English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Yonville, Emma Bovary, and the danger of imagination in power 1:30 On the Y, here again it's a bit complicated, so I took something in the order of fiction. It's a town called Yonville. Yonville is the town imagined by Flaubert, where precisely Emma, Bovary, the anti-Julie, is going to entertain a great many illusions about these questions of love and end in tragedy, as we know.
2:05 So my question was, in the end, what is the place of the imaginary in literary creation, and also this relationship between illusion and imagination. How can we distinguish them? Because sometimes the boundary isn't as obvious as all that. So you, being a dialectician and a Hegelian, you'll no doubt find something to put a 'against' and a 'with', to find a little bit what the key is and the solution to the relationship of the creator when he invents Yonville, for example.
2:42 And then his creature, Emma Bovary, lost in a world of illusions, in an imaginary world and in a world of illusions. You took the words right out of my mouth, I was about to start answering. Indeed, that connects to the question of against, against-with, depending on the status one gives to the imaginary. So I'll start, as always, by claiming a tradition, and Hegel-Marx appears aggressively rationalist and therefore opposed to the values of the imaginary — I'll start by taking on that nasty role. It's far from exhausting what I think about it, but I start there, in all honesty.
3:18 There was a slogan in '68 that you all know, 'imagination to power.' It's nice, I'm young, it's generous, it's beautiful. What I've always loved is to see it carried out — well, a society that sets out to put imagination in power. It's terrifying. It's not in the heads of the young people who chanted that refrain. I was one of them, I took part in demonstrations. But what's terrifying is to see what that can let slip through fraudulently.
3:49 Because the Corsicans make good customs officers [play on words]. Demonstrations of power, that has existed — that's the Third Reich. I should say, strictly speaking, the imaginary in power. Ruled by fantasies, by representation — Nuremberg, the ceremony, isn't that the imaginary? And Goebbels blasting the funeral march from Twilight of the Gods in his bunker, and the figure of the Jew there in cars kidnapping children — there were films circulating saying beware of unidentified passing cars, there are Jews inside stealing children and putting them in sacks like the ogre, etc. Isn't that the imaginary being in power? Be wary of the imaginary as a value, especially in the political domain. So there we're in aesthetics, we're in...
The imaginary "while waiting": Hölderlin, Rousseau, the Romantics 5:03 the plastic arts or politics, for the two extremes, passing through music, whatever you like — it's in the meantime. While waiting for it to become real, we need the imaginary to evoke it and to induce its coming into being. For example, Hölderlin is a poet who acclaimed the French Revolution, acclaimed the New Society, etc., and yet his work keeps getting taken for that of a nostalgic for ancient Greece.
5:37 But as he says very well — that's why I begin my expression with 'in the meantime.' Meanwhile, there's a beautiful hymn of his that begins like this. He's an immense reader of Rousseau, it's true I like to quote him. 'Meanwhile, grant me to turn my thought toward the hours of festival, and that a peace be given me toward the dead. For long ago there died many beautiful women, captains and poets, and such great multitudes of men.' Meanwhile — meanwhile what? The classless society? The revolution, I don't know — but meanwhile, while waiting for a change in the real state of things, the imaginary is necessary, for that is where truth might take refuge — I'll go that far. It took the Rousseau of the Reveries to give full truth and depth to the Social Contract, or the one of La Nouvelle Héloïse, whose preface answers your question somewhat: I dedicate this book to all those who have put reality into their chimeras. There is this sacred function of the imaginary which I defend tooth and nail and which has given us an indeterminate number of masterpieces, again in the plastic arts as much as in music or the arts of language.
6:47 when the imaginary is, for one part, the flight from that portion of reality which prevents me from adhering to it — I come back to servitude and to the domination of the outside world, to adhering to it totally. But there is also a realism of the imaginary, if I absolutely wanted to be a dialectician. That is to say, insofar as nothing measures up to the truth of the society I'm waiting for, I mean, I withdraw into a world of reverie and imagination.
7:19 But here again we find the same ambivalence there was for nature earlier. There is a deadly imagination that leads to dead ends, to regressions if I may say so. And we mustn't forget that the whole generation of German Romantics ends in suicide or madness, or both. I often cite Nerval — with him it's both, madness and suicide. Isn't that exactly where you're making a fairly precise and rigorous distinction between illusion and the imaginary? That is, the two aren't the same, they aren't superimposable, but on the other hand the imaginary always has an illusory side to it.
Illusion as inversion of the real: Copernicus, Spinoza, Nietzsche 7:55 especially if I take illusion in its precise sense, which isn't simply false — because 4 plus 5 equals 11 is false, but that's not an illusion, that's a distraction, a tiredness, a cup of coffee and it's over, and I correct it. Whereas, man and the earth, we are at the center of the world, we are the Paris of that whole suburb which is the universe, but we are there near the Louvre — that's an illusion. What does that mean? It means it's not just false; it means the true is not simply different from the false.
8:25 What Copernicus set right was not a truth that was merely different from the false. It was the opposite, the reverse. That's illusion. Besides, all illusions begin with optical illusions, where everything is inverted. Everything is inverted, exactly. So that's not a coincidence. I'm a threat — for example, for others, I in turn become a paranoid person who always feels threatened. That's the German world, the American world, etc. I feel threatened, my geraniums on the windowsill are threatened, right?
8:55 There are little backwaters where there isn't an immigrant within a three-kilometer radius. But illusion is the inversion of the real. Illusion is not nothing. Spinoza gave one of the finest accounts of illusion. He says: if error and illusion consisted in saying things that don't exist, we ought rather to admire them, and admire the power of the human mind to act like God, to create, to make appear things that don't exist. He says no — it's realities in the imaginary. But watch out, a reality that is not in its place, that is, in the very Freudian sense, displaced.
9:26 As I said earlier, Nietzsche's mistreated horse, which takes the place of the man, in France. Isn't it Nietzsche who rehabilitated illusion? Yes, he rehabilitated that word, that is, he even makes a defense of it. Yes, because all of philosophy set itself up against illusion. There's no bad intention at the outset, I don't quite understand what he means — and especially in aesthetics it's better to stay on the surface than to go into the depths. The Nietzsche I adore, the one least commented on, is the one who is anti-aesthetic, unexpectedly, when he says somewhere: 'I am weary of all the poets who muddy their waters so that they may seem deep.' That's something you won't find in Foucault's geography, by contrast — it's he who makes the apology of unequivocal clarity and the concept. It's unexpected coming from Nietzsche — the poets muddy their waters so they seem deep. He contradicts himself on every page, because afterward he says Zarathustra is a poet and not a philosopher — but that's where his richness lies. So again, there's always illusion in the imaginary, but there are illusions...
10:36 ...of a prospective kind, and afterward the truth must be put back in its right place. Illusion isn't being in relation to a thing that doesn't exist, or exists only in my head; on the contrary, it's in relation to a deep reality that has been displaced. For example, I think today that a great part of ecological distress — and here I take the matter seriously, because these are people who are sincerely unhappy — ecologists suffer from the world they live in, from aggressions, from industries, from their carpets that give them cancer, I can't help caricaturing it a little, but indeed dangers much more serious than that unfortunately, or nuclear waste in your region.
Ecological distress as displacement; nature does not suffer 11:16 and done without taste, without consultation, without precaution, and with a scientific assurance before which we can only bow since we're not experts — all of that is nonetheless quite random for matters this serious. These real threats are, to a large extent, a displacement — a displacement, let me give an example of what I meant by displacement — of the unhappiness we're living through. The crisis has been there a long time; what's called 'the crisis' in the short sense is only from a few years ago, but it's only the revelation of a crisis that's been going on since the 1970s. We can see clearly, I mean, since the financialization of the economy, since the decoupling of the dollar from gold, the Nixon move in 1971 — that's no coincidence.
11:54 In some sense, people are unhappy. I'm not going to reproach them for being unhappy. I simply reproach them for attributing their unhappiness to the reasons that the dominant power whispers to them, as reasons meant to mask the real causes of that unhappiness. That's it. It's not nature that suffers — nature does not suffer. You can crush a stone to make sand out of it, I mean, it's not going to complain and say, I'm going to complain to the human rights commission, or the stones' rights commission.
12:26 Nature does not suffer, again. And when the animal, and even the child, when he's still a little savage, not yet educated, is sacred — insofar as he belongs to me, harming a child is harming its parents, etc. — it's insofar as he's inscribed within a human community that it's sacred. But nature by itself does not complain, hence this displacement. I often say, when I talk with certain ecologists, who are great interlocutors otherwise, I tell them: you're against nuclear power, you're for nature.
12:57 But the biggest nuclear plant is nature itself, by far. The sun is a gigantic nuclear plant that spends its time fusing deuterium, tritium. That's not my field, so I won't go on too long — but what's quite clear is that all energy comes from a permanent nuclear fission, I mean, nearly permanent until the possibilities run out, of course, because of entropy, etc. So nature is implacable — even toward nature. Nature wiped out the dinosaurs, who reigned, who were more powerful than man was at the time relative to the planet — it wiped them out without asking their opinion. And there weren't yet men, of whom I would be one — I'm the first to defend the survival of this or that animal species that I would be sorry to see disappear.
13:37 And then when I go into a forest, even if I don't see a single animal cross the path, if you tell me before I go in, there's not a single forest animal left, we've hunted everything, it's going to be a wasteland, there's nothing left — somehow that removes some of the interest of the forest. The mere fact of imagining that an animal might appear adds interest to it. But that's a selfish interest, I'm not speaking in terms of political values. It adds mystery, charm to the forest, etc. That is, it's... Well, here again, we have to recenter on man — it's insofar as man can, at best, become not the exterminator but the shepherd of nature.
14:09 Man is the first human species to concern itself with the survival of other species. That can happen somewhere in the world of nature, but only among what we might call symbiotic species, those that need each other to survive — that's something else again. But still, the fact — I'll be a bit blunt — there are evolutionary dead ends. An animal like the panda, I want it to survive, it's cute, it's adorable, like everyone thinks; even though a bear is far more dangerous than a lizard, but childish racism works like that — a lizard is mean and a bear is slow, that's how it is in the imaginary, we can see it's a dangerous function of the imaginary. But the panda, which can only survive if it eats a certain category of bamboo that grows only in certain valleys deep in China, is a species condemned by evolution — were it not for man, it might already have disappeared. Second example: the cheetah, poor cheetah, whose speed is always shown to us, the world speed record among mammals, speed record, 110 km/h — yes, but it can only hold it for 3 or 4 seconds, that's well known to specialists on the matter, and it has to try again 15 times a day, with 14 failures before finally catching something...
15:19 that looks like a gazelle that was a bit sick or young, and that it managed to catch for its cubs. Well, it's not over, because as soon as it has caught it, there's a lion that had been dozing nearby who wakes up and with one swipe of his paw takes it away from the cheetah, and the cheetah won't have fed its cubs at all — these are evolutionary dead ends. I would be delighted if the cheetah were protected, if its extinction were prevented, for selfish reasons — I'd be delighted, I'm glad to see one, and that's personal. But in some sense, if it were left to nature alone, it's on its way to extinction, whereas the panther, which lives just as well in the forest as in drought as in the savanna, etc., is found almost throughout the whole tropical world — we don't see it because it's nocturnal. Sorry for these African digressions.
