English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Why Nietzsche is a "great fool" 0:14 I'm going to talk to you about music again. And by way of... The word is overused, but frankly here, it's so fitting for a great text by Nietzsche, by Nietzsche, as the Germans say. So... I notice, from the comments you're kind enough to send me, that some of you are always very surprised, aren't you, that I call Nietzsche a great nincompoop.
0:46 Because you can reproach him for whatever you like, but not for being a nincompoop—on the contrary, that word is mainly used in... in the counter-revolution, you know, you know my themes well, the counter-revolution, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc. It started with Heidegger, all the hyper-Nietzscheans, weren't they, of the Cold War, as I call them. And I don't level the same charge against him... well, I don't bring the same severe indictment against Nietzsche that I bring against those people. Because he, after all, pays with his own person, and above all he says admirable things—that's what we'll see as soon as he talks about music.
1:20 People are always surprised, but yes, he's a great nincompoop who gets passed off as the opposite: a stripper of illusions, a demystifier of received ideas. He volunteered to go crush Communards in the German army in 70-71. Well, when they saw that he had an eye that, to put it in French, said one thing while the other said another, and with his pathological neuralgias—sorry for the pleonasm—the officers said, listen, go as a stretcher-bearer, that'll be something.
2:02 They didn't send him to the front. No, no, but he's a... And then, with women, well... Handing off to Paul Rée, the future husband of the elusive and in some way marvelous Lou Salomé, entrusting to him his own marriage proposal to Lou Salomé, to the very man who's going to marry Lou Salomé, that's... Well, anyway, I won't dwell on it. On the contrary, I'm going to read it. Perhaps the most positive thing about Nietzsche's pen is when he talks about music.
The music of the late nineteenth century and its ruptures 2:32 But a text taken—I'll tell you right away—from Beyond Good and Evil, so, the late Nietzsche, if you will, as a last period, paragraph 255, to be precise. Because it's divided into paragraphs, it's easy to find your way around in Beyond Good and Evil. And in chapter 8, entitled 'Peoples and Fatherlands.' Well... And... What strikes me in this text is the incredible foresight—there's no other word for it in Nietzsche's case—who lived through what is perhaps one of the most complex periods in the history of music, the late 19th century, when music had exhausted a whole lot of veins, a whole lot of seams.
3:14 You see, I'm spinning the mining metaphor. The French Impressionists, and before them the German Romantics—to afford oneself the luxury, for the Romantics, of having both a Schubert and a Schumann, it's night and day, and yet they're contemporaries. And a Brahms, and a Mendelssohn, and a Chopin, well... all of that is Romantic music, and yet there isn't a single pair in that list, is there, that could be mistaken for one another. All of that had been...
3:44 And then along comes Wagner, doesn't he... the sequence... the three B's, as they say in Germany, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms... You see, you get the impression there's nothing left to say, that everything has been said. And that's the period when music heads toward ruptures. To carry on, it would take... Among those ruptures, some would give rise to jazz, well, not very long afterward, as early as the 1920s. In the 1920s, there's this extraordinary Mr. Wolf, who owns 700,000 records!
Reading of §255: a music "sister to the palm tree" 4:19 78 rpm records! 700,000 records, organizing what would later be called record-collecting culture, you see. Well, all of that is in the air. And Nietzsche, in the passage I'm going to read you, calls forth these new musics. He senses them coming. I won't say any more, because he says it so much better than anyone. Let's start. Paragraph 255 of Beyond Good and Evil. 'I hold that one must handle German music with great caution.'
4:49 'A man who loves the south...' So, the whole of Germany. 'A man who loves the south as I love it, as a great school of recovery for the soul and the senses.' Don't forget this is someone who's going to end up in a psychiatric asylum. 'A school of recovery for the soul and the senses.' His love for the south... Don't look in Nietzsche for an intelligence. It's not the true and the false, those aren't Nietzsche's great values. It's the healthy and the unhealthy.
5:20 It's health and sickness. You see it clearly here. This is where he gives the best of himself. 'A man who loves the south as I love it, as a great school of recovery for the soul and the senses, as an overflowing abundance of light and sunshine that suffuses and transfigures an existence poised on the verge of sovereign self-belief.' Such a man is a little wary of German music. In another text, another jab at Wagner, Nietzsche had said Wotan, the Zeus of German mythology,
5:52 Wotan is the god of bad weather. We're at the opposite pole. 'A southerner of this kind'—the sentence isn't finished—southerner, underlined, 'by belief and not by origin.' That is, he himself, of course, belongs to it. 'A southerner by belief and not by origin—should he chance to dream of the future of music, and here we are, how do you anticipate what music of the 20th century will soon become—of the future of music and of its deliverance from the North.'
6:24 That was the era when German music was at its peak, Brahms, Wagner, Strauss—nothing to do with waltzes, this is Richard Strauss. So I'll pick up that sentence again and continue. 'A southerner of this kind, a southerner by belief and not by origin, should he chance to dream of the future of music and of its deliverance from the North'—and here the positive part begins—'he will hear in it the prelude of a more profound'—implying more than German music, so they say—'a more powerful, more sinister, one senses The Rite of Spring coming, more sinister, you see, and more mysterious music, a music more than German, one which would not fade, pale, die away, as all German music does, in the presence of the blue and voluptuous sea and the brightness of the Mediterranean sky.'
7:28 'A music'—until now the German epics, look what he adds here—'more than European, that would hold its own even amid tawny sunsets of the desert'—but feel this coming! You know, take rap, rock, blues, all that, it comes after all from extra-European cultures originally, particularly African ones—how he senses all of that coming, you'll see it's confirmed, I'm not interpreting anything, you know, I do have interpretations, but it's enough just to read—listen instead!
7:59 'A music more than European, one that would hold its ground even before the tawny sunsets of the desert, a music'—and this sums up the whole text I'm reading you—'whose soul is akin to the palm tree, and that knows how to prowl and be at home among great, beautiful, solitary beasts of prey.' I feel like sometimes you're hearing Mingus, listen, Pithecanthropus Erectus, that incredible album, you see, Pithecanthropus Erectus, that's exactly what it means!
8:29 We're in King Kong territory here, not the Apollo Belvedere! Oh! 'I could imagine a music whose rarest magic would consist in its knowing nothing more of good and evil, only perhaps some sailor's homesickness, some golden shadows and tender weaknesses might now and then flit across it—an art which from a great distance would see the colors of a perishing, and almost incomprehensible, moral world fleeing to it for refuge, and which would be hospitable and profound enough to receive such late fugitives.'
Reading of §244: German depth 9:18 I move straight on, since there's a charge against German music at the outset, to an even more topical text, about today's Germany. Everyone's asking themselves, so, how are the Germans going to react? The Americans are ruining them! How? Them, who were the most faithful Atlanticists throughout the whole Cold War—that's a fine way to repay them, ruining their economy by cutting them off from Russian gas! I don't need to spell it out, you all know this! And it's starting to spread, to multiply. And there was the German chancellor's trip to China, wasn't there?
9:51 Much to the dismay of his entire camp assembled. And then I come across this. Look closely, look closely. Sorry. There. It begins like this. It's paragraph, excuse me, 244. Still in 'Peoples and Fatherlands.'
10:22 'There was a time when it was customary to attach to the Germans the flattering epithet of "profound."' The Germans are profound. Kant is profound. Hegel is profound. Marx is profound. Bach's music is profound. Beethoven's, isn't it? It's not 'Viens Poupoule, viens Poupoule, viens.' Well, still, isn't it? It's not Carmen either. Carmen is a marvel. But it's not profound, no. It's cruel, it's brisk. There's nothing in it that weighs or poses, as Verlaine would say.
10:57 But profound is the Germans. 'There was a time when it was customary to attach to the Germans...' Yes, he speaks of it in the past tense. The epithet... Ah yes, I need to give you the context. Prussia has just crushed France in one of the greatest defeats in our history. The war of 1871, the siege of Paris, the Commune. I mean, the Emperor of the French taken prisoner. It's a total disaster, really. You'd have to go back to Agincourt, to the Hundred Years' War, to find such a collapse of our national vanity or pride, whichever you prefer.
11:30 That's another subject. But... And that's needed to understand why he goes on to say: at present—that was in the past, the Germans are profound—'At present it is to quite other honors that the German aspires, and profundity now seems to him rather a lack of dash.' And indeed, the warrior has no use for depth. A man of action. They have no time for reflection, however profound. 'It is therefore almost timely and patriotic'—it's ironic, you know, one has to be fair to Nietzsche. When he talks about seriousness, it has nothing to do with paratroopers.
12:02 And especially German ones. 'It is therefore almost timely and patriotic to ask whether this old praise'—that we are profound—'was not perhaps at bottom an error. In short, if German profundity is not, in reality, something else, and worse: a quality of which we are, thank God, on the point of ridding ourselves.' So it's not the profound Germans, it's the mercantile Germans we're about to discuss now, isn't it? You know the Greeks said Hermes was Mercury, if you prefer, among the Latins—he was the god of merchants.
12:36 And so—that's my addition, the 'and so'—and so also the god of thieves, wasn't he? 'Let us try, then, to relearn with regard to German profundity: a little vivisection of the German soul will suffice.' And I'll skip half the text, which is a bit long, and read you straight away its striking final page. 'That is why the development, the discovery, the German achievement, in the vast domain of philosophical formulas, a master idea associated with German beer and German music, is at work Germanizing Europe.'
13:17 Europe. Well now, that's topical—people complain about having a German Europe, don't they? And this was written a century earlier. 'Foreigners stand amazed and attracted by the riddles which the contradictory nature at the bottom of the German soul—of which Hegel and Richard Wagner have of late given the most audacious demonstration—propounds to them.' And here he opens a parenthesis and says: Hegel systematized it, and Richard Wagner recently set it to music. 'Good-natured and cunning'—this alliance of words, absurd with regard to any other people, unfortunately justifies itself all too often where Germany is concerned.
13:51 I repeat, 'good-natured and cunning.' Go live among the Swabians, the southern Germans, for a while. 'The clumsiness of the German scholar, his social ineptness, combine in a terrifying way with an inner acrobatic capacity.' Look how prophetic this text is. 'And a boldness of daring, of which even the gods have long since learned to be afraid.' This was written in the 1880s. The two greatest bloodbaths in human history haven't yet begun.
14:21 And you see, both come from Germany. I'm not saying Germany is alone responsible for those wars—imperialisms can shake hands. But still, it plays a major role. That's the least one can say. 'The clumsiness of the German scholar, his social ineptness, combine in a terrifying way with the opposite of clumsiness, with an inner acrobatic capacity, and a boldness of daring of which even the gods have long since learned to be afraid.' If one wants an ad oculos demonstration, right before one's eyes, of what the German soul is, one only need look at German taste, German arts, German customs.
14:57 What music indifferent to good taste! One finds side by side the noblest and the basest. What disorder and what richness in the whole economy of this soul! The German drags his soul around like a ball and chain! That's what distinguishes him from Americans, who are actually very Germanic, contrary to what people think, much more so than English. Isn't that so? But I'll come back to that another time. Look, I'll give two quick examples because I don't like making claims that seem gratuitous—look at two emblematically American foods, the hot dog and the hamburger.
15:28 The hot dog is sausage. That's much more German than English. And then the hamburger—that's Hamburg. Let's continue. The German drags his soul around like a ball and chain. He drags along after him... So, another interruption: the American is the German minus the ball and chain, if you like. Perhaps even more formidable. 'The German drags his soul around like a ball and chain. He drags after him the whole content of his existence. He digests badly what he has lived through. He never gets to the bottom of it. German profundity is all too often only a difficult, delayed'
16:05 digestion. He used to say... There are two great cultures. There's the culture of beer and that of wine. The culture nourished on beer and cabbage produces painful digestion, and that gives you German metaphysics, which is a metaphysics of ressentiment belonging to someone with a difficult digestion. I'll stop the voiceover. Perhaps today... Sorry. 'German profundity is all too often only a difficult and delayed digestion.'
16:35 'And just as all chronic invalids, all dyspeptics, tend toward indolence, the German loves frankness and good-naturedness.' It's so convenient to be frank and good-natured. 'This is perhaps today, of all the disguises the German masters, the most dangerous and the most successful.' This honesty... You know, I was drawing a parallel between the Americans and the Germans when American presidents come down the steps of Air Force One...
17:06 and go 'Hey!' 'Hey!' What friendliness! All the other heads of state stand stiffly beside them and they're so relaxed. It's likeable. 'This is perhaps today, of all the disguises the German masters, the most dangerous and the most successful. This German honesty, familiar, obliging, that always shows its hand—this is his truly Mephistophelian art, and one that can lead far.' The German makes himself comfortable. This passage is admirable.
17:36 'He fixes on you the empty gaze of his honest blue German eyes'—and the foreigner immediately mistakes him for his dressing gown. That's what I wanted to say. 'Whatever may really be the truth about German profundity, and between ourselves perhaps one may be allowed to laugh a little at it—we would do well to continue honoring the appearance of it.' Let's keep on pretending, in Germany's interest, to be profound, that is, a bit heavy and awkward. This isn't a matter of lulling, as they say in slang, the adversary to sleep.
18:08 to honor the appearance and good reputation of it, and not to make a fool's bargain by trading our old renown as a profound nation for the Prussian dash, the Berlin wit, and the sands of Berlin. 'It is wise for a nation to pass for, and let itself be considered, profound, clumsy, good-natured, honest, and foolish.' It might even be very profound. After all, this is the punchline. One must after all live up to one's name.
18:38 'One does not call oneself in vain the deceptive people'—das Täusche-Volk. I'll leave you with these two texts for today, which complement each other admirably: the one on the music more than German, akin to the palm tree, and the one on the danger there is in granting the German his frankness, his good-naturedness—in short, his clumsy profundity.
