English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The two themes of the year: language and historical present 0:00 Well, I thank you for your loyalty, and those—I see new faces—who cannot but delight us, I salute their boldness and their willingness to take a risk. I say that because we're going to look at a text where it's a question—you know I said this year that we've been talking quite a bit about language, about speech, described by the poet Hölderlin as the most perilous of goods.
0:30 And given to man. So, I'm very glad we're meeting again for this second session of the new term. And for those of you who worry a bit about my detours, often rightly so, you know these are spiral detours, detours to circle around, to stay at the center. At least I try to, even if I get a little senile sometimes and forget a bit. Sometimes I make detours with no way back.
1:00 And no recourse. But still, at the first session of this term, I had said that we would be able to dig deeper and go into detail and become more concrete about what we saw somewhat hastily last year, in a more abstract and general way. So by getting into the concrete, we're more precise and above all it's more engaging in every sense of the term, including the seductive sense. And I had said that we would talk a lot about the problems tied to language, which is at the crossroads of many philosophical problems this year—that's the first thing.
1:36 And then another theme which apparently has no connection to the previous one. I had cited that aphorism of the young Hegel that he put in his private notebook, in his diary: "You will never be able to be more than your time, but at best you will be your time." A phrase that has become famous and that Hegel would take up again at the end of his life in the preface to his last work, his political testament, the Principles of the Philosophy of Right, where he says that everyone is the son of his time in philosophy.
2:06 That is to say that a philosopher, when he believes he is thinking about the future, or the past, or the origins of humanity, of the world, of the cosmos, of whatever you like, of being, in fact only reflects his historical present, sometimes without even realizing it. So it's as if the historical present were somewhat the insurmountable horizon of philosophical thought. Which means that most of the time, when we think, we fall short of our historical present, of the richness of the reflective potential it can contain.
2:39 So, a second theme apparently unrelated to that of language. And to show you that I haven't moved arbitrarily from one theme to the other, having raised both last time, and that this is indeed the continuation of my remarks, I've chosen a text that shows the link between the two problems clearly. I recall, in passing, from the point of view of method, that we had agreed—well, I had found, and you agreed—that the approach so far was a bit too magisterial, that it resembled the dissertation somewhat, if we're to draw comparisons with exam and competitive-exam formats, and not enough like textual commentary.
Textual commentary and Kafka's Imperial Message 3:21 There you go, and I said that this year we would strive to work from texts. The advantage of textual commentary—it's an advantage that's also a drawback, in every genre—the advantage of textual commentary is that you at least risk straying from the subject less than in a dissertation, because you're always brought back to the subject by the text; that's already something. So this is the first implementation of this shared reflection, and I had asked you to propose texts you'd like us to work on together.
3:56 I'll open a small parenthesis within the parenthesis: I saw on Facebook someone proposing a quotation from Nietzsche—"one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star"—a beautiful quotation, and he asked me whether we couldn't reflect on that sentence. I remind you that we need a text, so give me a page of Nietzsche, or a page or two, but not just a sentence, not a quotation, otherwise we'd be back to the dissertation. We'd fall right back into it.
4:26 There you go. So, I have nothing against that sentence, but go ahead—propose a whole text by Nietzsche and I'll be delighted, that's not the issue. So I'll close that little parenthesis, and I'm going to propose to you myself several texts I've thought of, so that together we can agree on which one to start with. And I do intend to give you the list later, but in the meantime, I've settled on a text that isn't by a philosopher, on purpose, to begin with, so we can reflect a bit on the approach we're going to take in the exercise of textual commentary.
5:08 I chose a poetic text, since it's a text by Baudelaire, which has the advantage—so I'm picking up my remarks from the previous session—of linking, you see, the theme of language, of speech, which we're going to look at (it's not obvious on a first reading, at least for those discovering the text), with that of trying to think about the present, the historical horizon in which we live. I chose this text first because it is clear—I say that because there are themes in this text that I could have found in a thousand authors, I won't say which, since that would be jumping ahead of the discussion, but among others there would be, for example, the difficulty of transmission, of communication in the modern world, oddly enough, when there have never been so many means, media, material channels for communicating; yet the exercise of the content of communication has never been so difficult and fraught, there have never been so many misunderstandings, in the strict sense,
6:18 and words that never reach their destination. I could have found plenty of examples; I'm thinking of an admirable text by Kafka that I recommend to you, I believe it's on Wikisource, you can find it online, called An Imperial Message. One page—it's one page long, so no need to be frightened, but goodness, it saves a thousand pages of nonsense, it's superb. This excerpt, I'll go through it quickly just to place the text for you, to whet your appetite a bit, to urge you to read it—it's taken from a collection of Kafka's, there are many unfinished texts by Kafka, tuberculosis makes people die rather young, called The Great Wall of China, a fairly short collection of texts, it's taken from that, so, Imperial Message, China, the Emperor of China, nothing very precise, but there you go, just to situate a bit the context in which Kafka wrote it, and it begins by saying that the emperor is dying, and that he dictates, to his messengers, a message, addressed to whom?
7:18 "To you, poor puny shadow, hidden in the most distant of distances"—to you, that's you, me, him, a woman, any peasant lost in the depths of China, and who is going to receive a message from the emperor—unbelievable things, that never happen, right? And of course, the emperor addresses his messenger, who has the sign of the sun on his chest, before whom everyone steps aside, so the message will reach its destination, you see the continuity of what I'm saying, and the emperor is dying, he makes the messenger repeat with effort that yes, that's indeed what he said, there, he's relieved, the message, and the messenger sets off—it's only one page, all of what I'm telling you—he sets off, and so you think he's going to arrive, we're going to hear his mighty fist knock at your door, but no, first he has to cross a hall, the imperial palace, if you know the Forbidden City, you've heard of it, it's huge, and then there are halls, and then more halls, and then there are crowds filling these halls, and then once you've crossed these halls, you reach a courtyard, which conceals other courtyards, in short, the messenger never arrives at his destination, there, and it ends with: and you are at your window, and you wait for the message as evening falls,
8:29 to show—I had an embarrassment of choices, there are a thousand texts like that, on incommunicability in modernity—and I'm starting there, with that theme, with a reading of this text, which I'm going to read once, out loud, because—I say this for those who teach, and even more for those taking exams—simply reading the text you have to comment on, without thinking, without starting to say "I'll begin with this part," without starting to work on it, simply reading it, in the sonic sense of the term, in your head, out loud if possible, as the ancients did, reading it several times—I insist on this, several times, I mean more than two; the Greeks had the singular for one, the plural for beyond two, and for two, the dual, for the two of them, it wasn't yet the plural—they were quite right—so, several times, seven times, I used to tell my students, sort of symbolically, seven times, to make sure they had read it, several times; you can't imagine how many difficulties flatten out, even before you've started thinking, from the mere fact of having read a text several times, and how many misreadings you already avoid,
9:39 because on exam day you're anxious, you're on a first reading, so, that's a piece of advice I'm giving you there—I'm only going to read it once, don't worry, and we'll go straight on, I'm going to move right into and pick back up this problem of communication, nearly impossible, connected to the notion of the historical present, which I haven't yet developed in this text, so here it is, it's taken from Les Fleurs du Mal, I want to say beforehand, I am not doing a literary commentary, a proper one—it's a poetic text, but it's...
10:11 Ah, yes, thank you, that's kind—I'm not doing a literary commentary, even though it's a rich vein, it would be fantastic, one could write 50 volumes on the literary exploitation of this text, which has already been assigned 36,000 times at the school and academic level—that's not a problem, but well, that's not why we're here. I'd like to give it a philosophical treatment, and I won't dwell too much right now on the distinction between genres, because there are those who still believe, when they're in the equivalent of eleventh grade, that when they move up to the final year, they're going to keep doing literature in philosophy class, just more in depth, whereas it has nothing to do with that—it's a different approach, neither better nor worse, it's not a value judgment—philosophy is not literature taken further, it's something else, and literature is not philosophy.
Reading of Baudelaire's La Cloche fêlée 11:01 So, I'm going to insist on this difference between the literary approach and the philosophical approach, once I've read it to you, put it a bit in context all the same—it will be more concrete. So, there you go, I'll point out that it's a sonnet, that's important for what follows; I'm really only telling you the strict minimum needed for philosophical understanding, for the philosophical account I'd like to give of it. It's a sonnet, one of the shortest forms, not an epic in 3,000 lines—there are 14 lines, as in every sonnet, 2 quatrains, 2 tercets—tercets, we're not at the betting shop, not one vowel too many—2 quatrains, 2 tercets, 14 lines, 2 times 7, a form perfected as early as the Renaissance, this isn't the tail end of the millennium, we're not doing literature, moving on—so, a fairly short form, and goodness, how can I find the important philosophical themes, those of difficult communication and those of thinking the historical present, in so few lines—that's what we're going to try to see, so I'll read it to you, without further ado,
12:13 The Cracked Bell. "It is bitter and sweet, on winter nights, / to listen, by the flickering, smoking fire, / to distant memories slowly rising / to the sound of chimes singing in the mist"—"vers," that's the line, it's called a Norman rhyme, it's a licence, you draw out the "er" to rhyme with "hiver" [winter], that's called a Norman rhyme, but we're not doing literature, so never mind, you can forget it—"to listen, by the flickering, smoking fire, / to distant memories slowly rising / to the sound of chimes singing in the mist. / Happy the bell with the sturdy throat, / which, despite its age, alert and in good health, / faithfully utters its religious cry"—"religious," otherwise it doesn't make twelve syllables, excuse me, I insist, I haven't lost my touch, we're not being strictly literary, but you mustn't butcher the poem either—a poem is above all music, otherwise it's not poetry, it's just prattle—there are twelve syllables, so it's not "religieux," it's "religieux" [with the correct stress], there you go—so, "Happy the bell with the sturdy throat, / which, despite its age, alert and in good health, / faithfully utters its religious cry, / like an old soldier keeping watch under his tent. / But my soul is cracked, and when, in its weariness,"
From romantic voluptuousness to the wounded man's nightmare 13:25 "it wants to fill the cold night air with its songs, / it often happens that its weakened voice / seems like the thick death-rattle of a wounded man left forgotten / by a lake of blood, beneath a great heap of the dead, / and who dies without moving, in immense struggle." A strange poem, which begins in the voluptuousness of a winter afternoon, in a very conventional genre, a conventional sensibility, which is exactly what was called, at the beginning of the 19th century—I say this quickly, because I'm not doing a literary treatment, but I'm recalling things worth knowing and worth repeating—the Romantic sensibility; it's typically in "It is bitter and sweet," where there's a voluptuousness of melancholy among the Romantics, you're a little sad, but it's a sadness that feels good, you see; this had already begun back in Rousseau's time, when Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, a reader of Rousseau, said—and this is astute—that through his windowpane, when the weather outside is foul, it's pleasant to see that the weather is foul outside while you have a good fire in the fireplace, you see, it's ambivalent, it's interesting, interesting.
14:31 We'll talk about praxis, I don't know—you still need a good deal of historical, material, and economic progress to have a fire, a home, comfort, central heating, and to look at the bad weather outside and say "still, nature is wonderful"—yeah, right, you have to work it, for it to be wonderful. Well, and yes, I can't help it, because you see, at COP21, I really suffered through it, so I'm getting my revenge, okay. So, "it is bitter and sweet," typically Romantic. How can we move, in 14 lines—that's why I insisted it was something short—in such a short span, poetically, from Romantic voluptuous melancholy, to the appalling nightmare of the final two tercets?
15:11 Do you realize? A wounded man dying by a lake of blood, beneath a great heap of the dead, and who dies without moving, and yet he tries, in immense struggle. I'm not making anything up here. I'd like us to agree on this. I hate interpretation, whatever it may be, of a text. I'm doing analysis here. I'm only talking about what's in the text. If I take some risks at times regarding the meaning, I'll back it up with other passages from Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du Mal—doing what's called intertextuality, if you want to show off a bit in literature.
15:42 That's the best way to be rigorous, to make sure you don't go wrong. But I can guarantee you this: in another poem, Baudelaire said, "Ah, never to leave the realm of numbers and beings." It's somewhat the same thing here. This is not at all the guy who's proud to stand apart from society, to be original, to be a poète maudit, and to bother you—no, I'm being polite—it's not that. It's the opposite. It's someone whose nightmare is being separated. Think of the companions—imagine Napoleon's battles, at the start of the century—a man dying after a battle, beneath heaps of the wounded, watching the army move away, or the drowning man watching the ship sail off, having fallen overboard.
16:17 There's an admirable text by Hugo in Les Misérables, of such beauty, such depth. At the beginning, you know, when Jean Valjean gets caught, when there's a dilemma over whether he should steal the priest's silverware. There's a passage called—I recommend it to you—"The Wave and the Shadow." That's Hugo. The Wave and the Shadow. That's Hugo. And he imagines a drowning man to illustrate social distress.
16:47 The guy who is tipping from a roughly normal economic life into misery, into destitution, into unemployment, at a time when there was no safety net at all—unemployment, with no benefits, nothing. This text is called "The Wave and the Shadow." He compares someone in social distress to that drowning man watching the ship that's about to sink sail away. There's nothing, no one to rescue him in the infinite, in the ocean. I recommend this text, "The Wave and the Shadow." So, it's a bit like that here. I insist on this point: this is not the decadent poet, delighted, in his ivory tower, art for art's sake. That produces masterpieces too, I'm not being ironic about that.
17:19 But that's not it at all. It's the opposite. Someone who laments precisely not being connected to what? Well, look at the two quatrains before. To the society of those who live by the good bell. Those who live by the hour. The bell that rings the quarter hour, the Angelus, in the morning, right? Sometimes the knell. Right? That's a moment of history or of sudden disappearance. Sometimes also the tocsin. But most of the time, it rings out regularity. Do you realize? The quarter hour.
17:49 I say that because I've heard that for some years now, there are people who complain—when they're in the countryside, I don't know—about being woken up by the church bell in the village where they are. It's really extraordinary, city people. They feel attacked by the wonderful sound of a bell. It's good, you're in the countryside, the hours are being marked out. But there are some for whom it's unbearable. They're more eco-conscious than I am, those ones, I tell you. Well, let's move on. So you see, how we can move in 14 lines from "it is bitter and sweet on winter nights to listen, by the flickering, smoking fire, to distant memories slowly rising, to the sound of chimes singing in the mist."
18:27 The chime bothers no one, it's a delight. You know there are people from the North among us. The carillon is a specialty of people from the North. When you visit, especially the cities of Belgium, by the Sav—I don't know—over there, almost the whole classical music repertoire gets played on carillons. I once heard almost the entire overture of The Magic Flute played on carillons in Bruges. There you go. The mist, the North, the North. So, you see, "Happy the bell with the sturdy throat."
18:57 You'll tell me, but what's the connection? He's gone senile, he's talking about language, about the present time, I don't see the connection, all that in the text. But yes, look, "Happy the bell with the sturdy throat"—the throat is, after all, the organ of speech. If I don't have a sturdy throat, you won't hear me. And my oral message, my speech, won't reach you. I told you I had an embarrassment of choices. Rimbaud says somewhere that to understand my words, they must flee and fly.
19:28 Rimbaud has a problem, already, which isn't the one here. He takes the risk of not being understood, right? "To understand my words, they must flee and fly." It means: figure it out yourselves. Meanwhile, I've mentioned this—his mother once asked him in a letter, "But what are you saying? We understand nothing of what you write." He gave this admirable reply: "I said what it says. Literally and in every sense." Full stop. I'm telling you, if you want to decipher what Rimbaud says, wisely follow his advice.
19:58 He says what it says. Don't try to read between the lines. The great authors aren't sneaky. If they could have said it otherwise, they would have. Otherwise they wouldn't be great authors. We must, in what we're doing right now, take literally what is written in order to understand a text. Literally. That's it—littera, that means "letter" in Latin. Literature means first of all taking things literally. And being wary of the thoughts that we add ourselves, that we inject into it. We must give the floor to the words.
20:29 That's Mallarmé: "The pure work implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who yields the initiative to the words." So, I'll ask my question again, the problem we haven't yet solved. How can we move, altogether, in 14 lines—I repeat, it's short, it's a medallion, a sonnet is a medallion, it's the small form, a French specialty in music as in poetry, the small form. The French aren't made for the epic and such things, with a few exceptions like Hugo, and that's rare. Look at Ronsard, we admire those sonnets, which are admirable.
21:01 When he wrote an epic like La Franciade, it's a bit clumsy, a bit long, nobody reads La Franciade—glorifying King Henri. And in music, likewise, the little pieces by Rameau—La Tendre Nanette, Le Tic-Toc-Choc ou Les Maillotins, Les Barricades Mystérieuses—little pieces lasting 3 minutes, 4 minutes. Not the great German symphonies, the concertos—admirable too—or the fugue. No, no, it's a small form among the French. The sonnet is the small form.
21:32 How can we move, in a small form, from the Romantic voluptuousness that was already valid for the previous generation, to the full-blown thriller, the nightmare? Did you see the ending? Picture it in images. It sends a chill down your spine, all the same. Well, that's where my second theme comes in. As for language, you can guess, you've seen it—it's someone whose voice we don't hear speaking there.
"A wounded man who is forgotten": Rousseau and the fifth walk 22:02 Someone whose voice doesn't carry. Blocked by a clot, no doubt—"seems like the thick death-rattle"—I'm saying nothing extra, I'm sticking to the letter—"seems like the thick death-rattle." A death-rattle is what comes out of the throat, agreed? I'm not interpreting, I'm analyzing what's there. And if it's thick, it's blood that's thickening, you know that. I nearly died not long ago from a clot because of excessive smoking. For once I'm being eco-conscious, I tell myself it's better not to smoke. There you go, take advantage of that, may it never happen to you.
22:33 It's serious, "the thick death-rattle of a wounded man left forgotten"—the apostrophe there matters, I told you I analyze it to the letter. Not a wounded man delighted to be all alone, thinking "there, now I can have my Robinson island"—that's a bit today's discourse, isn't it, that society is a pain, that danger starts with my next-door neighbor, right? How wonderful it is when I'm on vacation somewhere all by myself. If only I could have a beach all to myself and my family, that would be nice. But since there are several million of us, since paid vacations began, all wanting the beach to ourselves, we come to terms with it, we put out the trash cans, we manage, we organize.
23:04 And yes, we're no longer feudal lords who get the beach all to ourselves. Ah, how sad. Well, come on, let's be serious. "By a"—no wait, "forgotten"—no, it's not that he wants to be alone. He would have loved to have kept up with the troop. But there, he's left forgotten. It's not solitude, you see? And that's why I warn you from the outset about the misreadings one could make of this poem. Already, any interpretation risks being a misinterpretation—interpretation is always a dubious business.
23:34 It's always somewhat subjective. It's your interpretation, it's his, it's mine. No, it's better to do analysis. If you don't understand the difference, think of it this way: to analyze is first of all to break down—analysis in the chemical sense. When you analyze water, you shouldn't suddenly find lemon juice in it, or else it wasn't pure water. You have to find what was really in the water: H2O. And when I take apart a car engine, on the cloth where I lay out all the pieces, I should find nothing but what was already in the engine.
24:05 Things mustn't come from me, sneaked in on the side. No, that's what analysis is. It's serious business. It's a term common to both science and thought. So that's what we're trying to do here. The apostrophe matters: "a wounded man left forgotten." When Rousseau extols, like an apostle, the sweetness of solitude—how wonderful it is to be far from men, and in nature, and in the forest, as he often says—but be careful about the literalness of what he says, all right? In the Fifth Walk, where he goes further into solitude than anyone ever has, into the voluptuousness of being alone as no one ever has been.
24:42 I remind you that the Fifth Walk—I'm not wandering off, I'm right in the middle of it—I'm in the process of telling you about a text that expresses a paradisiacal state on the part of someone far from all men, in total solitude, in Rousseau's Fifth Walk, in parallel with a text where being far from men is a nightmare. You see? And you'll see that it's not as contradictory as it seems, since, let me remind you, this ecstasy that Rousseau recounts in the Reveries is his final work, which he writes while battling the pains of the stone disease, kidney colic as we'd say today, I don't know, which afflicted him on the Rue Plâtrière in Paris, now called Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the Marais district.
25:23 Don't forget that his stay on the Île Saint-Pierre, narrated in detail in the Fifth Walk, is somewhat, ahead of its time, like Proust later on, right, where he tries to recapture a kind of search for lost time—"oh, that I might return to that beloved island," etc. So, where he tries to relive through his pen what he himself calls the best moments of his entire life. It was just a few weeks that he spent on that island. Except, mind you, one must remember that he was on that island because he had been condemned to be there, being hunted by the police of the three great powers of Europe.
25:59 The Empire, Austria, etc.—Germany didn't exist yet—France, and Prussia, which was starting to rise. Three states were hunting him down over his publications, The Social Contract, his unbearable, collectivist, Jacobin—we might say totalitarian—works, but no, we're not siding here with certain Anglo-Saxons like Popper, or with Onfray, it's the same thing, France Culture. So, and there he was on that island, thinking he would have to end his days there—very important for understanding this text.
26:34 He was in his thoughts thinking he would never get out of it. And he says, afterward - I'll skip it, but I recommend it to you, because the fifth reverie is the most beautiful text, well before Proust, it's extraordinary to restore lost time like that, to recover it to this point, through the pen, it had never happened before - notice this detail: the flux and reflux of that water, its continuous sound, but swelling at intervals, striking my ear and my eyes without respite. I stop myself because one wants to restore it all. Well, one gets the impression they're saying, do as I do, flee society, flee mankind, settle on an island in the middle of Lake Biel or on a desert island in the middle of the Pacific, that's even better.
27:14 The farther you are from society, the better off you'll be. And that would be a misreading, and he senses that it could be a misreading, and he clarifies. He says that most men do not know this state, and in the present constitution of things - here I quote him word for word - it would not be good for them to become disgusted with the actions that their active life prescribes as their duty. So don't follow that example. But, I add, I quote him, an unfortunate man - all this, I started from my 'that,' you remember - but an unfortunate man who has been cut off from the commerce of men can find in this reverie consolations that neither fortune nor men could take away.
27:58 There you go, an unfortunate man that - the same 'that' - not someone who withdrew out of love of solitude like the French Romantics, like Lamartine, often on the mountain in the shade of old oaks, at sunset, sadly, I would sit down. That's a poem called 'Recueillement.' Very nice. That's not it. An unfortunate man who has been cut off. Me, Rousseau, I was the most sociable of men. In fact, I'm going to write The Social Contract. It's in that very solitude that I understood the contract.
"Hypocrite reader": the universal, not psychology 28:33 There you go. Well, it's the same 'that' here. It's not someone seeking solitude. You see, there are some who really feel it. There are things in this short text. So when I tell you, 'sounds like the thick death-rattle of a wounded man one forgets,' I don't know about the 'that' - we can talk about it more. What connection did you sense - of course, in fact, more than sense it. It's almost explicit, but it's not that there's a tragedy of speech. I am dying for want of being heard by my fellow men.
29:03 I'm not interrupting myself, I'm digging into the same theme. In the first poem of Flowers of Evil, called 'To the Reader' - it's addressed to you, to me, 'To the Reader,' it's the very first one. It ends with that apostrophe where all of Baudelaire's ambivalence toward the other is summed up. He has just spoken of boredom, which for him is the greatest of monsters, all the other monsters being small change next to Boredom with a capital B in the sense of the time. 'You know it, reader, this delicate monster.' Before that he had said he was in a yawn about to swallow the world.
29:34 'You know it, reader, this delicate monster.' And here comes the apostrophe. It's the last line, the admirable turn. 'Hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother.' You see? Hypocrite. First there's this kind of distancing, this insult. Hypocrite reader - you get the impression he's sending him packing. And at the same time, this reaching out of the hand, 'my likeness, my brother.' Hypocrite because you are in the very act of making the misreading against which I am warning you. Because you might say, 'But what is this guy? He's depressive, this guy. He's sick.'
30:04 He's a neuropath. What are these fantasies at the end? It's not possible. He was well off by those chimneys. Why are we bothered by these stories of a lake of blood? I told you we'd do the philosophical exploitation of it. So I'm not here to do the psychology of Baudelaire, of Charles Baudelaire, born in such a year, died in such a year. That's worth doing, it's interesting in literature. Here I'm looking at the universal. Baudelaire speaks of us in this text. And here I get to my theme of modernity. It is the fate of modern man to be cut off from his society of origin.
The substantial world of antiquity and the modern detail 30:35 And there I've just taken a step forward from what I've said since the beginning of this second session. The great difference between antiquity - if we want to make broad divisions - and the modern world, is that antiquity is what Hegel would have called a substantial world. Do you know whether Oedipus liked potatoes with bacon? Potatoes didn't exist, they came from America - excuse me, I could have picked something else. But do you know whether he liked peas with bacon? No, I'm asking you a real question.
31:05 Does Sophocles tell us that? Did Achilles have a beauty mark on his left nostril? I'm asking you the question. These are the texts most read for 2000 years. We've been reading them for 2000 years. There's the Odyssey, so we should know it by heart. In fact we know nothing of all that. The properly individual doesn't interest the ancient world. Do you see where I'm going with this? It took centuries for people to become interested in an individual taken as such, with his particularities.
31:35 On the other hand, in Balzac, right from the start of the novel, you get 50 pages on what's on the mantelpiece. And there's a tuft of hair, and there are bank accounts in a box. You get every detail specific to that individual, to that family, on that day, in that season. And the weather that day. Do you agree? And even - I was quoting a passage from Proust earlier to an excellent friend. Just before the first appearance of Gilberte - he's still a kid, the narrator, Gilberte is also a kid, he hasn't seen her yet - but strange things always happen in Proust just before the appearances of characters who are going to recur in the work.
32:17 He's near in the park and there's a silence, and he says: 'Dividing the height of an uncertain tree, an invisible bird strives to make the day seem short.' Can you imagine? Since Homer, we've made progress in detail. Sentences like that are unthinkable in the ancient world. 'Dividing the height of an uncertain tree' - how can a bird's song divide the height of a space? It's extraordinary. Dividing the height of an uncertain tree.
32:49 An invisible bird - so he doesn't even see it, it's the song, it's the song that holds him. Strives to make the day seem short. You immediately see what he means. We've all heard that kind of bird at that kind of strange hour of silence, on a summer afternoon like that. Dividing the height of an uncertain tree, an invisible bird strives to make the day seem short. I'm telling you that care for the individual, for detail, for what is specific to the here and now, is modern. So when I told you last time, you see, we're a bit more concrete than last time. When Hegel says you can never be more than your time, at best you will be your time.
33:23 I had told you that means the horizon of modernity is the insurpassable content of our thought. For each person. The world in which he lives, the contemporary world - that's it for Descartes in his time, etc. - is the limit in an almost quasi-mathematical sense. The horizon. 'Horizon' comes from a Greek term, horos, which means determination. It's finished, it's over. Beyond that is the infinite. Interesting, the meaning of horizon. 'The azure of the immense round sky,' as Baudelaire says somewhere - he who knew about navigation and the sea.
34:02 And who says somewhere that our condition is 'an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.' Terrible, sentences like that. The condition of modern man. An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom. I'm not here to make you despair. On the contrary, you'll see, there's only good news. So, let this be understood between us: this is not specific to the individual Baudelaire, however neurotic he was. Or if he is neurotic for reasons that concern Aupick, whatever you like, it doesn't matter - the point is that it predisposes him to express well what is our problem, all of us, as moderns, if you prefer to take it that way.
34:34 Here I'll give you a small suggestion to think about together, to see how the contingencies of personal life and the logic of collective life can be articulated. Some ask: is it psychoanalysis or Marxism that holds the truth? Is it really my personal history or is it the destiny of the collectivity? These are not contradictory. Someone can, for reasons that are their own, individual, due to their personal path with all its contingencies - that path can predispose them.
35:04 Someone who, for example, is going to die very young. Schubert, Mozart. 31 years old, 34 for Mozart, 31 for Schubert. Even Pergolesi, 27 years old. I could go on like that. It's obvious that when you know you're going to die, you don't write music the same way. The Unfinished Symphony in Schubert. At the end of his life, Schubert produces lots of works like that which remain unfinished. They're all unmatched masterpieces. So there you have it. The contingency of his own private life - not everyone has tuberculosis, consumption, syphilis, whatever you like, all that.
35:40 It's not contradictory, moreover, that it predisposed him to express the anguish we all feel. That's universal. The anguish of precariousness, of time passing. So it's not a matter here of doing the psychology of the individual Baudelaire. It's a matter of seeing why he was designated as the emblematic poet of modernity as soon as Flowers of Evil appeared. Why did Rimbaud, who is so harsh with all those who preceded him - 'I am an inventor quite otherwise than all those who preceded me,' even a musician who found something like the key to love -
36:11 18 years old. That takes some nerve, all the same - 'far more deserving than those who preceded me.' 18 years old. And it's true, moreover. It's fantastic. Well, Baudelaire - Rimbaud, in a famous, well-known letter in which he hands out the prizes, so to speak, to all the poets from the Greeks up to himself, to his rhetoric teacher, no less - yes. Hugo saw well in the last volumes, because his criterion is: is one a seer or not a seer? You know about that, I don't want to dwell on the notion of the seer. There you go. Well, Hugo saw well in the last volumes.
36:42 That means it's already a tribute to him, in part. There you go. And then he says his faults - too much Belmontet, too much Jehovah, old burst-out enormities. He says, but I have Les Misérables at hand, a real poem. Oh. Yes. Great tribute, not to a poem of Hugo's, but to his prose work. 'I have Les Misérables at hand, a real poem.' So he hands out the prizes, he comes to Baudelaire, he says Baudelaire is the first of the seers. The first chronologically, the first modern. King of poets, a true god. But he lived in too artistic a milieu.
37:14 And the form so vaunted in him is petty. Rimbaud, this age is pitiless. But you see the prestige Baudelaire had as the first of the moderns. If he was very quick, well-placed as it were, to express your reality and mine as moderns - this fear of being separated, of being that wounded man one forgets under a great heap of the dead. It's frightening, this ending. Whatever the personal reasons that led him to express it better than another, the result is there.
The public bell, religare, and the confusion of words 37:45 I come back to my comparison. We will never know whether Achilles had a beauty mark on his left nostril. That doesn't interest the Greeks. What interests the Greeks is the citizen. It's not this individual - you have an admirable analysis of this in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, in the chapter called 'the ethical world.' In Hegel's coded language, there's no proper name in Hegel. This is the moment of Greece in the history of Spirit. The moment of the Greek city, if you prefer. I'm telling you this for those working on this difficult book - it can shed some light and make things easier. Hegel says very well that in the world of the city, this particular individual is 'the ineffective shadow' that interests no one.
38:24 What counts is that he counts as a citizen. Hence the tragedy of Antigone, for example, which I alluded to for other reasons last time. As long as he is alive, the citizen belongs to the city, which can send him even to the supreme sacrifice, to fight against the Persians, for example. Once he's dead, it's the family's affair, the particular's affair. The city has nothing more to say - so Creon rather oversteps his prerogatives in forbidding his burial. He goes too far. Antigone is wrong to disobey the law of the city - that's incomprehensible for the Greeks - and Creon is wrong to extend the law of the city to the private domain.
38:56 There are problems today about that - the private and the public. But look, this brings us back to the text. The first two quatrains are the public world, the world of the bell with the vigorous throat that tolls the same hour for everyone - you agree, I'm not inventing anything - that tells everyone at any moment, 'ah yes, it's the quarter hour, it's 6 pm,' not only in my head but for the whole community. That is what the one agonizing in the two tercets is cut off from.
39:26 You see? And so that bell is quite fortunate, because it speaks for everyone, and moreover it faithfully casts its religious cry, like an old soldier. Two figures emerge there: the soldier and the priest. 'Religious' - he's not making anything up. Freud, though he was completely unaware of Baudelaire - that's not his subject - wrote a very interesting text on group psychology, and he takes two examples of crowds: the church and the army. Two worlds without women, he does it on purpose.
40:00 I won't go into detail about that, it would lead us astray, but you see what a coincidence - the church and the army, there they are already in the quatrains. The church is present from the very beginning because the bell - we find it, if nowhere else, in churches, let's not forget. There's already a religious connotation from the title onward. Now what does 'religare' mean originally? You probably know, some of you - yes, and if you nodded yes, then you know it, and there you go, it's wonderful, thank you - what binds. Religion is first of all what binds, before arriving at metaphysical things, beyonds and transcendences. Don't forget that it first means what binds. We understand why language is sacred in religion. 'In the beginning was the Word' - that's how the Gospel of John begins. Yes or no, are you starting to understand why?
40:51 It's serious, this business of what binds - I once said, in a workshop last year, that there are two forms of exchange since the highest antiquity between men - it's troubling as a parallel - language and money. With the period of economic and financial crisis we're going through, I find nothing accidental in that. Words get muddled today - we no longer know what's on the right, on the left, on the far right, on the far left - it's strange, this confusion, isn't it. There are those who know how to produce this confusion - we spoke well of the 'red-browns,' you remember, the red-browns, those who make you believe they're on the far left and who palm Hitler off on us - that exists. It means words are getting muddled, because words are made, after all, to introduce distinction and separation into confusion. Words are the world of the lights of language, of clarity against a background of darkness - it's not the mush of feeling, of affect, etc. Words are good for making things clear - that's an animal, that's a plant, it's not confusion - though, classify mushrooms for me in that - I'll ask you something new -
42:01 I'm not straying, because I could get carried away - mushrooms pose problems, because - yes indeed, you know plenty of plants that have nothing plant-like about them: no leaves, no fruit, no chlorophyll function, and above all - above all - what's common to all plants, what makes them superior to animals on this one point, is that they don't need already-living matter to create life: they synthesize the mineral salts in the soil, starting from the mineral. There's a great chemist among us, Sacha, correct me if I'm wrong - plants have the privilege of synthesizing the living from the dead, from the inert, from matter, whereas we - we animals, and I include us as men - we are parasites, we need already-living matter in order to live, even if we're vegetarian, we need living matter - well yes, mushrooms, that's it, they're parasites, that's the parenthesis, I'm not going to stray - as the season, with the exceptional mildness, drags on a bit, mushrooms are starting to grow back, might as well fit that in - so words introduce clarity into confusion.
43:11 If words get muddled, that's serious for a historical era, if meanings can be perverted like that, if you say you're waging war on 'faceless finance' - you heard that during the electoral campaign, I didn't invent it either, I'm only analyzing what is said, I think to make fun of Macron afterwards at the finance ministry - it's strange, but yes, there you go, it's serious, this confusion, because it reminds us of the very beginning of our philosophy workshop since last year: if a Socrates suddenly appears in the city, it's because the words of the city are starting to get muddled, and someone needs to come and say, 'What do you call this, what do you call that? You, general, you speak of courage - you must know it, you're a general, you're a specialist, you've made war. You, the sculptor, you speak of beauty - you're going to tell us what beauty is. What do you call...' - and then those who are questioned -
44:21 ...questioned by Socrates start to stammer. Well yes, beauty - well it's the sculpture I made, or it's the Parthenon, or it's Brigitte Bardot - excuse me, I have somewhat old-fashioned references - it's today's confusion that people have, fascism - well, there are those who prefer animals, these confusions - I say that because, as for me, I prefer to save humanity rather than the planet - you'd think we lived on the same planet, we'll have time to come back to that - anyway, the planet doesn't care about us, I don't care about humanity - the planet wiped out the dinosaurs without batting an eye, next - and it will still be there when we're all dead, don't worry about that. What is beauty?
45:08 What do you call beauty? You remember, that was the fundamental philosophical question - since 'what is it?' - in 'what is it,' I already know too much, there's being that's given, I don't even know if what you're talking about exists at the outset - I have, we come back to it, words, people who speak, who say 'this is beautiful, this is this, this is that, this is just, this is good, this is not good' - well, one must know then. If I say to you, 'pass me the salt,' you don't pass me the sugar - we agree, we must know what we're saying. But yes - so the artist speaks of beauty, well beauty is more the vase I made, it's the Parthenon - well yes, but the sunset, isn't it beautiful too? Yes, yes, it's very beautiful - it has nothing to do with your statue - yes, that's fine - he ends up stammering, and as a result they end up resenting the one asking these questions, and they put him to death - that's how philosophy begins, with someone who tried to recover, as Mallarmé - one of the successors of the movement initiated by Baudelaire - admirably says, the poet is the one who, I quote, 'gives a purer sense to the words of the tribe' - which means the words have become impure. 'Give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe' - you'll find that in 'The Tomb of Edgar Poe.'
46:20 The 'tomb' is a poetic genre - one pays tribute to someone as if it were inscribed on their tomb, it's a poetic genre - he wrote one for Verlaine, 'he lies among the grass, Verlaine' - he wrote one for Baudelaire, he wrote one for Edgar Poe, who was somewhat the ideologue, somewhat the mastermind of that whole current - the one who was found dead drunk in a gutter in Baltimore, who died like that - and we come back to language, speaking of a drunkard's words, I say that because in the poem he says 'they, they' - I understood 'the Americans,' the crowd, the masses, because he was - he was a cursed poet, we'll come back to that, that's the topic here - 'they loudly proclaimed the spell drunk from the dishonorable flood of some dark mixtures' - that's Mallarmé, let me translate it into plain French for you right away: it means 'they said it was a drunkard's talk, Edgar Poe is a drunkard, that's all, from the dishonorable flood of some dark mixtures' - some dark boozing, if you prefer, of bitters - whereas he was in the very act -
Tragedy of language: Adam names, Babel confuses 47:31 - of giving, I quote, 'a purer sense to the words of the tribe' - the paradox: we think it's a drunkard's talk, we treat as a drunkard's talk the speech that restores the original exchange, the Adamic stage - I'm alluding to Adam, of the earthly paradise, let me explain - in the biblical Genesis it is said that God gave Adam the privilege of - thank you, yes - naming the creatures, and since we're talking about language today, let me take the opportunity to recall that in the Bible you have a tragedy about language in three acts. The first act, I've just recalled it: right at the beginning, in the earthly paradise, isn't it, it is said that God gave to Adam, to man - Adam, that means, in the Semitic language in which the thoughts, the Gospel were written - by contrast to that of John, the Greek one, and especially the Old Testament, in the Semitic languages, Arabic, Jewish, whatever, not Hebraic - you know what Adam means, Adama, Adamou, someone said - it means the mud of the Nile, the silt - you know that afterward he makes Adam with a statue of earth, precisely of clay - that's what it means, Adam, the clay -
48:41 - the clay that was at the bottom of the river, Adama, and Hawa, Adam and Eve. Those of you who have lived in Ivory Coast know there's an excellent Ivorian mineral water called Hawa - 'eau,' water. Adama is the fire and Eve is the water, and then it's a religious thing, I come back to our topic - first act: God gave Adam, man, the privilege of being the animal that speaks - and not only that speaks, but, as I just said, that introduces clarity into this chaos - you are a plant, you are an animal, you are a sheep, and you are an ox - the creatures undergo this - what is a tree, what do you call a tree - I'm digging a bit into this - we started from a poet, someone who gives a purer sense to the words of the tribe - let's make use of it, so, the empirical definition, as we do at first when questioned - there are roots, there's a trunk, there's foliage, there's a woody trunk in general, wood is called 'legno' in Italian, isn't it, and is called 'Holz' in German, Holz which comes from the Greek term 'hylè,' which means matter, because for a long time the most common material for craftsmanship -
49:51 - that was worked was wood, and the island of Madeira was named that because people were struck by the forests that abounded on that island - you see, let's not stray - we can name things right away and distinguish them thanks to the privilege - the Bible says privilege - it means that animals don't speak, they have very sophisticated communication systems - we've seen that a bit, dolphins, bees - but it's not language, we could come back to that if you're interested, to the great difference, in particular the double level of articulation - a bit off topic today - which exists only in man, the double level of articulation - and I come back to this tragedy in three acts - so at the start, Adam - but that, I've told you, is the Adamic stage of speech, it's somewhat the poetic golden age, when things were called by their name without it getting muddled, without language being perverted by the fault - the fault hasn't happened yet, the woman hasn't intervened yet - the woman is the serpent - we don't mention the serpent's sex, you'll notice - we say that he lies and that he deceives, except on that day -
51:01 - the day he provokes the fault, it's the only time he tells the truth. What does he say to Eve to tempt her? Because you know plenty of things today, it pleases me - what does he say? If you eat of it, you will be like God, you - both of you, you and Adam - if you eat of it - bravo - 'eritis sicut deus scientes bonum et malum' - you will be like God, knowing good and evil. Yes, that's indeed man's tragedy, we come back to the text - when one is a happy fool, as the French language puts it so well, when one is an animal, one doesn't know one is going to die - that's good, one lives in happiness, one lives in the instant, in the eternity of the present, one heads toward death without ever thinking of it - it's better - but still, as Gérard de Nerval, for whom you know I have a weakness, says, ignorance cannot be learned - once you know it, you can't go back. It's said in the Bible: there's an angel with a flaming sword who makes sure we can't go back to the earthly paradise - I'm not saying just anything, I'm only spelling out things that are said - so there was that paradisiacal stage where things were called by their name, but it got muddled, and there you can guess my second act - isn't there a passage in the Bible where suddenly the languages got confused - bravo, Babel.
52:13 Those of you who have young children know that between the moment they don't speak - the infant stage, literally, one who hasn't reached the phatic stage of speech, early infancy - and the moment when they speak like you and me, there is in between babbling - you know, there's a stage where children coo, they articulate impeccably from a sound point of view, they don't yet have the code, but they already have the channel - you see, information theory, for computing, for there to be communication - we're talking about that today, about someone who is agonizing because he can't manage to communicate, to make himself heard - I'm not straying, we're right in the topic - in the modern theory of information, which originated in the research of Mr. Bell inside the telephone - you see, it's serious, people were reflecting on how information works, how what's in my head can pass into yours - good grief, it's not obvious - and what if Proust was right when he says - each person is quite alone, we'll come back to it, because it's tied to the text, you can guess - each person is like this wounded man agonizing somewhere - that's what Proust means. So you see, I think I no longer need
53:23 to insist on saying that it's not the psychology of the neuropath Baudelaire that is our object today - it's our universal as human beings. Let me open a parenthesis to recall why Proust says that, or rather, the passage - it's when he goes to visit his grandmother, who isn't far from death, who is sick, and he crosses paths on the stairs with Doctor Cottard, that great doctor who is somewhat ridiculous at first because he makes jokes that make no one laugh, or that make people laugh out of the sheer ridiculousness - when he sees a beautiful woman he says 'I'd rather see her in my bed than thunder,' well, anyway - but who is a very great doctor, he says - when he was examining, he makes a diagnosis, suddenly he had nothing ridiculous left about him, a great doctor of his time - anyway, Doctor Cottard comes out of the grandmother's room with a certain look - she's old, one has to pass a certain age - what does that mean, to heal? It doesn't heal, you can treat, you can improve a bit, but in the end you can only give them up for lost - and there, he sees in his grandmother's eyes the distress of knowing she has no more recourse, that the doctor has nothing left for her - that's when he says each person is quite alone - so when I tell you second act, the Tower of Babel
54:34 let me remind you all the same of the textual given: in the Bible, men had undertaken - religion has always been ecological, hasn't it, well yes - the flood is because we consumed too much, sinned too much, gorged too much, that God sends us the flood as punishment - I'm not inventing this, that's what's said - now, when there's a tsunami, we no longer say it's nature's fault, we say it's man's fault - well yes, when I was a child there were tsunamis that killed far more people than now, I'm telling you - anyway, let's move on, and I'm not denying that the earth is warming, far from it, nor that man has something to do with it, that's another debate - I'm outraged that the director of the weather service at France 2 was fired from his post even though he wasn't denying that the earth was warming, wasn't even denying that man had something to do with it - so he's not at all an anti-ecologist, but he was simply saying that COP21 was a big PR operation for the presidential election - we're in France, there's no crime of opinion - he was fired, I saw no protest, no union, there you go, I'm outraged, excuse me, but it had to come out - I didn't see a million people in the streets, it's like when we invaded Libya, including the well-meaning left, everyone thought it went without saying - well, we shouldn't be surprised afterward
55:44 when it blows up in your face. So, yes, I seem to be jumping from one thing to another, not at all, I'm coming back to the Tower of Babel - so of course God, whose only obsession is that man should equal him, isn't it, that's existed since the Greeks, it's not specifically Christian, I remind you of a well-known myth - which one? The one where Jupiter fears that man will equal him - but yes, you know it, the myth of Prometheus, the one who went to steal fire from Olympus to bring it to men - it's not, we're going to be able to warm ourselves, we're going to be able to see the girls at night in the dark, well yes - we come out of darkness - it's true that now it's said to be the origin of all our ills, fire, energy - he was well punished, Prometheus - well it's the same thing, it's the same story there, it's not fire, it's water, we send the flood - much more clever, God, much more clever - he doesn't send fire, he doesn't send water - wait, he does send water - he doesn't send nuclear bombs - he decides, in order to thwart the construction site of the Tower of Babel, because many peoples were working on it, to introduce the confusion of tongues
56:54 Deep, the Bible - second act of the tragedy, first act, speech that works all by itself, man names each object, he calls it by its name, by its right name, the words of the tribe in their native purity, and I tell you that all great poetry tries to recover that paradisiacal stage of speech - second, the antithesis, isn't it, the confusion of tongues instituted by God - it works very well, because with different languages we no longer understand each other, hence misunderstandings, hence quarrels - you see how the metaphors chain together, we make war on each other and it's over, and then the construction site falls into disuse, it's still lying in a jumble, moreover, that construction site - toward what, why do we produce - it's interesting, after the crisis we can finally lay it all out flat, ask our questions - after all, I am the complete opposite of a fanatical productivist - in 'produce' there's 'pro' - those of you who did Latin know that means 'for,' with a direction, an end, a goal - it doesn't mean bustling about like an ant, no, no, it means having a very precise goal - so if we produce without agreeing on the goal, that's not production, that's mere mechanics.
58:04 So, second act, the antithesis, the tragedy: men no longer understand each other. People talk, but what you're saying means nothing to me. That's where we see that speaking and saying — you see, it's very simple, I'm not going to lead you astray into abstractions — I hear, because the walls are often thin now in modern buildings, I hear people next door speaking Chinese. I don't understand — I take this example because I don't understand Chinese, I could take another language — I hear clearly that there are people speaking, I see right away that these are people speaking, that it's not just the noise of the shutters or the wind, no, no, it's people speaking, but I don't understand what they're saying. Have you understood the difference? You see, in saying there's speaking plus a meaning, still plus a message that has actually arrived at its destination this time, plus a code. Well, that's it — from then on what the Tower of Babel lacks is not mutual understanding — I told you, a drama in three acts, right, I haven't finished with the second one yet, telling you that historically we still haven't gotten over it, we humans — third act: the revenge on the Tower of Babel.
Pentecost, fire, and the speech of mortals in Hölderlin 59:14 The New Testament this time, in the Gospel — I'm moving from Judaism to Christianity, historically now, and you know that Gospel means good news, and here's the good news: we are avenged for the Tower of Babel. I'm alluding to Pentecost. You know what Pentecost is: after the death of Christ, the apostles are gathered, a bit sad, somewhat in mourning — the figure from the Last Supper is no longer there, that's where the misfortune of being thirteen at table comes from, twelve plus one, and he's no longer there. They're sad, and God sends them what is called, in a word that's hard to translate, "paraclete" — a comforter. We translate it as "spirit." With the Old Testament we had the Father, with the New Testament we had the Son — who does not at all proclaim himself the son of God in the Gospel, but the son of man, I recall in passing, if you read the text: "and as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the son of man be lifted up." Let's go back to the text: he must pass through the crossing of the desert, man must, it must be in solitude in order to understand community and to rediscover the social bond.
1:00:24 It must be in dereliction and abandonment, and as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the son of man be lifted up. So at Pentecost God sends the Spirit — so it's no longer the Father, no longer the Son, the Spirit is... I don't know, but we know its effects, because the text says — you see, I told you I don't interpret, I'm happy to be literal — that from that moment there's a kind of little flame on each person's head. That's the second time I've mentioned fire in connection with Prometheus, I'll speak of him again shortly. That's twice now we see a link between fire and language. I say this for the philosophers who want to dig a bit into the texts: Heraclitus, the father of dialectics, Heraclitus called "the obscure" because he has fragments like that, a bit hard to decipher, one of the most fascinating pre-Socratics, of whom Hegel said he had been the first to understand dialectics — even before Plato's dia-logos there is Heraclitus's dialectic — the one who said we never bathe twice in the same river, and who adds afterward that we always bathe twice in the same river, the one who says the way up is the same as the way down, the one who says the bow is named...
1:01:34 Bios — that's topical, look, I talk a lot about ecology — the bow is named Bios, and its effect is death. The bow is named Bios, life, and its effect is death. The bow — superb, yes, there's nothing more mortal than life. I can't help it — glass isn't at risk of dying, nor is a pebble. It's a privilege of the living, death. And since I'm on this, and since we're talking poetry, let me — I haven't yet defined modernity, we're watching it take shape before us, but I had bounded it in rough chronological, empirical terms when I told you: modernity, if we absolutely wanted to frame it historically, begins with those two great upheavals that are the English industrial revolution — within a historical handful of years, late 18th early 19th century — the English industrial revolution, the French political revolution. Roughly, that's it, we're still struggling now in the world that emerged from those two great upheavals. Well, at the dawn of modernity, for the great poets — the one I'm about to quote is Hölderlin, Hegel's university friend, you know, who remained thirty-seven years...
1:02:44 mad, at that carpenter's house, because he had been struck by the word — precisely, "Apollo struck me," he says in a letter — Hölderlin, who said somewhere that the great poets appear at the beginning and at the end of great eras, of great periods. Well, he, who was at the beginning of modernity, tells us this in a poem called "Mnemosyne," goddess of memory among the Greeks, without whom there would be no language, goddess of memory. He says: "For the immortals cannot" — so all the gods, mortals, that is you and I, before them — "reach the abyss." Indeed, the gods do not die, so they lack a kind of knowledge compared to man. Man knows death, the immortals do not know that. A woman in love waiting for her guy at an RER or metro station in the suburbs, it doesn't matter, with her heart pounding, and even if she's a checkout girl at Monoprix, that may be a more interesting love story than Philippe Sollers's — I've already said this, for me it's a subjective judgment I stand by — she wouldn't have that sudden joy of seeing him arrive...
1:03:54 after having been worried because he was ten minutes late. If we weren't mortal, you understand, this is important, what I'm saying — that's man's privilege, that all this could be lost, none of this is guaranteed, it's not like the gods, it's fragile, marvelously fragile. So there it is: "for the immortals cannot reach the abyss before them." I continue, it's very short now: "thus with them" — so with you and me, with mortals — "with them the echo changes, for time is long, but the true arrives." 1802, it was written in 1802. "With them" — how can the echo change? You know all this, a bit of science, you know what an inequation is, what relation — A greater than B, or A greater than or equal to A. We're right in it: an echo can, at most, like a reflection in a mirror presupposed to be perfect, a mirror that is neither convex nor concave, a reflection can at best reproduce the model, right, but never more. There can't be more in the mirror...
1:05:04 than what is in front of the mirror. There can't be more coming back to my ear through the echo than the sound I emitted — at most, right, the volume I emitted, certainly not more. And yet, because we have consciousness of death, "with them the echo changes" — the echo distinguishes itself from the sound. All of a sudden man introduces a new temporality, a new history, whereas the gods remain in their timelessness. I understand why they get bored, why they go chasing after mortals all the time — mythology is full of gods disguising themselves as shepherds, look closely. Ah, but listen, I'm not inventing anything, even Eros — Eros himself, he's beautiful, if Eros isn't... he's charming, isn't he, I ask you — well, who does he fall in love with?
1:05:51 There are famous couples: Zeus and Leda. Zeus has plenty of mortals — I won't list them all, each time he has to disguise himself, because if a mortal woman sees the god as he is, she's struck down. There was one who wanted to — Semele, it's in mythology, I'm not inventing anything — Semele must have been quite a lover, because, the classic move, Zeus told her: "Fine, I'll give you whatever you want, make a wish, I'll grant it, word of honor, you won't regret it." She said, "I want to see you in your splendor," that is, for once not disguised, not transformed into a swan or a heifer — once he transformed into a heifer, you know that, with Io — no, no, as he truly is. Fine, he couldn't take back his word. She was struck by lightning on the spot, and from her ashes amid the storm was born Bacchus, the sacred one — yes, Dionysus, Bacchus, the god of drunkenness and excess and community, as opposed to Apollo, who is the god of clean-cut individuality. Dionysus was born from the union of Zeus and the dying, thunderstruck Semele — it's magnificent, the one who wanted to see him...
1:07:02 in his excess, as he truly is. So, back to Eros — who is that, his partner? I'll guide you, her name gave birth, I think, to one of the best-known human sciences, psychology — go on, I've told you everything, but yes, Eros and Psyche, what a couple. He had to fall in love with Psyche, the soul — that's what Psyche means, soul, in Greek, simply. Dealing with psychology means dealing with the soul. There are always taboos — she had the good fortune to be the lover of the god of love, that doesn't happen to everyone, it's the dream of shepherdesses — I'm a Corsican speaking to you, a shepherdess is nothing, back home we say "I saw two men and a shepherd," in Corsica that's the bottom of the ladder, and not only in Corsica, all the way to Niger, believe me, a shepherd is at the bottom, not even like a farmer, who can at least bring in a harvest. Abraham grazed his flocks on boundless land, Abraham comes from the infinite, well...
1:08:12 We are all children of Abraham, you know — Jews, Muslims, Christians, it's important, it's a gathering point, Abraham, Ibrahim as they say in Bamako. So the shepherdess there is captivated, only there's a small problem: she can't boast about it to her friends. She's allowed to go back to the fields, the meadows, with her old shepherdess friends, but she can't say. So what's the guy like? "I only see him at night," that's the condition he set, Eros, you know the mythology, right, "you mustn't try to see who I am." She could have been content with that — no. So one night she has a bit more curiosity because her friends told her, "Oh, if he says that, maybe he has a nose like this, he's a monster, let's find out." They sow a bit of doubt. One night she gets up with a lamp — no EDF electricity back then, it's an oil lamp — and she sees, she's reassured, a young man of such beauty that she trembles with emotion, but a drop of oil falls and wakes him, and everything vanishes, she becomes a shepherdess again. There you go — well yes, we want to have our cake and eat it too. That's to tell you, this is serious, what I'm saying.
1:09:22 Man's superiority over the gods — the gods get bored, they need our women, and vice versa when it's men. It's interesting, because there's the same thing: Diana falls for Actaeon, you know, the hunter, and since Actaeon caught her — she, the goddess who hates being seen, like Zeus, one mustn't see her as she truly is, that is, one sees her naked — Diana the chaste, she makes deer antlers grow on his head, and he's torn apart by his own dogs. Harsh, this religion, in mythology, torn to pieces by Diana's dogs. Strange goddess. So that's the gods, and Hölderlin tells us why they need mortals so much — because we have a secret they don't know, which is finitude, limit, death, which means that we know how to value life. And yes, having a drink with friends is already not bad, when you see the dangers threatening us, it's good. So there, I told you...
Concept of modernity: singularity as a path 1:10:33 empirically, modernity is late 18th century, English economic revolution, industrial revolution, French political revolution — but that's not a conceptual definition, it's empirical, it's rough. Now we're arriving at the concept of modernity, which isn't tied to an empirical chronology, which could appear 5000 years ago, and likewise there could be an archaism still lingering two centuries from now. What am I saying? I mean this is a definition: modernity is when the individual begins to emerge, to appear as such — the particular, here and now, with what it has of the unique and the singular. I add "singular" to "particular" because "particular" could still be an instance, right, among a series, but where nothing distinguishes it from those next to it — like, say, 50 ten-cent euro coins fresh out of the factory that made them, well, that's not really the individual, each of the coins. Whereas the singular is what makes it so that when we read a novel we take interest in the characters, in each one, because we've seen them, we've seen their trajectory, and it's that trajectory...
1:11:43 through time that makes them unique, just as each of you and me is unique — not because of an origin, nor because of an end either, but because of the trajectory that unfolds between the origin and the end, right. Look, take two rivers, if you want a comparison, two watercourses — it could be a small stream, oriented, a small trickle, ten kilometers, I don't know, barely sprung from the mountain because the slope is such — with us, in Corsica, it's already reached the sea, it makes a beautiful beach actually, because the slope is steep — or the Amazon, which is what, 300 kilometers at the mouth, can you imagine? They're all alike at the origin, rivers, when you go back up to the source. It's called a "reception cone" in geography — when you want to trace back to the source, you think you'll arrive at a spot where, there, the river springs forth — no, that never happens, there's what philosophers call an "always-already" complexity, it's never simple, the origin, you arrive at a threshold, I mean, you know, in the mountains, there's a little stream here, a little trickle of water there, and it's when they join together that it starts to make a watercourse, depending on the snowmelt, it flows a bit in every direction, spreading its legs, so to speak. All rivers resemble each other at the origin, it's not there...
1:12:53 that they distinguish themselves, that they're individuals, it's not there that the Amazon differs from the Var, for example — there's the mouth, well, there is a difference, I said it, in size, between the mouth of the Amazon, which is not wider than the Río de la Plata, a bit further south too, in Argentina, right, which is even wider, which is by the way called Río del Mar, there used to be a sea there — the Argentinians, like the Uruguayans on the other side — but that's a quantitative difference, it's not very important, it doesn't distinguish them in kind. The mouths are all roughly the same, it's a bit marshy, there are meanders because the river is no longer up high, it's flat, so it goes off in every direction, it makes marshes, fine. But what's unique for each river is that its course, its meanders, its precise path — none is substitutable for another, you can't, by overlapping them, make the profile of one match the other. That's the difference — it's our trajectory, there's a temporal dimension in man, that's what I mean, there's a history. It's not geography that makes man, only physical geography — I mean human geography — yes, there's a historical dimension constitutive of man, man doesn't exist...
1:14:03 first, producing history afterward — it's history that constitutes man, without which there would be no man. Rousseau himself — Rousseau, right, whom we often take for a naturalist — says in The Social Contract that before the transition to civil society, man is a stupid, limited animal; he becomes an intelligent being and a man, I quote Rousseau, only through the transition to civil society. And Rousseau reintroduces history when he speaks of slaves, rebelling against Aristotle, who had said — Aristotle is one of the greatest minds of all time, but still, he's a Greek of his era, he too has the prejudices of his time — Aristotle had said there are men born to command, there are men born to obey, there is nature — nature, being born, birth, nature, it's all linked — some are servile by nature, some are made to command. Aristotle — that was very widespread in his time, there are still many who think so now, some are still two thousand years behind, that's their problem, not mine, I hope it's not yours either. So Rousseau said this admirable sentence: if Aristotle was right — but he mistook the effect for the cause, I quote him word for word in The Social Contract, in the first part, book 1, chapter 1 — "he took the effect for the cause: men lose everything...
1:15:13 in their chains, even the desire to escape them, and if there are men who are slaves by nature, it's because there were, at the origin, slaves against nature." It reintroduces history greatly. It's true that some end up with servile natures — what's now called, and it's become fashionable again thanks to La Boétie's admirable text, "voluntary servitude." You see, you end up getting used to your servitude, it's so much simpler to always serve the same master, better a bird in the hand than two in the bush, you know that kind of wisdom. So, restoring time to my image of the rivers, which I hold to — you can't superimpose two watercourses, even a ten-kilometer one has its meanders, its hesitations, its quirks — that's each of our destinies: to love what one will never see twice, said Vigny in a very beautiful poem — "to love what one will never see twice" — true singularity is there, that's modernity, the awareness of what is unique in each individual. It's the opposite of totalitarianism, you see clearly, it's the opposite of collective belonging, but at the cost of erasing everything properly individual. Modernity is difficult.
The political animal, the bee, and the common ground of communication 1:16:23 You have to be both collective, for man is zoon politikon — Aristotle's great phrase — man is a social animal, a political animal, a social animal, an animal that lives in society — that's rigorous as a way of speaking, from Aristotle. You'll tell me: bees too, they live in society, so what? Yes, yes, yes, but only in man is it essential — I'm speaking logically here — it is essential for a triangle that the sum of its angles equal 180 degrees, that's not accidental; it's accidental for a triangle to be right-angled, because a triangle can be a triangle without being right-angled, that's not part of its essence, that orthogonality, but the sum of the angles equaling 180 degrees, that's true of all triangles, that's the essence as opposed to the accident, in logic these tools are precious. Well, the difference between man and the bee, right, beyond what Marx saw — you know the famous phrase of Marx on the difference between man and the bee?
1:17:23 What immediately differentiates the clumsiest architect from the most skillful bee is that the architect has his house in his head before producing it in reality. I come back to what I said earlier, that the animal is a kind of permanent eternity of the instant, instantaneous, when it does — when the bee builds its impeccably hexagonal cell, it's superb — you have to have seen mason wasps as I've seen in Africa, and weaver birds — have you ever seen weaver bird nests? Look on Google Images, some people use them as lamps in Africa, what birds make is splendid — I remind you, they make a racket, a din, all working together with... yes, it's like a computer program running through the bird, observed by a great entomologist, whom I quote incidentally, very well known, Fabre, right, who left a whole body of entomological work at the end of the 19th century, who studied insects all his life, Henri Fabre — he had studied the mason bee of the walls, precisely a mason wasp, I'm not straying, I'm illustrating that the animal, which we think performs tasks like us, very organized...
1:18:33 knowing what it wants, is in fact unfolding a program, and its will has nothing to do with it. That's what I'm illustrating through Fabre — I'm no specialist, he was — and he observes the mason bee of the walls, this kind of wasp that builds its cell, and he observes how it stores its food, its provisions, and he says he notices it does so in two stages: first it disgorges the crop where it has accumulated the food by foraging, and second, it comes back out, ruffling its wings — I don't know if that's the right word, the hairs — to shake off, I quote, the pollen load. After doing these two stages several times, he blocks it between the two stages with a little stick, a straw, he blocks it right after it has disgorged its crop and before it ruffles its wings. What does it do?
1:19:27 It immediately goes back to the bottom of the cell, there's no hesitation, no hiatus, it disgorges its crop again — which is empty, a completely useless act, if it thought for a fraction of a second it wouldn't do it. Have you ever seen women drawing water all day in a country with no water — it's crazy, as they say in Abidjan, that doesn't exist there — that means it doesn't think. One might think it's thinking — it doesn't think, it's an automatic act, it's programmed, if you interrupt it, it has to redo the whole program from the beginning. So, I'm reminding you: man, a political animal that lives in society, and the problem is this — the problem that modernity still hasn't solved: how can we subscribe to our fundamental political nature without sacrificing what each of us has that is unique? That's the problem of modernity, I don't have the solution, but if we don't pose the problem, if we sacrifice one of the terms of the problem to the other, we're doomed — if we sacrifice everything to the collective, or on the contrary everything to the individual, who at that point is no longer even the individual, who is nothing but the singular — you've seen documentaries where there are 400,000 frogs...
1:20:37 mating — it happens sometimes, there are big gatherings like that, humping all over the place, excuse the crudeness — but the individual, that doesn't deserve the status of individual, it's super-individual for lovers of abstraction and rigor. I recall in the Philosophy of Right an admirable passage where Hegel says that the individual is the particular reflected on itself and thereby raised to universality. That's what we're doing right now: we're all particulars to begin with, we're all unique things, as I was saying, and if that were all, I wouldn't be speaking right now, you wouldn't be hearing me, because what is proper cannot be common — that's something we're taught in primary school, proper noun, common noun, it's one of our earliest school distinctions, yes or no? If there were only things absolutely particular to each of us, we could never communicate. Look closely, you just have to read — it's written right there in "communication," there's "common" in it, there can be no communication if there isn't something that transcends singularity, even if only the code that's common to us right now, which is the French language, for example, which is common to us.
1:21:47 For example, this code is common to us, not only to the French, to the whole Francophonie. I'd even say that if the French language remains alive, it's thanks to the peoples outside of mainland France who are having more children than we are, fortunately for the French language — I'm thinking of sub-Saharan Africa, where there's a birth rate that breaks all records, particularly in Niger, precisely, which holds the world record for birth rate. That makes a lot of little French speakers. I pay homage in passing to those teachers, right, whom no inspector ever sees, deep in the bush, in suffocating heat, teaching in our language, right, writing, arithmetic, etc. I pay homage in passing, everyone couldn't care less, especially the bigwigs of the Francophonie organization. So we're not talking about the Francophonie institutions here. If we communicate, it's because we have something in common. I'd like to develop that next time, but we have a bit more than a quarter of an hour left, and I'd like to give you the floor for questions, even if it means...
Question: why from voluptuousness to unhappiness? 1:22:57 continuing to answer them next time, based on what we've just seen. This text, I think you've all seen that it poses the problem of communication, but poses it as only modernity could pose it, and I'm glad to have been able to connect the two lines of thought: thinking our historical horizon, and thinking it through an effort to restore a purer meaning to the word of the tribe — an effort we cannot make alone, by definition, it's a collective game we can only play together. So I give you the floor on a few passages, whatever they may be. Yes — I just wanted... I hear that you spoke of two things, that in the poem I can't quite connect them: the fact that we go from pleasure to misfortune, and the fact that it speaks of the organ, and how do we connect these two themes? Yes, that's true, I haven't fully resolved it, but I agree there's a puzzle there — that's already good, that's the essential thing, the problem is posed, I'll answer you quickly, a bit dogmatically...
1:24:07 given the time we have left, so we can dig into it more. I could give demonstrations, but I'm opening up avenues, I haven't been reflecting on your question just since this evening. You're right in this, and it's a bit linked to my whole line of argument that I've just tried to unfold: the more archaic and substantial a society is — without any pejorative connotation, we wouldn't be here without these archaic societies, we wouldn't be here without leaving them behind, letting them burst open, it's magnificent, that's how it began, the paths of praxis, yes, from the club of prehistoric men to the particle accelerator, what a history, that of the tool, of the productive force, what a history, which made us what we are, right. It's obvious that the more I have the means to distance myself from the threat of origins — death, illness, cold, heat, wild beasts, I'll take the example of the Inuit, it's been noted by those who study them that they have two mythologies, one for winter, one for summer, you can guess that the one...
1:25:17 that is more collectivist, and the other more individualist — there's one where they tell the story of heroes, seal hunters, alone like that on a boat, and others that are more collective. You can guess that the more collective one is told in winter — we need a bit of solidarity, right — and the more individualist when we feel a bit less in danger. That's the path leading to an answer to your question. Roughly, I mean by this that Baudelaire belongs to the early effects of industrial society. There's a very beautiful poem in the Tableaux Parisiens, unrelated to this one, I recommend it, you'll see he's often very happy, we shouldn't think he's always wounded like this — again, it's our condition that he reminds us of — and he says, it's a poem about a window, where he talks about the spectacle of Paris seen from his window, and he says: I see the rivers of coal rising to the firmament — that would make people scream today, "rivers" with that — Paris was much blacker back then than now, contrary to what we think, when we heated with wood charcoal anyway. So he lived through the first moments of industrial society, right...
1:26:27 in which the individual could assert himself more freely, less subject to the curtain that opens and closes, right. It's obvious that in a small Corsican village, I mean, if I talk with a girl on the village square, all the windows are watching, the grandmothers, "who's that one," etc., "where does she come from" — you see, in the city, what do you get? It explains a lot about the great migrations from the countryside to the city — there's employment, of course, but there's also this, there's more freedom, we're not there, hassled like in the old substantial society, we always have to answer to the community all the time. You see, traditional society is more totalitarian, which is normal, we owe it to society that it lets us survive after all — I'm not making value judgments, I'm not saying the ancients were terrible tyrants, totalitarians, no, they had reasons to be like that, the real is rational, to borrow a famous phrase, there are reasons for things to be this way. And how, from the admirable preface to The Spirit of the Laws — one of the first to see this sociologically, as we'd say today, when he says: "When I began to examine men, I believed they were not solely guided by their fancy" — there are reasons, men act like this first, then in our time like that.
1:27:37 So there, the more industrial the period, therefore developed, and already Baudelaire makes some rather scandalous claims from the standpoint of morals, things one couldn't do in traditional society precisely, or else on the sly, the libertine authors under the cloak, right. Proof is that he had a trial, you know, a trial for obscenity, can you imagine — meanwhile on the boulevards you could find all sorts of obscenities without Baudelaire's beauty, well, another matter, but he's one of the first, one of the first expressions of civil society, as we'd say today, quite simply modern. So he suffers the counterpart: anxieties that couldn't exist in the traditional world. There I'm answering your question. You have to see what mourning is in Black Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, if you want to speak politically correctly, you have to see what mourning is — now in psychiatry we know very well the link between depression and mourning, it's often a consequence not of the loss — what's the connection? I'll tell you right away — we're a bit alone facing mourning in our society...
Collective mourning and diversion according to Pascal 1:28:47 in a village, right, deep in Togo or Ivory Coast — I said "deep" on purpose, not to say in the capital, where there are already more symptoms resembling ours, where there's already more individuality, more privacy, where there's no longer the extended family but the household, dad, mom and the kids in a two-bedroom apartment, you see, that's already different, that's not the traditional family. Well, when there's a death, the whole village mourns with the person who lost someone, people come to cry with them, at my place too if there are still wailing women, you know that, it comes to us from an old Arab tradition via the Maghreb, they're not professionals who come tearing their hair and crying like that in front of the deceased's bed, no — afterward, it's a bit like those who go on to reboot, then it gets better, then she asks for coffee afterward, it's over. That's how it is in Africa, which means there's no depression, it's terrible, the whole village is in mourning, etc., they lament, then afterward everyone goes back to their business. There's an admirable documentary about this by Rouch, you know, the filmmaker who devoted quite a few films to Africa, called The Mad Masters, I recommend it because it's a striking, extraordinary document, it's famous, I mean for those who know Africa, The Mad Masters.
1:29:57 You see ceremonies like that taking place in Ghana that are striking. So, in short, so there, that answers your question: in these traditional societies, I escape — it's clearly depressing, but it's because we had to wait for the modern world for the individual to see what the human condition is, for man to begin appearing, the human condition in all its implications, I'm an animal who knows he's going to die. Pascal said that spoils the view. "When I set myself to examine men," in the Pensées, the chapter on diversion, "I realized that all of men's unhappiness comes from the fact that they cannot stay quietly in a room." Pascal is the first to define all human action not by the carrot in front of me that I pursue, as cognitive science still does today — stimulus, reflexes, effects, hormones and other delusions, it's a rigorous delusion, but one that completely misses man, what's specifically human, I mean, because otherwise I'm an animal through and through when I digest — not especially anthropological, but the hours when I do it, yes, what's important...
1:31:08 is that we had to wait for the modern world for the human condition to appear, it was somewhat masked before by the collective fantasy that protected us against the human condition. So Pascal, he explains for the first time human behaviors, human action, behavior as the Anglo-Saxons say, behaviorism, experimental psychology, not by the carrot or the stimulus in front of me that I pursue, but by something behind my back that I flee — man cannot stay quietly in a room, because if he's alone he'll think about death, he says, because of all this he'll be inconsolable. He says: kings' great advantage over us is that they're surrounded by people who spend their time diverting them, making them think of something else, that's why they're happier than us, not because they're in better health, but because they have more access to diversion than we do. That's why what's scandalous today, in the 21st century, is that there are people whom material poverty still condemns not only to lack diversion but to face abandonment and dereliction. That's a modern scandal. Thank you for your question, but I think I've opened up a path toward the answer, we had to wait...
Question: the shift, the middle classes, and the medium 1:32:18 for the modern world for the human condition to appear, and with it anxieties — less serious than our ancestors', our ancestors when they fought the great plague, it wasn't only fantasy anxieties. — Yes, but precisely, continuing what you're describing, I have a question, because I hear you well, but certainly, ancient societies etc., isn't it relative to modernity — I interrupt you just for the philosophers who want to speak rigorously, that's what we're here for, after all — substantial societies, that's a friendly piece of advice — what makes their substantial character? Because from a material point of view, even Greek society is progress, there's an organization, so there's even progress, technological, technical, scientific, so scientific too, what causes the shift? Because there are material conditions, but that doesn't seem to be the fully determining element, since material conditions have progressed for a very long time, so I don't know if there's an answer... I have to hang on because you're asking a good question, it's tough — yes, these are the real questions, that's good, it's that...
1:33:28 you take the example of the Greeks, well, 20% free men versus 80% slaves, roughly, that's the proportion on average. So as long as I'm in the world of masters, who are a bit like the gods I was talking about earlier, who live in a kind of eternity, problems, fatigue, the whole thing, illness, that's for the slave — it's interesting what I'm saying — I can defer the awakening to the misfortune of the human condition, I can escape anguish. So, what I'll say — we had to wait for the modern world for it to appear, I'll answer you simply: what we all are, the middle classes — we had to wait for the French Revolution. Hugo said: I put a red cap on the old French dictionary, I no longer speak the language of aristocratic roots — that means, I put a red cap on it and I popularized it. What am I saying? I'm saying that the comfort we enjoy in our bourgeois world — not in the pejorative sense but in the strictly economic sense, that is, neither, right, the world of the gods where the aristocracy lived in the old regime, nor the Greek citizens...
1:34:38 right, free relative to slaves, nor those who are in distress and dereliction and who, in India, are renting out their children into slavery to pay their debts — most of us moderns are between the two, and in this middle ground, this middle where everything blends together — I come back to confusion — this middle where confusion has the most chance of being recurrent. I can't help myself, let me read you a poem by Hölderlin, it's one single sentence, I reassure you, where he starts from language, right, and which answers your question well: "But man dwells in huts" — yes, man dwells in huts, huts are where one hides, he's talking about what we repress, precisely the knowledge that we repress, that we've long repressed because we had the means to repress it. Let me give a quick voice-over commentary to save time: "But man dwells in huts and hides himself in shameful clothing, for he is more intimate, more prudent too, and preserves the spirit as the priestess the sacred flame" — the Vestal Virgins who tended the fire.
1:35:48 Knowledge, we hold it within us, we don't disclose it, and that's why he has the freedom, the omnipotence — listen closely — to lack as well as to accomplish the most perilous of goods, speech, given to man. This was said in 1801: "the most perilous of goods, speech, given to man." What am I saying? That we are in the middle, the middle is what's best and worst — what's between you and me, in the middle? The language I'm speaking right now, the intermediary, mediation, media, that means "middle," all of that, like the hub of a wheel, it's the same root, all of that is the medium, that which is in the middle. Money, the best and the worst, language and money, I told you earlier, language and money, the two great forms of exchange between men — exchange is what's in the middle, the two extremes are me now and you, the sender and the receiver, who can go astray — that happens all the time of course, in between there's the medium, that's the best and the worst. And 2000 years before our era, Aesop, that fabulous man in the strict sense, because he's the fabulist of antiquity — La Fontaine drew heavily on him for his fables — Aesop had said: the tongue is the best...
1:36:59 and the worst of things. He trivialized it a bit by saying: it's the best because language is education, transmission; it's the worst because it's slander, it's lying. It's true, this answers your question a bit: we had to wait for the middle classes — you see the continuity in what I'm saying — for the best and the worst to become conceivable at all. It depends on what we make of it, because we are orphans of history, we no longer have, as before, substantial society had a religion it merely had to follow and things to apply — they cut off your hand if you're a thief, and there you go, that's the Code of Hammurabi, or there are the Ten Commandments, or you go to confession, there were purgative forms, a flash, freedom has its counterpart, its counterpart is fulfillment or dereliction, as we see here at the end of the poem "La Cloche fêlée." But we had to wait for that, these middle classes who are in the middle, we've partly sketched...
Robinson, the veil, equality, and shared unhappiness 1:38:16 the answer to this question, but only partly, so it's good to ask it again. I was saying it was linked to material progress, that the individual has all the more chance of appearing the more the community provides more means than the previous generation to do without the community. I can live on a desert island with internet, with a generator, you see what I mean, whereas it's unbearable for someone from the old society to live alone on a desert island, it's dreadful, it's certain death. It's possible — take Robinson, I'm answering your question — the first pages of Robinson Crusoe, it's grueling work, I'm talking about Defoe's original version, not the shortened one for children — swimming, everything he does to get to the ship, the shipwreck that threw him onto this island, what to do, grab everything he can as a tool, gear as we'd say today, right, sextant, calendar, spyglass, because he gets to the top of the island, he looks around a bit...
1:39:26 he sees that it's even smaller than he thought. So what am I saying? I'm saying that we think Robinson Crusoe is man's destiny in nature, but no, he's not in nature, he's a man benefiting from the highest level of human technology of the time, English technology. It's as if — I'm answering your question a bit — society had to give me the means to distance myself from society. That's progress in freedom, that's what means I'm no longer obliged to be watched like that in front of the group. Well yes, that's better, it's progress, but at the same time you need the means and the possibility. So I find it scandalous — and this is your answer too, your question gives me the occasion to spell it out — I find scandalous the accusation made against those who have veiled women — I'm not saying, I'm not saying all women should be veiled, don't worry, no misreading — but I mean by "those who make that accusation," while saying it has nothing to do with economics, "it's green fascism, Islamic fascism" — this was at the time of Afghanistan, it's Bernard-Henri Lévy who came out with that enormity. What does that mean?
1:40:30 That means I'm anti-Marxist, I'm Bernard-Henri Lévy, so we don't care about the material progress of Afghans, let them stay in their poverty, but let them unveil their women. It's really quite something. I say that if our own women are unveiled here, it's because it's been a long time — it's not just that there are women who earn three times more than the man and run the household, and those aren't going to unveil themselves, believe me. You understand what I'm saying — entire societies that live by substantial, archaic law, I think I'm being precise here, precisely because they don't have the means to do otherwise. It's enough for wealth to increase, and above all be better distributed — the Greek citizens and the slaves, I'm answering your question again — for it to be better distributed, for there to be more people in what I've called the middle strata and fewer at the extremes, and women get unveiled automatically. So if you want them to unveil, give them social and economic progress and we won't talk about it anymore. But when it's the same people denying them social progress, because that would be totalitarian of course, and crassly materialistic, and who at the same time...
1:41:40 want them to be unveiled, that means you have to take everything from the man, including his wife. It's enough — there's my answer. What matters is this middle-classes story — I'll illustrate your point: contemporary feminism, there was a feminism in the 17th, 18th century that Molière took offense at when he wrote The Learned Ladies — he's furious somewhere, Molière, it's not his most progressive side, that is, women who meddle in astronomy and whatnot, right: "I consent that a woman may have some enlightenment about everything, but I don't want her to have the shocking passion of wanting to be learned just to be learned," etc.
1:42:33 In short: "and besides, a big Plutarch to put among my petticoats" — that means among my stockings — "we should burn all this useless furniture and leave science to the doctors of the city." What am I saying by this? That feminism was reserved for an elite, you're right. So progress, you see clearly that equality is inseparable from freedom — you've just helped us discover this thanks to your question, but of course, it's you who spoke of inequality, not me, bravo, it's not entirely stupid, the Republic with its motto — if there's no equality, there's no freedom; if there's freedom only for a few, the world is doomed, because the slaves, I mean, if they become more numerous, will end up revolting. You know, Crassus alone in Rome had 10,000 slaves, how do you expect him to hold out in the long run with a few Spartacuses lurking about — yes, sorry, it's inseparable, that's why I said earlier: prosperity must be shared, if it stays in the hands of only a few, we remain in substantial society, we don't fully get out of it, in the society where there are gods and aristocrats.
1:43:43 Brahmins, as we say when talking about castes, right, and untouchables, right - I quite agree with your interventions, but I wouldn't want that to make us forget that this accession to individuality, which again is emblematic of the essence of modernity, which is the destiny of any modernity worthy of the name, also goes hand in hand with new anxieties and new perils. I'm not talking about economic and political perils, I'm talking about the perils Baudelaire speaks to us of, to conclude on the text after all - namely that there are anxieties for which there are no longer the ready-made solutions that used to exist to slide over them and slide toward the beyond, as he said in an admirable passage, into myths, or what Nietzsche calls afterworlds. That's what I wouldn't want us to forget: being an individual also means assuming a certain modern unhappiness. But that's good news, because an unhappiness shared collectively is, believe me, less of an unhappiness than that of someone abandoned alone in dereliction. That's my conclusion, so we need
1:44:55 mutual recognition. Thank you for being here.
