English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Return to Africa and the triangle "against," "with," "against with" 2:00 I'm sorry to depart a little from our little convention, I'm perhaps going back to the previous question, three seconds, all the same, because it matters to me for Africa. To sum up everything I think about it, I often say that the Russians are the negroes of whiteness. What I mean by that is that being someone's negro, literally as well as figuratively, in the editorial sense, is being a slave. We shouldn't forget that Slav, slave. And that for a long time you could still see in Venice the quay of the Slavs, where slaves were unloaded by the cartload, whole carts of them, whom they were going to...
2:33 Throughout the Middle Ages, it's never talked about. Taken from what is now Ukraine or Belarus, en masse, there you go. I'd still point out that I found, in the report of the master race, I'm thinking of the Teutonic Knights, about the Slavs, the sub-humans, Untermensch. I'd still point out that I experienced that somehow between blacks and whites, in a way, and deep relations. There you go. That was for that little return to the first question, to the preceding question.
3:03 Ah! Opposition. Yes, yes, but I really liked the way you put it, saying "against with," no it was better than that. Being against. Or being against-with. Being against. Being against-with, there are the three. There we have our triangle. Well, I myself am for being against-with, in a way. I'm not for "einseitig" opposition, as they say in German philosophy, one-sided. I was thinking about this — it's your question now — I was thinking about it earlier when we were in front of Rousseau's tomb.
Nerval's Angélique: from Mortefontaine to Rousseau's grave 3:35 I said to myself, that's going to plunge so deep into fundamental things that it's going to take us away from the subject. Let me use your question now to dive right in. When Nerval, who for me is the best introduction to Rousseau, that concerns us in this Angélique novella, uses as a pretext for the story a book he's trying to find — I'll go quickly — a book found at a secondhand bookseller's, but he can't manage to find it. All the libraries of Paris disappoint him, either because they don't have it, or because they no longer have it, or because they're closed, on holiday — there's a whole staging, not made explicit by the author, so as to produce, and this is very modern actually, an anti-novel.
4:13 I can't find the book, so what am I going to talk about in the meantime, since this text had been sent to a newspaper, a real serial, and readers were waiting for the next installment. So, I don't find the book, what do I do? The book about the Abbé de Bucquoy. And suddenly, he says, my research shows that the Abbé de Bucquoy is linked to the Valois region. Well, well, nobody knows that the author is from that region too. So, he multiplies the pretexts, he arrives at Compiègne, he doesn't go straight there at first, he's clever, he doesn't go straight to the heart of the matter, to Ermenonville.
4:44 He goes to Compiègne, and he says, I was able to consult the archives, where I came across an unpublished correspondence of Voltaire, no less. And, a nice surprise, songs, scores, set to music by Rousseau, performed in his own hand. Which gave me the idea of returning to Paris via Ermenonville, which is the shortest route in distance, but the longest in time. As if he were mocking the reader, there he goes wasting more time, taking a detour. Fine. And there, we get to the answer to the question.
5:15 Anyone who is a Nerval specialist — that's not the subject so I won't dwell on it, but I'll act as if we already knew — knows very well that there is a whole quest for the mother in him, whom he never knew, who died following her father through the Napoleonic campaign, who is buried somewhere in Poland, where she died of fevers, of the war and of the cold, out there, after the Berezina. So he never knew her, it didn't occupy a large place in his biography, of course. We might well doubt otherwise. And so his quest, his pretext for leaving to pass through the Valois, taking the Parisian reader somewhere into the homeland of his ghosts, ought to end at his mother's village, Mortefontaine.
5:47 Oh, what a terrible place name! Mortefontaine, how so? Well, "fontaine" is the spring. It's what quenches thirst, it's the origin. But the spring has run dry, Mortefontaine, the mother ["mère"/"morte"] is dead. Now, that is the place name that appears the least in the novella I'm talking about, which is the least autobiographical one, the one that comes out in serial form, and which seems light, in an almost humorous and playful tone, with the chronicler's verve. And everything happens as if — and I thought of this earlier at Rousseau's tomb, which is, I insist, the least deathly of tombs — as if Nerval had tried, all along, between his personal tropism, as we all have, his singularity — I think that's the great question — which pushes him toward the deathly, toward the dead end, toward what?
6:35 Toward the realization that he is in quest of something that is dead. The thirteenth returns, she is still the first, and she is always the same, or it's the same moment, it's death or the dead woman, and so on. In his poems, it's a bit enigmatic, but it's nonetheless fairly clear. And so it happens that, just as there is a distinction well known to a geographer between the geographic pole and the magnetic pole, where there's a slight but decisive offset, like a clinamen, likewise here he resists the temptation of the personal narrative, and heads instead toward Rousseau's tomb, toward the collective stakes.
Inner opposition and the dialectic immanent to things 7:10 That's why this novella is so essential, because both are there, the against and the with. Because the story of opposition runs right through the inside of each one of us, as I tried to sketch earlier. Each of us is first of all a being of nature, with our egocentrism, our almost animal selfishness, I mean, that's what's normal, which knows only relations of force, of intimidating or being intimidated, and so on. Of being dominant or dominated — we're bombarded with animal documentaries, and I worry about seeing so many kids watching these documentaries, being told about dominant males, marked territory, etc., with a kind of ethology — let's not forget that ethology was founded by an out-and-out Nazi, called Konrad Lorenz, who is very relevant otherwise in his field, which he knew better than I do, but still, it's a fascination with animal behavior, and above all a way of reducing man to those behaviors, to animal behaviorism.
8:00 So we each have a personal tropism, determinations that an analyst — for those who take that seriously, and I'm one of them, even though I'm a Clouscardian, and I think Freud's unconscious itself has an unconscious of its own, which he calls the unconscious of the unconscious, and which is history and the class struggle, which psychoanalysts don't suspect, and which holds a place in the unconscious as determining, if not more so, than strictly individual problems. And at the same time, we all have a collective destiny, man is a zoon politikon, as Aristotle already said, social, political, historical, cultural animals, however you want to put it.
8:35 Always. So, in a way, one cannot seriously be "with" something without at the same time being "against" it. Starting with oneself — I quoted earlier that beautiful line of Novalis, the philosophical act par excellence is the murder of oneself. Socrates — they hold out a lifeline to him. If he'd truly had only individual ends, they tell him, we can get you out of prison, we know people, we have connections in the city, there's money — soon they'll have bought back Plato who's being sold as a slave, because he wanted to train a king, since he had to rule, that's not done.
9:08 So there you go, they put him in prison, they try to buy him out. Come on, Socrates — he refused. I've spent my whole life trying to make people understand that the law is right against the individual whim, of Sophie if you like, now, and I give this example of the derogation from the law. So there is a dialectic immanent to every being. This book is about to fall, it's fallen toward the center of the Earth, that's what Newton tells us, and he's right.
9:39 At the same time, an opposing force, the resistance of the table. There's a balance, more or less precarious. As soon as this table is worm-eaten, the book will keep falling. There is a dialectic immanent to things, that infamous dialectic that Deleuze wanted, I don't know, to drive off the screen of contemporary culture. Still, it's the least of humilities to acknowledge it. So, I thank you for your question because it goes deep. And hence the somewhat isolated position of the philosopher. I think of the rather pathetic figure of someone like Leibniz, living at the time of the Thirty Years' War, amid political, geopolitical tearing-apart, what today we'd call religious.
10:16 It's terrible, the quarrels between Protestants, Catholics, Pietists, Quietists, and so on. Leibniz trying to reconcile — that's typically philosophical. A bit like there are avowals in Plato. If Plato's first written philosophical work took the form of a dialogue, it's because there's no "for" without the "against." And Plato shows the greatness of his vision. From that very first work, the great philosophical corpus, Plato — who had started out for identity, the idea, the stable, a nice young dominant figure of the Athenian city — ends up, and what greatness this shows, acknowledging, self-humbling in the murder of the self, in the Sophist, the great dialogue, where he says: if there is sameness, it's because there is otherness.
10:57 He resigns himself to it, and that's what elevates him now, and that's what makes the great Plato in the dialectic: there is sameness only insofar as there is otherness. What is a field? You can make a field by clearing away a forest. And the forest is the boundary of the field, just as the field also bounds the forest. So these notions are not — as Spinoza says admirably — every determination, this is a field, that is a forest, every determination is negation. To posit, one must oppose. Anyone who's had teenagers in their care knows very well that a teenager, in order to establish himself, must first oppose himself.
Against one-sidedness: neither a happy medium, but sublation 11:33 Having values opposite to those he received from his parents, etc. It's healthy to go through that phase. That's what's disappearing from the current media and ideological landscape. Positions have never been so "einseitig." I repeat, I'm not a snob, nor do I share Heidegger's idea of dropping a German word into every sentence, but here, it's called for — Seite, the side, means a one-sided side, of Latin and French origin as well. It seems irreconcilable between left and right, between the partisan of security and the partisan of anarchy, as if every human being didn't have an interest, in his inner life, in both.
12:13 What human being wouldn't be concerned about the safety of the stroller carrying the baby he's just had, protecting it from noise, from aggression, but still, from nuisances. No one holds security as an anti-value across the board. Insecurity, I mean — and we were talking about music earlier, I seemed to be condemning metric, repetitive music, etc. I'll apply what I say to myself: I pay tribute to that metric, repetitive side, because it's the moment of security in which I recognize myself, where I find my bearings.
12:49 And if there's the other side, adventure, melody, change, unexpected chords, I can do that to the extent that I have this framework, this canvas that lets me advance difference within identity. Forgive me for sounding a bit abstract, but we do have to philosophize a little among philosophers. So, more than ever, I think philosophy is the daughter of crisis; all the great advances in the history of philosophy occurred precisely at moments when everything seemed stuck, precisely because everyone was entrenched in their own one-sidedness, and the great fruitful advances are the ones that draw from both extremes — not, mind you, to make a compromise; for me, the extreme center is among the most fearsome things there is in politics.
13:37 It's in the French extreme center, the right wing of the PS and the left wing of the right, that almost all the former collaborators took refuge, in the postwar period when they were keeping a low profile, not being so foolish as to be officially far-right — I'm thinking of the unaffiliated, the "various right," the "various moderates," all those categories where you'd find all the former light-touch collaborators. There you go. So one must take both the for and the against into account, not to make a little compromise, a happy medium as they say, a fair middle ground, but to go beyond them, to send them back to back.
14:08 That's where, once again, I have to cite the German, because this untranslatable term, "Aufheben" of course, which made so much ink flow in Hegel, means at once to suppress and to preserve, but in the sense that for the fruit to appear, the flower must disappear, while keeping the essential — for what had the whole flower been doing but directing its sugar, its sugar synthesis, toward the fruit? So there's a way, both tragic — we come back to Antigone — and dialectical, of suppressing while preserving, of keeping the best of the other in order to keep remaining oneself.
The Greeks and the Orient: revolution and evolution 14:39 There you go. I believe, for example, that the entire cultural West — I mean the intellectual West — developed from the sixteenth century onward under an identification with the Greeks, especially among the Germans. In my view, it's the Germans who invented the Greeks. Am I forcing things a bit? One day, Hölderlin found himself in a garden in Touraine on his return from the fateful trip to Bordeaux, where his madness broke out. There's testimony about this. A French aristocratic woman sees a fairly tall individual, the German, looking at the statues in the French-style garden, which had a Greek feel to it.
15:11 So she questions him a bit, the man in rags, he was on foot. And he tells her, Madam, the statues of the gods should be better maintained. And he speaks to her of Greece, it's his thing. She says to him, are you Greek, sir? And he gives her this extraordinary answer, in light of what's happening now between Merkel and Athens: On the contrary, Madam, I am German. On the contrary — I think of Nietzsche. We produce the Greeks of culture, roughly speaking. Or roughly. Now, what does this have to do with your question?
15:42 I'll point it out now. It was necessary to lay claim to the Greeks in order to owe nothing to the Orient, to those myths. To make a break. And I say the truth lies somewhere in the passage from one to the other. What is it that made Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess, become the Greeks' Astarte. Venus, quite simply, Aphrodite. And moreover, from her island, which is Cyprus. That is, closer to Turkey, let it be said in passing, just a few fathoms, a few cable-lengths away, as those who sail along the Turkish coast say, and much closer to Izmir, Smyrna, than to Athens, for example.
16:21 So what I mean is, in a way, coming back to our fraternity, to our, let's say, our original human wildness. I mean, let's not tell ourselves stories among ourselves. I mean, we were all originally in a state of distress, just as a newborn baby is a kind of wailing creature in distress. And if it weren't precisely for the zoon politikon side, for society welcoming him, the little human wouldn't be viable — I'm not making this up, Lacan himself insisted on this — the little human at birth is not viable, he is unfinished. I don't want to get into medicine, but the narrowing of the woman's pelvis with the shift to bipedal posture produced an obstetric catastrophe in ancient times, and childbirth is much more problematic and painful among humans.
17:09 You should see a wildebeest give birth in the African savanna while running, and the little wildebeest trotting along within a few minutes. Among us, it takes two years of coddling. There's the social relay that makes the child viable. That's where we truly clone the zoon politikon. Likewise, this ancient savage fraternity — I owe to the peoples of the underdeveloped countries the recognition of our common origins. And so I use this example because the Orient, for better or worse, has been in the news for many generations already.
17:46 I mean, on the other hand, this break we've made, as if the Greek world were the birth of things just like that — there is a specificity. Things appear in classical Greece that didn't exist before, but it isn't a break that falls out of the sky. It's a revolution that's part of a long evolution. Hegel makes a beautiful dialectic of evolution and revolution. He takes precisely the example of the fetus. He says: during a long and silent nutrition, there is only evolutionary growth. And it's only at the first breath that the child is born.
18:16 And there, there is a revolution. He thought a great deal about 1789. There you go. What does that mean? When there's a revolution, we can't believe that nothing was happening and then suddenly something happens. Something is always happening, but imperceptibly, until it reaches such a scale that the change becomes noticeable. So, this change, what is it? It's the relation of the same to the other. That's the essence of your question. And in a way, we won't get anywhere if we stay stuck in fixed positions. I sound like I'm giving an extremely anti-ecological speech.
Ecology: protecting the landscape, not nature 18:47 I often say, a bit provocatively, that I'm the most anti-ecological man in Europe, but that's because there's a dominant, terrifying strain of ecological discourse, and moreover the most conservative one. But in reality, I'm more of an ecologist than the average even among the ecologists I talk to. I'm constantly doing outdoor activities. I don't want to dwell on that. And I'm the first to wish for a more effective defense of the environment — but of the environment. Let's turn our eyes: Rousseau's park, the château, that's not nature in the raw sense.
19:17 It's landscape. It took millennia to move from nature to landscape. And then it becomes heritage that must be preserved. I am in favor of that. If you ask me tomorrow whether, if there's a lovely Romanesque chapel in a wheat field and someone wants to build a McDonald's parking lot in its place, of course, I'll sign a petition with all the ecologists to stop it. Let me reassure those listening to us, watching us, right here. But in doing so, I don't think I'm protecting nature. I'm protecting the wheat field, which is anything but nature, which is crystallized human sweat, as Marx would say, and the Romanesque chapel too.
19:49 There you go. So the same needs the other, and vice versa, as you'd say... you and me, I want to be upfront and open, always... well, you know, several things.
