinely serious problems on the ecological level. Let's not mix things up. So, yes, I care more about the world. The world is relations between men. If we talk about the Roman world, the world of the pygmies of central Africa, that's a world, the world of the Indians of the Altiplano or the high plateaus of the Andes, isn't it?
10:38 There, I'm taking spatial diversities, but in time, I could say, yes, I could use the Roman Empire, but we can speak of the world that serves as backdrop to the Age of Enlightenment, the world constituted by the century of Trianon, of Versailles, when Versailles is no longer the Grand Palace, but the little—it's in keeping with Mozart's music which is contemporary with that—the little games of Blind Man's Buff at Marie-Antoinette's farm and the games and revels at the Petit or Grand Trianon.
11:19 All that is worlds and worlds, it presupposes a constitution by man. So, how should we speak about it? There, I've just—I started with this sequence corresponding to the overture of The Marriage of Figaro to be immediately in tune with the meaning, the most common, most conventional signification of what we call worldliness.
11:53 I'm going out into society tonight. You noticed right away that if I say I'm going out into society, it doesn't mean I'm going to some awful little dive, you know, to ask at the bar for a glass of red wine. Because there, I'm going out, but that's not going into society. Society is always somewhat high society. I say somewhat, according to each person's means, right? There you go. In short, come on, each one of you, each one of us, has had the occasion at least once, you know, to go rub shoulders with high society.
Voltaire, Le Mondain and the Letter on Commerce 12:31 So, you see, I started with this light aspect that I connote a bit with the excess of champagne which is often, champagne is often at the heart of this worldliness. Remember, I think I already quoted it, yes, but in another context, the way Voltaire, a great man of the world, you know, a habitué of eighteenth-century salons, not a vagabond like Rousseau, mind you, who plays truant, who can no longer go back home because he stayed out too long outside the walls of Geneva, the gates are closed when he returns and suddenly he's condemned to wander the roads, you know, doing all sorts of odd, sometimes dubious jobs, before achieving the great writing career that will bring him glory, even when he will have an almost incomparable literary glory in the Age of Enlightenment, except perhaps with people like Voltaire, precisely, even then he will always remain somewhat on the margins, you know, of that high society that will have frequented him, but into which he will never have
13:41 integrated, especially since he will never integrate into it. So, yes, Voltaire wrote a poem called Le Mondain, how convenient, isn't it, no, it's not a caricature of some show-off dandy with ribbons, no, it's not the worldling one could caricature precisely, no, in fact it's the very one who embodies Voltaire's own thought, the one who, yes, I'm starting to unfold it, the one who illustrates the happiness there is in being in society.
14:16 I'm now moving from the concept of world, and therefore of worldliness, of the worldling, to that of happiness, which are going to be paired. And before telling you the closing line of this text, this magnificent text—not as a poet, Voltaire is not a very great poet, he's a marvelous writer, he's never as brilliant as in his tales, in his letters, in his correspondence; in poetry, he doesn't have the sense of grand lyricism, nor even of the small kind, for that matter.
14:46 There you go, but it's well turned. So, rather than give you an excerpt from this poem which is a bit long, I'm going to quote you the closing line of a text taken from his first major publication, the Letters concerning the English Nation. Because at the time, I'm making reminders, I can't help it, it's my teacher side, one must pass on everything that's no longer being passed on.
15:19 No, I'm not saying things were better before. On that particular subject, yes, things were better before, in schools. On that subject, things were going much worse. So, the English Letters, it's no accident that this was his first publication, because in the eighteenth century, in the Age of Enlightenment, the model is England. The model for the French writers of the Enlightenment, they look toward England, which is an economic model where the industrial revolution has just taken place, where this bourgeoisie is developing, which will soon rise to power throughout Europe and take over from what, for centuries, had held power, that is, the aristocratic feudality, the feudal monarchy, whether absolute or parliamentary.
16:07 There you go. Already, on the economic level, there's this model. First trading nation of Europe, of Europe, and first industrial nation, that's the economic model; political model, I just alluded to it, it's a monarchy, but not like in France where we groan, I mean, absolute monarchy, but there's a monarchy, or the famous formula of parliamentary monarchy: the prince has his hands free to do good and his hands tied to do evil, because parliament prevents him from indulging virtually all his whims.
16:50 Whereas France's motto is that at the end of every decree, he could add "for such is our good pleasure" as the only justification. That has some flair too, all the same. Anyway, there you go, I can tell you, it's not quite the same model. It's a matter of models of values. Economic model, political model, religious model—for Voltaire, this matters, tolerance. There's a letter on the Quakers, for example, there's the state of sects among Protestants, since Protestants are less politically unified than Catholics are through papal and Vatican authority.
17:24 There's also that side of things, that's the drawback too, not everything is black or white, in the reformed religions—the proliferation of sects. There you go. I'm going a bit fast, but these are reminders. For all these reasons, England is a model. For everyone, for Montesquieu, for making the trip, for going to meet Hume, in short. So, in the English Letters, they're letters like that, each one has a subject, letters on Newton, on I don't know, a scientific model too.
18:09 The regard enjoyed by those we'd call today the great scientific researchers—the queen can ennoble someone of common birth who, because of the great advances he brings to humanity, deserves to be ennobled, for example. And then, I'll give you an excerpt from the letter called "Letter on Trade," precisely. Where he compares, you know, the arrogance of the French great lord who despises work in general, and even more so manual labor, let's not even mention that, but even the work of the shopkeeper, the merchant, the trader, which is—
18:55 We find that a bit again when we say "Oh, it's his Poujadist side." Politically, we're right to be wary of the movement called Poujadism. On the other hand, if it refers to small business in general, that's unfair. So, I'll let Voltaire speak because there, he's brilliant. In France, anyone who wants to can be a marquis. And whoever arrives in Paris from the depths of some province with a name ending in -ac or -ille—"Chirac, Couve de Murville, hasn't changed much, well, that's not your generation, but still."
19:38 And whoever arrives in Paris from the depths of some province with a name ending in -ac or -ille can say "A man like me, a man of my quality, sovereignly despises a merchant." Yet I do not know which is more useful to his country: a well-powdered lord who knows exactly what time the king rises, what time he goes to bed, and who gives himself airs of slavery in a minister's antechamber, or a merchant who from his counting-house gives orders to Surat or to Cairo and contributes—wait, I'm coming back to my point—to the happiness of the world.
20:26 There's the closing line. Look at it, the closing line, it's golden in color, the happiness of the world, an enormous champagne bubble. Yes, Voltaire, liberal in spirit, really believes, you know, this is his own way of illustrating in advance the famous trickle-down hypothesis whose proof we're still waiting for. We'd love for it to trickle down. In fact, we see that the more wealth accumulates, the more it concentrates in the hands of the 1%, you know.
20:59 Well, in any case, it doesn't accumulate among those who create it. But you see, I'm keeping the expression, the closing line, that's it, it contributes to the happiness of the world. Happiness and the world, they're linked. Remember, when I distinguished notions, yes, philosophy is giving a purer sense to the words of the tribe, as you've often said, recently, when we did—thanks to Philippe—when we did the live reading of magnificent excerpts from Mallarmé's text called "Restricted Action"
Happiness presupposes a relation to the world and a duration 21:44 before it became "Conflit," well, within it, I had asked you to distinguish, yes, it's Mallarmé who says the poet is the one who gives a purer sense to the words of the tribe, I close the parenthesis on the reference to Mallarmé, and that's where we see it, what "the tribe" means here is the world. And the link, it's right there, isn't it?
22:15 Sorry, that's my cat being naughty. Namely, I spoke of the earth earlier, you see that has nothing to do with the world, there could be nobody, not only no world, but not even a single person on earth, and the earth would continue to exist, it existed for far longer before there was any world upon it, you see, we can play with words as much as we like, you can clearly see it's not the same thing when we confuse the earth and the world, that we must concern ourselves with the good functioning of the world, mind you, and not of the earth which will keep turning, whether the world turns well or badly.
22:52 So, there you go, the link between happiness and the world. But as for the difference between the earth and the world, I won't go back over it, it's established, we may have occasion to return to it, but it's a bit clearer now. Secondly, the link between the notion of world and that of happiness. Several times, I've had you distinguish, here too, giving a purer sense, distinguishing within ordinary usage, you know, peace—having inner peace, which one can have even in prison, in solitude as a passerby, salvation, well anyway, everything one can confuse—happiness, the beatitude of the saints after death, you know, with God, for those who believe in that, why not, mind you, we're not here to settle rather complex problems.
23:50 And with happiness—and I had told you what characterizes happiness by contrast, for example, with religious salvation, a century before the Age of Enlightenment, which is haunted by the problem of happiness—how many times have I told you that happiness is the value that brings together people as different, indeed as diametrically opposed, as Voltaire and Rousseau, for instance, mind you, yet they are both immense authors of the Enlightenment because their ideal is this something, let's say it now, that is achieved here below, without waiting for the beyond, which has a necessary relation to the world around us, doesn't it?
24:34 So, also different from the peace I might have in prison or all alone on a mountain like a yogi in India, which one must also respect, that holiness, if you will, mind you? I say a yogi, but it could be the hermit, there are so many in France, monasteries founded by a saint who wanted to withdraw from the world and retreat somewhere in a forest, in a cave provided with a spring, generally, it's often linked. The origins of monasteries are often springs.
25:04 That's the minimum required for someone withdrawing from the world. "If you drink this water, you will thirst again, but the water that I shall give you, you will never thirst again." That's because I'm going to quote you a passage from the Gospel in a moment, so I'm setting the tone a bit. So, you see, happiness has a necessary relation to the world.
25:34 We've just seen it. And my theme isn't happiness. My theme, for now, is the relation of happiness to the world, which I'm developing. It's still the world, the central theme today. But still, in order to understand it, since I'm linking it to happiness, let me recall that happiness—there are two elements, there are several, but two essential ones which, if you forget the others, by which you cannot go wrong, characterize in a specific way—sorry for the redundancy, characterize, specific—happiness, is that it has a relation to the world, so it's not beatitude after death, it's not inner peace without the relation to the world, since I can have that in prison, so relation to the world, but also a certain thickness of duration.
26:21 Otherwise, we confuse it, and I have nothing against it, with pleasure, enjoyment. But it's not the same, because there, it's a bit more evanescent. Enjoyment can be of an almost infinite intensity. But it's evanescent, whereas the world—most often, our moments of happiness are described in novelistic narration in the imperfect tense. You were taught this in school, it's not the mode, the tense, the mode that corresponds—both of them—to long duration, or else to things that were repeated.
26:55 This repetition presupposes that it lasted a certain time, "in the time when I was a child, in the time when I was a schoolboy"—the point of going to school makes my heart nearly break to say these words. As the unforgettable Villon says, "Mother," it's his most beautiful poem. Yes, memory, In Search of Lost Time is almost entirely filled with the imperfect tense, which is the tense in which we recall things that lasted, that thus left a mnesic trace, doesn't it?
27:27 There are two opposite things that get imprinted in memory. Memory is selective. One shouldn't believe it's a magnetic tape recording everything there is. No, no, no. That's what's needed for the positivists, cognitive science, whatever you like. No, no. No, memory is highly selective. It doesn't mean anything to say someone has a good memory, or doesn't. People tell me, oh really, Pagani, you have quite a memory when I recite a text. Yes, I have a memory for texts, and even then, not all of them. An article from Le Monde, if I read it, I won't know it by heart.
27:58 On the other hand, certain excerpts of poetry or highly musical prose, I retain much more easily. I'm not the only one. But on the other hand, I keep forgetting, I don't know, my keys, my phone, there you go, I mean, it doesn't mean anything to have a good memory or not. That's not how the faculties work. It's not a matter of having it or not. So, a thickness of duration—for it to get imprinted, to come back to my thread—either it was repeated often, it lasted a long time, or, on the contrary, it was very brief, but with a force and violence that we call trauma, for good or ill, a great joy, or a great misfortune.
28:42 Joy, joy, tears of joy, as Pascal says when he has his illumination. In an almost literal sense, since he speaks of fire, late at night. And in large letters, capitals, in the middle of the page, a paper found in his coat when he died, sewn in, which recounts an illumination. Yes, if you want to find it, on the internet, it's called "The Memorial," Pascal, "The Memorial," an astonishing document.
29:12 So, we now see more clearly the necessary relation happiness has to the world. And at the time of the French Revolution, which practically brings the Age of Enlightenment to its close, there emerges the marvelous figure, the unforgettable figure of Saint-Just, who will dare to say: "Happiness is a new idea in Europe."
29:42 The word world isn't there, but you can guess that a sentence like that coincides with the appearance of a new world. What we call the new regime, the new world. There you go. So there is indeed a necessary relation between the world and happiness. But you'll say to me, wait, happiness doesn't correspond at all to the image on the thumbnail illustrating the video, with the photo of that gang of four.
The world is a theater: Shakespeare and Nerval 30:20 I won't even say their names because they're too well known. Plenty of people will rightly tell me: for me, happiness is anything but the obscenity of those four characters, isn't it? Excuse me, I need to take my medication. No. Well, there you go. That's what we're going to unfold throughout this session.
30:56 You see, our reflection on worldliness is going to spend its time moving a cursor between two extremes. Worldliness in the most pejorative sense possible, which we just saw, and worldliness — and I come back to the beginning, to that Mozart theme — the childlike and total joy of going out to have fun this evening by going to the theater, to the theater of the world.
31:32 If you know Spanish literature a little, the teatro del mundo. Type that into a search in Spanish, teatro del mundo, and on Wikipedia you'll see that the world is a theater. And yes, a necessary relation of the world to happiness, isn't it? And now, of the world to theater. I told you, theater is the most worldly genre in literature. All the world is a stage.
32:02 Men and women merely players. All English schoolchildren know this recitation taken from As You Like It by Shakespeare. A wonderful comedy that takes place in a wonderful world outside the world. Outside the world — I'm playing on the word, to show you how problematic this notion is. That's what we're here for. Outside the world, we're outside the cities. Almost the whole play unfolds among characters who are basically rather aristocratic, but who don't look it because they're all disguised as common people, because they have political troubles, they've been somewhat driven from power, and they're almost picnicking throughout the whole play by the banks of rivers.
32:46 That's why I said it's a world outside the world, a bucolic world, otherwise it wouldn't be such a marvelous comedy. Well, since that's not our subject, I'll come back to what interests us in it: this recitation, this passage that has become a recitation for all the schoolchildren of Her Majesty. The whole world's a stage. All the world is a stage, on which men and women, whether they like it or not, are the actors.
33:24 The investment a Gérard de Nerval put into theater, the dream he had his whole life of achieving glory through a play, as his childhood friends Alexandre Dumas and Hugo had done, and with what success — that dream he had of triumphing in the theater is because when you have success in the theater, today it would be at the Cannes Festival, you get recognition, you get a crowd cheering you, because you can be a genius, you can be a painter of genius, with paintings nobody exhibits, and put absolute masterpieces that will only be recognized later in a garret, on the seventh floor — nowadays it would be the thirty-fifth, I don't know — of some slum building, in the painter's slum room.
34:15 You can be a musician of genius and be very little performed, but theater — I can't put on a play by myself at home, the way I can look at my paintings or play my piano piece. Even if it was a masterpiece, there will be no applause when I'm finished.
34:46 I'm talking about this because it played a role in his madness — when you look at the chronology, the efforts he made, going as far as he did with theater by writing L'Imagier de Harlem, a kind of essay about someone who supposedly invented printing in the 16th century. His reason couldn't withstand the tension that represented for him, precisely because of the worldly force of what was at stake: getting recognized in the theater.
The prince of this world and the woman at the center of evil 35:26 A necessary relation between worldliness, the world and happiness, between the world and theater, the theater of the world, since we've just seen that the world was a theater, a stage, as Shakespeare says. And I told you we'd unfold this between these two extracts. So we've seen the positive side of the notion of world, a happy world, a notion common to both Voltaire and Rousseau, that of happiness, which presupposes a world, a collectivity, that I'm not alone — I'm repeating a bit what I just said to sum it up, to better bring out now the contrast with the antithesis.
36:07 The point is that the world can embody, and here I come to the photo, everything that is worst. And where can we find a better illustration than in, perhaps, the most beautiful passages of the Gospel, for example in the Gospel of John? That's why I put the Passion of Christ next to the champagne bubble. Why the Passion? Because the Passion begins practically — well, of course, that's tied to Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Good Friday, Easter weekend — but anyway, the last evening with his disciples, just before the Passion, in the sense of receiving blows and carrying the cross, begins — that's Maundy Thursday, the last conversation with his disciples, undoubtedly the longest conversation Christ had with his disciples, and in which returns, almost obsessively if I may say so, an expression like: 'The prince of this world is coming, but he is already defeated, for his essence is a lie.'
37:15 The point is that the world is also the realm of the unsaid, of lies, and there, you see, Clouscard played admirably on the ambivalence I've just brought out. That's why I've fairly often positioned myself against this tendency toward a right-wing recuperation of Clouscard, which would only want to retain the world in its pejorative sense.
37:45 The world is just orgies, it's the bourgeoisie or the rich — as if it were that simple. And besides, as for moral affairs, I'm delighted, mind you, not that a wife cheats on her husband, but by what happens in the haystacks in the thick of peasant life — there we're not among the rich, but back in the day, to take a little break in the middle of exhausting field labor — what happens there not only doesn't concern me, but even if I managed to watch it, well, I don't see why I'd be upset.
38:27 It's their business, after all. And it's that censorious gaze, by what right do we intervene in what men and women do, whether women among themselves or men among themselves, for ten thousand years. Enough — as long as it hurts nobody. In itself, I mean, it's not the pleasure they feel that's an evil. Isn't that the Republic? Having the right to get all the pleasure you want, provided it hurts no one. Let's be clear.
38:59 No, no, Clouscard is not that. It's the world in its full range of meaning that can oscillate, precisely, depending on the political management it's subjected to, since I told you that what distinguishes the world from the Earth is human relations. It's not our relation to geology, to climate. It's our relations among men, among human beings. And yes, if I specify human beings, it's not because I'm afraid of getting hit by feminists — feminists, we're not into that kind of terrorism.
39:32 No, no, no. It's that indeed this raises a gender problem, this business of the world. Because if we look carefully at this puritanical critique I'm sketching out, the one attributed to Clouscard, and in which people want to lock him in, the world, going out into the world, meaning into a place where dubious, condemnable, sulfurous things happen, as the photo of the gang of four illustrates so well.
40:06 And if I position myself against that, it's precisely because that sense of the world always revolves around woman as a figure in the narrative. Since I was about to quote the Gospel to you, look at the Apocalypse, the descriptions of the beast, the beast of the Apocalypse.
40:37 Woman plays a central role in the description of the beast. She has fallen, Babylon, she has fallen, proud Babylon, you see? There's already an ecological critique there. What has fallen is the city with its debauchery, as if the countryside were pure and the city impure. Beware of the Khmer Rouge, the so-called Khmer Rouge, whom, as far as I'm concerned, I call the Khmer Greens, whose first great and deadliest action was to have Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, emptied out.
41:18 Emptying — that's unprecedented, a city of a million people, to go work at harvesting rice, that'll teach them, healthy labor, these people who had been trained not in Maoist communism, even if the Red Guards and China, certain Maoists who had lost power at the time and wanted to reconquer it through 14-year-old kids brandishing Kalashnikovs, former Mao comrades who had done the Long March — but that's another story.
41:48 You see that I'm neither pro- nor anti-Chinese — to each their China, to each their France. Pétain is no less French than de Gaulle, but you choose the France you love, and the one you want to identify with — I say this to those who confuse sovereignism with identitarianism. I'm for a sovereign France, but I don't lock France into an identity I detest. There's another identity of France, one worth fighting for.
42:20 There you go. A certain idea, as the other man used to say. So you see, it's not simple, but fortunately these are notions people tear each other apart over. So it's worth simplifying by looking closer, because complexity appears at first glance, doesn't it? When you start lifting the veil, and you look closely, it's not so complicated. You have to look properly. We're in the process, right, of commenting on the second great sense, after worldliness as emancipatory, happiness, the champagne bubble, to remember it through that emblematic image, and the world as a place of perdition with, at its center, woman.
43:13 I gave you the example of the beast of the Apocalypse, but I'll come back to that, to sacred scripture, but even outside of it, look at political opinion, look at what I call the Marie-Antoinette syndrome. I'm not defending — I'm on the side of the revolutionaries, not the royal family — but still, it's a bit unfair to always attack, even more than the sovereign whose legitimacy is rightly contested, to attack his wife even more, as if she embodied all the evil there is in the political regime.
43:58 Let's not exaggerate. And I say this about Brigitte Macron too, yes, I'm going to shock people. I'm not defending her. I'm defending her against those attacks. It's not that she's attacked as a woman, as... I'll stop there, because what's implied by that is so obscene. There are enough political liabilities in the profile of that kind of figure without adding what isn't political, what shouldn't be, and has been made so.
44:29 Private. I've said enough, haven't I? I've reproached Creon enough for encroaching on the private domain by meddling in how the dead should be buried, which is the business of the family, of loved ones, and of the private sphere. There, the public has no business getting involved. I've insisted enough on that for it to be understood what I mean: leave the private person alone, and denounce all these political vices.
The lie to oneself: the seventh Duino Elegy 44:59 There's plenty to work with there. I'll close this parenthesis. You see that woman is always somewhat at the center. I come back to the Gospel text after this excursion into the Marie-Antoinette syndrome, which I wanted to include because one must try to be fair, to speak of another example where woman is at the center in the gospel of evil. Roughly speaking, this is precise — it's not evil in a vague sense.
45:29 You saw? No, you heard it, but you've already forgotten. The prince of this world is coming — that's the devil — and his essence is a lie. Evil is defined in Christianity as a lie. The essence of evil. Why not? That seems a bit disproportionate, some will say. The kid who says 'It's not me who ate the candy' isn't exactly a monster.
46:02 Of course not. You see, we need to question the notion of lying, since we're talking about the lie of the world. 'Ah no, that's not that kind of lie.' So what is it then? What does it mean? They're not stupid in the Gospel. They're excessive, whatever you like, one can dispute it, but they're not stupid. Why? Christ says: 'The prince of this world is coming,' and his essence is a lie. That's it. It's not the child's lie, it's the lie to oneself.
46:38 What Sartre will call bad faith, if we want to spell it out, to show a few kinds of people who lie in the evangelical sense. It's when I don't want to know. I want to read you an excerpt from a Rilke elegy, the great Duino Elegies — there are ten of them. I'll read you an excerpt from the seventh. The first ones are still somewhat under the shock of the crisis he went through, the depression, and then the seventh marks the change of tone, it's the salvation, he recovers his literary fertility — I'll skip that, it's another subject, but it's to understand the context.
47:18 'Hiersein ist herrlich.' I find it again, here. Yes, sorry, I'm speaking German. 'Hier sein' — 'to be here.' 'Hier,' as in English. 'Sein' — 'to be here.' 'Ist herrlich.' 'Herr' is the master, the lord. It's the word for master, as opposed to slave, 'Herr' versus servant. 'Hier sein,' 'to be here.' Where? In the world, precisely. To exist.
47:48 'Being here is splendor. You knew it, girl, you too, who seemed wretched, sunk' — he's talking about prostitutes — 'you who, in the most dreadful alleys of cities, were exposed to decay, a mere refuse.' Yes, you too, you know that 'being here is splendid.' But what is he saying? While he's showing a world of misfortune, of misery.
48:18 For each one of them, it's admirable, there was an hour, perhaps less than a full hour, a duration barely measurable by the hands of a clock, between two moments in which each one had an existence, veins fully filled with existence. A world of happiness. But we forget so easily. There, there, there is the lie of the world.
48:49 Look at what I don't want to know. 'But we so easily forget that the mocking' — sorry, 'the mocking neighbor' — it's the same, well, not the same laugh — 'but we so easily forget what the mocking neighbor does not confirm to us, or does not envy in us.' Ah, there we've taken a step forward into what Clouscard, in a dizzying way, unfolded with this concept, which is the most important of Clouscard's contributions.
The weight of the worldly and the privation of knowledge 49:26 Well, the most Clouscardian, let's say, the most Clouscardian concept — not that it's more important than the relations of production and the productive forces which often recur in his writing, but those aren't concepts specific to Clouscard, that's his continuation of Marx, for instance. But on the other hand, his insistence on the worldly — why does class struggle perpetuate itself? Why does it last so long? Why is it so difficult? Because what could, by unifying, free itself from the ruling class, why doesn't it free itself from the dominant ideology?
50:01 Why are they permeated by the ideology of those who dominate them even though it's not even in their interest? Because of the weight of the world. And there, we see it. That's why I wanted to address this concept. For those who find that capitalism — who wait for the great night every evening but grow impatient — well, there's good reason! I repeat, so as to make myself understood, the pressure of the world, that is, what doesn't even manage to enter my thinking, my consciousness, because I don't want to be the only one thinking that, I want to think what the dominant world thinks, I don't want to be the only one thinking the unthinkable.
50:43 'Being here is splendor. You knew it, girl, you too, who seemed wretched, sunk in the most dreadful alleys of cities, exposed to decay, a mere refuse, for each one of you there was an hour, perhaps less than a full hour, a duration barely measurable by the hands of a clock, between two moments, in which each one of you had a whole existence.'
51:14 'Veins full of existence' — that's generous, isn't it, to grant that to what the world, in the pejorative sense, what respectable people call fallen women. No, there, it would have been granted to each one to have veins full of existence. But we forget so easily — that's why we don't grant these women dignity. 'We so easily forget what the mocking neighbor does not confirm to us, or does not envy in us.'
51:50 It's that world, the world of lies, but now, if I may, I'll try to go a bit beyond the Gospel's moral vision, toward a more political and social vision, of how the lie is indeed the supreme evil. And there, it's well seen. Rimbaud knew that theology is serious business. Namely that it's not just any lie — the lie of the world in what it has of the obscene, the criminal, the false semblance.
52:32 What characterizes that lie, unlike — I repeat on purpose, because it's important — the child who says 'It wasn't me who stole the candy,' even though he still has the raspberry taste in his mouth, is that it's a lie to oneself, the deprivation of knowledge, of understanding. The concept of privation. Aristotle got us used to — well, it should really be a habit — initiating the distinction between privation and negation.
53:10 Thus we say a blind man is deprived of sight. Why? Because in the definition of man, sight is among the qualities one is supposed to have. What is the human animal supposed to have? It has sight. If it doesn't have it, following an accident or from birth, it doesn't matter, that's a privation. Whereas in a book, sight is a negation. Sight isn't among the attributes expected of a book. It's made to be seen, not to see.
53:40 Yes, the distinction of... Well, there, it's a knowledge, an understanding I could have. That these girls are not sluts, as the reactionary says. There are some, there are some, but they're not necessarily the poor girls who used to wait for husbands outside church after Mass, not so long ago, on Sundays, in the countryside.
54:11 The good folk, the petty bourgeois, the small property owners who waited for them outside the church while the women, the wives, prepared the roast at home. Oh yes, look it up. It was well known. That's not the essence of evil. It's not them and the monsters. But I don't want to be on their side. Because the world, the world of power, the world of the dominant—ah, that's the one, that's when my thinking is governed by the world of domination, I, dominated, that I am a liar in the sense denounced by the evangelist.
54:50 There. So, I wanted to make this point to show you that it wasn't out of frivolity that I chose this concept of worldliness. I'll pause a bit because we've seen some important things. I'm sure this will give you material for your questions, or in any case, for those who don't dare to ask in public, your own questions for yourselves.
Swann at Madame de Saint-Euverte's 55:29 But I insisted on taking up this concept which at first seemed to be worldliness. I don't know, it could have been something else. I'm going to read you worldliness in the ordinary sense. I'm going out into the world tonight. I'm coming back a bit to my beginning, but illustrating it with a wonderful passage, right? You know, I've already often quoted this passage where Swann is trapped in a social gathering. Swann, Swann who somewhat represents Proust, a little bit the author, a little, not only—Swann is even more aristocratic than Proust.
56:09 Proust idealizes himself a bit in the character of Swann. He mixes with the Prince of Wales, which could have happened to Proust. He came from a very wealthy family, he moved in very high society, right? The Princess of Polignac. But, there, I'm thinking of the evening when Swann is invited to Madame de Saint-Euverte's, a passage I've read to you 36 times, to illustrate the return of memories, right? Because he's in the middle of a crisis, right?
56:42 He feels that—how do young people say it now, how do you say it—it's dead, when it's dead. The passion of my life, suddenly, I discover it's dead. Everyone has experienced that. As long as you haven't experienced that, you're a human being who isn't fully mature yet, whether you're a man or a woman. I say this for those who think they're going to die—no. Stirb und werde, as Goethe said, die and become. Become mature. There are deaths more serious than a heartbreak. But yes, and so, at that moment, right, a single being is missing to you and everything is depopulated, as Lamartine says in that immortal line.
57:23 And there he is, in the middle of the gathering, and he wants to leave this evening, but he can't because he's well-bred, one is in society, one must be courteous, and the musicians—these aren't hi-fi systems back then, mind you, I don't even mean the computer's sound, because some people think they're listening at 3 watts on a computer. Imagine 150 choristers and 200 instrumentalists at 3 watts. Well, anyway, but it's not even a hi-fi system, however faithful and high-fidelity it might be.
57:53 No, no, these were actual musicians. They could ask the best pianists of the time—how many times was Chopin brought in to liven up evenings, or Liszt, not to mention him, who was a stage animal—or a quartet, as was the case at the evening we have questions about here, a sonata for piano and violin, where they're going to play the little phrase that will suddenly stop Swann from leaving, because this phrase will remind him of the best moments of his love, cruelly, mercilessly, as the author says.
58:27 But that's not it. I'm going to read the part I don't usually dwell on when reading this passage—precisely the people who are there and who don't even have the depth of Swann's grief. At the moment he wants to leave, I'll continue with Proust's words: but the concert began again and Swann understood he couldn't leave before the end of this new number on the program. He suffered from being confined among these people—there's the world without lying to ourselves—whose stupidity and absurdities struck him all the more painfully because, ignorant of his love—suppose they were aware, oh yes Swann, he got dumped, he's doing fine right now—incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest in it or of doing anything but smile at it as childishness or deplore it as madness, they made it appear to him as a subjective state that existed only for him.
59:31 of which nothing external confirmed the reality to him; he suffered to the point that even the sound of the instruments made him want to scream, to prolong his exile in this place where Odette would never come, where no one and nothing knew her, from which she was entirely absent. And it's there that the musicians struck up the sublime little phrase, right, that would remind him of the best moments of his love with Odette—but suddenly it was as if she had entered, and the rest I've told you often enough.
1:00:04 despite the temptation, right, but that would be an unforgivable digression, I'll leave that there because we're leaving the world—we're leaving the world in the pejorative sense and entering what the world has produced most beautifully, right, the most beautiful moments of music. I'll simply recall the end of these long, long pages, among the most beautiful in all literature, right, where Proust says how these musical phrases—since he's talking about death at this point, he's serious, and we see his lucidity—he says perhaps we will return to nothingness, and that nothingness is what's real, you see, a totally atheistic, materialist hypothesis—but then these little phrases of music, and more generally the masterpieces of art and especially of music, would have to be nothing too.
1:00:58 We will die, I quote it to you here, we will return to nothingness, but with it, with these little phrases, death has something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable. So you see how the world can mean such opposing things. I don't want to be on the side of those who point to the sin in which the world wallows, right?
Right to enjoyment, right to happiness, and the word "West" 1:01:29 Even the world of the rich that I denounce—but not because men and women make mutual concessions to each other. That's not what bothers me. That's not what bothers me about their domination. On the contrary, I want many of those who suffer to gain access to enjoyment. The right to enjoyment, there, which is the first step toward opening up, further still, the right to happiness, which is still a new idea in the world.
1:02:08 And I'm not saying this about Europe this time, because there's a whole part of the world knocking at Europe's door. You know I don't like the word 'the West.' Never has it been repeated as much as it is now. China, Russia, they keep throwing back 'the West' at us. It's incredible. But what's hiding behind this word, which has been meaningless ever since we knew the earth was round? If you like, the West, well, still. I've already told you that Russia is west of the United States. Well yes, when you're in Alaska, what do you think? You go a little kilometer west and bam, you land in Russia.
1:02:42 Yes, but fine, right, that's fine, the world—that's exactly what it means. It means the big industrial countries. Japan is the West. The Far East is the West. You see, this is pure Socrates. It's Socrates who taught us to denounce the words of the tribe and thus to seek purer ones. Ah, listen, it's the Europeans. The leader of the West, it turns out, is the Americans. It's not Europe. You see, we end up driving our opponents crazy when we're this precise.
1:03:16 What are 'Westerners'? We won't find out, because it designates something that doesn't exist, that doesn't exist geographically. It means capitalism. Now that's a dirty word. We've already said this, I think I mentioned it. A former private employer, powerful, since I'm Greek, I've rarely been paid so well. To hand him over to public condemnation—but still, I had said, this is quite typical of how capitalism works.
1:03:49 I was told, you know, we don't really like that word around here. But yes, so as not to say it, we say 'the West.' And then, this is serious because it can cause millions of deaths, we create struggles, clashes of civilizations. What a scam, right? What a scam. So there, the world, worldliness, the worldly in Clouscard's sense—if you don't want to misread Clouscard—well, and here I'm saying it for the first time since the beginning of this session, you gather together all these meanings, the worst and the best.
First reactions and the journal Faites entrer l'infini 1:04:36 You sum up this movement, you leave this cursor moving to be fair, right? And I'm going to ask Pierre-Alain from now on, because I see it's getting late, ah well yes, I don't want to eat too much into your sleep, and I'd like to see if any questions have started, so there.
1:05:17 Ah well yes, there are quite a few actually. Oh, how happy that makes me. Sorry, that's personal, huh. But I'm happy to see that some are glad we're back together, right? But your humble servant is not the least happy about it, I tell you. What would I do without you? So I see there are familiar faces I'm always glad to find again. I'll start, I'm starting with the first one, Raoul Leboeuf, who must surely be commenting on the photo of the gang of four since he says what?
1:05:55 They were called 'thick as thieves,' the two on the left. Well. So, you know, I don't buy into that too much, I won't repeat it. Even though I understand why it suggests that, but we're always on the edge of injustice, that is, when we denounce what may not be the most denounceable thing—sorry for the barbarism—among what is most denounceable. There, I agree. So, Pierre, I don't know if it's one or the other since we know several, but in any case, they're all excellent friends, whether it's Bettinelli or Soubial or others, and I'm delighted to say good evening to them, as to the irreplaceable Laurent Angot, whom I'd like to invite—I'll take this opportunity, Laurent, if I may say, I'd like us to hold a session someday based on a topic you'd propose.
1:06:57 There, I'll close that. Said in front of a witness. Good evening to everyone, to Sébastien, whom I'm happy to see again of course, Claude Missy, who made such precious contributions to help us understand many things, and Frédéric Pignot, and my friend Claude Gallier, whom I'll see again soon, I haven't forgotten him, far from it—ah! If only I had more comrades like him, that's what comrades are.
1:07:31 You know, it's thanks to Claude Gallier that I was able—makes sense, they've disappeared. Ah yes, because I put in some new things, yes, I need to explain to you anyway. Yes, I was thinking of the journal I showed you the other time, FED—ah here it is, wait, no, excuse me, I did some tidying up, I'll find it—Faites entrer l'infini, you know, this journal devoted, right, to the couple, to Aragon and Elsa, and to their work and the world in which they lived, which is fitting to say, right.
1:08:18 And it's Claude Gallier who had the immense friendship and camaraderie to give me a subscription to this wonderful journal, which I cannot recommend enough for the happiness you would get from subscribing to it. So, Faites entrer l'infini, put that into a search online and you'll find it easily. So, see you soon Claude. So, Raoul Leboeuf commits to going to Pierre-Alain's exhibition.
1:08:55 He's right, you should follow his lead. Good evening, professor, good evening to all, good evening Abdirahim, it's a real pleasure to see you again, I was about to use the informal 'tu'. So, there's the medical field, there are comments, but I'm looking above all for questions. Do you like the Third Republic? I don't know if that's a question or a statement in the form of a question from someone with the username Franzese Charlemagne.
The Third Republic aligned with Victorian England 1:09:32 Franzese, I could say 'French' as an epithet, if you like. French Charlemagne. That would mean Charlemagne who doesn't have his capital in Aachen, I don't know, but somewhere would fit, it will come. So, you're asking me, well no, not really. If it's a question, I'll answer what seems to be at issue in this question. If that's the case, Franzese Charlemagne is right to ask it.
1:10:06 it's the world, you see, that era, it's the era of a civilization, of a world we call, to characterize the period, the Victorian world. The world dominated by England, which ruled the planet at that time, even more than the United States today, but that's saying a lot already.
1:10:43 You can't imagine what the British Empire was. It wasn't just India and Canada, right? So why am I starting there? After all, 'the Republic' designates a period in French history. Why go looking at England? Because—you'll understand why—no, it would be a misreading if one thought I liked the Third Republic. There's something I like in it. There's some marvelous music.
1:11:15 That's when we see the flourishing of French musical impressionism, a miraculous blossoming of French music. Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, Chabrier, who's often forgotten in the group and who is by no means the least innovative, far from it. And then impressionism, and then symbolist poetry. No, no, but that's not... That's rather what happens against the powers of the time. But the powers of the time...
1:11:45 Ah no, I don't like them. Why? Because they were vassals of England. Of Victorian England—I have nothing against England. Ah well no, I have nothing against the Arthurian romances, nothing against Shakespeare, nothing against Shelley, against Byron, I have nothing against British literature in general, including even the Irish, if you like, against Joyce, etc.
1:12:22 say, still, no, no, what I hold against it is that France had already ceased to have—as now, vis-à-vis NATO and the United States, go on, I'll say it, I seem to hesitate because we're coming back to the most serious of what's happening right now, right? You see, if I took up this notion of worldliness, it wasn't to forget my concern about the carnage and the war, but if I had kept repeating it with those explicit words, I was afraid of boring you or that you'd think it's a personal obsession.
1:13:01 No, look how we come back to it even though we were talking about worldliness, about the evening at Madame de Saint-Euverte's. Oh yes, and I was saying that Swann frequented the Prince of Wales, to come back to England, right? The second figure of the kingdom. Go on, let me put it simply right away: what I don't like about this world is that it leads to the greatest carnage and the greatest misery. All these convulsions of the two world wars, which were nothing but—the century's sickness, that is, not the declining nineteenth century of the Third Republic but the magnificent nineteenth century, its rise, which is characterized above all by what is called Romanticism in the field of literature and art.
1:13:56 And not only Romanticism, you know, we've already spoken of it as historical, even legal, aspect of life. That's precisely it, you must judge the tree by its fruits, you see, I'm coming back to the Gospel saying since it's a reference tonight because of the link between world and lying—but how much lying there must have been in that end of the century which accumulated wealth like never before.
1:14:28 France was lending gold to Japan at the time, before European wealth, right, dissolved, evaporated, right, in the war of 1914 like snow in the sun. Ah yes, but not in sunlight—in the light of bombs and chemical weapons already, right, of mustard gas.
1:14:58 Yes, it ends in a slaughter beyond anything ever imagined before. And just as people started saying 'never again' after barely 20 years—what is 20 years in the long span of history?—a slaughter breaks out beside which the previous one seems like just a timid trial run. No, but I'm not overstating it. I'm not overstating it. I speak of it with a mixture of anger and emotion because every day I hear Russia being pointed at.
1:15:36 do I need to remind you that I've already said I wouldn't vote for Putin if I lived in Russia, and if, and if—because there are a lot of ifs—if Russia weren't surrounded by nuclear missiles, and if this and if that. Because if Putin has this popularity, it's also because he restored a dignity that Russia had lost, above all under the Yeltsin regime, against whom I've never seen a thousandth of the hatred there is today against Putin. To the point that I think what's held against him is not—what I hold against him, right, is above all, not above all, but is that he never misses an opportunity, right, to drive a wedge or throw a stone into the garden of the communists and the Bolsheviks, particularly regarding the Ukrainian issue—but on the other hand, what others hold against him, and there I defend him against that charge, right, is precisely that he restored the dignity and part of the strength, right, of what Russia had become when it was literally Americans from the World Bank and the IMF running Russia's affairs right inside the Kremlin itself.
1:16:46 Check it, check it. Never believe things this important just on someone's word. Even mine, especially if it's mine—I don't know, Oscar Wilde said Pagani was a wit, don't forget, so check it. So there, that's why I don't like calling it the Third Republic, because we got locked into it, no doubt after Napoleon III's defeat, of the Second Empire's regime, while the last monarchical figure before the Third Republic—I'm answering your question—which showed us things, the idea, on our topic tonight.
1:17:29 Thank you. If I'm not misreading what she's raising, what she's bringing up. The last monarchical figure in the history of French power is Napoleon the Little, as Hugo called him, right? France is traumatized by the shocks of the defeat in the war against Prussia, 1870-71, of Sedan, the crushing of the forces at Sedan, of the emperor taken prisoner, of the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, so, the amputation—but what's even more important, symbolically as much as really, is like a castration when a region is taken away from a country, right?
1:18:17 When this region had been part of what belonged to it for centuries and centuries, right? These traumas facilitated the alignment of French power out of fear of the proletariat, fear of the rise of the working-class forces, fear of seeing the conclusion of Marx's Communist Manifesto come true—workers of all countries, unite, right?
1:18:52 This fear in the face of the fact that this unification began to take shape with the organization of the various Internationals, the development of unions, the revolutions that soon multiplied after the war due to the anger of the peoples at the slaughter of 1914, the fear before the first workers' councils, the first soviets, including in Germany, the first manifestations of what would later be called and what would triumph in the form of the Popular Front at the end of the 1930s—because of all these fears.
1:19:33 The lie reached its peak at that time, right, at the ideological level of this Third Republic, when French diplomacy aligned itself with England. Here, ask Google to inform you about Fashoda. I said Google because when we have the Chinese equivalent, I'll be happy to use that too, I mean. Fashoda, F-A-S-H-O-D-A. Look for a tiny little village in Sudan that's currently making headlines, Sudan.
1:20:07 Ah, I could well make a digression on Sudan. But still, you only discover these countries when there are convulsions. Nobody talks to you about them, otherwise why would anyone talk to you about one of the poorest countries, at least the largest country in Africa by area. But yes, come on, just two minutes—but still, they make you believe it's a struggle between two warlords, each as disreputable as the other. Except that the other one, the one who started the current conflict—well, well, well, I hear there are conflicts in this country.
1:20:44 For years, and years, it's been more than a generation now, the south of the country which is more Black—I know, I'm doing it on purpose, speaking incorrectly—but it's not just that the north is more Arab, let's say, that's not really the right word when you look closely, but anyway, is lighter-skinned in any case, and more Islamist. Whereas the south, as is often the case, is more animist. In short, an opposition you find almost everywhere along the Sahel fringe, in Mauritania, in Mali, in Niger, in Chad, etc.
1:21:16 And yes, those are the keys. The traditional oppositions, for now, never produce millions of deaths, no, not even thousands. There are occasional skirmishes that get compensated for—people offer livestock, make alliances, marriages. No, here it's been years of an appalling massacre in total indifference in southern Sudan, a horrific civil war between... traitors, shall we say, ever since a lot of oil was found there and the West—those who even call themselves, I denounced the word earlier, the NATO countries, the powers that make up NATO.
1:22:01 As for me, I'm at war, not even against America, but against Atlanticism. I would like—I don't know—for us to be at war against Atlanticism rather than waging war, right, on behalf of Atlanticism, while pretending it's on behalf of the Ukrainian people, who are instead being sent to the meat grinder, as they say over there now, right, ever since powers were discovered in that region. The Atlanticist powers fully support the more colored animists against the Islamists of the north—I'm not a partisan of either, you can well imagine—but anyway, in case you thought this was an ethnic or even religious war, right, and ever since South Sudan gained its independence, because it's now a separate country, right, and has this conflict, atrocities, mass rapes, villages razed because the Atlanticist powers achieved their goal, that is, splitting the south from the north.
1:23:14 Why should I go looking for Putin's crimes when I see this? There are some, I'm not saying he's a choirboy, but anyway, I don't see the candle when you hold it up against the sun. But yes, careful, there's denialism and denialism—what matters is the content, not the form. Denialism is a form. But between denying ten and denying a million, the content is different, the content of the denial.
1:23:47 We're making philosophy out of this. So, I wanted to recall this, I'm reopening my parenthesis on Sudan, that's why I have a bit of a grudge against the Republic ever since France became Atlanticized. Ah yes, it was Victorian England that geographically commanded the North Atlantic, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. I don't know, but then it took the ruin of its empire, etc., for it to hand over to its slightly less well-bred cousins.
1:24:21 How is it that we often call them Americans? No, it's not the English but the Germanic descendants, especially the white American settler population—I've already said this, I won't repeat it—the WASPs, White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. There, we'll talk about it again, dear Franzese, I am Charlemagne—there's something I quite like in your pseudonym, there, as long as it's not identitarian. There, I'll stay clear on that.
Equity as a source of happiness; Spinoza 1:24:53 "Isn't equity the sole source of happiness?" That comes from Grolon Delphine, whom I greet, because I don't think I'm familiar with her, but maybe, since I'm a bit senile after all, I mean, I have too much memory now, which is quite damaging—to me first of all, in fact—I notice that sometimes I make memory errors, but I don't think so here. Well then, excellent—well no, not an excellent question, it's an oratorical commonplace, it's a beautiful formula, a beautiful formula.
1:25:27 I do notice that this pretty much amounts to what I've been saying since the beginning of this session, but it's good to have it summed up like that—I wouldn't have put it that way myself, so I'm quite grateful to Delphine for saying that enjoyment, one's relationship to the world, shouldn't be pointed at and condemned as "not okay, it's a sin"—no, as long as it isn't the privilege of a few. I think that's what Delphine means, and in that sense, I agree 150%.
1:25:57 What I hate about ecology is its punitive side, saying that it's because we consume too much, enjoy too much, that—not humanity, but supposedly the Earth suffers, as if rocks could suffer, honestly. So people will say, "Yes, yes, but you can distinguish humanity from the planet all you like, still, if the planet weren't there, with a certain climate and a certain balance and a certain climatic regulation..." We don't hear about that regulation.
1:26:33 What we hear about instead are the disruptions, which implies that if man weren't committing all these assaults against divine nature, against Mother Gaia, to speak like Latour—I'll come back to Latour, a man much more at stake, right, than many other reactionary thinkers, which isn't stupid. But another time, because I don't shoot at ambulances in a hurry, still less at coffins. So yes, Mother Gaia—I mean, if the Earth weren't there, humanity wouldn't survive a second.
1:27:09 Yes, I agree. So we agree that value is not the Earth and the planet. It's because it's the Earth on which humanity exists, which, in nature, is exceedingly rare and even unique as far as we know. We'll eventually find inhabited places, in my opinion, in terms of probability, in terms of the law of large numbers. Agreed? Well after my death, given the distances and thus the time needed to get there. But don't tell me that life, the biological, the bio-world, is emblematic of nature, when in ecologist discourse it's always identified as such.
1:27:51 Whoever says "bio" says green, says ecology, says bio—whoever says bio says green, whoever says green says the blue planet, moreover, when that is precisely the exception. But I agree with you that everything must be done so that the natural conditions—I'm not stupid—climatic, temperature, etc., that favor the emergence, development, and prosperity of humanity are preserved, or even sometimes restored, or even, right, created where they don't exist, where nature hasn't done so.
1:28:35 We can create a little paradise in Antarctica and in the Sahara, with the means we now have. Yes, but then, I quite agree with you, the value here is humanity, is the world, and that's where we meet on common ground. And if people are unhappy, if they become ecologists, if they become reactionaries, because, as Spinoza admirably puts it, with that simplicity of the most profound formulas which is his secret, men are for the most part wicked and unhappy.
1:29:09 Implying that they are wicked because they are unhappy. And they are unhappy—well, this is a bit more illusory in Spinoza, a specialist in illusion, let it be said in passing, but anyway, he's often a victim of it too—not solely because of ignorance, it's not by their own determination. Or rather, there are reasons why ignorance perpetuates itself and men don't want to know, my dear Benoît—Baruch—Spinoza: is it not precisely the power of the worldly that prevents me from having the lucidity I would need to be less unhappy?
1:29:51 Agreed? I repeat one of Spinoza's most beautiful formulas: men believe themselves free because they are ignorant of the causes that determine them. That means that if we knew the causes, implicitly, we could free ourselves from what makes us essentially, what makes us unhappy.
1:30:23 Yes, but what keeps us from freeing ourselves from it, or what slows down the enormous work of liberation that I try to support with all my feeble strength but that humanity as a whole—and one part of the world today, yes, one part of humanity today increasingly—is beginning to push back the other part of the world, the part that would like to remain in inequity, I'm still on Delphine's question.
1:30:59 I quite agree that what prevents us from speeding up this movement of progressive liberation is the power exerted by the prestige of the world—"the prince of this world is coming, and his essence is lies"—the prestige of this illusion that my fate, as a dominated person, is tied only to the interest of the world of the dominant alone.
1:31:31 That's roughly how I could conclude the whole session tonight, but there are other questions—in case I forget and lose the thread, I think this beautiful formula from Delphine, in the form of a question for which I thank her infinitely, sums up the essential point well. Someone younger tells me that the world of traveling fairs was also "the world." Ah, that pleases me, the world of traveling fairs. So no, it's not just the rich.
The world of fairgrounds, powers and counter-powers 1:32:04 Yes. Ah, that pleases me. That makes two women now, at least. Well yes, I can be feminist in my own way. Because there are some who, like me, are exasperated by the LGBT—what do they call it—the woke, the inter, whatever. Anyway, it doesn't matter. She knows this better than me, so. I can afford not to be precise.
1:32:34 I'm precise in the allusion, at any rate—you can see what kind of discourse this points to. And it's not just me it irritates; some are irritated by it for dubious reasons. Ah, listen, well, I'll tell you that fundamentally, it's been this way since the Berlin Wall fell—and no doubt it had to fall. Yes, I'm going to make more enemies among my friends, among my comrades—it had to fall for simpler reasons.
1:33:07 There are external reasons that brought it down, of course, but short of being a conspiracy theorist, which one should not be, whatever we're accused of, there are also internal reasons. And in that sense, it's a great misfortune. I always quote René Comer's phrase—our best friend to all, to all who knew him as a friend, and it's said he was everyone's best friend. Someone like that is rare. René Comer used to say: the fall of the Berlin Wall is not a failure of communism, it's a great setback for humanity.
1:33:46 There, so I'm delighted to see—I see the trio is enriched by Pauline Saïd, whose contributions I've always liked a lot. She's a bit briefer tonight, but I'm quite happy to have her back, since she says yo, yo, yo, good evening. So, this trio—I like trios of women. No, no, no, don't go thinking it's about polyamory. No, no, it's very precise. It's because among the most beautiful passages of sung music, there are the three fairies, the three attendants of the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, right?
1:34:26 The three Rhinemaidens in Das Rheingold. It's funny how it works in threes. The three Graces in Greek mythology. The three Norns in Twilight of the Gods. I like this feminine trio, which is always a great richness. But here, they've done us a great service. Thanks to all three. Julien Belmond: what is the reality of power and counter-powers today? Today, meaning what exactly, notably in terms of symbolic power?
1:34:58 Too vast, my dear Julien Belmond, though I'm delighted by the question. Of course it's well-founded, but it's not in a few seconds of live response, on YouTube, in a YouTube session, that I'm going to answer it. There, it would be better to narrow it down. There, power and counter-powers, well, the very notion of it—but still, so as not to dodge the question, and to thank you for taking part tonight and for having understood the essential since you're asking this question at all, allow me to specify what I often used to say, what I often retorted to my African students.
1:35:41 When they said to me—I always had older students, because in Africa we have twelfth-graders—"You're lucky, you have democracy in Europe, because we have heads of state who, etc., dictatorships, whether military or otherwise, plus corruption." So I would tell them, you know, they're just as much crooks over here as over there, and probably more so in terms of harm caused. It's not you, it's not your states that produced the greatest massacres in the history of humanity.
1:36:11 And ever since war started up again among white people, look, it's far bloodier than the conflicts in your countries, apart from a few monstrous exceptions everyone knows about in Africa. What did I answer them? I told them, we're at least as much crooks, and probably more so. The difference, bravo Julien, lies in the notion of counter-powers: in our countries, there isn't just one crook in power.
1:36:45 There are about ten. That's a figure that's roughly right, not far from the truth—it's fairly restricted, this lack of power. A symbolic ten. Right? They used to say "the two hundred families," I think, at the time of the Popular Front, or "the hundred families"—I have a sudden slight doubt. Anyway. It's in that spirit that I mean the ten crooks who are in power, but who don't necessarily share the same till. And so they eye each other warily. That's what I told my African friends.
1:37:16 If we have what you call democracy, and it's true that in a lot of sectors, the press and so on, we function more democratically. But why? Precisely because not everything goes to just one person, or one family, or one clan. So they were forced to invent laws so that among crooks, right, there'd be a bit of sharing. There. If the sharing could now extend to the whole social body, to all those who produce collective wealth—I'm not talking about parasites and crooks, there are some in every milieu, but it's the most powerful crooks who do the most harm, of course.
1:38:00 That would be better. So it's good to ask about the reality of power and counter-powers today. And it's true that in our societies the counter-powers are much more multiplied than at the heart of a tribe, deep in the forest, deep within a community, a village, a region of the Congolese forest, or a state wedged between the Himalayas and northern India. There are quite a few small states there, in that spot, wedged between the two.
1:38:33 There. Dear comrade Estavisky, ah, that feels good—it's a sovereign platitude, in short. Always the humor, your friend Estavisky. I say this for the young people who don't know that "le souverain pontife" is the pope, of course—sorry, preaching to the choir, but one increasingly has to take time to pass on what used to go without saying not so long ago.
1:39:03 There. And I say good evening to everyone I find here again—to Naoufel, of course, Frédéric, whom I practically never miss, I'm so glad to see these videos which I recommend to you, Frédéric Cordier, right, on YouTube. So, Pauline tells us she has started Hegel's Philosophy of Religion. Dear Pauline, I don't think I'm exactly a religious person, though when people ask me if I believe in God, I'd say, look, I have no idea, I'll answer you when I die, and even then, is that really the best moment to speak with full lucidity, we'll see.
Hegel's Philosophy of Religion 1:39:42 I don't think that's the most important thing, I mean, the existence of God. What matters is having a notion of it, whether it exists or not, and dealing with it. But that's not the subject, so I'll move on—if you disagree, you disagree, no matter. But what I would like to tell Pauline is that the numerous volumes—there are four in the old editions—of Hegel's Philosophy of Religion are a summit of Hegelianism.
1:40:18 Not because he's talking about religion there—well, it's actually no accident that it's on this occasion that he gives his best, I'm thinking in particular of the part usually grouped together, this isn't Hegel's own title but a posthumous one, within the Philosophy of Religion, the last volume called—and this seems to be truly the furthest thing from materialism—"The Proofs of the Existence of God," an old philosophical tradition, the proofs of God from Descartes, from Saint Anselm, there, there are plenty.
1:40:54 And if there are so many, it's because none of them is truly convincing, but here, through this reprise of philosophical problems, Hegel adds refinements of unprecedented richness about how dialectic functions. So that's why I tell Pauline: far from me to say "drop the Philosophy of Religion, read a more Marxian Hegel."
1:41:26 If you want to understand what is best in Marx, then read, like Pauline—take her as an example—Hegel's Philosophy of Religion. There, I recommend it. Especially since it's late Hegel, and so it's noticeably less difficult, indeed distinctly less difficult, for most of the pages of this enormous, this more substantial work than others in page count, even if there are some tough passages, but anyway never ones that require, as Lenin put it while reading the Science of Logic—he noted in the margin, I say this to reassure those who sometimes despair of understanding certain passages—Lenin wrote: "these passages should be called the best way to get a headache."
The "green" Khmers and negative freedom in Hegel 1:42:15 There, between two exclamations of admiration at Hegel's advances. Thank you very much, Pauline, and well done. So, Sébastien tells me I made a digression on the Khmers Rouges by calling them Khmers Verts. Yes—could you come back to that another time, since it's a big topic? That said, Sébastien, no, I know you're a loyal follower so I won't tell you you haven't watched them—I've made numerous videos where I point out just how much this is an idea of the Khmers Verts. And they took their lessons not from Mao of the Long March, the Mao for whom I'll always have admiration—that's because of the Cultural Revolution.
1:42:53 No, in Paris, among the Parisian leftists, the anti-French Communist Party crowd, right, on the left, who claimed to be to the left of the Communist Party and who, as I often say, were in fact only to the right of De Gaulle. Yes, yes, it was while they were in Paris that Pol Pot and Khieu Samphan got their schooling, right? Whenever a faction claims to be anti-totalitarian, that's when it's at its most monstrous.
1:43:26 I'll come back to this formula. Because I recognize myself, I must admit, because I... Ah, I'm ignorant of. No, no, excuse me. What did I just say? Excuse me, that's because I... it's because I'm afraid of looking ridiculous with these glasses. Even at 120 years old, one keeps a bit of narcissism, terrible, isn't it? Because I am ignorant, I must admit, of this period of history. But yes, I did illustrate it, Sébastien, for now I'll stop there, but it seems fairly convincing in relation to your question.
1:43:59 The first great act, once they took power in the capital, Phnom Penh, was enormous. It was to empty it entirely—women, children, all business suspended, "go, your belongings, you have none, too bad, we have no time, a blow with a stick, off you go." And that's when the carnage began in the countryside: whoever didn't plant their crops properly got a pickax blow to the back of the skull, and that was the end of him. And it produced millions of deaths, but in record time.
1:44:29 I even quoted, since you're asking me, I'll go back to Hegel's Philosophy of Right—there's a passage I quote where I say that Hegel has a kind of prescience, a divination—I don't know if one should call it angelic or demonic, not exactly angelic or demonic, but certainly demonic, which is not quite the same thing, right—of the link between the Khmer Rouge, what is historically called the Khmer Rouge, which I call the Khmer Vert, and abstraction in power, that is, the part that takes itself for the whole, right?
1:45:06 The part that abstracts itself from the other parts, the part of society that abstracts itself from the other parts. To be abstract in the pejorative sense — we speak of an abstraction, I don't know, mathematics, the sciences, the good abstraction, because we know we set that aside and take it up again afterward. Whereas here, no, look closely — it's that famous passage where he analyzes several forms of the will and arrives at this form of abstract will, of identity of the abstract self, which believes it attains its truth only when it negates everything that is not itself, right?
1:45:46 And which gives us this — it's the paragraph, from the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, I'm quoting them by paragraph, it's better than pages because there can be different editions, but the paragraphs, their numbering is always the same. So, my God, I hope I haven't lost the page — no, it's fine. So, here.
1:46:20 "No doubt the aspect of the will defined here" — this absolute possibility, let me pause, no, no, it's to clarify, don't worry — this will to define the self by negating, in the sense of even going so far as to destroy everything that is not the self, right? I had illustrated this with the admirable — so I refer you to that text — Illuminations by Rimbaud, a prose poem less than a page long called "Conte" [Tale], in the style of "once upon a time": "Conte — A prince was vexed at having devoted himself only to the perfection of ordinary generosities."
1:46:59 We were rereading this, and you'll see that it illustrates perfectly — I talk about it too in my own writings, well, forgive me for quoting myself each time, but it's because I'm addressing exactly what forms the substance of the answers to your question. "No doubt the aspect of the will defined here" — and there he describes this absolute possibility of abstracting myself from every determination — I am not French, I am not a man, who says I am a man — this absolute possibility of abstracting myself from every determination in which I find myself — I am French, it wasn't me who decided that when I was born, I didn't choose my community of birth, or wherever I've placed myself, I decided to be an artist — "this flight from every content as from a restriction, every content, every determination" — but there is no...
1:47:55 ...to finish, it's over, there's nothing finite in me, I am the infinite, so there — well, refusing everything that is a determination, that is what representation — in Hegel that means common consciousness, opinion, it's pejorative — "what representation posits for itself as freedom, and this is only negative freedom, or the freedom of the understanding" — you see, the understanding is not reason — and there he begins: "it is the freedom of the void, which can take on a real shape and become a passion. If it remains merely theoretical, it is, in religion, the fanaticism of pure Hindu contemplation" — you know, where they repeat om, om, om, Atman, I am solely, I am, I am the one who is, the tautology, there is only the One, there is only Being — well, in short, being without being anything at all, it's not being lying down, it's not being standing up, it's not being on the right — forgive me for laughing, but it all smells so stale, so rehashed by now — but well, why not, one must respect it, one must be tolerant, so —
1:49:06 "If it remains merely theoretical, it is the fanaticism of pure Hindu contemplation; but if it turns to action" — and there we must be much less tolerant, and I'm getting to the Khmer Rouge — "if it turns to action, then in the political as in the religious realm it is the fanaticism of destruction, directed against the whole existing social order" — he wrote that more than a century and a half before the Khmer Rouge, yes — "the elimination of individuals regarded as suspect by a given order, and the annihilation of any organization which attempts a new departure. Only in destroying something does this negative will possess the feeling of its own existence" — and moreover, it has only a certainty, not an established truth — indeed, it has only a certainty, there is a long way from certainty to truth, for this certainty is not based on the concept but on feeling, on mush of feeling, as Hegel often says.
1:50:05 "It believes that it wills some positive condition, for instance the condition of universal equality" — which is what, at a certain time, made people want to kill a peasant because he had the audacity to own a sheep or a cow. So — "it believes that it wills some positive condition, for instance the condition of universal equality or of universal religious life" — that's for sects — "but in fact it does not want the positive actuality of this condition, for this at once brings in some sort of order, a particularization both of institutions and of individuals; but it is precisely through the annihilation of particularity and of objective determination that the self-consciousness of this negative freedom arises."
1:50:54 So, we've now heard the fine conclusion that brings us back to the question about the carnage of so-called Democratic Kampuchea: "Thus what negative freedom's own thought holds to be positive is for it too abstract to be applied, and any organization it undertakes is destroyed again by this abstract self-consciousness, for it is merely a fury of destruction." If people had taken the trouble to read Hegel and understand him in this sense, we wouldn't have had the carnage of the Khmer Rouge, nor that of Rwanda either — but the greatest carnage of the postwar period all the same.
1:51:28 So, Khmer Rouge — I'll give you two reasons. The first, I'll tell you: for them, the city is the place, as with all of today's right and the most trivial ecologism, right? It's above all in the cities that corruption happens, right? And the countryside would be pure — that one's a good joke, but let's move on. The second thing, which I'll introduce now, is that he alluded to pure Hindu contemplation, which, as he says, as long as it stays theoretical, is less dangerous than when it passes into action and becomes political.
1:52:10 You know well how he puts it, "a fury of destruction" — but tell me, Hindu, Hindu, Cambodia, the Khmers — but that's a Buddhist culture! Amazing, this text — I don't believe in coincidence, you know. I don't know if you watched that video, Sébastien, where I recalled that when I was a kid — since I was born in a region of the world where Buddhism dominates, in the Indochinese peninsula, which included Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos besides — I remembered that around me, the colonial world, which was my world — not the world, but my childhood world, until people started talking about "the world" — used to say: the Vietnamese, they don't like us French, they're nationalists, they're never happy; whereas the Cambodians, they're gentler, they're kind, they're Buddhist... the greatest carnage of the postwar period.
1:53:20 So, let's be wary of the lotus flower, of the discourse around it, of the publicity made of it, of the scam, and of alternative medicines and gentle medicines — but be careful, with all that — watch out, there are excellent things in there, likeable things, more often pleasant than excellent, there are irreproachable individuals in all that, there are even a few substances worth knowing about, after all, no more beneficial than others — but, caution, badly linked together, after this terrifying reading, right, of what Hegel so brilliantly perceived.
Ellul, Kojève, Kant, and conclusion on the worldly 1:54:07 I see it's 11:26 p.m., we'll need to set ourselves a limit, right? Yes, well, Stavisky — but Stavisky, I know, I know his lucidity, it's relevant — Jacques Ellul, in Propaganda, must have missed a word — states that risking stepping outside dominant thought means risking opening a door onto immense anguish. Well, there you have it, Stavisky helps us understand the lie that — I was drawing earlier from the Gospel, because there it's said in a striking way, to be clear — it's not the lie of the child who says "I didn't eat the candy," but the lie one tells oneself so as not to be crushed by anguish — so it's a lie to oneself, not the lie a child tells his parents.
1:55:00 Amblard David, whom I greet — "Good evening Dominique, I take this opportunity to thank you for all your clarifications on Hegel" — so he's a regular — "and I would like to ask your opinion on Kojève and his commentary on Hegel." Well, I promise to answer that more fully next time, because it's such a rich question, given how late it is — but I'll say anyway, to thank him for being with us tonight, quickly, that he is certainly one of the most brilliant commentators on Hegel.
1:55:34 But you know the word "brilliant" carries a slight ambivalence, which comes with a few drawbacks, and that all that glitters is not gold, as the saying goes well. And so I'd say that the best of Kojève — since you ask my opinion on Kojève and his commentary on Hegel, because Kojève is not limited to being a Hegelian, he also has his own thought, very much inspired by Hegel — his masterpiece is not a text devoted to a reading of Hegel, but a reading of the history of pagan philosophy.
1:56:10 That's what it's called, published by Gallimard, NRF. I believe it was put out in paperback. Yes, it was published in paperback, in the Idées collection, I think. Or Tel. Tel — T-E-L, Gallimard. So in a less expensive paperback format. Superb, isn't it — "Essai d'une histoire raisonnée de la philosophie païenne," which begins with the pre-Socratics, but I've rarely seen such a pertinent ordering of that sort of free-for-all in which, generally, works dealing with the pre-Socratics get caught up, because we've inherited them through texts that are somewhat isolated formulas, phrases, sentences, that people have tried to put in order.
1:56:49 I salute Mr. Diels in passing. But I mean, there is truly here a reconsideration of the whole pre-Socratic corpus, and of the most important figures of course, in particular the Parmenides-Heraclitus dichotomy. I'm not saying Democritus, or Anaxagoras, or Pythagoras are less important. But here I'm talking about a play of mirrors, right, between what affirms being and what affirms that part of non-being that is in becoming.
1:57:20 I won't dwell on that, it would take too long. And the passages on Plato and Aristotle are exemplary in their richness, both documentary, with a critical apparatus. So, for now, I'll stop there. Thanks for the question. Dear David, well, there are forms of worldliness that are less visible than the ones shown in the photo. I quite agree.
1:57:50 But still, it's always the same — when you have to choose one photo among thousands, right, you're bound to choose a photo, that is, something made to be seen by the eye. But you're quite right to say that there are things that don't show themselves to the eye and are far more formidable. Here again, not individually — I'm not putting individuals on trial, even Bernard-Henri Lévy. I always have a reluctance to mix the trial of social classes, the class struggle that must be maintained, with the fight against persons, individuals.
1:58:24 It's almost giving them too much importance. On the other hand, it's true, it's true that what's worst in the lie induced by the weight of worldliness — that is, the weight of what serves only the interest of the dominant, that is, after all, of a minority, right — is a bit like an iceberg, in that the greater part of it isn't visible. So, quite agree. With KS, Pauline speaks of conditioning.
1:59:08 Well, I'm not going to comment on all these interventions, not because they're uninteresting, but to leave room for others too — but I have the impression, glancing quickly, scrolling a bit, and I see I was about to miss a contributor as important and relevant to me as Sébastien Deville, whose posts I always follow with the greatest interest. On the subject of lying, he asks me: isn't it within this framework — the critique of the worldly — that we can better understand Kant's radical condemnation of lying?
1:59:46 Sébastien always hits the mark. Sorry, I'm not here to hand out grades, but really, that is exactly what one needs to think about. I don't believe Kant related this — Kant knew nothing of, well, neither the Khmer Rouge nor, after the mal du siècle [the century's malaise], the century of evil. He didn't experience, fortunately for him and his era, the utter paroxysm, right, of evil, of the unleashing of the beast.
2:00:17 But, as Clouscard admirably puts it — since this whole session is, after all, under the heading of an eminently Clouscardian concept — it's a lie of worldliness, as Clouscard says very well about Kant: Kant saw everything, but immediately drew the curtain. So, by digging deeper, by exactly extending what Kant glimpsed when he spoke of the lie — I see very well the passage he's referring to, about the categorical imperative, right — yes, we're arriving at tonight's topic.
2:01:01 Bravo Sébastien, if I may say so — again, I have no standing to grade anyone, but a friendly greeting. "Thank you very much. 'Beast' reminds me of Balzac's literature where Rousseau's choices are a refusal of worldliness. In Rousseau, there's from the start an almost insolent choice, whereas the Balzacian hero withdraws from the world out of disgust." I'm surrounded by relevant people, honestly, what happiness!
2:01:34 That's part of happiness, isn't it — sharing. I'll take a look anyway, because I don't want to leave anyone frustrated. I'll come back to this amusing question from Julien Chevalier: "Good evening, Mr. Pagani, like idiots, are there, in your opinion, useful philosophers?" We'll come back to that. It reminds me of a question from a man who was fundamentally right-wing, a harsh right, who had written "Why Philosophers?"
2:02:10 We'll come back to that. So, let me look, let me see if there are questions. Well — "Do you find interesting things in Louis Althusser?" That's too vague. Good grief. Of course there are interesting things about Althusser, but well, I mean, let's say that the aspects of his thought he holds most dear are those I hold least dear. So, I can't answer you so quickly given the hour, while still saying more or less the essential of what there is to say about your question.
2:02:45 It's important — important especially at the time when he reigned supreme over a certain French Marxism, but that seems well over now. Not in every respect, but there you go. Yes, Pauline is tapping me on the fingers. Well, she doesn't put it that way, she doesn't say it, but I realize I made a mistake — that wasn't right, she's correct, it's from — ah no, it's Gibelin's translation. But it is indeed published by Vrin, I believe, if I'm not mistaken. There you go.
2:03:18 Yes, all the same, it's from CNR Soviète — it's not a question, but I'm reading it because it pleases me regarding my native country. I'm not going to fabricate an imaginary identity for myself, but it reminds me, regarding the carnage carried out by the Khmers I call the "green Khmers," historically known as the Khmer Rouge, but it's the same set — he says: "And it was the Vietnamese bo doi" — you know, bo doi is what they call the ordinary soldier of that extraordinary, unique army in human history that freed itself, within barely a generation, which is very short historically, from the two greatest imperialisms of the era, the French and the American.
2:03:58 And it was the Vietnamese bo doi who liberated Cambodia in '79 — yes, it was they who drove out the Khmer Rouge, who nevertheless kept up enormous activity and kept getting resolutions passed in their favor at the UN, very much a live issue then, because they were supported by everything our opponents call "the Westerners," and which, I remind you, is essentially the Atlanticists — yes — who needed the pro-Chinese of the time, from the era when China was above all anti-Soviet, who needed the anti-Soviet pro-Chinese against the pro-Soviet Vietnamese.
2:04:44 And yes, we're learning something — well, we're not really learning it, because some people already know it, but it's all so wiped from memory because of the weight of worldliness — nobody talks about it anywhere, so you'd look ridiculous bringing something like that up at a fashionable gathering, right? So, well done, CNR Soviète, for recalling this. No, it's the paragraph — ah yes, thanks for reminding me of the paragraph from the Philosophy of Right, Frédéric Pignot, who's a regular — since I jumped from one thing to another — it's paragraph 5.
2:05:24 Actually, you should read straight through, 5, 6, 7. There you go. I'll skip over the question about determination. If we saw that these problems, which take a bit of time because they're abstract but deserve to be raised, they need better than an end-of-session treatment, if I may put it that way.
2:05:57 I'll stop here for now, to recall the essential point all the same: we don't yet imagine — I've tried, with my modest means, no, this isn't false modesty, I feel — I'm the first to be convinced that as long as one is alone, one has little impact on what happens alone, even in wanting to know — not only for political action, where it's obvious you need to be several — but even at the level of clarity of thought, teamwork is needed to be relevant, right?
2:06:30 An individual as such always has more or less unacknowledged interests of his own, and so I want to conclude with the point that we can never overstate how much, regarding Clouscard's concept of worldliness, we've barely begun — that's what I want to say — to scratch the surface, to skim, the richness of this concept, which too often the right-wing exploitation of Clouscard, I'll end on this, reduces to nothing but a critique — a bit like in the photo, right — of those who so obviously wallow in the world of the privileged, which is much easier to notice, and as a result leaves in the shadows, as our friend KS's question said earlier, the fact that there are things far more serious still.
2:07:32 So, on worldliness — I dwelt on the Gospel and I don't regret it, because the Gospel, in saying that it is the essence of evil, well, it has the fault of condemning the world as a whole, because I myself stand with Saint-Just — I don't know, the world has a right to happiness. But, well, there you go. I'll finish with a phrase from one of our listeners — which is still better than "followers" — who reminded us that after all, "the world" and "the worldly" can be given a positive meaning, so let's end on a positive note, when this world is equitable.
2:08:19 We're not there yet. Good evening to all, and heartfelt thanks — pardon my rough, heartfelt way of putting it, a bit African-style — for having found you again. Thank you a thousand times, and to Pierre-Alain, who once again worked wonders — go see his exhibition, those of you who are nearby. There you go.
2:08:50 Thank you.
