English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Against the state: private and public domain 0:00 Dominique Pagani is a friend and collaborator of Michel Clouscard. I invite you to go check out his channel, it's really great. And today we're going to comment on an alphabet primer that he made. We're going to try to do all the letters maybe, we'll do one letter per stream. We'll start today with the letter A, it's a philosophical alphabet. Look at this. Today, the Popular University of Saint-Dizier has the extreme honor and pleasure of making a film with Dominique Pagani, who is a philosopher.
0:30 and who published a book on Hegel called Femininity and Community in Hegel, published by Éditions Delga. And today we're going to do an alphabet primer a bit like the one Gilles Deleuze made a few years ago. But I don't know if we're actually going to be Deleuzian today. So the first letter for this alphabet primer is also related to this book on Hegel where the figure of Antigone is quite present. So what does Antigone evoke for Dominique? Is Antigone really the element that opposes the State?
1:10 Is this Michel Clouscard talking? No, it's not Michel Clouscard, it's Dominique Pagani, a collaborator of Clouscard's. They have fairly similar thinking. There's a question here—one couldn't say it lacks relevance. Who doesn't oppose the State today? From the anarchists, that's a bit their function to be against the State, you can't blame them for that. To MEDEF [the French employers' federation] which spits and slobbers against the State. Every time it has the floor: too much State, too many regulations. We can see that the documentary may have aged a bit, because today the State can regain power, notably on an authoritarian level.
1:47 But it's 10 years old, so it has to be taken in the context of the time. That is to say, at once a Left that is critical of the State and a Right that is also critical of the State. And I'll answer regarding Antigone, but first let me make a small distinction, since we're in this autumn setting, which is the season not only of hunting but also of gathering. Hunting and gathering, the old savagery as Marx would say. I'm thinking of mushroom picking since we're in autumn. And when someone puts up a sign saying private property, mushroom picking forbidden, well, there we're not in the State.
2:25 We're in the opposite: we're in the private, that means tough luck, you're not going to pick them, you're deprived of it. In fact, private means I deprive you of it. He does something interesting, that is, he shows that there are actually two meanings of the State. There's the State that is authoritarian, that can tell you what to do or not do. And then there's the State that can be somewhat protective, in the sense that the State is also the public, the public domain.
2:55 And there he says when you go mushroom picking and you see it's private, that means it's no longer within the State. And that means you no longer have the right to take it. It's a bit like what I was telling you the other day about Henri Lefebvre's right to the city. He talks a bit about that too, about the fact that the city is a common good. And as soon as you enter the private, you start taking from the common good. We don't think about it because we've lived in the same society since we were little. And so we tell ourselves it's obvious that the city is a common good, that the park in my city is a common good.
3:30 No, it's not obvious. It could be private. When you go to a country, like when you go to Italy, and you don't have the right to swim because the beaches are private, that shocks me, I find that shocking. To them it seems normal. So we see that this notion of the State and this notion of the public as opposed to the private is not nothing. And it says a lot about the relationship to the world and the class relations that exist within things, within a society. On the other hand, if he sees a sign that reads state forest of Ermenonville, but whose domain is it?
4:00 Well, it's you and me and him, it's us, it's the general will, it belongs to us, we can go there. There, it's not the State that the anarchist thinks of, it's the State that extends my freedom rather than the one that oppresses it. So someone in the chat says, isn't he confusing State and public? But how can there be public without the State currently? That is, in the capitalist society we live in, how can we have public without a State? When liberals say there's too much State, too many norms, what they're criticizing is the fact that there's too much public and not enough private.
4:30 And so, what Dominique Pagani is actually saying is that the discourse against the State can be turned into a completely liberal discourse by saying there's too much public. That's ultimately what he's saying. Yes, both exist, but be careful with the word, that's what I mean. And I propose a distinction that I often discussed with Michel Clouscard and that he was very attached to, which is the distinction between the State and the State apparatus. To go very quickly, before talking about Antigone, I would say that today we live, we witness, we are controlled by the most monstrous state apparatus ever seen, which is normal given the evolution of technology, cameras, the Internet, wiretapping.
State and state apparatus 5:11 We are the prey of the most oppressive, the most enormous state apparatus, the most instrumentalized state apparatus ever seen, to the benefit of an absence of State, which is the private. There you go. So, Antigone? Here he draws a distinction, a distinction made by Althusser in an article, a non-article or a small work, I don't know how to call it, called 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,' I believe. And where he makes the difference between—where he describes the ideological state apparatuses, for example school, the police—well, the police isn't an ideological apparatus, it's a direct state apparatus, not necessarily ideological.
5:49 School is an ideological state apparatus. And Clouscard takes up this distinction, he says: there's the State on one side that will tell you, through laws, what is private, what is public, what you have the right to do, what you don't have the right to do. And there's the state apparatus which is going to be a bit like its armed arm and which can be much more authoritarian. And in fact, what he's saying is that today we hail the state apparatus in order to control people, to control the masses, have more police, things like that. And alongside that, we let the State die when the State means having teachers, having public services, all that, which the State also allows.
6:28 In fact, there's a double discourse: MEDEF always attacks the State in order to attack the public good. And alongside that, we always demand more state apparatus to control people. That's a bit what he's saying. Xeno Goudineuf says: 'Social security was a form of public without State, at least before it was nationalized. But indeed, in fact, public without State, in a capitalist context, is complicated.' And yes, that's the problem in fact. Obviously, we were saying that earlier too with Francis Cousin, that is, there are people who tell you 'Yes, we must abolish the State and all that.'
7:01 Obviously, when you're a communist, you're in favor of the withering away of the State. And on the other hand, that discourse can be turned against you in a liberal domain where you're told 'Yeah, there's too much State.' And in fact, what they're telling you is 'There's too much public.' There's this slippage of meaning that happens quite quickly and that can be dangerous. Saying the libertarian discourse that says 'there are too many norms,' it can be taken up by a liberal discourse. That's Clouscard again, the liberal-libertarian side.
7:33 That is to say, the unconscious and unintended alliance between the liberal and the libertarian. That is, the libertarian who ultimately gets screwed by the liberal, who gives him the almost moral approval and the societal project to bring about a liberal world that leads to today and leads to neo-fascism. The State, that's me. Well, Pagani is invoking Althusser. Actually he's mostly invoking Clouscard. I'm taking the opposite view following my reading of Hegel, for whom she is a central figure in his thought.
Hegel and Antigone, from Tübingen to Berlin 8:06 I'll remind you that his relationship to Antigone spans his whole life. He translated Antigone when he was 14 years old at school. In Germany, he says, at the gymnasium. In Stuttgart. Later he talks about it during whole evenings. I would have loved to be a little mouse listening in. In that small room that housed, at the Stift, the seminary for trainee theologians at Tübingen, where he shared a room with Schelling and Hölderlin, the two greatest philosophers of the time, along with the greatest poet perhaps, one of the greatest of all time, in the same room.
8:39 I would have liked to be there. I don't know if you knew this, but it's true that they cut their teeth together a bit, Schelling, Hölderlin and Hegel. And they were in the same room. Imagine the madness. You have the three greatest minds of their era in Germany sharing the same room. This is like the Beat Generation, also seen with Pasolini... hmm actually it's true there are bottles on the bed every time I do a livestream. And there he talked mostly with Hölderlin about Antigone. There is thus the admirable last text wrested from madness by Hölderlin, his remarks on the translations of Oedipus and Antigone that he had just made.
9:18 The smell of the dormitory with Hegel and Schelling inside. Wrested from madness by Hölderlin, his remarks on the translations of Oedipus and Antigone that he had just made. And finally, in the Aesthetics and in the Philosophy of Right, the works of old Hegel's maturity in Berlin. In the Aesthetics, he has this cry, there's no other word for it. He lived as part of a group, like 'la galère' [the gang/the crew]. Now it's Éribon, 'la galère', Édouard Louis.
9:51 Before this student of all the masterpieces of antiquity and the modern world—and I know them all—he adds, to be modest, everyone can and must know them, Antigone seems to me the most perfect, the most satisfying. It's a kind of prize-giving at the summit of everything. And finally, in the Philosophy of Right, it's the political testament—there we're far from tragedy and aesthetics. He evokes the conflict between the private and the public that is found in the tragedy of Antigone. Someone says, I don't get the connection. Antigone, in fact, for those who don't understand, Antigone is the story of a woman whose brother did wrong and died, and she wants to be able to bury him.
10:33 Except that in fact, Creon, who runs the city, forbids her from burying him because her brother did wrong—I don't remember what he did—and so he forbids the burial. And so, Antigone is caught in a dilemma, it's a tragedy, there's a dilemma, which is that on the family level, she must bury her brother. So, the tragedy—there you go, she must do it because there are laws, let's say, family laws, the law of blood.
11:04 And on the level of the State, of society, she's told she must not bury her brother. And so there's the law of society. And so, it's really this dilemma where, in every case, she's wrong. Either she gives priority to her family, or to society. And so, that's where we are. We're between, in this case, the domain of the intimate and the domain of the social. Here we are dealing with the supreme ethical opposition. And therefore the most highly tragic one.
11:34 It remains valid in all places, in all times. A remarkable exception. A philosopher who, before Marx, said that every aesthetic production is nonetheless a function of the historical moment of its time, of the moment lived by the Spirit at that time, to speak in Hegelian terms. And yet there is an exception. There's the tragedy of Antigone which is valid for all times. So already, Hegel's relationship to Antigone. Yes, indeed, thanks to Hegel, I was able to take the opposite stance from an imagery that has become established, which turns Antigone into the little left-wing activist of the moment. And on top of that, feminist, as we'd say today.
One community against another community 12:04 Who defends the rights of the individual and the private, regionalist, leftist, feminist, against the oppression of society. A Hannah Arendt avant la lettre. What a misreading, Hegel says. It's not an individual against the community. Let's read Sophocles carefully. There's a community against a community. There's a traditional community, that of the family. It's a Corsican speaking to you here. Traditions are powerful. When blood is affected, all those in whom this blood circulates are supposed to participate in the vendetta, in the revenge, are affected.
12:41 The individual has little place, as Hegel says in his analysis of the ancient city. The individual here is an ineffective shadow. We will never know, reading Sophocles, whether Achilles preferred potatoes to water, or had a beauty mark on the left side of his nose. In Balzac, we'd know all that. That's modern, that's more modern. There, none of that. It's true there's a misreading in giving Antigone an individualist vision, even if it could be a rewriting, taking up the myth to give it a modern meaning. But in the Greek era, the individual was not exactly the thing placed at the center. That's something much more modern.
13:11 With the advent of modernity—that's why he mentions Balzac, I believe, or Rimbaud, people like that. There, we have the individual who is almost a product. There is almost an individual who is produced within history. But before that, we think much more in terms of community. And in Antigone, there's the family community that opposes the larger community, the city. That's what's tragic, in fact. There's almost no good choice.
13:43 The traditional ones, the family, the blood, as they said at the time, the sum of my relatives in whom the same blood circulates, and then facing a more political community which is the city, whose bond is less natural—neither the family nor the city is natural, neither one nor the other. We're in anthropology here. Since the family presupposes institution, not instinct—marriage, not merely sexuality, etc., etc. But the family bond, the parent-child bond, or collateral bonds, is a bond where nature plays a decisive role, whereas the bond of citizenship is higher, more spiritual.
14:21 And so this is the conflict in the archaic world and in the nascent world, quite simply, of the passage from the 'genos,' the clan. Again, it's a clan member speaking to you when I talk about the clan. Someone in the chat says: 'So there's no good choice regarding the family, do you have children?' So they're claiming that family is more important. I'd like to tell the story of Stalin, when his son gets captured by the Nazis, and Stalin lets his son die at the hands of the Nazis.
14:53 There's that side to it. What do you think? Do you think he should have sold out the community to get his son back? It's not that obvious. In fact, there's this thing—Stalin relived Antigone. Toward a broader society. That's why this encounter with the figure of Antigone in Hegel's thought struck me. I'm starting to understand why his whole life was preoccupied with this figure. Because she remains relevant insofar as this conflict between the private and the public remains relevant.
15:28 That is to say, there is always a sacrificial part to be carried out in order to be a citizen. When Rousseau talks about alienation in the [social] contract, one must alienate part of one's natural freedom, as it is in the Social Contract. That's what allows me to go left or right in the forest. There we come back to mushroom picking. One must alienate part of one's natural freedom in order to live in community. There we come back to mushroom picking. There's the difference between Rousseau and mushroom picking—very far apart. Because I'm soon going to be hungry. That's also nature. That's natural law.
15:58 And there, there's no exception. You have to eat to live. I can't go against that. I can't live without eating. On the other hand, I must respect the red light—well, yes, but I can run it. I can take the opposite approach. If there are no cops around, at night. There you go. That's the big difference. We make a fool's bargain believing we're freer in nature than in society. There you go, I'm trying to answer fairly quickly about this unforgettable figure who fascinates Hegel, whom we always believe to be the philosopher of the State, of the collective. And somehow, he is fascinated by the one who unforgettably defended the rights of the private when the State betrays itself, when the State goes beyond its own mission and attacks.
16:40 Attacks what? Death, the corpse, which falls under the private domain. And Hegel puts it very well: the citizen, as long as he is alive, belongs to the city. And his life belongs to the city, which sends him to fight. He fights against the Persians, for example. But once he's dead, it's a family matter, the funeral rites. And that, since Cro-Magnon times, funeral rites are sacred. The sacred is private. There you go, in what way this figure is unavoidable. Well.
17:10 I don't know if this episode is the clearest, but well. I find it interesting, and I think these are things you can even listen to several times over. I like Dominique Pagani for that. He's someone who makes a lot of digressions, and that allows you to also gain some general culture, and then afterward, to critique it. I'm not saying he's right about everything, Dominique Pagani, but he's definitely someone worth listening to.
