English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Two themes: communication and language 0:00 I want to briefly remind you why this avalanche of texts, on what theme, and why this theme at the point we've reached. These themes actually, because there are two we've been discussing since the workshop resumed.
0:30 So it's been since the start of the 2014 season, if you will, since last November. There are two essential themes—one is... I don't like to say communication, because people immediately think of TV panel shows, and frankly you can imagine I don't want to have to choose sides between Caroline Fourest and Tariq Ramadan. I'm trying to hold a philosophical discourse. So, communication in the sense the word ought to have, that is, in the sense that presupposes—look closely, it's written right in the word—that we have something in common when we communicate.
1:08 If we had nothing in common—not even the French language while I'm speaking to you, not even this code, for instance—we wouldn't be communicating. I say this for those who claim, I don't know, that we're all locked in solitude. Yet they write and speak in order to say so. That's a bit contradictory—they're a bit like the skeptics, you know, those who spend their time saying there's no truth, yet fill page after page with demonstrations to prove there's no truth. Instead of doing what a truly consistent skeptic would do, like Cratylus.
1:39 You know, I quite like—well, not quoting him. We have nothing from Cratylus. We only have hearsay, rumors in Aristotle, in... Cratylus is said to have said such and such, according to Diogenes Laërtius, you know, the one who put together that incredible compilation, Lives, Doctrines and Sayings of the Philosophers. He wasn't exactly the sharpest tool, by the way, since Diogenes Laërtius tells us all sorts of things of very unequal importance—like when Plato arrived at the stadium and, with some movement, people saw he had a golden thigh.
2:09 You see, Plato was already surrounded by such legend that some people thought he had a golden thigh. Really, quite Pythagorean—no wait, sorry, that's Pythagoras. Not far off though. And when Plato arrived at the stadium, everyone stood up. That part must be true. But alongside that, there are important things too. Thanks to Diogenes Laërtius, we know that Democritus reportedly said this, reportedly said that.
Heidegger and the charge of totalitarianism against philosophy 2:39 We don't have the texts of these people, you know. I'm dwelling on this a bit because the more important philosophers of our own time—I'm thinking of Heidegger, whom I call the most Nazi of philosophers, to mock those who still debate whether he was a Nazi or not, I just say the most Nazi of the philosophers. The philosophers who matter are profound people. Don't think that as long as you imagine the far right as my thick-necked, dim-witted brother-in-law—no, no, the right has been working at this for 30 years.
3:09 It's reaping the benefits in Europe right now. We mustn't play into the enemy's hands by mistaking them for my brother-in-law. For 40 years now—that is, roughly the Mitterrand generation, to use at least a chronological reference point since we're talking about it again—for 40 years they've been trying to make us believe the debate is between my buddy and my brother-in-law. Back to Tariq Ramadan and Caroline. What poverty! This mirror dialogue, isn't it, of the same people against each other? That is, my thick-necked brother-in-law, stupidity written across his bull-like forehead, as a beautiful poem puts it.
3:45 No, no, no, no, no. If Nazism had been nothing but a loudmouth in a Munich beer hall in the 1930s shouting that the Jews, the queers, the communists all need to be liquidated—if that's all it was, you'd find that in every café in France from north to south, between midnight and two in the morning. Yes or no? You'd find plenty of that. That's not dangerous, because everyone laughs. Yeah, that's it, that's it, Arthur. That's it, go to bed. There we go.
4:16 Good evening. If that's all it was, it wouldn't matter. When 70% of the electorate votes for them, it's about something else. It means they got green lights from prestigious, intelligent, recognized people—like Mr. Heidegger at the university. Mr. Heidegger, who, when the law banning Jews from the university was passed, no longer even shook the hand of the man he had brought to the university—Husserl, the Jew, Husserl... They cross paths—this was told to me by Arthur Adamov—they cross paths on campus, and he no longer even shakes the hand of the man who made him a doctor.
4:51 No, no, Jews no longer get a handshake. It took green lights like that for things to go from a beer-hall loudmouth to the Third Reich. That's why I insist: we must not mistake dangerous people for idiots. It would be so simple otherwise. In principle, intelligence is supposed to overcome stupidity. So, in this vein, it's very important to remember that it was Heidegger who told us...
5:27 Well, the French Heideggerians, anyway, we'll come back to that. The Gulag was already in Lenin, before Stalin. You've already heard that—I'm not inventing anything, and I'm not caricaturing. And it was already in Marx too, because it's totalitarian. You know this as well as I do, even better than I do, it's your generation. And besides, it was already in Hegel, and already in Kant, and already in Descartes. Oh yes, Descartes—how totalitarian is that? Making man master and possessor of nature—say that at COP21 and you'll get lynched. Well, yes.
5:59 And the Gulag was already in Plato. It's Karl Popper, the great Anglo-Saxon philosopher, who says Rousseau and Plato are the totalitarians. But hold on—before Plato there's no more philosophy left! He's the first philosophical system, right there, Plato. So basically the entire history of philosophy is totalitarian. What's left? Oh, yes, yes, yes—there are the Greeks he adores: Parmenides. Heraclitus the obscure. Parmenides too—mind you, I'm not saying these are idiots. But the advantage with them, I come back to my point, is that we have nothing of theirs.
Heraclitus: the oracle neither says nor conceals, it signifies 6:31 We have little fragments, hearsay, three lines in Plato, a page in Aristotle, like that. So you can make them say almost anything—it's perfect. Fantastic for the operation. Nacht und Nebel. Some of you know German and what that means. It was the name of one of the SS divisions, you know. Night and fog. Move along, nothing to see here. Nacht und Nebel. We're at the opposite pole from Descartes and the Enlightenment there. We agree on that. Nacht und Nebel. The pre-Socratics—well, I adore them, because I should also quote them fairly in my argument.
7:04 Since we're starting from language: Heraclitus said one of the most profound things ever said about communication. When he said, the oracle at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign. The whole modern theory of the sign is contained in that superb saying of Heraclitus—called 'the obscure,' whom I find very clear here—the oracle at Delphi, you know what that is? The Pythian oracle, because the Pythia had to swallow mushrooms—no, actually it was known, it's shamanism, the fashionable word, which I hate, because everything has to come from America, like the shamans—that's American Indians—it's traditional prophecy, whether in Africa, in Corsica, in Sicily. It's spider venom, you know, tarantulas—some of you may know—which gave rise to that dance, the tarantella, comes from that, dances of the possessed originally, people got bitten by the venomous spider in order to prophesy—yes, these are serious matters, a bit murky, all this.
8:15 So when you come to ask the oracle for advice, it gives you an answer you understand nothing of. Well, Heraclitus wisely tells us: the oracle at Delphi—and this is a bit the essence of all language—neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign. We're not in mathematics here, where when you say A plus B—sorry, A equals B implies B equals A—there it says something, it hides nothing, and it says—it's a speech that speaks, or rather it's not even speech, it's pure signifying without speaking at all. And then there are those who conceal, those who try to create a false mystery, you know, the ones Nietzsche talks about—the Nietzsche I like, the one nobody has quoted for 40 years even though he's quoted a thousand times a day on France Culture or elsewhere, but I mean the one quoted less because he's usually cited as an aesthete—and there he says: I am weary of all the poets, they trouble their waters so that they may seem deep. I like that Nietzsche, that Nietzsche so close to Hegel when he says that, so close to the critique.
9:25 that Hegel levels at his little Romantic contemporaries there—little, I mean his little friends, who are supposedly profound people, great authors, seriously—but there you have it, so: I am weary of all the poets, they trouble their waters so that they may seem deep. That's those who conceal, those who ask what did Rimbaud mean, as if there were some hidden meaning behind the lines of the saying—but no, those are bad writers, for whom you have to look between the lines for meaning. If the meaning isn't in the lines, the writer has failed—he can't manage to say it in the writing itself. I believe I already quoted you last time Rimbaud's formula, replying to his mother who had asked him in a letter what on earth he was talking about, that no one understood what he wrote, and he had answered: I said what it says, literally and in every sense. So, that was to make these reminders—so we have two themes, communication, language, but with the difficulties I've just raised—I went back to Heraclitus on purpose—neither speaks nor conceals.
10:35 I remind you that we're not in mathematics—otherwise there'd be no problem with language, we'd all understand each other perfectly, as Aristotle magnificently puts it: mathematics unites men, politics divides them. That's nice because it's still true today. Everyone agrees that A equals B implies B equals A; there's no long argument to be had over whether if A is greater than B and B is greater than C, then A is greater than C—yes, everyone agrees, from the pygmies to whoever—there's no problem at all, there's no left, no right, and even less an extreme center, which has been ruling over us for so long. That reminds me of a great, somewhat forgotten writer, now dead, who was the third in the series of great playwrights of the absurd—Ionesco, Beckett, and before them people used to add Adamov, until he made the gross error of joining the French Communist Party, after which nobody heard of him anymore because everyone fled the PC—and he had written, this is why I mention it apropos the extreme center, a play called Mr. Moderate, about a great serial killer.
The poetic function of all language 11:47 but it was Mr. Moderate who was obsessed with always staying moderate—so, you see, if language were an unambiguous communication, an information as univocal—that's what I was looking for—as mathematics, there'd be no problem. But no, as soon as we speak, we're in poetry in the very serious sense meant by the Prague Circle, as they say, for those who know a bit about the history of linguistics—if you don't know it, that's fine, but the point is that even the scientific specialists of language have acknowledged that in every language there's what's called the poetic function. Don't think that's complicated—on the contrary, it's the simplest thing. You do it all the time when you say 'the day is breaking already'—we're in full metaphor. How could it be breaking? It wasn't broken before. We know perfectly well it's all images—besides, the sun doesn't rise, it's us who move, not the sun, you see what I mean. We're in metaphor, that's what language is—good news: Monsieur Jourdain was delighted when he learned he'd been speaking prose without knowing it. He goes to see his maid, the class one.
12:57 Martine, do you know what you're doing when you say... yes, it's genius, Molière. Here's even better news I have to announce: you are poets without knowing it, at every moment, all while remaining in prose—it's the prose of the world, as someone once said—we do it when we say 'the day is breaking' or when we say, 'ouch, you're drilling into my eardrum with your shrill cries'—you're not literally making holes in my ear with a drill either. Yes, we're always in imagery, and so language is murky. We cannot—and here I am, in philosophy, trying to convince you that with this we're going to reach the truth—mathematics arrives at true propositions, but that's not the truth we're seeking. I'm summarizing for those who weren't here from the beginning, in the seminar that started more than a year ago: the origin of philosophy is this—someone who goes through the city, through the streets—Socrates—and says to all those who seem to display knowledge and are recognized by others as having competence, expertise—that's the fashionable word now—there are no more intellectuals.
Socrates against the experts; Plato's Academy 14:07 now there are experts. Ah, here's so-and-so, the Middle East expert, who's going to explain to us what's happening between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Great, we have an expert, he tells us, we shut up and listen. Yes—the murkiest problems, the ones with the most subjectivity, that's exactly where we now have experts. Fantastic—Kepel. You don't know Gilles Kepel? I recommend him, it's intimidating, he speaks Arabic—you don't speak Arabic, do you? Any idiot can speak Arabic, Corsican, Corsican—I have great admiration, it's one of my great regrets not to speak Arabic, which is a magnificent language, for any musician—that's not the point, but I organized Quran recitation contests at a music school in Niger, so I'm not talking complete nonsense—it's magnificent when well recited, it's truly orality; besides, flamenco, this music that tries to follow the movement of the flame, like that, you see, in front of the gypsies' hearth, flamenco echoes a bit the muezzin's call, if you look closely, it's that same kind of permanent ascent upward that comes back down like a fountain jet, it's extraordinary.
15:18 but still, I mean, any secret-service spy speaks Arabic—that doesn't make him an expert who's going to tell you the truth about what's happening. Yes, no, I say this because I once had a young flatmate who had helped me a lot to pay my rent at a time when I was struggling—that's when I discovered co-housing—I mention it because of difficulties—and who's still a brilliant student at Sciences Po, and was writing his thesis on exactly this, on the way the notion of 'expert' is taking over from that of 'intellectual'—experts with multiple cards, as they say, multi-positioned—there are experts in 'securitology' now, you know, who explain security issues to you, but who are at the same time the ones selling surveillance cameras for civilian use—it's extraordinary. And that's what's taking the place of Rousseau, Kant, I don't know, who knows, Mozart even. But yes, so, at the origin, that's what philosophy is—someone who says, what do you mean by that?
16:28 we're speaking right now, we all know our language isn't mathematical, and Socrates goes through the streets of Athens right when a revolution has occurred—the mathematical revolution, Euclid came before Socrates—these are civilizational issues. So Plato set up the first properly constituted philosophical school, a school in the proper sense, the Academy—Akademos was the name of the neighborhood, because he'd bought the garden there. He had inscribed at the entrance, as you know: let no one enter who is not a geometer. But that certainly doesn't mean, come on, we're going to do geometry—it means it's the best training, the best propaedeutic, as they say, the best preparation for doing philosophy: training yourself to make propositions that are no longer debatable, that everyone can agree on. Ah, and that's not only scientifically interesting, it's politically interesting too—remember Aristotle earlier: mathematics unites men, politics divides them. Well, Plato thought: what if we combined the two? What if we approached the problems of the city the way mathematicians do, by starting with definitions, by being clear—wouldn't that be better than sitting at the local café?
The biblical tragic comedy of language 17:39 where we throw arguments at each other's faces, where we stay in the domain of doxa, of opinion—I won't redo the whole course, but that's where we started, as any philosophy course must: by interrogating the words of everyday language, which we've just seen are essentially problematic, always have been. And last time, if you remember, the very last time—I'm making a big leap back a year and a half—I recalled that there's a summary of all this in an almost detective-story serial in the Bible—the tragic comedy of language. I said tragic comedy because it ends well. In the Bible, three acts: first act, the earthly paradise, the poetic moment par excellence of language, the Adamic moment—I'm thinking of Adam, where scripture says God gave Adam the privilege of naming the creatures. There you have it, the paradisiacal period when things were called by their true name without confusion. Then, suddenly, boom, the Tower of Babel—remember, men, through a tower, risk putting the divine in check, because if humanity starts to—here again I'm opening a parenthesis.
18:51 because we're constantly saying 'our Judeo-Christian civilizations,' we're always making oppositions now, everything's ethnic, we're constantly logical—men, women, young, old, Greeks, Christians—there's no fundamental opposition between the Judeo-Christian world and the Greeks, in spite of the Iliad, the wars, and Nietzsche and company—think about it, it's exactly the same story as Prometheus, the very same story. Jupiter, jealous, punishes Prometheus for having taken the risk of making man equal to the gods by going to fetch fire from Olympus. Well, that's exactly what the serpent gets that hussy Eve to do—okay, we're among the Semites here, that's the difference; I'm Corsican, it's the same, it's the Mediterranean—it's always the woman who is sinuous like the serpent, the serpent that slithers along until the end, whereas Adam is straightforward and upright. Well, that's how it's told. Antithesis: the Tower of Babel, putting the project in check—no need to send down lightning.
20:01 He has all the means at his disposal, God—sometimes he sends atomic war, because there are those who say that Sodom and Gomorrah, according to the Bible's description, might have been an atomic attack. Well, yes, fire—let's not dwell on it too much, because there are enthusiasts of that sort of thing on the internet, we're saturated with it—or else he sends water, the flood—that's more like COP21, we've consumed too much, we're the wretched consumer, we move around too much, we wallow in consumption, and even I'm going to send you the flood, that'll teach you to sin, much smarter and much more powerful than that. What does God do—remember, at the building site, the Tower of Babel—what does he send? Confusion of tongues. Up to that point, understood, men spoke a single language—no need to learn Esperanto on the metro, like I saw a young man doing yesterday morning, he had a nice face, a bit tortured-looking, but a nice face, and no, I'm not being ironic, that kind of Esperanto is actually a good thing—well, at that time there was no need, they say men all spoke the same language.
21:11 the language, no doubt, of Adam, from before the sin, before urbanization, the city—it's always the same story—God sent confusion of tongues, and of course the project remained, as I put it today, an unfinished thing. Humanity is that: we no longer share the same language, we no longer understand each other, we're at cross-purposes, so we fight instead of cooperating, etc. But I had ended badly because it was closing time, so I had said—and thirdly, since I call it a tragic comedy, we're not going to end on this desolation—the revenge is Pentecost, the New Testament, that is, the good news, literal translation from the Greek 'evangelion,' good news. Good news, what is it?
21:56 it's that now—remember, when Christ died, they were gathered together, the apostles, rather downcast, someone is missing—there's one of the most beautiful poems of all time called Patmos by Hölderlin, read it, it's one of the great hymns of his final period, and I say this because in French I was talking last time about the small form, the sonnet, like the cracked bell—we're not used to the long lyrical breath, but after two or three readings it starts to sink in, it's superb, Patmos—you know, Patmos is the island where John had the vision of the apocalypse, John the Evangelist, not John the Baptist, the same one who wrote the Gospel, John, the one that in Greek begins precisely with the problem of language, 'In the beginning was the Word,' and it's the same one who wrote the Apocalypse, beginning and end—his father was mute, the master of the Logos named at the moment of baptism by a mute father, fantastic—scripture, Rimbaud used to say, who was no altar-boy type, said theology is serious—so read that poem.
23:06 Patmos, so, they're gathered there in this absence, and you know, you've heard scripture, God sends a comforter after the Father, the Son, there's the Spirit, the Paraclete, translated as 'comforter,' I'm not a linguist, look it up—and yes, there's a collective dimension in the Spirit that isn't found in the singularity of the Father and the Son—that's the history that begins, that's Christianity, a dimension of temporal, historical fulfillment. And from that moment the apostles are going to preach the good news in every language—it's written in the text—they're going to go to the Gentiles, to the goyim, if you want, to speak as the Jews do, because no man is a prophet in his own country. There you go, it's no longer a religion for one people, it's not just for the Corsicans, or the Occitans, or the Basques, or the Catalans—tired of it, and yet there are institutions in Europe that busy themselves cultivating these identities—I'm being led by a German, moreover, who has as his right-hand man a Catalan—I'll stop there because it's going to annoy me—it's them who come.
24:16 to sow discord between the Corsicans and the Arabs, when the Corsicans are so Arab down to the bone that they have complexes about it—mustn't say that—I say this because I'm tired of seeing, in my own country, 'French, get out' and underneath, 'Arabs, get out'—that's not good in a country where so many people are named Mauro, Mauresco. Third act, the revenge, Pentecost—there it is, the curse of the Tower of Babel is lifted, every language is spoken, we can understand each other again, that's the Spirit, as Hegel says in the preface to the Phenomenology, the highest concept of modern times and of their religion—don't forget that this philosopher, who inspired Marx, started out, after all, as a little seminarian; he knows his texts well. So, I'm recapping for those catching the train mid-journey, who are doing us this kindness, for themselves and for us and for the cause.
Philosophy, daughter of crisis 25:26 I recall this trajectory: initiating oneself into philosophy is starting the Socratic gesture over again each time; it's interrogating first the words of everyday language, insisting on two things: it's through them that we communicate, that we have something in common; as long as we're communicating, we're not fighting. I say this because I see that our—we have the kindness that the organization hosting us here—Saint-Curel, Gosciny—what's your first name again?
26:04 William. William, there, thanks—I'm getting a bit senile, I'm losing my memory for names—I'm pleased to see he's read Plato's Gorgias—I don't know—and it's precisely the moment to recall it—it starts like this, I mean, since I'm bringing it up—in the Gorgias we're on the brink of a fight—I already told you that Callicles, the young little Nazi-in-the-making—I say that because he has all the classic themes, little Nazi already 2000 years ago—threatens Socrates: 'if you weren't old, you'd deserve a whipping, if you weren't so old you'd deserve a whipping.' But well, as long as we're talking, and as long as we're in dialogue—since we're in Plato—I don't know what the crisis enjoins us to do, and I had insisted a great deal at the very start of our talks on the fact that philosophy is the daughter of crisis, because—I come back to it—if Socrates suddenly emerges in the city and starts asking questions, it's because something has happened in the city. I had given Egypt as a counter-example.
27:14 as one imagines it in full swing—I'm talking about ancient Egypt, the one where the pyramids are being built—they're not finished, we don't visit them, they're under construction—let's imagine someone who would ask the Socratic question, 'what must I do,' or the Kantian question, 'what must I do'—he'd get whipped in the face, being the only one in Memphis or Thebes who doesn't know what to do—no, we're going to go build the pyramid like everybody else. So if the question can even be asked, it's because there's a margin of maneuver that didn't exist before, because there's a society where one can speak, discuss, question the law of the city, because there's an embryo of democracy—even if, and we must never forget this, there was one third free men and two thirds slaves in that city—but still, it's progress that these slaves don't serve the whim and arbitrariness of one charismatic individual, an emperor of China, the one dying in that magnificent text by Kafka, 'An Imperial Message,' an imperial message, or the King of Kings among the Persians, who beats every record for titles—it's the old sovereign of Ethiopia, Negus, King of Kings, Lion of the Tribe of Judah.
28:24 descendant of Prester John, and other titles like that—well, what was new among the Greeks is that this doesn't serve one individual who has power of life and death over everything else, over his wives, over his favorites, but a community that, within itself, doesn't impose power arbitrarily but a power that emerges—here we come back to it—from whoever knows best how to speak, because it's decided in the assembly. That's what's new, that's the Greek miracle—it's not some ethnic trick, that we're all blond with blue eyes and we've done away with the Arabs and the Orient—no, but some people see the Greeks that way. When you look closely at the Greeks, what's striking is the continuity with the East, as soon as you're not ignorant and look closely—when you see that Astarte, our lovely Venus, is the Hellenization of Ishtar, the great Babylonian goddess, and the flood you already find in the tale of Gilgamesh, 2000 years before Athens—well, I won't dwell on it further, but...
29:34 if there's a novelty, it's that: this embryo of democracy, which suddenly makes questioning possible—not questioning about the world around us, we didn't need the Greeks for that, there was vertiginously profound thought in China and in India well before Socrates, about the gods, etc.—no, questioning about the words of the city, that's new, about what didn't pose a problem before: pass the salt, you pass it to me, you're not going to ask me 'what do you mean by salt.' So you see how it all holds together. I come back—I've finished this big biblical parenthesis, so to speak, in three acts—you see the word that names each thing, God gives Adam the privilege of naming the creatures, to man, to Adama, to love—then it gets muddled with the Tower of Babel—it's not... I had even alluded to the stage where the baby, you know, those with young children, or who've had them, know this stage well, where the child.
Babel and babble; Kafka's "The Next Village" 30:44 starts articulating well, so he's got the channel now, he's no longer in cries or gurgles or noises, he's making sounds, and he delights, moreover, in multiplying them, trying them out like a bird, that's the stage of infant babble, to speak as the psycho-pedagogues do—but he doesn't have the code yet, on the other hand he articulates plenty of things, he babbles, but without having the code yet—so, Babel, babble—I say this because for those interested, there may be another channel of communication with sounds—music, I mean, when words have reached their limit. This is interesting, since I mentioned Kafka earlier, I recommend a magnificent text of his—I won't confuse you too much, but there are the great texts of Kafka, I mean in terms of size, the great novels, there are four, not many, because they all fit in one Pléiade volume—Amerika, whose original title was 'The Missing Person,' the one who goes to America and gets forgotten, the missing one, or the stoker; The Trial; and The Castle—I said four, I don't know why—and The Castle, which remains a mysterious image—and then there is.
31:56 a series of short texts gathered in the second Pléiade volume, I recommend it, they're a treat, some texts run 30 pages max, and then there are others that don't even run a full page—here, there's one, a short story I'm going to recite to you in full, not difficult, it's a single sentence, so I'll tell it to you in full because it has a connection, of course, with this impossibility of the message reaching its destination—even though here he's not talking about language, it's about walking, but you'll see it metaphorizes the same thing. 'The Next Village' is the title—we've already said a lot—the next, keep that in mind, not 'the villages,' 'the next village': 'My grandfather used to say: life is astonishingly short. Now, in my memory, it is so foreshortened'—that's grandpa speaking—'that I can hardly understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that—not to mention accidents—even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed'—
33:06 'for such a journey.' Full stop. Extraordinary—we can't even reach the next village. It reminds you a bit of Achilles and the tortoise, or as Valéry says in 'Le Cimetière marin,' 'Achilles, motionless, in his great stride'—there, 'Achilles motionless in his great stride,' frozen there, exactly—yes, the mouth that opens to speak but doesn't manage to speak. I remember someone who was preparing for the agrégation, and folktales were on the comparative literature exam that year, and being fond of genuine expertise—I don't mean the experts of TV panels, I mean the professors, the folktale specialists—who had made this revelation: first, that folktales most often come from well-established trades, there are tales that come from basket-weavers, tales that come from blacksmiths, tales etc., and by looking at this pattern, at the figure of the ogre that appears in so many tales, there are so many of them.
34:17 that Bluebeard, etc.—Bluebeard is terrible, we tell children such dreadful things—it reminds me, when I was little, of that story where there was so much blood on the walls you could see your reflection in it, like Mr. Clean, except it's blood. And you remember Puss in Boots, when he tells the peasants, 'you will say that all these lands belong to the Marquis of Carabas, otherwise you'll be chopped up like pâté meat'—I kept re-reading it, I was 8 years old, I was terrified, 'chopped up like pâté meat,' it's written right there in the tale. Well, children see worse things, but still—so the figure of the ogre would come from the mouth—I'm getting to it, it's extraordinary, this organ through which we must fulfill three functions that aren't obviously synchronized: breathing, speaking, eating—try doing all three at once, you end up either anorexic or bulimic, I don't know how you manage, don't think about it too much, it'll confuse you—to eat, to speak, and to breathe—so, the figure of the ogre would be the one, you see, who never passed into the phase of language, who remained stuck at devouring. That's interesting.
Socrates put to death; sharks and evolution 35:27 now here I'm getting into serious matters, so let's try to stay in the wake opened up by Socrates, that is, we ask questions that are of course dangerous—he lost his life over it, poor Socrates—the history of philosophy begins, after all, with someone put to death by the city, we're in the realm of the political here, it's the polis that condemns Socrates to death, it's not a personal vendetta, it's serious business. He corrupts the youth, and it's practically the same thing—he teaches the youth, and this is true corruption, to discredit the gods of the city—that's the world of celebrity—the gods of the city; if you attack celebrity culture, you're committing sacrilege. Oh yes, you think 'people' [celebrities] means 'the people'? I'd love to believe that, I'm not sure—as they say in Abidjan, 'I'm not sure'—I'm actually certain of the opposite. I believe pop music was made to wipe out popular musics—the proof being that they no longer exist.
36:37 everywhere the other one appeared—that's why now you hear the same refrains at 2 a.m. in a club in Tokyo, in Rio, in Paris, in Abidjan—that's unprecedented in the history of global music consumption; before, there was accordion here, gourami there—gourami's a lovely lute they make in Niger—anyway, well, so let's try to stay in this wake opened by Socrates, knowing it's difficult, that it's dangerous, that's exactly what happens when we apply ourselves to it—but that we have little to lose. So, coming back now to what I was saying—why does he suddenly show up in the streets of Athens—well, firstly, because it's possible, because we're not in Egypt, because we're not under the dictatorship of a charismatic sovereign, etc.
37:23 that there has been progress, that there is a world in which one can ask questions and discuss, so we must preserve that as a value; secondly, because things are going badly - because otherwise we don't ask ourselves questions. Here I bring back my sharks, I'll go very fast, it's a long summary, I apologize to those for whom all this is already familiar, but it's important to retrace the path and to know why there are all these texts today. Yes, the sharks - why do I refer to them? Because in the zoological universe it's one of the least evolved animals, or rather, among those currently thriving, one of the oldest, going back almost to the primary era, whereas so many species have disappeared, they're still there. And we had noted that they're there because there's nothing much that threatens them in their ecosystem, they're the masters of the game, basically - if it weren't for man. Even then, shark meat is less prized, fortunately for them, than tuna, except in the China Sea - well, Australia supplies the Chinese because it's supposedly an aphrodisiac, the big sharks - but apart from that, I mean, sharks have no enemies in the world, there you go.
38:33 He's the master of the game, why would you want him to evolve? What am I in the process of saying - that life poses questions for itself, complicates its own task, passes from the unicellular to the multicellular, from the multicellular to a vertebrate, in short - I was listening to Coppens the day before yesterday, I was looking for something completely different, I was struck by a word he said - you know, Coppens, the discoverer of Lucy, Lucy's father, who rightly said: it's rather strange, this paradox - the further we advance in evolution, the more things get complicated, you know, I'm not telling you anything new, a mammal is a bit more complicated than an amoeba - but at the same time he says the more it gets complicated, the more it gets organized, it's almost contradictory, don't you agree? When I said organized, that's not the same as simplified, but still, there's a side of unification, you see, that doesn't go along with complexity - it's interesting to see this rich dialectic in evolution which both diversifies in the direction of complexity and at the same time unifies in the direction of organization. A jellyfish -
39:43 is less centralized than our encephalon, than us - not encephalon, I have nothing against jellyfish except the one my ex-wife still bears the mark of - there are terrible jellyfish, I have to tell it, I can't help myself - but it was in the Calvi harbor, you see, in Corsica, I don't know how many years ago, and we were scuba diving, and fishermen had said come see, there's a 300-kilo ray - that used to happen, at the time there was still a stingray like that. So everyone dives in fast, my wife, who was German, a bit slow - I say that with much tenderness - takes her time, and so she's working her fins to catch up with the others in the bubbles, and suddenly, bam, she gets hit by an arrow by accident from the divers, and she lets herself sink to the bottom - that's what she thought, to give you an idea of the pain she felt. It was a jellyfish, and she still has the mark now, you see, 45 years later. Well, jellyfish don't have an encephalon, and that gets complicated - that's a metaphor to help understand why we ask questions.
Crisis and critique; human incompleteness 40:54 In philosophy we complicate our situation - that's why people resent Socrates. You can see it clearly in the Gorgias, so Callicles says, listen Socrates, when you're young, fine, but when you're old, to keep asking questions is a waste of time and deserves the rod, clearly. If we ask them, it's that the philosopher is a little sadist who comes to needle us when we have every right - we've dearly earned our rest, haven't we? And I had - I'll go fast since this was a summary - I remind you of a recap, I had invoked here, to settle, well, this debate - here it is: is it the intellectual who brings discord into the city, is it critique that brings crisis into a society, or is it because there is crisis that the intellectual worthy of the name asks questions and raises questions and thus submits reality to a sieve - because that's the origin of critique, true critique is a sieve, you see, what passes through, what doesn't, what can be kept, what must be dropped. Crisis, critique - it's all the same
42:04 root origin - it was an agrégation topic 30 years ago, critique and crisis, how to conceive their relationship - a fine topic. So are they Socrates's questions that bring discord into a city where everything was going fine until then - that's a rather far-right vision, you know, what did Goebbels say - when I hear the word culture I reach for my pistol, remember? Well yes, if it weren't for all these intellectuals we wouldn't be in this mess. Or else it's because there is crisis that Socrates spreads through the streets. And so I come back to my sharks, you see - we are not like sharks, we humans, we're even the opposite, we're the worst-off of creation - that's where I return to the myth of Prometheus, remember, I'll recap: the myth expresses this very well - man from birth is not viable, so his superiority over all beings doesn't come from a plus, it comes from a minus - it's magnificent as a dialectic. Look at the fontanelle of a newborn baby, and it still takes several months before it stabilizes, before it hardens - not before it calcifies - it is indeed the trace, somewhere, of an incompleteness
43:14 which comes - this was studied by the physiologist - which comes from a transition to bipedalism a very long time ago, and which means there's an obstetric catastrophe, that childbirth became nightmarish in the human species compared to the average of animal species. Just look at the speed with which a little antelope, within a few hours, a few days, starts fleeing with the herd if there's danger, whereas we don't act so proud for three years - especially me, I bet it took me a while to stand up on my two legs, there you go, and to speak too - people thought I was slow at some point, that was noticed. And you know the story of the child who's five years old and had never said anything, and suddenly at the table he says, pass me the salt please - tears in the family, everyone - he says, up till now everything was perfect. Which brings me to my subject: when there's no problem, we don't ask questions - that's where I wanted to get and come back to. So there were questions in the city - I come back to this - either they're conjunctural questions, let's leave that to the politicians, let's leave the politicians - I'm not saying the leaders decide in our place -
44:24 let's leave the discussion to the political arena, to democracy - no need for intellectuals or philosophers especially for that - or else it's structural, either there are difficulties going back a long way that leave their trace in language. So I come back to it - there, I've summarized the reasons why we have this avalanche of texts today, which all have in common, if you will, either language directly, as we saw with the cracked bell, because the bell has made itself blessed, the bell with the vigorous throat - not throat, the throat - we're right in the middle of the organ of speech, despite its old age - old age, the voice - I retry alert and in good health, faithfully casts its religious cry like an old soldier keeping watch under the tent. And I had pointed out to you that already in this short poem, when there isn't much room like that, everything counts - even in longer texts everything counts, but especially when it's short, it's no accident if there's the church and the army, the sword and the holy water sprinkler, as they say in French, isn't that so - in that poem, the bell, I won't insist, it's the church
La Cloche fêlée: community and individual 45:34 it's a metonymy for the religious order, and there I had gone on last time, and then, like an old soldier keeping watch under the tent - two crowds that couldn't be more homogeneous, the church and the army - in both cases women have been evacuated, so the community is rather homogeneous. I'm getting there - here's what we hadn't seen last time and what I'm following on from: if we were, last time, we had gotten to a tragedy between the individual and society, remember, that was our problematic, typical of what we had called modernity, which is now beginning to acquire some precise determinations - namely that modernity begins with the emergence of the individual and all the problems that poses within a society which originally has trouble, doesn't it, allowing particularity, singularity, to develop freely, with the risk that it alters the codes precisely, and everything that - I come back to earlier - is common to us and makes us a community. Ah, but tell me, do we make a community or a society? Ah, there I'm a bit topical, don't you find? We're not talking about communitarianism -
46:44 it's in that sense - and not only among the Corsicans, unfortunately we're only 160,000, it wouldn't be so serious if it were limited to Pantin plus Aubervilliers - that's about the Corsican population, sorry, 200, 230,000, of whom 35,000 are Moroccan migrant workers thanks to whom you have clementines at the markets here - there are even some, yes, it's them who pick them, the two quatrains, remember I summarized a bit - blessed be the bell, this society of the good bell, the one that isn't cracked, the one whose voice is heard by all the faithful, by all the citizens, the good citizens, the good people who live by the rhythm of the bell. It's not certain that this is society with a capital S, but a form of exceptionally homogeneous society called community. In that case we understand better why the poor wretch of the two tercets is excluded from it - you're starting to understand what I mean - if this is the old world
47:56 the world that I had called, in more precise philosophical terms, the substantial world, the substantial societies - no need to go looking to Corsica, Ireland, any archaic society - look at our great-grandmothers, I mean our great-grandfathers, even worse - there were things that were done, things that weren't done, and in villages the curtains, you see, twitch immediately if there's the slightest deviation from usual behavior, and as soon as there's a face that's not from around here, immediately people say who's that, where's he from, etc. We already had a colonial empire, you see, in Marseille we were quite used, for a long time already, to seeing Black people - imagine a small village in Russia, you see someone Black show up - oh no, we can't have that. That doesn't mean anything, racism in general or anti-racism, there are notions of history, of sociology that have to be seen - it's not the same form in Marseille and in Sverdlovsk, nor in Germany either, in those small homogeneous squares where there are always the same geraniums at every window, in front of the fountain that babbles on good June evenings with the smell of lime trees, I say this
49:06 because soon, in March, they're going to perform Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at the opera - it's a big event, they never perform it because it costs too much, there's a huge cast, it's a prodigious work, and it's right at the heart of our debate - but I won't say how, it would take me too far, it's right at the heart of our debate anyway - there's this whole second act that takes place like that on this little square in June, on June 21st, St. John's Day, the lime trees perfuming everything, everyone's asleep - I feel like telling it, it's itching me, this music, as Nietzsche said, there's no music cleaner than that one - it turns into an obsession you have in your head. So there we made progress, it wasn't society on one side and the individual on the other, we were a bit in abstract extremes there - here's what I discover today, what I discover as one discovers - one removes a sheet, I remind you that Aletheia, truth in Greek, means removing the veil, laying bare - among us we say truths come out stark naked from the well, you know, in our traditions there's a voyeuristic side to it. So I was looking for truth, no doubt
50:16 So the moment I say, but it doesn't exist, this society of the good bell - here's what I would like, what I'd like to convince you of today: who among you, even a scrupulous driver at the wheel, has never once crossed the yellow line a little, at least by a few centimeters, you see, the solid line, it could be white now - you've never done it? You're saying you never do that? Ah no, I'm speaking to those who drive - me, I do it all the time, but I'm speaking to those who are scrupulous, who aren't like me. Even those, I've noticed, sometimes - well yes, a truck and a tractor, there's a hay cart, you've had enough, it's hot. Who hasn't made grammar mistakes speaking French, who has always agreed the past participle with the direct object placed before it, you see - we often transgress the codes of the community. So this society of the good bell doesn't exist, it was a bit ideal - blessed be the bell, everyone at the same hour - there's an Edgar Poe story that's quite amusing called Von Kempelen - no, Vondervotteimittiss, it's a pun on 'wonder what time it is,' if you look closely - it takes place in Holland, he pokes a bit of fun at the Dutch, it's a village like that
51:26 where everyone plants the same cabbages at the same hour, etc. - Holland seen by an American, don't forget that means New Amsterdam first, a little score to settle - and so he, the accursed poet, mocks a bit precisely the people who live by the good bell, and then one day the devil comes and moves the church clock in the village, but by just a millimeter - well, it's the apocalypse in the village. It doesn't exist, these are limit-cases - just like the dying man who's there, the dying man, the thick death-rattle of a wounded man forgotten at the edge of a lake of blood under a great pile of corpses, and who dies without moving in immense efforts - I had asked you how one can go from the voluptuousness, the melancholy at the beginning - it is bitter and sweet, during winter nights, a small good fire and a little Bordeaux - to the nightmare of the tercet, in 14 lines - that's also a limit, and I had warned you: don't think we're dealing with someone specially neurotic named Baudelaire, etc., and that it doesn't concern you - this guy was sick
Harmonie du soir: sensations without a plot 52:36 I'm not like that, no - I'm in the process of showing that the poem expresses us, modernity, but at a certain moment we're not all at that moment, and to convince you of that, you see, I move on to the first text we could look at together, it's Harmonie du soir - now careful, there's a recto-verso, so right next to it, Comte de Rimbaud - oh, I didn't have time, sorry, it says Rimbaud, Baudelaire, no, it's all there, it's fine, it's a reference for movement - it's not marked 'for movement,' it's Rimbaud too, it's taken from the Illuminations, there, what he could add in pencil. So I go back to Harmonie du soir to show you that Baudelaire isn't always like that, in nightmare mode - he's still a hedonist, he had an inheritance, then he lived in garrets, it's terrible because this guy, who invented dandyism, who spends his time - it's well known in literature, but I won't do the literary explication - luxury is one of Baudelaire's great themes, there, 'all is order and beauty, luxury, calm and pleasure,' you see, this type of super-hedonism lived in a garret, a garret that was sordid, he was in debt on all sides, he even wrote
53:46 a short article called How to Pay One's Debts When One Has Genius, and there you go, and so he'd had an inheritance, he blew it in two years while living in one of the most beautiful apartments in all of Paris - try to go see it on the Île Saint-Louis, it's called the Hôtel Pimodan, on the side of the old houses of Michèle Morgan, the side where the Île Saint-Louis is a bit sadder than the other side, you see - not a drawing, there's a noble side, a bit sad, solitary and royal, and then there's a side that's a bit more Parisian gaiety, one imagines pools up top, solitary, well there - so it's on the sadder side, looking toward the Pont Marie, you recognize it, it's the only one that has this - a gutter that comes down, a period gutter, entirely carved, they're serpents shaped with dolphin heads, I don't know if you can picture this extraordinary gutter spilling down from the roof - Baudelaire lived there, he must have blown his money with beautiful leather-bound books and all that, it didn't last long. So there, look, Harmonie - we're not in the nightmare, let's read it, Harmonie du soir - whereas The Cracked Bell told us a story, a truly dramatic one, and what an intense dramatic arc, which in 14 lines
54:56 made us pass from voluptuousness to melancholy to total nightmare - here, listen, look, is there a plot? I don't see one - it's going to be, this will be the word that makes its fortune - impressions one after another, olfactory, visual, sonic. Look: 'Now is coming the time when, trembling on its stem, / Each flower fades away like incense' - there, already, for the nose, incense-burner. 'The sounds and the perfumes turn in the evening air' - it's for the nose and for the ear too, I'll say it without interrupting: 'The sounds and the perfumes turn in the evening air, / Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo!' - 'Each flower fades away like incense; / The violin trembles like a heart being afflicted' - 'Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo! / The sky is sad and beautiful like a great altar of repose; / The violin trembles like a heart being afflicted, / A tender heart, that hates the vast, black void!' - 'The sky is sad and beautiful like a great altar of repose; / The sun has drowned in its own congealing blood. / A tender heart that hates the vast, black void / From the luminous past gathers up every trace!' - 'The sun has drowned in its own congealing blood... / From the luminous past
56:07 gathers up every trace... / Your memory shines in me like a monstrance!' You see, there's no dramatic arc at all, no story, it's a series of impressions, and quite bold for the time - it tells nothing, this poem, it lines up sensations, not feelings. That's romantic - there's no sadness, joy, melancholy, jealousy, feelings, no, no, no - it's sensations, it's the body that's there, it's not the heart, it's the body that fills the soul. If there's only 'melancholy' that would connote a feeling - there's still always a feeling attached, 'melancholy waltz' and 'languor' - so each sensation is lined up, which means there isn't a single line that carries over onto the next, except perhaps just once - look at the last quatrain, the first two lines: 'A tender heart, that hates the vast, black void, / From the luminous past gathers up every trace' - that's the only line that carries over to the next one, the others -
57:18 each line is self-sufficient, like a sensation - something of the other, it's admirable. Well, we're not here to do literary and poetic explication - why am I talking about this? We've talked enough about Baudelaire's evocative magic, his art of sonorities, it's a musician's work, I don't want to develop it, it's obvious - I can just give a very beginning to show you, I'll leave it to you to do the rest on your own afterward - I set the text aside and analyze the score. Look closely: 'Now is coming the time' - 1,2,3,4,5,6 - bam!
57:54 In the middle of the line you have what's called a masculine sound - the sound doesn't extend, there's no silent 'e' - whereas 'stem' [tige] is a feminine rhyme, there's a silent e that resounds - you learn that, you learn it in poetics, it's not complicated. So 1,2,3,4,5,6, M, bang! 'or trembling on its stem' - F, feminine, 'each flower fades away' - F, hey hey, at the same spot where there was masculine, it's feminine, so there you don't stop, 'each flower fades away like incense; the sounds and the perfumes' - M, bang!
58:32 You see the regularity? There's a score there - in other words, metrically, the first line and the third are rigorously identical: a first hemistich, half a line, a hemistich that ends with a masculine sound, and that ends with a sound that extends, either with a silent e or without a silent e like 'soir' [evening]. So there you go, to show you that there's really an intention of evocative sorcery, as we said about Baudelaire - but what's it for, thinking a sorcerer -
Evening as transition; Senancour's Oberman 59:07 it seems like a shaman - not fashionable anymore, apparently. What's it for? You know very well - to make it rain. You always have to take things at ground level, like children - all children know that a sorcerer starts by dancing to make it rain. That's what a sorcerer is - why look for complications where there are none? No, it's not a sorcerer if he doesn't make it rain - well, that's what Baudelaire does. You see, don't you see what's happening on the weather front there?
59:37 Look closely, an effect of the poem on the weather - no, I'm not joking, I told you there was no dramatic arc, and that's where I'm revealing one in the poem, I'm telling you - it's the line 'The sun has drowned in its own blood' - what is an evening? Harmonie du soir - look how rigorous poetry is, I like this quip I made at the start of our seminar last year, that I said - the only difference between poetry and mathematics is that poetry is an exact science, and again this is certainly not an irony against mathematics, far from it, I've always paid tribute and I still do - but it's to point out that there are hidden numbers, in the Pythagorean sense, rather well expressed moreover in successful poetry. What am I saying?
1:00:32 I'm saying that evening is not a fixed moment like noon or midnight, it's a transition, like morning, you agree? Just as there's summer and autumn among the seasons - for three months it's roughly the same climate, and then there are seasons where it shifts, spring, autumn - there, set the text aside a bit and take - it's not the text where the eyes are, we have it, but look at the second, letter 24 in Roman numerals - he's talking about voluptuousness, about melancholy, you see, we're not so far from the beginning of The Cracked Bell. But that's normal because there we have the period - I situate it for you - it's in the pre-romantic current, a contemporary of Bonaparte, it's even before we talk about romanticism, you see, it's at the beginning, it's the generation that follows immediately on from Rousseau
1:01:42 you see, but Senancour analyzed, with almost surgical clarity, the century that was going to ravage the century I'm talking about - and so I read this text: 'When the frosts recede, I scarcely notice, in the season when everyone is happy, the birds return' - spring, the frosts recede, old winter withdraws, as a very beautiful poem in Goethe's Faust says - well, summer passes - oh yes, spring passes and did not attach me. I point out to you that Baudelaire, almost two generations later, will say 'adorable spring has lost its scent' - there's really something continuous about modernity, because all the poets before played on the seasons - Chrétien de Troyes's Perceval, one of the most beautiful poems of all time, the most beautiful story ever told at a royal court - 'this is the tale of the Grail,' it's Chrétien de Troyes who begins like that in his intro - it's good because right away the young girls are listening at the court of Champagne - the most beautiful story ever told at a royal court, this is the tale of the Grail - yes, it begins with 'it was the season when the bird sings, when it lives
1:02:52 cries out' - there was even a very well-known literary genre among medieval specialists called the aube (dawn song) - it's a literary genre: the sun rises, the sun is magnificent, icy, and suddenly it pales because the beloved appears and outshines the sun with her own radiance - those were established conventions, but there was never a valuing of winter or autumn - that was death, decomposition, bad weather. It's Nietzsche who says, mocking Wagner, Wotan is the god of bad weather - so here we're right in the middle of it - 'summer passes, I do not regret it, but I take pleasure' - ah, still, still? So where do I take pleasure?
1:03:31 'In walking on fallen leaves' - it's the season of dying that I like - listen, I'm not inventing anything here, I'm not interpreting, you agree - 'on the last beautiful day, in the Pouilliers forest, from what does man derive the most lasting of his heart's pleasures, this voluptuousness of melancholy' - I'm not straying from Baudelaire, I'm counterpointing one text with the other - 'this charm full of secrets, which makes him live off his own sorrows and still love himself in the feeling of his own ruin. I cling' - excuse me if I make mistakes, I haven't put my glasses on, the print is a bit small - 'I cling to the happy season which will soon be no more' - well, there, he loves summer now that it's disappearing. This too we know - it's Proust who says the only true paradises are the ones we have lost, or who says elsewhere, as if reality only forms itself in memory - you see how all this holds together, and Plato who, at the beginning of all philosophies, said all knowledge
1:04:41 is remembrance, recollection - after all. So, come on: 'I cling to the happy season which will soon be no more, a belated interest, a pleasure that seems contradictory' - I told you, this man is a surgeon - 'she draws me to her as she is about to end' - it's the guy who starts getting interested in a girl right when she's about to dump him, there are guys like that - well, we're all a bit like that, but some more than others. So there: 'the same moral law makes the idea of destruction painful to me' - well, that's true of magnetism, destruction is a bad idea - 'and makes me love here the feeling in what must cease before me' - not so stupid, because the forest, the leaves fall, I'm still here, I'll still be here come spring. Come on, that's what he says next, look, it's superb: 'It is natural that we enjoy existence, perishable as it is, all the better when, warned of its full fragility, we feel it nonetheless endure within us. When death separates you from things, it subsists without us, but at the fall of the leaves, vegetation stops, it dies -
1:05:51 we remain, for new generations. Autumn is delightful because spring must still come for us.' We had never dared read sentences like that before - that's Senancour, and there's this phrase which I quote often - you've already heard me quote it, even elsewhere than here, because it's a phrase that shows the importance of history in what we believe to be the enjoyment of landscape. We think we have an immediate relationship with nature and that our pleasure comes from the things right there in front of us, whereas it comes from things that are no longer there and that we don't see, and from everything that has happened. Look at this admirable phrase: 'Spring is more beautiful in nature' - that's clear, beautiful, that's aesthetic - 'but man has done so much' - there, in terms of history - 'that autumn is no longer' - all Senancour. There aren't many people who quote Senancour - there's Nerval, I like Nerval, you know that, I don't quote him often, I never quote him, but I tell you all the time that I like him - I won't quote you because I won't be able to stop, but anyway he quotes Senancour precisely when he talks about the château d'Ermenonville. We think he's going there for reasons - I'll quote it now
1:07:01 we think he's going there for personal reasons, he spent his childhood in the area, and then suddenly, suddenly he says something that has nothing to do with the personal story he's telling us: 'In the famous suppers of Ermenonville, just before the Revolution, there were illuminati who gathered at the château d'Ermenonville, it was the age of illuminism, of freemasonry - in the famous suppers of Ermenonville one saw successively the Comte de Saint-Germain, Cagliostro, Mesmer, Cazotte, perhaps even later Senancour, come and expound, either in that château or in the one belonging to Le Peletier at Mortefontaine' - because in Nerval there's already, among a number of countries, bizarre ideas which proposed the reform of an aging society - which, I remind you, we are on the eve of the Revolution - which society, in its very fashions, even with that powder which gave the youngest brow a false air of old age, indicated the necessity of a complete transformation. 'The memory of the place where I am oppresses me, so I send you all this at random' - that's Nerval speaking - 'but based on reliable facts.' End of quote. There, Senancour
1:08:13 and this great 19th-century critic named Sainte-Beuve said, 'Monsieur de Senancour has a discreet but faithful posterity' - there, I hope you'll be part of it - sorry for this bit of publicity, I come back: 'Spring is more beautiful in nature, but man has done so much that autumn is sweeter, the greenery being born, the bird singing, the flower opening, and this fire that returns to firm up life, these shady groves' - well, all that makes the charm of spring - 'these shady groves that shelter obscure retreats, and these fertile grasses, these fruits without cultivation, these easy nights which allow independence - season of happiness, I dread you' - good grief, a whole century talked of nothing but happiness, what happened? He still has one foot in the 18th century, where the supreme value is happiness - good grief, well it's not the same whether it's Voltaire or Rousseau - Voltaire, it's through commerce, free enterprise, Rousseau, it's through justice, equality - but still, they have happiness in common, here in this world, before death, a positive relationship to the world, one that lasts, not the fleeting enjoyment - happiness. And here, what?
1:09:16 there hasn't even been a full generation yet - 'season of happiness, I dread you, too much in my ardent disquiet' - there, you see modernity setting itself up - 'I find more rest toward the evening of the year' - that's autumn - 'the season when everything seems to end is the only one where I sleep in peace on the earth of man.' Let's go back to Harmonie du soir - you see how homogeneous all this is - what's homogeneous? I've told you that poetry deals with the political, with the today, with the historical present - let me wake you up, we're falling asleep - Nietzsche said the problem with the romantics is that they always confused the pleasure of falling asleep with the start of waking up. So let me wake you up: we are in the West, yes or no?
"Occident": an occluding concept, the land of death 1:10:01 What does that mean, West? What were we talking about? What does West mean? Saddam Hussein defies the Westerners - that's supposed to be you and me. Good sense, it ought to be precise, no? The West protests against Syria's policy - the second secular country, there aren't many in the region. The West intervenes against Gaddafi's regime - let's see, now everything's going fine in Libya, as you know - I'm not saying that Gaddafi was good, he put some of my comrades in vats of acid, that's not my cup of tea - but still, everyone now agrees that it was better than what's there now, it's horror now, they play football with the heads of the decapitated. So tell me, the West - is this serious? It sows death and desolation in Afghanistan, maybe even among the Uyghurs
1:11:11 because what causes the attacks in train stations in China, in Muslim China? These Chinese Muslims have never moved for centuries and centuries, what's happening in the end - no, I'm challenging you, this is reality, we have to wake up, because the West is precisely, in the first sense, the proper sense - one falls asleep, it's the decline, yes or no - what does 'the West' [Occident] mean? 'I have occis-ed him' means I have killed him - is that not what it means? That's the country of death, literally - it's not me deciding, the West is a mortal man, no? Is that not what it means? We're here to interrogate words, I make the words speak, I don't speak behind their backs - if the words don't speak, who's going to speak, good grief, it's terrible, there's a whole story around this word. So the West isn't a place, because if I'm told right away, well it's simple, it's the West as a direction - meanwhile we've learned that the earth is round, you see very well, we're not going to argue, anyone can take a sign and put it on their house, 'I'm in the West,' and be right everywhere - I'm up top, I'm at the bottom, in Australia I'm up top and there you go
1:12:25 there's no direction anymore, none of that means anything - we'd already discussed a bit this notion, I believe, or else it means, ah, the European countries, come on - but no, the leader is the United States, that's not Europe. But damn, that's true, that doesn't work either, complicated, this West, good grief. You see, I'm being Socratic here because these are everyday words I'm interrogating, and words without which everyday press wouldn't function - yes or no? It seems to go without saying, well, all right, all right, well, it's the developed countries - Japan is a pillar of the West? Ah damn, that doesn't work either, so what is it? I'll tell you, I don't know anything, but what the word says, in any case for me, is that it's a concealing concept, it's a word that serves not to say, not to name, not to say other words, uglier ones, unlike green or bottle or plant, which designate something, a positive reality - concealing concepts, as they're also called elsewhere. But what is certain is that the word itself has troubling connotations, not necessarily - look at Harmonie du soir, whether it's not brutal
1:13:35 whether it's not - if I haven't killed you with a stroke of the sword that cuts you in two, but if it's like this, a decline - I prepare myself the way Senancour does, he almost wants to die when he says spring more beautiful in nature but man has done so much that autumn is sweeter - well yes. Or when you read the whole of the Recherche, everything is found again among the last lines of Combray, you know that the first part of the Recherche is Combray, that is, the village where he's supposed to have spent his childhood, and in fact it's, of course, at the end of his life, when he's fighting against death, that he finally finds the expression of the beginning. Proust is always taken for a mediocre, failed writer, unworthy of writing - don't forget that's what's at the origin of it, death had to put its foot on his chest, he had to start his oxygen tent, to begin to write - and among the last lines, it's almost the last page, isn't it, when he says, having said what the Méséglise way is, the Guermantes way, Swann's way - it's the way of his memory, of course - and he says, when on summer evenings
1:14:46 the sky rumbles like a wild beast and everyone sulks over the storm, it's on the Méséglise way that I owe the pleasure of remaining alone in ecstasy breathing, through the noise of the falling rain, the scent of invisible and persistent lilacs' - magnificent - it forms in memory, in the moment he wasn't paying attention, he says this all the time - at the time I had a date with a girl, my mind was occupied with something else, I had a toothache, you see, where I was thinking about the past, about yesterday's worries, etc. - we're never in the present in these sensations, it forms in memory, that's interesting, and so it forms at the end. And there, I'm changing texts, but you don't have it because I didn't want to bother you with a technical text, a philosophical text - I'm going to read you some Hegel because I'm reproached for not quoting Hegel, even though he's a philosopher I refer to often, but I always quote the others, well, I develop the others, and him I make amusing citations like that, but without - good grief, you see - end of the preface to his last work, his political testament, the famous Elements of the Philosophy of Right - a work that's not funny, I tell you right away, it's about right, it's not aesthetics, it's not philosophy of religion
The preface of the Elements of the Philosophy of Right 1:15:56 philosophy of history, it's not law - and in the preface there are famous passages, one even archi-famous at the end, it's the old Hegel - I can't prove anything - he alludes to Plato, it's interesting to see, at the two extremities of the history of philosophical thought, how these two great minds greeted each other somewhere. He's just made some developments to contextualize things for you, on the fact that there are philosophers who, regarding political philosophy, are always giving lessons to the state, in short what he calls the philosophies of the ought-to-be - we should do this, we should do that - whereas he says the true philosopher, the one who wants to know, is the one who studies what is, as Marx does with Capital, how it works, how it functions, how surplus value is obtained, without seeking to know whether it's good or bad or nice - that's something else. And so he's just developed that, I won't go back over it, that's another debate - and there would be an entity, it's Plato's Republic, which is the very model of what one should do
1:17:06 in the ideal society - the opposite of the philosophy of being, which is an ought-to-be - and he says this in the course of this work: 'I have indicated that Plato's Republic itself, which is the proverbial image of an empty ideal, in fact grasps nothing other than the nature of Greek ethos, of Greek mores' - he means, he had a sense of a deeper principle - understood, remember we talked about traditional societies, substantial ones, those that live by the rhythm of the good bell earlier, I'm not straying too far - that's traditional Greek ethos - 'he had a sense of a deeper,' so newer, 'principle, which was making a breach in this ethos, but which at this degree, at this moment in history, could only be an unsatisfied aspiration' - he's talking about freedom which is beginning to appear, careful, in the modern sense - 'but which at this degree could only be an unsatisfied aspiration, and consequently could only appear as a principle of corruption. Plato, moved by this aspiration, sought a resource against this, but as the help
1:18:16 could only come down from above, he could only seek it first in an external, particular form of this morality, thus believing he could master corruption' - he's alluding to Plato's fight against the sophists, he doesn't see what's profound in the sophists - not in their discourse, which is rascally discourse, Plato is perfectly right about that politically against the sophists, but he doesn't understand that this way of exercising thought against all received evidence is a form of the modernity that's beginning to appear, of no longer recognizing a law that applies to everyone without regard and without discussion - as that's not the subject, I continue - 'so, believing he could master corruption, and succeeding only in wounding intimately what was there, deeper, far beyond the sophists: colon - free, infinite personality.' Still, he proved he was a great mind because precisely the principle around which what's decisive in his idea in the Republic revolves is the pivot around which the world revolution then in preparation turned: colon - guess what follows, the most famous sentence of Hegel and the most subject to misunderstanding. Louder, my friend
1:19:29 louder, that pleases me, you'll hear the echoes, and you have modern translations, you're a great intellectual, no, no, yes - 'What is real is rational, what is rational is real' - that's it, that's where he quotes it, that's what's revolutionary about Plato and what he showed and what he overcame in that crisis - he showed that one could no longer go back, that now, for truth to be, it had to be demonstrated in dialogue and in taking the other's opinion into account - that's enormous. If it's not rational, if it's not scientific, if it's imposed by force, it no longer works. You'll tell me, what does this have to do with the West and decline - patience - 'to conceive what is' - yes, I take it up a bit higher: 'thus our treatise, in offering the science of the state in this preface, wants to represent nothing other than an attempt to conceive the state as something rational in itself' - he didn't say something good or valid, rational - it's no accident that it's like this or like that. Already Montesquieu had said, at the beginning of the 18th century, 'when I set out to examine men, I believed they were not
1:20:39 guided only by their fancy — when you look at the laws, you understand that there is a spirit to the laws. It is a writing, my work is a philosophical writing, and nothing is further from its intention than to construct an ideal of the state as it ought to be. If it contains a lesson, that lesson is not addressed to the state; it teaches rather how the state, which is the ethical universe, must be known. Hic Rhodus, hic saltus — it's a proverb. Rhodus is a river — there is a river, one must jump. It means: here it is, we're up against the wall. To conceive what is, is the task of philosophy, for what is, is reason. As for the individual, everyone is a child of his time. You remember, it was at the start of this series since last autumn — I said we would reflect on this proposition of Hegel's, that the historical present is the limit of my philosophical thought. As for the individual, everyone is a child of his time; likewise philosophy too sums up its time in thought. It is just as foolish to imagine that any philosophy could go beyond the contemporary world as to believe that an individual could leap beyond his own time, cross
1:21:49 the Rhodus. If a theory actually goes beyond its limits, if it constructs a world as it ought to be, beyond the present, that world does indeed exist — but only in its opinion, which is an inconsistent element that can take on any imprint. Changing it slightly, this formula would become: hier ist die Rose, hier tanze — I say it in German, it decidedly brings me back to the Meistersinger — here is the rose, here one must dance. A moment ago it was a river one had to jump; now it's here is the rose, one must dance — a bit sexier. What lies between reason as self-conscious spirit — the one in the philosopher's head — and reason as given reality, what separates the first from the second and prevents it from finding its satisfaction there. When we say 'that's nonsense,' it means we don't recognize what is rational in what we're talking about, yes or no. It doesn't make sense — nonsense — it shouldn't happen. But if it does happen, it's because there are reasons. Reason here does not mean reasonable, it means rational — it means it has causes. We must know what separates the first, reason in my head, from realized reason
1:23:00 and prevents it from finding its satisfaction there is that it is chained to abstraction. A philosopher who speaks against abstraction from which it does not free itself in order to reach the concept — you see the concept is anything but abstraction. I said, recognize reason as the rose — decidedly this is fun and sexy, it's odd for the end, because it's a bit dark — to recognize reason as the rose in the cross of present suffering, and to rejoice in it: that is the rational and mediating vision that reconciles one with reality. That is what philosophy provides to those who have felt the inner necessity to conceive and preserve subjective freedom within what is substantial, but not to leave freedom in the contingent and particular, but to place it in what is in-itself and for-itself. I admit this is a bit abstract at this stage. So now I come to 'occident' [the West/setting] because that's where I started, to quote this text, to say one more word about the pretension to teach how the world ought to be — you see, he doesn't like that. We notice that in any case — you'll tell me, but in that case why did we come — philosophy always arrives too late
The owl of Minerva and Baudelaire's frozen sun 1:24:10 Now we come back to the evening, to 'Harmonie du soir' — I'm not straying off topic, poets are serious as thought of the world. Philosophy appears only when reality has completed and finished its process of formation. What the concept teaches, history shows with the same necessity: it is in the maturity of beings that the ideal appears facing the real, and after having grasped the same world in its substance, in its immediacy — I'd prefer — reconstructs it in the form of an empire of ideas. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a manifestation of life has finished growing old. Now is when one can understand capitalism — in any case, what we manage to understand now is that it's cooked, that's what he's saying, that it's in the process of handing over. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a manifestation of life has finished growing old; you cannot rejuvenate it with grey on grey, only know it. And I follow with that well-known phrase: only at the falling of the dusk does the owl of Minerva spread its wings. I remind you that Athena
1:25:20 — Minerva among the Romans, Athena — was the goddess of wisdom. Only at the falling of the dusk does the owl of Minerva spread its wings. So, I come back to 'Harmonie du soir.' I would still like, before handing over the floor, to take a small step toward answering the question of how the poetic magic of a Baudelaire has an influence on the weather. That's indeed what I told you — I insist on it — and I told you that true sorcerers made the rain fall. Well look closely: the sun has drowned in its blood which congeals. I'm picking up my thread — I've made my parenthesis long enough, now I can say it: it's a process, the decline, the dusk, we're heading toward the end, toward night — yes or no. In the evening we're heading toward — not toward noon, it's not like Nietzsche, the prophet of the great noon, who wants to lead us — that's his whole heroism, Nietzsche, poor fellow, I pity him with a certain tenderness, poor thing — heading toward the great noon. It is still to his credit to wish that for man — well, for now, that's not the case. In Baudelaire we are in the evening, aren't we — what does he say at the end
1:26:30 a tender heart — well yes — that hates the vast black void — that's harsh — who loves that, midnight there, of the luminous past, gathers every vestige — you see, this is already the whole program of Proust before the fact: I turn my back on what is coming, I don't want to know the night, death, it's the winter that comes after autumn, it's the night that comes after day — take whichever images you like — ultimately it's the void. I don't know if I'll survive — I don't get over waking up each morning again, I'm telling you this as a confidence, I'm unbearable in the morning because most people are a bit groggy in the morning, whereas I chirp like a bird, I have coffee like that, I chat, I don't get over still being here. Alright: a tender heart that hates the vast black void, gathers every vestige of the luminous past — the sun has drowned in its blood — what am I after, damn it — but yes, dear magician, I have stopped the march of time thanks to the verbal magic of my poem. At first there was a muffled anxiety, the violin trembles like a heart being afflicted, a melancholy waltz — but at the end, this anxiety of dusk heading toward the night, toward the void — there, I have frozen time: the sun has drowned in its blood which congeals. It's not at all
1:27:40 the same blood as in 'La cloche fêlée,' by the edge of a lake of blood beneath a great heap of corpses — not the same blood at all, this is the royal apogee, it's not a dusk that would always remain at the stage of dusk without moving toward night, a West [occident] that would always remain with its name without ever being slain [occis]. You see, it's interesting, this battle of metaphors — that's what I wanted to show you: there really is an effect of verbal magic on the weather, that was truly literal, it wasn't the traps I was setting for you, it was about the stopping of the sun, it wasn't — well, I'd have other texts to look at but I don't want to monopolize the floor, and I'm sure there are questions on the material we've stirred up this evening. Can you come back to the difference between the expert and the intellectual? Ah, good question — I went a bit fast because it's the work of my former colleague there. Well first, an intellectual — there's a whole protocol, look at a linguist's lecture, I'm just saying anything — and I don't want to confine it to the humanities, it could be a biologist
The expert and the intellectual 1:28:50 a worker of the intellect, I mean, not someone who transforms leather to make a sandal, as with praxis — at the Collège de France it could be a biologist, it could be an anthropologist, it could be a philosopher — suppose at the Collège de France, that's an intellectual — look at all the protocols of caution, all the deontology — I say this but I'm not sure, it's in certain sources, and one must check the translations. You see, the expert isn't that — me, I'm an expert, I know — you find the same division as between philosophers and sophists, Gorgias, he is paid to hammer out a piece of knowledge. It's already interesting to see that, and here — I dare not give names, you all know them, it's in the air, it's always the same ones who come — and here is So-and-so who is the Middle East specialist — but do you realize, nobody agrees on the Middle East, it's one of the places where sensibilities clash the most, and here come guys with expertise, it's really extraordinary — well, there are still a few, not naming names, I won't name them but you'll recognize them — someone who is a terrorism specialist, someone who is a terrorism specialist while we don't care, well there are some who work on terror and he has sideburns
1:30:02 he presides over the International Observatory on Terrorism — I mention the name of this first because everyone has their own outfit, if you look closely at the Institute of This or That, if you investigate, this guy is alone, he doesn't even have a secretary, he has nothing to pay with, and we're impressed because he is, after all, the president of the International Observatory on Terrorism — what do you want? I'm answering your question indirectly — that's the expert, it's really extraordinary, there's a certainty there, and moreover — I am not criticizing the ballistics expert, the one summoned to trial to study the trajectory of a bullet in a criminal case, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the expert who comes onto the intellectual's turf, who comes to speak in place of the historian — and here I'll answer your question more precisely — in place of the linguist, in place of the philosopher, in place of political engagement, by disqualifying it: I am an expert, I don't speak within ideology, ideologies are over, that's finished — I knew some, there were some, I put up with as much — that's over. Now, when we say ideologies are over, that's serious
1:31:12 it means that there is one ideology that dominates everything and submerges everything, and so much like the air we breathe that we no longer even notice it's an ideology. So, to come back to our experts, this too is typical: they are multi-positioned — that's an expert's term — they are always at the border of several disciplines, unless it isn't serious. In Descartes's time, in Leibniz's time, one could still be the greatest philosopher of one's time and at the same time the greatest mathematician at the cutting edge of the mathematics of his time, at the cutting edge of legal knowledge — I'm thinking of Leibniz, advisor to the princes of Hanover on the examination of old manuscripts and 8th-century treaties, it's fantastic, Leibniz — but at the same time advancing infinitesimal calculus, producing the formula for the derivative, still used today, and at the same time leaving philosophers a vertiginous universe of the scale of a Spinoza — except that Spinoza is one big sphere and he is a billion bubbles, that's roughly it — Spinoza and Leibniz, each bubble reflecting all the others, it's prodigious. One could
1:32:24 because physics, chemistry, and biology were not as developed. Now it's impossible, with specialization, one has to be serious, one cannot be an expert in everything. Auguste Comte said that the philosopher — I'm not teaching you anything, you remember the law of three stages, I say this for those who don't know positivism, which is a position that must be respected, not because it doesn't have its limits, not that it should be swept aside with a wave of the hand — and besides, it's broadly shared by many people today who belong to the scientific community, which is not nothing. For Auguste Comte it's one of his best ideas: there are, roughly, three ages in humanity that correspond roughly to three ages of the individual, a kind of parallel between phylogenesis and ontogenesis, as they say. There is the childhood of humanity, which corresponds to what he calls the religious age — this is the viewpoint of a 19th-century man — where everything is explained by principles of personal gods, Brahma, Jehovah, etc.
1:33:19 Zeus, etc. — you find in 'it's raining' the fact that it's a person making it rain, what's now called impersonal moods in grammar. Then you have adolescence — a crisis, we question everything a little, we do away with these personal gods, this merciless age — but we still keep something absolute, except now they're abstract principles, no longer Brahma, Vishnu, or Jehovah or Allah, but Being, Becoming, the One, the Many — that's the pre-Socratics, that's the beginning of Greek philosophy, that's metaphysics, not a bad parallel. And then you have the adult — what is the adult? It's the one who drops what Auguste Comte calls, with a certain wisdom, first causes and final causes, which we will never know, and in the meantime Voltaire supposedly said we must cultivate our garden — in the meantime, what lies in between first causes and final causes, we must work well, that's us, that's our garden, we must tend to it, we must cultivate it, and that is the positive moment, that is maturity. So then, the philosopher — what's left for him?
To be committed is to be precise 1:34:19 he said, then, to answer your question, he is a specialist in generalities. Usually we oppose the generalist and the specialist, don't we, and the philosopher — well, I'm fine with being a specialist in generalities, but still — either I'm in the abstract, which isn't very serious, you see. The same man, Bachelard said — one of the greatest philosophers of science — he said: to be precise is to be engaged, or rather, excuse me, to be engaged is to be precise — it's not quite the same thing. The criterion for knowing whether one is truly engaged is whether one is precise. If I tell you all men desire power — I'm talking like Foucault — well yes, yes, you're right to laugh — when Newton says all bodies attract each other in direct proportion to their mass and in inverse proportion to the square of their distance, all the notions involved — mass, distance — all that is measurable, not measured, we haven't yet measured the distance to such-and-such galaxy, I don't know, but it's measurable, it's democratic — if you don't believe it, we do the experiment together, we agree on how much this table measures. Afterward you'll say it's small, it's big — that's each person's own thing, it's heavy, it's light, I'm strong, I'm not strong — I'm talking about myself when I speak with words
1:35:29 like that — and yes, it took time to emerge from the darkness, I say this because many would like to bring us back to quality. It took so much time to arrive at quantity, to agree: the schoolbag isn't heavy, isn't light, it weighs 1.20 kg — is that heavy or light? That depends, that's your problem, not mine, not the schoolbag's. There was progress in democracy with science, one shouldn't neglect positivism too much either, I continue answering your question — so it's serious, but to be engaged is to be precise, and I come back to my comparison of Foucault and Newton: what is the unit of power? I know the unit for measuring mass, by the way it's the newton, as my physics teacher used to say, the joule for electricity, the watt for power, the ampere for intensity — each quantity has its unit of measure, which is a purely human, arbitrary creation. We decide that
1:36:39 the meter is what? It's what's in the museum at Sèvres, that's its definition, in the museum at Sèvres near Paris, it's written in its definition, because the equator is not the same weight everywhere — one must be careful. There you have it, it's a convention — reality dispatched as a convention, the power of man, you see. So that's the great difference by which the philosopher always tries to remain within the question, the search for wisdom, the 'what must I do,' whereas the expert answers in terms — one might say dogmas — in terms of pseudo-scientific assertion. That's how I would answer, especially pseudo-scientific — why pseudo?
1:37:36 because multi-positioned, that is, having scientific competence at once in history, in linguistics, in demography, in economics — yes, exactly. I was a bit harsh on Kepel earlier, I'll tell you why, because I heard one of his protégés — he's a gentleman who has stables, that's fine, I trained some young people, that's very good, that's not what I reproach him for — but I heard one of his young protégés who might have had a brilliant future ahead of him. I had the chance to know him at one time, he was very good in physics and all that, he dropped everything, captivated by Kepel, to become a specialist on the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia. I saw him in an interview on Mediapart, I won't give his name, not long ago — it was before, I tell you, before what's happening now between Riyadh and Tehran, I say this to be precise — he was being asked about the Saudi Arabian regime, and he said, oh no, people exaggerate, but yes there is, as everywhere, the religious sphere that adds a bit more, that's fundamentalist, but there's the power that is political — politicians are shrewd, you know, they don't get taken in by words, they have opportunism and realpolitik circulating, there's nothing to see — the state which is our main ally
1:38:47 to whom we, we French in particular, sell our weapons — the weapons with which they gun down people on our café terraces — no, no, but where are we now, I'm a philosopher, I'm here to try to untangle the fog, words kill, words, when we don't question them, isn't that so — it's serious what's happening, isn't it. Everyone knows that Daesh or any jihadist outfit would collapse like a stone if there weren't, behind it, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, or all those who buy oil from them, which amounts to the same thing, doesn't it, or Turkey, which is called, geographically, over there, the jihad highway, for those who frequent the region. There are training camps, we know it, I've just named three of our allies, not our adversaries. I agree that we should wage war on terrorism and all that, but this evil, one begins by breaking off diplomatic relations with Riyadh, with Turkey, then one bombs those responsible — but well, what do you want me to say, we bomb people, I can't say what I haven't said, but one wants to be logically consistent, if not morally so. And this gentleman is an expert, ah, he speaks Arabic better than I do — I remember a Nigerien
1:40:01 I lived quite a while in Niger, the most Muslim country I've lived in, a marvelous country and marvelous people, I mean, otherwise it's the desert, the place was nothing but desert, and he said to me — well, I saw him say to someone — I said, I'll bring you, I'll bring you the goods tomorrow, there, I promise you — and he had said it, it was his compatriot, he said, don't start saying 'there' — when he says 'there' it means you're going to lie, so 'there.' I was stunned to hear an expert — I don't want to say anything — it was a few days before, I don't know, a fluid period, and there it's the political decision of the central government — but no, these are politicians who are much less dangerous than we think, there are the words, as long as they push them a bit to the extremes, it's still terrifying, the world we live in, these are our allies I'm talking about — I'm afraid for a second on this precise point
The Occident as a moment of modernity 1:41:19 that you just raised about Plato, because — thank you, because it's very important what you just did, it's very important for everyone and very useful if it can clear up whatever legitimate confusion there might be, that's entirely normal. It's precisely about this business of the 'Occident' [West] which seems to fall out of the blue. I thought I had, and tried to show, that the Occident isn't a place — I think that's understood, it's not the west, and the west is everywhere. If it's not a place, it's a concept — that's what I wanted to show — it's the moment when we know too much, that's modernity, you see how it holds together — now, when we know too much to keep living in the substantial and somewhat naive and immediate world that existed before. I have a little girl, my daughter, who came up with a very pretty phrase, I think, because we've just come out of the holidays, when she was 6 she said: it's the time when you start to doubt Santa Claus, and she had this wonderful formula — I was talking about crumbling certainties — Santa Claus is really nice, she said, because
1:42:30 I don't believe in him anymore but he still brings me toys, isn't that nice? She was in an intermediate phase like that, where doubt begins, yet still tied to a trust, a lovely childlike trust in the marvelous — he's still nice even though I don't believe in him, he still brings me toys. That's what modernity breaks with — this anxiety that modernity expresses is no longer having these certainties that the community used to take charge of before, before the individual asked the questions himself — the priest, the brahmin, the pontiff were there to forestall and give the answers even before the questions were formulated, even before the anxiety was expressed — the Unruhe, as they say in German, the non-rest, the restlessness. So modernity is not a discovery, it's what man has known since forever, in contrast to the animal — this famous restlessness without which man would not be what he is, as Pascal saw very well that all of man's unhappiness comes from not knowing how to remain at rest in a room, and Pascal's greatness is to have understood all human behavior
1:43:40 not starting from something toward which man tends, but toward something he flees, toward a knowledge he does not want to know — and for millennia, freedom is when one can no longer flee this knowledge too much, too many things have accumulated. That's what I'm saying: we are not more intelligent than in Plato's time, certainly not, one mustn't believe that — it's prodigious, the effort of intellection of an Aristotle for his time, in nearly every domain, almost encyclopedic, it's prodigious, even if he says outrageous things in physics, it's prodigious for the period. We are not more intelligent, but we know more, and he says somewhere that things which required centuries of research are now offered to children as training games — it's important to see this too, this historical evolution. So if I bring in the Occident as a concept, I mean one can be Chadian and be Occidental — that's what I'm saying — if that Chadian is making this passage through his studies, through his path, through — yes, that's what I'm saying, it's Chadians
1:44:50 Bolivians, whatever, it doesn't matter, it's not an ethnic notion, I think we've shown that enough among ourselves. Yes, sorry, yes, yes, go ahead, sorry, you had raised your hand perhaps, yes yes, no but I had said it, as the gentleman wishes, it was about the Occident, no, quickly, I'd like to look a bit at the relation between occire [to slay], occidere, occident and death. Well yes, so I don't know if you could — ah, well you know very well, when we say I turned toward the occident, it means toward the west, that is, where the sun dies, declines, disappears, we are indeed in the same metaphor, but it's a metaphor, that's why all the poems about autumn and evening in general are a bit more melancholy than those about morning or spring, which are generally more cheerful. But yes, I mean, that's it, I'm not making a pun, I note that we are the prey of a pun insofar as we are Occidentals, because we are truly Occidental, we come after the Orientals, history began there
1:46:00 with the Indians, the Chinese, and the Egyptians, and Mesopotamia, well before us, while the Gauls were in smoky huts, there were already modern cities in Memphis, in Thebes, in Babylon, etc. The historical morning, the morning of humanity, is the Orient — I'm playing on the word on purpose — the moment of noon passes above Greece, it's neither morning nor evening, it's a balance we will not see again, a fragile balance — otherwise it would have remained. I'm not saying that Greece had resolved all the problems, far from it, but it's a heroic moment, that's what I'd like to say for now, without explaining too much. And the decline is perhaps the disintegration of this heroic figure — you see it in aesthetics, the classical form has a clearly determined outline, and that's what dissolves, for the better, I'm not saying for the worse — I find Monet's painting no less beautiful than that of Zeuxis, that fabulous Greek painter who painted so well that pigeons came to peck at his painted grapes — big deal
1:47:10 to fool the pigeons, as Hegel says in his Aesthetics, to mock realist art — big deal to fool the pigeons, painting is not photography, no, no, it is indeed the decline of things, but you see, in Impressionism there's a decline of the outline, for instance, a decline of the object, which will soon disappear. In music, we have here a great musician, with whom I had the honor of working south of the Sahara in the field of music, well, of getting young people, especially, to work — and you see clearly the decline of tonality, which gave organization to Western music, of temperament — I won't get too technical, I'll say all this starting from Debussy — Wagner dissolves tonality somewhat into chromaticism, I'm saying banalities that are throughout the whole history of music — Debussy carries modes that are at the edge of European musics, modes that look toward Russia, hence toward Asia, or toward Spain, hence toward Africa — it's toward the peripheries of Europe that music renews itself, the great moments, to answer your question, the great moments
Romanticism identical to modernity 1:48:20 of modern painting — Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso, for example, it's not me who says it, they say these are the pivotal works — the equivalent in music is The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, it's the Russians banging on the table, all of a sudden, because old exhausted Europe, the Germans, the French, had given everything, there you have it. But what happens each time is in the form of a decline, a wasting away of an entire corpus that existed before — and that begins with Romanticism, it is the first to destroy the beautiful classical form, I'm not saying it pejoratively, once again — Hölderlin, who saw the beginning of this process, who wrote his most beautiful poems at the very start of the 19th century, in 1800 to 1802, already Napoleon was showing through Bonaparte, as Victor Hugo says, there isn't even Napoleon yet, there's already Bonaparte — and well, Hölderlin, why did I want to cite him there? Because he's precisely the one who thought these things most deeply — but it's not for his ideas that I wanted to cite him, sorry
1:49:31 yes, thank you, that's kind — regarding Romanticism, what's often said is that Hölderlin is too profound, so he's more than a Romantic — well, you know the definition given of Romanticism — one gives a definition, so he doesn't fit in it, of course; but if we give a broader definition, as I think we should, that is, to identify with modernity, that is, there is nothing more Romantic than being anti-Romantic. If you want to know — here, I'll give you a musical example, since we're on the subject — look at the vogue for baroque music, how long has that been going on?
1:50:03 about 40 years, that's what I was going to say, a generation, and before that there had already been a return to Bach, but that was more among musicians, whereas with the general public it's been 40 years, and after that people spoke frankly of the 'baroqueux,' that is, this era's music but played on period instruments etc., it goes each time hand in hand with an ever more demanding historical authenticity, which is very good, it makes for discoveries and rejections. But the first to rehabilitate this music were the Romantics — it's Mendelssohn who premieres the St Matthew Passion, or rather who conducts it for the first time since it had not been performed since its creation. It's in his Aesthetics that Hegel, the great Romantic contemporary, spends his time saying, it's strange that we always talk about other musicians, the Italians, Mozart, but Bach — he fights to get people to understand that Bach is a great musician. Now it's universal, it's the almost undisputed reference for all musicians — there's nothing more Romantic than hating oneself, nothing more modern than hating modernity, nothing more ecological — you can guess what's coming — there's a Romantic side too among ecologists, not being able to stand
1:51:14 one's own modernity — well yes, that's what I mean, so Romanticism is not an aesthetic school, it's not a school that tells you 'you must not be like this, you must make music like that,' it's hyper-ambivalent, like money, like language — there, we come back to money again — with language too, you can do the best or the worst with it, that's what Aesop said, at the very origin of humanity, that language is the best and worst of things. So you did very well with your remark, I won't develop it too much, but in answering your question, I don't know if I've partly answered about the Occident — but the Occident is indeed the world where traditional forms are being questioned everywhere. It's only in the Occident that at home one has an African mask, a little souvenir brought from India, yes or no, I mean, in other cultures that isn't done, one has one culture, period. At our place, to be cultured, and rightly so — I'm in favor of it — is to step outside one's culture, not to remain enclosed in it. I say this because when we were dealing with music in Niger, Étienne and I, and we tried to get Nigerien ears, which only knew Vanessa Paradis thanks to Radio France Internationale, to listen to Thelonious Monk, which wasn't doing quite
1:52:24 the same work as us — there's worse, you devices, whatever, whether it's pop, I mean — there were some who told us, I don't mean the Nigeriens, I mean the expatriates who made good money there, some said, you want to disturb them with music that isn't in their culture — it's the only region of the world condemned to remain in its own culture, isn't that extraordinary, whereas we feast on all the cultures of others, and all the better, yes or no. I myself love the polyphonies of the Solomon Islands, you can find them, I recommend them, in the Auvidis-UNESCO collection, it's an extraordinary complexity. But still, we mustn't forbid Africans, need I say, from listening to anything other than African music — but that's practically forbidden to them, if you look closely at the entertainment industry, we're all condemned, aren't we, to having a pseudo-African guarantee, NGMP, I'm going to get worked up, so I'll continue. When you were talking earlier about the boundary that separates the expert from the intellectual, you said that the expert is the one who comes onto
When the expert steps outside his field of competence 1:53:34 the intellectual's turf — would you have, how to put it, names to identify the moment when the ballistics expert is tempted to become a jack-of-all-trades? Ah, that's a very good question, very good question. Well, it's quite simple: it's when one steps outside one's field of competence, it's like a CV — you're advised to first put down your field of competence, that's honest, that's where I perform best, now you can employ me to do other things, but truly, where I'm at my best is when we talk about green ants. Well, for a long time, family doctors made bad experts — not as doctors, I wouldn't allow — I might not even be alive without family doctors, certainly not — but you know it's a social status, that's why I say the family doctor, almost — but at the time in the countryside, I mean I'd say especially the country family doctor, the country doctor for women, Dr. Knock knew everything, that famous film. Well, that is to say, at the outset he had a competence that everyone recognized in him and that I don't dispute
1:54:44 by what right am I going to dispute medical, hence biological, competence? Medicine is not a science, it's an art, its goal is not to know but to do good or make evil and suffering disappear, which has nothing to do with knowledge — but it has become effective since it takes a detour, this is a summary I'm making, through biology, which is a form of knowledge, and before that it was witchcraft, through biology, or charlatanism, which can be put in the service of the worst designs. One must not confuse — medicine is an art, let me remind you — but there was also morality. Yes, the family doctor was a bit the gentleman one listened to in the countryside, who could even say who to vote for, that's what I mean, he was an advisor, he stepped outside his domain, this is an embryo, it has nothing to do with the outrageous presumption of the experts who lounge about on our TV sets, but it's the seed, if you like — we've gotten into the habit, starting from a competence people recognize in me, of dabbling in others. And I'll cite one, one of the greatest, since he won the Nobel Prize — there I'm going far — it's a book that played a huge role in making Marxism disappear as a reference among intellectuals, rightly or wrongly
1:55:55 I won't settle that, but it's the manner in which it was done, I'm talking about a judgment by default, that is, a book that assassinates Marxism without ever quoting a single sentence of Marx — he says so at the start, I'll tell you right away, it's called Chance and Necessity, this book — those who are older remember, it made an enormous stir at the time, didn't it — bravo Jérôme Monod, Nobel Prize in biology — well, as you wish, you can dispute the competence of a geneticist to know — the Nobel Prize, French-style, means he's good — but was he trained to decide whether Marxism was legitimate or not? You see, Jacques Monod — because Jérôme is in the private sector, and it's Lyonnaise des Eaux I believe originally, Jérôme Monod, the future Vivendi — so, Jacques Monod, who worked with François Jacob as a team, it's the team that won the Nobel Prize, if you recall — one takes the opportunity to settle scores with those who are anti-Marxist, that's his right, that's not what I'm disputing, but it's the procedure, that is, with the aura of a Nobel Prize in biology, how are you going to decide whether one must defend freedom
1:57:07 by making the eyes of Vietnamese children burst out with a napalm strike — I say this because I've seen films where the eyes came out of the face because of the heat, that's what I'm saying — one steps outside one's field of competence there, just as there was — I'll give another well-known example, among physicists this time — Heisenberg, one of the greatest physicists of this century, of the 20th century, that's no small thing, it's the century that had, after all, relativity and the quanta, and among the quanta figures there's one who counted, it's Heisenberg, since he's the first to formulate the so-called uncertainty principle, which we owe to him, that one cannot at once determine the position and the speed of an electron, etc. Well, this is a man who adhered to Nazi ideas at the time, like many others — one can be very fragile ideologically even if one is an immense biologist — there, I think I'm answering your question, it's very important, thank you for asking it — from when? There, you asked the question well — it's when one steps outside one's field of competence, and especially when one has competence in the natural sciences, which are now called the hard sciences
1:58:17 the natural sciences — how can one decide in the human sciences, when man begins to appear precisely when natural legality is called into question — the natural legality that commands me to eat in order to live, and I say, well, help yourself first, or I fast, or observe Ramadan, I go completely against natural legality, and that is where man begins. If we looked closely at history, I make a tool in place of an organ — so, thank you for asking the question, thank you for being here.
