English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Freud: the death drives progress in silence 0:00 As long as we talk about music, and for as long as it isn't idle to speak in place of music, we ran into the difficulty right from the start, and we're not going to leave it at that. But since we're talking about it, there's still a statement I'd like to introduce now, one I can't help drawing your attention to. It's a statement I'm borrowing not from a musician, nor from a philosopher, but from a doctor, a doctor of souls, since it's a psychoanalyst, a chief psychoanalyst.
0:32 I'm thinking of Freud, and I'm borrowing from the late Freud, the one in his final topography, that is, the one who suddenly understood that beyond even the pleasure principle, there was something even more imperious, more fundamental, namely the death drive. So the late Freud, who says this: "The death drives progress in silence." There are two ways of breaking the silence voluntarily, I would say. That is speaking and singing, expressing oneself through words or expressing oneself through sounds.
1:07 In any case, according to Freud, that's always better than silence. "The death drives progress in silence." What does Freud mean? It's the silence that is immanent to expression. It's what is not said within the saying, the unsaid. And perhaps that's where music takes up its full function again, to express what words have not dared to make explicit. Music arises out of silence like any figure in the plastic arts, whether in painting or drawing.
1:44 Every figure arises against a background. When music begins, it's always a silence that is broken. Linguists make a clear distinction. Language [langage]. A system of communication common to humanity. A tongue [langue]. Ah, a system of communication too, but specific to a people, not to all of humanity. There's a Japanese language and then there are Bantu languages. But for now, we're not in existence, we're in essence. Ah, that sounds abstract. No, no, it's very, very simple. It just means that for now, a tongue is a system, it's a code, like the highway code.
2:16 Nobody drives the way the highway code says to in reality. You always cross the yellow line a little just to pass a tractor that's annoying you when there's no one coming the other way. What exists is not really the highway code. What exists is not the tongue. It's speech [la parole]. Language proper to humanity, a tongue proper to a people, speech is the business of each individual. And there, we enter into the existence of language. Language only begins to exist at the level of a singular, sonorous speech.
Speaking and saying; music, images, and analogy 2:46 That's where we see that speech is not discourse in general. It's not ready-made formulas. To illustrate my point, I'd like to do a kind of crisscross between speech and music. I hear people next door, in the apartment next to mine. The walls are often thin. I hear people speaking Chinese. I'm using Chinese because I don't understand it. So, I hear people talking. Do you agree? I can clearly see that they're talking. I don't want to confuse the sounds I hear them exchanging with the sound of the wind in the windows.
3:17 No, no, no. I can clearly see that these are people talking. But I don't understand a thing they're saying. Ah! You see that it's not complicated at all, the difference between speaking and saying. One can very well recognize that there is speech without knowing what it says. Music is of that order. We clearly feel that something is speaking to us. We can argue for hours about what it says to one person, what it says to another. One will see the wind murmuring in the branches.
3:49 And the other will see the churning waves of the western sea. Why not? We're not going to say one is right and the other is wrong. What I'd like to show you here is that music has no use for all these images. Not because it has nothing to do with these images, but we could have given 2000 of them for the same passage. An infinity. You get what I mean. Now we're touching on an extremely deep problem. Imagine someone sleeping out under the stars.
4:20 And behind his back, he didn't see it when he fell asleep, there's a little sharp pebble, right? It hurts his back a bit. Let's imagine all the dreams he might have. One will dream that at that spot he has a boil. Another will dream that a snake bites him there. A third will dream that a dog bites him there. You see that there's an infinity of possible realizations of a single reality, which is the sharp pebble that's there and which has nothing to do with anything we've just said. Music is like that pebble.
4:51 You can give an infinity of images for it, all of them justified. They all have something in common, something analogical. I'm not talking about comparison, I'm talking about analogy. Mathematicians know perfectly well what analogy is. It's A over B equals C over D. It's not the empirical, visual comparison of Peter and Paul, saying, "Look, one is thin, one is fat." No. It's not the empirical visual comparison of two distinct realities. It's the comparison of two ratios.
5:21 What A is to B, that is what C is to D. So what the murmur of the wind over the waves of the western sea is, that is what the autumn breeze is to the foliage of the forest. This is what Baudelaire called correspondences. I'll extract just the following line: "There are perfumes fresh as children's flesh, sweet as oboes, green as meadows."
5:52 You see, correspondence between all the senses. "There are perfumes," that's for smell. "Fresh as children's flesh," that's for touch. "Sweet as oboes," that's a sound. "Green as meadows," that's for the eye. What does that mean? That there is something circulating between the green of the meadows, the timbre of the oboe, and the freshness of children's flesh, but which is neither a vision, nor a hearing, nor a touch, nor anything sensory, which is absolutely invisible, untouchable, inaudible.
6:22 You can call it metaphysical if you like, but it's extraordinary. Not metaphysical in the sense of a beyond, but a metaphysical that is present. This is what's called immanence in philosophy, as opposed to transcendence. There is something there, circulating, which makes the green of the meadows, the timbre of the oboe, and the touch of children's flesh stand in a relation of analogy. Well, that is exactly the relation music maintains with all the representations that come to mind when we hear it.
All speech signifies for someone first: from the shepherd to the daughters of the Rhine 6:55 All these representations, most often visual or dramatic. One can imagine an action, a predator chasing a prey, and that can correspond very well to the musical sequence we're hearing at that moment. Yes, we started with: the death drives progress in silence. But one can speak in order to say nothing. And that's not meant pejoratively. When a soldier chats up a girl on a train, his speech isn't meant to inform her, to teach her things, but so that she doesn't get off at the next stop, so that she doesn't change cars.
7:29 He'll try to be funny, to interest her. What matters isn't what he says, but to whom he says it. And that's what leads a great Freudian, I'm thinking of Jacques Lacan, to say: before signifying something, all speech signifies for someone. And that's not the case for music. There is an addressee who is often unconscious. I think I'm making music for myself alone, just like that, to express myself, like the shepherd all alone on the moor. But in fact, he's thinking of his beloved, somewhere.
8:01 For example, Chateaubriand, in an admirable passage from the Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, hearing in the distance a shepherd's song, says, "This song reminded me that, all over the earth, the spontaneous song of man is sad."
8:57 As if music were a kind of speech, but a speech—I'll tell you exactly, you all know it, especially those of you who've had children—this speech that infants begin to articulate, young children, as if they were talking to us: they already have the channel perfectly mastered, but they don't yet have the code.
9:28 Music is somewhat of that order, like an infra-speech. And I'm thinking here, to illustrate it, of a passage taken from the Ring—the Ring is Wagner—right at the very beginning of the Ring, in the prologue to the Ring cycle. This prologue is called Das Rheingold [The Rhinegold]. It's a pretext to tell the origin of the world, it's a cosmogony; everything begins in the waters of the Rhine, you know that in all cosmogonies everything begins at the bottom of the water. From the depths of the Rhine emerge the first three characters, who aren't yet characters that will matter later—they're the three Rhinemaidens, the first ones we see stirring there, all of a sudden.
10:00 Think of naiads and freshwater sirens. And their first words are that babble I told you about: "Weia! Waga! Woge, du Welle, walle zur Wiege." Wagner begins by playing with these sonorities, as if they were girls babbling.
Two ways of keeping silent: silence and the instrument 10:38 If I repeat Freud's saying that the death drives progress in silence, there are two ways to overcome silence, speaking and singing. There are also two ways of falling silent, of passing over in silence. I'll take it the other way around now, to lead into a crucial distinction within musical expression itself.
11:12 You can fall silent either by saying nothing at all—total silence, you put up a microphone and hear nothing—but you can also fall silent while playing an instrument. You say nothing, you play. That's a way of being silent that we're not used to putting in parallel with the previous one. Because if I play the piano, the flute, in short, if I only play without singing, without singing with words—because you can also fall silent while singing, that's what's called scat in jazz.
12:13 I express myself, I sing, but I've said nothing. That's where you understand my earlier example with the Chinese. Saying is speaking, plus a very precise meaning. Whereas here, that's not the case. And yet it's precise from a sonic point of view. You can measure pitches, sounds, frequencies, whatever you like.
12:46 So making instrumental music is also a way of being silent. And thus perhaps playing into the death drive. On the other hand, there can be a way of expressing oneself without saying anything precise, as instrumental music does with admirable precision, down to the tiniest detail, down to the most subtle and infinitesimal nuance. Piano, forte, high, low, speeding up, slowing down, all of that is present in instrumental music.
13:21 So it's a way of being silent, but not meant to deceive us—rather to say and to express everything that words haven't dared to say. What they might have wanted to say, but didn't dare, as if they were retreating at a certain threshold of verbal expression, faced with the stakes of their own unveiling. I'm thinking here of Hölderlin, who said this admirable line: "The most perilous of goods, speech, has been given to man." The most perilous. And a fabulist from antiquity, Aesop, said—it's a famous phrase—"The tongue is the best and the worst of things."
13:58 It's the best because it's capable of educating, transmitting, teaching, revealing, informing, but it can also serve slander, lies, and so on. Well, to get around this ambivalence of speech, there is the truth of pure music. That's an expression one could debate, because "pure" carries a somewhat unjustified moral value judgment. But in any case, we're more precise saying instrumental music. That is, music that is not in the service of a text, whether religious or secular, or of a poem, or of a scenario, that is not in the service of an extra-musical activity, that is not a text meant to sing of peace, or war, or love.
Emancipation of pure music and Wotan's farewell 14:38 And yet, it speaks to us. When we see the stakes of this pure music, this instrumental music, and the importance of what it tells us without saying anything, we shouldn't be too surprised to understand why it took so long in the history of music to arise, to appear, and to begin to develop. Because the further back we go into the past, the less we find music separated from speech. So almost all ancient music, let's say up to the 16th, 17th century, remains essentially vocal.
15:13 Music took a long time to emancipate itself, not from this vocal constraint—it's not a constraint, it produces masterpieces—but in any case, from this vocal companionship, in order to be content with expressing this permanent unsaid which is pure sound, sound without words. It expressed itself so purely instrumentally that even when it returns to the vocal—I'm thinking of what opera becomes after Bach, after Beethoven, with Wagner for example—it can happen that, in the dramatic sequence Wagner has us hear, what the orchestra says completely contradicts what the characters are saying, what the story is supposed to be telling is contradicted by the music, which tells another story—not just another, but sometimes the opposite of what the voice is saying.
16:08 I'm going to illustrate this for you with an excerpt from the final measures of Die Walküre, the second part of the immense tetralogy of the Ring, usually referred to as Wotan's Farewell. Wotan is the German Zeus, king of the gods, and he's saying farewell to his daughter because he's punishing her, putting her into an eternal sleep, until she's awakened by the first man who will possess her. It's supposed to be a father's farewell to his daughter—it's not a cataclysmic ending, as is often the case with Wagner, it's an ending where he himself says in the stage directions that the curtain falls slowly; it's an ending all in gentleness, with all the drives slowing down, since she's going to sleep for millennia.
16:51 You can guess there's an echo of Sleeping Beauty here. So he is putting her to sleep, and we hear above all a theme we heard much earlier in Das Rheingold and which has been repeated many times since, called the renunciation of love. So the orchestra tells us, through the instruments, that in bidding farewell to his daughter, Wotan renounces love. Wagner, Die Walküre, Act Three, finale, Wotan's farewell to his favorite daughter.
