English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The triangle self, other, thing against naturalism 0:00 Fourth episode of philosophy with Pagani, Dominique Pagani's ABC. We're at the letter E because B as in bar was censored by the chat. We'll see if we do it as a B as in bonus at the end of the whole philosophy with Pagani thing. I'll take the opportunity to do a little promo because it happens that Pagani is currently trying to get Michel Clouscard translated into English. So he's launched a fundraiser to get him translated into English. I'll put the link to the fundraiser, and you can give him a little something so that this translation of Michel Clouscard finally happens, an author who is nonetheless important, very very interesting in my view, and who can teach our Anglo-Saxon friends something.
0:46 So we have the letter E as in enfance (childhood). Let's look at this. So today we're in the Jean-Jacques Rousseau park. Dominique is a great reader and a great specialist of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So for the E, it will be a triangle. So we're not with Girard, and we're not... So it's interesting, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, if you're a bit new to Pagani, Clouscard, all that, he's a very important author for them. He's the author who represents the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And so Clouscard, in particular, draws inspiration from Hegel, from Marx, and from Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Those are really the three great figures he's connected to.
1:23 I always love hearing Dominique Pagani talk about Jean-Jacques Rousseau because he really knows him well. Not about desire, but I'll give you 3 E's: Émile, Enfance, Ermenonville. So Émile, Rousseau's Émile obviously. Enfance and Ermenonville because he is buried in... well, not buried, but he rests in Ermenonville. I like seeing the figure of the triangle because it's particularly appropriate for Rousseau. I'm not into number mysticism, nor Pythagoras, nor numerology, nor Masonic forms.
1:55 When I talk about a triangle, let's be clear. I'm talking about intelligibility. It allows us to get out of the binary that I was condemning earlier regarding musical consumption. Here we move on to 3. What am I alluding to? I was talking about it just now. When I talked about the peace pipe that's passed around, the glass that's shared, the bottle that's shared, the aperitif that's shared, and I'll take it further, the worker of Zola's time who, when payday comes, it's so... I'm willing to take this reference historically, it's so minimal at the time that he has to make choices. We can have both the necessary and the superfluous; he, at that time, cannot have both.
2:31 So if he were really a determined animal, as they're trying to make us believe today in cognitive science, by... as they say, the neo-Spinozists, who have a bit of the Spinoz... Why is it that every time there's an episode with Pagani, he attacks the Spinozists and Lordon? In any case, in that sense, driven by purely natural conatuses and determinisms, he would immediately rush off to the local grocery store, to buy the quantity of carbs, fats, and proteins he needs to reproduce the life he loses in earning it.
3:01 Now that's interesting. It's really interesting because he's connecting it precisely to our Wednesday debate on eating disorders, nutrition and all that. He's saying that in humans there is the notion of the superfluous. There's that notion. He says that if man were an animal, he could just focus on going to buy the fats, carbs and proteins he needs. He's saying that's not how it is.
3:31 So what does he do? Let's be scientific, let's observe him, camera, tape recorder, come on, let's record. He goes to the bar, we know it well, he goes to drink with his mates. That is, caught between the superfluous and the necessary, a human being still goes. Right, let me give one last example. Far from our worker, it's the guards I've seen, or even out in the middle of the desert. When you stop, you think you're alone in the middle of the desert, you're never alone. From a rock a head appears, two heads, with a little plastic jug, asking us for water, nomads, small herds, three or four goats, two camels.
4:05 They're thirsty. They're given water, we hold out because we have wet t-shirts wrapped around our heads there in the car. They're given water, and before drinking, they pour drops on the ground for the gods. Then they drink. It's a little silent struggle for recognition with the wealthy white man I appear to be in their eyes, equipped with my 4x4, etc. It really resembles a ritual, a sacrifice, giving something that will, objectively, be wasted.
4:37 But that too is part of humanity, giving in excess. It means I may be... I have a knife at my throat, I'm nothing, socially, economically. But I'm a human being, I'm going to show you that. I give water to drink to the ground first, and only afterward do I take some. Or like the guards who say their prayers on a little cardboard mat. But there's a sacred space, distinct from the profane space. There, I pay tribute to those who know something about consumption and desire. So thank you for the triangle, because it's not just my relation to the thing that matters.
5:11 That's where naturalism goes wrong. It's not only my relation to the other either. It's this triangle that indissolubly unites me, the other, and the thing. Of course, if he didn't need to eat to live, if there were no thing, I wouldn't be having a meal. But I don't consume food merely to satisfy hunger. I eat at a table, at certain hours, with dinner guests. So I consume the other at the same time as I consume the thing. That's what I'm saying. And it's this triangle, just as language, the word, is not merely a relation to the thing.
5:43 When I say tree, there isn't just a relation between the word and the thing. I say it to you. Language isn't made to speak all by itself. There's me, the thing I'm speaking about, the tree, and the person I'm speaking to, you or someone else. That's the triangle. So thank you for the triangle. And Rousseau never stopped placing himself within this triangle. He set the partisans of the Ancien Régime and the liberal libertarians of the Enlightenment era, so to speak, back to back. He set them back to back in order to place himself on a third plane, that of the general will, already.
Rousseau's childhood and Émile, from the pedagogical to the political 6:14 So if I take the three E's, childhood, of course, I'll start with childhood. It's extraordinary, the childhood compared to that of François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire. I said Arouet because his father held one of the most prominent notary offices in Paris at the time, born into wealth, and good for him, receiving an excellent education at the best school, Louis-le-Grand, while Rousseau played hooky, read as best he could the books he found in his uncle's cellar, where he'd been placed as an apprentice, and was more often on the roads than at school desks, and gorged himself on what made up the bulk of popular culture at that time, which people said stirred up desires — what were called at the time 'romances.'
6:55 The romances no longer called that, the baroque-school romances, the romances with swashbucklers who die five times only to be resurrected, sword fighting. I love listening to Pagani lose myself like this. I know we're losing viewers here, but there's always this sort of romanticized culture. It's nice. It's nice and interesting. Well, lots of action, lots of love. That was Rousseau's childhood. I've found the third E — Ermenonville, in my opinion — but the second, Émile.
7:26 Émile, there you go. So how can one not think of Émile, since we're talking about childhood? So Émile, first of all, is a resumption of something that had been circulating since the Renaissance. Let's say since Rabelais, actually. I'm talking about the beginning of the Renaissance, because Montaigne will do the same thing, but the first was Rabelais. Namely that pedagogical discourse always has a political aim. Good education is the one that shapes the future citizen or subject, if we speak in terms of the Realm.
7:57 That said, in passing, today we see, with the destruction of the school system, the destruction of the humanities a bit, of that education we inherited from the Enlightenment, whose purpose was to form citizens. And today, Macron still wants to form workers, employees. That is, from age 12, they ask: what do you want to do? And by 14, you already need to be in an internship and then in a job.
8:27 Before, it wasn't like that at all. Before, you reached the baccalaureate and there was philosophy in the baccalaureate to open you up a bit to the outside world and to citizenship. And it's not at all the same type of education. Today it's really something extremely reactionary, wanting to train people for a very utilitarian purpose, rather than forming them as citizens. It's very important. The paideia, the old Greek notion of transmission to the child, paideia is the pedagogical as the antechamber of the political.
9:00 So already, Émile fits into this tradition. But with what novelty? Especially since it's addressed, it's meant to... First, it also inaugurates a literary genre that will flourish afterward, through Goethe and up to the 20th century — I'm thinking of Jean-Christophe — what's called in Germany the Bildungsroman, the novel of formation, where we follow a hero from his very early childhood right up to his fulfillment, or his decline, no matter. And so it's Émile, the first, that inaugurates this series.
9:34 But it's addressed to the child of a different social class, to the child of an aristocrat. And here, it's no accident, there's a decision on Rousseau's part: it will nevertheless be necessary — not that this aristo kid has anything to atone for, he, he hasn't done anything. But when, to take an example I'm attached to, he decides to tell Émile's mother that Émile, at the stage he's reached, now needs to learn a manual trade, around age 8-9, 'a trade for my son, my son a craftsman, sir, do you really mean that?'
10:07 A reply from the narrator, expressing Rousseau's thought: 'I mean it better than you do, madam, who would have wanted to make of him nothing but a lord, a marquis, a prince, and perhaps one day less than nothing. I am going to raise him to the rank of man. And whatever you may say, he will have fewer equals in that regard than in any rank he might hold from you.' Already, we're informed about what Rousseau calls 'man': it's not enough to be born a man to be one, one must become one. We talked about this earlier in the capsule about Sophie Rabhi, this anti-humanist side of thinking that we simply 'are' human.
10:42 No, we become human through education, in human society. It's not a program, just a biology and a soul unfolding in the world, being a man. It's also managing to enter into a socio-historical culture and being educated into humanity. It doesn't mean there are many men. 'He will have fewer equals in that regard.' But still, what audacity for the time — we can see we're no longer under Louis XIV, he would have been thrown back into the Bastille immediately. But here, simply: from the rank of king, which a coward, a wicked man, a fool can fill just as well as anyone else, he rises to the rank of man, which so few men know how to fill.
11:21 We see here that this isn't just Rousseau's pedagogism. It's not just the right way to educate my child, etc. The child is inscribed within a political totality, without which pedagogy has no meaning if it's not taken into account. And many aristocrats who had listened to this speech of Rousseau's later congratulated themselves for it, because they were exiled to London during the Revolution. They were quite glad to have learned a little trade — locksmith, like Louis XVI, and another one, I don't know, carpenter — to support themselves. They could no longer simply live off collecting the harvest from their tenant farmers.
11:54 He's basically saying we need to send the bourgeois to the gulag, roughly speaking. They need to be re-educated through labor. So, Émile fits into this. Still more, since we're getting to Ermenonville, so the progression is necessary, from childhood to Émile — childhood remains present, in Rousseau. There's what we might call a bit of a maternal fixation, in Rousseau, and I'm just saying it to place things, I won't reduce him to that. As we see from his biography, the fact that he calls the first woman he was truly in love with, Madame de Warens, 'mama,' I mean, there's the same significant thing, the famous text about the pleasure he feels from spanking, I'll skip the rest, and best regards.
The maternal island and the Île Saint-Pierre 12:35 And if we put Rousseau and KB in a room with 50 women, how many women does Rousseau take, and how many does KB take? But... you're not asking me about that. The thread is important. Ermenonville, here we are. I even have a glimpse of the island where Rousseau's tomb is. It's an island. There, Rousseau finally has peace. He's isolated. As they say in Italian, he's 'isolato.'
13:05 An island is where one is isolated. Preserved. Even a fortified castle — the fact that it's surrounded by water has never stopped it from being stormed. But somehow, in the imagination, having water to cross to get somewhere is a much deeper separation. The Egyptians did say that the navigation of the dead to the sacred land of Punt, the world of the gods, was a voyage by boat. The other guy has a way of always finding new ideas to explain things to us. I think in oral competitions, in eloquence contests, he must be really good.
13:37 The famous boats, the mystic vessels that carried them there. So where am I going with this? He's back in the maternal womb, protected from everything. Like the fetus, which is an island in the amniotic fluid. And this island follows Rousseau throughout his career. I mean, already his somewhat isolated childhood, and away from the movement of the Enlightenment — which makes sense given where he came from geographically — but also isolated even from the normal daily life of his little playmates in Geneva, coming across as a bit of an outsider.
14:12 Then, literally, the Île Saint-Pierre on Lake Biel, in the 1760s, where he took refuge, forced and constrained, because a warrant had been issued for his arrest, and where he lived a few weeks, too short for him, but it's very important to realize, and this answers your question well, that while he was there, he thought he would be condemned to stay there for the rest of his life. So he goes into exile. Like Ovid among the Getae, except here it's on an island, in a lake in Switzerland, Lake Biel, where I actually made my first long hitchhiking journey to go to this wonderful place.
14:48 But how did he come up with these plays on words, with isolé, isolat, Émile, exil — it comes out of nowhere, even if he'd prepared it in advance, it's not that obvious — and it's there, on that island, that he experienced moments where he touched the absolute, he says so himself, that is, he recounts much later, at the end of his life, in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, in a pre-Proustian mode of a search for lost time, and he even attains time regained.
15:18 So I continue to see the importance of the island in Rousseau's life. The maternal island first, the very first, is the secret bond of the embryo to the body carrying it. The Île Saint-Pierre on Lake Biel, where he attains this bliss — because Rousseau is no puritan, he does use the word 'bliss' — in what did this bliss consist? You hear it: 'in the experience I had on the Île Saint-Pierre, I would leave it to all the men of this century to guess,' and it's there that he says it consists essentially in a precious idleness (farniente).
The draft constitution for Corsica 15:53 And thirdly — may my Corsican compatriots not hold it against me if I go on about farniente in Corsica, even at the risk of feeding a false stereotype, which Rousseau himself denies — but when he's contacted by envoys of the young Corsican Republic, contacted following either a plot or, on the contrary, a genuine request, no matter, he receives this contact where he's asked, one might say for a consultation, he does a bit of consultant's work, to draw up a draft constitution for the very young Corsican Republic, which was the first to put the Enlightenment program into practice in reality, before the United States, before France.
16:32 He said 'Corsica-based,' 'Corsica-based' — mustn't forget that — and Rousseau is enthusiastic, first because at the time Corsica, a bit like the Vietnam of its era, excited intellectuals; it was the exemplary country that had just freed itself from a yoke, from oppression, from tyranny, by itself, from the Genoese, only to fall back afterward into another oppression, that of the King of France of course, and here it's between the two, France hasn't yet gotten hold of the matter, so a constitution can be drawn up for this young independent republic, and Rousseau, at first, shows little interest in the project and only writes what could be called dilatory remarks: 'I'm too old, I'm tired, it's wonderful what you've done, it's a pity, but I'm no longer up to it.'
17:12 and then little by little, informing himself about the island, about the Corsican matter, as a conscientious consultant should, we see him getting more and more involved in the project, to the point of making this extraordinary declaration to his correspondent — there are four letters that have been preserved — to his correspondent Mr. Buttafoco, incidentally an envoy of Paoli, he tells him: 'let's forget the constitution project, let me go die on your island.' So when I say the island from the beginning of childhood, to take up your three E's, passing through Émile up to Ermenonville where he rests on an island, it's a symbol without which we cannot understand Rousseau.
The island, metonymy of nature in Rousseau 17:46 I'll just end with this sentence, which I don't understand — it would seem paradoxical for a Marxist to make an apology for the absolute solipsism of someone closed in on himself in his bubble and on his island, who has no ties with anyone else except with the sea, that is, with someone who is, generally speaking, dead. I love this guy — on the left, every time, he gets treated to explanations out of nowhere, he says, 'yeah, tell me things about the theme of childhood, Émile and Ermenonville.' Pagani takes detours for 15 minutes, explaining to him that the relationship, yeah, it's — that he follows him throughout his life or something, and meanwhile he's sitting there listening to this, making a rather worried, serious face.
18:25 And who has disappeared. So I'd point out here that the island is a metonymy, an indirect way of speaking about the status, the famous status of nature, in Rousseau — it needs to be settled once and for all. Nature is that recourse I can always have at hand when civil society has become unbearable, when, as he himself said, servitude and domination reign. That's where nature is the island. Refuge island, exile, taking to the maquis on the island. There, with Corsica he'll have done both.
18:58 Well, this letter was particularly fierce, I find. Hard to get into at first, quite... Yeah, I don't know, it goes off in all directions a bit, but I like it, I like it because there's a lot of culture in it, and besides, you can see he loves telling stories, and there are plenty of interesting fragments in there. You can tell he's an old literature and philosophy teacher who has lots to say. He's the kind of guy you want to go see sometime, who tells you stories like that.
19:30 that makes you want to.
