English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
An eleventh promenade? Reverie, a precise term 1:30 You spoke a little about The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, could we imagine an eleventh walk?
2:03 Can Dominique imagine an eleventh walk? You're asking me — that's a terrible responsibility you're assigning us, because I invite you to do it with me, this eleventh walk, I do it with myself, and, well written, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, there's a dialogue there that he borrowed from Diderot, Diderot liked dialogues like that. The R is for rêverie. Yes, I understood that well, and it's a term of extraordinary precision, despite its rather vague side, reverie.
2:35 The eleventh walk. You're asking me to do something I would never dare do. For example, Mozart's Requiem is unfinished, everyone knows that, plenty of musicians have tried to finish it. I wouldn't dare. Like the Temple of Philosophy, which is unfinished. Yes, but that one is meant to remain unfinished. But The Art of Fugue — Bach died, it's rather pathetic. They're going to do the score, three notes rising and, bang, the pen fell. So let's stay with the language of the Reveries. There you go. Well, this language must be taken very seriously. And the word reverie too. I said it was precise. I like to introduce precision into what seems most irrational, reverie.
3:08 Frankly. I draw on Verlaine for this, in his poetic manifesto, the manifesto of poetic modernity, called Art poétique, as manifestos in this field often are, he says, after praising vagueness, the opposite of clarity and precision — we're in the Impressionist era — 'more vague and more soluble in air, with nothing in it that weighs or poses,' we're in full Impressionism. 'You must also not go seeking your words without some blunder. Nothing is dearer than the grey song where the indefinite joins the precise.'
3:40 That's Verlaine. If Verlaine urges us to be precise, we won't lag behind. So, reverie, what is it? It's a middle term between waking and sleep. An altered state. When Nerval says, in the most famous passage of Sylvie, which Proust admired so much, 'on returning to my bed, I cannot find rest, plunged in a half-drowsiness, all my youth passes again through my memories.' Half-drowsiness — but drowsiness is already a half-sleep. So half-drowsiness is a quarter-sleep, how precise these things are. These altered states, where, to speak in Freudian terms, censorship relaxes a little, then I'm in a state of hypnosis.
Lake Bienne and Rousseau's maternal fixation 4:15 We're not yet in sleep, in real dreams, but we're in reverie. So somehow the determining forces begin to express themselves, the ones I repress during the day, for the sake of work, of my relation to the other, what I'm going to show, what I'm going to hide, like everyone. So in reverie, things suddenly appear. Thus, I spoke earlier of Rousseau's maternal fixation — in the Fifth Walk, he first describes, in an encompassing way, the landscape before coming to what is immediate, namely the Lake of Biel, and he's grateful to it, unlike Lake Geneva, for being surrounded by hills and mountains — it's said, very pleasant for someone who likes to circumscribe himself.
4:55 There he says everything about the maternal fixation. Circumscribere, to be the center of something that surrounds you. We come back to the island. It makes me think of a spider's web too. That's not bad, because there are traps in it, deadly traps, if the fixation remains a fixation, of indelible and unresolved censorship of the term. So there is, in reverie, this altered-state aspect, the richness of combining at once the consciousness that is still there, which is not sleep.
5:29 And at the same time, the richness of determination brought by the unconscious, which expresses itself much more than when the severe control of censorship operates in active life. And I come back to that opening, where he says, 'this beautiful basin' — speaking of the Lake of Biel — 'contains in its middle' — basin already, I'm not a psychoanalyst, but this beautiful basin contains in its middle' — in fact when you look at the island, it's not at all in the middle, it's quite noticeably off-center toward one end of the lake, toward the village of Erlach, to be very precise, since we're passing from French-speaking to English-speaking territory — two kilometers away in Switzerland is La Neuveville, and two kilometers opposite, Erlach.
6:13 So, as if in the imagination he were correcting the landscape according to the determining fantasy of being obliged to be at equal distance from all dangers. There you go. So the sea protects me, it's in the uniformity of the continuous motion that lulled me. So reverie has this side too. I note that all the decisive advances of modernity — textual, I don't like the word 'literary,' as Verlaine says, poetry, read, all the rest is literature in the pejorative sense, but verbal creativity, I'd say logical, I'm not afraid to scandalize, in the sense of logos, quite simply, in the strict sense — have, since Rousseau, situated themselves in this altered state.
Modernity in the second state, from Proust to Rimbaud 7:01 How does In Search of Lost Time begin? Which barely names Rousseau at all. 'For a long time I used to go to bed early.' And there begins, over several pages, the inscription of an intermediate state where he says clearly, 'I am somewhat like the patient in the hospital who believes that the bright line below means day has finally broken, that the suffering is going to end, that the nurses are going to come,' while treacherously it's a line of light in the middle of the night — it's an altered state, and sometimes 'a thigh folded beneath me made me think of a woman' — we're in this altered state. The great advances — I'm thinking of Rimbaud too, or Baudelaire.
7:42 So we must take this word seriously, which is extremely precise, which designates an intermediate state that combines the functions of thought and the functions of dream. Of directing thought and directed consciousness. So it's really a very important theme. If one were to write the eleventh reverie, I would see it as a synthesis, an attempt precisely to synthesize — we always come back to it — what we have in us of nature and culture. That's what it revolves around, modernity doesn't manage to get out of the enigma. And I mentioned earlier Rimbaud's illumination called 'Mouvement,' but I didn't go all the way to listen to it quickly, after having praised an extraordinary industrial futurism, a hyper-modern enchantment, if I may say.
8:41 'They are the conquerors of the world, seeking their personal chemical fortune' — an ark of Noah, a kind of planetary vessel fleeing the Earth and its disasters toward other horizons. And then suddenly, contradicted, a kind of entity right at the end of the poem, 'amid the most surprising atmospheric accidents that surround this power station' — 'a young couple withdraws apart on the ark, is it ancient wildness that one forgives them?' And there it is, nature, that one pardons. Question mark. 'And sings and stands watch.'
9:12 Rousseau is that one — the one who was never unfaithful to ancient wildness, and who also never dismissed everything that this wildness has given through praxis.
