English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Falstaff and the title of the book: the eternal irony of the community 4:02 I'm happy to be back with you on this burst of female laughter, this triple burst of laughter. But yes, do I need to say it, you've missed me? So I saw there was a comment on our introductory video, the one for which Pierre-Alain was kind enough to call for a boost in memberships. I saw one of the comments saying he was quite happy to see me again even if it tears me away from Corsica. So I asked myself the question. Corsica without you, that doesn't work... that's not it. And you without Corsica, well you have to be patient, you have to wait until the next holidays. There, I'm joking of course. But I have to admit I needed a break.
4:59 Let's not dwell on that, I've already taken enough time off from the workshop as it is, so let me take the opportunity to reconnect with this wonderful opening theme. It's an excerpt from Verdi's final creation for the stage. He had the good fortune to have an excellent librettist, Arrigo Boito, unlike many other operas where he wrote sublime music for, let's say, mediocre librettos.
5:38 Here, that's not the case. Arrigo Boito knew Shakespeare admirably well, he's a great translator of Shakespeare, and Falstaff is one of the characters from Shakespeare's comedy called 'The Merry Wives of Windsor.' What connection, you'll say, with femininity and community in Hegel? Well, the...
6:08 The title of my book published by Éditions Delga, just so we're clear, this is, for once, something I actually wrote myself, anything can happen. When we say 'the system' without specifying, that means the Hegelian system of course.
6:39 So I borrowed the two words that appear as a dichotomy in the title, femininity and community in Hegel. The two words femininity and community, I borrowed them from a quotation of Hegel — if you want to see it in the original, in the original itself translated into French, I'm thinking here of the Aubier Montaigne edition translated by Hyppolite, you'll find it on page 41. In a chapter called 'The Ethical World.' We need to agree right away, I'm starting a bit abruptly, but the holidays are over, let's make a little effort.
7:33 For now, not too much abstraction, but just so we agree on the terms. When Hegel talks about the ethical world, everyone who is even slightly familiar with his text, with his thought, knows he's talking about the Greek city-state. So in the Phenomenology, it's a moment, it's not a history book, but it's a moment whose best embodiment would be, historically, that of the Greek city. Moreover, the allusions he makes are transparent, since he's going to study this Greek city, among other things, filtered through a reading of the great Greek tragedians, in particular Sophocles, in particular the tragedy of Antigone. You see how we arrive at femininity.
8:24 Now, it's in this chapter that Hegel lets slip this formula, and I quote it here word for word: this femininity, the eternal irony of the community. And here are our two words, femininity and community, linked by the concept of irony. You understand better now why I began with the laughter of our three gossips. This eternal femininity, irony of the community. We'll come back to this formula, which is much denser than one might think. Just the word 'eternal' in Hegel is so rare.
9:02 Hegel is rather a thinker of what is relative to the historical moment in question. And so here it's as if there were something transhistorical in femininity. Everything happens as if — we haven't settled this for now. It's just to give you an idea of the density of this formula, one has to be careful here about the immensity of the stakes present in each of the words. This femininity — he says 'this' because he's just been talking about it, we'll come back to that — this femininity, comma, eternal irony of the community.
9:41 This is all the more strange since the tragedy of Antigone is not exactly a comedy. One might think I take pleasure in multiplying paradoxes, but it's not for pleasure. I'm opening this reading with a reading by Hegel of the tragedy of Antigone. We'll see that this occupies a... it has great importance in... in my little book, opening with the burst of laughter of the three wives of Windsor, whereas the tragedy of Antigone ends very badly. It's a tragedy, there's no confusion of genres in the classical world, in the Greek moment, according to the French classicists themselves, it's the unsurpassable model.
10:33 And one of the characteristics of the classical school, of the classical moment I should say, in terms of genres, is that genres must be carefully kept separate. Either you're in comedy, or you're in tragedy, or you're in the dithyramb, or you're in lamentation, or in the ode, in the hymn — with odes we think of Pindar, the great lyric poet, but there we leave the dramatic world.
11:08 Here we are in dramatic art since it's theater with Antigone, and within dramatic art, in tragedy. It's not just dramatic — that is, drama means action — it's not just that there are characters unfolding an action, but that this action ends badly. So it's not just dramatic, it's tragic. And here I begin with a burst of laughter. I've just justified it, sketched a justification by recalling that Hegel, speaking of femininity and its role in the ethical world — that is, in the ancient Greek city — lets slip this formula, this femininity, eternal irony of the community.
Verdi, Wagner and Italian unity 11:54 I'll come back to this throughout our cycle, so I can take the time to go back a bit to the musical introduction you saw and heard, since it's opera — that is, a genre that is at once a very impure genre, since it mixes the plastic arts — impure not at all in a pejorative sense, mind you — since it gives us something to see, to hear, bringing together all the arts into a single super-genre that the ancient Greeks called 'mousikē.'
12:29 And yes, mousikē, we translate it as music, but in the Greek context it's much more extensive than that, it's the union of all the arts, of all the muses, in dramatic art. Including dance, set design, the visual, the plastic arts of course, poetry, text, etc. Declamation, meter. And I told you, I come back to Falstaff. Why? Because, as I told you, it's Verdi, who was born the same year as Wagner, 1813. In 1813 two musicians are born who are united by everything and separated by everything.
13:25 In the north a German, in the south an Italian. They're already united within the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, but let's leave that aside historically — Napoleon had put an end to it with a stroke of the pen a few years earlier, before Verdi. But above all, both devoted nearly all of their compositions to opera — well, in any case to lyric art, since Wagner prefers to speak of music drama rather than opera for his works.
14:01 Verdi being entirely in his element in the opera genre strictly speaking. So for now that's all that brings them together. We've just brought them together aesthetically, but at the historical-political level, both are contemporaries of the political upheaval that gives each of their respective countries its political unity.
14:32 Germany unifies in Wagner's time through, among others, the action of Chancellor Bismarck. Italy unifies around that statesman Cavour, the Piedmontese Cavour, who, on behalf of Victor Emmanuel, the King of Piedmont, would unify Italy. And this is so important in Verdi's work that at Verdi's funeral, where there was a huge crowd — you have to compare it to Victor Hugo's funeral, millions of people following the coffin — and without any coordination — I'm going too fast, you think it's a digression? On the contrary, I'm going too fast.
15:18 If Verdi was the object of popular fervor on the side of the Italian left of the time, of those who wanted to free Italy from the Austrian yoke, in particular from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and found the first sovereign Italian state, and soon after, the Republic of Italy, it's because of a wonderful coincidence: the spelling of Verdi, V-E-R-D-I, are the initials of the political program 'Vittorio Emanuele, Re d'Italia.'
16:00 Vittorio Emanuele, re d'Italia. That gives Verdi. You see that here politics isn't something I'm introducing from the outside. And that's why — coming back now to his funeral — there's popular fervor. And in the midst of the silence of this immense crowd, all of a sudden, more than a million voices rose up, first sotto voce, half-voiced, then in a striking crescendo. The chorus from Nabucco, which everyone knows even without always knowing that it was Verdi who composed it.
16:40 You know, there it is. So it's this same Verdi who, at the end of his life, closes out a series of works — dreadful stories, right? Il Trovatore, it's dreadful, it ends badly every time — with a burst of laughter, with a marvel of freshness, of youthfulness, at over 80 years old.
17:12 Verdi writes this Falstaff, which he hadn't even intended for the public at first — he wanted it performed among connoisseurs, among friends, just as entertainment. And it became a must — forgive me for stepping outside French for a moment — a must of the operatic repertoire the world over. There, I didn't pick my example entirely by chance. Here we are at the end of the first act of Falstaff, when the three wives discover that each has received a letter from Falstaff, an old lecher, let's say, who sent each of them, to each one, a marriage proposal.
18:01 And it's of course at the very moment when they suddenly realize that each has received a letter from the same man, right — this femininity, eternal irony of the community. I think we understand better and better why I began with this burst of laughter. So, we're going to talk a great deal about the tragedy of Antigone, which has nothing funny about it. So I'll read you right away the passage now, to plunge into the body of the text, not a passage from my book, but a passage from the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the — sorry, this is getting jumbled — Aubier-Montaigne edition, Hyppolite's translation, volume 2.
Human law and divine law in the Greek city 18:50 And on page 41, page 41, whichever you like, the 41st page. Hegel has just distinguished — I'm specifying things we'll use throughout this cycle, so pay particular attention — he has just distinguished, in the preceding pages, within what he calls the ethical world, which is the title of the whole chapter that opens this second volume of the Phenomenology.
19:20 So he has just distinguished, at the heart of what translates the ethical world, of the Greek city, what makes up its specificity, two worlds that are absolutely mutually inseparable and at the same time somehow antagonistic. These two worlds, he designates them by two laws, two legislations: human law reigns, and divine law. And we're going to learn — we've just learned — in the preceding pages, that human law is the domain of man, the domain of politics, what is decided in broad daylight in the public square, in the agora, where people vote.
20:03 The manifest law, which is opposed to what happens inside the walls, in a more nocturnal world, an underground world, Hegel says, over which femininity presides. Notice that I'm not saying 'woman,' I'm saying 'femininity' — we'll come back to that, as you might expect. Over which femininity presides, and before I read you the quotation about eternal irony, let me still read you the passage where he distinguishes these two worlds, and you'll see that Hegel is not always unreadable.
20:46 So here is the first part. In the essence we are considering here — the first essence being human law, that is, the one where man dominates, the world of daylight if you prefer. In the essence we are considering here, singularity — what we'd call the individual — has the meaning of self-consciousness in general, underlined.
The community as effective spirit: people and citizen 21:16 Not singular self-consciousness. That would be too modern, that would be an anachronism. In the Greek world, I've told you a thousand times, we'll never know whether Achilles preferred peas with bacon or peas without bacon. Whether he had a beauty spot on his left cheek — we'll never know any of that. Whereas in a Balzac novel — I'm switching to the modern world, or ours — for a hundred pages we know everything lying around on Père Goriot's mantelpiece.
21:47 So, I repeat, here we're dealing with an individual in general and not with such-and-such a singular individual. In the essence we are considering here, singularity has the meaning of — underlined — self-consciousness in general. Not that of a singular, contingent consciousness — for the Greeks, quite contingent — in this determination the ethical substance is therefore actual substance, absolute spirit realized in the multiplicity of consciousnesses that are there.
22:19 In short, the city — I repeat, absolute spirit realized in the multiplicity of consciousnesses that are there. Absolute because it is realized, it is objectified, it's not consciousness inside my head. This absolute spirit is the common essence — you see community beginning to take shape — is the common essence, in parentheses Hegel says community, in German Gemeinschaft, which must be carefully distinguished from Gesellschaft, society as in French — community and society are not quite the same notion, far from it.
22:56 Look how communitarianism resents society. So the conflict of communities within society — we'll come back to that. This absolute spirit is the common essence, the community which, at the moment when we were considering the practical figure of reason in general, was for us the absolute essence, in the abstract, and which here is... produced for itself here, that's the Greek moment. He's alluding to the emergence of a relative democracy, isn't he?
23:33 It is produced for itself in its truth as conscious ethical essence and as the essence for the consciousness which is our object. Let's not forget that the object of the whole Phenomenology is the stages that the consciousness of each of us must go through to arrive at absolute knowledge. And here it takes a decisive step, for consciousness arrives at substance and at essence. I repeat: the practical figure of reason in general was for us the absolute essence, and which here, here at the moment of the city, has produced itself for itself — underlined — in its truth as conscious ethical essence and as the essence for the consciousness which is our object.
24:19 The community is the spirit that is for itself when it maintains itself by reflecting itself in individuals, and which is in itself, or is substance, when it contains them within itself. We begin to have a movement, a kind of tension between the community either unified in the notion of government, for instance — he'll talk about that a bit further on — or on the contrary spread out among each of the individuals. Sometimes in the extension of individuals, sometimes on the contrary concentrated in the executive of government. As actual substance, this spirit, thus defined, realized, this spirit is a people. As actual consciousness, it is a citizen of the people. Look at the vocabulary.
25:06 The substance is a people, but as actual consciousness, it is citizen of the people. Every citizen of the people is conscious of the substance common to all, which is the city. This consciousness has its essence in the indivisible spirit, and certainty of itself in the actuality of this spirit throughout the whole people.
25:40 And it also has, immediately, this too: its truth. Look, this is an exercise done on purpose, it seems a bit abstract, difficult, but on the contrary, look at this new light it sheds. Look at the distinction between truth and reality. The unity of the city, in which each citizen recognizes himself, is the truth of each consciousness, but this truth would have no reality if there were no concrete, existing individuals.
26:11 There is a tension between center and periphery, look closely. So, I repeat here: as actual substance, this spirit is a people. As actual consciousness, it is citizen of the people. Actual, because as citizen it exists, it's not an abstraction. This consciousness has its essence in the indivisible spirit and certainty of itself in the actuality of this spirit throughout the whole people. And it also has, immediately, this too: its truth — underlined.
26:42 Thus, not in something that is not actual, a daydream, a utopia, but in a spirit that has existence and validity. And now we come to the vocabulary I was mentioning when introducing this excerpt. One can call such a spirit human law — that moment, that of human law — one can call such a spirit human law because it is essentially in the form of self-conscious actuality; in the form of universality, it is the law.
27:13 The law, the one voted on in the agora, the law known publicly — underlined — and of present customs. In the form of singularity, it is the actual certainty of itself in the individual in general. And self-certainty as simple, indivisible individuality is spirit as government. Its truth is what manifestly holds good and is exposed to the light of day. This public truth — it's not a hidden truth, it's not magicians whispering in the ear of the Emperor of China, or any feudal lord who had his astrologer or his alchemist.
27:56 Its truth is what manifestly holds good and is exposed to the light of day, an existence which, for immediate certainty, emerges in the form of being-there set free. So much for human law. But that's not the whole of the city, that's the world of man, in the sense of manliness. But to this ethical power that we've just defined, and to this manifestness — see how he sums it up by the fact that it is in broad daylight, that it is manifest.
The power of the state against being-for-self: to will and to please 28:27 And to this manifestness is opposed another power, divine law. Indeed, ethical power, the power of the State, being the movement of explicitly conscious operation, finds its opposition in the simple, immediate essence of the ethical order. As actual universality, the power of the State is a force exerted against individual being-for-self. This is the ever more topical conflict between the private and the public.
29:02 To assert itself, the public must partly alter the 'do as I please' of the private. Liberalism, for example, would love the disappearance of the State, that's what it has in common with anarchism. It's curious. If you want to make progress in dialectics, try to see, in two forces that seem 100% opposed — the anarchist versus Macron, versus Pompidou, versus the banks, versus the corporations...
29:42 Try to see what they have in common. That way you arrive at a new opposition, much richer, since it includes the previous one. And we see a new term emerge. Indeed, ethical power, the power of the State being the movement of operation, is a force exerted against individual being-for-self. When the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the French Revolution say that liberty consists in doing everything that does not harm — not, not, negative — does not harm others, there is a dimension.
30:20 We see an element of negativity emerge with regard to doing what I want, because that is freedom, we don't touch that, but with regard to doing what pleases me. There are some who don't know how to distinguish between what pleases me and doing what pleases me, and doing what I want. Yet the language is there and it distinguishes them, it must have a reason. Language knows things, I repeat this often. It knows more than each of us speakers, we who speak. So, a very simple example that my longtime listeners will forgive me if they've already heard, which is relatively familiar to them and has the advantage of being simple.
31:01 Pierre and Paul are cramming for an exam whose deadline is drawing nearer and nearer, let's say the baccalaureate for instance. And they both agree, since they work together, they live in the same shared flat, and they decide to wake up together at 6 in the morning to resume their revision. Because time is now pressing, there isn't much time left to revise. And so the alarm goes off at 6 in the morning, Pierre gets up, Paul stays in bed.
31:38 Which of the two is doing what he wants? When I ask this question, the majority of answers—I don't have yours here, I'm not in a classroom setting, and all the better because as a result the full range of answers has to be taken into account, which is excellent for dialectics. I'll come to that. The majority of answers is: each of the two did what he wanted, one of them wants to get up, he gets up, the other wants to sleep, he stays in bed.
32:12 Pay attention to the word, he wants—this concerns the will. Does it take will to stay in bed in the morning when you're sleepy? Is that a manifestation of the will? No, this is where you see that the one who stays in bed is not doing what he wants, since he wanted to wake up the night before, but he is doing what pleases him, because he feels a pleasure in sleeping which I don't condemn at all. But I simply condemn those who are confused about doing what pleases me. You know, if a revolution was made, it was against a regime that maintained itself by saying such is my good pleasure. That's arbitrariness, doing what pleases me. That is not freedom. Freedom is winning out over arbitrariness.
33:05 Look at the host of reminders that the tight dialectic Hegel is engaged in here forces us to make. When he says that human law, as we've just defined it insofar as it represents law, political law which governs the city, must necessarily sometimes be exercised to the detriment of what would have pleased this or that individual.
33:35 When for example it mobilizes the young citizens, and even the less young, but the young ones as a priority, to go defend the city against the Persian empire which is at the city's gates. Isn't that so? So, so there is a tension between these two laws, and you will see that Hegel does not choose one against the other, far from it—otherwise it would no longer be dialectics.
34:06 So I'll now finish this sentence for which I carried out a fairly tight analysis, I'll reread it this time without commenting and finish it, which I hadn't done. Indeed, power belongs to the order. The power of the state, the world of man, being the movement of explicitly conscious operation, finds its opposition in the simple, immediate essence of the ethical order as effective universality. As effective universality, the power of the state is a force exerted against individual being-for-self, the state against the family, against the private. And as effectiveness in general, it finds within the inner essence the opposite of what is voted on the public square outside, on the forum—as they'll say in Rome, fora, which means outside in Italian—or on the Pnyx, the agora, as they'll say in Greek. That's where things get decided, agon, isn't it?
The family, natural ethical community 35:05 So it finds—the power of the state is a force exerted against individual being-for-self—and as effectiveness in general it finds within the inner essence, which we'll see in a few lines is here presided over by the woman, something else again than what it itself is. And here you see an important passage where Hegel is going to show that he does not choose. We have already mentioned that each of the opposed modes of existence of the substance contains the whole of it. Divine law, with the woman, contains the whole Greek city. Human law, with the man, the warrior, contains the whole Greek city.
35:49 If then the community is the ethical substance as the side of self-conscious effective operation, the other side has the form of immediate substance, or of substance posited in the element of being and no longer of essence. The city, a moment ago, was the essence facing individual consciousness, essence, that is, the truth of being. But the feminine world, the inner world, of hearths, of the family, is the world of being.
36:22 This latter is thus, on the one hand, the inner concept or the universal possibility of the ethical order in general. Remove the woman, and essence no longer has existence. For without the woman, the citizen, however much he claims to be the truth of being, nonetheless has no existence at all. He has only essence. You see? This is the magnificent tension of this dialectic. This moment, expressing the ethical order in this element of immediacy or of being, or an immediate self-consciousness, both as essence and as this particular self in another—that is, an ethical community no longer political but natural, for it is not by political decree that a son is the son of his mother, or that a sister has a brother as her kin.
37:10 It is a bond of blood. The bond belongs to nature. That is, a natural ethical community—that is underlined—this essence is the family. The family, as the unconscious concept which is still only inward, arises facing... Let's see how the unforgettable figure of Antigone comes to stand forth.
37:40 The family, as the unconscious concept which is still only inward, arises facing the effectiveness of this concept when it becomes explicitly conscious, which is the case with Antigone. As the element of the people's effectiveness, it arises facing the people itself, as immediate ethical mastery facing the ethical order that shapes and preserves itself through labor for the universal. In short, and this sums it up—the penates, the penates were the family gods, the French language has kept the word, we say je vais regagner mes pénates, meaning I'm going back home. The penates arise facing the universal spirit.
38:23 So I'll skip ahead and come to the sentence that inspired the title of my little book.
Family solidarity, mafias and pirates of the Red Sea 38:53 There is a threat to the unity of the city, and that is this division of the community into families, each having its own particular interests. You know, in the traditional world, the very pejorative notion—which I condemn like everyone else—of mafia has an archaic justification at its origin. Because at the beginning, precisely, when there is no state that takes care of the whole set of individuals making up the city, each person can only count on immediate solidarity.
39:31 And immediate solidarity is first of all the family, even if it is to the detriment of another family. I'll put it this way, I'll take a very simple example, because I seem to be justifying mafias. Let me explain: the real is rational, meaning that if mafias have existed, and if they still exist, it's because there are reasons for it. That doesn't mean one is right to be a mafioso, but that there are some reasons why mafias arise. Let's take the example of the Red Sea. I take the Red Sea because it's a place swarming with pirates.
40:06 The pirates of the Red Sea. Acts of piracy. Put yourself in their place. Here I'm taking... I'm almost putting myself on the side of Robin Hood here, on the side of illegality, but put yourselves in the place of the peoples who haunt these ungrateful shores, to speak in classical terms, right? It's an aridity you can't imagine, the Somali coast, the coast of Ethiopia and the salt deserts.
40:39 And in this desolation, the inhabitants of the coast see all the wealth of the world pass by, heading toward the Suez Canal, coming from the most productive regions, container ships overflowing with all the world's wealth—Japanese cars, Korean-Chinese flat screens, computers, that sort of thing. You can do whatever you like.
41:10 I won't even mention textiles, right? Do you remember when nearly a thousand textile workers burned to death in a building—those little hands behind the Zaras and the Jennyfers, right? Who are at the other end, in Asia, over on the side of what used to be East Pakistan, now called Bangladesh. So he sees all that go by, and it creates temptations. At the start, I mentioned Robin Hood, it's a theft to redistribute to the small local solidarity there.
41:53 Afterward, of course, it turns into thuggery, the same people trafficking people who want to get in and migrate to industrialized countries. It becomes slave-trading, to put it in concrete terms. At the start there was a reason, which is that the family—I'm commenting on everything Hegel says about the family—is first of all the first solidarity of proximity.
42:28 The first one, fortunately it's not the last. So, now, you see, when... Sorry... I'll find that for you right away...
43:04 There. There, look how damaged the book is.
War and death: the community creates itself in what it represses 43:41 There, excuse me. So I'm going to read you something now which will have the merit of summarizing what we've just said in a simpler way. But first we had to train ourselves a bit for it to seem simple. The community — I'm now going back to the world of day, to the political world over which man presides — the community, the law from above whose validity is manifested in the light of day, I'm speaking of Pericles, Solon, etc. The simple Self of ethical substance.
44:35 It is true that this simple force allows the essence — that is, the spirit of the city — to spread through the organized members that compose it. So you see, it's always the same reality. Unity can diffuse into the different individuals. The unity of the city consists in giving each part, each family, its own subsistence and being-for-itself. In this, spirit has its reality. And it comes back. If spirit contented itself with being negative, with opposing everything individual and familial, it would suppress its own existence. In this, spirit has its reality or its being-there — a translation of the German word Dasein, which means its existence. And the family is the element of this reality. I'm insisting a bit so I don't have to repeat it afterward.
45:29 To familiarize you with this vocabulary: element here doesn't mean element in the atomic sense, it doesn't mean the simplest pieces of a Lego set, it means element in the sense that fish are in the marine element. The family is the element of the world of day, of the political world over which man presides. Remove the family, remove the woman at the center of the family, and the citizen no longer even has existence. He doesn't even attain existence. In this, spirit has its reality or its being-there is the family, and the element — this is underlined — of this reality.
46:05 In German, element is Mittel, the middle. I mentioned the marine environment for fish, which fits well. But, you see, there's always a 'but,' a back and forth. Sometimes the point goes to political authority. Sometimes the point goes to the diffused particularity of each of the families. But spirit — now we come back to the city — is at the same time the force of the whole which once again gathers its parts into the negative One. Negative, that is, which must limit the claims to do as one pleases within each of the parts.
46:39 It gives them the feeling of their dependence and holds them in the consciousness of having their life only within the whole. The community can therefore — note well, not must, but can — organize itself, on the one hand, into systems of personal independence, of property. You see that economics is starting to appear, out of personal right and property right. Likewise, on the other hand, they can articulate themselves and become independent in their own associations.
47:11 Listen carefully: modes of work for ends that are in the first instance singular, ends that have nothing ethical about them, that don't aim at the general will or the good of the collectivity, but singular ends. Namely: acquisition and enjoyment. It can — it's possible, it's not forbidden. The spirit of universal association — again a back and forth, we return to the unity of the city — is nevertheless the simplicity and the negative essence of these systems in the process of isolating themselves.
47:47 And here, listen carefully, in order not to let them take root and harden in this isolation, there is a struggle between liberalism and dirigisme, liberalism and dirigisme, so as not to let all these systems in the process of isolating themselves take root and harden in this isolation — so as not to let the whole disintegrate and the spirit evaporate — it must from time to time, earlier it was these individual elements that could isolate themselves, but here the government must from time to time shake them up in their intimacy through war.
48:33 It's not a matter of saying here that Hegel is in favor of war; he notes that it's the moment when, all of a sudden, the citizen who was in the arms of his beloved is suddenly called to war against the Persians — that it's at that moment, all of a sudden, that he rediscovers what Hegel here calls the spirit of universal association. For let's not forget: the particular, familial, feminine side gives the city its existence, but the political, masculine side, in the era of government — the government, one divides, citizenship gives the essence, that is, the truth of this existence. Man is not an animal. So as not to let them take root and harden in this isolation, so as not to let the whole disintegrate and the spirit evaporate, the government must from time to time shake them up in their intimacy through war.
49:34 Through war, it must, listen carefully, disturb their order which is becoming habitual, violate their right to independence. Just as with individuals who, by sinking into this order, detach themselves from the whole and aspire to inviolable being-for-self and to the security of the person, the government must, in this imposed labor, make them feel their master: death. Through this dissolution of the form of subsistence, spirit represses the engulfment in natural being-there — far from ethical being-there — it preserves the self of consciousness and raises it up in freedom and in its strength.
50:26 The negative essence, that is, the government, the law of day, virile, shows itself as the community's own power, no longer that of the individual, and as the force of its self-preservation. You'll say to me: but that's terrible, I mean, that implies the death of the individual. Listen carefully: the community therefore finds the truth and the reinforcement of its power in the essence of divine law and in the subterranean realm. For death is indeed the domain where the family precisely intervenes.
51:01 Hegel keeps repeating, when he analyzes the conflict of Antigone, that as long as he lives, the citizen belongs to the city, which can send him — the supreme sacrifice — to fight against the Persians or against a rival city, Athens against Sparta, against Thebes. But once he is dead, it becomes the family's affair — to embalm his corpse, to bury him. The state has nothing more to do there; it's the family's affair, that of his relatives, of those who are related by blood, within what he called earlier that natural community which is the family.
51:37 And it is indeed this right proper to the family — to reserve for itself the rituals concerning the corpse — that is violated by Creon in the tragedy of Antigone, when he forbids, on the pretext that the warrior's body betrayed his city by collaborating with an enemy city, in order to punish him — he forbids that he be buried. There he steps outside the prerogatives of the whole, of the totality of the city, and he encroaches on what is inalienable in the private sphere, on what is proper to the family.
52:20 And that is where Antigone arises. Since one of the two forces that were being dialecticized earlier suddenly tries to prevail over the other. So I come to the passage I wanted to point out to you, in which we find the two words of the title. Human law, then, in its universal being-there — the community, in its activity in general, virility in general — there are the Amazons — in its effective activity, the government, human law, I repeat, is.
52:59 This is underlined: it moves and preserves itself by consuming within itself the separatism of the penates, of the families, or the independent singularization into families in the plural, over which femininity presides, and it dissolves them in the continuity of its fluidity. But the family is at the same time its general element. Remove the seawater and marine fish don't survive long.
53:31 But the family is at the same time its general element, the universal basis of activity of the singular consciousness, whereas the community gives itself its subsistence only by destroying familial bliss and by dissolving self-consciousness. Into universal self-consciousness — it is the woman who biologically gives birth to the individual — it creates itself, it creates itself in what it represses, it creates itself in what it represses, you see how the contradiction becomes internal, that's what dialectic is.
54:04 It creates itself in what it represses and which is at the same time essential to it, in femininity in general. We're beginning to approach the subject of my book — its inner enemy, the inner enemy of the community. This femininity, I quote, the eternal irony of the community. I'll stop there for now. So you see this dialectic is so tightly woven that I confess that one of... there are two reasons — I was about to say one of the two reasons why I'm returning to the reading of this little work.
First reason for returning to the book: Hölderlin, existence and essence 54:49 If I'm coming back to it, it's for two essential reasons — I don't want to pass over in silence many other reasons, you know we can come back to them on occasion, but they're less important. The first is the topicality of this problematic, given that — topicality, because he's analyzing not even his own contemporary world, after the French Revolution, he's analyzing the fifth century — I said before Jesus Christ... He studies the ancient Greek moment through the tragedy of Sophocles, because everything we've just read is a close analysis of texts that he himself and his fellow students knew by heart at the time.
55:34 Hölderlin says somewhere, in his admirable remark on the tragedies of Oedipus and Antigone by Sophocles, he concludes his analysis with this formula, which brings crashing down the whole Heideggerian reading of Hölderlin — this falsification which we'll certainly have to come back to one day — namely: Sophocles is republican.
56:04 And in Hölderlin's time, republican meant that he was not at the extreme cutting edge of the Revolution. He was not in the Duchy of Württemberg or in the Kingdom of Bavaria, which was suffocating the Republicans. I'll close this little parenthesis on Hegel — the first reason is the topicality of this problematic, and, you'll tell me, the fact that this war of the sexes, which Hegel shows to be intrinsic to the very life of the city, and that neither of the two sides should prevail over the other, insofar as each of the two brings things just as indispensable to the whole — existence for one, essence for the other.
57:04 Ah yes, yes, there are some who don't see the distinction very well. Look, a block of marble, a rough block of marble that has just been taken out of the quarry, that's what allows a statue to come into existence. But it's not the statue, it's not Michelangelo's David. Well, there you have it! It's not Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus. It's not Rodin's Thinker.
57:49 That's existence without essence. Essence is what allows you to give a name to that block. A name, not just to say "this block," but a name. Look, I recognize Achilles, look, I recognize Rodin's Thinker, look, the Victory of Samothrace. We mustn't trifle either with existence or with essence, or with the in-itself, without which there would be nothing—the seed for the tree, if you prefer—and essence.
58:25 For this seed, if it is not watered, if it does not rot in the ground so as to destroy itself, to germinate and give a tree, the tree does not exist either. It's not me speaking of rotting, it's in the Gospel. Unless a grain of wheat dies and rots in the ground, it bears no fruit. So, you see, this sexed dialectic comes back to the forefront with the attempt of a capitalism at bay—at bay historically speaking, it probably still has quite a bit of time ahead of it, but in great difficulty.
Crisis of capitalism and societalization of problems 59:01 The rise of contradictions that it can no longer fully master, far from it, in Marxian terms if you prefer. Capitalist relations of production are reaching a saturation point such that entrusting production to private agencies is no longer equal to the fantastic possibilities opened up by progress—not by the relations of production, which are stagnant, we're still at capitalism—but by the progress of the productive forces.
59:35 Something that even those who nevertheless talk every day about the computer revolution don't notice. If there is a revolution in the productive forces, we have never seen a revolution in the infrastructure that doesn't eventually imply... The English industrial revolution, a few generations before the French political revolution—in the way of producing, in technology, that is to say, which is what interests us philosophically now, in the considerable extension of the possibilities offered in existence, not in what-ought-to-be, but in being itself, in reality.
1:00:19 Such a considerable extension must also translate into a new political deal. We are living in the in-between. And that's what the crisis is, isn't it? That is to say, the new productive forces are pregnant with a gestation. We are in the labor pains of this historic childbirth where these new forces must give birth to new relations of production. Now, in order to slow down, to postpone this birth, to play for extra time, capitalism bombards us with societal issues, in order to divide, to prevent the critical mass, that is, the unification of all those who are dominated by that 1% who concentrate almost all economic, cultural, media, etc. power in the world we live in.
1:01:23 This should have exploded long ago. If it's still holding, it's because each time, those in power buy time by turning problems into societal issues, by pitting against each other those who are discontented and unhappy. Forty-somethings against young people, claiming that forty-somethings are coming to take young people's jobs, or pitting colors against each other, blacks against whites, or within the black community, you see, I'm not speaking in politically correct terms, I'm speaking like Africans who say "the whites," they don't say "Euro-Caucasians"—Hutus against Tutsis, or within the Arab world they'll pit Shiites against Sunnis.
1:02:08 And yes, oil producers are especially the ones it's in their interest to divide. Sunnis, who are the majority in the Arab world, against... well, Sunnis who are present in the Arab world but who are especially dominant in Iran, which is not an Arab country. Yes, using all these old divisions. Always playing any one of the parts against the whole.
Antigone defends a community; imaginary identities 1:02:38 But we're not far from a bad reading of Antigone. Antigone is not this little leftist à la Hannah Arendt who defends the rights of the individual against the wicked city. No, it's not in the name of an individual that Sophocles' Antigone rises up magnificently and unforgettably. This is serious business. It's a community that Antigone defends. But it's not the strictly political community that is the city.
1:03:08 It's the community more bound to the natural tie, but which is not natural, of the family. I say it's not natural either, because marriage does not proceed from instinct but from institution. A mother rabbit takes very good care of her baby rabbits when they're born, she nurses them, all that. Once they're weaned, she devours them. I'm sure of it, because there are those who talk about instinct, but wait, yes, well, instinct...
1:03:40 We'll talk about the female rabbit again. On the other hand, an old Russian woman can be devastated at having lost her husband, her two sons, and her brother at Stalingrad, even if she's 80 years old and has her grandchildren. The bond is no longer natural. Something else has intervened. So when Hegel says the family is a natural community, that is, a community that would not exist if there weren't a natural bond that owes nothing to the city or to history, only to nature.
1:04:20 However, this community, from the moment it is a family, proceeds from institution and not only from instinct. The institution can differ—it can be polygamy here, monogamy there—but it obeys rules that are no longer of the order of nature. Because if it were natural, it would be the same everywhere. Like the fact that one must eat to live, which extends to the whole living world, including plants. So once again, this societalization—I have nothing against societal issues, what I have something against is this discourse that uses the societal to block the social, to lock down the immense sociopolitical demand that is emerging.
1:05:15 And which make people unhappy with the system they're in—unable to prevent this unhappiness, those in power try to divert this unhappiness, to redirect it, in Freudian terms, to displace it—that's a Freudian term, the dream operates by displacement. There is indeed a truth at work, there is indeed a reality, it's not just the imaginary, but a reality that is not in its place.
1:05:50 Those in power try to displace this discontent in a societal direction, that is—I like it, well I like it, allow me to propose this generic term—for what concerns color, sex, gender, the age bracket of young against old, religion, of course. I propose the notion of ontology. It's the favorite weapon of power and it's by this weapon that it survives.
1:06:27 Because you can always find something to reawaken old resentments. Someone says, I don't know, the Vietnamese and the Chinese have always been in conflict, historically. Yes, but reawakening these conflicts—that's something else entirely. The Normans and the Bretons argue over whether Mont-Saint-Michel is in Normandy or Brittany. It doesn't cause millions of deaths. But one day a local power might need, in a return to barbarism, to resurrect this Norman-Breton dichotomy, as is done with the Catalans against Spain. And if Corsica becomes independent tomorrow, I have no objection to that. But I note that divisions will appear over whether it's the language of Bonifacio, or that of Bastia, or that of Corte that should be determinant.
1:07:25 When an identity is imaginary, it loses itself in the infinitesimal fragmentation of parts that keep disintegrating, like a cancer. So these are the issues I invite you to explore throughout this cycle that will occupy us. And you'll tell me, yes, you've spelled out the title a bit, we're beginning to see what femininity and community mean, with a tension between femininity, which presides over singularity, facing community—the singularity of families, for example.
Comments: masters and prohibitions, Mont-Saint-Michel, Oedipus 1:08:17 There, let me take a look at our timing, and I don't know... I'm going to ask Pierre-Alain and our control room whether any questions have come in at this point. If questions have been asked—but I don't think so, because normally I should see them appear. I don't get the impression that questions have been posted. Am I mistaken? I'm adding myself. If you look on the right, I'm looking at the comments.
1:08:51 Ah I see, it's because I hadn't... so much for me being such a good navigator, right? I forgot to click on the comments control. Thank you, Pierre-Alain. There we go, oh la la, yes okay, okay. So, well, I greet the most loyal of our commenters, and it also pleases me each time that there are new names, new faces, so to speak. I see here an Arsène Lupin III, for example, who tells me this—I'll start with him because... Those who want to be our masters don't observe the prohibitions they impose on us, and no doubt get vaccinated with saline solution for show.
1:09:40 I neither endorse nor reject this comment, but I note that it touches on a problem so vast, one that is already stirring up so much on TV panels and in the media, that I'm not going to... And yet, at this stage, it's not incompatible with my own approach. But I take note. On the other hand, I do retain the very beginning of the sentence, which goes well beyond the vaccine issue.
1:10:14 Those who want to be our masters don't observe the prohibitions they impose on us. Those who advocate degrowth wallow in a consumption that isn't that of the Malian on his own territory or in our suburbs. There are quite a few of them. I'm thinking of Montreuil, for example, who would love to consume a bit more, and who would like a growth that would let prices go down for goods that he can't buy for himself or for his family, his loved ones. So, those who want to be our masters don't observe the prohibitions they impose on us. Let's keep that one from Arsène in letters of gold. It will come in handy.
1:11:00 I see there are questions, because that one wasn't really a question, so I won't dwell on it too much, but I'll come back to the issue. I have Karcha who picks up on the Mont-Saint-Michel matter. I tried to take a reality outside of Corsica to defuse the passions, but apparently the passions are there anyway. With a lot of humor: the matter is settled, Mont-Saint-Michel belongs to Normandy, a slice of Great Britain. There, and he adds—and that's where I see his depth, ha ha ha, you see, to show that he has a sense of humor, and thus that the irony of community, this eternal irony, is not the privilege, far from it, of femininity, even though we'll come back to that.
1:11:45 I began with the musical introduction of The Merry Wives of Windsor on that laugh, ha ha ha, on purpose, so as not to forget this link that we haven't yet cleared up between irony and femininity. The difficult back-to-school for Daniel Arias, who is a loyal member among the loyal—that's almost an understatement—it's more than difficult for most of us.
1:12:19 I see a lot of comments, which I thank you for. I won't dwell on them because they're not questions, they're greetings or kind words. So, the same Karcha, who has just annexed Mont-Saint-Michel to Normandy, with a legitimacy I'll refrain from contesting, says this: And the Oedipus complex is in fact a repression of feminine perversion—neither maternal, nor paternal, nor fraternal, nor humanist. Freud's symptom.
1:13:09 Greetings, I greet—they know I never forget them—Khaled, of course, Maléfique, who is very loyal and whom I thank deeply for being present even though she has lovely children who keep her busy. I won't mention the husband, but anyway, that takes a lot of time. So, let me quote Simitri, who is among the quasi-newcomers among our followers.
Dialectical law of the common point: dogmatist and skeptic 1:13:49 Thank you for this reflection: on the opposition between human law and divine law, in order to find a new term, develop one's thought, or perceive a more accurate opinion, by seeking the common ground of two parts that at first seem opposed. I thank Symmetrie O—to quote Sommetido in full—I thank them for pointing out something I was afraid would be hastily forgotten, something I'd like to insist on, I'll come back to it, because this concerns the general laws of dialectic that I propose. I haven't found them, so far, in Hegel, mind you—I draw on him, of course, but this way of formulating them, I allow myself to claim as my own, because it can be pedagogically valuable.
1:14:33 I renew my advice: when you see two parts that seem entirely opposed, try to see whether they don't both share a common point that is essential to them. Because at that point, let's say A is opposed to B, between A and B I draw a vertical line, I make two columns. Liberalism, dirigisme. Liberalism, I don't know, the individual... Doing as one pleases, laissez-faire, laissez-passer, poly-centralization, decentralization. It was under Giscard, then Mitterrand, that we stopped decentralizing.
1:15:20 In particular the regional health authorities, to briefly brush against current events without dwelling on it. Don't worry, current events will bring us back to it. On the other side we can set the whole against the part, the general will versus "such is my good pleasure." We must first dig into what opposes them. Take the criterion of the beautiful, we saw this once, between the dogmatist and the skeptic.
1:15:57 Here's another line dividing a sheet of paper into two columns, where on the left I put the dogmatist, who is asked the question: what is the criterion of the beautiful? He will answer: the beautiful is unity, harmony, look at the Greek temple, the Parthenon. And then, on the other side, the complete opposite—one wonders how a common point can be found. The skeptic says that's not the criterion of the beautiful, because it's the criterion of the beautiful for you, here, now, in Athens, in such-and-such an era, whereas if you go to southern Africa, it's the steatopygous women who are considered the most attractive, and who don't quite have the morphology of the Venus de Milo.
1:16:41 And so on, they're completely opposed. And for good reason: each defines the beautiful by turning toward the exterior. There's the common point. Except that as for the exterior, one of them hasn't traveled much, for whom exteriority is reduced to what he has always seen. In Athens, for example, which is why he says the beautiful is the Parthenon. The other, who has traveled a bit more—I've given the point here to the skeptic—but he too sticks to the criteria of what he sees on the outside.
1:17:12 He sees all sorts of different models pass before him, and he ends up concluding that the criterion of the beautiful doesn't exist. Enter Socrates, Plato, the philosopher who is neither dogmatist nor skeptic—I'm reviewing a bit here—who says, know thyself. If you know yourself, you'll immediately see that when you say "it's beautiful"—whether it's to claim that the criterion of the beautiful is the Parthenon, or that there is no criterion at all—whether for the dogmatist or the skeptic, in either case, when they say "it's beautiful," that is equivalent to, or implies, "it pleases me."
1:17:48 If I feel pleasure, if it pleases me, that means a desire is in the process of being satisfied by the object I'm pointing to. And so the criterion of the beautiful is to be sought not on the outside, because desire is what comes from within, it presupposes a subject, whereas we were looking for the beautiful in objects. And we've made progress—I return to my dialectical laws—instead of a single line separating two columns, dogmatist and skeptic, I now have a new double line, with on the left the dogmatist and the skeptic, and on the right the dogmatist and the skeptic reclassified now under their common point, which is empiricism—not scientific empiricism, not scientific experimentation, but the empiricism of trusting only one's senses, only immediate knowledge, which is the poorest kind.
1:18:39 And which I oppose to rationalism, and we get a new opposition, no longer dogmatist-skeptic, but empiricism—which includes both dogmatist and skeptic, since both search on the outside, through experience, immediate experience, not scientific experimentation—and which we now oppose to rationalism, which begins with statements that come from within. I call it "circle," etc., through mathematics for instance. So, I thank Symmetrie Haut, let me reread their comment: thank you for this reflection.
1:19:15 Two points: to find a new term—here we found the opposition rationalism-empiricism, so it's obviously rationalism that is new—developing one's thought or perceiving a more accurate opinion by seeking the common ground of two parts that are at the outset opposed. Here, the common point of the dogmatist and the skeptic was recourse to sensible exteriority, the kind that only the senses can offer us.
Woman and femininity; bourgeois feminism and the Red Army 1:19:45 Jean-Paul Legrand is entirely excused for his lateness, more than made up for by his loyalty, which touches us deeply, and by his great work as a militant, which I respect and admire. So, let me see if there aren't many questions. There are many interesting and inspiring reflections. Dominique Pagani, may I come back to you? Yes. Back to some questions. What's been done?
1:20:17 Thank you very much. So, so, so. Ah yes, I see the question marks. Good grief. So, revolutionary against counter-revolutionary. I don't know what the subject of these epithets is each time—Lhomissie, whom I also greet, and whom I thank for her loyalty—what is supposed to be either revolutionary or counter-revolutionary? The world of the day, the world... equals showing that both are indispensable to the city.
1:20:50 That's the most important result. Opposing one to the other is precisely what our current powers are trying to do—making it seem as though each entity were valid on its own, without its relation to the other. Laurent Angot. Good evening. "The woman refers to substance, whereas femininity refers to the historical subject"—well observed. "One should avoid the pitfalls of Otto Weininger." I'll set aside Otto Weininger's important body of work for now, but very well observed, Laurent.
1:21:27 This isn't the first time we've noted the relevance of Laurent's readings. Woman refers to substance whereas femininity refers to the historical subject. Earlier, indeed, someone was attentive to what seemed to be a detail in what I was saying but which was in fact essential. The title of the book is Femininity and Community. I'm not talking about woman, I'm talking about femininity. Now, in the societalism of contemporary bourgeois feminism—I'm not talking about the feminism I'm the first to fight for, equal pay for equal work, for instance—but bourgeois feminisms couldn't care less about this metro-work-sleep routine, they spend their time saying it can't be reduced to that.
1:22:13 Or else, more subtly, as Clémentine Autain has already done—but it's not contradictory to deal with both the social and the societal. In principle, that shouldn't be contradictory on this point, we can agree on that, but in that case, how does it play out in practice? Every time she speaks about feminism, it's never for the social or the societal. When we see the greatest sacrifice of all time, made by a people, at the level of a people, at the level even of... at the level of a nation and a state, I'm thinking of the Soviet Union and the whole of the peoples that made it up.
1:22:51 When I see that the greatest sacrifice made by these peoples, who overcame Nazi barbarism, and that all Clémentine Autain remembers of it is that the Red Army raped German women—which is undeniable, I'm not justifying it at all—it's true that the shock troops, as they're called, who had just marched thousands of kilometers strewn with the corpses of their loved ones, their fellow citizens, even their own families—it's certain that when they arrived in Germany, there were some among them who, as they say, didn't hold back.
1:23:24 As soon as the regular army arrived after the shock troops, there was a great deal of repression of what is unjustifiable, of rape. Quite a few were executed by firing squad by Soviet officers, those who hadn't handled things gently, as people say with far too much levity about something unspeakable. So there you have it, I mean, but to remember only that about the Red Army—I never... Normally there shouldn't be any contradiction between the social and the societal, but good grief, where would our common freedoms be, what's left of them?
1:24:04 To Clémentine and to myself, if there hadn't been a Red Army. The United States, Germany, that is to say original Germany and the New Germany, I'm thinking here of the WASP, let me remind you that it's my German wife who drew my attention to the fact that the main and dominant component in the United States, the WASP, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, is in overwhelming majority of Germanic composition. You know I'm a germanophile, I'm not demonizing here. I recall here, to understand the United States, it's better to look toward German traditions than toward an Englishman who became a bit more of a thug than the British gentleman.
1:24:50 The hamburger, recall Hamburg, the hot dog is a sausage, and the colossal, for the first time in the world. The mania for the superlative is not at all British, it's not stiff-upper-lip flegm, but on the other hand it's very colossal, it's very German. And you know, I have affection for many aspects of the German world. But anyway, I recall here that if there hadn't been the Red Army, there was a fine understanding between the two sworn enemies of communism who would have shared out the planet, and where would we be now.
Left washing, NATO and the second reason: a book too short 1:25:34 So one must not say that there's no contradiction between the social and the societal. That's what I'm fighting throughout the cycle to come. And I'm answering here in advance a few of the main contributors to our common efforts in our association. I'm thinking here of Philippe Degnaud, whom I greet and who is putting in efforts for which we will thank him.
1:26:08 Never enough to arrive at an English, English-language translation and edition of the works of Michel Clouscard. I'm telling you this as a preview, Philippe Degnaud had sent me a long question in a personal letter, well, a letter sent within the framework of our association Stricto Sensu, in which he asked me whether it wasn't time to put on trial what he calls left-washing. It's not like we talk about greenwashing.
1:26:39 That is to say, this new far right that absolutely insists on thinking of itself as left-wing. And that's what explains its longevity. If liberalism and France's reintegration into NATO's integrated command—I'm talking about somewhat more current matters since the fiasco of the Australian aircraft carriers affair.
1:27:09 If France's reintegration into NATO's integrated command means that the United States can trigger a total nuclear war and we would have to follow automatically—that's in the very articles, even the denounced ones, of NATO. Whereas de Gaulle stayed within the Atlantic Alliance—he wasn't anti-communist for nothing—the Council stipulated that France alone had sovereignty over the choice of war and peace. All the same.
1:27:39 Well, if France came back into NATO's integrated command, it's precisely from the moment when we made all these societal concessions, on questions of gender, of color, etc. They started to win out over social solidarity. I'm alluding here to a time that now seems quite distant, when there was a strike at Billancourt, at the Renault factories, and it succeeded, which translated into a great socio-economic advance that benefited everyone, whether men or women, within the Renault company, whether they were white, North African, or sub-Saharan African. So it became urgent to divide all that up so that capitalism could keep on ruling.
1:28:37 There, I think I'll leave it there for this evening because you can imagine we're stirring up the first reason. I've almost finished, but I'm closing here the presentation of the first reason why I'm returning to the reading of what seems to be a small pamphlet. The second reason is because of a criticism that has often been made of this book, a criticism whose relevance and validity I fully acknowledge, especially since it often comes—I'm thinking here of the review I already mentioned moved me deeply because it was made in a newspaper founded by Louis Aragon, in Les Lettres françaises, and which says things that, to put it quickly, I didn't dislike, but which reproaches me, like many others, with the same thing.
1:29:31 And rightly so, no doubt, that my book is too short, too allusive, and sometimes glides too quickly over subjects on which people wanted to know more. That's the second reason explaining why I wanted to come back to it and carry out the development that was missing from this book, together with you, in your company. So I bid you goodnight, I thank you a thousand times for being present for this return, for your questions. I forget none of them, you know we're going to alternate the reading of Féminité et Communauté with the forms in short, and first of all with answers to your questions. No one will be forgotten.
1:30:12 So I'll see you in a fortnight on Wednesday, and there's no need to tell you how happy I was to see you again. Have a very good evening and a very good night.
1:31:33 ...What do you mean?
1:32:10 Rising, in haste, in haste.
1:32:53 ...when it shines? I love! Reckless one, you!
