English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Lenin's question and the theoretical detour 0:00 I set off. I'm giving a summary at Dominique's request, a summary of what I've been saying since the beginning, so this is good timing for those of you who weren't there, so that it doesn't happen again. I started with the question that Dominique raised on the occasion of Friot's talk on wages and more generally on properly revolutionary advances at the level of social sharing.
0:35 What appealed to Dominique, among other things, in Friot's proposals — correct me if I'm putting words in your mouth — was that, for once, they weren't abstract considerations but answers that seemed within reach, to the question posed by Lenin, of course the famous question, what is to be done? I started from there, from a famous title by Lenin, What Is to Be Done?
1:05 And afterwards I recalled, with a certain mischievous pleasure, that this question, what is to be done, which seems to point to a practical urgency and to send theoretical labyrinths and research and headaches, as we'd say now, packing — I seem to be saying, with a Marx who's been misunderstood and only partially read up to now, that the intellectuals, I'm slightly altering the sentence, he says the philosophers have only interpreted the world, we want to transform it, so it's time to act and we must stop thinking — that's not it at all.
1:38 Because that same Lenin — this is where I move on in my introduction, second step forward — that same Lenin who says what is to be done, says in an equally famous sentence: without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary practice. Agitation. So if we want, not agitation, but practice, if we want to transform the world and not merely dream of its transformation, perhaps we can draw on what happened in one rare domain where it succeeded, namely the natural sciences and the technology that resulted from them — that is to say, a theoretical detour was indeed necessary for our power, in keeping with Descartes' wish, for man to begin to make himself master and possessor of nature, to borrow Descartes' phrase; a detour through theory was necessary, so there is nothing more concrete, more practical, than this detour through theory — it being understood that I oppose this completely to ideology, even though it's a standpoint that doesn't collapse into Althusser's theoreticism.
2:40 So there it is, I recall that to the question what is to be done, Lenin immediately points out that the answer is not agitation — for instance, the wind agitates the branches of trees, but the wind is just as passive as the branches, it isn't the case that one is the cause and the other the effect, one active and the other passive; it's grammatical, it's metaphorical of course when we say the wind agitates the trees, but in fact the wind is the same as the tree — the tree is passive and its movements are caused by the wind, and likewise the wind is caused by the difference between hot air and cold air, etc. So what I mean is, there is no action in nature, only passions, passivities.
3:24 Fundamental reminder — the step forward I then took, starting from my Lenin saying what is to be done: well, here's my little mischief — that a theoretical detour is very urgent. I recall that this is a formula that comes up, expressed differently, in the writing of all the great philosophers of politics, starting with the great initiator of political philosophy, none other than Plato, when Plato, in the Republic, begins with a discussion of opinion — we'd say today, café-and-commerce chat — as it always so admirably begins in Plato, very pedagogically, right down at ground level: should we teach my son gymnastics? There's a dialogue, I think it starts like that.
4:00 And then, we get to the idea, the same, the other — well, a few pages later. So there, tangled up with questions of power, of politics, at the start of the Republic there's the discussion of whether democracy or monarchy is better, etc., the usual debates. All of a sudden Socrates says, oh dear, I see, my friend, that if we want to solve our problems here, we must undertake an immense detour. That's the famous detour, the bracketing, the epoché as Husserl will later call it, the bracketing of the immediate world in which we live — but on condition of not losing oneself within the brackets, of not remaining in a theoreticism that contemplates the world from the outside, that of the intellectual — it being understood, as I recalled earlier, that for a Descartes, for instance, if he adores mathematics, it's because, as he says so well, they serve to lessen men's labor and to make mechanical work easier.
4:45 That's a practical aim too, there we are. Little reminder. Once I'd made these reminders, the question what is to be done — the best way to be practical is to answer by committing oneself to a theoretical resumption, to theoretical advances, which are not quite repetitions... What path brought us to Rousseau?
From ruse to the tomb at Ermenonville 5:15 That's the path I took, yes, I went that way, by the detour, since I'm now on the topic of the detour that is mediation. It's the detour in the literal sense, a detour that's always twisted, instead of going straight I make a turn. In other words, to the question what is to be done, taking it a step further, I now answer: let's use cunning! The detours of cunning — a ruse is always a detour; force goes straight for what it wants, but when I lack force... cunning forces me, quite intelligently in fact, into a detour, I go around the obstacle, however you want to put it. And it's this detour that takes us to Ermenonville. That is, to Rousseau's tomb, recalling that we are one year from the anniversary of his birth, that there are indeed quite a few publications and stirrings around Rousseau's name, and to forestall the usual mummifications in which discussions get trapped — I alluded to Popper earlier, that Rousseau, according to him, is the father of the totalitarian state, etc.
6:05 Or else, yes, Rousseau, fine, but isn't he misogynistic, and so on, the usual anecdotes, the drawing-room chit-chat. He abandoned his children. I hadn't thought of that, by what right? Just imagine, some role model he is, how disgraceful. Whereas Rousseau says admirably, precisely, I am the best placed person in the world to know how children should be educated. I know the effect of material conditions, I do. Well, there it is, I didn't have the good fortune, like Monsieur Voltaire, to be born the son of Monsieur Arouet, a notary on a Paris square, to go to Louis-le-Grand; I played truant from school instead — anyway, never mind.
6:37 And just as an alcoholic can very well teach young people in an association why one shouldn't drink — he may be better placed than anyone else to do so. I recall coming to the aid of an alcoholic once, forgive me, I'm dwelling on this a bit — a friend who, when I left for Africa, died of it, unfortunately, but the moment he started getting better was when I brought him to the Alcoholics Anonymous people I knew. I don't know, I called on them at that point and they were wonderful, because they talk to each other without making each other feel guilty. There, that's what I did... So. Rousseau comes into the picture from the moment I spoke of the theoretical detour, because this theoretical detour was produced within the framework of a genuine detour.
7:11 That is, Rousseau turns away from economic, political discussion, etc., that of the Social Contract, of Émile, to go daydream by the water. I'm now going to take up the second set of texts, which are no less Rousseauian, and which count just as much — we saw earlier that this is the phrase that appears in the Reveries — it's going to constitute this prose poetry around which all of modernity will try to gain access. Chateaubriand, Proust, Gracq, whatever you like, Nabokov, never mind, that's a stretch, Makine, cross that off the list. There. And this detour — it's no accident that I propose we make it at Ermenonville, it's symbolic, of course.
7:46 It's to be by the water, for everyone knows, as a reminder, that Rousseau's tomb is on an island. The Island of Poplars. An island that saw a great pilgrimage of men of letters, many Japanese visitors. Those Japanese, quite something. Another example cited by Nerval — the importance of this tomb lies in two things. First, it will interest structuralist modernity, in that it's one of the rare tombs that is a pure sign. I mean that at the time of the Revolution, later, well after Rousseau's death, the Convention, one fine night with torches, a fine ceremony, came to take, in the name of a revolutionary decree, Rousseau's ashes to bring them to the Panthéon.
8:23 So it's one of the rare tombs that is a pure sign. Those ashes aren't there. There's no fetishistic side to it, no corpse. There's nothing morbid about it. I'll say, there, the ashes are at the Panthéon. The ashes — we've known since Socrates in the Phaedo. When Crito asks Socrates how he wants to be buried — never mind all that, since it's soon, you're about to drink the hemlock in five minutes — he says, however you like, however you like, as if you could catch me. That's rather good. And so Rousseau's tomb, as a sign, comes to remind us of everything buried in his work and stolen from us — from this tomb I would like to summon up that great Rousseau who rises like a statue in the Nerval quote from earlier, which said everything has crumbled, his immortal image remains standing on the ruins.
The Île Saint-Pierre, a forced exile 9:06 There, I refer to his tomb, not in some morbid little way, but as a pretext. And to recall that if he's buried on an island, I now come back to the shore, and to my detour. Yes. I haven't lost sight of my detour, quite the opposite. Yes, and it's the shore of the island — it's to recall that his theory of happiness, Rousseau formulated it at its highest degree, apropos of events that occurred on another island, the blessed island, the famous Île Saint-Pierre on the Lake of Bienne, to whose stay the entire fifth walk is devoted in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, which is nonetheless his last work.
9:37 So the island and the isolation that results from it — in Italian one says isola for an island. I recall that isle is the same word as isolate. And at the same time — this isn't wordplay, it's etymology — now I'm making a pun — île, exile. I recall that the Île Saint-Pierre, on which Rousseau — perhaps I'll come to elaborate this now — was to constitute later, something that would be recalled in Paris a little before his death, the material of the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, which are even memories, a first search for lost time.
10:09 That island — he had gone there not out of a taste for scenery, and it is indeed an island, not bad — I don't know, Madame Bettencourt's island is a bit small, but anyway, it would do for me — no, that's not it. He had been forced to go there. His house had been half stoned. I would remind those who speak rather lightly of conspiracy theory — because I wouldn't want us to be reduced to a choice between Meyssan and the Réseau Voltaire on one side, and Sarkozy on the other, saying, oh no, those are conspiracy theories. I mean, Sarkozy or Le Monde, Libé or the Nouvel Obs, it's the same thing... I'm talking about Rousseau, you know that in the textbooks you find that Rousseau was a bit paranoid, that he saw plots everywhere — that's why I bring it up — the plot of the Grimm brothers, the plot of the Holbachian coterie, and Hume in England, all of them supposedly leagued against me — it's true you find all that in a text by Rousseau — but to claim it refers to imaginary dangers is going a bit far.
10:49 His house is stoned, the Social Contract and Émile are banned in four countries — the Kingdom of France, the Netherlands, yet a country of freedom of the press to which Descartes went to take refuge in order to be freer, and in which Nerval would go to investigate counterfeit French books — the Netherlands, paid for by the Ministry of the Interior, though we're not too sure about that, Nerval played a bit of a spy's role abroad regarding book counterfeiting, how quaint, and good old Nerval — it was his friends who came up with that to get him out of the asylum, to give him some kind of social cover.
11:21 And so, we always come back to the book's program with him, and so this exile, this island — it's no accident, he was compelled and forced into it, and he even says at one point, after — I'm going to read you the passage — where he speaks of the paradise he reached, you'll see the political importance of this new happiness that Rousseau expresses for the first time, a secular happiness — even a student once spoke of secular ecstasy, which is well put for Rousseau, like Proust's madeleine, it's a kind of secular ecstasy, and generally ecstasy is Theresa of Ávila, you see, it's divine after all, the same thing, but the same habitus, but without God, that's new — and this fifth walk, at the end, not only does he not prescribe it, he doesn't say, come on guys, do like me, daydream, we'll make progress — no, he says it wouldn't even be good if, in the present constitution of things, men grew disgusted with the activities their needs prescribe as their duty, etc., and he adds — and this is where I prove that he was forced into his solitude — but an individual who has been cut off from the commerce of men, and not one who has withdrawn, who has voluntarily isolated himself, out of a taste for solitude, like a martyr — no, but an unfortunate one — I said an individual, an unfortunate one — who has been cut off from the commerce of men, may find compensations,
12:32 etc. — so I specify that what he's apostrophizing proves just how unjust the conspiracy theory charge was: banned in four countries, the Social Contract burned in the public square, his house stoned, incited by the pastors of Geneva, whereas he thought he was defending Geneva, like poor Plato who thought he was defending Sicily against Athens — much good that did him, in both cases, another parallel, it turned out badly — and so, on the island, if he left it, he'd get shot at with a musket, I mean, he was forced to — and it's important to understand, so as not to miss the point of the Reveries, that while he was there, he was convinced he had to end his days there — that's important for understanding the text — that this unfortunate one who's been cut off, but it's for good, so he does need to find a modus vivendi — there, that's the preliminary point, aside from which, I now turn about, I leave the Rousseau who prescribes — no, I don't quite leave him, one last point — the Rousseau of labor and political action, before moving on to the dreaming Rousseau, rather the 'dream-wandering' Rousseau, an awful neologism, but I hold to the nuance between reverie and dream, we'll come back to that later, to intermediate and altered states — Proust begins with
13:43 'For a long time I used to go to bed early' — it begins in a state like that, the great advances, and the chord, the chord in the musical sense, the harmony that governs the whole Ring cycle of the future which lasts four days — he says himself that the fundamental chord, the E-flat that is heard on the very first note resounding in the pit, in the Rhinegold, the deep E-flat, Wagner recalls that he got the inspiration for it while in his bath, traveling in Italy, that he had dozed off in the bath — interesting, the waters of the Rhine in a Venetian bathtub, all that, wonderful, the relations between North and South, well.
Natural and civil liberty, possession and property 14:27 So, before moving on to the dreaming Rousseau, I'll still finish the passage from chapter 8 on civil society — I insisted on everything... After another detour? The internal opposition that enriches our understanding of the text each time, that's why. They're spiral returns, drawing closer to the center. And so, regarding... he adds — and I skipped this on purpose — regarding the compensations, what have I gained, what have I lost in passing from the state of nature to the civil state, and there follows a real accounting of political bookkeeping.
15:01 Let us reduce this whole balance to terms easy to compare. What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty, and an unlimited right to everything that tempts him and that he can reach — the wild beast roaming the bush — and to everything that tempts him. What he gains is civil liberty. Note the opposition, like Socrates against Callicles, of civil liberty against natural liberty. What he gains is civil liberty and the possession of everything he possesses.
15:32 Ah, forgive me, the misreading — and property, that's a significant slip for everything he possesses. So an opposition emerges, which will lead us to the theory of value and to Marx, between possession and property, made explicit for the first time in this way. I'll continue. It's too serious a matter for me to speak behind the author's back. So as not to go wrong in these compensations, he specifies — this is not a dreamer speaking here — we must carefully distinguish natural liberty, which has for its bounds only the forces of the individual — now we're measuring it, we give it, as they say in mathematics, a domain of definition —
16:07 The wild beast roaming the bush goes as far as there are no other beasts to snatch its prey away, I'll say, or to bring it down. Which has for its bounds only the forces... well, it's limited. My freedom doesn't go very far in nature when there's no historical or social contribution — especially when it's man, Prometheus's man, who has neither claw nor... never mind. Which has for its bounds only the forces of the individual — we must carefully distinguish this natural liberty from civil liberty, which is limited by what? By what? By the general will. Say, if I want to go to New York, I'd better have at my disposal everything the general will has produced, rather than going on foot with only the bounds of the individual in nature.
16:42 All the same, that's my freedom. These texts are fundamental. I used to tell my students, to trap them a bit, for the baccalaureate — I mean the students it does good to, it's a good exercise for the oral philosophy exam — I'd say, so as to reel them in, are we freer in society or in nature? Knowing full well you'll all say in nature, especially with everything they hear on TV. Say that again: are we freer in society or in nature? I was sure of my move, it's a bit sophistic or didactic, and it was so that they'd tell me, of course, we're freer in nature, because there I can go right, go left, do whatever I want.
17:13 And then I said, but you need water, you need to eat to live. We are all bound by that — ah yes sir, that's an old affect. And it was, I remember, in my parenthetical asides, but it's political, that's why I allow myself to make them, it's shareable. I once had, which is rare in a teacher's life, at the oral exam, a student I'd had in tenth grade, fifteen years earlier. As a point he'd earned — but in Africa, often, one has to drop out of school to look after a little brother because the parents have died; he became an economic agent, and fifteen years later, with real courage, he came back to take the baccalaureate. That's why I gave the guy a good grade — fifteen years on, still.
17:45 He deserved to get his baccalaureate. Anyway, he'd answered well on the starting text, Rousseau's text, at the time, and I told him so. I'd rather say: I can go left, right, I can eat to live, that's a law, yes, fine. Now, I must obey the red light, that's a law too — ah yes — and so, the big difference, which he understood very well, I'll spare you the somewhat laborious maieutics: in the first case, there's no exception. It's natural necessity — there, I can't write, I can't live without eating. And I'm not forgetting anorexia, and that wonderful Kafka story they call 'A Hunger Artist' — I'll come back to it — there's no anthropology more telling than fasting, I quite agree; we've never seen an animal say, help yourself first, help yourself first.
18:28 And I would remind you, in passing, how anthropology, training, comes about — and if this difference is so important, it's because all of a sudden, the guy realized that it's better, after all, to be subject to laws I can change than to laws in which I have no say. I'm being had all along the line — that's an illusion, there, to illustrate what Rousseau was saying, this distinction between natural liberty, which has for its bounds only the forces of the individual, which must be distinguished from civil liberty, which is limited by the general will, and — second distinction, corollary of the first, still Rousseau — one must distinguish possession, which is merely the effect of force, we're getting there, the effect of force, or the right of the first occupant, which amounts to the same thing, from property, which can only be founded — this is going to be my turning point — on a positive title, a title by which I am recognized — we arrive at Hegel, you see, recognition — as owner, I'll get there, the struggle for recognition starting from there.
19:27 There it is — the human world, the human world is only valid insofar as one subject recognizes it as valid, another subject than myself, provided of course that he also recognizes it as valid, just as I recognize him too — it's reciprocal, that's important, this juridical aspect of the matter. So there, the little supplement to Rousseau's Social Contract with which I wanted to end the political Rousseau — provisionally, of course — so as to move now to the Rousseau who seems to me the most profoundly political, but who is classified, of course, in the usual imagery, as being instead the poet, the dreamer, somewhat lesser. There.
Precious idleness and the flight from domination 20:03 And so I come to a eulogy, since the title of my talk, which I'd proposed to Dominique, is 'Work-value and idleness-value in Rousseau.' As for the value of work, I've just alluded to it, I'll come back to it with Émile — but still, a eulogy of doing nothing. What then was this happiness and what did its enjoyment consist in, the one he had at Saint-Pierre, on the Île Saint-Pierre, daydreaming by the lakeshore?
20:35 So, the word comes back, the word from my opening, the word that links Voltaire and Rousseau, the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, and which is democratic and topical. And which is the third term, the middle term you recalled earlier, 'Happiness.' There, and which recalls the passage from 'The happiness, the enjoyment I have with Gabriel' — Yes. — and 'The Rhinegold.' Between Sade and Robespierre. There, there, the middle term. And so this happiness — and here we'll see the difference with Voltaire — and what did its enjoyment consist in, I'll let you guess, and there he really targets Voltaire, to all the men of this century, from the description of the life I led there.
21:06 Precious idleness was the first and principal of these enjoyments that I wished to savor in all its sweetness. Clouscard used to tell me often — he's gone now, his father was a miner at Carmaux, disappeared, raised as a natural child, coming from a peasant proletariat, with a schoolteacher mother, well, he still managed to make the transition. Clouscard would tell me: it's rich, when bourgeois thought talks about the pleasure to be found in work and all that. It's spoiled brats' nonsense. I mean, the moment you can slack off, the common people know it, you grab three minutes, three minutes, ha, you take them.
21:40 Where he comes from, that world. So, I'll let you guess — I know it well enough to reach retirement, of course, I'm not worried. I'll let all the men of this century guess, from the description of the life I led, precious idleness was the first and principal of these enjoyments that I wished to savor in all its sweetness. It's provocative. And everything I did during my stay was in fact only the delicious occupation — an oral metaphor that recurs often in Rousseau, we'll come back to it — and necessary, of a man who knows — fine phrase — how to devote himself to idleness.
22:11 Provocation, in the age of the Encyclopédie publishing the sciences, the arts, the techniques, the plates, the tools, the machines. And Rousseau took part in that, he wrote the article on music, he's in it. Quite the betrayal, this fellow, isn't it — it's not true that he's exactly what you'd... it's incredible, really, on the couch there. There. No, we're not on the couch, we're not into that... And so much for happiness, and now for the dread he had of work. So here I take up a text found in the Letter to Malesherbes, which relates to roughly the same context: what do I enjoy when I am far from you and your plots, and alone with the lake and the forest.
22:50 I'm deliberately taking this at ground level. There. Yes, Malesherbes had been a decent fellow, connected to the Encyclopedists and so on, to the Enlightenment, to Parisian high society, himself an aristocrat, of course, who was very fond of Rousseau and who felt he suffered a great deal, and who wanted to play the role of go-between, we'd say now, between him and the Enlightenment figures, saying, look, explain yourself, you explain yourself badly, you're making enemies. What do you find in the forest? We don't understand that.
23:20 I mean, isn't it nice by a fireside with carpets, luxury, beautiful women, Mozart's music? What do you find there? Because Madame de Sévigné, not long before, crossing the Alps, draws the curtains — the horror of crossing the Alps. I mean, this pleasure in the mountains is new with Rousseau. We're so steeped in it since, right down to having produced sickening postcard imagery, that we've forgotten just how revolutionary it was in a way. So, Rousseau's answer: a day in the life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the Hermitage.
23:52 Rising before the sun — a unity of time, there it is, yes. Rising with the sun to go watch it rise in my garden, when I wanted to begin a fine day, my first wish was that neither letters nor visits — there's the antisocial Rousseau. Now, who's going to begin. Total antithesis. The anti-social contract — that neither letters nor visits should come and disturb its charm. After giving the morning to various tasks which I fulfilled all with pleasure because I could put them off to another time — that's a comfort for my procrastination, another disease of our century, if we're to believe the internet — I hastened to dine so as to escape the importunate.
24:23 The other appears only in the form of aggression, of intrusion — and to secure a longer afternoon. Before one o'clock — the vocabulary here is that of a paranoiac, if you look closely. But a paranoiac, as I showed earlier, isn't necessarily delusional to be genuinely in danger. Before one o'clock, even on the hottest days, I would set off in the full sun with faithful Achates. Achates is the dog — it was the name of Aeneas's dog in the Aeneid. Quickening my pace, quickening my pace for fear that someone might get hold of me — note that vocabulary — before I could slip away. But once I had managed to get past a certain corner, with what a pounding of the heart, with what a sparkling of joy I began to breathe again.
24:57 Change of tempo. Change of tempo, there. We've gone from allegro furioso to andante cantabile. I had managed to get past a certain corner. You have to — I wish you could — he's a musician, you have to know how to hear it with your ears. I would say to myself, I feel, I feel myself breathing again, feeling saved, telling myself, here I am master of myself for the rest of this day. I would then go, you see, brothers of tempo, at a more tranquil pace, to seek out some wild spots in the forest. I did the same trick as with the Social Contract — I stopped the sentence right where a misreading might occur. To seek out some wild spots in the forest, some deserted places where nothing showed the hand of man — a manifesto of misanthropy.
25:34 I'll stop the sentence there. Not for long this time. Right away, there's the answer. The answer that Hegel is going to plunge into with the dialectic of master and slave, but let's listen instead. "Where nothing showing some wild and deserted places in the forest where nothing showing the hand of men, announced" — circumflex accent, guess what — "servitude and domination." So it is not society that was his first lie, as we're always told. It is not society, but this particular society where reign not right and contract, but servitude and domination.
26:05 Natural state and typically natural relation, which is that of force. The earth, as we've known since Newton, has a mass greater than the moon. It's the moon that revolves around the earth and not the other way around. That's how it is. And I'm going to show that it's the very essence of evil to reintroduce this state of affairs. I'll explain, using an ecologist, that we must protect the environment against nature — the human environment, that is, the city in the broadest sense — against this relation of force. There. What Rousseau — and we do understand the passage into the forest — we understand that it's a necessary mediation, it's ternary.
26:38 There is, one, the bad society, the actually existing society, the one I'm talking about, Paris, the monarchy, servitude and domination. Three — I'll skip two. Three, the good society, that of the social contract, the one which, I hope, begins to be put into practice starting from a revolution. And between the two, well, Rousseau in the forest of Peyrolaz, forced out, chased away by the bad society of human commerce, instead of withdrawing, becoming embittered, as young people would say today, is going to take advantage of this isolation to think through the social contract.
27:11 That break with isolation was needed to think modernity, and so I continue. "I went first at a quieter pace to some wild places in the forest, some deserted places where nothing showed the hand of man" — I'm reading quickly because I've already said it — "announced servitude and domination, some asylums" — you see, asylum, island, exile — "some asylums where I could believe I had penetrated first and where, little by little, where no intrusive third party had to come between mommy and me" — sorry, between nature and me, that's what's written. There. That was the new surface.
Landscape, a luxury produced by history 27:44 I'm going to arrive at a new theory of wealth that Rousseau brings, a theory of the inheritance we hold in common. Enjoying a landscape was not something given before the industrial revolution, which was happening at that very moment, made nature retreat. That's the great thesis I want to bring out — that there would be no such wonder before landscape if Rousseau did not have a relation to landscape different from that of the pygmy walking 20 km in a day to try to find an elephant.
28:21 Afterward, you have to kill it with a machete, going underneath. There are several. Fine. The production of existence. So, "it was there that nature seemed to display before my eyes an ever-new magnificence" — a typical confusion of the vocabulary of the time, not yet fixed, between nature and landscape. I'll give another talk sometime on the concept of nature in that era, which has at once a polemical sense, a metaphysical sense, a scientific sense — a confusion that persists today — and a political sense. There are even other, new ones. When they slap the tax on oil, on carbon, and then remove it a few weeks later, there are political stakes.
28:53 There's the relation to nature all the same. Right. So, "it was there that..." And here there's this sentence that literary critics have noted, because there's never any color in Rousseau. The specialists know this. There's a lot of sound, the musician. It's not like Chateaubriand, with "there are waterfalls." Well. He's not a colorist, he's not a painter. And in the Fifth Walk, I could demonstrate it, there's nothing but sounds. And we see nothing. You might as well close your eyes. He falls asleep. Curtain. Except, except — exception — "the gold of the broom and the purple of the heather struck my eyes with a luxury that touched my heart."
29:23 There, it's an allusion to... Even if he wasn't thinking of it, it's me putting it explicitly in relation to Voltaire's famous poem Le Mondain, where he speaks of happiness through the carpets of luxury, of modernity — we'd say today, consumer society. Right? And that wealth is indeed a good thing. Yes, they say Adam and Eve were communal, communist as we'd say today, because they had nothing to share, says Voltaire — yes, that's why, with their loincloths. Well. It's a total antithesis. And then, all of a sudden, Rousseau says: wait, I have my own luxury — my luxury is a new luxury that the proletariat had now become irritated by. Because this one, you can have without a penny, my friend.
29:54 Because it took millennia of history to produce it; before, we couldn't enjoy it because nature terrified us, now we're emancipating ourselves from that. There, that's the whole background against which I was resituating: "the gold of the broom, the purple of the heather struck me with a luxury that touched my heart, the majesty of the trees that covered me," etc. "My imagination" — now I come to the intersubjective turn — "did not leave the land thus adorned deserted for long; he did not come to nature in order to be alone, to isolate himself."
30:27 "I soon peopled it with beings after my own heart, and, banishing far away opinion, prejudices, all factitious passions, I brought into the asylums of nature men worthy of inhabiting them" — the men of the Contract. "I formed for myself a charming society of which I did not feel excluded, I made myself a golden age to my own fancy." Superb passage — Rousseau shows clearly that even when he is most isolated deep in the jungle, it's not to play Tarzan, to say, look, there's a German amid primitive things, I won't say more, he goes native — no, no, no, that's not it, that's not Hollywood, it's not meant to create a fiction, it's rather to remind us that one must go to the very edge of humanity in order to rediscover the profound meaning of the human bond, of sociability, which will come to light in the contract — which makes Hölderlin say, at the time when he is walled up in madness and in the tower of the kind carpenter, now only, in one clear fragment it seems to me, all the same, "only now do I understand man, though I live far from him and in solitude."
31:20 There, as he says elsewhere, the spirit loves the colony, one must go far away, exile oneself, in order truly to think the here and now — this detour, I spoke of detour earlier, so this detour was necessary, and we should be the first to make it, a total detour from linear thought: "I am political, I will think the political" — no, this detour through the poetic was necessary, and a radically new poetry, that of landscape, which I think we've understood together is not nature — landscape is a surface, nature runs deep — and what makes landscape always deeper, much deeper than nature, is not pejorative when I say that nature, that landscape, is a surface — literally speaking, taking the Greek word, an aisthesis, an appearance.
32:02 So, Rousseau's aesthetic aspect and his political aspect seem to me here to increasingly become intertwined. We clearly see that Rousseau the poet is not there as an embittered man consoling himself for all the miseries men have caused, but he reconstructs an exemplary humanity, and he goes so far as to say: "Oh, if in these moments some thoughts of Paris, of my century, of my little author's vanity, came to disturb my reveries, with what disdain I chased them away at once, to give myself up without distraction to the exquisite feeling with which my soul was filled."
32:33 "However, amid all this, I confess, the nothingness of my fancies sometimes came suddenly to sadden it." There. And now we move to the unhappy consciousness. "Had all my dreams turned into reality, it would not have been enough for me; I would still have imagined, dreamed, desired more." Modernity begins, the impossibility of ever being satisfied. "I found in myself an inexplicable void that nothing could have filled, a certain yearning of the heart toward another kind of enjoyment of which I had no idea and which yet I felt the need. Well, sir, that very thing was enjoyment, for I was pervaded by a very keen feeling and an attractive sadness which I would not have wished not to have."
The produced bond, Rousseauist eros, and a question from the audience 33:10 Never mind death and illness. Well, as for death, it's the taxi from Abidjan, which is an internal allusion. To the Abidjan taxi, yes. To the old African. It's reassuring, when you get into the bush taxi, there's a motto written above: never mind death. Well. "Poor wrongly" — I noticed that too. That's nice, that. Poor wrongly. There are quite a few of them. Does he mean the poor is wrong, or that... Yes, yes. If we go down that detour... We're in Rousseau, poor wrongly. There.
33:41 So, this Rousseau who suddenly gives himself over to idleness, I mean — let me recall my ternary structure — there is, one, the bad society, the actually existing one in which we all emerge, governed by servitude and domination, and in which the natural relation of force has reintroduced itself, to sum it all up, into the very heart of what ought to be the intersubjective bond, the super-natural bond — not in the religious sense, in the anthropological sense — that is, the fact that it be artistic in the technical sense, that it be a bond made, produced, and not simply found already there, like branches, like fruit hanging from the branches of trees.
34:13 An artifact. There. No, but above all, man loves to consume, just as the raccoon can only consume once it has first washed its food, man can only consume what bears the mark of human labor — hence the raw, the cooked, the rotten, tobacco, fermentation, I'll come back to this — in every culture there is always some form of beer, millet beer, corn beer, depending on the place. There. And even the naked body — there are still people who think, it's the story told to children, that men originally invented clothing because it was cold, forgetting that we are dealing here with a warm climate — nonsense. In short, all that is fairy tales, I mean. The loincloth is a first garment, well before clothing that protects from the cold; there's a symbolic function to clothing.
34:47 And you who have been to Africa — the adornment of the body — there is no continent in the world, well, maybe the Papuans too, they're also black people, that knows how to enhance the adornment of the body beyond its lamentably natural appearance. I'm talking about the body of the man; the adornment of women, I won't even get into that. There. And so, moving on to this praise of idleness everywhere, I note in passing that Rousseau warns Malesherbes, in the Letter to Malesherbes, against a misreading. He says: you say I am the most unhappy of men, you would like to console me.
35:18 I'm afraid... I'm ashamed to contradict you. I am the happiest of men. Here again is a Rousseau contrary to the image we have of him. When I am in my [natural] state, I am the happiest of men. I am a man of enjoyment, I am an idler. You cannot know. I have found the theory of happiness. It's not a problem. Fine. And here is what causes me not to enjoy it enough — that's a political problem. I mean, it's really... "I could not tell you, sir, how touched I was to see that you consider me the unhappiest of men. The public will no doubt judge as you do, and that is what afflicts me still more."
35:48 "Oh, would that the lot I enjoyed were known to the whole universe! Each would wish to make himself one like it. Peace would reign upon the earth. Men would no longer think of harming one another. There would be no more wicked men once none had any interest in being so. But what, after all, did I enjoy when I was alone? Myself, the whole universe, all that is imaginable" — sorry — "the whole universe, everything that exists, all that can be, all that is beautiful" — the sensible world — "all that is imaginable" — the intelligible world. "I gathered around me everything that could flatter my heart. My desires were the measure of my pleasures." No.
36:18 "Never did the most voluptuous" — here again the libertine dichotomy — "never did the most voluptuous" — that's from Des Grieux — "never did the most voluptuous men know such delights. I have a hundred times more enjoyed my fancies than they do their realities." There's a proposition against Lacan, against Sollers, because there's an emergence — Sade is an immense writer, I'm not criticizing him as an author — but the modern posture, a century after Sade, of using Sade to make it seem that if Rousseau wouldn't go for a closed Stalinist-type society, doesn't want theater, pleasure, that sort of thing, it's because he's an old prude and afraid of a pleasure he doesn't know, doesn't know women — but that's completely missing the point. I recommend, to convince you of Rousseau's Eros, perhaps the passage of his that I know best on this score, it's in the Confessions, there's a passage where he helps a girl — again, a man of the people — they're frightened, two little aristocratic girls crossing a river, little châtelaines, and he helps them because the horse panics, afraid of the river.
37:15 So he brings them safely to shore, she invites him in, of course — quite a good deal for Rousseau, finding himself with princesses — there's a whole day of it, I won't say more, read it — there's not a single touch in it, he practically says, damn, I go further than any libertine today. Read it, it's admirable, with white and red as the fundamental colors, milk, strawberries — because he says somewhere that women eat white, cream, and so on, whereas men eat red, meat, steak. There, let's move on. I offer this passage to show — and this is always, in passing, a tribute to my friend Clouscard — because Clouscard played, with respect to the Latin Quarter, a decisive role in the years, the way of '70, where we lost a battle here in the war against the counter-revolution, which passed itself off as someone wanting to curb morals by denouncing — how does he put it — the libidinal, the ludic, the marginal, its holy, or rather unholy, trinity.
38:05 Whereas, when we know that Clouscard says — this is my own point — I'm for pleasure, for sharing, I'm not moralizing, all I want is for things to be named as they are, recognition. There, do what you want but state it as such, it's not a question of morality. So, I think this praise of doing nothing seems fairly clear to me now, and I should move on — can I continue?
38:35 Yes, I wanted — can I ask you a question here? Of course. Just a reflection that comes to me. This doing-nothing, this enjoyment of himself, everything you've just described — there's a little paradox in the social being emerging with Rousseau, which we'll talk about afterward — he doesn't even think, in fact he's even opposed to the idea of sharing it with the other. Rousseau?
39:05 Yes. But no, not at that point. What I just read you shows that as soon as he's alone, he forms a society, a golden age. There, but that's the paradox I'd like — he reproaches the society from which he was cast out, and from which he left to go into the woods, to go toward the other. Yes, but this enjoyment... He reproaches that society for not being about sharing. Yes, but precisely, there, he shares none of that enjoyment. I understand your objection very well and I'll answer through Rousseau. I don't agree, but I'm not saying so dogmatically — this will be my fall, my downfall. Because the last words of this Walk deal exactly with this problem.
39:37 I do mean the fall, Rousseau's last words. And so I'm not putting it off, it's for right now. But for that, I'll continue first. I come back to the political Rousseau, the working Rousseau. I go back and forth, I leave him on his shore, on his banks. I'd love to give a talk on the notion of the "bank" or "edge," starting from Racine. There will be plenty of others. "The charm drew him to its banks."
40:07 Bravo, exactly. And if you take Phèdre, there's nothing but that. There's a "bank" every three lines. "What charm has made this bank so dreaded, since upon its banks the gods have sent" — well, the whole mess began "since upon these banks the gods have sent." The bank, the edge, is a dangerous region, perilous, but interesting — because the game is worth the candle. It's a place of risk. And with Rousseau, I've brought you to the edge, to the edge of the lake, to the edge of the island. We leave him on his shore and come back into full civil society.
Emile: revolutions, alienation, and property through labor 40:43 There, and on the subject of work, I now turn to Émile, where there is a praise of the most prosaic work there is, not even the work of the artist. There's quite a difference in what he asks. When he prescribes to Émile's mother, who is an aristocrat, let's not forget, that her pupil must learn a manual trade, scandal erupts. And here there's this passage, which is one of the high points of Rousseau, it seems to me. "You rely, you, the countess, the duchess, the status quo, you rely on the present order of society, wishing your son not to work, without thinking that this order is subject to inevitable revolutions."
41:19 That's said twenty years before the storming of the Bastille. "And that it is impossible for you either to foresee or prevent the one that may concern your children." A bit of a threat, this. "The great become small, the rich become poor, the monarch becomes a subject; are the blows of fate so rare that you can count on being exempt from them?" — on slipping through the cracks. We're approaching — this is someone who is a prophet — "we are approaching a state of crisis and the age of revolutions." Rousseau is the first to have seen that if each century has a proper name and a number — number 16, the Renaissance; number 17, the Grand Siècle, the century of classicism, the century of 14; the 18th, the Enlightenment; the 19th, what is it?
41:57 The nickname. There isn't one. Do you notice? Look at literary manuals, Lagarde et Michard, it just stops there. There isn't one. Because it's still too close. It's the century that, if we look at it objectively, we can agree on this, begins in '89 and ends in 1917. That's the right division. It's true that the great changes happen after or before '89. It's a very, very long century. Whereas the 18th is very short, since the 18th — interesting, it's not about numbers — begins with the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and ends in '89; it's exceptionally short. It goes fast. A lot happens in little time, the century of the Enlightenment.
42:28 Right up to the explosion of the Revolution, it goes fast. And it climbs fast. But there, the 19th century, if there's a title that would suit it, in my opinion — I don't know what you'd suggest — it's the century of revolutions, it never stops. '89, 1830, 1848, the Commune, 1917, it never stops. The world revolution that was then in preparation, that Hegel spoke of, became irreversible starting from the French Revolution, and began to spread. Which would explain why a Congress of Vienna, a Holy Alliance, and now a NATO are needed to guard against it. You see we're coming back to current affairs after all. So, addressing you: "we are approaching a state of crisis and the age of revolutions."
43:01 "Who can tell you what you will become then?" This is the passage I quoted earlier: everything men have made, men can destroy; there is no ineffaceable character except what nature imprints, and nature makes neither rich man, nor prince, nor great lord — no natural foundation for class, for the division of society into classes. Fundamental, this. Many people are still far from grasping it. "What will that tax-farmer do in poverty, who knows only how to live off gold? What will that ostentatious fool do, stripped of everything" — a series of oxymorons, identity — "that ostentatious fool, worn out from himself, and there..."
43:41 I'm being a bit solemn — this is the first statement of what will become the famous concept of alienation, as far as I know, perhaps there were earlier ones — "and who puts his whole being into what is foreign to him" — alius, the other — into what is foreign to him. "Happy is he who can then leave the estate that leaves him" — I recall that social class was called "état" at the time, in the sense of the Third Estate. The estate of carpenter, the estate of weaver, etc. "Happy is he who can then leave the estate that leaves him, and remain a man in spite of fate. Let people praise as much as they like this defeated king" — Ben Ali — "who wants to bury himself in fury under the ruins of his throne, you defy him."
44:16 "As for me, I despise him. I see that he exists only through his crown, and that he is nothing at all if he is not king. But he who loses it and does without it is then above it." And here there's this sentence which would have been unthinkable in 2014 — it would have gotten someone thrown in the Bastille right away — but which shows that ideas were making progress all the same in the 18th century: "From the rank of king, which a coward, a wicked man, a madman can fill as well as another" — we've seen others like that in the history of royalty — "he rises to the state of man, which so few men know how to fulfill." Careful — man, for Rousseau, is not empirical man. There aren't many men who live up to the concept of man. "He rises to the state of man, which so few men know how to fulfill."
44:48 "From the rank of king, which a coward, a wicked man, a madman can fill as well as another — it's enough to be born — he rises to the state of man, which so few men know how to fulfill." There, so I'll skip a passage and come to the question of right. Man and property, man and citizen, in order to show, if you will, the guiding thread through the true father, to show that Rousseau's thinking, having ruled out force as legitimation, is going to found a new regime of property. If it is not force that founds the social bond, then property, which lies at the heart of the social bond, must itself be founded on something other than force.
45:23 That's why I ended the Social Contract earlier with the passage where he clearly distinguishes possession, which is made of nothing but force and fact, from property, which differs from possession by that somewhat elliptical title which must be recognized on a positive title. And now we're going to see, in Émile, since this is the text that comes to complete it, that this positive title which founds legitimate property — not what should be nationalized, what should be left to this or that person — is labor. It is labor that will be the foundation of property in Rousseau.
45:53 That means I am only the owner of something when I have produced the thing, or when I have produced labor that allows me to buy the equivalent of the value of the thing, etc. That's roughly Rousseau's theory. It matters because if you ask, "what proves to you that this pack of cigarettes is mine?" — I'll say, doing the experiment with students, or between teachers somewhere, three out of four will say, "well, it's obviously in your hand" — they haven't understood the concept of property, which is normal, you have to start there. I say, yes, but I could have stolen it. "Oh no, sir, we know you, come on, we're not here to talk about you" — well, it could have been taken, etc.
46:26 So there, open your eyes wide, look at it under a microscope, examine its physical and chemical properties — it's not in empiricism that you'll find what makes it my property as opposed to my mere possession. Listen closely: you have to stop looking at it, and look instead at my relation to the other, not my relation to the thing. Did I produce it? If you saw me make it, then you see it's mine — or else, did I produce, in labor, the equivalent of the price for which I bought it? There, the value for which I bought it. We're on the theoretical plane, I mean. But it's revolutionary that Rousseau links the legitimation of property to labor.
46:59 And so he's going to arrive — that's what I want to prepare you for — at a formula about property that's much richer than Proudhon's. Proudhon says property is theft. All we'd need is for the miner who reaches retirement age when he gets there, despite silicosis — that's the example I always use — and who spits, for forty years, has been coughing up his lungs in the coal basin, or rather beneath it, at the heart of the basin, in the seam, as they say, and who buys himself, on retiring, his first color television — which will be treated by the leftist of the time as a filthy consumer who sold out the working class for a mess of pottage, consumption, integration.
47:33 It's really extraordinary, all the same. He produced enough value to buy thousands of color televisions. He's certainly, it's certainly legitimate that he can afford one, a color television. There. So that's the problem Rousseau serves us here, in Émile. "Man and citizen, whoever he may be, has no other goods to bring into society than himself" — the first capital.
48:05 "All his other goods are his despite himself. And when a man is rich, either he does not enjoy his wealth, or the public enjoys it too." That goes far. "In the first case" — well, in the first case, that's this famous unoccupied apartment, to take a current example. "In the first case, he steals from others what he deprives himself of; and in the second, he gives them nothing. Thus the social debt remains entirely his as long as he pays only with his wealth."
48:36 Response. He mentions a response. But my father, by earning it, served society. That's often what people expect. But for me, it's not theft. My father worked all his life. He got that, his inheritance. It's perfectly understandable. And Rousseau answers in a very precise way. Fine, he paid his debt. He worked. He paid his debt. But no, not yours. You owe more to others than if you had been born without property. It's beautiful, it hits hard. Yes, I'll explain that to the kids at Sciences Po. You owe more to others than if you had been born without property.
49:08 Since you were born favored. It is not just that what one man has done for society should discharge another from what he owes it. Because each man owing himself entirely — it's very legalistic, this passage — because each man owing himself entirely can only pay for himself. And no father — a very fine formula — can transmit to his son the right to be useless to his fellow men. And so, conclusion, rich or poor, powerful or weak, and here's Proudhon's formula enriched, every idle citizen is a scoundrel.
49:39 It's still different, property is theft. Work came in as mediation. That was the purpose of the long mediation I just did with Émile, which went from the negation of force, to the new legitimacy through contract, arriving at property based on work, production, and praxis, which legitimize values. And what I'd like, coming back afterward to the Reveries, is to show that what makes the beauty of the landscape is millennia of unconscious work. Let's get to it.
Productivity, idleness, and the unconscious of praxis 50:16 And idleness. Exactly. Which one can and should enjoy now. Hölderlin says in a fragment, 'And behold the given landscapes.' It's marvelous. So we think that applies to him, the poor madman at the end in his tower, who has nothing left but that to contemplate from his window. But no, it's the destiny of modern humanity. We should perhaps work one hour a week given what productivity is now. I'm deliberately using a provocative formula, but certainly much less than 35. When you see the increase in productivity between the 1920s and now, and that in the 1930s, we went from the 40-hour day obtained in '36, all the same, to 35 hours — where did the difference go?
50:50 Whereas productivity has been multiplied by 127. Where did the difference go? Maybe, as the other saying goes, we should live in philosophical leisure like you. 127 is a hyperbolic figure. To check — I think I heard it's more than 80 times the productivity. It's easy to understand. I mean, you see the state of the factory workshops of 1930 and the rationalization, beyond Taylor, with computerization, the little Korean hands, 14 years old, putting the copper wires into the motors and the printed circuits — it's prodigious with rationalization.
51:27 Let me make sure I'm not saying 127 — that was a hyperbole. It's a hyperbole. It's the mille e tre of Don Giovanni. Yes. 1003. As he seduced a thousand and three. Very precisely. There. And I'm not leaving Émile, I'm not going back to the Reveries yet, before the crucial sentence that will let me make the back-and-forth, come back to the edge. A crucial sentence because it acts as mediation, as an edge, between the political Rousseau and the poetic Rousseau.
51:59 In other words, after — he praises manual labor there, I'm in Émile, I'm not in the Reveries — he's suddenly going to speak as if alluding to himself in the Reveries. Watch closely, even though it hasn't been written yet. After praising manual labor outside society — sorry, after saying every idle citizen is a scoundrel — he might say: still, he's exaggerating, it's a bit deliberate, his thing, not fun every day, his world, you have to work. Wait: outside society — you see, this comes back to the island — the isolated man has the right to live as he pleases. Rousseau is clear, that's the contract, he'll live as he pleases. But in the society where he lives at the expense of others, he owes them in labor the price of his upkeep. This is without exception. To work is therefore an indispensable duty for social man, rich or poor, powerful or weak; the idle citizen is a scoundrel. I deliberately skipped a word — when he says 'he owes them' — 'but in the society where he lives at the expense of others' — I forgot the adverb on purpose, to show how much he condenses everything that Marxism will soon rush into through this breach: 'but in the society where he lives necessarily at the expense of others,' in the social production
53:17 of their existence, men enter into necessary relations independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a given degree of development of the productive forces. Suddenly, that same idea of the unconscious, which has nothing to do with Freud, which is the unconscious of the unconscious, as Clouscard used to say — the political and historical unconscious behind the scientific unconscious, the economic unconscious if you prefer — slips in here, namely that it's clear, it's the example I gave the other day: when I walk on the sidewalk, I don't consciously seek in my mind to enter into an intersubjective relation with Abdallah, the immigrant worker who built the sidewalk so I could walk on it with a jackhammer — I don't even think about it. So Marx is right to say that men, in the production of their existence, independent of their will — there's a theory of the unconscious there, well before the psychoanalytic unconscious of the psychic field, the PR unconscious, praxis. There, I see my magician Clouscard, who gave that beautiful formula, saying that with respect to the Freudian unconscious, the unconscious of historical production plays roughly the same role as — plays the role of the unconscious of the unconscious. So, here's the sentence that lets me come back
54:28 to — I'll repeat it, it's short — outside society, that's the case on the island, which is where I want to go back to — the isolated man, owing nothing to anyone, has the right to live as he pleases. But in the society where he lives necessarily at the expense of others, he owes them in labor the price of his upkeep. There's a deal, a contract that has just been made, I mean, and which seems decisive to me — that is, Rousseau is clear and removes all the apparent contradictions of Rousseauism, between the dreaming Rousseau and the working Rousseau. He said clearly why: in a forced situation, that of the island, all he'd need is the disadvantages of men's wickedness without the advantages that implies. But I mean, he's there differently, maybe another man would be bored on the island, or miss the salons, that sort of thing — what's extraordinary with him is that he goes on to say: I have never been so — I have known a happiness that the greatest sensualists in the world don't even suspect. So I mean, it's important to see that this isn't the happiness of the island, as you said earlier — we shared — I will, yes, that was — you still haven't answered — no, no, no, but I'll go in order, I'm telling you my answer, my answer was in the Reveries, that's it, in the Reveries, and applies to me
The end of the fifth walk: writing as sharing 55:38 since the impatient ones — I'll go ahead, as I'm telling you, I'm entirely in the Reveries, I'm not impatient, I wanted to put it — worried, I want to tell you why I'm putting it off — that was between Philippe and me — I'd actually rather start there, I don't know why anymore — because there's a literary implication in what I'm about to say, even a poetic one — but precisely there's 'later' because of that — but in fact it's the key to the problem of the relation to the other, at the end of the Reveries, at the end of his fifth walk, that's clear — when he says: here's how I lived at Saint-Pierre a long time ago now — I have the stone disease, kidney stones — that was in the table, the last sentence, alas — it's when one begins to leave one's remains that one is most upset by it — you see, his style has really improved since the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts — but before that he says: here's what I lived, oh how I'd love to go back — your classic — oh if only I could — and suddenly a reversal that will answer your question about shareability, we're agreed, I haven't lost the thread, not at all — freed from all the earthly passions engendered by the tumult of social life, my soul, if I went back there, would often soar above that atmosphere and commune in advance with celestial intelligences. We're right up in the empyrean here — it's an old man speaking.
56:48 with one foot in the grave, and hoping soon to increase that number. Men will take care, I know, not to grant me so sweet a refuge, where they did not want to let me stay; but they will not prevent me from transporting myself there at least. One arrives there every day on the wings of imagination — for now we haven't answered your question — it's an imagination that for now doesn't write, but afterward this imagination, with the Reveries, does it become writing? and to taste there for a few hours the same pleasure as if I still lived there — if I stop there, I'm not answering your question — and suddenly, this is the fall: what I would find sweetest would be to dream at leisure that I am there — am I not doing the same thing? — then suddenly, back to the present, 'dreaming that I am there' — there, the friends, because that happiness I was speaking of is a past now, I am unhappy — the whole plot, I even do a total reversal — to the attraction of an abstract and monotonous reverie, I join charming images that enliven it; their objects often escaped my senses in my ecstasies, and now, the deeper my reverie, the more vividly it paints them for me. I am often more in the midst of them
57:58 and more agreeably still than when I was really there — that is to say, in the writing, that is, when I address the other, because that's not why we write — every word, before signifying something, signifies for someone, there's a message-in-a-bottle side to writing, that's how happiness gets shared somewhere. Rousseau — I'll answer very precisely — is coming to understand that this happiness he has is a happiness he owes to praxis. It's not as conscious as I'm putting it, it's just beginning to emerge — but to praxis, which required a great deal of human effort. I often tell environmentalists, to illustrate what I'm saying, precisely on this point, that we have a debt when we benefit from the beauty of a landscape — we have a debt toward others, that's what I'm illustrating: when someone tells me, come sign the petition, did you see the beautiful Romanesque chapel in the wheat field, apparently they're going to tear it down to build a McDonald's parking lot — obviously I sign, of course, I myself love these Romanesque chapels, it's imaginary, there's even a similar case — I'll simplify, this can happen every day — I'll sign, agreed, but my big difference from everyone else who signs is that I'm not signing for nature, I'm signing against it, because what I'm preserving there, what I call Romanesque, has nothing to do with nature, it's human labor, and you're not signing for material sweat, it's art, it's sweat in every sense
59:08 sweat of the soul and of the body all the same — there's the architect, there's the engineer, there's the one who made the stained-glass windows, the connections, the crops — and the wheat field, let's not even talk about it, what an ordeal, they had to break the stones, grow the ears of wheat — and so I'll say, I'll sign to protect this heritage, and not nature, not a heredity — that's natural — but a heritage of which I claim, for you, for him, for me, you see the sharing now, of which I claim universal co-ownership. It doesn't matter, it's an aesthesia, it's an appearance, it's a surface, it's beautiful, the poetic world, we frustrate no one — these problems are interesting — and there's where it suddenly turns very modern, when he says that I get more enjoyment writing about the pleasures I lived in the here and now before — I have more happiness writing them than when I lived them — I see a foreshadowing, a course toward Proust later, when he says — often with Proust, it's a letdown, when you see — I had dreamed so much of coming, and when you finally see it, meh — and so it's that the object aimed at something else. I'm opening a parenthesis on Proust, you'll see, do you agree I'm keeping my thread on sharing — yes, I don't know, did I satisfy you
1:00:18 but do you agree there's a problem of an answer — unsatisfied, but agreed, there's a beginning, a call for air toward an answer that I'll dig into, because it's not yet — this is familiar, this business of — it's the sole object of my discussion — a link between art and the concept, between the aesthetic domain and the political-economic domain, arbitrarily opposed, whereas Samuel shows very well how there's a whole logistics, an implacable and pitiless economy, behind art — and there's also another economy that I'm trying to unveil, not of the art market, but of the work of art itself, in this case the literary and poetic work, namely — and that's why I got to Proust — I'm going to quote a passage from Proust that, if you didn't know whose it was, changing the style a little so it's not recognized, because it's fairly recognizable — it's just one sentence I'm going to give you, but be warned, this sentence is long — I'll say, if someone quotes it now, I guarantee that in Libé, in Le Monde, etc., they'd get accused of mechanistic Marxism if we don't say it's Proust.
Proust: the beauty of the girls of Balbec 1:01:29 which would be delightful in Proust's case, don't you think? What am I alluding to? I told you right away the point I'm going to illustrate, let me recall it: I'm going to illustrate how history, and in particular its engine, which is class struggle, to come back to basic fundamentals — mastery and servitude, servitude and domination, we were talking like Rousseau — is found even in the appearance of the most intimate, of the physical, down to the smallest detail of cosmetics — not just on this surface which is the skin of the pretty woman — I think 'pretty woman' is quite objective, it's not just messing around in one's head, but it's the object of desire, I could just as well say to the woman that she's the one who gets it, I said it earlier, it doesn't matter who else finds her pretty, that's the object of desire — so not only on the skin, but that's not a sufficient surface, you have to add another surface, it's called makeup or tanning — I'm getting there, we're at the seaside.
1:02:40 Tanning, we're on the pier at Balbec, the first time the narrator, still a kid, convalescing there with his grandmother, sees for the first time the troop of young girls from among whom Albertine will later emerge, etc. — we don't know the girls yet — and he describes the passage very well: it's at the age when he's an adolescent, a bit like Chérubin in Figaro, between two sexes, between two ages, causing a bit of mischief everywhere, and he says that they had a group beauty, a genre beauty, there's a beauty that plays out from one to another independently of individual particularities — let's not dwell on that, because we understand each other, we're people who have lived and are living — and there's a moment to dig into this common thing without turning it into a substance — Proust, you can't say it without doubt, the class to which they belonged, in which sporting practices and comfort were something new, gives us the idea that a certain level of economic ease can produce beautiful bodies, beautiful forms, in abundance — a guy writes a text like that, that the beauty of — I don't know, I have models from 40 years ago, Lauren Bacall, I don't know what now, it's the model, not the actress anymore I think, I don't know
1:03:50 I don't know him, but it's already been said a little for showbiz stars, pop singers, etc. — I mean, that this beauty isn't tied to her own essence, on the contrary there's an extension, spanning several millennia, of surplus value — that had never been said before Rousseau, you'll see, then Proust — it became so — I mean by that that all the great authors are Marxists, and that basically those who say Marxism is outdated mean that nothing is outdated — Buddhism is current, look closely, it's older than Marxism, Buddhism, whatever, shamanism, Monism, everything, nothing is outdated — there's only one thing that's outdated, and that's Marxism, from that point of view — ah well, obviously, because all the great authors, take Flaubert, etc., I mean, somewhere they clearly saw social classes, the novelists, the filmmakers when they're good, etc. — American cinema knows very well how to see social classes indeed, and they even took sides in the conflict, in which they're ideological — but of course, yes, yes, of course, of course — and Citizen Kane, earlier, wasn't bad, I mean, regarding the quest for the object of desire, up to Rosebud, all the same — so I wanted to reach that fall, you made me anticipate, I wanted to get there to show, all the same, that the highest happiness Rousseau conceives of, which we had thought
Robinson, mediation, and Senancour's autumn 1:05:00 through his text, was that state of ecstasy by the lake — but no, it's the happiness he has in recalling it, that's very Proustian — the true paradises are those we have lost, firstly, and secondly, of expressing them for the other, in writing, in transmission — I'm not going to say I've co-shared, but I'm saying, we'd agreed, a pedagogical and didactic aim, all the same, without which the writing — without writing, this pedagogical aim would come down to a crude apprenticeship, that's what I mean, it's the pleasure of telling, the pleasure that's distinct from the libertine's pleasure of telling, it's not that of Crébillon — quite so, Crébillon fils, you're kidding, the one who said 'she had a shapely leg, she showed it' — sorry, I love that, it's curious, we wouldn't think that way now, you see the men of the 18th century, he sees the silk stocking, she had a shapely leg, she showed it, well, anyway — for example, you mention Crébillon to me, but a second allusion, it's in Nerval — Nerval is inexhaustible, Nerval, you know that courtier of a Crébillon who says, ah, you were a sofa in a former life, but tell me, that's very gallant, and tell me, were you embroidered — and Nerval who says, I was embroidered on every seam, well, anyway, let's get back to our sheep.
1:06:12 This idea of a shareability — I'll go even further, I say there is — this is to lead toward answering Dominique's decisive question, that of sharing, which is the current question — that in the fact of writing, and writing what? Of transmitting, not a scientific discovery — that too is a form of sharing, dealing cards, etc. — transmitting a heritage — it's not a heritage of knowledge, of technologies, art is an aesthetic heritage — the happiness, I tried to restore through writing the happiness I felt in front of a surface — I'm not a physicist in the setting, I'm not concerned with the origin of the winds, or whatever, of the water and the glacial lakes of Switzerland, that's not my problem, I stick to the surface and to what it reflects back to me, agreed?
1:06:50 That's what reverie is, and in the act of transmitting it, I appeal to the other, but not only — it's not just a coding system, that would already have been understandable enough in the 60s-70s, what's called subjectivity was fairly common — on the other hand, what's more with Rousseau is that there's a restitution of the enjoyment I obtained by the lake 30 years ago — I obtained it, I'm continuing my thesis, through the mediation of the labor of others which transformed nature into landscape — or which allows me, even in the heart of the jungle where no leaf owes its appearance to the hand of man, even there — let's take the Paris-Dakar rally, when it's in the heart of the desert — fine, I set aside all the gear, the helicopters, I assume I'm lost, I've lost the others, I'm all alone in the Ténéré, a region we know well — and somewhere I'm not in nature, I'm like Robinson on his island — Robinson makes a calendar, does his thing, he has the whole cultural heritage, he has language, he has thought, he has the highest technology of the time, English technology, and the first hundred pages of Robinson are the exhausting labor he does to salvage from the boat the rakes, the compass, the sextants, in short the productive forces which, within certain relations of production, allowed him, even in the heart of an apparently virgin nature — we are never in immediate contact with nature, that's fundamental to understanding Hegel
1:08:00 We are never in immediate contact, except in fantasy — that's it, there's always mediation, and Hegel has a troubling saying, he says death is the immediate being-there of nature having become — except at the moment of death, we're never in immediate contact with matter — otherwise, to live, to be a living being, is to take a distance from nature, no joke — and the first object Robinson makes is a table and a chair — I didn't forget, but for you it doesn't surprise me that you remembered, because it's the table of commensality, no doubt the first guest can only be Friday, if I remember correctly, since there's no one else before — and Hegel noted well, because this book had huge success at the end of the 18th century, it's no accident, it comes at the right moment — when Marx talks about Robinson, when he sits down to eat, no pun intended, I mean it's no accident that when the human relation is finally reconstituted, we leave the moment of the single individual where I'm alone on my island, immediately what gets established? The master-slave relation, the first founding relation — it's a very lucid novel, not idyllic or ecological at all, by the way — there, I mention it in passing — so now that
1:09:28 that I've put forward this thesis — I admit it's not self-evident, one has to dig — that the writing of beauty, the transmission of beauty, provided it succeeds — one has to be a great artist for it to succeed — that is, that the beautiful could be expressed as far as possible, and no matter the medium, whether pictorial, musical, literary, poetic, for now — is somehow a restitution of a surplus value received. Yes, I'm not reducing it to that, I'm saying it would be unthinkable — it's one of the determinations of the beautiful, that's what I mean, I'm not confining it entirely to that, but I mean somewhere I recall it's no accident that the attraction to landscape and the great lyricism of landscape in literature appears at the end of the 18th century, when nature begins to recede in reality, no longer just in texts, with the first factory chimneys — and it's no accident that the poetry of the Nordic countries is much better than ours on nature, the English and so on — I mean for a long time, especially at the beginning, when comparing the French Romantics to Coleridge or the Germans, we have other qualities, but not those, precisely, and
1:10:38 that it's there, where society, where the industrial revolution was most advanced, that the poetics of nature, of landscape — landscape, as Coleridge would say — was most developed. There's a very beautiful text by Senancour on landscape, which is an appendix in the Folio edition of Oberman, a superb text, and he's a great disciple of Rousseau, if I may quote Senancour — two titles, I won't say more after that, at least tonight, it's a title so under-consumed, sorry for that commercial expression — even Sainte-Beuve had announced that Monsieur Senancour would always have a discreet but faithful posterity, and well, I'm part of it, and Gracq too apparently, and then Nerval, who quotes him, says this — and he tells me in the same angelic text that, at the famous suppers of Ermenonville, we learned, this is a historical point, that the illuminati gathered to prepare the revolution at the château of Ermenonville, among other places — it was one of their great meeting places — preparing the reform of aged societies, etc. — Robespierre came to the château of Ermenonville — and then Senancour, I mention this in passing, says this sentence which for me sums up, as concisely as possible
1:11:48 this link that I'm making between the aesthetics of landscape and praxis — that's exactly what's under discussion at this point — a passage where he starts from autumn at Fontainebleau — this is Senancour — and suddenly he says why he prefers autumn, it's a heartache from the sky, and he says spring is more beautiful in nature, but man has done so much that autumn is sweeter — admirable passage, you see clearly, 'man has done so much,' that's the difference — spring more beautiful in nature, spring more tied to values of vitality, of regeneration — if Christians decided to put Easter in April, it's from old pagan festivals, that's it, alright — regarding vegetation and all that, we know it, we're basically still within the biological and naturalistic universe — but 'man has done so much that autumn is sweeter' — mysterious, interesting to dig into — there, I'm closing this citation from Senancour, always discreet, brief — I find it superb, it will deserve to be dug into — it takes a lot of labor to make what we believe to be
1:12:59 nature, which is in fact most often — I took my example, at the limit, in the jungle earlier, or in the desert, both limit cases where nothing even seems to express fabrication — but even there I showed we arrive at categories that presuppose history, labor, praxis, theory, practice, etc. — but all the more so in the universe we frequent 9.9 days out of 10, when you look around you — that's why I tell the environmentalists, we must protect the environment, I'm for it, I'm not for lying under the eyes of the poplars hoping with delight — but we must protect it against nature precisely because this environment, in the story of the Romanesque chapel in the wheat field, is above all constituted by humans, with human sweat, and it has constituted a wealth, I'd say a human heritage, which I enjoy when I stroll, even by car, on foot or on horseback, that's a separate issue, or even when I think about it or dream of it in my bed, as Rousseau said when the stone disease prevented him from using his legs — I mean by that there's a kind of algebra of the balance, of the restitution of wealth — yes, if I may just make a clarification, in fact the heritage you're talking about is in the subject too — bravo, but go on
1:14:09 go on, it suits me, that's why it constitutes true interiority, that's what Clouscard will call the psyche, that's his concept of psyche — it's that quantity of accumulated values that history has placed in the setting, whether natural, urban, or forest, it doesn't matter now, or in the girl's blouse, or as Proust said earlier, in that kind of I-don't-know-what that ran from one to another but was tied to their social class — or sport, interesting, Proust, or the diffusion of wealth — it's true, I remember, let me remind you of the Tokyo Olympics, the American medal haul, unprecedented, the new gods of the stadium, in Paris Match — I'm making images — you saw new Siegfrieds like that, except for Spitz who was dark-haired, probably the greatest swimming champion of all time, 9 gold medals, 9 world records, so it's superb — but the new gods in sporting creation — there's always this debate, because Clouscard's first article was the sociology of sport — between people who are gods by nature, and what Proust teaches us — you need a Proust for that, not an Althusser, one should really redistribute credit — is that it takes a lot of praxis to produce the legs you love, the looks you love, and the curls you love — it takes a lot of praxis, agreed, because otherwise
1:15:20 the domestic squabbles between Cro-Magnon and his wife, you must have had to settle it your way, that's it — I mean, and this kind of temporal thickness that I'd like to restore to the notion of beauty is tied to the temporal thickness of the history of praxis itself — that's what I'm saying, quite simply, and what I wanted to illustrate with Senancour's sentence, that spring is more beautiful in nature, but man has done so much that autumn is sweeter — he speaks with great precision, I find it has a soothing effect.
