English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Two comments on coherence and the girl offering fruit 0:00 Hi, we're back. I'm sorry about that little interruption. Thank you for your patience. It happens several times in the neighborhood these days. I even thought I heard that it's happening elsewhere in the Paris region. Anyway, let me pick up again for those who were kind enough to come join our session this evening, in the meantime.
0:35 So I'll start again from the beginning, if you don't mind, but quickly. This comes from various comments on recent videos, both the regular Thursday workshops and the musical podcasts, so to speak, which have come out over the past several days now, on the various streaming platforms.
1:10 These comments converged toward something, toward the themes that gave me tonight's topic, which broadly revolve around the apparent contradiction between the invariance of my discourse since the beginning, since the few years I've been doing occasional interventions online — what remains constant in my talks — and, on the opposite side, what apparently seems disjointed, full of detours, ruptures, discontinuities, and so on.
1:53 I told you that it's based on recent comments that I decided to focus on this theme. So I'll first read the two comments I selected, which more or less sum up all the others. I'll ask Pierre-Alain to display them, thank you. I hope it works better now. So the first one is from Maximil, who is already an old acquaintance of ours, even though he must be quite young, I don't know.
2:24 Let me read his comment. "I'm immersing myself again in Dominique Pagani's older videos, and it's remarkable to see how consistent his thinking remains." In a way, it's a relief for me to read this, because I tell myself that there must be people thinking, "Wait, why did we suddenly jump from this to that, like jumping from one thing to another with no connection?" "How consistent his thinking remains, whatever the subjects and however much time separates them."
2:57 That comes as a kind of counterpoint, like a second voice running parallel to mine, and I'm all the more grateful to Maximil for it. A refrain you hear me repeat more and more often is that, far from having the casualness of systematic digression, it seems to me that I keep saying the same thing since my very first talks.
3:27 In the mode of theme and variations, of course, but it's always the same theme. One which has some connection with the situation of the historical present that concerns us and preoccupies us. I think I've said the essential, now let's get more concrete. Whatever the subjects and however much time separates them, Maximil — and he's not the only one these days — seems to detect a consistency.
4:01 I don't take that only as a compliment, I won't allow myself to. Maybe one can be entirely wrong and still be consistent, I mean, that's not a guarantee, is it, of relevance. But I am very grateful, Maximil, that you've gone through a large number of my talks, and it's only under that condition that one can suddenly see the recurring themes — I'll come back to this in a moment — which allow one to hold on each time to a few invariants, which I'm now going to detail.
4:40 Let me first finish with the two comments I mentioned. I'll reread Maximil's and then continue and finish it. "I'm immersing myself again in Dominique Pagani's older videos, and it's remarkable to see how consistent his thinking remains, whatever the subjects and however much time separates them. If there's no logic and universality, then what is this?" "So thanks again to Mr. Pagani, and I'm very glad he's adding to his little team, which he well deserves, hoping to see him again soon for new videos."
5:12 There you go. Thank you, thank you so much for that comment. Now let me read the comment that goes in the same direction, in substance, but with a mischievous turn of phrase that I liked. "So, Pagani, with your natural manner, without seeming tired of having scoured so many pages so many times" — so here again, apparently it's abundant, jumping from one thing to another, a bit scattered — "you mischievously show us places where the nectar of life lies hidden."
5:49 Here we shift to the singular — you're a bit like the supplier, or the godfather, of the girl with the fruits. So here's someone who has apparently paid very close attention to earlier videos. Let me remind you that the girl with the fruits is one of the most disturbing, endearing, and remarkable figures to appear from Hegel's pen, precisely in the Phenomenology, where, at the moment of almost passing into absolute knowledge, he compares our modern relationship to aesthetics, to works of art — us moderns, who go see them in museums, often far removed in time and space from the concrete context in which they were produced, created — he compares this mediation of museums
7:02 to a young girl offering fruits. And after seeming to find it a bit unfortunate that the fruits are cut, no longer on the tree, no longer having their freshness, the light, all the natural elements that had accompanied their growth, so to speak, there's a superb dialectical reversal, where Hegel says: but in fact, the girl goes beyond what her fruits were in their natural state, through the very gesture of offering them, and in the glow of her self-conscious eye.
7:40 Isn't that so? There you go. So it's a metaphor for transmission in general, and it touches me deeply, so to speak — if that were all, I'd keep it to myself. But what concerns everyone kind enough to follow my talks is that, as I often repeat, and this comes to confirm it, I don't believe I'm a creative person, and I strive instead to invest myself in transmitting the creations of others, if you will — whether they be thinkers, poets, writers, or of course musicians, everything that belongs to poetry, poetry in the ancient sense, that is, of creation.
8:31 And so, there you have it, I set the act of transmitting the creations of others against the act of creating, even though someone told me mischievously — which pleased me — that perhaps I am, but it's up to you to judge, creative in the very act of transmitting. But let's not mix everything up. So, these two comments prompted me to try to bring the audience you make up onto the same level, though — and this is one of the difficulties of my transmission — it includes people who have followed me from the beginning and others, and I'm glad of it, who are joining recently, so to speak, this series of talks.
Reference videos and three triplicities 9:25 And so that everyone can be reset, so to speak, to the same level, these two comments suggested to me that I should point you toward videos going back almost to the beginning of my talks, precisely to deepen the invariants and to help both the veterans and the newcomers hold on to a few markers that I'm going to develop this evening and which, if one ever gets lost in the details, at least allow one to stay in touch with what seems to me the fundamental question that I thank you for continuing to pursue with me.
10:12 There you go. So, here are the videos in question. Their somewhat cabalistic numbers with the hashtag and figures simply correspond to what you find either on our site — which Pierre-Alain has organized very well — or on YouTube: you type dominiquepagani.net and you land on the list of videos, or you click on Home, or you click on Videos, but either way you get them exhaustively listed.
10:48 Here, if you don't mind, I'll ask you to click on Home — actually, there's no need, because I see Pierre-Alain has already pulled up the few videos I'd like to point you to and ask you to watch when you have a bit of time; there's no rush, but if you go over these, which I chose because they were the most synthetic and best summarize, and most emphasize, what remains invariant in my talks — well, that will allow the veterans, the newcomers, and so on, to...
11:25 ...reinforce themselves through a more uniform listening experience. And, in terms of content, I'll now continue with the content elements that circulate in these videos I sent you. I've summarized them — if Pierre-Alain would scroll down a bit more — as a series of triplets. That's where we were when the interruptions occurred, right? OK, that's for the videos, good.
11:58 There you go, you see, there are three bullet points, right? And the themes stated by these bullet points concern elements of content, circulating in the five listed videos, which will remain, of course, on... you'll notice it's three sets of triplets.
12:29 Tragedy of language in three acts in the Bible — I'll come back to that; some of the veterans surely remember it, and we'll see how it's still relevant today. The philosopher as middle term between the poet and the mathematician — again we're in triplicity, two extremes, the mathematician, the poet, two extremes in the manner of expression, in the relationship to expression, to language, to discourse in any case, and the philosopher, that makes three.
13:04 Torn between — fortunately torn, so to speak — between the poet and the mathematician. And finally, the three stages of the self, from classicism to modernity — that too should ring a bell for some of you, and as for those who haven't yet encountered these themes, it will be an opportunity to catch up. So, here we go.
Adam, Babel, and the gift of tongues 13:35 Let me detail these three elements, once again, which are developed much further in the videos I'm pointing you to and which I ask you to consult at your leisure. I know it takes time. So, first: tragedy of language in three acts in the Bible. What is this about, let me remind you. This is my own somewhat dramatized presentation, dramatized in the theatrical sense.
14:10 That doesn't mean tragic — on the contrary, you'll see there's a happy ending. It should be called tragedy-comedy, right? I made a mistake in saying that word, tragedy. I meant to say tragicomedy, since there are tragic elements, but it ends well. Namely — let's respect the chronological order of the Bible — in Genesis, in the earthly paradise, in the first garden, it is said in Scripture that God gave Adam, that is, man, the privilege, unlike all other species, of naming the creatures.
14:49 First act. An Adamic act, as it's often called, going back to the earthly paradise, to Adam, to the first Adam, before the Fall, where the philosophical embarrassment of the question doesn't arise — what do you call this, what do you call virtue, what do you call democracy, what do you call justice, what do you call hair, mud, filth, as it's said in the Parmenides — but where things are called by their true name.
15:23 Let me note in passing, and you'll see I develop this in the videos indicated, that all great poetry, in whatever culture and language, tries to reconnect with this almost paradisiacal relationship to speech, where speech gives beings and things their true name.
15:53 So, first act, the Eternal gave Adam the privilege of naming the creatures. Now the antithesis — here's where it turns dramatic, right? Many verses further on in the Bible — I'm still staying in the Old Testament for now — there is, on the contrary, the episode of the Tower of Babel.
16:23 Let me remind you that the episode consists in men having planned to build a tower reaching up to heaven, and that to thwart this attempt by man to equal the divine, God uses not the weapons he had already used effectively and fearsomely — water and fire, I'm thinking of the Flood for water, of Sodom and Gomorrah for fire. I laugh because, you know, there are always somewhat fanciful exegetes of the Bible, and some say this symbolizes an atomic attack, Sodom and Gomorrah, since Lot is told not to look back, implying so as not to see the flash of the explosion.
17:10 Water, fire — that's serious business. God has an infinity of fearsome means to annihilate his enemies or to eliminate whatever he wants to eliminate, and yet, to thwart the Tower of Babel, he uses neither water, nor fire, nor these apparent cataclysmic disasters, this apparent cataclysmic violence, but something far more effective. He institutes — and you'll see right away the continuity with this tragedy, tragicomedy of language — he institutes the confusion of tongues.
17:44 Up until then, all the actors engaged in building the tower — workers, engineers, I mean — spoke one single language, as if humanity had not originally been divided into different languages. You see, this is an obsession in German culture — they call it the Ursprache, the original language. Some German linguists absolutely want it to be a Germanic language. Let's leave that aside.
18:14 So, in contrast to this language understood by all the peoples of the earth, all of a sudden God institutes — as is still the case today — the multiplicity of languages, and men no longer understand each other; there are misunderstandings in the strict sense, and the tower remains to this day a failure, an unfinished thing. Doubtless the most striking illustration, literally, is the magnificent painting by Bruegel — not Brueghel the Younger, the Elder — his Tower of Babel, which is impressive in its splendor while at the same time the failure is patent, admirably expressed in the painting.
18:51 So there you have it: first act, perfect expression and communication, God gave Adam the privilege of naming — that is, of giving their true name to — the creatures. Antithesis: suddenly, men no longer understand one another, because the Eternal, to punish them for wanting to measure themselves against him, institutes the confusion of tongues. And finally, the final synthesis — but here I move on to the New Testament — the moment of Pentecost.
19:24 You see, when I said tragicomedy in three acts — once Christ's Passion is completed, he is dead, no longer there, the apostles are gathered, right, in the Cenacle, the place where the scene took place, in the Cenacle, they're together, a bit sad, Jesus is no longer there. And then Scripture, in the New Testament, says that he sent them — it's translated as a Comforter — the term Paraclete, right, a Comforter, who is the third term of the Trinity — I'll go quickly, there was the Father, there was the Son, and the Spirit was missing — and here the Spirit appears in the form of a small tongue of fire above the head of each of the apostles, and that is the moment celebrated as Pentecost in the religious calendar, and what interests me here is...
20:22 ...that it is stated very precisely that, from this visitation by the Spirit onward, the apostles find themselves able to speak in all the languages of the earth. The curse of Babel is lifted. That's the first triplicity. You'll notice that the relationship to expression, to language, to speech holds a very important place. Second triplicity: the philosopher as middle term between the poet and the mathematician.
Natural language and formalized language 20:58 Well, listen, here's a good example, so to speak, of the fact that I always say the same thing, and never the same thing. It's not as contradictory as it seems. No, no, I'm serious. We're going to find the elements of what I just said, but arranged differently. First variation on the theme I just stated, right, with the tragedy — the tragicomedy — of language in the Bible. Once again we have three elements, but this time there are two extremes; the common point among philosophers, poets, and mathematicians — let's first clarify what's common before specifying their differences, and even what separates them, sometimes even opposes them — is their relationship to language.
21:46 So we find again this element already present in the first triplicity, in our initial tragicomedy. Where am I going with this? Well, let's start with the mathematician. He has a very particular relationship to language. He clearly sees that the language linguists call natural language, everyday language, does not consist of saying "Y equals X implies," no, but instead uses words that are more concrete, apparently.
22:23 It's not... words, images, let's say it in a word — this language which is packed with metaphors, to the point that we never notice it. And we're so used to this everyday language, this everyday language, and it's the one philosophers use. I might say to myself, "You're joking, this can't be serious." Between everyday language and then when I open a work by Kant, Aristotle, or Hegel, I don't find that it resembles everyday language.
22:53 Of course, arranged in a rather odd way among philosophers, but the words used are not mathematical algorithms. They're words where you find the words of everyday life. Let me give you a very clear example. Hegel speaks somewhere of the pure porosity of matter. Context doesn't matter. These three words — the pure porosity of matter. Each of these words is common. They're not terms taken from a highly formalized language like mathematics.
23:27 Pure porosity — we know what porous means, matter too. We don't understand at all what he means by it, but we still remain within language, at least within the words of everyday language. It's their combination that's a bit odd and puzzling. So the philosopher and the poet use everyday language in an unusual, unconventional way. Which the mathematician does not do. Let me go back to the mathematician.
23:58 He, on the contrary, moves completely away from it. He leaves everyday language behind to invent an entirely formalized language, one that becomes more and more so as you follow the history of mathematics — let me open a parenthesis to illustrate the point I'm making. Take, for example, a mathematics textbook from Descartes' time — a towering mathematician who is behind what's called Cartesian graphs, precisely, which underlie what's called analysis, hardly the most marginal discipline of mathematics.
The mathematician's univocity against plurivocity 24:32 X, Y, nothing more. Descartes describes how he got the idea of combining algebra and geometry, right, how he speaks of the geometry of the ancients and the algebra of the moderns, that is, of the Arabs, at the time. The word algebra itself being of Arabic origin, like many words that begin like almanac, alphabet, or Alhambra. So, compare a mathematical treatise by Descartes — there are still plenty of everyday-language words interfering with the equations, from which it follows that — thus one obtains this metalanguage, as it's called in logico-mathematics, in terms of logico-mathematics, this metalanguage, this return to natural language to explain the purely mathematical, formalized part, diminishes more and more as mathematics evolves.
25:28 Take a contemporary textbook of topology or number theory, and you'll see that there are very few words from everyday language. So, there you go. And why? Why does the mathematician bypass everyday language, to which the philosopher, like the poet, in very different ways, remains attached? It's because of, precisely, the plurivocity of that everyday language.
26:04 If you ask yourself what democracy is, you can see that there's a risk of conflict—everyone will have their own idea of democracy, and often these are not only different but contradictory and opposed ideas. Isn't that so? Whereas the mathematician seeks a mode of expression that is univocal, valid for everyone, whether one is a Congolese, Californian, Japanese, Russian or French mathematician, so that there is no divergence at all and one obtains exactly the same results when speaking about the same primary notions.
26:37 Isn't that so? So the mathematician seeks a univocal mode of expression. And he does not resort to images. I'll give a very simple example. When I say "Ah, day is breaking" or the sun is setting, it amounts to the same thing. We're not in science, we're not in astronomy. We're in poetry. The sun does not set.
27:07 It's not tired from its day, don't worry about it. First of all, it's not the sun, it's us. It's the movement of the Earth that gives us the impression that the sun disappears behind the horizon, like someone hiding their head under blankets, isn't that so? Under the "crêpes"—that is, the twilights (crépuscules), the clouds, right? Little clouds, little crêpes. We're in metaphor, we're in poetry. The day does not rise, it did not set, it did not fall asleep, it doesn't have to get up, the day.
27:37 It is this imprecision of everyday language that means we never know whether we've moved—I'll come to this more simply in a moment—into the figurative sense or the literal sense; the figurative, the metaphor, the symbol, or the literal sense—it's clear here that when we say the sun is setting, it's not in the literal sense. This is what makes the scientist in general, and the mathematician in particular, who is the foundation of everything that deserves to be called scientific—a foundation from which one must then go out and apply pure mathematics to some external material for the other sciences to appear.
28:21 It is precisely to avoid this ambiguity of language—I prefer to say this plurivocity of everyday language—that the mathematician creates a separate language of his own. Once you learn it, it's within everyone's reach, isn't it? But at least you're sure that the same expressions designate the same things for the same people, or for different people.
28:54 And then, what interests the philosopher here in the mathematician's attitude is the demand for rigor. It's the fact of not merely feeling something in that way, of not being merely in sentiment, in "it feels that way," but of being able to demonstrate, to transmit to the other in a sure and reliable manner. The philosopher is in search of, isn't he, what the mathematician obtains by way of his bypassing of everyday language.
29:26 According to the philosopher, this is perhaps where he gets stuck in an insurmountable difficulty—you see why this becomes topical. From its Socratic origins up to today, the difficulty remains: the philosopher would like, like the mathematicians, to leave the world of opinion, of café chatter, isn't that so, which cannot give an account of and demonstrate what it says with the mathematician's rigor—but he wants to be able to do so while remaining within everyday language.
29:57 Isn't that so? So there can be a contradiction, a difficulty. Can one strip everyday language of its figurative content and remain with the literal sense alone? And as for the poet, then—he, at the other extreme from the mathematician, the three of them having in common a rather particular relationship to language, we're agreed on that. The poet, I will define as I develop it in the videos I refer you to again, and I thank you for taking the time to watch them, if not all at once, then at least whenever you can.
Mallarmé: a purer sense to the words of the tribe 30:40 I will sum up his position regarding language with Mallarmé's admirable formula in the Tomb of Edgar Poe. I recall that the "tombeau" is a poetic genre, a homage to someone who has died, and it takes the form of a sonnet—it's not as though the sonnet were engraved on the tomb of the person being spoken of. It's this famous sonnet that begins with a formula so celebrated that even those who have never heard of Edgar Poe or Mallarmé know it: "Such as into Himself at last eternity changes him." That's where it comes from.
31:10 "Such as into Himself at last eternity changes him, the poet arouses with a naked sword his century terrified at not having known that death triumphed in this strange voice." Well, let's leave that; I'm not here to comment on this sonnet, but I'll come straight to the line that sums up the poet's position in general according to Mallarmé, and I find it perfectly suited. The poet's position with respect to language and speech.
31:44 They—the public, the crowd, the Americans—Poe is somewhat aristocratic, isn't he, he looks down a little from a distance on the buzzing American civil society. "They," like a vile writhing of the Hydra—a many-headed monster, that clearly designates the crowd—"they, like a vile writhing of the Hydra, once hearing the angel"—that's Poe—"give a purer sense to the words of the tribe." And there's the line. Hearing him say what? Give a purer sense to the words of the tribe.
32:15 The poet is the one who gives a purer sense to the words of the tribe. The tribe here is humanity, isn't it? You see we're not far from the first triplicity—language, Babel, different languages, finding again a language where everyone understands each other, giving a purer sense. "Pure" taken in two senses: returning to the origin, as if the origin, as if the morning were purer than the evening, as if—it's not, pure like the newborn lamb, as they say.
32:47 Purity is always tied to beginnings. There is this first sense of "pure," which is returning to the Adamic stage of the earthly paradise, where Adam named things by their right name, but there is also a moral connotation: giving a purer sense, one more worthy of what relations between men ought to be. So there you are—the philosopher, like the poet, remains within everyday language—I'll come back to this because there's a dimension we haven't yet seen—but wants to use it to attain the mathematician's rigor.
33:41 And for that, I must recall something. Why doesn't he do as any scientistic person would—I don't say scientific, scientism is not science, far from it, but a scientistic or neo-positivist deformation might say, well, this is getting annoying in the end, they should just do as the mathematicians do, drop everyday language and train themselves in a more rigorous formulation, as mathematicians have done since Euclid, and they're none the worse for it.
34:13 Yes, given the object that mathematicians, science in general, pursue—that is, knowledge of the world around us—they are quite right, and I have no criticism to make. That would be barbarism, wouldn't it? I know that criticism of science is rather rampant these days, and not only these days, but it has a strong resurgence in the unhappy consciousness of the era we're living through. But let's be very clear: if the philosopher does not make this leap, does not cross this threshold of setting aside, bracketing everyday language in order to forge a formalized language, a bit like the highway code where each sign corresponds to one single, precise, determined meaning for everyone—
35:04 It's because in everyday language there are aspects that relate not to the world around us but to the one inside us. I'll use Mallarmé again, but to make myself understood. Because this attachment to everyday language as the expression not of trying to communicate what is around, outside—ex-pression, exterior to us—but on the contrary of trying to express what happens inside, and to express what happens inside in a way that can be shared.
35:44 Because otherwise one could say that everyone is in their own bubble—yes, for secondary things. No one sees the window the way I see it here, from this angle. Even I, when I move, already see it differently. That doesn't matter. That's not what's important. But there are things inside me that are shareable with others in depth, in stakes, in resonance. And I'll give you a simple example. As Mallarmé says in a famous passage you find in a series of prose texts, a magnificent poetic prose, called "Variation sur un sujet" ("Variation on a Subject").
36:18 You'll find it on Wikisource. In "Variation on a Subject" you find this extremely famous extract for specialists in poetic expression: "I say a flower." It can be any word. When I say "a flower," before thinking of some well-defined thing—I add this now—of some well-defined thing, if I'm speaking of a tulip, a daisy, a rose—I say "a flower," and there Mallarmé continues.
36:49 "And out of the oblivion," I'll say it whole first, then translate—I mean I'll comment on it in French after—"I utter the word 'a flower'! and, out of the oblivion where my voice consigns any contour, insofar as it is something other than the known calyx, musically arises, the idea itself and delicate, the one absent from every bouquet." We're not in botany in everyday language. When everyday language says "a flower," we're not in botany.
37:19 The function of everyday language, I'm becoming increasingly clear, is not to know the world around us scientifically. Otherwise one wouldn't say "it's raining." What connection is there? When we say "it's raining" ("il pleut"), there's a personal pronoun. "Il," you learned this in primary school, it's called a personal pronoun, even though here it's conjugated in an impersonal mood. "It rains," "it's windy," "it's snowing." It's a leftover from the time, isn't it, when it was Zeus, or some person, some personal pronoun, who made the rain fall, etc.
37:54 We're not in science. You'll say to me, "But then let's drop this nonsense"—I'll be blunter—"all the more reason to side with the mathematicians in abandoning this language," where there are archaisms, naiveties. Not at all. This language is connected to our desires. Something science entirely evacuates, and rightly so, when it's a matter of measuring the time light from a star takes to reach us.
38:25 I don't want to burden it with the woman I'm in love with, the drink I feel like having, in short, everything of that order, isn't it, everything that only a subject can feel. And so everyday language expresses a logic of the subject and does not express a logic of the stars, of the galaxies. In short, it's not a logic of objects. You see this has allowed us to review the fundamentals.
38:58 There's more detail in the videos I'm sending you, but we need to be in good agreement about these fundamentals if we want to continue together into rarely cleared territory. That's why I need you to venture there with me. I don't feel like going alone. So we help each other at this level. I'll now move on to the third triplicity.
Poetry as an exact science: Rimbaud's dawn 39:32 Yes, when I say the day breaks, the sun sets—again, before moving to the third triplicity, I'll extend my reflection a little further on the second one: the poet, the philosopher, the mathematicians—the poet, the philosopher, the mathematicians, in whatever order you like—to insist strongly that the philosopher will not abandon everyday language, because his function is "know thyself" and not knowing, say, the barycenter of the universe, or after how many milliseconds, isn't it, after the Big Bang the galactic clusters formed—I know nothing about that, it's not my field.
40:21 It's a matter of knowing oneself, and this self, isn't it, is precisely what is rightly banished so as not to mix it with discourse about the external world. You see that this isn't contradictory. What is contradictory is that the inside and the outside cannot have the same expression. The philosopher remains attached to it because there are stakes here on which one can attain the mathematician's rigor—hence the quip you've often heard me make, but which I repeat for newcomers who may not have heard it yet, since it's been a while since I trotted it out, namely that the only thing distinguishing poetry from mathematics is that poetry is an exact science.
41:16 I'm doing this deliberately, it's a bit provocative, isn't it? But before moving to the third triplicity, I'll give two examples I've already used and to which I deliberately return, to show you that I'm quite serious. When Rimbaud says in "The Drunken Boat," "The exalted dawn, like a people of doves"—that's a line I'm extracting from "The Drunken Boat." The exalted dawn, like a people of doves.
41:48 First, let me recall that I don't interpret—I don't like interpreting; interpretation always has something subjective about it, it's the interpretation, it's his, it's mine. I try to stay within analysis, that is, to represent, well, the line "The exalted dawn, like a people of doves." In the middle there is "like." And that's not interpretation, it's analysis that reminds us that "like" implies, in the mathematical sense—you see we're in rigor here—that on the left and right of "like" there is something in common.
42:18 When I say this remote control is black as ebony, I mean there's a common point between ebony and the remote control, namely the black color, concentrated in the particle "like." Here "like" is what "ainsi que" is, which one could replace, swap, or, as they say in linguistics, commute with "in the image of."
42:51 In the same way as "after the fashion of" would not change—it would of course change the musical and poetic resonance of the line, but it wouldn't change the content. You need to know there's something in common between the left and right of "like." Now, if I say it's black as ebony, fine, we see right away that black people are black like ebony is black. There's no mystery, but precisely for that reason there's no poetry. For as Baudelaire says, the beautiful is always strange. That doesn't mean all strangenesses, all oddities, are beautiful, but the beautiful itself is always strange.
43:24 There is always a surprise, always something that gives a purer sense to the words of the tribe, but which comes as something of a surprise all the same. The routine of the words of the tribe, where we've forgotten we're in poetry and in metaphor, when we say "day breaks." Where do I want to get to? I come back to Rimbaud's line. When I say "black as ebony," no mystery. Isn't that so? "He roars like a lion." Fine. Like a lion roars.
43:54 But what connection, on the other hand—here we clearly see what's on the left and right of "like"—but what connection is there between dawn and a people of doves? There can be doves in the evening too, can't there? Let's leave that aside. Let's leave evening and morning aside. Let's stay within the poetic statement, within the words. And you'll see that a logic sets in, but it's not mathematical logic. Yet it's no less rigorous for that. Aube [dawn], Alba.
44:24 Yes. A-L-A-U. They go together. The Pays de Caux, in Normandy, is the region with the limestone cliffs, isn't it? A-L-A-U. What I mean is that not only a French person—it could be a Togolese, any French speaker—associates, in their linguistic unconscious, with "albino," "alabaster." Which denotes—what am I saying, "connotes"?
44:54 What denotes, in a rigorous and analytical way, whiteness. Albatross. The exalted dawn, like a people of doves—there you are, by recalling that dawn points to whiteness, not in the real sense—when I look at dawn in the morning for real, then outside, I'm no longer in poetry. I go back a bit to the landscape, I see the astronomy, if you like, the scenery. There's pink, there's orange, there are all the colors you want. But the poet—I'm thinking of Hugo—draws, in an admirable poem inspired by his daughter's death, "at the hour when dawn whitens the countryside."
45:34 Because the word itself means white. There's a logic here that comes from within language itself. And when I say albatross, when I say alabaster, when I say whiteness, all of that has a connection with our desire. Isn't that so? Just as what makes the Virgin desirable in traditional poetry or traditional ethics is that she is white, she is pure, she is white, she is white. It's a metaphorical white. Because arsenic too is white, isn't it?
46:05 It's not that whiteness that's at issue. It's specifically the whiteness of immaculateness, of being without stain, of purity. So this line, which seemed—why "like a people of doves" when we don't see the connection between exalted dawn and doves—we already see that there's whiteness. And our line begins to resemble an equation, with equalities on the left and right of the equals sign.
46:37 And that's not all. For "the exalted dawn, like a people" is not merely a people of white objects, but of white objects that fly—doves. Now, in the first part, there is "exaltée" [exalted]. Take the root. You see I'm not interpreting anything. On the contrary, I take the words literally. I'm not scratching behind them to find what's hidden in the words. On the contrary, I'm listening to what the word says. ALT—you find it, vary it as we did with "albatros," "albinos"—you find it in altitude, altimeter, highness ("altesse").
47:11 For it can also be, and here we come back to it, the high in the figurative sense. Perhaps someone who is quite small but is called "His Highness," as if he were tall, all because he's socially eminent. Socially. Even if he's a fool—that's another question. Or when one speaks of having an alto voice. There's already a register there that's higher-pitched compared to baritone, tenor, and a fortiori bass. So these words work on us.
47:45 You understand that the philosopher cannot avoid this. Because just as there is no innocent relation to whiteness—a relation that isn't that of physics and chemistry, etc. No, no, no—a moral relation. Know thyself. For there is no morality of limestone. Or of lime. Or of arsenic. Or of heroin. I say that because we used to call it "the white stuff," I don't know.
48:18 Let's be very clear. I just spoke of "alto," height, being up high. Holding the high ground. But throughout our language, high and low are distributed according to values connected to our desires. What is pejorative is always what is down below. "He dragged me through the mud." Mud is what's underfoot, isn't it? "He's wallowing in filth." Filth is what's in the mud on the ground, in the unnameable.
48:49 And when we say 'to hold the high side of the pavement,' that's the era when they left ladies or people one wanted to honor, right, on that side. They were left the part that was as far as possible from the middle of the street, where there were open sewers carrying unspeakable things. So the 'high' isn't only high in the physical sense — especially since it's been a long time since science banished 'up' and 'down,' which are relative notions, right? In New Zealand and here, we don't have quite the same idea of what's up.
49:20 What is up for them is down for us, and vice versa. That's how it is. Anyone can even consider themselves to be in the west, after all. Germany is east of France, but it's west of Poland. That's how it is. So you see, at the start, 'the exalted dawn along with a people of doves' — well, that sounds pretty, what's being done there, but we didn't quite understand the meaning, why 'as well as,' what relation there is between exalted and dawn.
49:51 And there, the more we dig, the more we notice that the rigor of the words means that dawn is white, doves are white, doves fly up. 'Exalted' means literally 'to go upward.' What rigor! But don't go believing there are three computers in Rimbaud's head every time he writes a line. He does better than think everything I've just said. There, I asked you to make an effort to think. When we're in philosophy, we're neither in poetry nor in mathematics. We have to hold both together.
50:24 The demand for rigor — I'm not saying we always achieve it — the demand for rigor of the mathematician, and the richness, the subjective richness of everyday language, of what linguists call natural language. There, I wanted to dwell on this because it's by digging into these fundamentals that we find ourselves each time at the crossroads of the different problems that run through my talks. We always come back through these questions.
The hateful self and classical characters 50:55 So now let's get to the third triplicity, and you'll see that we'll again find some invariant: the three stages of the self, from classicism to modernity. It's quite simple, it's another exercise in three parts, but this time these three parts follow a chronological order. Classicism, roughly the 17th century in our literature — I'm borrowing this division from literary history.
51:26 In short, what conception do we have of the self depending on whether we're a classical author of the 17th century — I'm thinking of Racine, Molière, Pascal — or a Romantic, right? And then a modern. You'll see, through the quotations I'll attach each time to these movements, that it's quite precise. A well-known quotation from Pascal sums up the classical conception of the self: the self is hateful. It's in Pascal's Pensées: the self is hateful.
51:58 Writing does not consist in spreading oneself out completely before the reader, in stating one's moods, one's affects — that's almost obscene, it's not done for a classical writer. Everyone knows Harpagon, Molière's character. Everyone knows Hippolytus in Racine's Phèdre, or Chimène in Corneille's Le Cid. But we know nothing at all of what is truly particular, concrete, as we would in a Balzac novel.
52:31 We don't know whether Theseus has a preference for peas with bacon over lamb chops. We don't know if he's blond or dark-haired. Neither does Harpagon. They're not there to embody concrete individuals, but rather what classical language and classical theater call 'characters' — avarice, jealousy, hesitation, the madness of Orestes in Andromaque, right?
53:09 Sadism, sadomasochism — I'm alluding to Nero in Racine's Britannicus. It takes Racine's genius to concentrate both the sadistic drive and the masochistic drive in two consecutive lines, when he alludes to the first time he saw Junie, who had been abducted for political reasons in the dead of night, because it's a rival faction — let's leave that aside. And seeing her suddenly at night in an outfit that must be that of a woman torn from her bed, surrounded by her proud captors, as he says, amid the sweat of the soldiers flanking her.
53:51 He speaks to his confidant: 'and the fierce look of her proud captors lifted from her eyes a timid gentleness'; he wants to speak to her, 'and my voice was lost, and, motionless, seized by long astonishment, I withdrew into my chamber' — and it's there that, of her image, in vain I tried to distract myself. I'm getting there. When she's no longer there, when he can finally think about her, alone in his room, in his chamber as he says, he imagines scenarios with her — and listen closely, this gives way to masochism — 'I employed, in my speech, sighs and even threats.'
54:34 That's for the sadism; 'sometimes, but too late, I begged her for mercy' — and that's for the masochism. You see, in a line and a half, he runs through those two drives like that. But these are types — the type of sadism, the universal mechanisms — that's the ideal of the classical relationship to writing. We're not, as we would be in, say, a poem by Musset, or later in Realism, at the start of a Balzac novel, where you'll know everything lying around on the mantelpiece in detail, right?
55:18 The receipts, the bills, the wigs — a whole array that takes several pages, and with which one doesn't burden oneself in the classical unity. So there we are: first stage of the self, the classical conception — the self is hateful. We must speak of what is of common interest. Second stage, the antithesis, as we did in the previous triplicity.
From the romantic self to 'I is an other' 55:51 The Romantic self — here again a quotation from Hugo, and you'll see why I laugh: 'when I speak to you of myself, I speak to you of you.' Well, there it is! So let me talk about myself as much as I want, since in fact I'm talking about you. That's defensible, in a way. And then, the synthesis — I'll go quickly — Rimbaud, a generation later, much later, we're no longer in 1830 but say around 1870, who says, in the famous expression, 'I is an other.'
56:31 Yes, yes, one must speak of oneself, but the self in question isn't the self of the Romantics. It's not the self I'm conscious of. Writing must be allowed to express what isn't only in my consciousness. And this anticipates modernity — the modernity that leads Freud, for instance, to say that when we speak, we say much more than we think. Whereas we think exactly the opposite: we think words are never equal to everything we want to express.
57:02 By using words, we somewhat reduce our inner richness — what vanity! Whereas on the contrary, it's precisely when I speak, that is, when I address the other, that suddenly aspects of myself I wasn't conscious of get expressed. Remember — and here I refer you to the series I did analyzing Racine's Phèdre — where Hippolytus, the character of Hippolytus, son of Theseus, whose very classical character consists precisely in not being someone drawn to social life at court, and who prefers hunting with his confidant Theramenes, right, a former companion of Theseus to whom Theseus entrusted his son's upbringing — so Hippolytus is more at ease in the forests and in hunting, right, than at court playing the courtier, flirting, playing the game of love and chance, to the point that his confidant says to him
Hippolytus and the split subject 58:12 when he wants to leave: 'And since when, my lord, do you fear the presence of these peaceful places?' This concerns Trézène, a small hunting residence that was the Versailles of Louis XIV's youth, far from Paris, right, which had originally been a hunting residence under Louis XIII. 'And since when, my lord, do you fear the presence of these peaceful places, so dear to your childhood, where I have seen you' — there's his character — 'prefer this retreat to the pompous tumult of Athens and the court.'
58:43 So there we have it: in his character, when he consciously relates to himself, he's someone who doesn't much like high society, the map of tender love, who prefers, among all the tales that accompany the legendary story of his heroic father, Theseus ridding the earth of monsters that hinder man's development and settlement, who purges the earth of what prevents man from dwelling there, like Heracles.
59:19 And that's why they're called demigods, those heroes. That's the side he takes after his father; but on the other hand, Theseus's seductive side — that he doesn't like. It's strange, a son moralizing to his father; usually it's the other way around. He lists Theseus's conquests, but when he recounts less glorious deeds, speaking to his confidant, he diminishes Theseus's glory.
59:50 'When you recounted less glorious deeds — Helen stolen from her parents in Sparta, Salamis witness to Peribea's tears, and so many others whose very names escape him' — Theseus, the eternal, forgetful, unfaithful guy — 'so many others whose names have even escaped him, too-credulous souls his flame deceived' — Ariadne on the rock, telling of her wrongs, Ariadne abandoned by Theseus, even though she had saved him from the Minotaur by giving him the thread that saved him.
1:00:26 That doesn't stop him from abandoning her at the first stop after Crete, on the island of Naxos. Let me take the opportunity, since I praised the podcast earlier, to tell you there's a sublime musical illustration of Ariadne with her hair disheveled, gazing desperately into the distance at Theseus's sails fleeing on the horizon, before Dionysus comes to console her and carry her off as a constellation in which she can still be seen on a clear night. There's a sublime illustration in what remains of an immense opera by the great Claudio Monteverdi, virtually the creator of the opera genre, which revolved around this tragedy of Ariadne abandoned by Theseus, but of which only Ariadne's Lament has survived.
1:01:15 There, I refer you — look up Ariadne's Lament, Claudio Monteverdi, on YouTube. There you have Hippolytus, who is no fool — I mean, he likes his father's heroic qualities but not his womanizing side, and I'd even dare say he emasculates his father, which is a reversal of the usual pattern, since usually it's the child who's castrated by the parents, when he says, alluding to that part of Theseus's legend that consists of running around, succeeding with women.
1:01:52 He says: 'Happy, had I been able to tear from memory' — 'tear' is violent — 'an unworthy half of so fine a story' — he cuts his father in two, this king, this father who is also the king. So this gentle, hunting-loving, virtuous prince — to return to my point — in his own mind, in his own consciousness, doesn't feel he's being aggressive, quite the contrary. From the very start of the play he says, 'The plan is made' — those are the opening words.
1:02:26 'I am leaving, dear Theramenes. For more than six months separated from my father, I know not the fate of a head so dear to me, I do not even know where he might be hidden.' I'm a good son, it's been six months without news of Theseus, that's worrying, so I'll go looking for him. And yet, as he talks with his confidant, we clearly see the aggressiveness, but completely unconsciously. Well, it's only when he addresses young Aricia — that is, the woman he's going to fall in love with for the first time — that he even wants, in this line that sums up my point, so I won't beat around the bush, right?
1:03:11 When he says to her — I'll start two lines earlier, to make it stand out better — 'I, I, who, I, who, I' — the conscious self, you see. I'm criticizing what Rimbaud's 'I is an other' means, showing the relevance of Rimbaud's formula in relation to the Romantic self. 'When I speak to you of myself, I speak to you of you' — but that was the conscious self. Why is that insufficient? Why was a further stage needed? But you can clearly see it in Hippolytus's case, because Hippolytus already speaks in the past tense of this conscious self, from before he fell in love.
1:03:43 'I, who, scorning the ravages love wreaks on mortals, always thought I'd watch shipwrecks from the shore' — that's the past — 'now enslaved beneath the common law' — now that I'm in love, I realize I'm not the exceptional fellow I thought I was, unmoved by that voice — no, 'now enslaved beneath the common law, by what trouble do I see myself carried far from myself?'
1:04:18 I am no longer who I thought I was; I am going to become another. What theme runs through this? And so I asked Pierre-Alain to make this point clearly, right? It's precisely that of modernity, you see? What characterizes the modern hero — each one of us, none of us being heroes in the sense of a dramatic character, still less in the heroic sense — what characterizes them precisely is this split aspect, this scission: the subject is no longer something homogeneous, unified, as the 'character' was for the classical writers and for the Greeks, who remain the model for all classicism, for antiquity in general and the Greeks in particular.
1:05:06 There. I think I've summed up the essential problems to which I wanted to draw your attention, on which I wanted to draw your attention. Don't hesitate to explore them further, if it interests you, through the videos that are listed, which we'll list for you this evening and which will remain on YouTube or other platforms. But let me also take this opportunity, orally, to answer a few brief comments right away.
Corrections on Beethoven and swing 1:05:48 I notice there are at least two people who corrected my slip of the tongue, thinking it was an error, telling me: 'No, Beethoven didn't write four concertos, he wrote five.' That takes me back — I'd say, it makes me feel quite old — no, I've been listening to that since I was 14, practically continuously, so that's, I can't say exactly how many, but well over half a century that I've been listening to Beethoven's five concertos.
1:06:18 Right, and one of my first revelations of the conducting genius of a Furtwängler, for example, and of a pianist, an immense pianist like Edwin Fischer — the first to record the complete Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach, right, at a time when the sound recording wasn't what it is now, but what a performance! The two of them, the conductor and the pianist, came together for Beethoven's Concerto No. 5, the 'Emperor,' right, when I was about fourteen — I was even in Ivory Coast at the time, and I never stopped listening to that record, which crackled a bit, during the endless downpours of the almost equatorial rainy season in southern Ivory Coast.
1:07:04 There. Second small clarification, again concerning the podcasts: when speaking about swing, regarding my remarks on immersion, the interpreter, Mulligan's magnificent improvisation on the theme of 'My Funny Valentine,' a song, a standard as they say — I said we had to wait for the era, the 1930s, the big bands, the migration from South to North, the migration of African-Americans from the cotton-growing, agrarian South to the North, where they would become factory workers, which gives full meaning to the Civil War.
1:07:51 It was necessary to free up the labor force from — which was for the better for them — agrarian slavery, for a new form of servitude. At least they had a choice. I said that swing — if it's understood that the first stage, that of New Orleans, before this migration, didn't know swing — that would be foolish; I never meant to say that. This is where we see the relationship of philosophy to words.
1:08:22 Let's never forget that the word 'swing' itself needs to be examined: there's an extensive, stylistic sense, one that can apply even to the way a person walks down the street — 'he's got swing,' you just have to see how he walks. That's the broad sense. In that sense, obviously New Orleans didn't wait for the orchestras of the 1930s to swing intensely. I never said that a Fats Waller, an Armstrong, doesn't swing.
1:08:54 But what I meant was the historical sense of the word 'swing,' as defined in every history of jazz textbook, the Swing Era, the era of the big bands, the large ensembles that emerge in the 1930s at the rhythm of the big city and no longer at the rhythm of the cotton fields. So, one jungle can hide another. There, that's the clarification I wanted to make, and now I'd like — I haven't clicked on the comments yet — I'd like to look at the comments and address your questions.
Science simplifies the real and complicates reason 1:09:39 So, Philippe Moreau — I'm very glad, you know, Philippe who worked so, so hard on our videos for a long time before being called away to work further south — comes back to what I said about mathematics, an old and always very enriching discussion between Philippe and me, so let me read his comment on the rigor of mathematics: 'Isn't it easy,' in quotation marks — meaning, I presume, too easy — 'to be rigorous when you control the rules of your own functioning?'
1:10:15 'Is this really a universal language, or rather the rules of a game meant to simplify reality? To calculate, one needs rules, conventions, postulates. But what would be the use of a language that could develop a thought, an ethics, a morality — notions so foreign to mathematics?' Well, the last part of his question is excellent. That's precisely what philosophy strives toward, right? But I maintain that I disagree with Philippe about the seemingly reductive side of what he says about mathematics.
1:10:45 No, it's not easy, for one thing; and even granting that it were, it wouldn't be bad news to have an easy way of reaching truth — namely, that if A equals B, B equals A. That is a truth, and it's a good bulwark against the skepticism into which capitalism wants to lock us, shutting each of us into our own separate bubbles where we have nothing left to share and where we're divided, 'scannerized' if I may put it that way, right? It's a good thing that we can all hold on to basic notions that are common to us all, notions that even prehistoric man mastered when he said 'there are three reindeer about to cross the river.'
1:11:34 You try to aim at the third one — there's already a notion of ordinal numbers there, the first, the second, the third, the timing you target, that you adjust, so to speak. So, if it's easy to reach the truth, good news. Is it really a universal language? Yes, and no — this is where Philippe is being profound at the same time, because where he's right is that it isn't a language — and that surprises a lot of people when I say that.
1:12:09 Of course, at a metaphorical level, one can always speak of 'the language of mathematics' — we speak of 'the language of advertising,' 'the language of cinema' — of course, it's a metaphor. But in the strict sense, precisely, it isn't a language. Mathematics banishes language, and it's right to do so — that's where I disagree with Philippe — for the goal mathematics pursues; because where he's mistaken is when he says 'meant to simplify reality.' But it's a tribute — the great Bachelard, surely one of those who reflected most deeply on the sciences in general, and on mathematics and physics in particular, said — and here I'm answering Philippe directly, through Bachelard — 'science in general, mathematics above all, science simplifies reality and,' implicitly in return, 'complicates the mind.'
1:13:01 At first, we believe all the complexity is outside us, in things, right? Lift the hood of a Citroën engine — it's always a bit complicated, Citroën — lift the hood, and the layperson, someone who knows nothing about mechanics, will find it complicated, all those cables and so on, precisely because he's ignorant. But science simplifies reality. The mechanic will immediately understand why this brake cable does this, that does that — I'm getting a bit lost myself since engines have changed so much, I wouldn't want to say anything foolish.
1:13:36 But he'll suddenly see a logic in the arrangement of what he's looking at, a logic that escapes the ignorant. And the ordinary person, who isn't a mathematician, precisely lives in a world that is much more complex but false, when he sees no connection between the motion of the Moon, that of the tides, and that of an apple falling, whereas Newton showed that all three are the effect of the same law, universal gravitation. Science simplifies reality and complicates the mind.
1:14:08 On the other hand, this complexity that we thought was in reality, alienated, that we ourselves put into reality, we have to take it back onto ourselves. And I come back to the heart of my point thanks to Philippe's excellent question. It is in us that there are, yes, thank you Philippe, second part of your question, desires, intentions, purposes, aims. And there we are not in science. We are not in science. We are in the domain of values. That is not the domain of science.
1:14:38 I did not say that a scientist must be indifferent to values. But when a scientist talks about values, it is not his scientific studies that entitle him to speak about them better than anyone else. As a human being, he is perfectly entitled, at least as much as I am, to express what he thinks about values, about good, evil, beauty, ugliness, etc. But at that moment, everything he learned at Polytechnique is of no use to him. That's where we see the difference between the dichotomy of true and false, which are the objects of science, mathematics in particular.
1:15:13 what matters is knowing whether the statement is true or false, and good and evil, which only make sense in relation to aims, ends, everything that precisely lodges itself inside the words of ordinary language. And I come back to Mallarmé from earlier, when he said - I wanted to state it, I didn't comment on it, but now we understand better. I say a flower, but I am not doing botany, let's leave it to chemistry and biology to worry about what's inside a tulip.
1:15:48 But when I say a flower, I was sending you flowers. Even before we have a specific, determined flower - tulip, rose, carnation, etc. - Mallarmé says, apart, now I'm translating, I told you earlier, apart from oblivion, that is, I let it drop, or my voice pushes aside, sets apart, no outline, no determinate form, no tulip, no carnation, no outline, insofar as the calyxes rise, musically, that is, the idea, before its precise details, the coarse one, the very idea itself and sweet - how can an idea give off fragrance, the idea itself and sweet - there, you see, there's a relation to aims, to desires, musically rises, and you know the role of flowers in sexuality, musically rises, the very idea itself and sweet, which flower, a tulip, a rose, the one absent from every bouquet, what Plato, the immense Plato, would have called the idea of the flower,
1:16:58 which is common to all flowers, whether they be carnations, tulips, marigolds, daisies, or wildflowers. Thank you Philippe. What unites us is the distrust there is toward a shameless use of scientific relevance by those who govern us. They'll have so many occasions to come back to that, so there I concede the point and share it. But that's not the mathematicians' fault.
The blues as a musical structure 1:17:37 Hi Dominique, in your last podcast about music, you don't talk about the blues. What place does it hold in relation to jazz, to swing? Well, my dear Anatole, thank you for the question. I'm very glad we're playing along with the podcast game. But I refer you to the person who put these podcasts together, to Alyosha, and to that short film you'll find on our site, that you'll find on YouTube, La Fausse Note, adding Alyosha, à l'Art, spelled A-R-D, who is its excellent director, and in which I hold the leading role, since there's only one role - your humble servant's.
1:18:12 A short film, I reassure you, I won't bother you for long. But in it, I discuss precisely what importance the blues had for the emergence of jazz, swing, etc. So. I'll say very quickly that, here again, just as I questioned the word swing earlier - whether it has the stylistic sense or the chronological sense, the swing era in the 1930s - it's not at all the same thing. Likewise, when we say the blues, we must clearly distinguish ordinary usage, that of people who don't know much about jazz, etc.,
1:18:49 who believe that blues is something slow, melancholic, etc. There's some truth to that, there is. But there can be a blues at 150 beats a minute. The blues, for musicians, when they said 'let's kick off a blues,' well then, it's very precise - it's a musical structure, we come back a bit to mathematics - it's a sequence of intervals, isn't it? It's what's called a scale, in English, which is different from the most common structure of jazz themes, of standards, to the point that we can say that nearly all jazz standards fall into two groups: those structured on the blues scale - and there are quite a few of those - and those structured on what's called the A-A-B-A form.
1:19:41 No, it's not complicated, I reassure you. Look, 'Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot, prête-moi ta plume pour écrire un mot' - the words have changed but not the music, it's the same musical phrase, ta-ta-ta-ti, it's the same, so we say A-A, you see, it's simple, and all of a sudden it changes, 'ma chandelle est morte,' well that's no longer the same melody, 'je n'ai plus de feu,' and we come back to A, 'ouvre-moi ta porte, au clair de la lune,' yes, 'ouvre-moi ta porte, pour l'amour de Dieu,' A-A-B-A - this structure governs nearly all standards, whenever it's not the blues. Well, all jazz musicians, when they tackle what's called a standard, a well-known melody that often comes from musical comedy or from compositions by composers of genius like Duke Ellington, like Monk - think of 'Round Midnight, or things like that, or Bill Evans's admirable Waltz for Debby, named after his little sister called Deborah.
1:21:02 We're not in the blues, we're in a standard, with a bridge, a middle part, in short - 'ma chandelle est morte' - that's what's called the middle part, the bridge, between A and A, A-A-B-A. There you go. That's what the blues is for musicians. Nothing else. You can play it at 150 beats a minute or else poignant, slow, something else. But it's the main contribution of African-Americans to American music. It's fundamental. Isn't it?
1:21:32 and the blues, which is a modal scale - I explain this in La Fausse Note, I don't want to linger too much - it blurs the modal difference between major and minor. There's just one small note that's changed, just one. The E has become E-flat.
1:22:02 It's a bit sadder. I go back into major and it's just, just one small note that's changed, the smallest interval possible. Well, the blues plays both at once. You see, it's neither finished this way, nor that, but both at the same time. There you go. Thank you for the question. I hope it's clearer now.
Mathematicians at the service of capital 1:22:33 You're picking the questions for me, Pierre-Alain, because Pierre-Alain does an excellent job at that. What worries me a great deal, coming back to Philippe, is knowing that 90% of the ever-growing number of high-level mathematicians work on algorithms that manage secondary-market trades executed in nanoseconds. Well, here again, I mean, we mustn't - I don't know about the 90% figure - we mustn't insult engineers.
1:23:08 There are plenty of engineers working on things that are useful to Philippe and to me every day, aren't there, and in huge numbers. And those ones escape - of course capital would love it - that one of the greatest schools of mathematics in the history of mathematics is the French school, the Russian school, the French school and the Italian school, whereas the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans tend more toward physics, chemistry and biology. Roughly speaking - that doesn't rule out that there's an immense American mathematician, an immense French biologist, even if he won a Nobel Prize.
1:23:43 So, but, given that this is a tradition that has been utterly defenestrated by current trends in recent years - I won't press the point, because it's so serious it's starting to make headlines - it would be time, capital will really need to be weaned off this, that mathematics stop serving, as it did for Theseus, to purge the earth of the monsters that prevent man from dwelling there, from settling there, and instead serve to optimize tax evasion.
1:24:25 There, I fully agree with him, it's not 90%. And above all, we mustn't hold mathematicians responsible. It's politics that's the problem. Young people who have distinguished themselves in equations need to be entrusted with nobler things than serving to ensure that France's leading fortunes, to stick to our own country, pay as little tax as possible.
1:24:58 There, he's right about that. Other examples - Camille, la méloise, whom I greet in passing, is someone who knows music well; mathematics too perhaps, but I've exchanged less with him on that. Is Aragon's work not one of the rare ones to give a positive voice to the problem of modernity, from an aesthetic as well as a political point of view? Well, I would...
Aragon: 'There is no happy love' 1:25:29 First, the question is relevant in itself, except for the vagueness in it. It's the word 'positive.' There you go. What does he mean by 'positive'? Is it in the ordinary sense, where we say that not everything is negative, that there is hope, that there is an opening, that it doesn't lead to, that it isn't deadly? If that's it... We need to look more closely. There are often quite despairing things in Aragon. Not really despairing, sometimes discouraged. Often discouraged in Aragon, despairing never.
1:26:01 There I agree with Camille. Look at one of the most tragic poems there is, the one that... Brassens set to music, you can guess I'm talking about the one whose refrain is 'Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux' [There is no happy love], what could be more negative, more discouraged - how can one say to young people, and to all those holding hands, and who will hold hands in front of the most beautiful landscapes in the world during these holidays, how can one tell them 'There is no happy love'?
1:26:37 I recall the beginning, which is very Hegelian, moreover, because there's the theory of destructive desire and negativity - enough of... prose, let's move on to poetry. Nothing is ever won for man, neither his strength, nor his weakness, nor his heart. And when he thinks, man, and when he thinks he opens his arms, his shadow stretched out to embrace, and when he thinks he opens his arms, his shadow is that of a cross, and when he wants to hold his happiness tight, he crushes it.
1:27:11 his life is a strange and painful divorce. There is no happy love. So we have a whole series of stanzas like that, I don't know, I'll say one more because it's great poetry. His life, it resembles those unarmed soldiers who had been dressed for another destiny; what use is it to them to rise in the morning, they who are found in the evening disarmed, uncertain. Say these words, my life, hold back your tears. There is no happy love.
1:27:41 That's not positive, all that, I'd say to Camille. But where Camille is right is the final line. And the closing line, it's magnificent, it's brief, I'll tell you right away and finish with Camille's question on this magnificent closing line: 'mais c'est notre amour à tous deux' [but it is our love, the both of us]. Thank you Camille for bringing us back to one of those who did the most to give a purer sense to the words of the tribe. Let me add, tooting my own horn a little, that Aragon was a fervent admirer of Gérard de Nerval.
1:28:16 It's not just a quirk of your humble servant, there you go, whom he knew admirably well. And I believe I recall that a few months before his death, he was asked the classic questionnaire question, 'Who are your favorite poets?' He had answered, 'Rimbaud and Hölderlin, but for reasons no one will understand.' I leave you with his answer. So, Joffrey, a question that interests me a great deal - there's a whole part of the masses who are not receptive to poetry.
Giving poetry back to the masses: the line from Mithridate 1:28:50 That's true, there are even often people who are wary of it. Is this proof that something is being taken from them in the meaning of words? What path forward to remedy this? Ah, what a good question! First, some good news, Joffrey. I notice that every time I've been able to explain to people who are wary of poetry, either indifferent or downright suspicious of it, by highlighting, as I tried to do earlier with Rimbaud's line, 'L'aube exaltée ainsi qu'un peuple de colombes' [the dawn exalted like a flock of doves],
1:29:24 Here, let me give you a new one on the occasion of Joffrey's question. A line from Racine, this time. Yes, Racine, Rimbaud, like earlier - Aragon said his favorite poets were Racine and Rimbaud. It's different, Racine and Rimbaud, but what beauty in both cases. A line I've already quoted in the workshops, which I take from Mithridate, at the moment when the son, a traitor to his father, collaborating with the Romans - Mithridates being, historically, the one who gave the Romans the most trouble among their enemies.
1:29:54 I think he led them on for 30 years before finally being defeated. So the rumor spreads, as in Phèdre moreover, that he is dead, just as people believe Theseus is dead. Mithridates has two sons, one in love with the favorite the father was about to marry, the youngest one, the little young girl - at the time it was harems, we're in the East - and the other, on the contrary, wants to collaborate with the Romans and would like at the same time not only to betray his father politically, but, supreme insult, ask his fiancée to follow him to Rome because he too is in love with her, like his brother.
1:30:37 Anyway, no matter, I refer you to Mithridate, an admirable tragedy, but at one point he says to her, 'Come on, let's go, the ship is in the harbor, let's just take off for Rome, we'll be better off there than here.' He doesn't put it that way, that wouldn't be Racine. 'Ready to receive you, our vessels await you, and from the foot of the altar you may board them,' and here's the line: 'Souveraine des mers qui vous doivent porter' [Sovereign of the seas that must carry you]. There, I'll focus on this line, the summary of everything I've said. But yes, it's not that complicated.
1:31:10 How many V's are there in this line, 'Souveraine des mers qui vous doivent porter'? Look how it bounces with these V's, how it undulates, undulation, how do you say that in English? Wave. Three V's in 'wave' - twice in the W and once in the V. I'm not inventing anything! We mustn't speak in place of the words. If the words don't speak, who will speak? It's not just 'souveraine des mers qui vous doivent porter.'
1:31:40 It's not sodium chloride that interests Racine when he speaks of the sea. A chemist can analyze seawater, find it's salt water, and it's not just any salt, it's chloride. Very good! And then there's oxygen, there's hydrogen since it's water, but on top of that. There's plankton. We're not in poetry there. On the other hand, on the other hand, if there's one word that corresponds to our desire from before we even came out of our mothers' wombs, it's to be carried.
1:32:11 To finally be done with this curse of having to struggle against gravity, against what falls, cadere, cascade, cadaver. Ah yes, you see, the only difference between mathematics and poetry is that poetry is an exact science, as we can see here. What makes the magic of this line - because one could be content to say, this line is beautiful, yes, 'souveraine des mers qui vous doivent porter,' and leave it at that, it's beautiful, but that's a cop-out, that's just how it is, it's irrational, it's beauty, it can't be explained. What do you mean it can't be explained?
1:32:42 What rigor! And once again, don't for a moment believe there was a computer in Racine's head and that he calculated 'I'll put the right V because...' Not at all, he does better than think. He expresses it. That's what makes a great poet. 'Qui vous doivent porter,' yes, when you're on the boat, on the vessel, the ship, everything that floats instead of sinking straight down. Good heavens! You see clearly a sharing of values, one anguishing and one reassuring and comforting.
1:33:15 The wave that carries has something in common with all those admirable carved virgins carrying the child, including those Burgundian virgins. At the Cluny museum, you'll see them, Burgundian virgins carved in wood, on average a meter ten, a meter twenty tall, with braids - of incomparable grace. The common point of all these virgins, whether in painting or sculpture, is that just as the wave carries the ship, she carries, she carries you, she carries us.
1:33:54 There's all of that in ordinary language. We're not in mathematics, but it is rigorous. Look at the logic - but it's a logic of subjects, a logic of beings who are afraid of falling, afraid of heading in the direction of the fall. And when Phèdre makes her extraordinary confession, one of the summits of our language, to Hippolyte - I'll spare you the confession, it's a shame, because it's magnificent - but the last line, where she says that she would not have been content, like her sister a generation earlier, with a thread, a thread would not have.
1:34:30 'Assez rassuré votre amante, compagne du péril qu'il vous fallait chercher' [reassured enough your lover, companion in the peril you had to seek]. She wants to go down herself. She projects herself as going with Theseus into the labyrinth. 'Moi-même, devant vous, j'aurais voulu marcher, et Phèdre au labyrinthe avec vous descendue, se serait avec vous retrouvée ou perdue' [I myself, before you, would have wished to walk, and Phèdre, descended into the labyrinth with you, would with you have been found again, or lost]. And everyone knew very well what it meant for a girl to be 'lost' [perdue] at the time, because if you go down, it's because you're already in the fall. You see how I'm playing on words - it's not me playing on the words, it's the words that are playing on us.
1:35:03 They make us believe we're talking about things, when actually we're talking about ourselves every time, about our deepest springs. I notice that every time I've made this effort of making explicit what's inside the words of ordinary language, the mathematician there has his own reasons, which are perfectly valid, since he can't talk about the amorous relationship between Phèdre and Hippolyte, but about the relationship to galaxies, for example, or to the spin of the electron, whatever.
1:35:34 Every time we make this effort to make explicit another logic, but one that is no less rigorous - we just saw that. I could go on, you know. I ask you to do it. It's a form of training. Someone who was initially indifferent, even hostile, every time, ends up won over by poetic texts. That's good news. Thanks to the poet for giving a purer sense to the words of the tribe, for it's meant for universal sharing.
The philosopher between fidelity and rigor 1:36:04 There's no reason to leave to just a few the monopoly on the only surplus value that has nothing to do with exploitation. We've already gone past 10:30 pm. So-and-so. Good evening, so-and-so. Can we see the poet and the mathematician as two insufficient moments set back to back by the philosopher? I really like this question.
1:36:35 I won't say yes, that would be presumptuous. No, not for me alone. The self is hateful. No, for philosophy in general - it would be a bit presumptuous to say it's superior to both the philosopher and the poet. But what's valid in this question is that what characterizes the philosopher is his effort - I'm not saying he succeeds - to reconcile at once, isn't it, fidelity. That's poetry. As I showed earlier, when I say 'souveraine des mers qui vous doivent porter,' there's an unconscious fidelity that takes us back to the time when we were carried in our mother's womb.
1:37:13 We are far from consciousness, aren't we? And so Freud was right to say that when we speak 'souveraine des mers qui vous doivent porter,' when it is the true and full word, isn't it, we say much more than what we think. I didn't think, of all the interest I have in being carried, in fighting against this effort that I barely notice anymore, that I make all the time, at practically every hour of the day, before collapsing into my bed - the effort to fight against gravity, which is the very meaning of life, isn't it?
1:37:46 So, on the philosopher's side, on the poet's side - the poet tries to reconcile, I'm answering your question, so-and-so, your question, sorry - the poet, it's fidelity. To what? To his deepest affects, to his deepest drives, which he shares with us, who does not have, isn't it, a grace in being carried when exhausted, isn't it? Who has never carried a child in their arms?
1:38:18 I'm not even going to understand what I'm saying, but who has never carried a child in their arms? Very few people. So, all of this is shareable, it's universal. And the mathematician - which, Jean-François Le Clou, as for Philippe, whom I hear grumbling at seeing him placed side by side with the poet - also has this heroism of absolutely wanting us not to exchange counterfeit money among ourselves when we speak, but to be able to pass on things that we are sure of, reliable, which is not so far from also being carried.
1:38:57 You see? There you go. So, yes, thank you, the philosopher tries to hold both together, which I once tried to condense into a formula of Nerval's - I can't find the source, I'm sorry, for once I don't have the source for a Nerval, you know, I know I saw it somewhere, and yet I had three volumes of the Pléiade, I searched in vain, I haven't scanned my three volumes, otherwise I would have already found it. Nerval speaks somewhere of bringing the crane down from the sky - the bird, the crane - bringing the crane down from the sky and making the griffin rise up from the sea.
1:39:38 You see, this double contradictory movement, that's perhaps the task of the philosopher, it's not... bringing the crane down from the sky and making the griffin rise up from the sea. Thank you for that very fine question, thingamajig. I wouldn't want to neglect important contributions.
Music, which speaks without saying 1:40:15 Good evening to a Pauline Sailly, whom I knew little and am delighted to meet, and who says, "Thank you, Hegel found me and I found Hegel." That's lovely. I find Symmetrie again, an old acquaintance whom I'm always very glad to meet again, since he's made remarkable contributions. There we go, I believe that - unless, with his magic, Pierre-Alain finds me - ah, Laurent Angot! Ah, I'm happy, I haven't had news of Laurent in a long time. There we go. "One could also mischievously slip in," says Laurent, "one could also mischievously slip the musician in between the philosopher's 'know thyself' and the poet."
1:40:54 "To give a purer sense to the words of the tribe." Learned music lacks another desire. Well now, I can see how much Laurent, for his part, watches the videos assiduously, because in the very one I passed on to you, I bring in music as a fourth element that might come to disturb the game, but at the same time enrich it, between the poet, the mathematician, and the philosopher in that triangle. And what if I placed at the center of the triangle, at the center of gravity, where the medians cross - if the geometers are to be believed, the center of gravity of a triangle is where those medians cross, isn't it?
1:41:32 At the center there might be music, which is also formalizable. Look, music and mathematics - do I need to insist on the most formalizable art there is? Since every musical statement found on a score can be laid out along a double quantifiable continuum: that of pitches, from the lowest to the highest, and that of durations, from the slowest, sorry, from the longest to the shortest.
1:42:05 So there, music somehow satisfies the mathematician's need for rigor at that level, to the point that Lévi-Strauss, in his admirable "Overture" to The Raw and the Cooked - it's a preface he calls "Overture" because the whole book is placed under the sign of music, which is why I take this reference - Lévi-Strauss, an immense anthropologist whom people have made much use of to attack Marxism, you can well imagine that's not what I admire most in him; what I admire is precisely his musical sensitivity - says somewhere that one must recognize that Wagner is the undeniable father of the structural analysis of myths.
1:42:57 Structural. In music there is the mathematical side, but there is also the side that communicates what I was saying earlier, what is inside us, what concerns us at the level of values, to the point that even people who don't speak the same language find common ground in music. We suddenly no longer need language to understand each other. Strange, music, which speaks to us but says nothing. And here, thanks to Laurent's question, I'm going to bring in a new dichotomy between speaking and saying.
1:43:32 Dichotomy, distance, a distinction - speaking and saying are not the same thing. For, as the language itself shows well, one can speak without saying anything. When a soldier somewhere on a train, it doesn't matter, I mean, one who's off on leave, courts a young woman he's found in the compartment, he speaks, he says whatever, and it doesn't matter what he says. He speaks in order to say nothing, but what makes it meaningful is that he is saying something to someone, before it signifies anything, even if it signifies nothing - implicitly, that's the formula of Lacan's that I prefer.
1:44:13 ...to restore, before signifying anything, every word signifies for someone. His goal is that the girl doesn't leave, that she'd rather be patient, that she laughs and relaxes instead of getting off at the next stop. There you go. So, speaking and saying. Second example to show the disjunction between speaking and saying. I hear people in the next-door apartment who are speaking. They're speaking Chinese. I take Chinese because otherwise, unfortunately, I would understand. I clearly hear that there are people speaking, but I don't understand what they're saying.
1:44:47 Now everyone understands the difference between speaking and saying. I clearly hear that they are speaking, that it's not the sound of wind on the windows or of the shower, isn't it, that there's a leak. No. I clearly hear that it's speech, that there's an interrogative tone, that there are answers, that there are exclamations, that there's anger, that there's seduction. I hear it clearly. It's speaking. But what is it saying? I have no idea. But that's what music is. It's a strange language that speaks without saying. Whereas mathematics says: A equals B implies B equals A.
1:45:19 There is something that is said, and that is clear, but without speaking. Without speaking. Written silently. With a formula in which there isn't even a single word of everyday language. With a fold, it's the arrow, the double arrow, that's it. A equals B implies B equals A. A speaking without saying: mathematics. A saying without speaking: music. Thank you, Laurent Angot. As for Yannick, I would have liked to know more, because I'm delighted to see Yannick again.
1:45:53 Yannick and Pauline, to whom I will be eternally grateful. I spent unforgettable holidays in Corsica, where the only thing I could do in return was serve as a guide, but I was so happy to do it for them - and who says good evening, comrades, with his usual good humor and customary courtesy - comradely courtesy, not with just anyone. Thank you, Yannick. I think that's... not quite enough, how do we wrap up... but that's enough for this evening's session.
1:46:30 I thank Pierre-Alain, whom - I say this, I don't say it often enough - is enormously in demand at the moment. He's between Milan, Rennes, and heaven knows where - in Korea, I say that because he's sending a very beautiful play by a Korean playwright, for whom he did admirable photo and video-sequence projections. In short, I will be eternally grateful for the time he finds, despite the demands placed on him by his work, for you, for me, for the cause.
1:47:10 Thank you, Pierre-Alain, thank you all, thank you for your loyalty, and see you soon, ever more numerous, and at the next videos in two weeks - I hope we'll go back to Thursdays, that there won't be any changes - and above all at the next podcast. I don't want to say more about that, so as not to spoil the topic. Have a very good evening, everyone, a very good rest of the evening.
