English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Mondanité, a concept proper to Clouscard 0:00 There we go, we're picking up our regular rhythm again. I'm going to repeat, at the risk of exasperating those who've heard it too often, that I'm very happy to be back with you and very touched by the loyalty of some, and at least as delighted to see new names joining our conversations. I give a special mention to Pierre Alain, who is kind enough to open this livestream with me tonight.
1:15 even though he's busier than usual — I'll tell you, it's not confidential — the exhibition I urged you, I urged you to visit at the Pompidou Centre, which remains open until May 27th... 29th, there we go, I had said two days off, until the 29th, I thought he'd finally be able to rest afterwards, but no, because he's doing it again in New York, starting early June, you see. So that's to say I'm all the happier that he finds the time to let us get together tonight, in the best conditions he alone knows the secret of. So, second episode of our series — call it what you like — on Clouscard's concept, not the most important one, once again I want to say, it's not more important than the productive forces and the relations of production. But the productive forces and the relations of production are not concepts
2:25 specific to Clouscard; he takes them up, he privileges them, but they are concepts belonging to those who made them operative from the time of Marx, then Engels, Lenin — I mean, that whole field of dialectical or historical materialism, familiar in that domain. Whereas Clouscard's own contribution is to have conjugated this — this revolutionary field, FIELD, we agree — with precisely his own contribution, which is to have introduced not the notion of modernity but of mundanity/worldliness, or rather to have considerably broadened both the extension and the comprehension
3:36 of what thereby becomes a concept — I'm sure the logicians among you understand me. You know that the pair of extension and comprehension in logic, in general logic, is fairly simple — it's abstract but simple. Comprehension is the set of predicates that can be attached to a subject — let's say, the isosceles triangle, there's the subject: a triangular geometric figure possessing two equal sides, we can stop there, right? The predicate 'possessing two equal sides,' 'triangle having two equal sides,' being the predicate of the subject 'isosceles.' So comprehension is everything we need to understand when we cite the subject. Extension is exactly the opposite: it's the set of subjects, so it's a more numerical notion,
4:46 you see, to which a certain predicate applies. So the predicate — I'm just giving an example, I'm saying anything here — talking about a class in a high school, 'student in year 9 B2' has an extension of 32 students, it applies to 32 subjects, if you like. So when I say that Clouscard's concept of mundanity considerably broadens the comprehension, on the one hand it means — we started off well, I think, well, it's not for me to say, but I dwelt quite a bit on the importance of not reducing mundanity to its light, common, bling-bling sense. We have to start there. That's why Pierre-Alain did very well to find an image, a photo if you like, that makes an excellent starting point. But from there we went on an odyssey that took us not just far from that mundanity, that facticity, to borrow a term dear to Sartre for example, but all the way to
5:56 straight to the opposite, that is, to quotations from the Gospel and theological concepts like that of the prince of this world becomes, and his essence is lie/falsehood — behind mundanity there is the lie, you see, we're far from bling-bling there. Except that — now, I won't come back to that — but what I'd like to insist on today, among other things, is to already warn against misreadings that I see, yes, through the reading of certain comments, which I'm delighted about, mind you — but I fear that some are exposed to a misreading, which is that we must not take the 'world' — which is the root of mundanity — solely in a pejorative sense, far from it. And that's why, to dissuade you
7:07 from this misreading, exactly in the same vein as when I said that Clouscard was not the anti-pleasure disciplinarian that a certain very contemporary puritanical stiffening would like to reduce him to, including among those who claim him and use him to lash out — lash out, whip in hand — against the excesses of the world of the dominant, so to speak simply, in the same relation, the 'world,' which is thus the root of mundanity, unfolds across a spectrum that runs from the worst to the best. And the best is when I conjugate it, as I did last time — I hope I'm not repeating it too much — with the world
8:18 as also indispensable to the notion of happiness. When I present it in the form of happiness, there are already fewer reasons to shoot arrows at it. So how — let me recall, so that it's well established — the deductive, conceptual link between these two concepts which don't, at first glance, seem to be in a relation of mutual implication, as we say. When I say 'world,' we don't necessarily move to 'happiness' — on the contrary, one can say, as in the Bible, this world is a vale of tears, right? And conversely, when I say 'happiness,' some see it rather when it's somewhat outside the world, having broken with the world, right? So the two notions are not implied by each other, and yet I'm going to come back to the concept of world, but starting from happiness this time, to show to what extent
The two determinations of happiness 9:28 as soon as you develop one you fall into the other. I recall what I said in other contexts, but I insist all the more since it's our subject today, on the fact that for happiness not to be — I'm putting it in quotation marks now, meaning I'm attaching myself to the concept, the word if you like, and not to all the things one can associate with it — precisely to elevate the notion of happiness, so this time in your head, I'd say, you put quotation marks around 'happiness' to remind yourself that we're asking what we call happiness here, before knowing what it is — even though there are two determinations characteristic of happiness. Another reminder upstream: if I insist on making distinctions, which I'm about to make regarding happiness, if I insist on providing precisions, determinations, giving it a predicate, a comprehension, it's in order to
10:39 avoid confusing it with things it may resemble. How many times must I repeat that no one will ever ask you much effort to distinguish a ladybird from a jet fighter — a ladybird, I mean the insect, right — or a remote control and a plane tree, I mean, you see, there's no risk of confusion there. So that's not where precisions and distinctions are needed. But when you're asked the difference between an elephant and a mammoth, or, more delicately, between the African elephant and the Asian elephant, you see, between a boa and a python — I could vary the examples, I don't know why I'm in zoology here — in other words, it's where there's a risk of confusion that we need to agree clearly on what makes it impossible to confuse the concept with another. And to apply that to happiness, I was proposing — these are reminders, that's why I'm going a bit fast —
11:49 two determinations. First, happiness, to differentiate itself from what it might be confused with — beatitude, the beatitude of the saints, a theological notion, salvation, voluptuousness, pleasure, and so on — we can sense that it's linked and close. So how do we tell the difference? First, there's a relation to time: happiness implies a longer duration than mere pleasure, which can be of an intensity that can go to infinity — I'm thinking of jouissance for example — but fleeting, evanescent, fugitive, to the point that in antiquity — I'll say it in Latin, but it's a tradition going back to Aristotle — post coitum omne animal triste, right, 'after intercourse every animal is sad,' you see. Happiness isn't that; it requires something that settles in a bit over duration, through repetition. I often allude to the verb tense
12:59 in which happiness is expressed in stories, or in memories, or in reminiscences, that is, the imperfect tense — and you learned this at school, from primary school, that it's the ideal tense for designating something that occupied a certain duration, that repeated itself. There you go: 'and every morning I was happy with the café au lait my aunt made me' — I'm a very poor writer, so I'll stop there, I mean I'm a very poor reciter. First determination: happiness already distinguishes itself from many things it resembles simply by the fact that it requires duration. Second, the more important one, and here we'll return to our starting subject, in case you thought I'd strayed from it: a positive relation to the world, precisely — mundanity is included in this. I mean by that that I have immense respect for someone
14:09 who, even in prison, manages to find a certain inner peace, through whatever apprenticeship, wisdom, meditation, whatever — I have the greatest respect for one who seeks salvation, a religious notion, salvation, who finds it, deliverance in Buddhist nirvana or in Christian salvation, doesn't matter for now — but the common point is that it happens outside the world, or after death. That's what makes the difference. When I say happiness implies a positive relation to the world, I mean to what is here and now. So if you combine the two — a positive relation to the world, and one that lasts a long time — we speak more precisely of happiness. And the second determination shows precisely that mundanity
Happiness, a new idea: from "a world" to "the world" 15:19 can have no pejorative connotation at all. This is where I recall — excuse me — not only no pejorative connotation, but moreover it's almost the opposite: it took millennia of patience to begin to glimpse, in universal history, the possibility of happiness. That doesn't mean there were never any possibilities before — but be careful — when, at the time of the French Revolution, that is, very recently in historical terms, relatively speaking, if you look at history since the Pharaohs, the French Revolution is yesterday — when someone at that moment, a fine figure like Saint-Just, says 'happiness is a new idea in Europe,' happiness, that is, the positive relation to the world, is a new idea in Europe, he goes somewhat in the direction of what I'm trying to bring out, namely that for millennia it was
16:29 survival, submission, this vale of tears framed by the terrors of what stood in for the sacred — the terror of the religious, ranging from human sacrifice to, conversely, God sacrificing himself for men, you see — but there's always something oblational, as we say, that is, everything that pertains to sacrifice within the sacred, sacer, sacrifice. So happiness, that is, a positive relation to the world — I repeat, in duration and without transcendent, supernatural reference — takes a great deal of time. And when you watch what's happening, when you watch the news — I'm not talking about those crossing the Mediterranean, leaving quite a few corpses behind, right, I'm not talking about those suffering the conflicts of war at our doorstep, the appalling carnage
17:41 that we thought had definitively disappeared — no, not because we suddenly believe, but again, the positive relation to the world, the fact that it be for everyone and not just some, presupposes a dimension of universality, and presupposes that the remedies some find against unhappiness by seeing power, wealth, privilege — precisely as privilege, that's why I wanted to include this notion of privilege in tonight's title — do not concern the world. And here I'll introduce a new distinction, between the definite and indefinite article — no, I'm not playing with words — there can always be a world that attains happiness, and for a certain time; it's not the world that attains it.
18:51 So you see, now I'm introducing a new notion, which is extending to the whole of humanity what, for too long and for millennia, has never been anything but the privilege of a few. This is the place to recall the link, now, between mundanity, no longer just happiness but — you'll say, but — mundanity and freedom. It would be strange, wouldn't it, for freedom to be opposed to happiness. But there's a more necessary way of linking these two concepts: look, I just said, extending to the whole of humanity the pleasures, even if settled into duration and thus representing a certain happiness, hitherto confined to a few.
The three stages of freedom in Hegel 20:01 It doesn't matter here whether it's a sovereign, a social class — you can guess the reference that comes to my mind, which I've happened to cite quite often — it's the meaning Hegel assigns to History, with a capital H this time. So you'll tell me, no, that's old-fashioned, history has no meaning, it's a monstrous chaos, and besides, even granting that it had one, that would be terrible, it would mean it's totalitarian, it would mean we're all heading toward a single goal, and that it's against diversity — well, you know that better than I do. But wait, wait, it's a bit much to pass off as totalitarian a meaning that Hegel concentrates in the word 'freedom.' Let me recall the formula: the Orientals knew that one alone is free; the Greeks knew — we're no longer in the imperfect tense — that some are free; the moderns know, in the present tense, that all are free. Strangely, this overlaps
21:11 strangely — so let's spell it out a bit — the Orientals first, let's be clear, we're not in geography, he's not talking about, say, Iraqis or Chinese today — it's the historical Orientals, not geographical ones, meaning history has begun. The Orientals knew that one alone — the Pharaoh, the King of Kings in Persia, or in Ethiopia, I'm thinking of the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings, descendant of Prester John, well, the Ethiopian sovereign, the Negus — the Emperor of China, all that, I mean it's an immense pyramid, right, where a single person, or at most a very small clan, decides at every moment the fate of millions of subjects. The Orientals knew that one alone. With the Greeks — wait, I mean, ah yes, that's it, democracy? No.
22:21 Yes, there's a form of democracy that appears, but within a minority — that of free men, that is, those not compelled to work for others, that is, as opposed to slaves. That was roughly — roughly two-thirds, one-third, a bit more than two-thirds, there you go — even if those slaves weren't quite the nightmare they'd become in Rome — but still, as in Rome later — but still, I mean, it would be a bit much to speak of democracy. On the other hand, what is new is that within the community of free citizens, what decides power is no longer force, or the rule of a clan or a family, it's speech — because power is exercised on the agora, on the Pnyx, wherever people vote, and after having heard various people propose something, that is, after having spoken — the parliament, parliament, yes, that's where we suddenly see the importance of these words, right, hence the importance, in the philosophy of a Plato for example, of the importance
23:31 of having to cross swords with the sophists, since the stakes now are knowing who will convince whom of what in the city. I'll give the example of the Gorgias, which is ideal here since its subject is precisely oratory, the art of convincing an audience, and Socrates begins by questioning Gorgias, who existed, who was at the time one of the most illustrious and most highly paid of the sophists — they were paid by ambitious young men from great families who wanted to gain political power, and for them these sophists were a bit like — we'd say today — communications consultants, if you like. And so when he's questioned by Socrates, who asks him what oratory is, he begins by answering: it's the best of things. First step taken.
24:41 Socrates tells him: we don't yet know what it is; you're telling us it's the best of things. Alright then, my mistake, let's say — listen, Socrates, it's the art of convincing, of persuading. Well then, you're a geometer! The other one is startled: oh yes, because when a geometer makes a demonstration it's indeed to convince, to persuade. And you see how we progress, moving from the form of persuasion to the content of persuasion, for there are two persuasions — within the genus 'persuasion' there are two species, which can no longer be more opposed to each other: one that results in knowledge, the geometer's demonstration, I convince you of a truth; and the other, that of the crooked lawyer, we'd say today — not that all lawyers are like this, but the sophist, proverbially at least, is the crooked lawyer, the one who — as long as he's paid for it — teaches you how to convince anyone at all, regardless of the truth-value involved. The whole point is that this opinion is in the head, and not whether that opinion corresponds
25:51 to something, to an objective knowledge. So once we're there, we've made progress at the level of — yes, I'm coming back to the grand three-stage plan — the Orientals knew that one alone is free, the Greeks knew that some are free, the possibility of being so, yes, on condition of being able to convince — and the moderns, whom Hegel of course associates with the appearance of Christian civilization, which historically indeed also corresponds to the progressive disappearance of slavery in the ancient sense of the term — because some say, oh my, the condition of the worker is even worse than slavery — but it's not a question of knowing whether it's better or worse, these are different things, and between the worker, even in the worst periods of the English Manchester factory where life expectancy
27:02 isn't very high, the worker who tramps across Great Britain looking for a job, and the one who is in battle against the Persians with a blade at his throat, having to choose between being slaughtered on the spot or saving his life as a slave — it's not quite the same status. And so the modern world consists in knowing that all are free potentially, of course not actually — meaning that in principle, in law, we must extend — I'm finishing my detour through the three stages of freedom — extend it to the whole of humanity, and we come back to what we were saying about a mundanity that would not be the privilege of a few, which gives it its sometimes exasperating, even obscene character, right, that it should no longer be
Reading of Rimbaud's "Barbare" 28:13 those who wallow in pleasure — which is still far from happiness — while others, at the very same moment, howl under torture, or in war, or simply at hard labor, or agonize in miserable lives. In both cases, the world changes determination considerably, and that's why I'd like to start by illustrating it, because otherwise we're on the verge of abstraction, and not only is that tiring for the mind, but it's also less telling than when it's accompanied by concrete representations. I'd like to start with a text by Rimbaud, taken from the Illuminations, called 'Barbare.' I won't give a full explanation of this text — there would be many somewhat enigmatic things to explain, that's not my subject — so no detour, but you'll see
29:24 that the word 'world' comes at the end. It's very short, and the poem has a beauty that's sufficient unto itself, whether you understand it or not — it's beautiful. You can take intense pleasure in listening to music without knowing what it says. 'Long after the days and the seasons, and the beings and the countries, the flag of raw meat against the silk of arctic seas and flowers' — obviously there are no flowers at the pole, they don't exist — 'restored the old fanfares of heroism which still attack our heart and head' — restored, meaning all that appears far, far removed from the ancient assassins — oh, repetition — 'the flag of raw meat against the silk of arctic seas and flowers' — it doesn't exist — and there it begins — 'Sweetnesses!' plural, exclamation point, look at what follows and the enumeration — 'the braziers raining down in gusts of frost, sweetness! — the fires in the rain of the wind of diamond, thrown by the earthly heart eternally carbonized'
30:34 'for us, O world' — we're not in bling-bling here, mind you — first of all it's a vagabond kid on the roads writing this — 'the braziers raining down in gusts of frost' — so you see, the braziers, fire, heat, the gusts of frost, ice, and then again the same — look — 'the fires in the rain of the wind of diamond, thrown by the earthly heart eternally carbonized for us, O world' — rain and the carbonized earthly heart — this union like this of the most burning and the most icy, of water and fire, this old couple — in the symbolic order, it's not — some will say in the symbolic order it has been like this for millennia, fire on the masculine side, water on the feminine side — you know that Eve comes from a root meaning water in Semitic — not in the world of African first names, especially in Islamized countries, Africa is Islamized by those who crossed the Sahara, right, Islam came from the north, you have Adama and Hawa,
31:44 Adam and Eve, right? Now Hawa, as is well known in Francophone Africa, is a well-known mineral water produced in Côte d'Ivoire, but found almost throughout Francophone Africa — Hawa, water, Eve — there are many reasons for this, right, the fact that the sea is the origin, right, it's the maternal womb, it's the origin, since the child begins by bathing in a liquid, it's the ocean of origins — remember the sessions we did on Wagner's Tetralogy, the longest work in the history of what's called the West, to which I always put many quotation marks, as you know, and which lasts four days, and which begins how?
32:45 with the three daughters of the Rhine frolicking in the water, to the point that musicologists call the prelude to Das Rheingold 'the prelude of the original element,' you see, in everything that is original. Then I'll also — let me try to find it for you — because in the tradition, I see well that the original, I know what it is, I thought
33:58 I had it at hand — I'm sorry for this interruption — I thought I had it at hand, but actually it's a text taken from the Upanishads, right, one of the oldest texts of the Vedic tradition, Brahmanic if you prefer, but truly among the oldest, as canonical as, I don't know, Genesis is for the Old Testament — and there's one called 'Cosmogony,' meant to be the origin of the world. So we're not in astronomy, it's not the origin of the Earth — I hope you no longer confuse the world and the Earth. The world presupposes that there is someone, and not merely something — I believe we established that in our first episode, I don't want to go back over it, or I'll come back to it if you have questions about it — anyway it's not a distinction hard to elaborate. So it's a cosmogony, meaning the origin here is symbolic. At the origin of everything there was
35:09 water, unfathomably deep — that's in the Vedic text, I'm quoting from memory — until desire took shape. You see, in the beginning there was only water, whether it's the oceans of origins, the gold of the Rhine, you see, or simply at the individual level, that is, not phylogenetic, at the species level, but ontogenetic, at the individual level — each of us was first an island in the maternal womb, right? And all this is to comment on the union Rimbaud makes of water and fire, right — you know that for there to be life, you need both. I mean, if there's only water, that gives you the ice of the poles; if there's only fire, that gives you the desert; and it's when there's both — it's well known in well-watered countries like the equatorial world, for example in tropical Africa or in Amazonia — plant a broomstick and you get a plantation
36:19 within a few weeks — I mean plantation, you get vegetation, plantation, it needs to work, there you go. I come back to this text which is a marvel, and which is a kind of hymn built from the repetition of the word 'sweetness' in the plural — 'the braziers raining down in gusts of frost, sweetness! — the fires in the rain of the wind of diamonds, thrown by the earthly heart eternally carbonized for us, O world' — and in a moment I'll comment on a text by Hölderlin, I'll tell you the title right away: we give as title the very first words because it has no title — 'In lovely blueness' — in which Hölderlin says precisely this: 'but does God take pleasure in bleeding from his heart?' You see, it's not so far off, we've never made the connection, though it's so obvious — 'far from the old retreats,' I continue now, 'and the old flames one hears, one senses' — so a moment ago he'd said he'd been restored
37:29 from the old fanfares, now you see, that means it's a real illumination which, in the present, suddenly carried him far from the daily grind that had preceded it, and it takes up again the braziers and the foams — again fire and water, you see, 'the braziers and the foams' — the music, suddenly, a turning — 'turning of the abysses and clash of ice floes against the stars' — the music as subject having as predicate 'turning of the abysses and clash of ice floes against the stars,' O sweetness, and we recapitulate, O world, O music, and then 'the forms, the sweats, the hair and the floating eyes,' and 'the white boiling tears' — again the white boiling tears at the pole, white, boiling, O sweetness — and then it's the end, 'the feminine voice arrived at the bottom of the volcanoes and arctic grottoes,' and right to the end we'll have this duality of the volcanic fire, right, and the ice, and the grottoes, and then again the flag
38:39 it's understood, it's like a rondeau and a refrain. So you see here the world isn't something, the world isn't something that wallows in the raw, it's not at all — it's not that mundanity, happiness only exists reserved for a few. And to that extent, they are very reductive. That's another aspect I'd like to illustrate now with a poem less ecstatic than that one. That one is an illumination. You know, Rimbaud's most dramatic, most tragic, most depressed work is of course A Season in Hell, as its title indicates.
39:52 And there, there's this deliverance that the Illuminations represent, where — what happens between the two? That's a bit Rimbaud's secret — but each of the Illuminations is like a sudden opening onto another breath, onto what the world could be, right, if this difference between the few and the all did not exist. We're starting to see a bit more clearly, right? So yes, I'll be a bit more concrete.
Luxury is not a bourgeois privilege 40:24 I recently gave a talk in Normandy, and I quoted a passage from Proust, because Normandy, Proust, Balbec, my talk was in Trouville. You know that Trouville is one of the places said to have served Proust in his depiction of the seaside resort of Balbec. Trouville, there's Cabourg.
40:55 And I saw some people making a remark, saying, 'That Proust stuff annoys me, because it's bourgeois literature.' What does that have to do with our topic tonight? But it means, oh dear, that concerns only a small part of humanity, the privileged, mundanity, the luxury hotels, the renowned grand seaside resorts, Deauville, Trouville, Cabourg, and later the Côte d'Azur, a bit later, and Saint-Tropez and the Cannes Film Festival right now — look at the outfits, could not be more bling-bling. Yes, but what does that mean? That everything told, the treasure, the splendors that In Search of Lost Time strews about — does it mean we're going to leave them to a minority and deprive everyone else of them? It's on this point that there's no debate.
42:00 Today's world — what I'd like to insist on today, and in opposition to the person who said that, who had qualities otherwise, but who really spoke as if, in opposition to bourgeois, the working-class world was condemned, right, to be deprived of the braziers raining down in gusts of frost, to speak like Rimbaud. And look, when [Roussel?] — this isn't my cup of tea, the communist regions, especially because of his positions on foreign policy, where they align in an absolutely unforgivable way with Atlanticist positions, on the Ukrainian conflict for example, on the conflict — not exactly Ukrainian actually — on the conflict between Russia and NATO. But on the other hand, when he said that every worker should have the right, on a holiday, to have better meat than usual, good wine, people pounced on him mercilessly. You see where I'm going with this?
43:15 Ah well, that one, I defend, you see, I'm not for or against — we're not doing partisan politics here. Otherwise it's the aberrations of party politics, the feuds of sects and clans. I'm not there. We shouldn't be there. But what is he actually saying? It's still not monstrous to say that a worker, when he can, because he'd like to do it more often, has the right to improve his everyday fare. What does that mean? That we're going to let the great ones of this world, great in the sense of a big bank account, that we're going to let the great ones of this world have the privilege of fine food, fine drink, beautiful properties and beautiful landscapes.
44:00 But that would be monstrous as an injustice. Must one be an unhappy consciousness to renounce one's own share? No, that's fine for the bourgeois, not for me, I'm... And that's why I'm thinking of... the Céline case. Yes indeed, pro-Céline — we'd say that... we stay within the genre of the novel, but people often say, in defense of Céline, yes, agreed, he's scum politically, but still, what style!
44:32 Yes, but it's his style that I find the most unforgivably fascist. This way of playing to the crowd, of always staying in the unspeakable. You have to play to the crowd. Listen, the people don't need to be talked to about pee-pee, poo-poo, because they dream of getting out of that, you see. That's what I wanted to say. The truly popular don't want to be constantly reminded of what the bottom of the barrel is, because they know that better than anyone, that's not what they need, what they need is to discover something else.
45:08 I'm saying that we cannot even imagine, cannot even assess the intensity of the happiness — I'm keeping to my thread, it's happiness — that there would be if the happiness of a few were extended to the whole of humanity. That's the stakes of the era we're living in, and that's why there is violence, because it's not going to happen just like that.
45:44 You can't imagine that power is going to say, "Listen guys, you're the strongest, here are the keys, it's up to you now." That's never how it happens. That's the reformist illusion, isn't it? Especially since this is your generation — actually it's been two generations now — that every time they tell you about reform, you know it means a counter-revolution and a hard-won gain wiped out at the end of social demands and advances.
46:17 if only by raising the retirement age, or by considering full-rate retirement to be privileges. Can you imagine, words like that are serious. The French Revolution was precisely, essentially, directed against privileges. Careful, privileges designated things of birth. You had to be born a noble to be a noble.
46:50 What does that have to do with paid holidays, which were won through hard struggle — there were terrible struggles, there were deaths to get there. Calling that privileges is a bit much. Those are social gains that must be defended, which incidentally was very clearly understood right after the Liberation, in 1947, when social security was created.
47:21 The architects of that enormous revolution insisted strongly that it was something that had to be watched over and defended. I didn't know how right I was to say that. So, you see, the notion of world takes on another extension. I used Rimbaud's poem to get a dimension like an infinite promise.
47:55 over that whole fall. And there, you see, the eyes, the sweat, the hair, the white, boiling tears. And the feminine voice arriving deep in the arctic caves, a kind of cosmic enchantment that composes a world. So, to move from a world to the world, to the extension of the privileges of a few to the whole social body, I'd like to go through a more pessimistic text than Rimbaud's.
Baudelaire's "Le Voyage": the true travelers 48:42 I'm thinking of Baudelaire's "The Voyage," which alone is an evocation of the world. Let me remind you, first of all, that this is the poem that closes the collection The Flowers of Evil. And that here, as in everything essential in poetry, we are in the symbolic order. Don't start thinking of the voyage in terms of a travel agency. Of course, that's the material, that's the central metaphor, but we'll see that it's also a voyage in the symbolic sense.
49:15 But Baudelaire is going to be much clearer than I am, and with a much more adequate expression, on this theme. So I'd rather let him speak right away. You see, "for the child in love with maps and prints," so it begins with a child dreaming over images, over maps, over geography — for the child in love with maps and prints, in other words for the one who hasn't yet traveled, "the universe is equal to his vast appetite." It's not the world, it's the universe. It's as big as the desire I have to travel through it.
49:49 "Ah, how great the world is by lamplight, in memory's eyes how small the world is." So, you see, it's as if Baudelaire has already finished his poem, he's already given the summary before going into detail, hasn't he? So, let's go on. "One morning we set off, brains full of flame, hearts heavy with rancor and bitter desires, and we go, following the rhythm of the wave, rocking our infinity on the finitude of the seas."
50:24 I'm often asked the question: but what exactly is dialectic? There are several ways to answer, and one of the least inappropriate answers is to say: think about this line of Baudelaire's, "rocking our infinity on the finitude of the seas." There you find the main ingredient of dialectic, which is opposites — here, the finite and the infinite — and the movement engendered by that opposition, "rocking our infinity on the finitude of the seas."
51:00 You know that in his youth — forgive me for going into anecdote, but it's to understand certain images in this immense poem that closes The Flowers of Evil, it's the estuary of the collection — Baudelaire was forcibly put on a voyage, on a ship that followed the African coast, forced by his stepfather, the man his mother had remarried. He sulked for a long time, staying in his cabin, but still, from what he discovered in those far-off regions he brought back things that would become among the finest achievements in The Flowers of Evil.
51:39 I'll say, at random, for instance "To a Malabar woman": "Malabar is a distant shore under a canopy of crimson trees and palms from which laziness rains down upon the eyes... I knew a Creole lady of unknown charms." So there, he brought back images — so when he says "rocking our infinity on the finitude of the seas," you can imagine him contemplating for hours, days, weeks — because it was quite long back then, in the age of sail — the sky's azure, immense and round, as he says in another poem. Let me remind you here that "horizon" comes from the Greek term horos, which means the determined, the finite, the limit. So, who travels — a typology: some, joyful to flee an infamous homeland, exile because their life is in danger, or else poverty; others, the horror of their cradle, a tragic family life; a few, astrologers drowned in the eyes of a woman — what are they fleeing? — the tyrannical Circe with her dangerous perfume.
52:49 there's always a somewhat demonizing vision of a certain femininity in Baudelaire — misogynist is too simple a word given the complexity of the Baudelaire case, but still: "so as not to be turned into beasts, they get drunk" — all those fleeing something, all those with a determined reason to travel, get drunk on what? "On space and light and blazing skies, the ice that bites them, the suns that bronze them, slowly erase the mark of kisses." But these are not the true travelers, for Baudelaire — the sails to come — but no, the true ones — "but the true travelers are only those who leave for the sake of leaving, light of heart, like balloons, they never turn away from their fate, and without knowing why always say, let's go" — those whose desires — we'll finally learn why they travel — "have the shape of clouds." So, wait, the object of desire has the shape of clouds.
54:00 that is, precisely an indeterminate shape — what is more indeterminate than the outline of clouds? By the time you think you've almost fixed it, it has already completely changed, frayed, or condensed, or vanished — "those whose desires have the shape of clouds" — but that's it, the dream is to have an object of desire that recedes indefinitely, and all this is said much more clearly at the end of that quatrain: "and who dreams, as a conscript dreams of the cannon, of vast, changing, unknown pleasures, whose name the human mind has never known" — you see, one can only speak of it in negative terms, we don't know them — "unknown, whose name the human mind has never known" — and yet that's what we desire. Let me repeat that passage anyway: "but the true travelers are only those who leave for the sake of leaving, light hearts like balloons" — I think of Nerval, who made his voyage to the Orient — at the time it was fashionable, Lamartine made his voyage to the Orient, Chateaubriand—
55:10 "Prayer on the Acropolis" and all that, everyone does his little number, now on the Acropolis in Athens, now on the pyramids in Cairo — Nerval, as for him, spends an incredible amount of time lingering, if I recall, in Châlons-sur-Marne, because there are floods, and he's delighted that it's taking time because people are stuck due to the floods — as soon as he's left home the magic of the journey begins to work, the goal of the journey is the journey itself. I don't know, I'm always astonished, when I go on a wonderful trip with people heading in the same direction whom I know more or less vaguely, to see that they can't wait for the trip to end — they're glued to their phones or in a book, you see, none of them look out the window, while we cross through some of the most beautiful regions of France — I'm thinking of trains, for instance, it's happened to me often — and we go through incredible things, in a country that is the most visited in the world, and not one of them looks, as if, as if the journey itself were a bad moment to get through and happiness were—
56:20 —where I left from, or where I'm going to arrive, but certainly not in between. Whereas here, it's the journey itself that is the object of the journey. "The true travelers are only those who leave for the sake of leaving, light of heart, like balloons" — so you see, permanent mobility — "they never turn away from their fate, and without knowing why always say, let's go" — those whose desires "have the shape of clouds" — it's really striking, I'll pause once more on this: in the history of the plastic arts, painting in particular, it's from the moment Baudelaire writes this kind of text, around the second half of the 19th century, which is roughly beginning, that Impressionism appears — where outlines dissolve, where it's no longer a matter of painting an object but the impression that object produces on a subject, which is quite different, isn't it. And who dreams of what?
57:28 "of vast pleasures" — not very determined — "changing, unknown, whose name the human mind has never known." So, we continue: "we imitate, horror, the top and the ball" — so we come back to mobility, but this time somewhat as an illustration of what Pascal, after "the misery of man" — misery in the ancient sense of unhappiness, of course — "in their waltz and their bounce" — "in their waltz and their bounce" — there's this magnificent line, "like a cruel angel that whips suns, strange fortune where the goal shifts, and being nowhere, may be anywhere, where man, whose hope is never weary, in order to find rest, always runs like a madman" — well, that's fine, it's Baudelaire, it's well put, but ultimately the idea is already less original — misery of man without God, Pascal said, misery of divertissement — "When I set myself to examine men," Pascal says, "I noticed—"
58:38 —that all their unhappiness came from being able to stay at rest — the opposite of movement — in a room. No, on the contrary, "in order to find rest, always runs like a madman." Our soul — a new way of illustrating the same problem — "our soul is a three-master seeking its Icaria, a voice rings out on deck, keep watch" — the crow's nest is way up on the mast, where the lookout man watches to see if land is sighted, or an iceberg, or whatever, or a whale blowing on the horizon — "a voice from the crow's nest, ardent and mad, cries out: love, glory, happiness!" You see, it's a symbolic voyage — "hell, it's a reef" — each islet signaled by the lookout is an Eldorado promised by destiny — that's in the imagination of the one who leaves — but "the imagination, that raises its orgy, finds" — and this is the real — "only a reef in the light of morning." So you see, aren't these the true travelers, those who leave for the sake of leaving, those who really believe they will find—
59:48 —somewhere in the world something better than where they left from risk being exposed to cruel disappointments. That's what follows: "Oh, the poor lover of chimerical lands, should he be put in irons, thrown into the sea, this drunken sailor, inventor of America, whose mirage makes the abyss more bitter — like the old vagabond trudging in the mud, dreams, nose in the air, of brilliant paradises." I can't help thinking here, in the poorest countries I've been able to travel through — and God knows I've traveled through some of the poorest, south of the Sahara — of the storyteller, the popular storyteller in the street to whom everyone gives next to nothing, or one can even sit and listen even without paying to hear him tell stories — the story is a bit like the Thousand and One Nights, you see, each time these tales — and so it's those who are the most destitute in the world who become enchanted, in the proper sense, incantare, who dream the Thousand and One Nights, while at the level of the air they are old vagabonds trudging in the mud — "like the old vagabond trudging in the mud, dreams, nose in the air, of brilliant paradises, his bewitched eye discovers a Capua—"
1:00:58 a Capua — that's the delights of Capua, near Naples — "everywhere a candle lights up a hovel astonishingly." But no, he's addressing directly those who come back from far away: "What noble stories do we read in your deep eyes, deep as the seas, show us the caskets of your rich memories, those marvelous jewels made of stars and ether, we want to travel without steam and without sail" — there were the first, the very first steamships — "we want to travel without steam and without sail, made to brighten the boredom of our prisons" — I meant to say prison is the real, wherever one is, isn't it, see that prose poem where he took up a title from his master Edgar Poe, his intellectual master, "Anywhere Out of the World" — anywhere as long as it's outside the world — "made to brighten the boredom of our prisons, pass over our minds stretched taut like a canvas your memories with their horizon frame, tell us, what have you seen?" And now it's the traveler who speaks—
1:02:08 —who speaks: "We have seen stars and waves" — I'm lingering on this text, deliberately commenting on it at length, because given the journey we're about to see, and since it's recited by the travelers, it is indeed the world that's at stake — the whole world, not some particular place or social milieu — "we have seen stars and waves, how simple and how beautiful that is as a first answer — we have seen stars and waves, we have also seen sands, and despite many shocks and unforeseen events" — stars, and this is the conclusion of everything that follows — "we have often been bored, as we are here — must man be an abyss of infinity for none of the world's riches to quench his thirst" — forgive me, his thirst — "the glory of the sun on the violet sea, the glory of cities in the setting sun kindled in our hearts—"
1:03:18 —"a restless ardor to plunge into an alluring, reflecting sky; never did the richest cities, the most beautiful landscapes, contain the mysterious allure of those" — and here we return to it — "that chance shapes" — with the indeterminate, the shapeless, like the clouds — "and always desire made us anxious" — the enjoyment — I'll skip a stanza or two, that's it, the two that come after — if the travelers — I'll just take the last two lines — "and yet we have carefully" — after the question mark, "and yet we have carefully" — it's still the travelers speaking — "gathered a few sketches for your voracious album, brothers who find beautiful all that comes from afar." So, what did we see? "We saluted trunk-nosed idols" — one thinks of Hindu deities, but let's not be too descriptive — "thrones studded with luminous jewels, ornate palaces whose fairy-tale splendor would be for your bankers a ruinous dream, costumes that are for the eyes—"
Bitter knowledge: the world, death as voyage 1:04:28 —"an intoxication, women whose teeth and nails are stained, and skilled jugglers caressed by the serpent" — envy, and already this stirs excitement in the listeners, and then again the answer is terrible: "O childish minds" — so as not to forget the essential thing — "we have seen everywhere, without having sought it, from top to bottom of the fatal ladder, the tedious spectacle of immortal sin: woman, vile slave, proud and stupid" — Sandrine Rousseau, no joke — "adoring herself and loving herself without disgust" — but don't worry, because for man it's even worse — "man, greedy tyrant, lecherous, hard and grasping, slave of the slave" — whatever those who say the opposite may claim — "and a gutter in the sewer" — and then it gets worse — "the executioner who exults, the martyr who sobs, the feast that is seasoned and perfumed with blood" — because that too is the world, I come back to the world — the valet of art, isn't it, the feast—
1:05:39 —"that is seasoned and perfumed with blood" — I'm thinking, no matter the human sacrifice, "the poison of power that unnerves the despot, and the people in love with the numbing whip" — there's Baudelaire's somewhat reactionary, aristocratic side; he's not at all an aristocrat but he has an aristocratic cast of mind, as often in decadent thought — "several religions similar to ours, all climbing to heaven; holiness, as if on a feather bed, a delicate man wallows" — I think of the fakir on nails and horsehair, seeking pleasure — "humanity, chattering and drunk on its own genius, and as mad now as it was long ago, crying out to God in its furious agony: O my fellow man, O my master, I curse you." Well, here again in Baudelaire we find the need to reassert the importance of religious reference at a time when secularism was of course growing, and what he judges to be impiety, proper to modern society, which he disapproves of; in this sense he's closer to a Pascal, if you like, than to a Hugo, who is closer at this level to the society of his time. And here it becomes magnificent again—
1:06:51 —"and the less foolish, bold lovers of madness, fleeing the great herd penned in by fate, and taking refuge in immense opium" — so, escape, you see, in what Baudelaire will call, in another book, artificial paradises — "such is the world, which is the world" — and the world, "the eternal, bitter goal, to know" — I tell you, it's very pessimistic, we're not in the illuminated ecstasy of Rimbaud earlier, oh the fires raining down — no, bitter knowledge — the one drawn from the voyage — the world — that's really our subject — "monotonous and small, today, yesterday, tomorrow, always, shows us our image" — that's perhaps the most despairing line I know — our image, what is it?
1:07:37 "an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom" — forgive me for saying it while laughing, that's exactly what I wanted, since it goes beyond the limit — "an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom." So what should one do — stay in the oasis of horror, or try to escape and die of thirst in the desert of boredom? Should one leave, stay? "If you can stay, stay; leave, if you must. One runs, and the other crouches down, to deceive the vigilant and deadly foe, Time" — let me recall here that Baudelaire was under the influence of a great counter-revolutionary thinker, who is not without merit, Joseph de Maistre, who said man is not made for time — you see the influence here — I say this because these are ideologies that keep coming back, but without having Baudelaire's genius, right?
1:08:27 and without having, either, those appeals to fraternity that come to counterbalance his reactionary side. What I mean by that is that anti-progressive ideologies today — or worse, even when they claim to be progressive — say that nothing has ever been worse than since there's been progress, and yet — "some, to deceive the vigilant and deadly foe, Time, there are, alas, tireless runners, like the Wandering Jew and like the apostles, for whom nothing suffices, neither wagon nor ship, to flee this net-thrower" — the rétiaire is a net-fighter, that's where the word "réseau" (network) comes from — "this infamous net-thrower — there are others who know how to kill it without leaving their cradle. When at last it sets its foot upon our spine" — now we're beginning to move toward the true voyage, because it's precisely here that we see it's a symbolic voyage — the absolute voyage is death — "when at last it sets its foot upon our spine, we shall be able to hope, and cry out, Forward! Just as once we set off for China, eyes fixed on the open sea and hair in the wind, we shall embark upon the sea of shadows with the joyful heart of a young passenger. Do you hear—
1:09:38 —these charming and funereal voices that sing: 'This way, you who want to eat the fragrant lotus'" — that means, at the gates of death — "'here one harvests the miraculous fruits for which your heart hungers; come and get drunk on the strange sweetness of this endless afternoon.' By the familiar accent we guess the spectre; our Pyladeses" — Pylades was Orestes' friend in Racine's Andromache, our Pyladeses, always the symbol of friendship — "our Pyladeses over there stretch out their arms toward us. 'Swim to your Electra, to refresh your heart,' says she whose knees we once kissed." And then the fall, which is magnificent — "O Death, old captain" — you see the metaphor, that was the voyage — "it is time! Let us weigh anchor! This land wearies us, O Death, let us set sail!" — this land is what Kant, since we're doing philosophy, would call the phenomenon — "this land wearies us, O Death, let us set sail! If sky and sea are black as ink" — that's the external world — "our hearts, which you know well, are filled with light! Pour out your poison, that it may comfort us! We so want this fire to burn our brains—"
1:10:49 this fire is the lure of the unknown — "to plunge to the bottom of the gulf, Hell or Heaven, what matter" — right into the depths — and these are the last lines of The Flowers of Evil — "to the bottom of the Unknown to find something new!" If we took that literally, but not perhaps in the sense one would want — Baudelaire, in an almost opposite sense — I'll take his vision, which is magnificent, and his observation, but I won't attribute it to the same causes, right, I'd compare it in particular to that phrase so often quoted from the Gospel, since Baudelaire feels very close to Christianity, which is quite clear in several texts, to which I refer you, in particular in his critical works — yes, this formula, very, very much—
"My kingdom is not of this world" 1:12:00 —that sums up almost entirely how Christianity is a religion of transcendence: when Jesus says "my kingdom is not of this world," we come back to it. We can stop at this first level, that is, a naively transcendent vision, in an almost literal sense — meaning there is another world, as there is in Plato the intelligible world opposed to the sensible world. Or else we can take it literally, to the letter — what does it say? My kingdom — it doesn't say "is of no world," he didn't say that — "my kingdom is not of this" — I take the letter — world, the demonstrative that one points at, this world, here and now. But this world can be transformed, and I come back to what I was saying: if the privileges of a few are extended to humanity, then the kingdom becomes credible again.
1:13:11 But this time, remember, as everything now comes back to it, happiness must have a necessary relation to the world, so there cannot be happiness when we speak of salvation as aiming at an afterworld — that's an expression of Nietzsche's — an afterworld after death, as a kind of promise for which life would have to be sacrificed. You'll tell me, wait, this isn't a given, you're not going to turn Christianity into its opposite, one shouldn't force the poet's words either. — But you often say you don't like interpretation, and here you're doing more than interpreting, you're twisting the text. — Wait, I'm following the text to the letter. How does the New Testament end? It's quite simple, there are three big parts to the New Testament, even though the whole of these three parts is much smaller than the Old Testament — but that's normal because it's not the same time span, is it, it's not the same — it's a compilation from several generations, the Old Testament. The New Testament is the four Gospels, so essentially the life and death of Christ, then the Acts of the Apostles—
1:14:23 —right, and finally, the grand finale, the Apocalypse. What is the end of the end, how does the Apocalypse finish? It's that we all ascend to heaven, finally reaching that kingdom that was not of the world below. Not at all — it's exactly the opposite, it's the descent to earth, so here and now, into the world, of the heavenly Jerusalem, which at last becomes earthly. Well, yes, I can't help quoting a few passages here, I don't know, that's all, and there, it's a bit—
1:15:52 It's a black thing. It's a thing like that. A bit animated. It's a thing. I'm not sure anymore. There. I'm not sure anymore. That's it.
1:16:22 I'm sorry, there have been plumbing repairs done in my house. So nothing is in its usual place. There we go. So, look at what happens at the end of the Apocalypse. It's not me speaking, it's the apostle John, the eagle of Patmos. Patmos is a Greek island where he received the revelation of the Apocalypse.
1:16:52 There we go. So. This is the ending, after catastrophes of a kind that only the Orient can produce. The lake of sulfur, Satan cast down into the abyss. I'd have something to say, by the way, about Satan's end.
1:17:26 In the text. Let me say it right away. The voice that rings out in heaven when Satan is finally cast down, at the end of time — not into hell, but straight into nothingness, the lake of sulfur, where he is dissolved. There is a voice that says: "Behold, he is vanquished, the great Satan, the ancient serpent" — comma — "he who accused our brothers before the Eternal."
1:17:58 I'm exasperated by this recurring return of a neo-paganism, isn't it, of an anti-Christianity. I'm not defending Christianity here. I'm defending it against a charge that is a misreading — namely, that it would be the religion of guilt-inducing. Hence the cult of the pagans. Well anyway, I won't spell it out further for you. Without even bringing in the neo-Nietzscheans.
1:18:29 Poor Nietzsche, as for him, is trying to heal himself when he prosecutes Christianity. He is Christian to the bone. But he's trying to cure himself of himself. But it's a misreading. In the Gospel, for instance — I'm not saying it's good or bad, I'm not saying the Gospel is well-founded, I'm saying what it says — it says the exact opposite of guilt-inducing. Everyone knows the chapter about the adulterous woman. Except people rarely dwell on the detail.
1:19:01 Everyone remembers less and less, given what transmission has become, that it's "let him who is without sin cast the first stone." Since adulterous women had to be stoned in that puritanical society — let's go, let's stone her. The condition: that one be without sin. Set the example. Of course, everyone slinks away in shame. And Jesus is left alone.
1:19:31 Facing the sinner. And here there's a dialogue we forget. Woman, where are those who condemned you? Ah well, they've gone. Go, neither do I condemn you. He didn't say "I forgive you," which would imply there was a fault. Neither do I condemn you. And if you find that's not enough, that I'm forcing the texts, three verses later he says to the Pharisees, "You judge according to the flesh, I judge no one." It's written in black and white.
1:20:02 Take it in whatever translation you like. You won't be able to change the meaning of the formula. And here's how absolute evil is defined, the ancient serpent, Satan? The one who accused our brothers before the Eternal. Not the one who tempted, who seduced us, but the one who accused our brothers, who tempted them, who seduced them, and then pointed the finger at us when we had succumbed to temptation.
Reading of the Apocalypse: the city descends to earth 1:20:32 There, that was a parenthesis I'm closing, because my subject here is that the beyond of the world, the opposite of the mundane, the extra-worldly, the supernatural, comes down into the world. That's the end of times, in apocalyptic terms, in the proper sense. "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and I saw coming down out of heaven, from God, that is, coming from God, the holy city, the new Jerusalem.
1:21:10 Not, not, not. The one that comes from on high, but comes down below, that becomes earthly, you see. The new Jerusalem, prepared—look at the metaphor, I remember discussing this passage with Clouscard. The new Jerusalem, like a bride, adorned for her husband.
1:21:40 I think it's a passage—I tell you, Hölderlin says, "For what God himself brings to surprises, garments, adorned, adornment, garments." And I saw coming down out of heaven, from God, the holy city. What does it matter whether one believes in God or not? I'd like us not to go off subject here. What does it change about the fact that here we're talking precisely about the descent of a supernatural below, of the ought-to-be into being, of transcendence into immanence, call it what you like, from the beyond to the here-below, or to here on earth, as you wish.
1:22:23 And I heard from the throne a loud voice saying—because the vision is at the same time an audition—a loud voice saying, "Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men." You see that the final solution is a community, it's a city. It's not an individual, it's not an isolated savior, is it? There had to be mediation. An individual, but I mean, the final solution is a society reconciled with itself, where it's no longer a matter of a few.
1:22:55 Look carefully, I'm not forcing the text. I heard from the throne a loud voice saying, "Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them." And not in some inaccessible beyond. "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, for the former things have passed away."
1:23:25 And he who sat on the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new." And he said, "Write." He says to the one, to the evangelist who has the vision, he says, "Write." For these words are trustworthy and true. And he said to me, "It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega." The beginning and the end, meaning the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
1:23:57 To him who is thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life. Freely. Good heavens. Notions suddenly appear that we're not used to associating with the religious domain. What's free and what's paid for. "He who conquers will inherit these things. But for the cowardly, the unbelieving, the abominable, the murderers, the sexually immoral, the sorcerers, the idolaters, and all the..." Ah, there's a generic term, that is, all the...
1:24:30 Yes, well, I can't hear you, but I'm sure some of you have understood that it was lying, and all liars. It's written, the generic term. Isn't it? "If there's murder, sexual immorality, sorcery, idolatry, lying—all that comes down to liars. Their portion will be in the burning lake of fire and sulfur, which is the second death. Then one of the seven angels who held the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and spoke to me, saying 'Come, I will show you'
Nerval, Rousseau and the king's favorite; gratuity 1:25:04 and here the bride comes back, the wife of the Lamb. It's the heavenly Jerusalem which is the bride. As if the city, you see, were... the bride was the metaphor, a source of infinite bliss. The bride adorned for her husband, isn't it? And this reminds me, good heavens, of when we saw in the Rousseauian triangle, you know, when Nerval is guided through the Abbey of Chaalis and there's a peasant who tells them, "Here is the tower of the beautiful Gabrielle, Gabrielle d'Estrées, the favorite of Henri IV, near the castle, in the Valois, near Rousseau's tomb, precisely."
1:25:45 And the peasant adds, "Here is the tower of the beautiful Gabrielle, then, recalling the king's favorite. Every evening Rousseau would come to strum his guitar under her window, and the king, who was jealous, eventually had him killed." And of course Nerval, who tells us this, starts, like you, like me, laughing at the peasant who is an ignoramus, mixing up like that Rousseau's era in the eighteenth century with Henri IV, in the sixteenth century.
1:26:18 The mixing up, three centuries apart, and suddenly Nerval stops laughing, he puts a full stop, he goes to the next line. This peasant is perhaps closer to the truth than we think, he says. By refusing Madame de Pompadour's hundred louis—it was a pension that Madame Pompadour wanted to give Rousseau after he'd had a brief, popular success with a little opera of no great importance, a pastoral, as they say—he could have lived off it if that's what he had been seeking.
1:26:51 By refusing what until then had been the income of all artists, the pensions of the great of this world, by refusing Madame de Pompadour's hundred louis, Rousseau ruined the edifice founded by Henri, the first of the Bourbons. Everything collapsed, the whole Ancien Régime, his immortal image remains standing on the ruins. The figure of Rousseau suddenly rising like a colossus on the ruins of the Ancien Régime. Now, what does Nerval say?
1:27:22 In "every evening Rousseau came"—what? To rob the sovereign of his source of pleasure, the favorite. It's a profound metaphor, and we find the same one here, roughly. I don't understand why this kind of comparison isn't made more often. It seems transparent to me, doesn't it? These are texts that are hardly... especially the Apocalypse, isn't it? It's the most commented-on text in 2000 years, roughly. Then, one of the seven... Yes, so, come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.
1:27:55 I remind you that the Lamb is Christ, the sacrificial victim. And he carried me away in the spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, from where it had been before, in the beyond. Its brilliance was like that of a very precious stone, like a jasper stone, clear as crystal. Well, I'll spare you the Oriental descriptions—it had twelve gates, one gold, one emerald, and so on.
1:28:31 Those who spoke to me had a golden reed to measure the city, its gates and its wall. It really is a city, a society. The city was laid out as a square, its length the same as its width. He measured the city with the reed and found it to be twelve thousand stadia. Well, he measured the wall. The wall was built of jasper. The foundations of the city wall were adorned with precious stones. So, we're all in Oriental hyperbole here.
1:29:04 I'll skip over the twelve gates. There. "I saw no temple in the city." Ah, you see, there's no longer any need. "I saw no temple in the city." It's society itself, in its entirety, that has become the sacred. "I saw no temple in the city, for the Lord God Almighty is its temple, as is the Lamb. The city has no need of the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb.
1:29:35 The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the... Replaced, isn't it? Here, absolute racism—God—by freedom, and everything is illuminated, isn't it? It's fitting, actually, since he's talking about lamps, isn't he? And the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day, for there will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and honor of the nations, and not of one chosen nation.
1:30:08 Isn't that so? Nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false. Only those written in the Lamb's book of life will enter. And he showed me, this is the end, a river of the water of life, clear as crystal. You know, in these desert countries, paradise always takes the form of water. Water. He showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb.
1:30:41 In the middle of the street of the city, and on either side of the river, was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month, and its leaves were for the healing of the nations. This is a kind of revenge on the tree through which the original sin came, in the earthly paradise. There was a tree of life. There will be no more curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city. His servants will serve him and will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.
1:31:15 There will be no more night, and they will need no lamp or light, because the Lord God will give them light, and they will reign forever and ever. And he said to me, these words are trustworthy and true. And the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, sent his angel to show his servants what must soon take place. And behold, I am coming soon. Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book. For now, all this is the words of prophets.
1:31:47 But now I come to the precise point. It's me, John, now, the one reporting this, who heard these things. And when I heard and saw, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed me these things. But he said to me, don't do that, I am your fellow servant. And this, yes, is the end, the very last bit. Fellow servant. And he said to me, do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near.
1:32:18 Listen carefully now: let the evildoer still do evil, and the filthy still be filthy, and the righteous still do right, and the holy still be holy. Behold, I am coming soon, and my reward is with me, to repay each one for what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gates, into the new Jerusalem.
1:32:55 Outside are the dogs, the sorcerers, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices, yes, falsehood. And so, the conclusion—which was what Clouscard liked best—is: the Spirit and the Bride say, Come. And let the one who hears say, Come. And let the one who is thirsty come. Let the one who wishes take the water of life without price.
1:33:29 Listen, if it's that world, yes, our kingdom, right now, is not that world, it's not that world of justice, it's not that world of gratuity. There, I wanted to show you the immense journey that the notion of world, and therefore of mundanity, can take, depending on whether the conditions allowing for some measure of enjoyment, even briefly—in short, a sketch of happiness—are confined to a few, for the misfortune of others, or on the contrary extended to the whole of society.
1:34:15 It's no small stake, the concept of mundanity in Michel Clouscard, and since I placed this series under the aegis of this irreplaceable friend, I'll take the opportunity to come back to this a bit—first to thank those who have contributed to the fund which will allow us, I hope, as soon as possible, to translate Clouscard into English and thus considerably widen the reach of his audience, and on the other hand, I call on those who haven't done so yet, or who are just discovering this project of ours, to step up the pace so that Clouscard's work can reach what I called, when I presented it another time, a critical mass, where nothing could stand in the way any longer of the spread of his thought and his research—which would consist in extending it into English, not at all because I'm absolutely determined to convert the Anglo-Saxon world
1:35:25 to Clouscardism—I'd be delighted, but I do have some doubts—but let's not forget that a Chinese or Indian student, for example, if they happen to master a language other than their mother tongue to perfection, a foreign language, there's a strong chance, an immense probability, that it will be English rather than French, given the current state of things. So the stakes are not small, I'm counting on you, thank you a thousand times, and we'll come back to this—I want to do a third episode on this notion of world, but I don't want to encroach on your question time by starting now. So I'm going to ask Pierre-Alain to project your questions for me. I'm so glad to find Clomici here—these are people I only know through the internet, maybe these are real communities, it's already a bit of a Jerusalem
Baudelaire is not a herald of escapism 1:36:35 not quite a heavenly one, quite an earthly one, but still, I mean, a community of minds, a community of ends, as Kant put it—does this Baudelaire poem have anything to do with the escapism you spoke of before, it seems to me, and if not, could we nevertheless draw a parallel? What pleases me about this question—I'm not saying it's a good question, that's another matter, I'm not here to hand out good marks—but what pleases me, you'll see why I'm talking about myself, is that Clomici has memory, and that I don't speak for nothing, and that what I say isn't like landscape, I'm not repeating the same image scrolling by in the rearview mirror, backward, never to return. So it pleases me to be reminded that I had spoken of escapism, denouncing it—well, not condemning it but deploring it—as the symptom of an unhappy consciousness. You know, when I say that what's typical of modernity is not to be able to stand modernity, it's to listen only
1:37:45 to baroque repertoire, saying that the shift from harpsichord to piano was the beginning of the end—I've heard that. You know, there are also those who say that already the shift from Gregorian chant, from monody to polyphony, was already the beginning of the end. You know, it's like the hardcore ecologists who say that from the moment we abandoned hunting and gathering and started settling into sedentary lives, that was the beginning of the end. But there are others, like Aurélien Barrau, who's an immense physicist—not my field, I don't judge at that level, he's an astrophysicist—but when he meddles in things he has no particular competence in—because there's no scam more dishonest than using competence in one area to prove one has it in another, like the family doctors of old who, after being rightly recognized as doctors, having cured someone of cirrhosis of the liver on a farm—I won't say in which province so as not to offend anyone—would say to his wife, well, you saw, there are legislative elections Sunday, who should we vote for
1:38:55 yes, it's as if technical-scientific prestige automatically granted prestige in values, as if there weren't immense scholars who were infamous scoundrels under the Third Reich. But no, well, Aurélien Barrau is not an infamous scoundrel, I don't know, he's not someone of the order of the Third Reich, but he went so far as to say that hunting and gathering was already the beginning of the end—but the imaginary never has an end, we're in the opposite of science here, it's not that we believe we're at a beginning, no, even hunting and gathering is already too much, it's at worst predation on nature, frankly. Well, I won't answer Clomici on the substance for now—I'm getting there, I'm answering now—no, well, yes, it does have to do with escapism, but Baudelaire here is not at all a champion of escapism. You saw clearly that he says almost the opposite. He's not saying we must escape—he says that elsewhere
1:40:05 I'd even say that if this poem on travel closes everything, it's because he realized that all attempts at escape are vain. The chapters of Les Fleurs du mal are Spleen and Ideal—that's the longest—then there's Wine, the first escape into drink, wine, artificial paradises, Travel, Death—everything that lets us free ourselves from exile, in this vision that corresponds to true mysticism: birth is already a fall, birth is the passage from a superior world to the world we live in, the world of phenomena, of time and space. The more time passes, the further we move from our divine origin—which is why this kind of thought is always anti-progressivist, this thought that thinks the absolute is at the origin, whereas I have the greatest respect—I've often said so—for liberation theologians
1:41:15 those who don't dwell so much on a God of origin, a creator God of the world—it's not very interesting to know he's an expert at creating ammonia clouds and galaxies, God deserves better than that, at least in value—but rather that God is not origin but result, and that the more we extend into the world—I'm not talking about the earth, we don't live on comets, thank goodness, or inside the sun where it's several million degrees—no, but where we live, here, in the world, which is neither the universe nor the earth, in the world, that is, with the earth and the universe as data, but as a relation between subject and no longer object, which is what characterizes a world, for better or worse—Baudelaire's poem consists precisely in saying quite the opposite, in saying that there's no point escaping, since—remember this terrible line—we are an oasis of horror
L'Invitation au voyage and Duparc's melody 1:42:25 in a desert of boredom. What good is moving if it's only to find the same thing at the other end—and that's why what's most Baudelairean here—I'm answering now, in the most poetic way possible, Clomici, but poetic not in the sense of straying from the truth, on the contrary, it's at the heart of his question, of the answer I'm giving to his question, sorry—what's most beautiful in Baudelaire, poetically speaking—I'll spare you his most famous poems—it's not "Le Voyage," which consists of finding them again—there's an intoxication in the voyage, I won't come back to that, those who leave just to leave—but once you arrive, you'll find again the problems you left behind, human dissatisfaction—I'll skip "man, greedy tyrant," sorry, "woman, vile, proud and stupid slave, adoring and loving herself without disgust"—that's not just true in Tokyo, it's true in Paris or vice versa, it's everywhere—"man, greedy tyrant, lecherous, hard and grasping, slave of the slave, gutter running in the sewer"—even less glowing—that's what we see: at the start we had what we'd fled, and we find it on arrival—so between the two we can at least have the intoxication of the voyage, no but
1:43:35 the most important thing is that he puts it on trial, so what matters is the intoxication we feel at the moment of wanting to leave, and so you can guess that Baudelaire's masterpiece is not "Le Voyage" but "L'Invitation au voyage," that famous poem which is a true verbal magic where suddenly he, who is so often harsh, a bit misogynistic, a bit brutal toward women, isn't he, who concentrates a bit, as in the biblical context, a bit of all that is maleficent in the mundane—there, it's the tenderest relationship Baudelaire has with woman, the sisterly relationship: "My child, my sister, think of the sweetness of going there to live together, to love at leisure, to love and die in the land that resembles you. The wet suns of those clouded skies... see on those canals sleep those vessels whose mood is to wander; it's to satisfy your slightest desire that they come from the ends of the earth." Yes, we're in a port, we're always somewhere
1:44:45 at a departure. "The setting suns clothe the fields, the canals, the whole town, with hyacinth and gold; the world falls asleep in a warm light. There, all is order and beauty, luxury, calm, and pleasure." Romanticism is over—there's luxury, there's calm—it's not romantic agitation—and order, which is more classical than romantic, isn't it? And in another poem he says, "I see a port full of sails and masts, still weary from the sea wave"—it's the port, the image where Baudelaire comes closest to travel, that is, not where one travels, because afterward there will be disappointments, but where one has a plan to travel—the invitation to travel. Let me remind you, as a kind of sonic epilogue to this poem, which is already in itself a magical music with its refrain, "There all is order and beauty, luxury, calm and pleasure"—that this poem was set to music in a tradition, in a musical genre
1:45:56 called the French mélodie—it's not the German lied, it's very close, that is, a poem set to music, but it's not at all the same style, and no doubt the highest achievements of the French mélodie come a little after Baudelaire's time, as it happens—Baudelaire's poems set to music by Fauré, by Debussy, by the great French Impressionists, by Ravel—but the greatest of them all is less well known than these three, a somewhat tormented figure who had a breakdown and died somewhat in solitude, but who brought the French mélodie to an unequaled perfection to this day: it's Duparc. Henri Duparc's masterpiece—and you'll find on YouTube "L'Invitation au voyage," add Duparc, and you'll see the ripples of "my child, my sister, think of the sweetness of going there to live together"—he's the only one who managed to capture it, and I recommend a somewhat old recording, too bad about the sound quality, which isn't ideal but isn't bad for the time, sung by that famous Panzera, that baritone, P-A-N-Z-E-R-A
1:47:08 of whom Roland Barthes—yes, yes, yes, that very same one who wrote Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes, or A Lover's Discourse: Fragments—said that we had never before achieved that grain that makes voices unique, isn't that so—"L'Invitation au voyage," composer Henri Duparc, performer Panzera, P-A-N-Z-E-R-A. Thank you, Clomici. So there, yes, it's a point about escapism, but not at all to encourage it, to say get out of here—no, know that you'll find the same thing on arrival, so stay with your desires, clouds, indeterminate forms. Pauline, I find myself—I was about to say almost among family, sorry to be a bit intrusive like that, but it does please me to find you again, Clomici and Pauline—Stéphane Mallarmé, man perhaps democrat
The aristocrat artist: making gold out of mud 1:48:18 "the artist splits in two and must remain aristocratic, sound judgment"—I'm keeping that one—ah yes, there I'm the one borrowing the formula, if I may—yes, that's it, you see, Baudelaire wants to remain hyper-aristocratic, an aristocratic stance, even though he, poor man, lived in a garret, in poverty. The poor man had wanted, to make himself look younger, to dye his hair, and it turned green—it was some concoction he'd been given at the time—he didn't go out for a month. So yes, well, still, he showed admirable stubbornness, didn't he, for example in defending his dandyism—it was a way for him, not to wallow in misérabilisme, which he could have done given the life he led, but on the contrary to act as though beauty here, in this world, beauty as one attains it
1:49:28 through work, through art—he despised the lazy, those who think it's enough to have a kind of mush of poetic feelings to be bohemians—he wrote texts about this, Baudelaire—he shows that there's an art, that through calculation one can imitate a rising line and a falling one in a swirl, through the choice of sounds and words—well, in short, it takes work, and the artist, as Pauline puts it very well, the artist splits in two, must remain aristocratic, must give to you, to me, to humanity, to his addressees, to those who will read his poems, he must give the best—and so I'm glad Pauline says this after I railed earlier against the qualities found in Céline's style—Céline isn't worthless, he's very strong in some ways, from a literary point of view, but it's precisely not his style, which wants to be lowbrow, which wants to plunge its hands into the unspeakable, precisely because, once again, the real common people don't like that
1:50:38 the common folk want to get out of it, want to get a taste of things, so I'm glad Pauline gives an example, rather that of someone who, even in misery, gives their best, and as I will conclude with the phrase that Baudelaire addresses to Paris, which he sang, directly or indirectly, so much in Les Fleurs du Mal, or even the second great chapter of Les Fleurs du Mal called Tableaux Parisiens, when he says to Paris: you gave me mud and I turned it into gold — thank you Pauline. No, I'll extend it a bit further, because I'm ending on gold, that is, on true wealth — it's not fiduciary gold, it's not gold bullion I'm talking about. You gave me mud and I turned it into Les Fleurs du Mal — but what gold in the banks could approach in value the wealth that Les Fleurs du Mal brings us, among others, Les Fleurs du Mal, as I would say, like La Légende des Siècles, or the tragedies, no matter which, of Sophocles or Shakespeare, or the work of Kafka.
1:51:48 To come back to the contemporary world — yes of course — I would even go as far as that reactionary Vladimir Nabokov, who writes unforgettable novels — yes, the author of Lolita. I recommend one of the most beautiful novels ever written, it's Ada — Ada, sorry, I pronounce it as the Russian grandmother he speaks of in his novel pronounced it, Ampa. That's gold in bars, you see — and yes, it's figurative, but if gold was chosen among all metals, it's because — you remember in The Little Prince, when the Little Prince is very sad about having to leave the fox: you're quite pretty, what's your name?
1:52:40 I am a fox, said the fox, and the fox said to the Little Prince: we're parting, but I won't forget you, because every time I see a wheat field, I'll think of the color of your hair. It's the color of gold. Blessed are the ripe ears and the harvested wheat, as a great Christian poet once said — you see, he says wheat, gold, champagne — it's that gold I'm talking about, the gold of shared happiness. The cups pass from lips to lips, don't they?
Was Jesus a communist? 1:53:21 So it's that kind of wealth that the artist gives to whoever takes it in — the artist, the one who produces beauty, which is not the case for everyone who proclaims themselves an artist. There you go, thank you very much Pauline for what wasn't a question but is a step forward. KZB, this evening you were explaining that Jesus was a communist — I understand, I wouldn't be so definite, I mean I'm not going to defend the thesis tooth and nail that Jesus was in fact a communist, especially since there are several elements that would contradict that — I can come back to it if it's not the center of the topic, or even of the question for that matter — but essentially, no doubt, I'll answer KZB: several passages of the Gospel — I'm not going to interpret, so I'll quote — answer the question positively, for example when he says: those who say to me 'Lord' — you know, those who address to me words of adoration —
1:54:32 words of adoration, those who say to me 'Lord' and insult their brothers, are liars. If I'm not right with the other, there's no point coming to build me a statue. And when the rich young man arrives — second example, second Gospel, that's it, I feel like saying: read them, they're not long, they're quite short, the Gospels, there are four, take whichever you want. They say the most complete one is Matthew's, the most sublime metaphysically is John's — the last one; Matthew the first, John the last, and between the two the marvelous Luke and Mark, who are perhaps the most marvelous. So yes, there's one where it's the rich young man who comes to see Jesus in the crowd — there he pushes the others aside since he'd heard that this was someone, that he had wisdom, people would address him, and that he promised the kingdom of heaven. So: do I deserve the kingdom of heaven? Here I am, I keep the ten commandments, I'm a true believer, I give to the poor, I respect the Lord's name, in short I honor my father and mother —
1:55:42 what do I still need to do to deserve the kingdom of heaven — implying: I'm among the righteous, he's not too displeased with himself, if you will — and Jesus answers him: leave your possessions and follow me. Ah, no, no, it's not over — no, it's the silence that precedes the fall, well, the rest, the rest and the end: and the young man went away very sad, for he had many possessions. There, epilogue of the end: Jesus turns to his disciples as he watches him move away and says: I tell you truly, it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. He didn't say it was impossible, just harder. So, in that sense, that goes toward a positive answer to KZB's question. Others don't — for example, the separation of the political and the religious — I'm trying to be honest, to answer yes and no to the question — so we've seen the yes, and that's not all — the only time —
1:56:52 where Jesus is angry and uses violence is when he drives the merchants out of the temple, saying: don't turn my father's house into a mess, a souk — no, he doesn't say it like that in the Gospel, it's more of a laborious periphrasis: don't turn my father's house into a house of trafficking. He surely didn't speak to them like that in the heat of anger — don't turn my father's house into a souk. On the other hand, when people come to him with trick questions — because he also gets trap questions from those who want to judge whether he's not someone dangerous, subversive, right — and the Pharisees, as they were called at the time, the sects that formed the political leadership of Palestine at the time, ask Jesus: should we believe in God or obey Caesar? Are we on the side of the God of the Jews, or should we be on the side of the Romans? It's a politically loaded trick question at the time, since they were occupied —
1:58:02 by the Romans. Jesus takes a coin, he says: whose portrait is this on the coin? So he says: it's the portrait of Caesar, on Roman currency, and there's the famous phrase of Jesus: render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's. That's not communist — that is, don't talk to me about politics, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and for what belongs to God, render unto God what is God's — it's ambiguous, the answer to the question. As soon as it comes to social justice and economics, Jesus would have made a strange communist. I heard it said myself by people from the far right — I remember very well, I was a kid, it was someone who used to come talk to my father, someone who had followed Pétain throughout the war, right — I'm from the generation right after the war, I was born in '45 — and he said: Mr. Pagani, anyway, Jesus was a communist, the first of the communists was Jesus, he remained... anti-Semitic, Jesus, all that was brought to us from the Orient, the Jews — that's why I get a bit worked up against a certain neo-paganism —
1:59:12 which often conceals a creeping anti-Semitism. There you go, but I don't want to change the topic — I've answered: there are many, many things that lean toward a positive answer to the question of whether Jesus was a communist. But we mustn't be anachronistic either — Jesus never said that the great means of production and exchange had to be nationalized. I'll remind you that that's the main objective of communists on the economic and social level — it's not to nationalize your toothbrush and collectivize your wife, no, no — because I remember, when I was in the Drôme, I never militated in a rural cell, back in the days when the party was still communist — there were images, at election time, from the right, showing a flock of sheep with a black vulture wrapping itself around the sheep, because it was a farming region, right, and the caption read: the communists are going to take your land. I laugh about it now, because since then the land has disappeared —
2:00:23 the peasants have disappeared, there was the great rural depopulation, there was the debt from farm machinery, the Common Market, in short — their land was taken from them, and the communists still aren't in power. There you go, thanks to KZB. I salute our loyal Stavisky, without whom the fundraising pot for the translation of Clouscard wouldn't have reached the momentum it now has, thanks to you — but I encourage you to go further. But with Clouscard, did he have two red holes in his right side?
2:01:09 We're back to Rimbaud here — Stavisky is obviously alluding to that poem you all know, Le Dormeur du Val, right? We see the tragic corpse of the brief but bloody war between the French and the Prussians — we didn't yet say 'the Germans' but 'the Prussians' — Rimbaud being in the Ardennes, and that's what he's talking about, right? That said, I don't understand the allusion — he means, did he have two holes... ah!
2:01:42 Maybe it's the same question as the previous one from Clomissi — there you go — and did Michel Clouscard have two red holes in his right side? I don't know if he had a right side, between us — he never told me — but he was very harsh toward leftists and toward those who believe leftists are the left — which is very widespread today, but what a misunderstanding. There, that's all I can answer, if I understood correctly — I'm not sure — I didn't understand the question, first because I'm very tired after my long talks tonight, and because it was full of humor, and sometimes I have — sorry for the comparison — like Rousseau, l'esprit d'escalier, that is, I understand a bit late, once I'm on the stairs, that the evening is over, right?
Feuerbach, alienation and nature 2:02:36 the joke we made earlier, at which the others laughed, but I missed it — I sense there's an allusion escaping me. In any case, I'm always glad to hear news from Stavisky. Paul, good evening — is your analysis of the descent from transcendence to immanence — so we're back to the Apocalypse — within being, comparable to Feuerbach's ideas and his work on religion and the nature of God? Now that's a very interesting question, there's a second part to it — you can read it right away — yes, so the question — and more generally, to the incomplete advances of the pre-Marxist left Hegelians — there's a well-informed, detailed question. So I'd be tempted to answer yes to the first part of the question: is your idea of the descent of transcendence into immanence — the celestial jurisprudence that finally becomes terrestrial, allowing not just salvation but happiness, to sum up everything we've said, with its mundane dimension rather than ultra-mundane — comparable to Feuerbach's ideas
2:03:46 and his work on religion and the nature of God? Well, let me remind everyone, since not everyone knows it as well as Paul evidently does, that for Feuerbach religion in general, and that of a transcendent religion, Christianity in particular, is the most emblematic illustration of that principal misfortune of man in which alienation consists. The word comes from alius, meaning 'other,' as you well know — to alienate a property is to pass it to another, alius, the other — and you see all the variations: the madman is the 'alienated' one, the one who's supposed to no longer be in relation with us, we tell him 'you're Jean-Pierre' and meanwhile 'I am Napoleon,' I'm simplifying on purpose, we'll agree on that — so in alienation there's the other. But what's the mechanism denounced by alienation in the Marxist sense — even though young Marx uses this term under Feuerbach's influence, though he abandons it fairly quickly — and that Hegel uses it enormously —
2:04:56 I should mention, for those who want to really get into the terminological detail, since this comes from thinkers writing in German, that there are two words for alienation: Entäußerung and Entfremdung — fremd means 'foreign' — when you walk around a tourist region in Germany you see signs reading Fremdenzimmer, room for foreigners, guest room — entfremden, to make foreign what is properly mine — that's not alienated... yes, except that for Feuerbach, all the treasures we've placed in God — the blessed one, the all-powerful, to you alone, Lord, belong wisdom, power and glory — in short, everything that's proper to man, well, everything man contains in potential form, right — not all men, far from it, but everything, all the attributes of being, of spirit — well, man, instead of assuming them himself and rising to a dignified state of being, places them in God, and, as a rebound effect, considers himself a wretch —
2:06:06 an object of derision, so to speak, as Nietzsche would put it — God having all the qualities that man strips from himself to alienate them into God. So, for Feuerbach, we must take back our own, reclaim our qualities like treasures we've squandered in vain by placing them in heaven. Paul will excuse me for not answering his question right away, but for now, to explain the meaning of his question to those less familiar with Feuerbach than he is — except, and now I'm answering Paul, what makes there now be a difference between the celestial Jerusalem — dare I say, which is somehow closer, in its metaphorization, to the communist or Marxist ideal — and the Feuerbachian recovery of the riches we've been dispossessed of by attributing them to God and distancing them from us — is that they must be recovered for the benefit of the Feuerbachian nature —
2:07:16 without bringing history into play. Marx starts becoming Marx when he realizes it's a dead end in Feuerbach — that in Feuerbach it's for the benefit of nature that we must recover the wealth squandered in religious alienation, forgetting that it's been more than 10,000 years, if I take the historical period, leaving aside even prehistory — but not erasing it, right, because we did have to go through chipped pebbles before reaching cities, the first Egyptian cities for instance, the Chinese ones, the Mesopotamian ones, and the hanging gardens of Babylon. We mustn't confuse heredity and heritage — nature is always there, until the end of my life I'll have to eat to live, I remain an animal, I'm not — one must remain not naturalist but materialist. Without that material support, what man adds wouldn't add up
2:08:26 to anything at all, of course — but what makes me myself, what makes you yourselves as human beings, is not just that heredity, it's not the color of my eyes or the color of my skin, it's the heritage, it's the fact that I can pass on to you a poem by Baudelaire, which was itself passed on through readings, forgiven — passed on by Baudelaire himself — and we come back to the world here, to relations between subjects, and there Feuerbach falls short — he's not a thinker of history like Marx, and that's where Marx meets Hegel again. So I'll return to the second part of the question — it's very good to start with a question about a parallel between the conclusion of the New Testament — I'll sum up — and yes, there's an analogy, there's the notion of recovery, of coming back down to earth — that, there, I answer yes to Paul, there is a relation between Feuerbach and the Apocalypse at that level — but where the relation stops, and where the return
Marx returns to Hegel, against Althusser 2:09:36 to Hegel, on Marx's part, having evolved from his Feuerbachian youth — now I'll tell you everything, I'm saying the opposite of Althusser, if you look closely, dear friend Paul — you seem well-informed. For Althusser, Marx is never more Marx than when he's cut off from Hegel. What I'm saying isn't different, it's the opposite — he would have started, I'm being honest, so I'm reciting his thought, he would indeed have been Hegelian like that in his youth, it was fashionable, as you say, the incomplete advances of the pre-Marxist left Hegelians, of whom Marx was one — Marx was pre-Marxist when he was Feuerbachian, right — and moreover the break with his Feuerbachian youth is contained in a work I'm sure Paul knows well — it's the famous Theses on Feuerbach — precisely where he says that the Feuerbachians, and many of the left Hegelians, neglected what constituted the grandeur of German idealism, namely having neglected the Tätigkeit — I'll say it in German first, Tat, that's
2:10:46 the deed, the acting, actions — and so we find history again, what man has done. Let's not forget — I've already told you — that if everything gets muddled in your head philosophically, if you no longer know where you stand, if you mix up proper names, that happens to us periodically, don't worry about it — but to find your bearings, it's friendly advice, in any case from someone concerned with transmission — you should know that all philosophical positions — there are thousands of them — can be reduced to three great categories, in which you place yourself as you wish, I'm not going to impose a sensibility or a content on you. The first is dialectical, as I'll do — the first, the second contradicts the first, and the third is to make a synthesis. The first is: nature makes man. The second — you state it first, I'll expand on it after — is: on the contrary, supernature — that's the religious point of view — it's God who makes man, if you will —
2:11:56 the first is: nature makes man; the second is: supernature makes man, a God beyond all nature; and the third, the synthesis, is: man makes man — transmission, man makes man, heritage, not heredity. There you have how far Feuerbach doesn't go. I hope I've been clear with Paul. Yes, there is the same movement of recovering what was above in order to bring it back down below — in that sense, there is a parallel with the prophet of the Apocalypse who sees the celestial Jerusalem descend and become a mundane Jerusalem — and no, insofar as precisely all that supposes the fulfillment of a history that Feuerbach doesn't take into consideration, having privileged, a bit like the dominant ideology of a certain bourgeoisie today, naturalism over the thought of historical becoming. So, in other words, contrary to Althusser, I say that it's not in his youth
2:13:06 that Marx is vaguely Hegelian and that, as he evolves, he moves away from it — it's the opposite. I'm not saying this gratuitously — in the famous second preface to Capital, in the second translation, sorry, the second edition of Capital — so we're talking about the Marx who no longer has anything to prove, I'm not taking him in the cradle, I mean in his definitive form — Marx says very clearly, and he says: I want to be clear about my relationship with Hegel, I have always defended this philosopher who was treated like a dead dog — he takes up the expression that was used to describe Spinoza in Hegel's time, which rehabilitated Spinoza at that time, he had the merit of saying that Spinoza was treated, especially among religious thinkers, like a dead dog — he says that's the fate reserved for Hegel in modern thought — and Marx even makes the plan, he says, when I've finished Capital, I dream of coming back to formalize — he doesn't say it quite like that, but to leave behind a treatise on dialectics, which is really the most precious thing in Hegel. There, what Marx
The gold of the broom-flowers: Rousseau against Voltaire's Le Mondain 2:14:21 borrows essentially from Hegel, from a formal point of view, is dialectics; from a content point of view, it's history — there must be a link between the two, history advances by contradiction. Thank you, Paul, we're back to the great classics. Laurent Angot — I'm sorry, I'll take the opportunity for a personal message — I'm sorry, Laurent, I had a communication accident because you called me on my landline and I was recording, and wanting to suddenly silence the landline, I broke it, I couldn't manage to open it to remove the battery — it's not impossible, it's an old phone, anyway, I'm sorry, I hope I can call tomorrow — so tomorrow, wait, I have — yes, and afterward maybe the ideal would be — I'll allow myself to call him, I don't want him calling me again without success, I'll allow myself to call him starting around 3pm tomorrow. There, now I'm always
2:15:32 very happy to hear from Laurent again, whose contributions have always been extremely valuable, and who has a literary culture to illustrate philosophical points, to the point that I'd like him to participate one day, to come do a bit of the livestream with us, and offer us his reading of choice — it's not that he'd be at a loss for a reference, given the range of works he draws on. So, of course, he cites this phrase from Rousseau that I noted, taken precisely from the third letter to Malesherbes — I'll remind you, it's a bit like a classroom thing what I'm about to say, in literature courses they often say, and it's true, that there isn't much color in Rousseau, he's someone who is more a man of the ear than the eye, and he'll write page after page on the murmur of the lake's waters, the sound, the ebb and flow of that water, its continuous sound but swelling at intervals —
2:16:42 sorry, striking relentlessly at my ear — we see clearly it's my ear, not my eyes — he soon falls asleep, sinks into the half-sleep of reverie — except, there, suddenly, this passage in the third letter to Malesherbes: the gold of the broom flowers and the purple of the heather struck my eyes with a luxury that touched my heart. I presume that if Laurent gives us this quotation without comment, it's in echo of what I said about the relation between the world and luxury, which we shouldn't say — 'oh, there's Proust and all that, that's fine for the bourgeois, for the privileged, I prefer Céline who picks up a dirty piece of paper in the street, or who shows the horrors of guts spilled in the war' — fine, and I had said the common people want to get out of it, it's not a horror thing, and so they too have a right, not to luxury, and so it's a way of depriving them, of doing this trick
2:17:52 of leaving luxury as a privilege for the bourgeois — no, does that mean we should eat badly to remain proletarian? Should we make an effort to eat badly? What does that even mean? If a rich man can afford a good wine, does that mean the worker has no right to it, that if he drank a good wine he'd become a bourgeois? What kind of reasoning is that? So, precisely, no, no, no — here, thank you Laurent, Rousseau shows us that there's this new kind of wealth that appears there at the end of the 18th century, because before, nature wasn't an object of adoration, it wasn't wealth to see the gold of the broom flowers, the purple of the heather — nobody would ever have associated the color of broom flowers, it's not a plant you eat, it has no value. It's, as I've often said, at the moment the industrial revolution has just occurred — let's be serious now — and man is no longer determined, constrained by natural necessities — sheltering himself, protecting himself against disease, against hunger, against cold, against death, against war, against horror —
2:19:02 for that you need a minimum of wealth, you need walls to protect against the cold, lamps, lighting, comfort — and suddenly, at the moment nature begins to recede because of technical progress, of the industrial revolution, man can finally see nature as spectacle and reconcile himself with it — but it's no longer nature, it's landscape, it's that surface reflecting a marvelous world. And I think that was the point of Laurent's quotation without comment — that Rousseau responds, with a sublime irony, not a biting or corrosive irony, to Voltaire, who had devoted a whole poem, Le Mondain, to saying: let's leave the Rousseaus and the savages in the forests and on the dusty roads, how nice it is — it's defensible too, in luxury, with beautiful carpets, beautiful women, a good fire in the hearth, beautiful drinks. It's in the poem
2:20:15 Le Mondain: 'let him regret who will the good old days of Adam and Eve,' right, he had nothing — it's well known that whoever owns nothing has no shares to divide — it's not very great poetry, in short — how nice it is to tread on carpets with one's feet rather than hurt one's feet on the stones of the road. Answer: there you have my carpets, the gold of the broom flowers — what's new is that it's free, that the poorest can enjoy it. I'd spoken of gold in a musical commentary on a solo by one of the greatest baritones in the history of jazz, Gerry Mulligan, and Alyosha had the presence of mind, once again, to find the title — it was he who chose it, among everything I'd been able to stir up as commentary on Mulligan. I'd said: it's like a stand of autumn foliage stirred by a breeze, with those leaves, with that gold bursting out like that in this season of luxury, a luxury within everyone's reach —
2:21:25 gold, gold for everyone — it's a bit the same thing Rousseau reveals for the first time, the gold of the broom flowers, and how — if you look closely, there's never any coincidence in the symbolic order — the colors of Spain, sangre y oro, blood and gold, the colors of imperial purple and of power, gold and purple — except that there, there, there, in the broom flowers and in the heather, without exploiting anyone, without making anyone suffer, and the red is not that of blood, it's the purple of the heather. Thank you Laurent, and that's a call I'll make again, for him to come co-drive with us, if I may put it that way in French, a livestream based on a text or a collection that he'll have chosen as a reference, that he'll have chosen — and anyway, I'll call tomorrow, thank you very much, I've taken up a lot of your time, but I missed you — listen, I've said I should be a bit shorter next time, there are
2:22:35 live readings in a much shorter format than the session we want to hold — I'll end on that, and they're currently being edited, and it will give you a rest from my open-ended developments. Have a very good rest of the evening nonetheless, and until next time, thank you everyone.
