English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Bégaudeau, Clouscard and sonic ghettos 0:00 It seems to me that we are together again. Good evening everyone. I am all the more happy to be back with you. You'll tell me I say this every time, but you can't imagine how true it is every time. And even more and more so, since—and I'll start with this—I would like to thank my very many new subscribers who have come to join us in the association.
0:39 There is a constant accumulation of new subscriptions like that, but here a threshold has been crossed. And I'd like to take the opportunity to pay tribute, to send a friendly greeting and acknowledge an old comradely complicity with our comrade Loïc Chaigneau. He recently made a video that I'm sure most of you have seen.
1:11 But as for the others, I can only warmly recommend it. It's not a video about Bégaudeau in general, but about the major weaknesses in Bégaudeau's argument—someone who is intelligent, cultured, subtle, as there are so many in Paris. But here it's about Bégaudeau talking about Clouscard. There, our friend Bégaudeau flounders a bit. So, it's not my subject, Loïc masterfully deals with Bégaudeau's reading of Clouscard.
1:54 And then, at one point—I'm only keeping this point to tell you how much I'm indebted to the IHT in general and to my comrade Loïc in particular—at one point Bégaudeau says, "Yes, but Clouscard, there are things…" Well, I admit that at first I was a bit dismissive. I admit that looking closely, it's actually better than what I was saying. But still, he hasn't understood a thing about rock. You can clearly see the old fogey who can't get used to new music.
2:24 At that point, very intelligently and slyly—but a revolutionary slyness that I salute—Loïc slips in, at that very moment on his own video, my face appearing—you can imagine my surprise. And I see an excerpt from Aliosha's superb film, which you know well, La fausse note, the short film. At the moment—it's just a few minutes, not even two minutes—where I'm saying that it's not at all the modern, noisy, youthful side of rock that bothers me.
3:04 It's quite the opposite. What I reproach this music for is not having moved for nearly 80 years now. It would need to move a bit to catch up with new music. New music—but you don't know it. I'm going to say, excuse me, I'm using "you" here a bit too inclusively. But I mean, most of those who are locked in the sonic ghettos I denounced—I tried to analyze the process in the short film La fausse note—are carefully kept there by capital.
3:39 Not in a Machiavellian way. Forget that, that's paranoia, it's worthless. They don't need to think about it explicitly. Young ears are penned into sonic ghettos where nothing moves anymore, neither in terms of timbre, nor rhythm, nor melodic design. For the most part—I'm not putting on the same level a boy band, that's how you say it, dance boys with the summer hits, with, I don't know, Yesterday by The Beatles, or much more recent things.
4:25 But precisely, I'm getting to it, there is new music. I won't dwell on it because we'll come back to all this in detail in our reading of Hegel. But I want to stress that the misreading Bégaudeau makes is that he looks for Clouscard far behind him on the road, down below, you know. He climbs toward the summit in his mind and sees Clouscard lagging behind, turned around. He sees his back turned, looking backward. When it's actually him. He doesn't realize that if he turned around, he would see Clouscard far ahead of him, near the summit.
4:59 In music much more current than rock, pop, folk, techno, and so on. Among which, yes, there are groups less bad than others. I know full well—I'll close on this—that every time one of the addicted fans, and why not, given the pressure exerted toward this music, tells me, "No, no, but wait, you don't know. You don't know these…" Because you listen to what's heard on all the TV channels, that's not what I listen to. But you have to listen, there are underground groups that go much further, it's more sophisticated.
5:33 So, I do what I'm told, I listen, I'm always on the lookout for novelty. It's been more than 75 years, almost—70 easily—that I've been on the lookout for musical novelty. In every genre, classical, world music, jazz, etc. And these underground groups are even worse, if you will, than the mainstream. There. I'll close on that. So I want to thank IHT on that front.
6:05 That's why I begin by greeting the new subscribers, whose numbers wouldn't have grown so discontinuously—and we are very happy about that—if this boost hadn't been given by Loïc Chaigneau. Take him as an example, won't you? I'll take this opportunity to relaunch the appeal that Pierre-Alain was kind enough to make to you at the very start of the season. We need an increase, I mean, in memberships.
6:35 So, to build things up a bit, as always, there's always equipment to repair, maintenance, nothing much, but a little is needed. There. After these greetings and thanks, of course, I also thank all those who are here out of loyalty, who have been our comrades and friends for a long time. I try not to say "followers" so as to stay within the French language—and I now move on to the continuation of our reading, which we have the whole year for, at least the school year, our reading of the short work that Delga was kind enough to publish, which I wrote, entitled "Féminité et communauté" in Hegel,
Bond of blood and political bond: instinct and institution 7:50 How do aesthetic reflection and political reflection connect within the Hegelian system? There, I won't elaborate, because that's what we're going to develop throughout this session. I'll simply recall where we left off. Except that last time, I mostly commented on the title "Féminité et communauté" by reading you some difficult passages. Today I'm going to clarify things, don't worry, from the second volume of the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the very famous translation by Hyppolite at Aubier-Montaigne—some prefer this or that other one, Bourgeois's is very precise too, but in terms of, when you combine all the parameters, relevance, clarity, critical apparatus.
8:37 Combining the three, Hyppolite's still seems to me the most suitable. Now, I had read certain passages where Hegel develops his dichotomy, his opposition in the Greek city-state—which he never calls the Greek city-state, I won't go back over all that, there is no proper name in this work, there's only one, the nephew of Rameau, across two volumes. But it's very well coded: when he wants to talk about ancient Greece, about the model of the Greek city-state in history, he calls it the ethical world.
9:14 So, you're not going to conclude either that the ethical world is the Greece of Pericles—it's not a history book. He's developing a moment among the stages that consciousness must pass through to arrive at absolute knowledge. There, I'm being clear—I may not know very well what all that covers, but I'm being clear, it's a moment. And this moment is embodied better by no other period of history than the Greek city-state, in Hegel's eyes.
9:46 And I had contrasted—I had read the text where Hegel opposes the human world, that of politics, and the feminine world, the more interior one, that of the family—the political community on the agora, where the majority, not to say almost exclusively at that time, were men, and then the world he calls the divine world, the world presided over by woman, which is older, which is tied to the bond of blood, which is the oldest, in all communities, of all the forms of sociability in which the human species recognizes itself or organizes itself.
10:33 It's the family which, each time—of course it doesn't have the same appearance, it's not the household, dad, mom, the kids, in a three-room apartment—today it can be the extended family, with aunts, grandmothers, the horde, all this has been studied in anthropology. But it's the bond of blood, that's what matters. That is to say, we're at the boundary here between nature and culture, with the family. Because as a bond of blood in the proper sense, as in the biological sense, the bond is natural.
11:03 The bond between a mother and her child is a natural bond, it's not a social convention, right? On the other hand, the mother doesn't just make a child at random, by chance. Generally, in the history we're studying here, in these periods, she does so within the framework of an institution that goes back to the highest antiquity, which has different aspects—monogamous here, polygamous there—you guess that I'm talking about the institution of marriage, among others, for example. So it's not entirely natural either.
11:33 Nature is the world of instinct. Culture is the world of institution. Hunger is an instinct. Hunger, hunger, H-U-N-G-E-R. The meal is an institution. And the proof that it's an institution is that it differs enormously in its rules and rhythms, depending on whether one sits at table with chopsticks, with a fork, with the three fingers of the right hand, in the oriental world in particular, and so on.
12:03 Or even with tubes, when it's astronauts, as the Americans say, cosmonauts, as the Russians say, who suck up—who knows what, even if it seems Bocuse got involved—into their tubes. There. So, the meal is an institution. Hunger is an instinct. There would never have been the meal if there hadn't been hunger. But if there's only hunger, we won't understand anything at all about how men eat.
Hegel and Marx are not prescriptive 12:33 And that's material. That means we're not even being scientific. That is to say, we're sacrificing everything we can experience every day, namely that I say, for example, "help yourself first." That's not of the order of nature. Do you see a dog saying to another dog, at the same bowl, "help yourself first, old chap, I'll wait for you"? So, once again, a little clarification: when Hegel speaks of man and woman here, he is not prescribing anything.
13:04 He doesn't say, here's the behavior woman should have in a society, here's the one man should have. No, no, no. There is nothing further from Hegel's thought. All those who are even slightly familiar with his texts don't even need me to spell this out. Hegel is a fierce enemy of what is called, in philosophy, the ought-to-be. If you prefer, it's "one should," "we must," that's the ought-to-be. That is, proposing the model of the ideal city, how he would want it to behave, the morality that should be followed, everything that's a bit prescriptive.
13:39 No. Just as Marx is not prescriptive in Capital, he doesn't say, here's how communist society should be organized. No, no, there's not a single line in Capital about that. There are a few, in some late works in particular, when he was solicited by the working class as it was organizing itself—there's the famous Gotha and Erfurt Program, where there are a few pages, very important of course, but marginal in number within Marx's immense body of work, which is devoted not to what should be, to what ought to be, but to what is.
14:14 There. In the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel keeps coming back to this aspect of things. Philosophy, like science, like knowledge, must concern itself with what is. And not, as at the corner café, with opinion that invests itself in what is not, in the shadows of opinion, or even the bottom of the cave in Plato—or as moralists do, especially when they're afflicted with what Nietzsche—I'm citing him on credit here, he's quite right to denounce this—calls moraline: men should do this, they are wicked, they should be kind, well, I'm caricaturing a bit, but that's the order of the ought-to-be, here's how things should go.
14:54 In the meantime, Marx studies what is—how capital functions, there, if you like it, all the better, if you don't like it, if you want to get rid of it, you have all the more reason to know how it works. That's what Hegel does in the passages where he speaks, in the Greek city-state, when they began voting on the Pnyx, on the Agora, on the public square, and there he insists, that is to say, in the light of day, in order to decide on an openly declared law, which was first defended by speeches, within the framework of what were the embryos of everything that would later be called parliaments.
15:27 For the great novelty of this moment, of the ethical world, or of the Greek city-state, as you like now—the great novelty is that what decides power, among free men, that 20% of the city—never forget that there are 80% slaves, we mustn't idealize things either—but within that 20%, what decides power? It's no longer force, no longer descent, lineage, it's speech, hence the importance—I won't go back over it—of Plato's dialogues, where he spends his time crossing swords with the sophists, who were paid handsomely to teach young wolves from wealthy families, who aspired to political responsibilities in the city: if you want to get elected, here's how to speak to convince people.
16:17 There, the best illustration, and one of the most dramatized texts in the history of thought at this level, is Plato's Gorgias—we almost come to blows. But let's get back to Hegel. So you see, I reassure you, compared to last time, I asked you for an effort of abstraction; it's simpler—as I just said—generally speaking, in traditional society, the one Hegel analyzes and which he calls substantial society, which has not yet emancipated the subject from substance—and there it's more mysterious, but we'll have so many occasions to come back to it that I'll leave it aside for now, just to familiarize your ears with a few analogies and comparisons—in traditional Greek society, it's undeniable, isn't it, that in war there are more men than women, even if we must never forget the Amazons, and that on the public square, where voting takes place, it's mostly men, right, and women, being confined, restricted, as you like, to the tasks you know well, which are precisely,
17:27 I come back to the bond of blood—closer to natural constraints than the purely political relation. The political relation is not simple, I mean that the pure political relation—I mean by that, that the meal is still tied to an old natural instinct, which is hunger; the kitchen, the bathroom, the women's spaces, the baths, are tied to constraints much older than the appearance of culture, of history, or even of man, right?
17:59 So it is, moreover, in my view, this connotation of woman with natural constraints that was induced within Greek culture, which made an enormous effort to tear itself away from nature. And yes, it's the opposite of today's world. What do you expect? I've already told you that what's typically modern is to resent modernity. What is typical of the industrial age is that we constantly denounce the world of the city to look toward greenery.
18:31 And, the first masterpiece of Romantic poetry, which comes to us from the North, as you know, from England and Germany—I'm thinking of Coleridge, for example—appears in England at the very moment the industrial revolution is taking place, and when, as Poe says in an admirable phrase, a phrase already with an ecological resonance, but expressed so much better than the discourse of the Jadots and company: the green leaves shriveled before the hot breath of the furnaces.
19:04 It's well put, it's no accident. There, well, it's the same here: the Greek world, as some have told me, escapes nature into the city—it's the opposite of us. It's not that as soon as it's the weekend I go mushroom hunting, oh yes, right away to breathe a little forest air, especially after the lockdown—I'm like you, I don't make a big deal of it—and I don't force politics to conform to my moods. But I'm a modern, I live in a city, right, where nature seems quite far away, so we're always delighted to rediscover it, especially in the comfort of a car to get there, or a good train, with warm clothes, in short, everything that thousands of years of history and culture have allowed us to push back natural constraint, and thus to have a more positive relationship to nature than the ancients, who were terrified.
20:05 I'll illustrate this last point with an anecdote I've often told you before, I believe, my regulars know it well—it's the driver of the project I worked on in Niger, the driver of the music training center. When we'd spent a whole day inland, as they say there, or more politically correctly, "in the interior," on tracks—you can imagine, often appalling—when we headed back toward the capital at the end of the day, as night fell, the last fifteen kilometers, the tarmac reappears, just with a few streetlamps at the entrance to the capital, in this case Niamey, capital of Niger, and I always remember the driver's exclamation—he was of Burkinabé origin but lived in Niger—who said, "Eh, your tar road, it's soft, huh, tar is soft."
21:08 Yes indeed, to understand that, you mustn't be in a comfortable protest camp, you have to have gone through it. There. I needed to recall all this to tell you—it wasn't that complicated. I wanted to familiarize you with Hegelian concepts, this world that, traditionally, without even going back to the Greeks, ask your grandmothers, in which there were more women than men, that of the meal, that of the... nightmare, of the laundry, which was far more grueling, believe me, than the dishes, over the centuries.
21:45 It's not this world, in which woman predominates, that he calls the divine world, and an underground world. Underground because it's less in the light than the political world, even if it's hypocritical, whatever you like—still, it's overt. There are newspapers that write about it, you see, it's not in the muffled silence of the walls, of home sweet home, of the house, of the family.
22:18 It's the opposition between this restricted, more archaic community, with a natural bond—that of blood, I'm summing everything up now—of the family, opposed to the political bond, the bond that makes one a member of the same city, whether one belongs to the same family or the same blood or not. You see that this is already quite different—so a looser bond at the natural level, right? But more evolved, without any value judgment, presupposing a later historical stage than that of the clan, the horde, the blood bond, of the pack, even sometimes.
22:55 Do you know how you say "pack" in German? You say "Gang." Yes indeed, Wolfgang means "pack of wolves." No, Mozart has nothing to do with that, it's just his first name, but it's a very common first name in Germany—they like totemism among those Germanic tribes. So, now that I've made this reminder, I would like to announce, after this long preamble, an opening credits sequence, and I'd like to say a couple of words about the opening credits you're about to see, to justify what I could have used—to illustrate the character of Antigone, femininity and community—you guess that the character of Antigone is going to play a central role in Hegel's reflection, and therefore in ours.
Alexander Nevsky by Eisenstein: the women among the dead 23:42 A photo of a painting on a Greek vase—I've seen quite a few, but I mean, some are very beautiful, but the figure you see could be Antigone, could be the queen of the Amazons, could be Athena, give or take a few symbols. So it wasn't very convincing visually. So I changed my approach completely and took an excerpt from one of the masterpieces of the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, one of his masterpieces, Alexander Nevsky, whose climax is that famous battle that actually took place, where the coalition of Slavic forces—of slaves, so to speak—who were being forcibly Christianized by fire and sword by the Teutonic knights—the Teutonic knights took a beating in that battle, and the hero of this Russian resistance, you guess that the film
24:52 came out in the 1940s, at the moment of the greatest conflict that has ever set men against one another, which left 30 million Soviets dead on the ground so that Europe could be de-Nazified. I'm taking the sequence where, right after the battle, on the moor, the endless frozen Russian plain, the corpses litter the ground, you can make out the howling of wolves, and what appears with torches—women?
25:25 And there's the connection I wanted to point out to you, which I'm now going to structure a bit more, just before the opening credits. As long as the citizen of the Greek city-state, of Athens, of Sparta, whichever, is alive, he belongs to the city. Belongs in the sense that he must obey the laws of the city even more than those of the family, to the point that if the city calls him up to go fight against the Persian army, which threatens, mind you, the very existence of the Hellenic city-states,
26:01 he must go, of course, dropping everything. On the other hand, once he is dead, once he has died, he ceases to belong to the city, he leaves the priority of the political bond—it becomes a matter for the family: his corpse, the rituals that must be performed, the washing of the deceased, his burial, all of this is the family's business. You guess that we're arriving at Antigone, you know, the one who committed that hubris, the gravest fault in the Greek world, that transgression of measure—measure being the city.
26:37 And the leader of the city, Creon, had said—two brothers were fighting, Eteocles and Polynices, I don't know exactly—and there, he betrays the Greek city outright by collaborating with another city, which is a monstrous crime, of course; there can be nothing worse among the Greeks. And so, faced with this exceptional crime, Creon, the leader of the city—so the political number one, not in Athens, it was in Thebes, in the myth—decides that he shall not even have the right, you see, to what even the poorest wretch is entitled to, namely burial rites, be it a common grave, a cross, anything at all—nothing; he must be left, volucribus et feris, as they say, as I found it in Cicero when he comments on this passage, to the wild birds and beasts of prey. And of course this scandalizes his sister—there, it's the bond of blood—the sister of the one condemned to receive no burial, nor to benefit from the rites owed to the dead.
27:47 It is his sister, Antigone, who transgresses the ban and who goes, clandestinely, at night—and well, that is precisely what inspired me to go through this extraordinary sequence from Eisenstein's film, where afterward, when there is nothing left but the corpses, when the peace of the dead has settled over the plain at night—well, you have a magnificent film, I'll let the image speak for itself, I don't need to tell you anymore that these are of course women who come to try to recognize among the corpses who is a friend, who is a son, who is a father, who is a brother.
28:24 I'll give way to one of the greatest films by one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.
32:45 I greet you all for being here, but I especially greet Redrom, who is a familiar face and whose continued loyalty up to today I'm delighted by, because he is one of our very first listeners. Redrom reminded us—and by the way, not to my credit as far as I'm concerned, I forgot to mention in the announcement—of course, as it happens, it's almost what interests me most in the film, the admirable music by Prokofiev. There are collaborations like that which one rarely sees in the history of cinema, isn't that so?
33:22 Prévert and Kosma, for the dialogues and direction, in Carné's films, in particular Children of Paradise, among others, Gates of the Night, and so on—but there is also this collaboration between Eisenstein and no doubt the greatest Soviet musician—I do say Soviet, because at the same time there was the immense Stravinsky, but he had emigrated to California.
33:55 I'm thinking of Prokofiev, who had been in the West and who returned at the end of the war to a devastated Russia. And where he died. So, after having written—if you want to see a work in which one sees, insofar as that can be expressed, the immensity of Russian suffering, this time it's Thursday, isn't it—although all the Soviet peoples took part in that suffering, from the Lyuente in Siberia, from the Chukchi, the Evenks, the Tungus, all the way to the Belarusians in the west, isn't that so?
34:30 Passing through everything you like, the Kazakhs and other Kyrgyz—Prokofiev's music—he composed a cantata; I'm telling you this for those who want to look it up on YouTube: you type in Prokofiev, Alexander Nevsky, and you'll immediately come across the cantata. Try to find the complete version, if possible with a Slavic conductor, even though there are very fine Western versions—I'm thinking of Abbado, for instance, the excellent Italian conductor, a very good musician—but try to get a Slavic conductor, it can't really be helped, can it?
35:11 So, I started with the end. The end of what? Of what we're going to work on now. That is, if you look at the table of contents, isn't that so, of my book—there's no need to project it on the screen, because the table of contents is extremely brief—you'll see that there are three parts, isn't that so?
35:45 Excuse me. A little sticking problem. There we go. There are two pages stuck together, I can't get through. There, that's it. Excuse me. So there is an introduction, isn't that so, and three parts. You could say there are four counting the introduction, however you like. So why am I splitting hairs here? Because we're going to spend a long time working on the introduction, which runs from page 5 to page 37 out of 140 pages—that's quite a lot.
Question and problem: what an introduction must do 36:22 And since it's in this introduction that I lay out the necessity of the problem that will occupy us, I don't see why I would impose on you a problem that interests no one. So, there is the necessity of a concept, indeed of a problem, and, among the most important things in philosophy, there's the philosophy of law. Then, advice to all those taking exams and competitive entrance exams in philosophy, isn't that so—well, you've all been told this again and again by your good teachers, there are many excellent teachers—the introduction should serve that purpose.
36:54 There is a topic that is given; it enters into the introduction as into a machine, and at the end, at the exit of the introduction, there must be a problem. The topic has been transformed into a problem. That is, ideally it should end with something resembling a question mark. But be careful, not every question is a problem. What time is it? That's a question. It's not a problem. A problem is a question—so it has the interrogative form, but one that cannot be answered immediately by yes or no.
37:25 One that can only be answered by taking a detour. And that is precisely what will occupy us in this introduction. And this introduction ends with the evocation of the figure of Antigone, who will then occupy the whole first part, which I call, quoting Hegel, the supreme ethical opposition. We'll have time to get familiar with these headings. So, I started with the end of this introduction, not in order to go backwards like a crayfish.
37:59 Rest assured, now we're going to start from the beginning. You know I long resisted commenting on my own book. I was asked, wasn't I, to make it the material for our workshops. And it seemed to me a bit pointless, even inappropriate, to comment on a text of which I am the author. But the accumulation of very friendly pressure I've been under in that direction, and the renewed topicality of the issues of femininity in the community and in society, inherent to the feminist movement and its diversity, first of all.
38:42 There's bourgeois feminism, which is the most widespread in the media, the dominant one. And then there's still equal work, equal pay, and there's... there's a feminism that owes nothing, isn't that so, to MeToo. So I'm going to begin this introduction by reading the text itself and stopping when it seems obscure.
Beginning of the reading of the introduction 39:19 I want to acknowledge here the work we had done along these lines—I've already mentioned it, but I insist. Philippe Moreau, our former stage manager before Pierre-Alain, who is now assigned to duties that require him to travel between Paris and Lyon, but whom we salute and who, I know, follows us very warmly—he and Hugo used to come every Saturday, isn't that so, so that I could explain what seems a bit—I won't go back over it—allusive. That's the third reason that finally decided me to use my book as workshop material this year: I'm very often told, even by those who give the most sympathetic commentary, let's say the most pleasant to hear—even they raise this same objection, this reproach, that it's too often elliptical, allusive, that it would need to be developed.
40:17 One might almost say it's a lazy man's book—that's perhaps the explanation—that I could have developed it, but I would have had to write for longer, and you know I drag my feet a bit about that. So, here is the beginning of the introduction, where I'll try to explain why I'm going to talk about the problems stated in the title, dwelling less on femininity and community—we'll come back to that, don't worry, since I just did so at some length last time too—but insisting on what already spells out the title, the relation of the aesthetic to the political within the system.
40:52 whether it be a matter of denigrating, of partly accepting, or of entirely subscribing to the system—so Hegel's irreducible opponents denigrate it, most accept it partly, or subscribe to it entirely. There, I repeat, if need be: I am not a Marxist, I am not a Hegelian, I am not a Clouscardian, even though the three references I've just named—and the further I go in time, the more I realize this is far from being disproved—are the three references that most encompass all the others; that is, with the others I would have a more mutilated world. That doesn't mean I approve of everything Marx said, everything Hegel said, everything Clouscard said, but I have far more objections to make when one descends from them toward others—there, but that's a point I'll come back to.
42:01 So, whether it be a matter of denigrating, partly accepting, or entirely subscribing to the system, the Hegelian bibliography, in all the books that deal, isn't that so, specialists, particularly in academia, with Hegel's texts, acknowledges in every case that the author of the lectures on aesthetics—that's how what is loosely called Hegel's aesthetics came about—Hegel did not write his aesthetics himself; these are his students' lecture notes, that is, transcriptions of his courses by his best students, approved, validated by Hegel, whatever you like, but still, it's not like the Phenomenology of Spirit or the Science of Logic, isn't that so, or the Philosophy of Right—these are not texts he wrote himself. It's important to know that, so they're called the lectures on aesthetics.
42:51 Acknowledges in every case that the author of the lectures on aesthetics possessed, along with a vast encyclopedic culture if ever there was one—because the work perhaps most emblematic of Hegel's approach to philosophy is the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences—along with a vast encyclopedic culture if ever there was one, he is credited with an exceptional diversity of interests.
43:22 Hegel is just as interested in the way tools were made in the history of technology as in what is happening in the English Parliament in his own time, in his final text—and indeed he takes up arms to protest against the irruption of liberalism with a political veneer, but which is above all the effect of particular economic interests, as he says, in the English Parliament.
43:55 It's the famous critique of the Reform Bill. Bill means a legislative bill, isn't that so? So, there—art, isn't that so, music, the origin of writing in China. Now you'll say to me, yes, but wait, there was no internet—the lines, that's contemporary, I admire it. There was no internet, there weren't all the museums at your disposal. You—not only do we have the museum, but if I want, say, a recent piece from a museum in Cologne, I get it off the internet.
44:34 I'm stating the obvious, but when we say an encyclopedic culture, a diversity of interests—someone who knows, roughly speaking, virtually the whole of what could be known about Chinese thought in Hegel's time, without the communication tools we have today, that's quite remarkable. So, if we credit him for this diversity of interests, we readily speak of an astonishing power of synthesis—you see, if we're paying him a tribute; do we hold it against him, do we reproach him for scattering himself, for instance—the system then amounts, according to the formula of Kostas Papaioannou—Kostas Papaioannou wrote this, I'm going to disappear, or at least move off the screen for a moment, I'll show you this, there, let me take a moment to move up a bit, there—
45:46 I can't recommend it highly enough—again, not because I agree with everything he says, isn't that so, but because it's surely among the most dense, most pertinent things written about Hegel in this format—I don't know, it comes to 205 pages, including the table of contents, it's not very long, isn't that so—and even then, 205 pages including a collection of texts at the end. It's a very good introduction to the system, provided one doesn't stop there and goes on to tackle Hegel's own texts, isn't that so—it's just an introduction.
46:19 Well, yes, so why do I quote him here—do we hold it against him?—the system then amounts, according to Kostas Papaioannou's formula, I quote, to an impossible cathedral in the style of Gaudí—you know, that Spanish architect everyone goes to see in Barcelona, the Sagrada Família, that church which always seems unfinished, and besides, there's always something unfinished about the masterpieces of that architect, Gaudí.
46:50 And there you go—that means a kind of system that never stops scaffolding itself, wanting to totalize everything, and never quite managing to. Well then, it is true that the intensity, as well as the permanence, of this interest may appear more or less vivid depending on the domain considered. It goes without saying that, like each of us, Hegel did not approach, say, botany—which he was interested in, especially with his friend Goethe—with the same interest as politics, which interested him far more than botany, even though, I don't know, he was well informed about the progress that discipline and that science were making in his time.
The relation between aesthetics and politics 47:29 So, it is true that the intensity, as well as the permanence, of this interest may appear more or less vivid depending on the domain considered. This is where I begin to hone in on the debate. There exist at least two instances—when I speak of aesthetics and politics, I'll now speak of instances within the system—with regard to which precisely the philosopher's investment never wavered. They accompanied him throughout his career, isn't that so.
47:59 From his earliest schoolboy exercises to his final texts in Berlin, to the point that one can rightly discern, in their mutual relation—these two instances, aesthetics and politics—to the point that one can rightly discern in their mutual relation, the indication—you see, I'm being cautious, I don't say the proof—the indication of a problematic essential to understanding the system. It concerns, as regards these two instances, of course, aesthetics and politics.
48:34 If we insist on this notion of relation—I'll leave the text aside for a moment, what I'm saying is that on this point I can skip the coming page because it's not very complicated—I'm not going to conduct a study of everything Hegel says about aesthetics, comma, then everything he says about politics. No—the object of our study this year will be the relation between the two. What relationship do aesthetics and politics maintain permanently within a given society, within a given culture?
49:11 I'm saying this in advance, so that the trees don't end up hiding the forest. If we insist on this notion of relation, it is to take into account this no less persistent tendency of the philosopher to ensure that his reflection on art—his aesthetics—as well as his attempt to think the state rationally—his political texts—far from being distributed throughout the body of his work as two sets of texts simply juxtaposed, like Aristotle's library.
49:41 There was logic, then physics, then, beyond physics—which is what "meta" means in Greek—the books that were placed in the library after the physics, metaphysica—that's where the word metaphysics comes from. Later, of course, the word ended up acquiring connotations that go rather well with the prefix "meta," beyond. Well, with Hegel, it isn't like that—there isn't aesthetics, then afterward politics, isn't that so? Rather, it's always one thought in terms of the other—we're getting there.
50:13 It appears, indeed, from the earliest youthful texts on, that one cannot grasp the political field without invoking the aesthetic element, and vice versa. And now, let me not just assert this—I need to give a few illustrations. But let me go back to his high school years. The oldest of Hegel's writings that has come down to us, Dialogue Among Three, is the title, between Antony, Octavius and Lepidus, the three Romans who share the triumvirate after Caesar's death—Dialogue Among Three, between Antony, Octavius, the future Augustus, and Lepidus, concerning the Triumvirate.
50:53 A political problematic, apparently. But look—Dialogue Among Three, in a theatrical form, dramatized, a dialogue—it is already in an aesthetic form that Hegel treats a political problem. From his schoolboy notebooks already, you see—well, his high school notebooks. This text already presents itself as a poetic staging, in this case dramatic, as with anything related to theater, of a political problem. So much for his youth. Now let's go to the other end of the arc, isn't that so, or of the arch, however you like—to the other extremity of the work, in a work reputed to be as arid, as devoid of existential references, as the Elements of the Philosophy of Right.
51:35 A text that is Hegel's political testament, which he wrote in Berlin. Berlin being the last of his positions—you know that German philosophers had to make, not a tour of France, but a tour of Germany in their careers. There isn't, as with us, as in France, the capital and the provinces. That makes no sense in Germany. Munich was a capital for centuries—it was the capital of the kingdom of Bavaria. You can see it in its palaces, its opera house, its theater, its museums. Berlin, for a long time, was only the capital of Brandenburg or of Prussia.
52:10 Hanover, for what concerns, isn't that so, the Niedersachsen, since we're in Germany—Lower Saxony. I won't dwell on it, because there are many micro-states in this Germany. The list would never end, but each had its capital. Stuttgart, which was a capital for the Duchy of Baden, isn't that so? Tübingen, for Swabia, and so on. I won't insist.
52:40 Nuremberg, for Franconia. Hegel held practically all these posts. Nuremberg, incidentally, is where he found his future wife. Heidelberg, with its old and famous university—we're still roughly in south-central Germany. And then he ended his career in Berlin upon Fichte's death, isn't that so? He was asked to come fill Fichte's position. If you want to look into his career, there wasn't much chance involved—you'll see by whom he was called there.
53:16 Isn't that so? A philosopher who was thought a bit suspect because he was somewhat too caught up in his admiration for the French Revolution, isn't that so, against which all the other states of Europe were fighting, as part of an immense counter-revolution financed by England, whose cannon fodder was essentially the German lands, plus Russian ones—the Germanic countries, since Germany did not yet exist. There are excellent works by our late comrade Jacques D'Hondt, who for a long time was Clouscard's companion at the Center for Hegelian-Marxist Studies in Poitiers, which he had, incidentally, founded.
53:57 Remarkable, an academic admired by all who knew him, whether Hegelian or not, Marxist or not. I think of the affectionate terms in which Bernard Bourgeois spoke of this great figure. I recommend two titles that are fascinating for following the career of Hegel the man—not his thought, that's easier to read. One is Hegel secret [The Secret Hegel].
54:28 Good grief. The ones that will come back to me, there are plenty of others. Hegel, philosopher of living history—that's one of his titles too. But for what concerns Hegel in Berlin, there's Hegel secret, and the other one will come back to me—sorry for that blank. What I hadn't thought of at first regarding our friend, our comrade Jacques D'Hondt, but he explains very well—I'll just isolate this point, to finish with this reference—that it was the most progressive government Prussia ever had, which didn't last long, that called Hegel to Berlin to replace Fichte after the latter's death there.
55:10 Incidentally, at his death, Hegel asked to be buried near Fichte. We'll see that another time. In the context of this study, this is not innocent either, as one might guess. When we see that Hegel's first publication concerned the difference between the systems of Fichte and Schelling—Schelling being his old university friend, his younger colleague—he ended up siding with Fichte, isn't that so, after having criticized him together with Schelling. Let's leave that.
55:40 So, there you have it—I recommend Hegel secret and Hegel en son temps [Hegel in His Time]. There, those two titles come back to me now, isn't that so, where they explain very well exactly who, at the ministry in Berlin—it wasn't the Ministry of National Education, that would be an anachronism, it was the Ministry of Religious Affairs—was in charge of education. The Church, being Protestant, had the upper hand over these dear young minds. There. So I wanted to make that clear right from the introduction, that every time he wants to speak of politics, he refers to aesthetics, and vice versa.
Antigone, "the supreme ethical opposition" 56:21 We're talking about aesthetics, we're coming to it now. At the other end of the work, I pick up the text where I had left it suspended, and I continue, at the other end of the work, in a book renowned for being just as arid, just as devoid of living existential references as the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, it is again tragedy, and more precisely the conflict between Antigone and Creon—we finally get there—considered here as, I quote, since this will be the title of the whole first part, the supreme ethical opposition which serves in some way as the backdrop to paragraph 166 on the family in his political testament.
57:05 You see, it's an aesthetic figure, Sophocles' tragedy, Antigone, it's a poem, a tragedy, a dramatic poem, which serves as backdrop to paragraph 166 on the family, in order to study the relationship between the family and the state in the society of the time; Hegel makes use of Sophocles' tragedy and of what is knotted together in that tragedy. Not only Antigone, but especially the figure of Antigone that he will dwell on. If we recall finally that it is within the framework of this same drama of Sophocles, again Antigone, that the most political analyses of the Phenomenology of Spirit are developed—you see, I'm playing ping-pong, we're constantly sent back from aesthetics to politics.
57:48 The most political analyses, that is, those which present to us consciousness—you, me—the consciousness that does not know, that is ignorant of its own determinations, isn't it, that is ignorant of its own logic and that will have great difficulty keeping its balance when it is forced to recognize its own logic. But let's leave that aside, we're not in psychoanalysis. If we recall finally that it is within the framework of this same drama of Sophocles that the most political analyses of the Phenomenology of Spirit are developed, that is, those that present consciousness—I arrive at the moment when it attains its truth as, I quote, "the spirit of a people."
58:27 In the Phenomenology, you find, don't you, this formula: that consciousness truly begins to obtain its truth when it recognizes itself as part of the spirit of a people, and not as blond, brunette, man, woman, isn't it, and all the communitarianisms you can imagine today, isn't it, where we badly need—since we live under the regime of the private—you don't see the connection between the private and the societal, isn't it, especially since there are plenty of people who call themselves anti-capitalist and who "societalize."
59:02 Full throttle, to speak as my friends from the housing projects and the blocks do, the young comrades—yes, it's so simple, so blindingly simple that we don't see it. There's a difference between blindness and a blunder. It's not a simple blunder, it's a blindness. Namely that power has no interest whatsoever in our being united against it.
59:33 So everything that brings us together, everything we have in common, beyond differences of color, sex, race, etc.—beyond, I did not say we should ignore these problems, far from it. But I said, beyond, to unite us, men and women, not men against women, young and old, not young against old, neither youthism nor feminism, isn't it, Blacks and whites—when there were the great strikes at Renault in Billancourt, and they ended in success, the same wage increases, the same union rights and gains within the company benefited everyone, isn't it, whether his name was Jean-Michel or Aziz, or Kouassi, or Abderrahman.
1:00:26 So when we realize, isn't it, that these analyses in the Phenomenology of Spirit—consciousness attains its truth as the spirit of a people, in the sense I've just tried to dig into a little, and not a "people" that is more global than my family bond, than my rugby team or my chess team—we will easily be convinced that the aesthetic reference and political reflection, because I'm going to multiply examples, are as inseparable in Hegelian thought as pleasure and pain on Socrates' leg in the prologue of the Phaedo.
Socrates' pleasure and pain, unity according to Baudelaire 1:01:11 I remember that Philippe Moreau and Hugo had asked me to spell out this curious—you see, I'm accused of being allusive, so I'm going to develop it. Let me remind you that this is an analogy here for the inseparability of the aesthetic and the political in Hegel's thought—when you treat one, he speaks of the other and vice versa. Well, we find the same thing for two things that are generally opposed, isn't it—pleasure and pain, among the most opposed things there are.
1:01:43 And in the Phaedo, that is, the last dialogue in which Socrates converses with his disciples—it is at the same time the one in which he bids them farewell, but it is the last dialogue, and its subject is the soul. Is the soul immortal or not? It's rather harsh on his disciples' part to have proposed this subject to him, isn't it? Imagine if he had failed to prove that the soul is immortal at the moment of taking the hemlock—that would be rather harsh.
1:02:13 Well, but let's leave that aside. Plato's humor operates on the umpteenth level. I have often repeated that he is probably the greatest philosopher—that means nothing, especially since things got more complex afterward. But he is certainly the greatest artist in the history of thought. He is in particular the greatest stage director. His dialogues are admirable, they are masterpieces both literary, poetic and philosophical, of course, and sometimes even scientific. So, I come back to it, in the Phaedo, just before the dialogue, precisely in the prologue—it's part of the staging, there's always a prologue.
1:02:54 The prison guard, who is a good man—Socrates tells us this in the course of the conversation—who almost regrets being his jailer, comes to remove his shackles so that he can converse a bit more comfortably with his companions for his last dialogue. And Socrates begins to scratch the spot where the iron had marked his leg, which is understandable. That's when he says how strange it is, what men call pleasure and its opposite, pain.
1:03:26 A moment ago, the iron was hurting me, the itching hurt. I felt good scratching myself. But the more I scratched, the more I stirred up the pain. I thus went back and forth constantly between pleasure and pain, so that it occurred to me that if Aesop, the great fabulist of antiquity—the one from whom almost all of La Fontaine's fables are drawn—the great fabulist, author of fables in antiquity—it occurred to me that if Aesop had become aware of this problem, he would have made a fable saying that originally pleasure and pain are two bodies with a single head, so that when you want to grab one, you automatically grab the other.
1:04:10 Yes, I'm Plato. He too is allusive. No, I'm not saying that. I'm not Plato, far from it. Well, let's say his allusions have such depth and reach. There you go. So pleasure and pain are just as inseparable on Socrates' leg as, if you prefer, the aesthetic and the political are in Hegel's thought. That's why our inquiry, to pick up the thread again, rather than undertaking a systematic commentary on each of these two moments of the philosophy of spirit that are art and the state, will try to clarify the nature of the shadowy and profound unity.
1:04:47 This is a quotation from Baudelaire. "Nature is a temple where living pillars sometimes let confused words escape. Man passes through forests of symbols there, which watch him." The symbols observe man. "The symbols which observe him," which observe man, "with familiar glances." The symbols are strange for man—the sphinx is an enigma. But man is not strange for the symbols. Man is familiar to them. It's a bit unsettling, in a way.
1:05:17 So, "Man passes through forests of symbols which watch him with familiar glances. Like long echoes that mingle from afar in a shadowy and profound unity, vast as night and as light, perfumes, colors and sounds correspond to one another." And you see, this is the famous sonnet called "Correspondences." But there you are: "in a shadowy and profound unity." We're going to see to it—we are in Hegel, not in Baudelaire, after all Baudelaire only serves here as a splendid illustration—to try, this year, to track down a little and send a few rays of light into this.
The hierarchy of aesthetics and politics is inverted 1:05:55 Isn't it? What is unworthy—it is unworthy of the philosopher's knowledge, isn't it, to leave in obscurity what can, sometimes it can't, but what can be brought back to the rigor of the concept. So this is where our problem, which gave its title to today's session, comes in. A first problem arises, that of the hierarchy governing this relationship.
1:06:27 Listen, I'm going to speak plainly first before going into detail. What is more important for Hegel? Aesthetics or politics? I put it crudely like that, but at least it has the merit—it's not a matter of being clear first and complicating things later, but it's best to start with clarity. First, what, in the hierarchy of these instances, in these parts of philosophy which are reflection on politics and reflection on art, aesthetics—which one goes furthest in the truths it brings us, in the answers to the question "know thyself," which has been foundational to philosophy ever since the oracle of Delphi enjoined it upon Socrates.
1:07:09 Not to do as those who preceded him did—the pre-Socratics, also called the physicists, who questioned the moon, the earth, water, fire. That's admirable, all right? I'm not saying at all that they were people who wasted their time. Not at all. But we weren't yet in philosophy. And the people of the time, quite rightly, called them the physicists. Even though it has a dizzying depth, and even though at the time physics touched on many other things than what we call physics today.
1:07:41 But anyway, the oracle answers Socrates: "know thyself." Stop questioning solid matter. "Know thyself." In which of the two spheres that concern us do we go furthest in answering this quest for oneself? In the artistic adventure, isn't it? Or in the many ways we have of changing the political order?
1:08:11 For now, I don't know, I don't have the answer, but it's this hierarchy that will occupy us. Yet at this very level, a first problem arises, that of the hierarchy governing this relationship. For if throughout this journey the domain of aesthetic art and that of the political state always seem, to quote Mallarmé, to "light up with reciprocal reflections," it nevertheless seems—and this is where there's a problem in Hegel's work—that between the way the philosopher of Berlin, the old Hegel, at the end of it, at the last stage of his intellectual journey, tries to conceive of the state, and on the other hand the poetic element in which bathes the reference of the young fellow-student of Hölderlin when the three of them were students together, Hegel, Schelling, Hölderlin, three, three lobes of a clover—I'm alluding to a very beautiful poem by Hölderlin, clover blossom
1:09:21 which splendidly grows green—he wasn't thinking of themselves, Schelling, Hölderlin, of course, and Hegel; he was thinking of Heracles, Dionysus and Christ, then theology students, isn't it, three figures indispensable to man's presence on earth, isn't it: Heracles who comes to rid the earth of the monsters that prevent man from establishing his dwelling there; Dionysus who melts away what separates us, who melts, who bursts these bubbles in which capital tries to isolate us, isn't it, each in his own bubble—of women, of men, of the young, of Turks, of Corsicans, of Hutus, of Tutsis, of Shiites, and others, Uighurs, and so on; Dionysus, in wine, drunkenness melts things away,
1:10:31 you know, in the carnival, Nietzsche saw this very well, isn't it, that Dionysus—what does he represent—he is the god of the crowd, the god of the collective, whereas Apollo is the god of individuation—not individualism, forget that, that's an anachronism, it's much more modern, we're not in 19th-century England, in Greek mythology it's the price of individuation. We'll have so many occasions to come back to this. So there is not at all the same political discourse between that of the old man in Berlin, in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, the old Hegel in Berlin, and that of the young student at the Stift in Tübingen, for whom the model—he has already found it, as if the quest were finished at its very start—the model of every political ideal is the ancient Greek city, isn't it, as he imagined it.
1:11:24 And you will see that he, as much as his comrade Hölderlin—I can't say the same of Schelling—will eventually be forced to shift this point of view, and to better understand what modernity carried that was irreplaceable, and which was still lacking then in the so-called Greek perfection, isn't it. So I repeat this statement of the problem: it nevertheless seems that between the way the philosopher of Berlin tries to conceive of the state, and on the other hand the poetic element in which bathes the reference of Hölderlin's young fellow-student to the polis, the ancient city, polis, P-O-L-I-S, of course, it seems that between the two a discontinuity is manifest, both at the level of content—since it doesn't say the same thing—and at that of form and tone: a readily lyrical tone in the youthful works, isn't it, in the explosion of German Romanticism, a much drier tone in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, much more analytical, alpha, beta, gamma.
1:12:33 Good. So then, there you have it—we're looking for a hierarchy that doesn't exist, because it isn't the same depending on whether we take the young Hegel or the old Hegel; we have a bit of a problem. This one isn't very complicated, you'll see, I'll try to get rid of it fairly quickly, but judge for yourselves: sticking very empirically to this evolutionary interpretation of Hegel's thought—young Hegel, maturity, the old one—it turns out that the hierarchy governing this relationship even ends up being reversed.
1:13:04 So it's even more serious—it's not just that there's a difference between the young man and the old, it's that one says the opposite of the other, you'll see—reversed depending on whether one refers to the young seminarian, I come back to you, the young man who, like his Romantic generation, wants to subordinate this one, politics, to that one, the political to the aesthetic. There I'll be forced, I don't know, to refer to another text, I'm going to borrow another screen for a moment.
1:13:37 I'm going to bring up my tablet. Thank you. I'll be right back. Thanks. You have to love it. Oh, and then, I think I had the best copy. "The Earliest System-Program of German Idealism." I don't think it's on the site. Yes, to illustrate this moment I'm alluding to, that of the young Hegel with his cult of the world of the city, I'm alluding to a text co-written by the three of them, to the point that even now we wonder who really is the author—even though the problem is rather oddly posed, and no doubt somewhat ideologically skewed.
1:14:26 I mean by that: was there really a great difference between the thinking of the three of them on this subject at the time? If all three of them wrote the same text and all three ratified it, then they think more or less the same thing. What is certain is that the handwriting experts are sure the text is in Hegel's own hand—but since it's a text that says exactly the opposite, isn't it, of what Hegel's adversaries want to reduce his thought to, as being a cold rationalist, systematic mind who understood nothing about art and...
1:15:02 I'm caricaturing, there are people like that, of course, it doesn't hold up. As soon as we're dealing with those who approach the texts—and there are quite a few of them even at university—well, there are still some for whom it's painful to show that there can be the same poetic pertinence—I don't say the same level of poetic writing as Hölderlin, but the same pertinence in reflection on poetry as Hölderlin, moreover on the same themes, and it's the same distribution of values.
1:15:38 So I'm going to find that for you. So, it's in my texts, don't move. Wait, I'm being silly, it'll simply be quicker this way, I'll take it. I wasn't planning to quote it to you because I didn't think it was on Wiki, but I was told it's there, in the Earliest System-Program.
The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism: freedom and creation 1:16:11 Is that it, Dominique, that I put on screen? Yes. Ah, there you go, you've got it. The magic of Pierre-Alain—well, the magic is competence and work, but in the service of a good cause since it's yours. Thank you, Pierre-Alain. So, this text is truncated, we don't get access to it, but listen, I'll pick up where I left off to show you the connection, isn't it? I was talking about a reversal between the position of youth—the young seminarian who, like his Romantic generation, wants to subordinate this one, politics, to aesthetics.
1:16:53 It is art that must, it's the values of art that must, isn't it, determine politics, political science, and not the other way round. And, judge for yourselves, an ethic. Well, I apologize, it didn't come back to me just like that—"given that in the future all metaphysics will pass into morals, of which Kant gave only one example with his two practical postulates"—I don't quite grasp it yet myself for the moment, but what you already understand is the importance Kant had for all these young men, turning everything upside down.
1:17:26 Kant, who is the summation of the century of the Enlightenment—this French Enlightenment century, well, it's a German who made the summation of it. Which led Hegel to say, and later Marx to take up the same argument: we Germans are profound. We are more profound than the French. We think better than they do, but we think what they do, whereas they actually do it. The French make the revolution, and we are still thinking about the French Revolution.
1:18:00 You understand that under the pen of Marx, who said "hitherto philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it," this has a certain resonance. So already, isn't it, it's no coincidence that this illustrates well the enormous political effort made—not merely philosophical, look at the Encyclopédie, its editorial culmination and its almost para-political action, isn't it, of the French Enlightenment philosophers. You remember the title: "Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts," making a comprehensive summary accessible to everyone, at the time, with superb illustrations—there were no photographs—all the machines of the era divided into plates, into parts, into pieces, extraordinary work to which I refer you.
1:18:46 Well, it is Kant, isn't it, who makes the final tally of this century. So here is what they say: "The first idea is naturally the representation of myself as an absolutely free being." Here I'm obliged to refer you, well, obliged, allow me to refer you to a talk I gave within the walls of the École Normale Supérieure, on rue d'Ulm, some time ago. The link will be attached when this video is posted on YouTube, this is today's session, in which I was continuing a series titled "Revolutionary Thought from Rousseau to Lenin."
1:19:34 There, we're right in it. That is, the sequence that leads from Rousseau to Kant. You know that Kant said Rousseau is the Newton of morality, that is, of action. From Rousseau to Kant, from Kant to Hegel, here we are, at the young Hegel, from Hegel to Marx, from Marx to Lenin, and I was encouraged to extend it further. I had said at the time, I had said we should extend it as far as Clouscard.
1:20:04 And one of my listeners said to me, oh yes, yes, you should do it. I'll do it one day. Food for thought. So I think that on the occasion of the translations currently being made—I can't say much more for now—of Clouscard into English, which is a way of considerably increasing the speed at which his audience is expanding at a planetary level, this may be an opportunity at that point to come back to this extraordinary avenue, isn't it, that runs from Rousseau to Lenin to Clouscard, passing through Kant, Hegel, Marx.
1:20:46 Now, why is Rousseau the beginning, the first one? Because he is the first who, as Hegel says elsewhere, taught us to walk on our heads. That's what Hegel admires most about the French Revolution: that everything is turned upside down. It is no longer sovereigns, force, that rules. You know that all the opening pages of The Social Contract disavow the idea of founding politics on force. "The strongest is never strong enough to always be the master, unless he transforms his strength into right and obedience into duty."
1:21:23 That said, in any case, with an almost algebraic rigor. He doesn't say force is bad, wicked—he doesn't moralize, he doesn't whimper. He says that's not how society was built. Otherwise there would be no society. There would be, as in the natural world where force reigns permanently, no stability, no regime ever—there wouldn't be the Egypt of the pharaohs which lasted millennia, the French monarchy which lasted, imagine, from Clovis to Louis XVI, such stability, or the Habsburgs.
1:21:55 Well, let's move on. I won't even mention China, probably the longest continuity along with France, a monarchical power. Historians have observed this. Well, there are two continuities with no equivalent in duration elsewhere. It's interesting given the times we live in. Well, Rousseau is the first to found anthropology, the study of man, on freedom. So I come back to this text by the three young men.
1:22:28 "The first idea is naturally the representation of myself as an absolutely free being." It's a generic term, of course. "With the free being, conscious of itself, an entire world appears at the same time." The term is underlined, as you see, in italics. "Out of nothing"—that means we are no longer in the natural order. That's what nothingness means. Out of nothing, in Latin: ex nihilo. "Let there be light, and there was light."
1:23:00 It seemed that only God could make something out of nothing. Because in the world of science, of nature, of physics, so in the world of... Let's broaden physics to biology, well, the natural sciences, the animal world. Up to man, who is an animal, but who brings new determinations. That's what we're in the process of seeing. Which runs parallel to the fact that he needs to eat to live, which won't stop until my last breath. In that sense, I remain an animal until my last breath. But I am not reduced to animal nature.
1:23:35 I step out, so to speak, of the species to create a new genus out of nothingness. What is that? Well of course, it's the whole world of the tool, of culture, of anthropology. Which often makes me say, in case you get confused in philosophy, in case you mix up concepts, it gets too abstract. And there's always, like a little light in the fog, that makes you find a clearer road again.
1:24:08 I am even better enlightened, that is, that all philosophical systems — not mine, I'm not dealing in opinions — can be reduced to one of the following three. Either, first, the naturalist point of view: it is nature that makes man. That's those who, today, try to deduce everything human from the natural sciences, from physics, chemistry, biology, cognitive science, neuroscience.
1:24:40 There are very serious things in there, but certainly not in the object it proposes for itself. But, you know, what matters is not the goal one pursues — which it saw very well — it's the means one deploys to get there, which lead to very interesting new discoveries. But that's a different problem. So, first point of view, the naturalist point of view: it is nature that makes man. Second point of view, then, the total antithesis. No, man is not natural, he is supernatural. You recognize the principle common to all religions.
1:25:12 I'll go very fast. There, I'm no longer dealing with the differences between religions that are so fashionable. Everything that divides us is very fashionable. Do you want me to make the list again. The Hutus, the Tutsis, the Corsicans, the French, the Bretons of Morbihan and those of Finistère. Well, what do you expect? There are the Alsatians of Mulhouse, there are those of Strasbourg, of Strasbourg. And even that Colmar in between, which I salute, a beautiful region. Like almost all the regions of France. All of them.
1:25:42 And no, what's at stake here is what is supposed to hold us together. A term that scares the culture of the bourgeois world, of the universal capitalist world. Except when it annexes it — one might think that what is universal in all men is what is only valid for the mature white man in full possession of his reason, in short, neither the madman, nor the savage, as was said at the time, nor the child, who is barely a man.
1:26:15 No, no, the concrete universal. There too, we'll have a lot of material to work with in this little book on the subject. So, for now, what interests me is seeing this creation out of nothingness, ex nihilo. It's that what man attributes to God is typical of the mechanism of alienation. It's not entirely false, it's true that one can create out of nothing, contrary to what physics has said, that nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed, which is true.
1:26:49 In physics — physics comes from the Greek word physis which means nature. In the order of nature, it's undeniable. Isn't it? That nothing comes from nothing, and that if there is something, it's because there was something else before that caused it, etc. You know that. But on the other hand, what Kubrick's film expresses well, you see, 2001: A Space Odyssey, we suddenly see the creation of the tool which is more than an instrument — the ape, at the dawn of man, picks up a stone and cracks nuts.
1:27:20 Tools that all have the same typical shape, we find the exact same shapes of arrowheads over thousands of kilometers in the Sahara, which means there's an idea in the mind, a form that's there — which made Marx say that what immediately distinguishes the clumsiest architect from the most skillful bee is that the architect has his house in his head before producing it in reality. That's to illustrate this whole passage which becomes obvious from the revolution carried out by Rousseau, which I sum up in this sentence from Émile: everything men have made, men can destroy, can undo.
1:27:57 There is no ineffaceable character except what nature imprints. And nature makes neither the rich man, nor the prince, nor the great lord. So, all the determinations that come to us from what man has made, we can change them. That's the discovery of freedom in politics. With the free being, I take up the text of the first systematic program of German idealism, that's what it's called, with the free being, conscious of itself, there appears at the same time a whole world out of nothingness, the only true and thinkable creation out of nothing — twice, underlined in italics.
1:28:34 This is where I'll descend into the field of physics. So, we move on to nature. The question is the following. How must a world be constituted for a moral being? I want to give new wings to our physics, which progresses so slowly and laboriously through experimentation. One senses the romantic impatience that would like, so to speak, to bypass what Hegel, at a slightly more mature stage, a few years after this text, will call the 'Anstrengung des Begriffs,'
1:29:05 the straining effort of the concept, the patience of the concept. He even sometimes says the calvary of history and of spirit through which spirit must pass to win its freedom. So, if philosophy provides the ideas and experience provides the data, we shall finally have — look, that's where I started, how to illustrate the young seminarian's enthusiasm for the ancient polis — we shall finally have the physics on a grand scale that I expect from times to come. It does not seem that present-day physics can satisfy a creative spirit, one might think one hears Rimbaud in A Season in Hell saying 'science is too slow,' a creative spirit such as ours is or should be, you see, from nature I come to the human work, the idea of humanity in the foreground.
1:29:52 I want to show that there is no idea of the state, for the state is something mechanical, no more than there is an idea of a machine. Only that which is an object of freedom is called an idea. We must therefore go beyond the state as well — you see, this is said before the young Marx, who will never stop repeating this formula — for every state is bound to treat free men as a mechanical cog, and that is what it must not do. You see, they are still at the stage of duty, of morality. It must therefore stop, we don't quite know how, you see for yourselves that here all ideas of eternal peace are merely ideas subordinate to a higher idea, freedom.
The idea of beauty and the mythology of reason 1:30:27 At the same time, I want to set down here the principles of a history of humanity. I'm quoting now. You can continue below, aside from the last one, for example. There. And, lastly, the idea that unites them all, the idea of beauty — you see we arrive at aesthetics, the word taken in its highest Platonic sense — I am now convinced that the supreme act of reason, the one by which it embraces all ideas, is an aesthetic act.
1:31:02 One could not better prove what I was saying earlier, what I was writing, namely that, at this stage, in his youth, Hegel, like his whole romantic generation, places at the top of the hierarchy the aesthetic instance in general and the poetic in particular. I am now convinced that the supreme act of reason, the one by which it embraces all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are sisters only when united in beauty. The philosopher must possess as much aesthetic power as the poet.
1:31:34 The philosopher must possess as much aesthetic power as the poet. It's interesting to see this at a time when a poet like Hölderlin has dizzying philosophical considerations in his most beautiful texts, without this becoming thought pasted onto poetry, and conversely, the philosopher — as we've often seen in Hegel's case — tends to poeticize his sentences. To recall the passage where he speaks of death, which we see in a human being's eyes, the consciousness of death, it is the night of being advancing here to meet everyone.
1:32:14 Men devoid of aesthetic sense are our letter-philosophers. This echoes the opposition found in the Gospel — let's not say these are young seminarians — the opposition between the letter of a writing and the spirit in which it must be understood. As it is said in the Gospel, the letter kills and the spirit gives life. The philosophy of spirit is an aesthetic philosophy. Without aesthetic sense, one can have no spirit at all, even to reason about history — as far as history goes, even history must be subordinated to poetics.
1:32:44 Here it must appear clearly what is truly lacking in those men who do not understand ideas and who are honest enough to admit that everything seems obscure to them as soon as they no longer have tables and registers at their disposal. Poetry then receives — wait, this is the most important moment. Up to now there have been somewhat naive things, and here a very great text begins. Poetry thus receives a higher dignity. It becomes again in the end what it was at the beginning. I think of Homer, we all think, and first of all, of Homer, the educator of humanity.
1:33:16 For there will be no more philosophy, no more history. Poetry alone will survive all the other sciences and arts. We'll now see the rest. At the same time as we hear so often that the great mass should have a sensible religion, you know there were fine talks at the Tropiques bookshop on sensible reason, a fine publication by our colleague. Forgive me if the name escapes me, it will come back to me very quickly.
1:33:47 It's not only the great mass, but also the philosopher who needs it. Monotheism of reason and of the heart, polytheism of imagination and art, that is what we need. I repeat this superb sentence. Monotheism of reason and of the heart, polytheism of imagination and art, that is what we need. I'll skip the next paragraph. Actually, no. I'll take it, but I'll start at its second sentence, after the dash. We must have a new mythology.
1:34:21 Yes. But this mythology must be in the service of ideas. It must become a mythology of reason. As long as we have not made ideas aesthetic, that is, mythological, ideas hold no interest. You see, a kind of synthesis. Ideas are too abstract in general. We must do as in mythology, that is, make them a bit more concrete, in the form of stories with characters that seem to us to be of flesh and blood. And conversely, the sensible rises to its truth only when it makes a detour through the idea.
1:34:55 So, as long as we have not made ideas aesthetic, that is, mythological, ideas hold no interest for the people. You see there's an educational aim here in direct line with Rousseau's Émile — we see it clearly, don't we? And in direct line with Rousseau's Émile and the immense effort of the Encyclopedists, to bring within reach of the greatest number — a growing number of literate people, even if a majority in the countryside was still illiterate — to bring them to knowledge.
1:35:25 And conversely, as long as this mythology is not rational, as long as it remains a superstition, it is a source of shame for the philosopher. Thus enlightened men and those who are not must join hands. Mythology must become philosophical and the people rational. And philosophy must become mythological in order to make philosophers sensible. What an extraordinary generation of young people, all the same, who were able to conceive such sentences in the years around 1792.
1:35:56 'No force will any longer be repressed. Universal liberty and equality of spirits shall reign.' See the importance of ideas, the French Revolution. 'A higher spirit sent from heaven must found this new religion among us. It will be the last and greatest work of humanity.' I could not fail to make this detour through this incredible text. If you want to find it again, it's the first systematic program of German idealism. What follows is called...
1:36:30 I would like to check the time, perhaps now, because I can't see it. There, that's it. All the same, yes. I've gone over my speaking time by nearly 7 minutes relative to your questions. I don't want to. So, if you'll allow me, I'm going to use my mouse for a moment. There. You'll find — well, there, I see there are lots of questions and I'm delighted.
1:37:01 I see that we have our regulars, first, I'll start with the oldest one, Redrom is still there, isn't he, and I'm glad about that. Stavisky, fellow traveler, that's a nickname, which has nothing to do with the Stavisky affair, I guarantee you. Guillaume Duguay, who asks us about the opposition between the letter and the code, no doubt to follow up on what was said about the evangelical opposition between the letter and the spirit.
Lordon, Friot and the elimination of the national level 1:37:33 Redrom tells us — he's talking about Lordon, it's impressive. Lordon is increasingly like Friot, unfortunately, I'll leave him the responsibility for what he says, but in general Redrom is extremely thoughtful. 200 years behind, or more, our three favorite Germans. Ah, that's the reading of the first systematic program of German idealism. Well, I have enormous respect and affection, perhaps one-sided, but no matter.
1:38:12 It's even proof that it's healthy with regard to someone I cannot help but call my comrade Bernard Friot. In any case, it's not within an organization — I belong to no organization, as you know — but within the communist movement in general, in the broad sense. And now, it's true that I have a few disagreements on some societal aspects of the society we live in.
1:38:45 The discourses — I have nothing against societal reality, he only recalled that, but against the discourses that try to account for it, and especially the way it's used to say that everything doesn't come down to the social, as if one wanted to reduce it. He's alluding to that. But let me go through them, I don't want to waste too much time, I'll first do a bit of clearing through the questions. And our comrade Stavisky says, Tannes, I'll turn the question around, why is it so important for those who support Bégaudeau to do away with the national level?
1:39:21 Very interesting question, very topical, isn't it? Earlier — I'm not one either, don't worry, for a chauvinistic, flag-waving nationalist, even though I'm appalled to see the way French sovereignty is treated by Brussels, by Washington. The submarine affair is still fresh in everyone's mind, I hope, probably more so, but above all by its own leaders.
1:39:54 Already, we have a head of state who has said — it's still the first time in French history — that there is no such thing as French culture. But I don't fall into the opposite camp of a nationalism that would take advantage of this to say that the essential thing lies in the bond of a kind of imaginary identity that would be, one wonders where — what strikes me is that I'm never so much a flag-waving Frenchman, in the sense of being in love with France, as when I see its extraordinary diversity of origin, of culture, of language — and Germanic language gives what happens, what is spoken in the intimacy of the Alsatians, all the more so still, at home too, these are no doubt the two regions where the traditional language is most spoken in daily life.
1:40:42 Besides, it's no use saying we speak Gaelic, Breton — both, that doesn't go very far in terms of numbers. On the other hand, you go into a bakery in Strasbourg and you hear a lady asking at the register, 'Give me a bichet of bread, please.' There. But it's this diversity that makes for incomparable richness. The identity of France comes from the number of identities that collide within it.
1:41:13 So, I'm glad our friend and comrade Stavisky put the problem in the form of a question, because that's indeed what needs addressing here. We'll certainly come back to it. The opposition between the letter and the code isn't quite the same thing, but I fully understand why one might think of it. It's not the same thing because here being would be on the side of the spirit.
The letter, the spirit and the code: Hölderlin's Patmos 1:41:46 The letter kills and the spirit gives life. I recall the traditional theological dichotomy. So, being would be on the side of the spirit. Those who don't cling madly to what is literal, like lawyers in general, for instance — you do have to hold to it — or like when you take your driving test, the code de la route, you mustn't change the words of the statement, otherwise you fail your test. Let's be serious, this opposition is important, but in the case of being it's not quite the same — the spirit is not on the side of being and the letter on the side of the code — the code is much more concrete and determining than the pure letter, than literalness in the evangelical text — although, you see, I seem to be going back and forth because I'm not sure, and so, out of intellectual honesty toward you, I want to try to give a chance to both points of view. In one of his most beautiful poems, Patmos, the island of Patmos,
1:42:56 in Greece, and according to the Acts of the Apostles — we're still in theology — the island on which John was shipwrecked, whom we call Saint John among Catholics, the apostle John, and it's there that he had the vision of the Apocalypse, he received the revelation of the text that closes the whole New Testament, on the island of Patmos. John, the master of the word, the one from the Gospel that begins not with 'Jesus, son of Joseph, son of so-and-so, son of this one, son of Levi,' the sons of — no, Isaac, Abraham, Jacob, that's important, but that's not the point — he's the only one who begins with 'In the beginning was the Word,' and he's the only one written in Greek too, I say that to set things straight at this level. Now it's this same John — who has nothing to do with John the Baptist, here it's John the Evangelist — who will close the New Testament with the revelation of the Apocalypse, so he's the one who always turns — you see we come back to the letter, to the word, to writing — the Gospel is the word of Christ supposedly transcribed.
1:44:06 I find it hard to say, it's so close, if only to the ear, isn't it — is there not already a betrayal of the word, to recall Rimbaud, 'to understand my word, it does what it flees' — how can one enclose it in the stability of writing? No, I don't want — I don't want to defend my own cause surreptitiously, to make it seem that it's for reasons as noble as this that I don't write — there's a lot of confusion, no doubt it's due to neurotic causes that don't interest the public, but there it is, it's an old story, isn't it — I said it was a very fine problem, but I haven't yet reached the passage where he speaks of the letter, where he contradicts what I just said, that the letter is somewhat more reductive than the spirit, when he says that the code — sorry, my mistake — when Hölderlin says that the Father, God the Father, demands above all else that the letter be respected — 'Dem folgt deutscher Gesang.' It's quite overwhelming.
1:45:18 this conclusion of this poem which is splendid besides, Patmos — I haven't read the most beautiful passages, I'm speaking of the one concerning the letter, and he ends, I'll say it in German, it's the last verb, 'German song obeys it' — German song is the one that strives to respect the letter. There, don't go telling me that this is nothing in favor of legal formalism, but anyway, it's to tell you that both can be discussed. I won't stay on this question any longer because it draws me on — not because it doesn't interest me, but because it would take me very far, I don't know — unless Pierre-Alain has spotted some essential questions, because I got the idea that Stavisky was reacting to questions from Tannes that you just skipped — just so you understand the thread a bit — ah yes, Tannes — ah yes, yes, that I understood, I understood he was replying, of course, and so, hello Dominique, they'll tell you that French national political identity is a division, a diversion from human community.
Against ontological identity: the "here" that is not a point 1:46:28 see Bégaudeau again for example — it's terrible, we try to import into the philosophical field ways of posing problems that are journalistic and very far from philosophy — posed like that, power already has the advantage — you see where I'm going with this — what is French national political identity? There are four important words: national political identity, French. Yes, isn't there — well, the one that seems weakest to me is identity — not that there isn't something that distinguishes, among other things, I'm the first to think so, a certain French tradition, certain French idiosyncrasies, yes I'm trying to find laborious words so as not to say identity — well, I have nothing against identity, but I'm wary of its ontological sense, that's what I'm going to try
1:47:38 to clarify right away — for example when the Germans say — as we say, 'I'm as happy as a king,' 'I'm as happy as the Pope in the Vatican,' that's an old expression — they say 'happy as God in France.' Isn't there a certain identity there that means the Frenchman likes good food — well yes, how could it be otherwise, God is better off in France than in paradise — will you find in paradise pretty curly brunettes like in France? No, not blondes, redheads, I mean — I'm not speaking in my own name, but that's how France is seen from abroad, you know, look at all the tourist postcards of Pigalle — now it's become a factory, it's a horror, but for a long time there was a Parisian gaiety, that's the title of one of the most famous operettas, isn't it, by Offenbach, at the time of the Second Empire — there's a certain French lightness, light as champagne bubbles, as happiness, as — which is neither in the puritanical tension
1:48:49 of the Protestant world, that is, the Nordic countries, isn't it, nor in the excessive — that's still what he's talking about — in the excessive substantialist rigidity of — look how women are traditionally kept in the Mediterranean basin, isn't it, they have incomparably less freedom than boys, and girls, and between the two, France is this country through which the 45th parallel passes, the singer — you see, sketching what might be an identity, but that's not at all what's invoked when we speak of identity, I'm not talking at all about a fantasy of Celtic-ness, I don't know — what is it, for me I mean, a Corsican is no more nor less French than a Ch'ti, and yet both come from respective identities that originally, that pre-existed France, but I was just saying, and I insist, what makes French identity is the richness of all these contributions, that when you look at immense Eurasia — yes, I'm broadening the debate — immense Eurasia,
1:49:59 When you go from Kamchatka - which isn't the easternmost part of Siberia, that is of Eurasia - and you arrive at the Pointe du Raz in Finistère, at the Raz, or not far from Cap Fréhel, or at Plougastel, in short in Finistère, where the land ends and you can go no further, well everyone gave themselves a rendezvous there back at the time of the great invasions, right - they still couldn't, at that time, they didn't yet have caravels, or the stern-post rudder, or the compass, to dare venture further still, which would only happen from the dawn of the modern age, that is the 16th century and the Renaissance, with the great discoveries, starting with that of the New World, right. So there you are, I want to be clear that all these identities ended up meeting there - some of them only passed through. Look at a Germanic tribe, the Visigoths - they crossed France, they didn't stay long, then they went to Spain, they continued on their way, and they stayed for centuries in North Africa.
1:51:09 Which is why I sometimes tease my Arab friends by telling them that the Germans were in the Maghreb before them - well of course, the 'Vaisers Sauten,' I mean the Visigoths - it's true they were there in the 3rd, 4th century AD, before the Arab conquest, there were already Numidians there, Libyco-Berbers if you want to speak in linguistic terms - yes, we're still in identities, and we lose ourselves as soon as we take them into account, we get lost, we metastasize. If a given region were to become independent, it would itself be caught up in struggles within itself over whether it's the north or the south of the region that's the most representative of the region's identity - I'm not giving examples on purpose to upset anyone, because every region of France is concerned. What is certain is that the Corsican of Bonifacio is not, linguistically, the same as that of Bastia - I won't go into the linguistic level - and as for mentalities, people never stop joking about it, that's the difference in mentalities and hence identities between the Bastia people and the Ajaccio people. So the closer you look, the more it dissolves.
1:52:19 The more you take hold of identities, the more you want to grasp them, the more you lose yourself - and here I come back to Hegel, who seems very far from all this. In his study of our perception of spatiality - it seems far off - in the first chapter of the first volume of the Phenomenology, sense-certainty, when he spoke of the 'now' - I'll skip that, but it's fascinating that the 'now' is something that's always fleeing, we've barely said 'now' and it's already past, the 'now' that is, is other than the one that was uttered, etc. Let's leave aside what holds for time, and when he gets to space he says it's the same for the 'here.' The 'now' and the 'here,' the two forms of what is right there in front of my nose, the 'now' and the 'here' - 'this, here, now,' the three parameters of the die-hard empiricist who sees nothing beyond the end of his nose, which is often, moreover, the entire world in which the animal is immersed - 'this, here, now,' with its senses. When 'this' aims at the 'here' - here, that's this book here, there's a place, but this one -
1:53:30 Look, I'm talking about the 'here' - up here is another 'here,' down here is another 'here,' to the left is another 'here,' to the right - excuse me, for you it's the opposite - is another 'here,' and the 'here' of this line, or the 'here' of that one - and there I'll stop taking you on this walk, because Hegel has this striking phrase that only he has the secret of, which suddenly puts an end to this quest that could go on to infinity, because it's imaginary, far from the real - and he ends up saying: the 'here' that was meant was the point, but it is not a point - that doesn't exist. Well, French identity, as it is too often imagined by those who defend it - saying 'the French national political identity' - with as much force as those who say 'the irreducible Alsatian, Breton, Corsican identity' - well, they're going to come into conflict. Afterwards - excuse me, that's the region - but the international, yes - the region will cry dictatorship on the part of the nation, and the nation will cry centrifugal forces, dispersal, and atomism of the regions.
The Congo, Katanga and secession 1:54:40 Be dialectical, let's be dialectical, and I'll finish with Africa to illustrate, to depassionate things, to distance ourselves a little - but you'll see we're right in the middle of our problem - of, how shall we say, French national political identity. I propose this formula to you: the region gets the nation it deserves, and vice versa. Why do I think of Africa? Because it's a country that has been atrociously bloodied, more than any other perhaps in modern history in the broad sense, let's say since the beginning of the 20th century - I'm thinking of poor Congo. We're talking - the most optimistic historians speak of 10 million dead, and it continues, the massacres, like in Rwanda, which is a recent avatar, historically speaking, and a late one, of an old carnage that has never ceased taking place on the banks of the Zaire river - to learn a text and the boy - but I'll come back to much less poetic things, right - the Congo was for a long time the personal property of the King of the Belgians, of Leopold I - it wasn't even
1:55:51 the Belgian people that it belonged to. And when there was the rubber boom, there was an entire system for exploiting the Congolese population so that rubber production - it all collapsed afterward with synthetic rubber - but you can't imagine, I'm not a voyeur, I don't want to tell you atrocities, but there were villages where, when production wasn't up to what the Belgian colonizers expected, here men were crucified and women had their breasts cut off, and then they were nailed to posts - it was appalling, this history caused 10 million deaths. Find out for yourselves, don't take my word for it, I trust you - there are educated people among you who know what it means to do research, to go to archives, even just archives online, who know how to distinguish, in the jungle of the internet, where the worst and the best rub shoulders - more often the worst, statistically I know - people who will immediately see that there are, alas,
1:57:01 documents that are perfectly serious that will report to you things far more terrible still than what I'm trying to report to you here. Now what did the colonizers do at a certain point - I'm going past the era of the King of the Belgians - when there was the civil war in Congo, what was called the Belgian Congo, right, the time when the UN had to intervene, when the UN Secretary-General mysteriously disappeared in a plane crash - Hammarskjöld, at the time - and the era when the Westerners, right, were directing how the UN managed the so-called Belgian Congo, at that time still Belgian, for a little while longer - what happened is that immediately the former colonizers, to keep the lion's share, that is the south of the former Belgian Congo, of present-day DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo - what was called at the time Katanga, the region fabulously rich, still now, in everything you could name -
1:58:11 it's more than a geological scandal - it's manganese, uranium, gold, diamonds beyond count, coltan, rare metals, precious metals - and it's a country whose population is almost poorer than the Sahel countries, where there's nothing but thorny bushes in the desert - I'm thinking of my comrades from Mali, Burkina, or Niger - not you, the Chadians - almost poorer, because of this criminal policy. Where I want to get to - I want to get to this: the Westerners did everything - you know I don't like that term, well it's just so we understand each other, since apparently the listeners understand it better than I do - did everything so that, since they couldn't prevent the country from becoming independent - it was the era, right, of the emergence and of the independence of former colonies - well, they'd try to keep the richest part by staging a coup and putting in place here a figurehead they could do whatever they wanted with - it was the era of Tshombe, right, Tshombe, the handyman of the Belgians and the French,
1:59:21 who hastened to have the great Lumumba assassinated, right, saying he was free, he could flee - he was shot, a bullet in the back, after having been brutalized - well, you know there are films about this, I'm not a voyeur, so I don't much like sending you back to all that, he'd rather quote texts, right - Patrice Lumumba, who had led his country to independence, and who had the misfortune, right, of setting it on a path he thought was that of Cuba, of the Soviet Union, of mass literacy, was assassinated, and a region tried, claimed to secede. You see where that can lead - it's not posed like that, there's no 'my idea, my values are the nation, my values, no, it's my region' - that's not how it's posed, it's posed in terms of blood, of mud, and forgive me, of the unspeakable - these are grave problems. I'm saying the nation gets the region it deserves and vice versa: when a region is neglected by the nation-state that's supposed to govern it, we have to understand that it might be tempted to secede, if you will.
2:00:31 For the region not to secede and to remain within the French, Argentine - and so on - or Chinese fold, if you like, in that case the region needs to feed the nation, as in an organism - I mean all the parts must benefit from the health of the organism. It's not possible for the liver to be shot while the heart works fine, little by little, or the reverse - if the heart doesn't supply the lungs, there will be breathing problems, agreed. So the radiance, and the best justification a nation-state can have for remaining a nation-state, with a national identity, with national sovereignty, is to extend itself into the regions, to take the risk of losing the one within the many, and in doing so, to enrich the many. At that point, the region gets the nation it deserves, and the
2:01:41 nation gets the region it deserves too. If at a certain point there's secession without foreign intervention - that can happen, but that wasn't the case, that's why I'm telling you: be careful, these problems are poorly framed. It's obvious that the Uyghur separatism in China, which didn't exist, right - and the color revolutions, they look for the weak point, and it produces bloodbaths that haven't stopped since - when we're still struggling with the bloody conflicts spawned by the secession of Katanga in the former Belgian Congo, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or in what's called the African Great Lakes region, which borders, right, this same conflict, extending as far as Burundi and Rwanda.
2:02:37 I'd bet you anything that current events will soon return to those areas. That is, when China builds a train that goes 500 kilometers an hour, even faster than the TGV, running all the way to Tibet, or to the Uyghurs, the problem is posed differently. When Uyghur women stop being abducted with a whip on horseback, as was still happening in Kazakhstan not so long ago, in the former Central Asian Soviet republics. And when the central state forces children to go to school, and women too to go to school - and since I'm on the subject, since I'm on the subject, I was talking about the region and the nation, now I'm going to talk about women and men, I'm not straying, I'm still on identities.
Afghanistan, the Taliban and the bed of Procrustes 2:03:22 It's not that they're biological identities - on the contrary, it's even worse. When the Taliban first took power in Afghanistan - now everyone says it's horror, look, you see, here we go, women no longer dare leave their homes - but what is this hypocrisy? I'm not defending the Taliban, they were my enemies. It was the obscurantism I was denouncing, the return to identity, to religious 'issue,' to the literalism of who knows what text, since, by the way, you never find in the Quran what the Taliban prescribe.
2:03:59 There isn't even a prohibition of alcohol in the Quran, if you're a little informed. There's a warning against excesses, which is more or less in the customs of every country. Back to my Afghanistan story. When the Taliban first took power, it was to hurrahs from the West. In Paris, you had lots of Afghan restaurants, the valiant defenders of freedom. The hero of the day was Massoud, Colonel Massoud, Commander Massoud.
2:04:30 The darling of the BHLs and so on. War criminals for peace, I say that because they live in peace but they trigger wars at the other end of the planet - which still isn't over. Where am I getting at? When they took power, that famous Massoud, this man - it's a close call, he was no angel - who razed Kabul. What happened is that the head of state of Afghanistan, the one who had called in the Soviets, in application of international agreements signed between them - the Soviets didn't intervene in Afghanistan the way the Americans and French are currently intervening in Syria, where nobody invited them.
2:05:16 When the Soviets intervened, when they left, the Americans having over-armed the Afghans with anti-aircraft missiles - a plane is useless in those valleys, a helicopter, out there, with a 15-year-old kid with a Stinger missile, a helicopter - but that, the Americans themselves tell this story, don't take my word for it - the former head of state whom the Taliban seized was tortured, crucified, then hanged, his corpse hanged, thrown into a pit of excrement.
2:05:54 And the schoolteachers who, for the first time in that country's history, had taught, had put girls in school, were themselves crucified, and all this to the applause of the West, since these were the soldiers freeing Afghanistan from the totalitarian dictatorship of the pro-Soviet regime. We ought to figure out where we stand. And now, the same people who were angels at that time are now shown as demons. Watch out for identity.
2:06:25 Nothing does more harm - here I become the philosopher again - than the imaginary trying to install itself in the real. This strikes me... The real is never as damaged as when what does not exist tries to obtain existence within it. Brutally. Without the agreement and acquiescence of what is already there. And this, I've already pointed out several times, but I repeat it here, is admirably illustrated - since our three friends from Tübingen used to turn to mythology - admirably illustrated by the myth of Procrustes in Greek mythology.
2:06:59 Procrustes was that bandit who lived off passersby, at the crossroads of the roads, and who had devised a bed or a table - depending on the translation - always some fixed measure onto which he placed the travelers he had captured, and the traveler had to be exactly the size of his bed or table. You see, a fine illustration - physicists know very well there's never an absolute measure. So when someone was too long, he cut off whatever stuck out, and if it wasn't long enough, if it was too short, he stretched them out on the rack, he pulled.
2:07:32 So it would fit a bit - which he never actually managed. So there's the mythological reminder I'll end with for now. You can be sure there will be other occasions to come back to it. No, no, I haven't strayed from the subject. If we don't tackle these problems, we'll fall into the trap set by those who have more interest in posing the question as it's usually posed - that is, positing a national identity and a regional identity. It's the very notion of identity that needs, first of all, to be made dialectical.
Proximity, Corsica and expanded solidarity 2:08:04 I think you've answered the second part of his question, but to be fair, Tan put a second part in his question just below. So, yes, thank you, thanks to Pierre-Alain's pointers. I'll take it up, but I wasn't answering Tan - I was using Tan's question as an opportunity, I'm quite certain Tan won't fall into the pitfalls I'm in the process of denouncing. So: what gives the national level a legitimacy that other community divisions wouldn't have? Very good question, which I'll answer right away, so as not to be too long, because it's late - for you, for me it's fine - with: proximity.
2:08:42 We need to get away from - we need to be wary of - solidarities that I'm the first to respect and even to call for when there's nothing else left, in distress, in destitution. Let me go back to Corsica. Back in the time when there was poverty in Corsica, when there was no tourist windfall, when there were no sea baths. You see the terrain where we live? When I think that some people talk about the laziness of Corsicans, their nonchalance, when it's very clear that it was a way of protecting themselves against the abuses of those who occupied them.
2:09:18 Already the Romans said that Corsican slaves would let themselves die rather than work for someone else. Yes, when you see the terraced fields climbing right up into ravines, from sea level up to passes where even goats could barely venture, you'd say those who did that weren't lazy. They didn't talk about Corsican identity, about 'Corsitude' - they didn't talk about it at the bar, they produced it with their hands. You should see the mule paths, right, that allowed transhumance.
2:09:49 But that's not what I want to talk about. There's something even more important: emigration from Corsica. There are more than 2 million Corsicans outside Corsica. There are 230,000 inhabitants in Corsica - Tan, more or less like Aubervilliers. There are more than 2 million of them. Why did so many leave? Because of what I just said, because at the time, there was poverty. There was poverty and the vendetta, the latter often being an effect of the former - that is, proximity vengeance. I'm not condemning the vendetta, nor justifying it.
2:10:21 But I'll come back to it - the region, the nation. When there was a crime that had made a family suffer, hence a community bound by blood - you see how we come back to Antigone? Thanks for these questions, Tan, which bring us back to the heart of the debate - and all the blood was concerned, the cousins, etc., everyone through whom that common blood flowed was concerned. That risked causing many deaths.
2:10:52 When justice was slow in coming from Genoa, from Pisa, from across the sea, from the bureaucracies, from corruption - the Genoese arranged things so that Corsicans could buy their way out of punishment. I'm simplifying, going quickly. But that's one of the reasons for the victorious and magnificent revolt of the Corsicans against the Genoese yoke. Even though Genoa, for its part - I'm not dealing in good and evil - built infrastructure, bridges, roads, sometimes some facilities that didn't exist in traditional Corsica.
2:11:29 But for now, I'm thinking here of the rapacity of the Serenissima. So, when the Corsican emigrated and arrived in Marseille, or later, when he arrived in the colonies - I myself am in this story, I'm in Vietnam, it's rare that I talk about myself, but all four of my grandparents, on my mother's side as on my father's side, met each other over there, in Indochina - they didn't know each other in Corsica.
2:12:01 You see how important that emigration, that diaspora, was. It's obvious that when you're that far from home, the bond of proximity matters. People often said that in the colonies, the most important celebration of the year was the party of the Corsican Amicale. The nicest beach in Dakar was the one belonging to the Corsican Amicale. That's how it was, because of the importance of the Corsican community in expatriation. Wealthier regions had no desire at all to expatriate, without antibiotics, at that time.
2:12:34 I'm thinking of my mother, who used to say she saw terrified cobras climbing up the stilts of her house, on the lagoons of Cambodia. All this to say that this is how the problems of identity need to be framed. What gives the national level a legitimacy that other community divisions wouldn't have? Freeing us from proximity, which, as you understand, doesn't only have advantages. I just said it only has advantages in times of distress.
2:13:05 When things are going better, another solidarity is needed, broader, more extensible. Look at language problems. It's often said, and it's true, that people were mistreated - the young Corsican pupil who spoke Corsican within the school grounds instead of speaking French was punished, chastised. But that's very poorly framed. It's presented as if there were a dictatorship, orders coming from the Ministry of Education in Paris to put the child in the corner. No - it was the Corsican schoolteacher who did that, because within families it was a hope of emancipation, that the child not be stuck with the shepherds' language, but could simply express himself, write, in order to get a clerk's job at the post office.
2:13:47 I've lived enough in Africa, you know - in Africa, when someone knows how to read and write, in Ivory Coast, they say, and him, he 'knows paper.' 'He knows paper' means he's saved, at least somewhat, compared to those who have nothing, who already have the possibility of a little clerk's job. That's what I'm reminding you of. Problems need to be framed concretely. What makes history move isn't abstract, ideological, biased oppositions serving the political interests of the moment for some clan.
2:14:18 These are problems that exist, I was going to say, almost from time immemorial, but that's a bit meaningless in history - problems intimately tied to the development of anthropology. In distress, we show a solidarity of proximity. These are the laws I'm trying to bring out, an anthropological law. And this holds in China, in France, in Chad, in Morocco. As soon as more abundance circulates, the gaze reaches further. It goes then from the region, a bit beyond, to the nation.
2:14:50 Quite simply. So, don't make me say I'm justifying Europe. Because you can go beyond the nation and see now - now that in America - European solidarity. But of course, I'm not anti-European. I'm against the Europe of Brussels. It's a diktat that doesn't exist - it's biased. Remember the draft constitution? Did you see? The whole domain of foreign and military policy, there are three lines saying it's NATO that's in charge of it. Full stop. That is, a power that isn't even European.
2:15:21 Who's talking to us about a European identity? There you go. I think I've given a few elements for reflection. I don't want to close these debates. Once again, with a pirouette, or a series of pirouettes, I'm trying to lay out, to bring up arguments that aren't usually brought up, concrete problems, the ones that really move people and that insist on being heard, and that are recurring, and that come back if they're not settled.
2:15:51 Unlike the abstract and criminal way in which they're generally posed or opposed. I'll end on this. Ironically, the Hutus too - it's the greatest genocide of the postwar period along with the Khmer Rouge, who were 'Khmer Greens,' as I like to say. Let's move on, I'll get worked up about the Khmer. There too, you have an identitarian discourse among the Khmer, right, against the Vietnamese nation, which was pro-Soviet at the time. Follow my gaze - they weren't trained by just anyone.
2:16:22 There's a Khmer Rouge in the jungle. Their first great action was to empty the city and go to the countryside. That's why I called them the 'Khmer Greens' - it's cruel - because they shed a great deal of blood, in that sense they're red. The pro-Chinese of the time, and the fiercest anti-Soviets, in the name of Khmer identity, who'd done their ideological schooling in Paris - in Paris, not Beijing or Moscow, mind you - were champions of identitarianism, of 'Khmeritude,' if I may put it that way, against which, by the way, I have nothing.
2:17:01 It's one of the finest cultures there is. No need to invoke the temple of Angkor for that, it's something else entirely. So, we need to put an end, right, to this permanent civil war of identities against one another, of ontologies, as I like to say - that is, these identities that all have as their common point - because I'm not against identity, I'm against ontological identity, that is, one resting on an already-given, race, I don't even know what that means, whereas Hitler, he knew.
2:17:34 I'll end on this, on Hitler. Hitler ended up admitting that it's not the nation that matters, it's race. What better way to conclude, regarding the opponents and supporters of the nation, that it's a false problem, because if you grant them national identity, you'll end up arriving at race. So in France, there's one of these collisions of race, well, there we go... And I'm glad of it.
2:18:04 In the history of France, I'm not talking about the way capital imported hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, right, to prevent wages from rising and to outflank generations of national trade-union struggle. There we are. I'll suspend my answers to these questions here. And you see how the opposition of the restricted community - I'm not talking about the region here, but the family - I come back to the text we're dealing with, it's the same - of the family and the city, has brought us to extremely current problems.
2:18:48 Thank you for your questions. To those whose questions I haven't answered, that I haven't even read, don't hold it against me. You can see how passionate I am about your questions, and you know that, thanks to our technical crew, in particular Pierre-Alain, we're working a lot on this - we're going to devote entire sessions of more than two hours to answering your questions, in particular those that weren't dealt with tonight. So, see you next time, in two weeks.
2:19:19 Yes, let me add one last word: alongside our workshops which are indeed weekly, as I just recalled, don't forget that Pierre-Alain is gradually making available to you sessions of my talks that were recorded but who cannot devote himself entirely to our association. Pierre-Alain, you understand, has an insane amount of work besides this. I even wonder how he manages to combine it all. He has already put into circulation—some of you have certainly noticed—for two days now, the continuation of our analytical reverie which consisted in reading Nerval's Promenades et souvenirs.
2:20:02 We had the continuation and conclusion for the past two days under the title "nomadic and sedentary." No longer, as in the first part, a choice between movement, nomadism, or being sedentary—starting again with the immigrant versus the native-born Frenchman—but instead we make the synthesis: how one can be both nomadic and sedentary at once. Watch this video, which is a short format, well, a bit shorter than usual, even though this one is actually the longest of my analytical reveries—and there you go, that's to tell you that you'll be getting new analytical reveries from sessions already recorded, which will soon be feeding the site while we wait to see each other again in two weeks.
2:20:50 Thank you—sorry for having worn you out, for having kept you a bit later—and in any case I am extremely happy to be with you again and to see that your questions are equal to the issues that concern us all. So, see you very soon.
