English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Opening excerpts: dead labor and the wild beast 0:00 Work becomes all the more absolutely dead, it becomes the work of a machine. When I don't give the author's name and I read this text, people tell me it's a text by Marx.
0:30 It is always the tool, the only thing that remains of the worker and of the worked object. That's something Marx will take up. The two extremes, the worker and the worked object, wear out and disappear in the process of production. That says exactly what spirit is for Hegel, it is anything but a little immaterial vapor or smoke. On the contrary, a long material process is needed to bring spirit forth.
1:00 He's talking about civil society here. And which, like a wild beast, needs to be continually tamed and mastered with severity. As you might expect, Hegel doesn't let liberal savagery run loose, he says the beast has to be tamed and mastered with severity.
Spirit, a historical matter 13:03 Here, this is my phone. I can only name it because I recognize it, because I take a little trip back into my past, where I learned that this was a phone, I recognize it. So, leaving memory and language aside for now, these are problems that go back, as we've seen, as we're seeing, to the origins, not even just of philosophy, but practically speaking, of the symbolic itself, since mythology unifies the two in Mnemosyne.
13:33 What's much more surprising, and this is the first time in the history of thought, is that an author, a philosopher, in this case someone like Hegel, brings in the tool, the most prosaic, most material thing there is. Now, this isn't my way of speaking, but you'll notice that most of the time, when the epithet "material" comes up, people can't help preceding it with the adverb "basely material." Right? As if Mozart's music weren't matter too. Vibrations in the air are matter. I know this scandalizes quite a few people, because this matter has to have a certain form to be Mozart's music, of course.
14:14 But still, if that form weren't inscribed in some matter, we wouldn't hear anything at all. Right? That's the point, we mustn't forget it. We have to remain materialist in that sense, even if here it's a certain kind of matter. Now here I part ways, of course, with today's dominant ideology, including the positivists — it is matter, but I don't think I'm telling you much you don't already know, since you've watched quite a few videos. It's a historical matter, not a natural matter, a spiritual matter in Hegelian terms, insofar as spirit is opposed to nature, precisely — not to matter, to nature.
14:46 Spirit is a historical matter that is opposed to natural matter. I'm glad you gave me the opportunity to clarify things we rarely get the chance to clarify, in the confusion in which these notions are currently floating. This is a great period of regression on this point, compared to the level we had reached, from Kant to Marx and Lenin. I'll have plenty of occasion to come back to this, as you can imagine, so I won't dwell on it.
Descartes' piece of wax 15:16 So, the tool, third power of spirit, because Hegel notices there's a common point between the tool and language — why does the tool come right after language? Because language, as we've seen, in its relation to memory, allows me to retain, right? The thing may disappear, but the word remains — remember Descartes. When he realizes that this piece of wax, which he had defined as something white, sweet, with a pleasant smell of honey, has not at all lost the scent of the flowers from which it was gathered.
15:52 At the time, as you know, candles, pieces of wax, right? The candles people lit were made with natural wax, not stearin. So its shape, its size are apparent. Anyway, as he says, all the sensible qualities that can make a body known are found in it. But now, while I'm speaking, it's brought near the flame of a candle. The white becomes yellow, its size increases, and however much you strike it, it will no longer make a sound. In short, all the qualities change all at once. For now, this is an experience anyone can have.
16:26 Everything by which I had defined it changes. So why do I keep calling it this piece of wax, since I had defined it by its qualities, which are precisely what has disappeared? Just a match, a flame! And Descartes, a towering philosopher, asks this question. The philosophical question par excellence. One that doesn't occur to others. Others see this transformation. Descartes asks: does the same wax remain after this change? The same wax, the same one I had defined as being white, sweet, obviously.
16:58 But from the point of view of the senses, everything has changed. And Descartes puts it plainly: "And indeed it remains, and no one would deny it." So we take a subject, a grammatical subject, the wax. But we no longer really know what it rests on. Because everything that was evident — evident, video, what I see — has changed. But I think, I imagine, I judge, Descartes will say. I don't see it, but I judge. And this is the famous passage that will end with coats, hats.
17:31 No, I'm not raving, wandering off. It's Descartes, in so many words, who says: I must be careful about the way words, right, sometimes make me go well beyond my thought. He says it a bit more at length, but I'm saving time. Namely, I say for example — I'm quoting him word for word here — "From this window I say I see men, yet what do I see?" but hats and coats, which might cover ghosts moved by springs. It's an extraordinary passage. The first automatons were just beginning to appear.
18:02 This is Cartesian mechanism, following on from Galileo's physics. So, he makes the hypothesis — a fantastic one — that perhaps I say I see men. For now, I see coats, hats, I don't know what's underneath. So, I judge that they are men. That's an activity of the mind, whereas seeing is passive. You see? So this first philosophy of mind is crucial because it shows that what seemed to be the privilege of language, right?
The tool as existing middle term 18:33 I have a memory that lets me say I have a word to express a thing to someone, the triangle of language. But the tool, what does it do? And here I can't help but read it to you. It's short, very short, the passage where he talks about the tool. I'm telling you about it because afterward, in the modern era, the tool will become the machine for manufacturing pins that prompted your question. You see how far it leads us.
19:03 Now, here's what he says about the tool. Labor must likewise be material labor, that of prehistoric man making a bow, or even polishing a pebble, a stone, giving it the shape of an arrowhead. Labor must likewise be the middle term in which the two extremes relate to each other as opposites. That sounds abstract. The two extremes are me, the worker, and the worked object.
19:34 And between the two, there's the tool that comes in between, right? Labor must likewise be the middle term, in the proper sense, the one that stands in the middle, in which the two extremes relate to each other as opposites, and in which they subsist as separate, and through which the act of laboring as such has its permanent existence, almost that of a thing, unlike movements one performs instinctively. The instrument is the existing middle term.
20:04 A hammer exists, a millstone exists. I found millstones out in the middle of the Sahara, it's quite moving. The instrument is the existing, rational middle term, because it presupposes a thought, it presupposes that I know what function I'm going to give it. It presupposes that I'm making something that's of no immediate use to me, but I have a projection that will serve me in the future. We saw a bit of this recently. The instrument is the existing rational middle term, the existing universality of the practical process.
20:38 It appears on the side of what is active, the instrument, facing what is passive. If I'm working wood, you see, the wood is passive and my scraper, right, serves to sharpen it. It appears on the side of what is active, facing what is passive, but it is itself passive relative to the worker, relative to the one who uses it — you see the fine dialectic. Active in relation to the worked object, and passive in relation to the worker who uses it. So it's passive in relation to one extreme and active in relation to another. On the side of the worker, and active toward the worked object.
21:11 It is — listen closely, because this is the key to how man begins to have a history — it is that in which labor has its permanence, whereas words are still evanescent. It is that in which labor has its permanence. The children of the new generation, in caves or in houses on stilts, don't start over from scratch each time, like a little tiger that, at birth, becomes a tiger embryo again — like us too, actually, physically, at birth.
21:42 Except that we don't only have heredity, we also have inheritance. The child soon finds himself, quickly — sorry — in a world, in a tool-equipped world. And there, history doesn't start from zero. He'll find himself facing metal objects. It already took millions of years to go from chipped stone to polished stone, and from polished stone to bronze, and from bronze to iron. It is that in which labor has its permanence. It is always the tool, the only thing that remains of the worker and of the worked object.
22:14 That's something Marx will take up. The two extremes, the worker and the worked object, wear out and disappear in the process of production. The worker exhausts himself in it, and the worked object — I don't know, whether it's a forest or a marsh — becomes a field. Look at Holland, for instance, how it was won back from the sea. If it's a block of stone, it will disappear into as many arrowheads as are needed to be fitted onto shafts.
22:45 It is passed on through traditions. From father to son, that's how it goes. From father or guardian to disciple, it gets passed on. That's the tool in its concept, from its origin, from prehistory, the middle term, right? This is what founds praxis, the practical relation to the world, without which spirit would never have appeared. There's the boldness. For the first time, a thinker says this — that says exactly what spirit is for Hegel: anything but a little immaterial vapor or smoke.
The pin factory and dead labor 23:16 On the contrary, a long material process is needed to bring spirit forth. Right? So you see how far your question goes? And so here, in chapter 5, which is titled — I'll tell you so you can find your bearings — "The Spirit of a People." You see that spirit here must now be taken in a very concrete way. Very concrete. I say more material, I say concrete to be more precise. Right? Hegel says in the Philosophy of Right, his political testament: the true is the concrete, comma, and the true is always concrete.
23:55 He gives this example in a subsection that begins with the Greek letter alpha. The division of labor increases the abundance of manufactured goods. Here he moves to the modern world, to mechanization, right? He's a contemporary of this great upheaval, as I often say, the Industrial Revolution, which first occurred in England and would soon spread like wildfire across Europe. In an English manufactory — and here's the answer to your question — 18 men work at making pins, each has a particular task and only that task.
24:25 You'd think you were watching Chaplin's Modern Times already, and yet this is 1803. Napoleon was barely peeking out from beneath Bonaparte, to paraphrase Hugo. He wasn't even crowned yet — that was 1804, not 1803. Each has a particular task and only that task, hyper-specialization. A single worker might not be able to produce 120 pins, or even one. These 18 distinct operations, divided among 10 workers, yield a production of 4,000 pins a day.
25:00 Now, that doesn't seem like much to us, but for the time, it's a fabulous threshold crossed in production, right? Now, for this same work, these 10 men, if they had worked in a team of 18, would produce 48,000 in a day. But the decrease in the value of labor is in direct proportion to the increase in the volume of objects produced — this is already almost a sketch of the theory of value. This heart — not a secret one, on the contrary, very explicitly spelled out by Marx — of Marxism, right? Labor becomes all the more absolutely dead, it becomes the work of a machine.
25:33 The skill of the individual worker becomes all the more infinitely limited — there's already a denunciation here, right, of an alienation in this kind of labor, when it's organized by the capitalist system. The skill of the individual worker becomes all the more infinitely limited, and the factory worker's consciousness is lowered to the last degree of dullness. When I don't give the author's name and I read this text, people tell me it's a text by Marx. "And the connection of a particular kind of labor with the whole infinite mass of needs becomes altogether impossible to perceive, and turns into a blind dependency, such that often some remote operation suddenly disrupts and renders superfluous and unusable the labor of an entire class of men who thereby satisfied their needs."
Money, a material concept, and the wild beast 26:23 I can't help finishing this paragraph that follows, which will end with another image that must be familiar to you, since it's this image from which Clouscard drew the title of his books, "The Wild Beast." These varied kinds of labor, in a modern world of machines, the world of the commodity — that's the first sentence of Capital, right? This world that appears to us first as a formidable accumulation of commodities. "These varied kinds of labor, aimed at satisfying needs taken as things, must likewise realize their concept, their abstraction.
26:59 Their universal concept — this may sound obscure, you'll see — must likewise be a thing like them." Well, I'll tell you right away, he's in the process of tracing the genesis of what money, currency, cash if you like, is. It's a thing, but a thing that is at the same time a universal. Their universal concept must likewise be a thing like them, but a thing which, insofar as it is a universal, represents them all. We can say this phone is worth 20 times the value of this pen, or 30 times, whatever — or conversely, right, that this pack of cigarettes — I don't have any left, a whole one — I can't anymore — and a fraction, a portion of what this microwave is worth.
27:48 There you go. They're all comparable in terms of exchange value. Right? So, here we get to it: money is this material concept — concept, nothing seems more abstract, we're in the logos, we're not in matter. Money is this existing material concept, the form of unity, not — as I say — man in general, as opposed to the particular man whose hand I shake; I don't shake the hand of man in general.
28:21 That's man in general, an abstraction that's in my head. Whereas here, it's a universal that is quite concrete. Money is this existing material concept, the form of unity, or again — listen closely — the possibility of all things of need. When you get your paycheck and you have money in your pocket, you feel a little moment of euphoria, you suddenly feel full of expanded possibilities. And as Spinoza says so well, joy comes from an increase in power — you suddenly have a possible increase in power.
28:53 It's the same thing, it's power, all that. Money is this existing material concept, the form of unity or again the possibility of all things of need. And that's why it drives us mad, right? Without, you see, of all the things of need, any one being specifically determined yet — I don't yet know what I'll buy first. Money doesn't designate the commodity that must be bought with it as a priority, that's something else. There you have it: need and labor, raised to this universality, thus form — he's defining our world here — for itself, within a great people, an immense system of community and reciprocal dependence, a life that moves within itself, self-sufficient, of a dead reality — he's talking about civil society here, what's called civil society in political philosophy — of a dead reality, a life which, in its movement, stirs blindly and elementally, and which, like a wild beast, needs to be continually tamed and mastered with severity.
29:55 As you might expect, Hegel doesn't let liberal savagery run loose, he says the beast has to be tamed and mastered with severity. There you go, you gave me the opportunity to read this splendid text, which is the conclusion of the passage on the pin factory. There, if you want to know exactly where, in this edition it starts on page 128. Thank you so much, Stéphane, for your loyalty and the relevance of your questions.
