English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The savage is one who flees 1:59 So is the savage the one who comes out of the forest? Is he the one we put back into the forest? Or is he above all the one we don't want to see coming out of it? Having lived for a long time in what are designated, in white terms, as savage countries, I'm attentive to your question. So let me let you continue on this notion of savagery. I don't want to make the mistake philosophers make when they say precise things about sciences and often say foolish things. So it seems to me, and Hegel played a lot on the etymology, that the savage is first of all the one who saves himself, who flees to safety.
2:34 When does he flee to safety? When does he flee? When he sees us, the civilized ones. He knows it can cost him dearly. The first savages trusted the first Spaniards who landed. There's not one left in the Caribbean. Exterminated, wiped out. Perhaps that's why they later went to fetch Black people, a second genocide, because apparently they're the most robust for labor. So the Black man, the one who flees. Now, where does he flee to? Second etymology. Anyone who has observed animals a little, at the forest's edge, at sunset, sees very well what I mean. In Haute-Marne you have plenty of fields bordering forests, so you can see this very clearly. The roe deer stand at the edge. And as soon as they sense a human presence, they go back into what? Into the selva.
3:09 The selva selvaggia. A magnificent passage from Dante's Divine Comedy, right at the start. "Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark." And he says "Esta selva selvaggia" — this forest, forested, I tell you — "Esta selva selvaggia." So that's what the savage is. And so, I come back to it always: who feels the need to flee to safety? Someone who has felt a danger. Rousseau is the man hunted his whole life. Again, because of his homes, his writings burned in public, his homes stoned, the threats of arrest that forced him to keep moving all the time.
3:47 To the point of wanting, as we saw earlier, to try to expatriate himself to Corsica, a land where he would feel a bit more at peace. Since there, at least, he was sought out as a thinker. And of course that won't happen. And so the savage is the one who flees to safety because he is in danger. And the danger comes from civil society, not from the state of nature, in this case. Men against men. The state of nature is the reign of force. It seems abominable to us to see a pack of wild dogs in the savanna, African wild dogs, admirably organized, devouring the fetus of a female wildebeest that is giving birth while running.
Nature, the reign of force and not paradise 4:26 It's not atrocious. I wouldn't tell this in front of children. And yet, this is the nature we're told every day is balanced, harmonious, and that if man hadn't sown discord, it would be paradise. Let's not kid ourselves. Nature is the relation of force. I'm not saying the animal does evil. The animal is beneath good and evil. There's no moral trial. It does what it can. The wild dogs — I'm rehabilitating them now. The poor female, the wild dog, has her young waiting for her in the den, cubs to feed too. Let's not be too harsh about it all the same. So, as Rousseau says very well, in chapter 8 of book 1 of The Social Contract, this passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a very remarkable change, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had lacked before. In the state of nature, there is no morality.
5:12 So, someone will say, but Rousseau is condemning the savage. There is no morality in the state of nature, in the forest. Morality would only appear in the civil state, in the city. That's a strong claim all the same. In the state of nature, we haven't seen Auschwitz, the Khmer Rouge, or the Rwandan genocide. What's going on here? Well, the text contains at the end the key to the answer. You see, an immense political thinker anticipating the genocides of our era. You finally understand the essence of historical and political evil. After this, it will show everything we've gained by passing from the state of nature to the civil state.
5:47 I quote: "His faculties are exercised and ennobled." "His faculties are exercised, his passions are ennobled." For example, sexuality, which is a passion in the sense of that era, which one undergoes passively, and which is not at my service but at the service of the species so that it can reproduce. I'm just a ruse in all this. I'm made to believe it's for my benefit. I'm made to feel pleasure so that the species can continue. Afterward, it dispatches me like those grasshoppers that mate only to die right after. So, his faculties are exercised, his passions are ennobled, love is going to become...
The abuses of civil society degrade man below the animal 6:21 Sorry, sexuality is going to become an institution — marriage, love, whatever, monogamy, polygamy, no matter — and create the whole world of romance that we know. "His whole soul is elevated to such a point that..." It's not a rhetorical coyness, I like to stop the sentence right there. Not to create a rhetorical suspense, but because what's at stake is enormous. Because until we get to what comes next, we get the impression that we've gained everything by moving to the civil state and leaving the savage state, to answer your question. And that's where this whole sentence's universe arrives.
6:52 Only hypothetical. "Elevated to such a point that if the abuses of this new condition..." — here I'm quoting word for word, it's too serious to paraphrase — "...did not often degrade him below the condition from which he emerged, he ought ceaselessly to bless the happy moment that wrenched him from it forever, and which turned him from a stupid, limited animal into an intelligent being and a man." All the terms of the problem are there. The balance is positive.
7:22 We were a stupid, limited animal, we become an intelligent being and a man. Yes, but here's the thing. In the meantime, there were the abuses of this new condition. The abuses often degraded him below the state from which he emerged. How can one be below the animal? So savagery is not the lowest and worst thing there is. Because the terrifying example I gave, of the wild dogs devouring the fetus, is because it's always more nourishing. There's worse, says Rousseau.
7:53 And here we begin to understand historical and political evil. It's the abuses of this new condition. But what does it mean to abuse the civil state? I'll answer quickly: it's reintroducing the relation of force where the civil state was supposed to institute a state of law. Force, and the relation of forces — either force in the literal sense, when a peasant didn't pay his tax back then, it was quickly settled with the butt of a musket, or the force of wealth, of finance. I mean, what makes it so I have no choice, even though there's supposedly negotiation — as the founders of capitalism liked to claim, it's a negotiation between two free persons, one looking for work, the other offering it.
Rousseau, "Newton of morality," and the neo-savage 8:31 That's all very fine, yes. Like a lamb, the guy is going to get fleeced, watch closely. He's going to get sheared, the poor sucker. Outside the relation of force — that's precisely what characterizes the natural universe. The first term you learn in physics class is the notion of force. From it, we build the notion of work, the relation of force to space, then the notion of power, the relation of work to time, because moving a ton ten meters, depending on whether you do it in one second or one hour, is not the same power, and so on. The notion of force is fundamental.
9:02 It's the only thing that decides in physics, in the order of nature — not of fantasized nature, this time. Not of nature as "mother earth who nurtures us." Because that's roughly the basis of a certain ecological discourse. One mustn't sully nature, just as one mustn't let daddy plow mommy. Daddy the productivist, and mommy who suffers it. But nature, real nature, the one that is the object of physics — physics being the science of nature — is the reign of force.
9:32 The moon revolves around the Earth because it has no choice, it's not the reign of freedom. And when Kant says Rousseau is the Newton of morality, by dint of repeating these well-known phrases, we forget, as Hegel says, that what is well-known, precisely because it is well-known, is not known. Pay close attention, it's precise. Because what is Newton? He explains the whole universe of nature through force. The first force is that of gravity, precisely, of falling. The inverse direction, submission to the law, is the inverse direction of freedom, which rises upward — a moral height, a metaphorical height — we are in the high, whether in New Zealand or here.
10:05 And what does that mean? It means that Rousseau proposed, for the human and social world, a principle of freedom that is just as important for understanding, for making the human sciences intelligible, as the notion of gravity is for the natural world in Newton. That's what it means to say Rousseau is a Newton of morality. So, I pay tribute to the savage in a way, who reminds us that we must always keep some room for maneuver to save ourselves, because the contract is no longer being honored. I'll come back later to nature in Rousseau, which is always an intermediate stage where I take refuge, in order to move from bad society to good society, the society of the contract.
10:42 We don't pass immediately from one to the other by a magic trick. You can't imagine capital today saying, listen guys, we're in crisis, we're losing ground, we're a thing overtaken by history, here are the keys, it's up to you now. No, let's not dream. I mean, good luck, buddy. That's not how it happens. So, between the bad society of fact and the good society of right, founded on the contract, there is a triangle between these two extremes, these binary poles: a passage through the landscape, through nature, as a neo-savage, where I must escape, I go that far, so as not to submit to the logics, the ideology of servitude and domination.
