English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Montage of archive material: Foucault and Pétain 0:00 What idea of man do you have? Well, I believe that man has been, if not a bad dream, at least a nightmare, or at any rate a very particular figure, very determinate, historically situated within our culture.
0:36 You mean it's an invention? Man is an invention. Assured of the affection of our admirable army, which is fighting with a heroism worthy of its long military traditions against an enemy superior in numbers and weapons. I therefore fail to see how an awareness, a political attitude, could follow from your working attitude. Of course, that is no doubt the question asked of all forms of reflection that are in the process of destroying a myth and have not yet reconstituted one.
1:08 Sure that through its magnificent resistance, it has fulfilled our duties toward our allies. Sure of the support of the veterans whom I had the pride of commanding. Sure of the confidence of the whole people, I give France the gift of my person to lessen its misfortune. I believe that up to now, we have never considered our own knowledge as a phenomenon foreign to ourselves. In these painful hours, I think of the unfortunate refugees who, in extreme destitution, are crisscrossing our roads.
1:45 I express to them my compassion and my concern. It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that the fighting must stop. We are dealing here with a situation that is obviously very complex. Our reason needs a whole twisting back upon itself in order to manage to grasp itself in this way, as a phenomenon that would be foreign to it. It has to pass outside of itself. In a way, it would have to be turned inside out like a glove. And besides, that's starting to happen — what I meant to say, I expressed myself badly, we may not have understood each other, that's fine.
The Tour de France against class contempt 2:18 It's starting to be felt — not so much through the heart of this new religiosity that's being foisted on us, but it's starting through the class contempt that's oozing out. There are a lot of people saying it's starting to get on their nerves. And I think this is a path that won't be scientific. That is to say, the bourgeois-bohemians of city centers are starting to piss us off. And when on top of that they slap taxes on us and tell us we smoke cigarettes and drive diesels, well, that's it, the Yellow Vests, that's enough. I'm very pleased with François's remark, that's twice now he's talked about class contempt.
2:51 That really brings us back to current events, to the latest avatars of what is odious in ecology — I'm thinking of course of the Tour de France. But let's take it step by step. I've said this in other talks, so I have a bit less trouble admitting it now, I've already admitted it once: when I was young, reactionary — I come from the colonial world, I mean, when I was a teenager, I was surrounded by quiet fascists, quiet colonialists and fascists.
3:22 And I was surrounded by French-Algeria types, things like that. So at the time, I would, when the Tour de France came on TV, I'd change the channel. The word didn't exist yet, you see, I found it vulgar, whatever, I was a reactionary petty bourgeois, I found it ugly, all those ads and everything, I already had a fear of the masses, which is one of the foundations of ecologism — the masses. There won't be enough for everyone, you see, there are limits on resources, we can't develop everything. So I remember, and it was Clouscard, a great sports fan, who told me — first, a scientific fact, it's been measured, I'm putting on the Tarn accent, excuse me, it's not to caricature him, it's because I miss him.
4:09 It's been measured, it's the greatest muscular effort a man makes, even more than a marathon — the Tour de France. I'm talking about those who climb the mountain passes at such speed, whereas I'd struggle just riding on flat ground, right? And, first — and so, this is the occasion for the proletarian to enter into the symbolic order, to get recognition, the opposite of class contempt. This popular success of the Tour de France is a tribute to effort, which is never honored — we honor the artist's effort, the thinker's effort, whatever you like.
The true scientist is not scientistic 4:43 We honor the artist's non-effort. Yes, the soldier's effort on the battlefield, but never the peasant's effort, the farm laborer's effort, etc. So, there it is, I'm very pleased with your remark. And as for Nicole's question, she's asking it as a scientist, and she's quite right, she's raising the confusion between science and scientism. Earlier I said I don't take a position on the scientific questions related to the files — plural — the ecological files, because that's not my area of competence, all right?
5:22 That said, precisely, the real scientist is not a scientist-ideologue [scientiste]. It's illegitimate to move from the discourse of equations, which is univocal, to the everyday language we're speaking right now, whether in philosophy or elsewhere. Because there, we enter a language that is equivocal, etc. Look, if I say, I don't know, democracy or progress, look at the number of different senses in which that can be taken.
5:53 Right. Value. You know, when I hear people say, oh yes, we oppose — well then I say anything at all, today it's Belarus, another time it was Saddam Hussein, etc. Those aren't my cup of tea, I mean, I probably would have ended up in a vat of acid under Saddam if I'd been Iraqi. But I find the aggression his country suffered odious, which is our own history. Against these people, they say it's not in keeping with our values. Our values — what are they? The electric chair for fourteen-year-old innocents?
6:24 Watch out, you see, everyday language. So I'm very glad she raised the question by actually addressing pedagogy at the scientific level. When you say you make diagrams, you try to explain what everyone ought to know. Yes, go ahead, please. It's just that there's been an anti-scientific discourse dominant for decades, like the discourse on ecology. There's a discourse that...
6:56 Exactly. We're fighting windmills. At the time of Fukushima, I wasn't invited to conferences, to things like that, whereas idiots were invited. Well, that's how it is. All right, I'll complete the answer. Go ahead. But I did complete my answer. You resist every time you restore a scientific truth. That's what I mean by this void. Bravo then for having recalled that... the fat, the grey, the grey, the grey. Yes, the green earth. The green earth.
Ecology did not belong to the field of politics 7:26 Good, perfect. I'm going to... to complete the already quite substantial answers given to the topics raised, I wanted to add one or two small clarifications because these are points that are nonetheless developed in the book. So first, on this epistemological question, let's say, on the scientific side of ecologism, because it keeps coming back. Even if it's from an extremely positivist standpoint and so on, I won't...
7:57 I looked into this in particular in response to Pierre's question, if I remember correctly, where he mentions a consensus. You know, there's a kind of consensus around ecology, in the sense that there would be, on the model of the famous international community — you know, that we always talk about, without really knowing what it is — there's the scientific community. We don't really know what that is either. And we have a bit of an idea of what the scientific community looks like right now with Covid.
8:28 If we know what it is, it's the IPCC. The least one can say is that the scientific community, for example, on today's current issues of pandemic, Covid, epidemiology, we can clearly see that it's rather dialectical, that they're not necessarily all in agreement, and moreover that they change their minds roughly every five minutes. So, in reality, they don't really know. And the most honest and most serious ones, scientifically speaking, say so themselves — that they don't really know. But from a political standpoint — I'll come back to the scientific aspects — from a political standpoint, we didn't wait for ecology to ask questions about pollution, about what's called the environment, whether health issues, agronomy, ecology, I mean, except we didn't call it ecology.
9:13 You see, words and things, the calves and things. So, we didn't call it ecology, and above all, it wasn't in the field of politics, for an extremely simple reason — this is the answer I give — nobody is in favor of what the ecologists are fighting against, at least those who fight the harmful effects on our health, on natural resources, on all sorts of conditions tied to our life, our everyday existence since forever, nuisances of every kind.
9:48 There even existed ministries linked to natural resources, whether waters and forests, public health, well, all sorts of things, except we hadn't attached some kind of word, new paradigm, Deleuze-style concept — that is, Séguéla-style — that we'd call ecology. We didn't need that, and it wasn't in the domain of politics, because no politician would have defended pollution, the destruction of nature, of natural resources, etc., the massacre of little animals, and so on.
10:21 So, I mean, nobody was claiming a position like that. So it wasn't in the field of politics — it entered the field of politics simply to obscure everything else, which were the questions that were the object of politics, of political debate, and historically that continue, obviously. So, that's... So I'm talking about this. I'm giving this answer to Pierre. You can verify it. It's not opportunistic.
10:52 I'm developing the answer. And in the same context, I mention the fact that... And this is relevant, including, to the discussion around Harry B. and others... And there, I might hand the floor over to Pierre W. — the other Pierre. There have been a whole series of occasions where we were able to bring up, on purely epistemological questions, the great difference that exists between a rational relation that is demonstrable, measured, validated empirically and scientifically, and the whole system of haphazard correlation that now stands in for reasons and thoughts.
From relativism to neopositivism 11:42 It's quite general. And I give a fair number of examples in the book. You'll find places where we see things being related that are, strictly speaking, incommensurable. So, the epistemological aspects, the mention and critique of what Dominique Pagani has called scientism, including in the positivist versions that are very much in vogue today. There's a constant balancing act — it's permanently the dominant petty-bourgeois, anti-rationalist ideology — between relativism and positivism, constantly.
12:17 The triumph of this neo-positivism, very quickly, is almost mechanical. When you look at the chronology of ideas, the collapse, the relentless attacks on the two great bodies of thought of the symbolic order, Marxism and psychoanalysis — and God knows the role that figures like Deleuze, Onfray for example, played in this — means that discontent doesn't disappear, it stays there, but there's nothing left but neo-positivism to express it. There, I'll give you the floor. There are fashions, there are circumstances that favor, in one case, all-out relativism rather, and it alternates, a bit like the alternation of Democrats and Republicans in the United States, and now, of the different variants of the social-democratic petty bourgeoisie in France.
13:09 They alternate, they alternate — so when it comes to changing, I talk about this elsewhere, there's a whole chapter devoted to it in the book, it's no longer at all about transforming, about achieving a convincing representation of social classes and their struggle in the political field, it's not about transforming the social order and singularly the order of production through concrete, objective transformations of those relations of production and the accompanying social relations — it's now simply about changing because one has grown tired of the previous thing. And that's how we move, well, from one to the other, from absolute relativism to so-called neo-positivism, but the common trait is that their principal enemy is reason, it's rationalism and science, knowledge.
Neo-Malthusianism and the collapsologists 13:55 That gives us, among other things, the Heideggerian fashion that periodically resurfaces, so the unthought, the destruction of reason and thought, as we had occasion to discuss a few days ago here with Emmanuel Faye. So, on these aspects, and then, the last thing your remark suggests to me is the problem of Malthusianism. Because, apparently, here I come back to our pseudo-Marxist ecologists, or our ecologists who present themselves as Marxists — and I've been able to verify this — most of them were completely unaware that Marx and Engels had written a book called Against Malthus.
14:37 So, I invited them to read it — that's where you see there is indeed a lot of ignorance, but ever since Rancière magnificently formalized and normalized the thing for us, we are the result of several generations now of ignorant schoolmasters, so the result shouldn't come as a surprise. So, I discuss in the book what Marx tells us about issues that greatly concern, that speak to, the ecologists, and we see quite explicitly that Marx is in total antinomy with their thesis, including on these questions of natural resources, sufficient or insufficient.
15:26 I simply mention the fact — and this brings us back to anti-humanism — that the way in which Malthusianism has been revived, which is nonetheless the ideological heart of the frustration and problematic of contemporary ecologism around the destruction of insufficient resources, etc. — I would have recalled that of course this is a very old problem, well, the details are in the book and carefully documented, but the big difference with the way it's being served up to us again fresh, as they say in academic circles or among journalists or at dinner parties in town, well, it's that half the problem has been removed, since at least Malthus, who is heavily criticized, notably in Capital, by Marx, since Marx presents him as the archetype of the vulgar economist — I refer you to Marx's definition of the vulgar economist, which also appears in the book — well, at least Malthus considered that there was a problem of the relation between demography and resources.
16:30 Now, demography, as you may have noticed — apart from the migration issue, which is nonetheless entirely a corollary of these questions — has been completely forgotten; we ask the question of insufficient resources, wasted, destroyed, and so on, by the vile productivism of capitalism. So, this Malthusian, or rather neo-Malthusian, side, I devote quite a bit to it, and it falls within the category of things many people are unaware of, even though they are Malthusians, a bit like Monsieur Jourdain who spoke prose without knowing it.
17:08 Yves Cochet — well, Yves Cochet, that's beyond Malthus, that's into caricature. Well, the collapsologists, I discuss them very briefly, I explain why I skim over the collapsology nonsense in the book, but they are mentioned nonetheless, along with one of the most formidable — our local buffoon, since he was indeed the deputy for the 14th arrondissement — Yves Cochet, whom I know very well, and who is even more of a joke than you can imagine.
17:41 But he gave fairly convincing proof of it, notably during his latest public appearances from his survivalist bunker, during Covid, which was quite amusing. Yes, yes, his fashionable survivalist bunker — yes, but it's an eco-friendly survivalist bunker. Careful now. So, maybe other questions, the last ones, because we're reaching the final moment of... There. I'm not a Marxist, but the analysis... I confirm. I know Monsieur very well, he's a loyal client, and he's not at all a Marxist, given that...
Expansion of the market, the societal question, and Christianity 18:14 There. So as for me, I'm on the dark side, I'm a Christian, Catholic employer. But Marxist analysis is extremely useful, and in particular, there's an aspect you haven't yet addressed, though I haven't read the whole book, I've only read the first part so far, which is that within the ideology of which ecology is in fact a spearhead, there's a movement at work, also — as you said earlier — from Foucault through to Cohn-Bendit, we are in any case within a movement that is a movement of capitalist expansion, also by increasing the space of the market, to the point of extending market space into the private sphere, including into procreation, that is, putting relations of production even into the private sphere.
19:02 So, one of the things that strikes me most in the surge of this ideology, and also everything it carries with it, is precisely that — that is, the destruction, in fact I'd say, the expansion of market space, and the fact that the market conquers every sphere, we see it today with the circular economy, with, I'd say, from BlaBlaCar to others, presented at first as a free space, as a liberation, but which in fact is only a continuous expansion of market space, progressively destroying everything that might, deep down, have resisted it, including within social structures, among other things.
19:45 Just a first response, I'll let you continue afterward — I haven't developed this much, but I refer to it in the book because it's one of the things I developed a great deal in my previous book called Critique of Digital Reason. Yes. So, in Critique of Digital Reason, if you've read it, you'll remember that I talk a lot about exactly this. So that's why it's not... Besides, it's not... I explain that ecologism is a tonality, if you will, or more precisely, a determination, a coloring, of the dominant ideology which is essentially that of liberalism.
20:18 And so, but this aspect isn't absolutely typical. I do bring it up a little bit in another answer to Pierre, which you'll read, in the self-critical section where Pierre Polinsky talks to me about people who aren't all necessarily bobos, hipsters, as they say today, on scooters, eyes glued to their smartphones. Not all of them are, but I say... So, in this context, in the context of this question, what you're raising is addressed, but for the substance of the question you're explicitly raising here, I refer the reader to the previous book, called Critique of Digital Reason, in this latest book.
21:00 And that's the connection which, from my point of view, you were mentioning earlier too. The social question is made to disappear by substituting for it the so-called societal question. Absolutely. But that's actually a complete mask. This is dealt with extensively in the book, this one at least. And it has today become so dominant that criticizing it has become a heresy that gets you burned systematically at the public stake. Criticizing it on social grounds.
21:31 That's what's very frowned upon, especially on the left. Sorry, I'm interrupting you. Just as Dominique rightly finds it scandalous that there are Marxists for whom ecology is fundamental, and who add the word 'ecological' to the demand for democratic, socialist, and ecological — Marx mocked those who added 'and citizen' to 'of man and of the citizen,' as if there were men who weren't citizens. Anyway. Likewise, I find it scandalous that there could be Christian ecologists.
22:02 I'm not talking about Christians concerned about the environment of their fellow human beings, because I am concerned about my fellow human beings. But how can a religion of transcendence abandon itself to this heresy of immanence, as you rightly said ecologism is? The moment you adopt a naturalism — well, for me, the great merit of Christian civilization, I'm not speaking in religious terms here, I'm speaking of Christianity, of its effect on history, for now — its great merit, and here I want to please the great Cartesian that Dominique is, was to have, if I may say so, forgive the barbarism, de-immanentized what surrounds us.
22:41 There are no nymphs in the springs, there is H2O. Scientific civilization could only appear in a world that had de-paganized — much to my own chagrin — creation. That's actually very important. There, I just wanted to say that we have an alliance on that level. That's not the point at all. No, no, but I'm throwing it out there. We have a possible alliance — the Christian community needs to take itself in hand sometimes when it listens to sirens that aren't Christian at all.
23:13 That's what I wanted to say. I pay tribute here. The... And we have the anthropological and truly humanist aspect that can exist in an ecology, but without separating man from... on his own account. 'You are the salt of the earth,' that says it well... You can't get more anti-ecological than that. Man, the salt of the earth. Well, that's speciesist, isn't it. That means... And he adds, 'and if the salt loses its savor, with what shall it be salted?' Good grief, you are the summit of creation, why would you regress? There you go.
Fetishism of technology and imposed frugality 23:46 Already, it's not bad that you condensed a certain number of ecological precepts that in fact you find nowhere else. When you read ecologist platforms, or talk with ecologists, or even I'm an occasional reader of La Décroissance, at least to keep informed of what's being said there, nowhere is there a set of points that one could take up and criticize. And so, one of the questions is... A question I could ask you is...
24:21 What do you think that's due to? The fact that there's a kind of shared imaginary, but one that isn't formalized anywhere. And otherwise, what you're highlighting is mainly the principle of separation between man and nature, which has been discussed quite a bit up to now. And what I found interesting were the reminders you gave about the fetishism of the commodity, and in particular the principle of fetishism in Marx.
24:55 And, well, we were talking about Christendom. I had noted, it happens that a friend had lent me a book by Jacques Ellul, called Marxist Thought. So Jacques Ellul, Christian and Marxist, in theory, well, allegedly. And here's what he says. Christian, but not Marxist at all. Not Marxist at all. But he felt close to Marxism. No, but he claimed to be a Marxist. And here's what he says. If Marx came back today, what phenomenon would he pick out to characterize our society? We were convinced, so that's him and Charbonneau speaking, we were convinced that it would no longer be capital, nor capitalism, but the development of technology, the phenomenon of technological growth.
25:34 So we centered our work on that. Stop, Heidegger. There we go, we're arriving at Heidegger. We're not going to talk about Heidegger here, now. We talked a lot about him a few days ago. But within these tendencies, and notably degrowth tendencies, there's a fetishism, not of the commodity, but of technology. Technology. Yes, technology. And there's no longer any social relation. So once again, it's another way of erasing the social relation. It's, we're dominated by technology. There's something above us called technology. There's the art of your neighboring salons.
26:05 That doesn't add up. It's... Yes, excuse me. There we go. And as for the red-green link, the alliances between the ecologists and the Marxists, etc., I had also noted what people who make this kind of alliance expose themselves to. There was an article in Le Monde diplomatique by Jean Gadrey, in July 2019, where I found this quote. Reducing inequalities is one of the conditions for accepting energy and material frugality.
26:38 Yes. So, in truth... Frugality, the word is out. There we go. And it's above all the social question, but let's say, it's what we're going to use as bait for the common people to get them to accept frugality. Yes, that's... And so, that's it. So, concretely, there's the theoretical part which you've developed perfectly in the book, but also the completely concrete parts that we can observe empirically in the newspapers, left-wing and ecologist at the same time, as Macron would say.
An ideology without a corpus, made of repressions 27:09 So, the social component is what we're going to dress up ecology in to make it acceptable. But in truth, what interests us is ecology, the social side, we couldn't care less. Yes. What is ecology the name of? I'm going to try to answer quickly because time is flying and I want to leave time for others to ask other questions. I could continue afterward, but for now... So, quickly, the questions that you... well, the problems you raised.
27:40 So, how do I explain it? Remind me of the exact wording of your first question. It's the fact that the precepts of ecology aren't... Yes, there we go. There's absolutely no... Yes, it was... Well, what you're raising there is an essential point, because it was at the origin of the first text. It was that I had observed, and everyone can keep checking this several years later, that nowhere did we have a consistent body of work that could resemble something scientific, epistemological, if not philosophical, that would describe conceptually, clearly, what the principles of ecology are.
28:24 Whether we consider it a discipline, a science, a political movement, or God knows what. What could it possibly consist of? So, that's the first part of the text explicitly called "The Calves and the Things." How do I explain it? Well, I explain it in the book, precisely. It's that in reality, of course, all this has a history, but it's the history of a repression, of layers, of successive repressions. I won't develop that here in our discussion, but I bring up the historical roots from a theoretical point of view, even before the war, with not only the Nazis—we're well aware of the Nazi precursors of ecologism—but especially, closer to home, clearly at home, we have, and who were themselves very close to the Nazis, and for good reason, what we'll call Mounier's personalism, which will give us Esprit, and a whole movement which will be a fundamental movement that will build our social democracy and our current ruling class.
29:28 I develop that—now I just mention it in the book, in the historical section, a useful historical reminder, as Nicole confirmed, since most readers of this book probably know nothing about all this. So how do I explain it? Well, quite simply, because, like all ideologies, it accumulates little by little, but this one, like the rest of the dominant ideology, nobody among, including today's ruling class—I mean, in any case, the younger generations, those under 50—has the slightest idea what personalism is.
29:59 Yet they're all personalists, to varying degrees, and it's very easy to demonstrate. I could multiply examples like that. So, an ideology—I talk about this in the book, I explain how it's built on materialist and dialectical foundations, that's where I talk about paradigms, how a kind of natural selection takes place—but obviously, and we come back once again to the title of the book, why "the calves and the things," they don't have the words to put on these things, and they mustn't have them. There we'd get back to the question of nominalism, that'll be another debate.
Commodity fetishism, Heidegger and Arendt 30:29 So, that's the answer to your first question, which would be interesting to develop further. So, the question of the principle of separation, well, it's developed at length in the book, and we've already talked about it, about commodity fetishism. Well, as you know, it's a fundamental point, it's extensively developed in the book, but also in other discussions and texts we've had. Yes, I re-explain it from a strictly Marxist point of view, since as you know, as one can see by reading the book, I do nothing but—there's no idea that's personal, there's no interpretation, there's simply the reminder of Marx's particularly explicit and clear words, provided one takes the time to read them and understand what he writes, including with the Hegelian backdrop that sometimes helps understanding, and including the commentaries that people like Debord, or even Clouscard, could make on all these questions.
31:22 And so, indeed, it's a very important point, fetishism is really at the heart of the first part of Capital, the one about which Marx, precisely, in his preface, explains that in every science, the beginning is arduous. So the beginning is precisely the famous chapter on commodity fetishism. So it's important. A point we haven't discussed much, and that I'm not going to discuss for very long here, because that would provide material for many other equally fascinating debates that we'll certainly have soon, on the critique of technē—yes, of course, they aggregate.
31:55 How do all these people aggregate a kind of massive demagogy, which they themselves will later call populist or fascist-leaning or whatever? And one of the most emblematic is still... it's still Nazism. So how are they going to reintegrate... How was Heidegger reintegrated... So, Nazism was reintegrated into what Heidegger's followers call philosophy. Well, Faye took care of that again not long ago.
32:25 I'll remind you that many of these people we're talking about, who are, among other things, ecologists, but broadly speaking, the intellectuals who are part of the dominant ideological current, of which political ecology, or so-called political ecology, is only the most massive and visible expression today at least—well, these people have as theorists one of the fundamental characteristics for them, from a strictly political point of view, one of the main divides they have, which fundamentally opposes them to Marxism, is what they call anti-totalitarianism, which is nothing but a new paradigm to designate good old anti-communism, as I believe I've demonstrated many times, and as is fairly easy to verify.
33:11 So, it's interesting to know that their intellectual master is Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt, who herself, as we recalled just a few days ago, always claimed to be, not only Heideggerian, but she never left the slightest doubt that she was not at all left-wing and firmly right-wing. So these people who claim to be, not necessarily Marxist, but in any case left-wing, since overall, today, ecology, and for quite a few years now, since it serves largely as a substitute ideology for classic liberal, social-democratic ideology—including, moreover, the one Foucault explicitly claimed for himself—well, these people, among the many contradictions they carry, the many skeletons in their closet, have this one too: well, Arendt was Heidegger's, and I had the occasion to explain to Faye, Emmanuel Faye, who didn't know it, because apparently he hadn't worked much on this whole ultra-reactionary and regressive ideological current, and I told him that one of the reasons why, despite his superb work a few years ago now, which nonetheless somewhat deflated
34:21 our Heideggerian-Marxists or so-called such, who are often also eco-Marxists, or claim to be—we'll understand why shortly—it's that, well, I've gotten a lot of very direct testimony, amused, though these are anecdotes, but very revealing, of all these ZAD activists who read the complete works, this being the circumstance, of Heidegger on their dry toilet. Why? For a very simple reason, which I don't have time to develop, but which could easily be developed—many are followers of Günther Anders, which is already a bit better than being followers of Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, although there's a fairly striking convergence between the three—on the grounds that they took from Heidegger the famous critique of technē.
35:12 That's, I suppose, what you wanted me to bring up. Yes, and that, once again, is another point we won't be able to develop this evening, but which could provide material for other discussions, since Heidegger is being brought back into supposedly progressive, supposedly left-wing, and particularly ecologist political current affairs. So it's interesting to see, notably through the anti-industrial movement, a movement I know well, since it's the one that someone I love very much belonged to, and whom I quote several times in the book, Jaime Semprun, but which was also, in a certain way, Debord's, and which is today, especially, the movement of many people, notably in anarchist circles, or at least those who claim to be anarcho-Marxists.
Ecology as the aesthetic of class domination 36:02 Follow my gaze. So all these points are very interesting, but they lead to the reason why I wrote the book. That is, to show that ecology is ultimately the aesthetic—including in the old sense of the term—the surface under which we perceive this whole ideological ensemble, which is simply liberal ideology, and which is simply the dominant ideology, in the sense that it allows the bourgeoisie, via the ideology massively assimilated by the petty bourgeoisie, to perpetuate the class domination of the bourgeoisie.
36:39 So the exploitation of man by man, etc. On the question of frugality, which you mentioned, you'll have to give me all the quotes, I'll put them up, including on the video. It was repeated not long ago. Yes, yes. So, obviously, on the cover, we see that we have the first champion of happy frugality, and if we unfold it, I'm rather perverse, maybe not narcissistic, but in any case perverse, like all...
37:11 since I'm generally considered Stalinist, well, at least the Trotskyists consider me Stalinist, it's not really the case with Stalinists in general, they don't see me as Stalinist at all. So there you have it, that's what happy frugality is. Pictures are worth more than a long speech. So here with comrade Rabhi. So here, we have the world before, and here, now, the world after, which we've entered. To justify the cover, of which I'm also the author. So, that's on the question of frugality, which is also developed in the book.
The esoteric Marx of the pseudo-Marxists; conclusion 37:43 One last word about what you mentioned, the esoteric, exoteric character. That's also something found in a whole current of so-called Marxists, so-called the most radical, those who, like certain Heideggerian sects, are the only ones who have understood Marx, that is, who have understood what he did not write. And for good reason, since they start from the idea—it's not at all in the same mode as Heidegger. Heidegger, that's normal, since Heidegger claims that good philosophy must be incomprehensible.
38:13 So obviously, they're all necessarily a bit esoteric, because without that, there's nothing to understand. So, in the case of the Marxists, we have this whole current of so-called value-critique, well known to our files of bungling ideologues. So, well, I won't name them, they'll recognize themselves, though they did innovate with this very interesting new paradigm, which obviously evokes ancient philosophy, and not necessarily the pre-Socratics, but at least Plato, Aristotle, etc., who had, who had two corpora, there was the...
38:55 and so which applied to Marx. There's the exoteric Marx, the one we know, the one for the dimwits, the cretinous communists, the people, the socius, the social, and then there's the esoteric Marx. So this esoteric Marx is probably that of the Heideggerian-Marxists, it's probably also that of the eco-Marxists, the eco-communists, etc., and of people who have seen, but without reading Marx, and outside of Marx, some correlation, however far-fetched, between ecology and Marxism.
39:29 So, and for good reason, because for that, one must refer to the esoteric framework, that is, what isn't written, and that's why I... on that note, I bring up the famous... I refer you to the book too, I give Derrida's definition of différance. Différance with an A. I'll put it on screen, but maybe not even, because it's really about encouraging people to read the book. And that will perhaps be my conclusion, unless there's one last question. No, let's stop there, so it remains for me to thank you, and see you very soon, since this is only the moment of dispersal, comrades, dispersal.
40:17 Greetings to all. Well, there we go.
