English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Amnesia and anamnesis: announcement of the cycle 0:15 Good evening everyone, good evening dear friends, dear comrades, dear faithful followers of all ages and all genders. I'm very glad to be back with you, because it's been a long time. I'm even wondering whether you still remember me. No, no, that's because I'm going to talk about memory, don't worry. Well, about memory and amnesia, one never knows. About amnesia and, on the contrary, the return of memory, that is, anamnesis.
0:46 It's the Greek privative alpha; you add an N when it's before a vowel. So, aphonia is with an A, and anamnesis, to avoid a hiatus. There. I'm keeping the properly philosophical treatment for the next session, drawing on texts from the philosophical corpus. There's no shortage on memory. A bit less on forgetting, as it happens.
1:17 But the praise of forgetting being a somewhat more recent thing. So I'm keeping all my philosophical texts for later, texts running from Plato, who said that all knowledge is recollection, to Nietzsche, to Bergson—Bergson's masterpiece is undoubtedly Matter and Memory, precisely. And Nietzsche—we posted an important text for you, since he defends forgetting, doesn't he?
1:57 Apparently against a well-established tradition. I said that the praise of forgetting was more modern, but that's a very general preamble. It needs to be qualified, because in Greek mythology—I'm not talking about a philosopher here, but about the mythology that is basically the staple food of nearly all classical Greek authors, whether literary or philosophical—look how often Plato quotes Homer.
2:32 In mythology, there is mention of one of the rivers we must cross to pass from life to death. You know that passing from life to death, for the Greeks, always means crossing a river. The Acheron, the Erebus, the Lethe. Well, the Lethe is the river that brings forgetting. Plato of course makes great use of it in his theory of recollection, particularly in Book 10 of the Republic.
3:07 The patient—I was about to say the dead person—must drink the water of the Lethe to forget everything of their past life and prepare to be reborn in a new avatar, in a reincarnation, if you prefer. There, I won't dwell on this. I'm keeping the properly philosophical treatment of these issues, in a more continuous way, for the next session.
3:42 But first, as a preamble, before starting with the more literary texts—even if their philosophical exploitation can prove inexhaustibly rich—I will begin by... I'm taking the opportunity of being with you live to greet you, to hope that you are in good health, and to acknowledge this long interruption, which combines the summer holidays.
Return from Corsica and megaliths with human faces 4:16 We are in France, where they are still, for a while longer, shorter than when I was studying, but still longer than in the average of comparable countries. And then lockdown on top of that—that leaves a big gap, doesn't it? Fortunately it was Philippe Moreau's initiative, whom I salute for this, during the start of Covid, and before I gave myself a break too—which hadn't happened to me in years—to go on holiday.
4:53 I had this somewhat silly idea in my head that a retiree is almost always on holiday. I didn't put it to myself quite so clearly, otherwise I would have answered myself with Bernard Friot's excellent counter-arguments against this view of things. If holiday means doing nothing at all, being inactive. But I realized it suddenly did me good, and that I was doing much more than I thought. We still held weekly livestreams throughout the last period before my departure, right up until the end of August.
5:26 And so I took a bit more than a month in Corsica. I salute them here because I believe I wouldn't have left otherwise. You know someone who had a heart-attack-style neurotic fantasy—like, at takeoff, my heart is going to give out. On first contact with the water, I'll sink like a stone because of the temperature difference. My heart won't take it—silly things that evaporated thanks to those who came to pick me up at my place in Cachan, with their car, with a tent and a sleeping bag.
6:02 I salute here Pauline and Yannick, my comrades from the PRCF who are also faithful listeners of our workshops, and who were kind enough—forgive me if I'm embarrassing them by declaring my gratitude to them in public—who drove me from Paris down to the Côte d'Azur, where we boarded, took the boat with their car, and spent a few weeks, I hope unforgettable ones, in Corsica. They were discovering it, and as for me, you know well that when it comes to transmission, I rarely declare myself absent.
6:38 There. So, all this means I'm resuming properly philosophical activities in a personal capacity, as Clouscard used to say—it's a quote I already used in a post I put up five years ago at the start of the summer holidays. I could hear Clouscard saying, with his great laugh, when we were on holiday by a mountain stream in Corsica, he'd say to me: there are no holidays in the concept.
7:12 So, but anyway, I was, let's say, on holiday from the effort of communication, the effort of transmission, that's for sure—with one exception, you see, which I allowed myself thanks to the Materia Scritta publishing house, whom I also salute. You see my preamble is trying not to forget anything, since we're going to talk about forgetting, I gave a small, vaguely philosophical talk as part of a festival where I was on the program in Propriano, in southern Corsica, in a region that is the densest in Europe archaeologically speaking.
7:52 It's not... well, since one finds megaliths there that are the earliest in Western Europe. If I stop here, you'll say, that's not possible, is it? And Stonehenge, I don't know—and it's even more... Yes, yes, surely Stonehenge, or even Carnac in Brittany, which has the largest alignment in all of Europe and probably the largest alignment of standing stones in the world, in Morbihan—those don't have a human shape. Now in Corsica, these are the earliest megaliths with a human figure. You even sometimes see swords in relief, you see, and sometimes even genitals, a small pair of breasts sometimes to indicate it's a woman.
8:30 In short, they stand upright like that. I gave a talk on this, even though it's not my field, but because the theme of the festival was the coastline, the notion of the shoreline, and because Corsica's fate has always been divided between the sea, which allows communication with the rest of the world, but which is also, precisely because of that, the source of all dangers, all perils.
9:00 You often notice in Corsica that you can see the sea from the village, but people make sure the village can't be seen from the sea, because danger has always come from there. Not to mention that the sea, at a time when there was no tourism, no prosperity, was where there was the least water, because Corsica is very... there are more than 100 peaks above 2000 meters, water streams down everywhere as soon as you go up a bit, but by the sea there are sometimes marshy plains, the largest being the eastern plain. I'm giving you a geography lesson, but you'll see, it's very important.
9:32 There was malaria ravaging the coast, so you see, the most common settlement pattern in Corsica lies between 400 and 1000 meters, roughly. There. There are villages higher than 1000 meters, there are towns lower down, especially since seaside tourism, but still, the traditional villages are within that band. So these megaliths are there, and I gave a little talk, and if I dwelled on it a bit, it's because I told the audience straight away that I was going to freestyle on a subject I don't know.
10:15 That made them laugh and it helped lighten the mood on the port of Propriano. And besides, I don't know them as a specialist would—I'm neither an archaeologist nor a historian, I've never done a carbon-14 dating experiment myself. All that has been done, all that is very well documented, but precisely, the more you look into the specialists who have tackled this dossier, the more memory gets lost. It's extraordinary. The more memory traces we have, where we can perfectly well know on what date bronze arrived in Corsica...
10:51 But the statues in question date from the end of the Neolithic and the very beginning of the Bronze Age, the late Neolithic if you prefer. There, that's between roughly 1500 and 800 BC. So I was struck to see that the humility and modesty of the true specialists isn't that they carefully avoid having a thesis.
11:22 Is it Sardinians and Corsicans who went to the eastern Mediterranean in a coalition that attacked Egypt, the fact being reported this time formally in a country that had entered history through writing—I'm thinking of Pharaonic Egypt—or is it, on the contrary, peoples from the eastern Mediterranean, the famous Sea Peoples mentioned on the stelae of Ramesses II and one of his descendants, let's not complicate things, who emigrated following considerable geopolitical and military catastrophes, about which practically nothing is known, but which resulted, roughly, along with the collapse of the great Babylonian, Egyptian empires, etc., or their entry into definitive decline, which is dated to around the 12th century, and who would have gone to take refuge in Sardinia, in Corsica—nobody knows.
The ideological thickness of prehistory 12:19 Most likely, it's the Sea Peoples, which allowed us to move on to the festival's theme of the coastline. And that's what... while working on the dossier, I realized that there was not only a considerable temporal thickness—already when speaking of prehistory or proto-history, as is the case here—but also a thick ideological layer, a layer, if you prefer, of ideology.
12:50 So there, in current debates, you can't even say 'Neolithic' among the specialists dealing with the matter without there being an argument. Some react—and it's not stupid, after all, I mean—to say that Neanderthal, who was presented as a brute, whom people even refused to include in the genus Homo, isn't it, that he shouldn't be called Neanderthal man, but simply Neanderthal, etc.
13:22 And in reaction, some have said he was so advanced that, next to him, we ourselves, Homo sapiens, are almost morons. You see, you find everything and its opposite. Who's the specialist? You can guess there's ideological weight here. Because starting from the Neolithic, there's agriculture. The nomad becomes sedentary, doesn't he? And you know there are those for whom it's a tragedy to have abandoned hunting and gathering to go wrest, so to speak, artifice from nature.
13:53 You follow my drift—you see there are stakes here that aren't scientific at all. Everyone leans on scientific data. You can always find, you know, something to back up your case when you're set on it. I remind you there were very great scholars and very great physicists in the Nazi era. I mean, scientific competence, even culture, literary, artistic.
14:24 And intelligence—that of the understanding, not of reason, that of the understanding, the 'if... then' kind, as in mathematics—can be considerable in an individual and not spare him, not blindness exactly—he sees plenty of things—but obtuseness, which is quite different from the blindness of not-seeing. Obtuseness isn't being partially sighted. And a fellow like Heisenberg, for instance, often praised, didn't he, the regime of the Third Reich.
"I have changed": a dialectical statement 15:01 Whereas it wouldn't occur to me—and how could it, since I don't know much about it—but still, his peers today are the first to recognize the importance he had in the emergence of quantum theory. You see. So, that's to tell you, I begin with all these stakes, everything that put me on the track of devoting something to this business of Amnesia. But not only that. I told you that the philosophical treatment through texts, I'm postponing it to next session, but I'm not saying we won't do any philosophy today on the themes that concern us.
15:36 And I'm going to begin with Rousseau's text, which raises nothing less than the problem of identity. I'll introduce it before reading it with a very simple example. About as simple as can be. So simple it has often been given as an essay topic to final-year high school students, for instance. Does the statement 'I have changed' express a contradiction? You see, it's simple. The statement 'I have changed.' Example: yesterday I was sick, today I am well.
16:10 Does this statement express a contradiction? I had already tackled this in a workshop a few months ago. And I recall that our friend Tarek took part in the answers. But you can see, I'm not going to waste time doing maieutics on this, I'll give away the outcome right away: yes and no. There is indeed a contradiction, since the statement affirms a change.
16:44 "I was sick, I am well"—and that can be proven scientifically. I don't know, I had a fever, I no longer do, it's measurable. Yesterday, today, I no longer have it. But at the same time, it's still the same subject. I have changed, I was sick, I am well. So the statement affirms a change and affirms something that is invariant, that doesn't change, that persists—in short, the statement is dialectical.
17:14 It's the simplest statement, 'I have changed,' and it's dialectical. So, I told you that the part which changes can be tested experimentally in the hard sciences, since you like that expression—the natural sciences, the exact sciences, let's call it whatever we want for now, as long as it designates the same body of knowledge—mathematics and its applications, mostly in the fields of the so-called natural sciences, from physics to biology.
17:51 So, this statement is dialectical—the part that changes is testable, but the part that persists, where is it? Where is this 'I' that was sick and is now well? It isn't in anything we can describe of it, since what we describe—for example, the body, the body temperature I measure—is precisely what changes. The body. You know that not a single one of our cells—we have more than 2 billion—not a single one remains identical to itself at each instant of passing time.
18:24 We are in permanent metabolism. It's a bit unsettling, but don't worry. It has always been like that in living things, hasn't it? That doesn't stop the fact that if I meet a Philippe tomorrow in the street, he'll say to me, 'Hey, hi Dominique!' I mean, that's a change in part, but there is an identity that persists. Well, I'm telling you today that this identity is suspended, in part, on an effort of memory.
18:54 I've almost—I already have almost enough to start on Rousseau's text, but just before, after the introduction, a little foreword to lighten things up. You know, there was a comedic show, a mainstream show called—I don't know if it still exists, because it's been a long time since I fled television, I only watch news channels on the internet, or of course debates, forums, etc. But I don't watch the general channels—there was a show called 'Candid Camera.'
19:28 You know, they'd make someone believe unbelievable things while that person didn't know they were being filmed, and at the end they'd tell them, 'There you go, actually, we were pulling your leg.' In my day, that existed too. Some say it was even funnier, and it was called 'The Invisible Camera,' for those with white hair like me who remember it. Well, I remember one of those episodes where they made someone believe—someone who used to come almost every week to his dry cleaner in his neighborhood to bring his laundry—with the agreement of the production company, which had the means.
20:07 They changed practically all the shop windows in the neighborhood, you see, the appearance, the appearance. For a certain time, they put things in front. In short, there was no more dry cleaner, no more bar, etc. It was hidden behind scaffolding. The guy nearly went mad. That's exactly what loss of identity is. Because he ran into people who were in on the show, of course, part of the show's team, who said, 'There was indeed a dry cleaner there. I was there last week.'
20:37 'Oh no, I've never seen a dry cleaner here,' you see. If others don't recognize you in the elements of your identity, if the setting has changed, and if your memory loses its supports, you're no longer sure of that identity. But no, I'll leave the anecdote and come back to one of the greatest theorists of the self, of this famous self that was present, for now, when I was sick and that is still present when I am well.
Fichte and the pure self 21:11 It's an impersonal 'I'—each of you can say the same thing. One of those who reflected most on this pure self, as self, clearly distinct as subject from everything that stands before it as object, including its own body, because I see my hand, so that's not me, is it? It's part of me, I would say, but it's not reduced to that. If I lose my hand, I remain myself. It's Fichte. My hand—Fichte's philosophy is rather complicated, but I'll recall an anecdote I already cited in a workshop, again a few months ago, reported by Henrik Steffens, a Norwegian traveler who had the means at the time and who traveled—it was the very beginning of tourism—across the whole of Romantic Germany to meet a few of the representatives of that fabulous verbal ocean, to use Armel Guerne's phrase, who translated almost all of them, that was German Romanticism.
22:16 German idealism, I prefer to say, because there are poets and writers, philosophers who write poetry, poets like Hölderlin who do philosophy. Think of Nietzsche later, who is still within that current, isn't he? Nietzsche, then. A long poem that I'll quote as part of the cycle beginning today—but not today. A long poem in Zarathustra called 'The Song of Melancholy,' where there's a refrain that goes: 'You, friend of wisdom—understood, philosophia, literally, you, friend of wisdom—come now, nothing but a fool, nothing but a poet.'
22:53 You see this hesitation between the genre of poetry and the genre of philosophy in German idealism. So, this Henrik Steffens—forgive me if I forget the name—this Norwegian, wanders about and tells us of a session he attended, a lecture by Fichte. It was all quite new, these lectures by great philosophers with listeners present. There weren't many. When there were about twenty, it was a great success. There was no national ministry of education, there was a ministry of religious affairs, you see, again, religious and secular teaching were not yet clearly separated.
23:28 In short. And yes, Hegel was employed by the ministry of religious affairs in Berlin. So, Fichte is giving his lecture in Jena, a small town in Thuringia, as we say in French. And here is what he says to his students, according to our Norwegian. It's very quick: 'Gentlemen, retreat into yourselves. Here it is only a matter of ourselves. Gentlemen, think of the wall.'
23:59 And the Norwegians, Steffens reports, all the students look at the wall. Successfully. He adds, with quite a bit of humor. And then, Fichte, second stage, says, now gentlemen, think of the one who thought the wall. And there, there's a bit of unease in the class. They look at one another, and they don't have a mirror to look at themselves either. It's not them. You see, when I say that this I, this pure I which only posits itself by opposing itself to everything that is not it, what Fichte calls the not-I, everything that is object, this pair of glasses, this piano.
24:40 There. So, I had to go through that to introduce this text by Rousseau. Why? Because it's a text of pathology. Rousseau tells us in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker about his ultimate work. No, it's not the fifth walk that I quote very often. No, no. He expresses an unparalleled happiness—no, he recounts an accident, a serious accident that happened to him while he was taking his walks in Paris.
25:13 It's his ultimate work, they were written at the end of the 1770s, in 1778 even, up to the last one, the tenth. And they were only published, well, I'm taking the published version, in 1782. You see, this is a late Rousseau. And there, he recounts an accident that happened to him while he was walking near the Faubourg du Temple, where he was knocked down amid the traffic of Paris, as they said at the time, by a street incident, by an enormous Great Dane, he says precisely.
25:48 And of course, the shock is terrible, and when he wakes up, so after fainting, so after a loss of self-consciousness, it results in an incredibly modern text. I challenge you to find, before that, an author who dwells on describing the impressions that come to him after fainting. There is someone who was very attentive to his body, that's Montaigne, but those are reflections that require all his attention, all his intelligence and understanding.
Reading of Rousseau's second walk 26:18 That's not what's happening here. It's much more discontinuous. But, judge for yourself. He was almost... You see, loss of consciousness.
26:52 What just happened to me is not something I remember myself, but I can only know it through the memory of three young men, from someone else. The Great Dane, unable to check its momentum, had rushed at my two legs, and knocking me with its mass and speed. So Rousseau is old at this point, it's the last Rousseau, and he takes little walks. He can no longer take them very far in the forest, but he takes them in Paris most often. Here, near the Faubourg du Temple.
27:23 And knocking me with its mass and speed, had made me fall forward. My upper jaw, bearing the whole weight of my body, had struck a very rough cobblestone. You can imagine the ground of that period. And the fall had been all the more violent because, being on a downward slope, there was a decline, my head had landed lower than my feet. The carriage to which the dog belonged followed immediately and would have run over my body if the coachman had not instantly reined in his horses.
27:53 That is what I learned from the account of those who had picked me up and who were still supporting me when I came back to myself. And now, listen carefully to this sentence. The state, you see, it's no longer... There, we've just been told a sequence of actions, actions in the cinematic sense, a little drama. But now, it's a matter of a state. The state I was in at that moment, when I regain consciousness, is too singular not to describe here.
28:26 Decidedly, the Rousseau we had come to know well in the fifth walk, who describes with stunning precision the ebb and flow of that water, its continuous sound but swollen at intervals, describes with hallucinatory precision the passage from wakefulness to sleep by way of reverie, which is an intermediate state. Here we have the same thing in reverse, the exit from loss of consciousness, from the nothingness that sleep partly resembles, into consciousness.
28:58 so, night was coming on. We were in the simple past, now we're in the imperfect, which conveys the state well, the long duration. Night was coming on. I glimpsed the sky, a few stars, and a bit of greenery. We're no longer in Montaigne, this isn't a reflection on the state of the body, it doesn't go that far in Montaigne—Montaigne talks about his colics and his suffering with great sharpness and even, sometimes, humor.
29:31 No, that's not it here, these are impressions in the very modern sense of impressionism, glimpses—a few stars, a bit of greenery. This first sensation, you see, is not a reflection, it's not a thought, it's exactly what in English is called an impression, that is, what imprints itself in me from outside. This first sensation was a delicious moment. Here is someone—we'll learn a little further on that his teeth are bleeding, that he's shattered his teeth, that he's an old man who has just brushed against death.
30:07 This first sensation was a delicious moment. And there, we find, as if by chance, the same epithet that we had, that we'll read shortly, because this is about the second walk here, in the fifth walk, when he falls asleep, when he remembers the time when he was on the shore of Lake Bienne, at the moment of sinking into his delicious reverie—indeed, he says, those thousand murmurs, the ebb and flow, plunged me into a delicious reverie, in which night would often surprise me without my noticing.
30:52 I'm quoting word for word what he says in the fifth walk. You find again "delicious," the loss of consciousness of time and the loss of self-consciousness, in a delicious reverie. Why do I dwell on this word? Because it's an oral metaphor. Oral, buccal, if you prefer. We all begin with sucking, don't we? And according to Plato, we should all end the itinerary of knowledge there too, since the human itinerary from the bottom of the cave to the Good, which he symbolizes by the sun in the admirable finale of Book Six of the Republic, after showing that this is where knowledge ends, that there is nothing more to know.
31:42 On the other hand, he adds, to those listening to him, to his disciples, he adds, you will further notice that the sun does not merely give the eye the property of seeing, and thus the soul the property of knowing, and to the object the property of being visible—light, to the soul the power to know and to the object the power to be known. That concerns knowledge, the love of it. But in addition, the sun gives beings growth and nourishment.
32:15 Ah! You see, delicious—that suddenly brings us back. What an anamnesis, 1,500 years earlier. This is not the last stage of the one who leaves the bottom of the cave to reach the absolute—it's an ascent. Let me return to this strange paragraph, one of the first of its kind in literature. Night was coming on, I glimpsed the sky—you see how discontinuous this is—a few stars, a bit of greenery.
32:51 This first sensation was a delicious moment. I still only felt myself through that. You see, he doesn't think but he still feels. I was being born, in that instant, into life, and it seemed to me that I filled with my light existence all the objects I perceived. It's extraordinary—it's not the objects gradually re-entering his consciousness, no. He says it's his own existence, his light existence, as he puts it so well.
33:25 Whereas one might think he's overwhelmed by pain, no. Not yet. My light existence, all the objects I perceived—this is exactly what in child psychology is called syncretism. There is no longer any subject-object distinction, just as there is none in the maternal fetus, isn't that so? I mean in the fetus in relation to the universe surrounding it.
33:56 I do mean universe, don't think it's small. It is immense for the one who is in it, isn't it? It's even infinite. So, I repeat, I still only felt myself through that, I was being born in an instant into life, and it seemed to me that I filled with my light existence all the objects I perceived. Wholly absorbed in the present moment—remember that. I'll tell you right away why, because we'll see a text by Nietzsche shortly which praises forgetting, right?
34:29 After the one by Rousseau, where Nietzsche insists that we too often neglect the present. That's not the case with Rousseau here. That's my perverse side, I make strange connections. Wholly absorbed in the present moment, I remembered nothing. I remembered nothing. So there, that's total amnesia, isn't it? I had no distinct notion of my own person, not the slightest idea of what had just happened to me. I believe everyone who has had a car accident and, fortunately, came out of it, and who at the time suffered only psychic shock, knows this feeling well, don't they?
35:07 There's a moment when suddenly one has trouble even recalling the last instants before the impact. Not the slightest idea of what had just happened to me. I did not know who I was, nor where I was. Wait, I told you that the problem of identity was called into question, was suspended on a memory that functions. We have proof of it here. Amnesia—I am no longer who I am.
35:38 I felt neither pain, nor fear, nor anxiety. I watched my blood flow as I would have watched a stream flow, without even thinking that this blood belonged to me in any way. I felt throughout my whole being a delightful calm. I spoke of "delicious," and here's a new epithet, "ravishing," which sounds as paradoxical as can be for someone who has just been the victim of a fall, that is, of a movement going from high to low.
36:16 Let me recall that "cascade," "cadaver," all that comes from a root, cadere, which simply means "to fall" in Latin. It's not the falling leaves. We're in autumn. So, here, "ravissant"—no, the root is avis. Avis means wings in Latin. Avian fauna, an "avicole" farm is a farm that raises chickens, ducks, guinea fowl. So, you see, I watched my blood flow as I would have watched a stream flow, without even thinking that this blood belonged to me in any way.
36:53 I felt throughout my whole being a ravishing calm. To be ravished is to be carried upward, as they say Ganymede was carried off by an eagle on Zeus's orders, having found him so beautiful that he wanted him to serve as cupbearer at the table of the gods. It was he who served wine on Olympus at the table of the gods. A shepherd. A poem by Goethe bears the title Ganymede, if that interests you, and there's a very beautiful musical setting by Schubert.
37:24 I felt throughout my whole being a ravishing calm which, each time I recall it—so, now that since this accident, I recall the state in which I came back to myself—I find nothing comparable in the whole range of known pleasures. Yet another thing that foreshadows the fifth walk, which nevertheless doesn't speak of an accident or a fall, but of a reverie on the shore of the lake, at the edge of falling asleep. You see?
37:54 The opposite, an absolute security. To the point that one could fall peacefully asleep. To the point—to speak as Rousseau does in the fifth walk—to the point that, called by the hour and the agreed signal, I could not tear myself away from there without effort—meaning I was so at ease. But not just at ease, but something beyond all known pleasures. Here I'm skipping the text that you know, that you have, don't you? So, I'm not going to—I know it can annoy Philippe, I understand—I'll send certain texts and actually comment on a few of them, but I do it on purpose, I don't want to overload you with too many texts, we'll see them next time in the philosophical treatment.
The fifth walk: everything is in continual flux 38:36 But here, I simply want to illustrate this: the very particular nature of this ravishment, in this state common to both falling asleep on the lake and, conversely, waking, waking to life, as he himself puts it, after his fainting. In the fifth walk, we find this—I'm telling you orally, you don't have it. But you can look it up, it's all on Wikisource. Everything is in continual flux on Earth, the opposite of stability.
39:07 Nothing there keeps a constant, fixed form. Well, that's a reflection that all sages have made for 2,000 years. And our affections, which attach themselves to external things, necessarily pass and change as they do—I'm opening a parenthesis, a Buddhist one, if you will. The fifth walk has often been compared to certain states of Brahmanic ecstasy, or rather Buddhist, in the teaching of the Buddha—I mean the official text, not the Buddhist institution, which had excellent relations with the Third Reich.
39:43 But yes, I'm not making an amalgam, that's just how it was. The Third Reich was fascinated, you know, by the Dalai Lama, already. Well, expeditions were sent at the time, let's set that aside. But in the teaching of the Buddha, which has as little to do with institutionalized Buddhism as the Gospel according to Saint John has to do with pouring molten lead into the anuses and eyes of Jews during the Catholic Inquisition, we find the core of the Buddha's teaching, what he calls the Four Noble Truths.
The four noble truths and Faust's instant 40:20 Yes, it's not hard to remember. It's like Descartes. It's a bit of a rough comparison, but Descartes says there are four rules in his method. Well here, there are four noble truths. The first is Dukkha. I won't translate it for now, roughly, change, since Rousseau speaks of that, doesn't he, everything is in continual flux on Earth. Dukkha. Second, the origin of Dukkha—where does it come from that everything is in perpetual flux?
40:50 Where does it come from that, as Heraclitus says, one never bathes twice in the same river? Where does it come from that, as Hegel says in the Phenomenology, manifestation, phenomenon if you prefer, lets time pass, manifestation and the movement of coming-to-be and passing-away, a movement which itself never comes to be nor passes away? So, first truth, Dukkha. Impermanence, that's the most exact term. Second, the origin of Dukkha.
41:21 Third, the cessation of Dukkha, how to get out of this perpetual flux. And fourth, fourth noble truth, the path leading to the cessation of Dukkha. There. So, I didn't translate it because sometimes one doesn't find "impermanent" but "suffering," because it's linked, of course. And Rousseau, this lets us return right away, will confirm it for us. Thus, here below, we have hardly anything but pleasure that passes. Always, ahead of us or behind us, our affections recall the past which is no more, or anticipate the future which often is not to be.
41:59 Not as I had imagined it. I believe everyone is convinced of that. There is nothing solid there for the heart to attach itself to; thus we have here below hardly anything but pleasure that passes. Here again, it's profound, but it's not unique to Rousseau. It's a reflective idea. As for lasting happiness, I doubt it is known. On the other hand, what is very topical in the eighteenth century, in his time, is that the central theme of this reflection is happiness. Not pleasure, not mere enjoyment—happiness. Hardly, in our liveliest enjoyments—the liveliest, this time, in enjoyment—is there a moment when the heart can truly say to us—and this is underlined—I wish this instant would last forever.
42:43 And how can one call happiness a fleeting state which still leaves the heart restless and empty, which makes us regret something before, or still desire something after? Before reading you the rest, I return to this italicized sentence: I wish this instant would last forever. A sentence that had never truly—that no happiness, no enjoyment is strong enough for one to be able to utter it, because that is exactly what will constitute the subject, the pitch, of Goethe's immense Faust, in the following generation.
43:16 we see here to what extent Rousseau is the founder of a modernity. It's the famous saying by Goethe, who said, with Voltaire a world ends, with Rousseau a world begins. Faust makes a pact with the devil, which I think you all more or less know. But what are the terms of the pact? On the devil's side, it's very simple, it's the same thing he always wants, the sinner's soul, of course. He wants to grow his clientele. On Faust's side, it's: devil, I'll give you my soul, no problem, because I've been disappointed by everything else, by philosophy, medicine, knowledge.
43:52 If and only if you make me experience such an enjoyment or such a happiness that I can say at that instant, "Verweile doch, du bist so schön"—stay, you are so beautiful. And of course, for 40 years, the devil, despite all his means—God knows he has plenty when it comes to pleasure—does not succeed. And that's entirely to the credit of humanity's immense restlessness, isn't it? Some make it a reproach, a grievance against man, and give us an example—we'll see this with Nietzsche too, actually, won't we?
44:27 Animal contentment, you know, I've already told you that every time I've seen—at Lyon, I've seen it often—it was wallowing contentedly, wasn't it? So, let's go on. We've just seen, then, for the fairly classic litanies, the misfortune of always being in what does not last, in what disappears, in the fleeting state. Let me return to the text. But if there is a state in which the soul finds a foundation—you see the image—solid enough to rest there wholly and gather there its entire being, without needing to recall the past, memory, nor to encroach upon the future, imagination, without needing to recall the past, nor to encroach upon the future, the instant, stay, thou art so fair.
A sufficient, perfect and full happiness 45:11 Where time is nothing for it. Good Lord, we're outside of time, aren't we. Where the present lasts forever, without however marking its duration, and without any trace of succession—yet how precise all this is—without any other feeling of privation, nor of enjoyment, of pleasure, nor of pain, of desire, nor of fear. You see that it's neither pleasure nor pain, but it's not pleasure either.
45:43 It's beyond desire, nor fear, but only the feeling of existing, of our own existence, he says. And may this feeling, the feeling of existing alone, be able to fill our whole soul entirely; as long as this state lasts, he who finds himself in it can call himself happy. And that's why I was reading you this text, which you don't have in front of you, because he adds, "not of an imperfect, poor, and relative happiness, such as one finds in the pleasures of life."
46:14 And Rousseau is speaking at the time of the height of libertinism. He speaks at the time of Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons, an admirably written book that I recommend to you, undoubtedly the masterpiece, strictly from a writing standpoint, of libertine literature. Of course, the works of the Marquis de Sade, and a bit of Casanova too, if we go down a little to the people, so to speak. But Mozart's operas, which, strangely, are always at the edge of this libertinism. And I'm thinking of Don Giovanni, of course, Il dissoluto punito, the libertine punished, chastised, and, of course, even more ambiguous, with a conclusion of truly incredible ambivalence, his Così fan tutte, which one might translate as "all women are the same," isn't it.
47:02 If I weren't afraid of being accused of sexism—it's not me, it's the text of the period. It was a defrocked priest who wrote it in the eighteenth century. And believe me, the men are even more ridiculous than the women in that play, if that can reassure our AI friends. So, Rousseau, at a time when, truly, the human being, in a certain milieu—I always like to recall that libertinism is not the preserve of the peasant, since it's after all the immense majority of the population that toils—it's nonetheless Count Almaviva in The Barber of Seville, it's the Marquis de Sade, isn't it.
47:39 And this is Choderlos de Laclos, the great libertines are great aristocrats. It happens in the boudoir. Well anyway, the fact remains that, for the first time, part of humanity grants itself, with religion discredited and undermined by a whole century of Enlightenment, of philosophy, of rationalism, of the emergence and development of scientific thought in the wake of Newton, right? To whom Voltaire pays homage in the English Letters.
48:10 Well, you can imagine how far that pleasure could go. In painting, of course, you have a painting like The Bolt, right? It's well known, by Fragonard, I'm telling you so you can look it up on Google Images, right? You type Fragonard, le verrou, there you go. It speaks for itself, the painting speaks for itself, and then you have something a bit more... 'coarse' isn't the word, all of this is very refined, but I mean a bit more voyeuristic, right?
48:43 The nymphets, if I may say so, of Boucher, one of the most famous painters of the era, Boucher as in 'Boucher,' who painted quite a few very, very young girls—these were commissions from old, lecherous marquises, right, who hung them in their alcoves—well, anyway, despite all that, for Rousseau, it's nothing compared to what he feels on the shore of his lake, in terms of pleasure, of intensity, of enjoyment—not the elevation of the mind toward reflections, no, these are not reflections, these are sensations.
49:17 That's the word that keeps coming back, and as long as this state lasts, whoever finds himself in it can call himself happy—not with an imperfect, poor, and relative happiness such as one finds in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, perfect, and full happiness that leaves in the soul no void it feels the need to fill. Such is the state—again the word 'state'—in which I often found myself on the Île Saint-Pierre, in my solitary reveries, whether lying in my boat, which I let drift with the water, no action even of the body, you see, no muscular effort, drifting with the water, or seated on the shores of the choppy lake, or elsewhere on the bank of a beautiful river or a stream murmuring over the gravel.
50:11 I wanted to finish the paragraph with these four designations, all linked to the presence of water and its murmur in the ear. Because when you close your eyes in a state of reverie—and it has been proven that this is the case for the embryo inside the mother's womb—it perceives sounds even if it doesn't see much. So I'm telling you this because it will later give rise to the great dichotomy of the plastic arts, the arts of the eye, right?
50:41 Sculpture, architecture, painting, whatever you like, drawing and graphic art, God knows, it's an infinite richness, and the arts of time. Mainly music, poetry, then later cinema, opera, etc., which mix the two. So, of a sufficient happiness. Such is the state in which I often found myself, I repeat, on the Île Saint-Pierre, in my solitary reveries, whether lying in my boat—there's the presence of water again—which I let drift with the water, or seated—so I'm no longer sure if it's in the boat—but on the shores of the choppy lake, which makes noise, that famous noise, that ebb and flow, striking my ear and my eyes without respite, as he said before, or elsewhere on the bank of a beautiful river or a stream murmuring over the gravel.
51:28 Let me continue for a moment with the text you don't have. What does one enjoy in such a situation? There truly is enjoyment. Nothing external to oneself—we come back to the object, and here you see the disappearance of the object. But this is no longer the abstract self from earlier, which is only a self negatively, by opposing everything before it. This is an extremely full self, he says so himself, lacking nothing. Nothing external to oneself, nothing but oneself and one's own existence.
52:00 As long as this state lasts, don't be startled, one is self-sufficient, comma, like God. That's the culmination of the text. Now of course, I am not God, because as long as this state lasts—God can allow himself that in eternity, right, in his concept at least, by definition, so to speak—we don't have that privilege. And he adds: the feeling, you see, it's not a thought, the feeling, to feel, of existence, stripped of all other affection—I don't exist as a man, as a woman, as French, as a musician, as a writer, as a philosopher—stripped of all other affection, and in itself, this feeling of existence is in itself a precious feeling of contentment and peace which alone would suffice to make this existence dear and sweet to whoever could banish from himself all the sensual and earthly impressions which constantly come to distract us from it and disturb its sweetness here below.
Rousseau refuses to turn people away from active life 53:04 So there are inner sensations and external sensations. But most men, agitated by continual passion—you'll see why I'm extending this to a crucial passage—know little of this state, and having tasted it only imperfectly for a few brief moments, retain only an obscure and confused idea of it. I don't rule out that those familiar with Zen Buddhism in Japan might draw comparisons with this state.
53:35 Retain only an obscure and confused idea of it, which does not make them feel its charm. And here Rousseau steps back from this state, becomes once again the great political thinker we know. This is where he is neither Zen nor Buddha, but is contemporary with himself, at the moment when we approach, as he says in Émile, the state of crisis and the century of revolutions. I quote: 'It would not even be good, in the present constitution of things—'
54:06 '—that, greedy for these sweet ecstasies, they'—the other men—'should become disgusted with the active life which their ever-renewing needs prescribe as their duty.' No question of degrowth for Rousseau, despite everything one can make him say in that vein. So you'll tell me—but let me speak plainly, excuse me—he's a hypocrite, do as I say, not as I do, meaning: you must not enter this state of bliss, I reserve it for myself.
54:37 But wait, look at what follows, and I'll end on this. 'But an unfortunate man who has been cut off—not who has cut himself off out of love of solitude, but who has been cut off from human society, and who can no longer do anything here below useful or good for others or for himself'—that's why he's on an island; you know they could shoot him on sight if he left it, he was under warrant for arrest—'but an unfortunate man who has been cut off from human society, like a beast put in a cage on this island, and who can no longer do anything here below useful or good for others or for himself, can'—not must, you see, can—'find in this state, for all human felicities'—and of the 18th century, going lower in the choice of words—'compensations that fortune and men could not take from him.'
55:33 There you go. So, thank you very much. I'm very glad we've spent an hour between the long introduction and the reading of Rousseau's text, because in the fifth walk in particular, this happiness came to him through memory, through the memory of the happiest moment of his life. Right? And when, in the second walk, where I started with the incident of the dog, right?
Nietzsche: forgetting as the condition of happiness 56:06 The state of rapture, of bliss, in which he finds himself only arises at the moment consciousness returns to him. We are now going to make exactly the opposite movement with the next text, which has been given to you, and which this time is by Nietzsche. 'In both the smallest and the greatest happiness'—decidedly, modernity is preoccupied with the theme of happiness.
56:44 'In both the smallest and the greatest happiness, there is one thing that makes it happiness at all: colon, the power of forgetting'—and the praise of forgetting. Now here Nietzsche takes a stance opposite to 2,500 years of philosophical tradition. Don't forget that for Plato, all knowledge is recollection, or knowing is remembering, however you want to put it, all knowledge is reminiscence—I won't get into the translations.
57:15 We'll see this in detail next session. The power of forgetting, the power of forgetting, or to put it in more learned terms, the faculty of feeling—decidedly these texts echo each other—things as long as happiness lasts, without any historical perspective. Here I have to open a parenthesis. What is history? It's what struggles to restore our collective memory.
57:47 If we take Nietzsche literally, right, the historian's work runs counter to what should make us happy. It's true that if I'm in some kind of ecstasy and someone tells me I owe all this to my slave's labor, that will obviously tend to spoil the scenery for me a bit. That's a metaphor I'm making, right? If you read the extraordinary chapters devoted to what Marx calls primitive accumulation, in the first volume of Capital.
58:29 That is, the history never written before him, never developed before him in a systematic and rational way. There were isolated testimonies here and there. But no one had ever spoken of the accumulation of primitive practice as the very principle of past praxis. The passage from the slave-owning mode of exploitation to the feudal mode of exploitation, etc.
58:59 Anyway, in short. So if I take Nietzsche literally—and I haven't made up my mind, maybe Nietzsche is right—I'll show you how many points he can be granted to be right on. In that case, think carefully: when he says 'without any historical perspective,' for him this isn't a randomly chosen allusion. Nietzsche wages a fierce counter-revolutionary fight, but an openly declared one. He's not like today's Nietzscheans who think of themselves as leftists.
59:30 There are some, I'm just telling you as it is. I refer you to a short book, a small but very dense work by Aymeric Monville, called 'The Misery of Left-Wing Nietzscheanism,' right, which will be developed much further on this point. At least Nietzsche is honest. He fights what were then called the socialist movements. There are plenty of other passages where he mocks social equality—for him it's the demands of slaves, of weak people, of inferior beings, and so on.
1:00:08 I'm not simplifying. I look at it from a distance, but I'm not simplifying. 'The man who is incapable of sitting on the threshold of the moment, forgetting all past events'—good grief, you see why I read you Rousseau beforehand. But Rousseau, good grief, the father of the Social Contract. We no longer know where we stand. Because for Nietzsche, this is incompatible, right, with thinking revolution, whereas Rousseau, who says we are approaching the state of crisis and the century of revolutions, and who theorizes it in the Social Contract, and who is the culmination of a journey that begins with the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality—
1:00:49 You know, that was scandalous at the time. This same Rousseau, as we just saw, gives an absolute praise of a kind of timeless ecstasy, where one is wholly within the instant, and here they agree on this point. That's rather interesting, all the same.
The man who could forget nothing 1:01:37 'A man who would be incapable of forgetting anything, and who would be condemned to see everywhere only becoming. That man would not believe in his own existence. He would no longer believe in himself. He would see everything dissolve into an infinity of moving points, and would end up losing himself in this torrent of becoming'—finally, a true disciple of Heraclitus, you know, the one who said you never bathe twice in the same river, he wouldn't even dare move a finger.
1:02:09 Here I have to say, for my philosopher listeners, of course, some of whom will recognize the allusion, 'move a finger' is an allusion to a disciple of Heraclitus, Cratylus, whom Plato discusses at several—sorry, yes, who is the title of a dialogue by Plato precisely about language, and to whom Aristotle devotes quite a few chapters in his Metaphysics or in On the Soul. Now, Cratylus was so Heraclitean in thinking that everything flows.
1:02:45 You can't even say 'Socrates is sick,' because he's already recovered; you can't say 'he's young,' because he's already grown old; you can't say 'now,' because between saying it and now we're already no longer in the same instant. Right? He had reached the point, I quote Aristotle, of falling silent and just moving his index finger, pointing at things, you see? He was pointing at the passing of the phenomenon. There, it's a bit complicated. So: a man who wanted to feel things only historically would be like someone forced to abstain from sleep.
1:03:15 That's one of the CIA's favorite tortures. They blast hard rock at 3,000 watts at the person being tortured, right? And wake him up as soon as he falls asleep. Or like the animal that should live only by ruminating, and ruminating endlessly. So, underlined in bold, you see: it is possible to live almost without memory, and to live happily, as the animal demonstrates. One might say—but he just said the animal is stupid, the animal that should live only by ruminating and ruminating endlessly.
1:03:47 But after all, the contradictions in Nietzsche—and I'm not saying this ironically, Nietzsche is after all the first to claim contradiction for himself—well, I'm rather being ironic about those who take him seriously and literally, right, and who often forget to turn the page when they're rapturous over page 2, forgetting that on page 3 he'll say the opposite. So: it is possible to live almost without memory and to live happily, as the animal demonstrates. In French we'd say the happy fool.
1:04:18 'But it is still impossible to live without forgetting.' There I grant him that. It would be dreadful if at every instant, you see—look, I just spent a month in Corsica, listen, I hadn't been in years, I won't tell you my whole life story. I thought I'd die before seeing Corsica again, I won't tell you about my emotional states, but these are the neuroses one has after a heart attack. You get the feeling that... well. And when I was there, when I reconnected with the mountain streams, with the water, jumping by the sea—thank you Pauline and Yannick again, without whom I couldn't have gone—if at that moment I had thought, say, of the atrocity of a man's suffering under torture in a concentration camp, it would be dreadful if we remembered everything at every instant.
1:05:07 He's right, Nietzsche, to say it is possible to live almost without memory and to live happily—sorry, excuse me—there is a man who would want to feel things only historically would be like someone forced to abstain from sleep, or like the animal that should live only by ruminating, and ruminating endlessly. So: it is possible to live almost without memory, almost, and to live happily, as the animal demonstrates, but it is still impossible to live without forgetting.
Rumination, resentment and the morality of health 1:05:38 It's subtle. Or put more simply still, there is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of sense, right—insomnia is opposed to sleep, and in sleep there is forgetting, right, restorative sleep, as they say so well—of rumination, ruminated, you know that Nietzsche is, morally speaking, the adversary of what he calls ressentiment, and there I grant him that too, of sense—and one could say that almost all of postmodernity is one immense ressentiment-ism against modernity.
1:06:19 I've already told you that the very nature of modernity is to hate modernity. Or put more simply still, there is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of sense—sense as opposed to sign—of the historical: we come back again to a critique, not exactly of historical materialism, of which Nietzsche knew little, but of the historical disciplines, which harm the living, and which end up, mainly through the historical approach to our human essence, harming the living and eventually destroying it.
1:06:55 Here we find Nietzsche's constant, his invariant. And here we see his coherence despite all these contradictions. You see, I'm trying to be nuanced when speaking about Nietzsche—he sorely needs it. He used to say, by the way, 'look at me, my name is Nuance.' But what is invariant? It's that the problem of true and false is not what matters for Nietzsche. That's why I'm harsh toward his disciples who, for the good use of the Atlantic powers during the Cold War, turned him into an anti-Marxist, anti-progressive, anti-democratic war machine, whatever you like.
1:07:29 Well. Why? Because he, at least, is coherent. What matters to him is not true and false. That's not the pair at stake. It's the living and the dead. It's above all the healthy and the unhealthy, health and sickness. Nietzsche is haunted, as a good modern, by—you see what collective pathological context we currently live in—Nietzsche is haunted, right, by what in French we'd call the morbid side, by sickly thoughts, by pathos in thinking, in discourse, in theory.
1:08:07 Right? When we understand that fossil fuels destroy the ozone layer, that they contribute to global warming and thus threaten life on earth—human life at least, because there are giant shrimp that have never been better off at 400 degrees, water boils at 100 degrees, imagine what happens at 400 degrees in underwater vents 10,000 meters deep.
1:08:42 Look it up, don't just take my word for it, right? But go try explaining to environmentalists that it's not the planet that needs protecting, but humanity—there I agree with them, we must fight against all threats, right, that attack the conditions necessary for a healthy life, but human life, which is not the life of the mosquito, nor of shrimp, nor of flies—I'll stop there because it's about to get scatological.
1:09:19 That's the greatness of Nietzsche: what matters is the good—not the good in the sense of 'moraline,' not the good of the catechism, no, the good of feeling good, as in the Nordic languages, where there's the same word for 'good,' meaning both 'nice' and 'well'—so it's not good as opposed to evil, we are über Gut und Böse, as in one of Nietzsche's most famous titles, with Nietzsche we are beyond this good and evil of moraline—Nietzsche's morality is a morality of health, but of the health of the soul and the body, you see, and it took reaching this end of the paragraph where, more simply still, there is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of historical sense, which harms the living and eventually destroys it—so it's not carbon that's destroying us, no, it's an excess of memory, collective memory here, right, it's more than memories à la Proust or à la Rousseau, the time I was by the shore of Lake Bienne—no, collective memory.
Against Nietzsche: historical reconstruction against emotion 1:10:30 whereas, for my part, I maintain—I've already said this, but this is an occasion to repeat it—that demonstration in dialectical, Marxist terms, quite different from the demonstration, from the rational dimension, that of reason which is not that of the understanding, such as one finds in geometry or algebra, which is necessary, essential, and against which I have nothing to say, but which in the historical sciences, true demonstration simply consists in reconstituting, in making the effort to piece together, to reconstitute a historical sequence that has been obliterated, censored, passed over in silence, right?
1:11:18 In favor of what? Of emotion. Now they show you the refugees, etc. It only takes two or three, a woman with a child, and immediately it triggers an emotional process, because figures are abstract, but we never dwell on the fact that our civilization, of which we're so proud, our values, as we so often say, opposing ourselves to countries supposedly authoritarian dictatorships opposed to our values—our values include the electric chair for innocent 14-year-old kids.
1:11:54 These three million dead in Vietnam, these three million dead in Korea—I'll stop there because there's also a million dead in Indonesia, all communists, I mean, it's not a loss for some, after all, maybe it's even a gain. But I'm telling you this to show that this is precise, it's a reconstitution, not a matter of feeling, it's a measurement. And here I'd paraphrase Prévert—yes, Jacques Prévert in Children of Paradise, who wrote the admirable dialogue, you know, when the mediocre authors of that play in which Frédérick Lemaître—an actor who really existed, of whom Nerval wrote an account, by the way—Frédérick Lemaître, played by Pierre Brasseur, right, is late; the authors are furious, the untalented authors, he needs money, so they perform their play, three of them wrote it, one act each, as they say—he bursts onto the stage, disheveled, just as one of the authors was telling the actors present, while waiting for Frédéric, 'Could you rehearse this scene with a bit more, how shall I put it, a bit more feeling?'
1:12:57 And we hear the thundering voice of Pierre Brasseur—and God knows he had some set of pipes, right—we hear him suddenly bursting up from the back of the stage, saying, 'That's it, feeling, more feeling, always emotion, more emotion'—sorry, it's not feeling, it's emotion, always emotion, that's all you've got, it doesn't make a drama, there's no action, yes, it's emotion, there you go. Let me remind you in passing, because the whole media monstrosity of the era we live in—I mean the dominant media, right, because after all I myself am in the media, timidly making a few videos, right, but it's so marginal, right, compared to what's called the mainstream, right, to use liquid metaphors again, that kind of cloaca maxima, as the Romans called the main sewer running through Rome, right, which carries along, right, sentimentality mixed with the most abject cynicism, in order to silence the real suffering of millions of people, right,
1:14:11 caused precisely by those who ask us to be very selectively moved by victims, when they are victims caused, where that's true, by countries that don't fall exactly in line with what we demand of them. There you go. So I'm going to finish with a third text. I'll come back to Nietzsche. I have other texts, this time taken from Zarathustra, which don't involve untimely considerations, as is the case here.
1:14:44 You see why 'untimely'? What is timely, the other day, is the historical sciences, it's not really in the human sciences and social sciences. And we've seen that it's necessary to go through that, because it would be dreadful to live only by memory, only by remembrance at every instant, to be invaded, for our present to be invaded at every instant by the past. It would be a bit as if our private space were, at every instant, open onto the whole outside world, as if we lived in the street.
Un amour de Swann: Swann trapped at a society gathering 1:15:16 So now I'm moving on, of course, to someone who is unavoidable when it comes to memory, that is... You see that I find happiness is like a... processes of surging up or of incompatibility with or without happiness, isn't that right? This is an excerpt from Swann's Way — sorry, from Swann in Love, an excerpt from the only, well the only masterly work of Proust, In Search of Lost Time, the second part, well the end of the first part which is called Swann in Love, which is the only part where he speaks of the main character, Swann, his main character, in the third person.
1:16:05 So in all the rest of the Search, the narrator speaks himself in the first person. So let me give you the gist very quickly, Philippe, if I have time. Well, that will do, I'll try to bite into it a bit, let's say I need a quarter of an hour at most. So let's not waste time — Swann, who is of course part of the summit of the establishment, is invited to a society gathering, isn't that right?
1:16:37 The aristocracy or the very grand Parisian bourgeoisie, as is very often the case. I remind you that Proust was a man of independent means, and at this moment he is the victim of great suffering because he feels he has lost Odette — that's the theme of his novel, Swann in Love — he has lost the woman he loved, he feels she is drifting away and is unreachable, and the scene begins when they are almost breaking up, and he is furious to find himself a prisoner of this social gathering, because at the time, there were no hi-fi systems, right?
1:17:17 There was a real pianist, a real violinist playing a sonata for piano and violin in the drawing room, and he cannot, without making noise, get up from his chair and leave, and so out of courtesy — an essential value in that world — he stays, and I'll go on with the text. 'But the recital began again and Swann realized that he could not leave before the end of this new number on the programme. He suffered at remaining shut in among these people whose stupidity and absurdities struck him all the more painfully' — he's talking about the people — 'since, ignorant of his love, incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest in it, and of doing anything but smile at it as at a childish thing or deplore it as a madness.'
1:18:00 'It made it appear to him in the guise of a subjective state which existed for him alone.' Well, my friend, one lost, ten found. You know, we've all known those moments when we feel terribly alone because we have no one to talk to about something that seems to us to be happening only to us, right? 'It made it appear to him in the guise of a subjective state which existed for him alone, of which nothing external confirmed the reality to him. He suffered especially, and to such a point that even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry out.' He was suffering from what? From prolonging his exile in this place where Odette would never come.
Vinteuil's little phrase from the sonata 1:18:33 I'm sure many people recognize themselves here — 'a place where no one and nothing knew her, from which she was entirely absent.' Full stop. But suddenly, magic of music — that's my addition, magic of music — 'but suddenly it was as though she had entered. This apparition caused him such a searing pain that he put his hand to his heart. For the violin had risen to certain high notes, where it remained as though waiting.'
1:19:03 'A wait that lengthened, without his ceasing to hold them.' It's awful, but I'm interrupting this sentence of Proust's, which is nevertheless a musical sentence. I'm interrupting it. Because there are very few authors — not authors who speak about music, there are plenty of those — but who know how to give voice to music itself, as if we were actually hearing it, who reproduce a musical passage, a musical sequence, in words. There are very few. I'll name two here, Julien Gracq and Proust — there are others, but very few. 'But suddenly it was as though she had entered, and this apparition caused him such searing pain that he had to put his hand to his heart.'
1:19:34 'For the violin had risen to certain high notes, where it remained as though waiting. A wait that lengthened, without its ceasing to hold them' — the high notes — 'in the exaltation in which it found itself, of already glimpsing the object of its waiting drawing near, and with a desperate effort trying to hold out until its arrival, to welcome it before expiring, to keep open, with all its last strength, the path by which it might pass, as one holds open a door which would otherwise fall shut. And before Swann had time to understand and to say to himself, it's the little phrase from Vinteuil's sonata — let's not listen ahead of ourselves.'
1:20:16 In the novel, Swann and Odette had what they called the national anthem of their love. Everyone knows that. There's a piece of music that belongs to a couple, to a memory that was somehow the nucleus of their love. That's the case with this little Vinteuil sonata. Don't look for it in the dictionary of the history of music. It's a musician invented by Proust. People have thought of Fauré and all sorts of things. Personally I find there's quite a bit of Brahms in it too. There's quite a bit of Brahms in Fauré, incidentally. Brahms, Fauré — that's Brahms minus the Protestantism, plus Catholic jouissance.
1:20:52 In short, it's the little phrase from Vinteuil's sonata — let's not listen ahead. All his memories, you see, this is our theme, from the time when Odette was in love with him, and which he had managed until that day, with the false memory that we always have, voluntary memory, as Bergson would say — and which he had managed until that day to keep invisible in the depths of his being — all his memories, deceived by this sudden ray of the time of their love which he believed had returned, had awakened and on the wing had risen up again and was singing wildly to him, with no pity for his present misfortune, the forgotten refrains of happiness.
1:21:31 And that's how happiness comes back to us like that, as a kind of fall from this extraordinary passage. I haven't quite finished, I didn't count the minutes — I skipped some passages — 'so often had the little phrase been witness to their joy, though it is true that it had often also warned them of its fragility,' so if they had listened to it properly, the little phrase, at the time when they were happy, they should have known that love is precarious. 'And even though at that time he had sensed suffering in its smile, in its limpid and disenchanted intonation, today, today that he was as unhappy as could be, today he found in it rather the grace of an almost cheerful resignation.'
1:22:10 So you see, this leads me to think that memory, remembrance, can bring happiness back to life within suffering itself. 'Of the sorrows it had spoken to him of in the past, and which he had seen, without being affected by them, carried away smiling in their sinuous, rapid course, of those sorrows which had now become his own, without his having any hope of ever being delivered from them' — Proust is lucid — it, the little musical phrase, seemed to say to him, as once about his happiness, what is all that, all that is nothing.
1:22:42 So you'll say to me, well then they were right, those people earlier at the party, they were right to say but it's nothing, your story, we've all been through that. Well, look at what follows. 'When it was the little phrase that spoke to him of the vanity of his sufferings, Swann found sweetness in that very wisdom which, a little while before, had seemed intolerable to him when he thought he read it on the faces of indifferent people.' He — what isn't said again — who considered his love a trifling aberration. And here's the explanation.
1:23:12 It's that the little phrase, which here is the support, isn't it, the substrate of memory, the trace of the past — it's that the little phrase, on the contrary, whatever opinion it might have had on the brief duration of these states of the soul that Rousseau spoke of, he saw in it something not like all those people, less serious than positive life, but on the contrary so superior to it that it alone was worth expressing — miracle of art in general and of music in particular.
1:23:43 'Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed, latent in his mind, on the same footing as certain other notions without equivalent, such as the notions of light, of sound, of relief, of physical pleasure, which are the rich possessions with which our inner domain is diversified and adorned. Perhaps we shall lose them' — Proust is lucid, and he apparently doesn't believe in life after death — perhaps we shall lose them. 'Perhaps they will fade if we return to nothingness.'
1:24:14 Proust is a modern, and here's the ending. 'We shall perish. But we hold, listen carefully to this word, as hostages these divine captives.' That's what they call the memories of happiness. 'We hold as hostages these divine captives who will share our fate.' And I think this conclusion needs no commentary, it's clear — 'and death, along with it, something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable.'
Dedications and answers to listeners 1:24:46 I think we can now give the floor to the audience. All right. If there are no questions, I'd like to take the opportunity not to continue with the texts, as you'll return to the corpus another time, but to add a few clarifications to my preamble from earlier, before I read the texts. I would like to dedicate today's session to a few people with whom I'm behind, behind in answering questions they've sent me, either collectively on our Facebook page or personally on my Messenger page, thanking them not only for their loyalty — that only concerns their relationship to me — but thanking them for the strength of their engagement with philosophical matters.
1:25:40 I'm thinking here, I'm speaking here to everyone in general, but I dedicate, in no particular order, I dedicate this session, across the Mediterranean, to a young Algerian listener with remarkable literary and philosophical culture, Fouad Amami. I also thank Sébastien Brunois, assuring him of my support as much as I can, within the modest limits of my means.
1:26:10 And I thank them for the immense stakes they put into their relationship with the text and their quest for meaning. There you go. I'll also take the opportunity to answer some more specific and technical questions, I think, for the faithful Khaled Koudak, whom we, the members of the association's board, know well, because we've held sessions together on Zoom between Algeria and France.
1:26:41 And since they are living through a period, aren't they, that allows fundamental questions to be raised, important moments in the history of their country — [Khaled] who was asking me how he could get hold of the book by Alexis Managou, Le Paganisme en détour, published by Éditions Delga, and whether there was a PDF version.
1:27:11 I advise him to get in touch directly with Éditions Delga. I personally have no other means. Otherwise, I'll check myself with the publishers whether there might be some small exceptions made for those who don't have an easy relationship with the thing, with the book as an object, with the bookshop network, quite simply. Given the slowness of order deliveries, with the suspension of flights, with Covid between Algeria and France, none of this is simple.
1:27:47 So I think we'll be able to find exceptional arrangements to, perhaps — but it's not up to me to decide, it's the publisher, isn't it, who is the sole manager of the text — to be able to send a PDF of the book. In any case, I thank him for how much he values getting hold of this text. There you go, I'll also answer those who asked me why I never talk about Spinoza.
1:28:24 Apparently they haven't watched all my workshops, which I understand, because, I mean, there's a lot to choose from, but I talk about him often, I spoke about him again recently and I even quoted a sentence from Hegel who said that every philosopher has two philosophies, his own and Spinoza's — it's rare to pay such a substantial tribute, one might say, to philosophers of substance. So I simply refer, I encourage the person who asked me this question to watch the videos they haven't yet seen, and I'll take this opportunity now.
The website and the Sahelian paths of praxis 1:29:06 So in case it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, that will no longer be the case in about two weeks, because another person in particular — I'm thinking of Camille, who was kind enough to let me know by message, on Messenger or otherwise on our Facebook page, that our website was no longer accessible, no longer responding online.
1:29:42 So it was suspended because, between Covid, the holidays and an occult section that also needed the same thing... it had many reasons for the disruption. But I pay tribute here to Pierre-Alain Giraud who, from Iceland — you know him because he's already taken part, very discreetly, in our livestreams, to which he's very faithful, not only that, but to practically all our videos.
1:30:13 I'll also mention that Pierre-Alain — I know it embarrasses him when we highlight all his skills — played a very important role in the short film directed by Aliocha titled La fausse note, about contemporary music consumption. He helped with the editing and the shooting itself, with a second camera. He's an excellent editor. Well, he's working for you right now, and he's going to make sure that if you search for Pagani Spinoza, thanks to his work on referencing — and this work had already been done beforehand, but he's continuing it — thanks to his referencing work, things will move much faster than you think.
1:31:03 Again, within a horizon of 15 days. And on top of that, he's gathered together a lot of documents that had never before been assembled on a single site. And in particular, I'll announce it here as an exclusive preview — it's a serial, but originally, it was for the tenth anniversary of the death, of the passing of Michel Clouscard — I had posted a few fragments of a series which would be titled — it's a title I'm proposing, but another could be found — 'The Paths,' not the paths of praxis, but 'The Sahelian Paths of Praxis.'
1:31:41 That is, an illustration of the developments, the stages of praxis as developed by Michel Clouscard, an illustration south of the Sahara, with very rich iconographic illustration accompanied by texts, quotations, authors from every era and every genre. It could be quotations from philosophers of today.
1:32:12 I know that Bachelard, at one point — because you see a kind of infinite expanse in Mali — and Bachelard says: I do not dwell in the infinite, because in the infinite one is not at home. Which is a tribute to the small village that protects itself from the infinite, with the right angle that is so specifically human, or the circle of the hut, isn't it, amid the immense steppes. This goes from Bachelard, but equally to the Old Testament, since I show a mosque such as one sometimes finds in the desert, that is, a small stone circle with an opening where one first leaves one's sandals, isn't that so, and I of course quote the very first sentence the Eternal says to Moses, even before the Ten Commandments, even before telling him I am that I am, he begins by saying: take off your sandals, for you are on holy ground.
1:32:59 So these Sahelian episodes of praxis, magnificently illustrated with photographs that your humble servant would be incapable of taking, have finally been gathered together in their order, in the order I wanted, that is, from hunting and gathering to agriculture and to architecture, and entirely — it's immense — in the setting and materials of sub-Saharan Africa, in particular the Sahelian zone.
1:33:34 I'll remind you that Sahel is a word of Arabic origin meaning shore, and that here the ocean is the desert. It's no accident that camels are called, to continue the maritime metaphor, ships of the desert. There you go, how much time do I have left, Philippe, if I can go on a bit? All right, in any case, if we're still online, I thank you for gathering with us for this reunion, and our periodicity is going to be every 15 days — in a fortnight we'll announce the continuation of this workshop on the respective benefits and drawbacks of amnesia and anamnesis.
1:34:23 Thank you all, and thank you to the production team.
