English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
"I is another": the unconscious expressed by Rimbaud 0:00 We've changed method. I was doing a bit of what's conventionally called the genre, at the level of genres, the lecture course, right? Or if you prefer, the essay, if we had to give analogies in terms of genre, of expression. And for a few sessions now, you've noticed we've switched to text commentary. Precisely because of the complexity of the thing. Why am I getting to it today? Because of the concept that surfaced last session, the concept of the unconscious. It gets there. Right? We dug into the notion of the subject last time until we saw it divide. The modern subject is the one who divides.
0:36 I'm going to quote Rimbaud again on the subject of modernity, that's not the worst reference, as you know. It's indeed him who says in A Season in Hell, in the magnificent conclusion he wrote, one must be absolutely modern. And Rimbaud is known for having said "I is another." You see, the notion of the unconscious as it's expressed here. Expressed, not developed, not modeled, theorized. We'll have to wait for the developments you know, Freud, etc. But it's expressed before being modeled. You see? At the moment when modernity emerges.
1:11 "I is another." Look at the audacity of the expression. It's a grammatical mistake in French. It should be "I am another" if you agree the subject and verb. Normally you'd say that in fifth grade and get your knuckles rapped. A stroke of poetic genius. On the contrary, he wants to show the self's strangeness to itself. By speaking of it in the third person. So, last time, we brought out this splitting of the subject in a somewhat abstract way.
The Cracked Bell: community, a concrete abstraction 1:46 And the word "abstract" is important because it sums up a bit our double conclusion from last time. We had gone back to the first text we worked through together, Baudelaire's "The Cracked Bell," which had the merit of posing the problem, the problem of modernity, that is, of the estrangement, the decoupling of the individual and society, which is a distress typical of modernity.
2:16 And we realized that if we interpreted—you know I don't like interpretation, whether I like it or not isn't important, it's always a dubious discipline. A bit like cookery. One must do analysis instead. But we were interpreting "The Cracked Bell" wrongly as a simple abstract opposition between the individual and society, a society that lives at the rhythm of the good bell, the one with the vigorous throat, that tolls the hours for everyone at the same moment, etc.
2:47 And the poor bell that agonizes at the edge of a lake of blood under a great heap of the dead and dies without moving in immense efforts—we stayed in abstraction. Because there's no society that lives so perfectly according to the law, according to the rule, and simultaneously never crosses, even by a centimeter, the continuous yellow line on the road. One must, one must, but we do sometimes bite a little, if only when we're impatient behind a tractor or a slowpoke. Nobody's exempt. We always end up making grammatical mistakes, I don't mean failing to agree the past participle or agreeing it wrongly, in short, deviating.
3:23 We never all live, even the most law-abiding among us, strictly according to the law. That's a limit. And so, this society is a bit abstract, this good society living to the rhythm of the good bell. And we saw that it resembled what's called a community more than a society. A community is narrower, more homogeneous, but as a result more fearsomely exclusive. We had seen, you see, the modern applications, the current ones. Modern, I don't know, maybe these are the archaisms we suffer from today in our current situation.
3:56 But you see the damage communitarianism can do—I have nothing against any community, but I hold a grudge against communitarianism. It's a Corsican speaking to you. Yes, because we end up putting the French out and then the Arabs out, as is happening in Corsica right now. That's not my ideal, let's say. Because I tell you, the more we think of ourselves in a homogeneous way, and most often in a fantasmatic mode—when I start thinking I am Germanness incarnate or Corsicanness incarnate, we necessarily become fantasmatic, or femininity incarnate or masculinity incarnate, it's the same thing.
4:26 We become caught up in a fantasy that excludes the other, right? You're not Corsican, you. Well yes, that was thrown at me, I'm Corsican by father and mother, and it was denied me because I had lived too much outside. Well yes, that's how it is. So, community is narrower, more homogeneous, but it's terribly abstract. When I say terribly, I mean concretely abstract. No, I'm not mocking you. On the contrary, I'm in full dialectics, it's fine. It means it's abstract, but not only in the head. Because there's a good abstraction, that of the scholar, of the mathematician, of the physicist, the kind that deliberately separates things in the mind, knowing that in reality it isn't separate.
Aristotle's ashtray, Procrustes, and the Terror 5:04 You see? I'll give you an example. Take an ashtray, a glass ashtray to keep it simple, crystal, something transparent. It has a form and a matter, like any object. Here I'm drawing on Aristotle, who reflected very deeply on this pair of matter and form. Matter, hylē, which gives us the German Holz, meaning wood, because matter—madeira, wood in Portuguese—was for a long time the most immediate matter in everyday craftsmanship. So, hylē, matter, and form, if it were said that way, eidos, the same word that gives us "idea."
5:39 I mentioned it in passing. Because for centuries and centuries, the word eidos, under Plato's pen, in Plato's texts, was translated as "idea," and in Aristotle's texts, as "form." And afterward they were opposed to each other. It's the same word, in the original text. It's interesting. Well, I'm not here to develop that, but it's good to recall it in passing. Take the ashtray. It has both a matter and a form which must be clearly distinguished. You'll agree that with the same quantity of glass or crystal it's made of, one could have made a bowl, a glass, something other than an ashtray. One could have given the same matter another form.
6:11 Assuming there are no losses, no shavings—it's the same quantity of matter. No beads lost in the melting of the glass. There, so there is indeed, in all our heads, the form of the ashtray and its matter, the glass. Moreover, the same form could have been embodied in wood, in stone, etc. Which proves indeed there's a distinction. But, as Aristotle gravely reminds us, and he's right, the fact that we can distinguish them absolutely does not imply that we can separate them.
6:42 The distinction is in the head, it is not in reality. That's what I'm saying. What Aristotle is making us understand. It's crucial for understanding things. It leads to nominalism in the history of thought, which avoids naive realism, right? Which believes that the distinctions I have in my head correspond to real distinctions. That's terrible. It can cause millions of deaths. That's what I'm saying. Do you remember Procrustes in mythology? The one who caught people at crossroads, on the roads where travelers moved about.
7:12 And Greek merchants were great travelers, great wanderers. He would catch the poor passerby and lay him on a table like this one, or on a bed, depending on the translation. And it was absolutely required that the measure, the length of the poor victim's body, be equal to that of the table or bed. Right? If it was too small, he'd stretch it, rack it. And if it was too big, he'd cut off whatever stuck out. A bit of head, a bit of foot, etc.
7:42 And of course you can well imagine there was never an exact equivalence between the victim's size and the... We're in abstraction, it's terrible. I'm telling you it causes millions of deaths. When we want the distinction not to remain merely in the head, but to become a real separation... in thought. You see? I have an image of absolute, real revolutionary virtue in my head. No, don't think only of Robespierre, he's a fantastic figure, one shouldn't think it's all fake either. But still, it's true we call him the Incorruptible, right?
8:12 Do you remember? In reality, there is no incorruptibility, there are always little arrangements. Not always very serious if kept in check. Here I'm not moralizing. Not at all. And you see, when it passes into reality, we become so furious to see that nothing in reality corresponds to the abstraction I had, that, as Hegel terribly puts it in his analysis of Terror in the Phenomenology of Spirit—there's a chapter called "Terror"—he says people ended up cutting off heads like cabbages. Like cabbage stalks.
8:42 You see? There, I'm closing this parenthesis on the distinction to be made between distinguishing and separating. Thank you, Aristotle. That is, a division that exists only in the head—that is, let's now be rigorous between philosophers, we now understand better the relations between language and thought in words. Because the head without words—there's nothing left in the head, you know, without language. Yes, yes, there are affects, there are... it's very fashionable, affects. You just have to read Lordon, he knows much more about it than I do.
9:12 There are affects, there's mush, feelings, whatever you like, but there's no thought. There's not the distinction that exists between 1789 and 1791. That's thought. It's not obvious, that thought, that distinction—it took, for that, the creation of numerals. Try doing it with Roman numerals. You'll see, it's already more complicated, isn't it? With Roman numerals, try comparing two large numbers exactly. You get confused quickly. That's why the Romans never produced a single great mathematician.
9:43 You see the importance of having flexible signs in order to have developed meaning. One shouldn't believe that my thought is sovereign, and then I just pick up language to communicate it to you, as I believe I want to communicate it. No, no, language is not a slave. There's a magnificent text by Hölderlin, who knew a thing or two about language as a poet, saying that it's thought that is the slave of language. It only develops where language has brought it, where speech has brought it. It's magnificent. In the beginning was the Word.
Racine, Phèdre, and the Cretan cycle 10:15 There. These reminders, then, to recall that this split within the subject—is it abstract, is it real? That's precisely the stake I'd like to try to grasp starting today. And for that, I'm going to keep using texts, that is, catching in the act moments where the unconscious is expressed, though not developed. I'm going to read you texts from the seventeenth century, well before Freud and all that. They're not texts about that at all. The author—had you spoken to him of the unconscious, he'd have opened his eyes wide—is Racine.
10:47 You see, I'm deliberately taking classic texts, quite clear ones—I mean, neither too modern, this isn't Rimbaud's illumination, still less Mallarmé. Nor is it a philosopher's text, which can be muddled by abstraction—this is truly as concrete as it gets, relations between pathos, between figures, between characters, how shall I say, between characters in classical theater. And I'm going to show you to what extent the characters at play in the tragedy Phèdre—simply, I'm deliberately choosing the best known one, so you'll recall it, all of Racine is available on Wiki, I mean, don't hesitate to find the text again, which is moreover one of the summits of our language, so it's really worth it, you get a double benefit.
11:32 You'll see how the characters, only when they rub up against one another in conflicts, suddenly reveal their truth. The truth they had been hiding from themselves, they themselves had an idea of themselves, in their conscious mind, which is completely turned on its head when confronted—when I say on its head, I mean a reversal, I don't mean that suddenly a different character appears from the one I thought I was, no, the opposite appears of the one I thought I was, right? I'll begin, let me remind you quickly of the plot, right, we're in the so-called Cretan cycle, one of the most mysterious, one of the most troubling in Greek mythology, the inexhaustible Cretan cycle, you know, Ariadne, you know that Nietzsche, on his deathbed in agony, when he was mad in the hospital—I say mad, it's not a value judgment, you know I have a soft spot for quite a few madmen, Gérard de Nerval, not... well, he wrote, "Ariadne, I love you, signed Dionysus," and he sent that to Madame Wagner, these documents exist, yes, that's because when Theseus killed the Minotaur on the island of Crete, and when he emancipated the Greek people from Cretan rule,
12:42 well yes, there's also—it's not all poetry here—there are economic and political problems too, for a long time it was the Cretans and the Phoenicians who ruled the seas, right, before Athens and the Delian League, right, took over, and before the Romans settled everyone's differences, well, let's not go through the whole generation—so, it was the Cretans who demanded a yearly tribute, as we say, with a T, that is, a tax, from the Athenians: 14 young people, 7 boys, 7 girls, which must symbolize the tribute they had to pay, no doubt in kind, right, to Crete, and it's Theseus who put an end to this dependency, by going to deal with the Minotaur, to whom the sacrificed young people were entrusted, who devoured them, right, I remind you, to understand what follows, that the Minotaur is nothing less, in precise terms, than Phèdre's brother-in-law—yes, the mother common to Phèdre and Ariadne, her sister, not "Ariadne my sister, wounded by what love," her sister—they have the same father, Minos, the same mother, Pasiphaë,
13:53 but Pasiphaë, "O hatred of Venus, o fatal wrath, into what wanderings love cast my mother"—wanderings, well you can say that again, legend has it she fell in love with a bull, Pasiphaë. Well yes, there have to be excesses, otherwise there'd be no tragedy to correct and purge all these disgusting things. All this hubris, as the Greeks say, these monstrous transgressions of measure. So, and the monstrous engendering of human and bull produced the Minotaur; to conceal this horror, which isn't quite in keeping with Greek aesthetics—the Parthenon, Phidias, the Apollo Belvedere—they hide it in the basements of the labyrinth.
14:37 It's unsettling, all this mythology, the inexhaustible Cretan cycle, all the way to Strauss's operas, Ariadne auf Naxos—that's the modern world, you see, it never stops—or Gide who wrote a play, the only one he wrote, called Thésée, you see, it never stops inspiring authors across the centuries, people keep prowling around the labyrinth, Borges, the labyrinth, there are so many references I'll stop there. Or a turkey of a film, a peplum, about Theseus, whatever you like. The characters, very quickly then, so we're well after all that—it's an old story of the labyrinth, all over the Mediterranean, word spreads of Theseus's exploits, but Theseus is a bit old, worn out, a bit of a Michel Piccoli, graying temples, he's settled down, Ariadne—no longer there, you know he'd abandoned her at Naxos, because oddly, from the moment he killed the Minotaur, I don't know what happened at the bottom of the labyrinth, we'll never know, between Theseus and the Minotaur, but as it turns out afterward—that's the wretched part—Theseus does nothing but repeat, if you read Freud on the death drive, Theseus does nothing but repeat forgettings, amnesias, he starts by forgetting, he makes a stopover, in those days you couldn't sail the high seas for very long,
15:47 you hugged the coast, so he starts by stopping at Naxos, on the route between Crete and Athens, and then afterward they re-embark, fine, they've drunk some spring water, good, and then in the end he's forgotten Ariadne—well yes, it's thanks to her that he'd killed the Minotaur, the thread, you know—well, not very grateful really, this guy, I don't know, forgetful, well, come on, lose one, find ten, Theseus, a seducer, his son alludes to it in Phèdre, when he reviews his father's women: "Helen stolen from her parents in Sparta, Salamis witness to the tears of Peribea, so many others whose very names have slipped his mind, too credulous souls his flame deceived, Ariadne on the rock counting his betrayals"—yes, all alone with the rocks, on Naxos, sitting, watching the sails on the horizon, which gave rise to—excuse me, since I'm telling you it inspires creators—among the crowd of what it inspired, there's an extraordinary masterpiece, of incomparable musical and dramatic density, Claudio Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna, the man who practically created opera, before it became a bit of vocal virtuosity, bel canto—I love bel canto, but still, it's a bit more complacent, there's no longer that l'oeil d'Ettarial,
16:57 if I may risk this barbarism—there we're really not far from Greek tragedy, you have to listen to it. We've lost this extraordinary opera, which was called Arianna a Naxos, and all that's left is this Lamento, that is, the song of despair that Ariadne sings alone on her shore, "Ariadne on the rock counting his betrayals"—it's a marvel, you'll find it on YouTube, there, I close the parenthesis. So, all that is quite old, Theseus, long ago, no longer thinking of Ariadne, and when Ariadne was in heaven, she became a constellation, which still exists, we don't know, you can see it, into which she took, up there in the sky, none other than, no one else but Dionysus, because while she was despairing, something magnificent happened to her at least—after all, it's she who got us out of the labyrinth, she deserves that much—but Dionysus himself, the god of drunkenness, comes to console her, with his retinue of Corybantes, and takes her up to heaven, a constellation, and so when Nietzsche writes "Ariadne, I love you," that means Wagner is a Theseus, a bit of a womanizer and forgetful, but me, I would be faithful, on that side—it's one of the rare women he loved, there, between Lou Salomé,
18:07 and Cosima Wagner—he ran into some strange creatures, the poor old man. There, let's close this tragic parenthesis, or comic one, as you like. So, it's ancient history, he's settled down with the little sister, with Phèdre, and Phèdre never knew any of that, she was little—that's important for understanding what follows—and so, when the play begins, it's been six months without news of Theseus, he's still off gallivanting, except now, since he's a bit old, nobody thinks at all that he's off chasing skirts, as they say—no, they think he's dead, you see, and so the first scene, his son—that's the first character we'll see—his son, Hippolytus, right from the first scene, is talking with his confidant, Theramenes, the old Greek, whom Theseus entrusted with his son to educate, an old brother-in-arms, etc., and Hippolytus is telling him, well, I'm going to go look for my father, it's serious, we have no more news,
Hippolytus, the good son who cuts his father in two 19:17 "The plan is made, I'm leaving, dear Theramenes, and quitting the pleasant stay"—of the lovely Trézène, it's not Trézène, it's Versailles, it's not Paris, it's the little hunting lodge, because we learn—it's his character, it's important—Hippolytus is someone who flees mundane society a bit, the court, women, it's not his thing, he's a bit shy, young, he's a teenager, yet he's the best match in Athens, he's Theseus's son after all, the king's son, the handsome young man, a good match, the best, he's just unlucky, he doesn't like women, nor men apparently, I mean, what he likes is hunting the boar, or the stag, or the lion, because it was still infested with lions back then, look at Hercules, the lion skin, the Nemean lion, the Mediterranean—so, he confronts monsters, no, not like his father, not the monsters that plague humanity's presence on earth, no, it's a bit like a repetition, in hunting, of what war, combat, should be—yes, that's interesting, yes, in short, he's someone who flees Paris for hunting in the environs of Versailles, since we're in that era, that's the model, you know, when we talk about crossing the sea from Crete to Athens,
20:28 you have to think of the Grand Canal at Versailles, it's 10 minutes, that's the boat, you have to think of it that way, but at the same time, it's infinitely far. So he says he'll go, and why, because I'm a good son, you see, in his conscious mind, I'm the good son—"for more than six months separated from my father"—pay attention to the arithmetic, remember that, six months, remember, I've told you before, you think I'm joking, when I said the only difference between poetry and mathematics is that poetry is an exact science—you know, Thomas, who's a great mathematician, knows this isn't at all a criticism of mathematics on my part, on the contrary, it's homage, homage to their flexibility, but poetry holds to rigor, and you'll see that these six months aren't a measure chosen at random—so, "for more than six months separated from my father, I know not the fate of a head so dear to me, I know not even the places that may hide him"—and the confidant, who has just spent months and months searching for Theseus, because he didn't wait for the son to take care of it, a freed slave, he's used to grinding away without asking anyone for anything, so he's already covered practically the whole Mediterranean, to see where Theseus went, he hasn't found him,
21:38 right? So, I'm deliberately restoring the dialogue for you, to show that the confidant does almost a bit of psychoanalysis, by collapsing each of the reasons Hippolytus gives for leaving—you see what I mean, I'm telling you in advance, but don't take my word for it, let's go back to the signifier, I don't want to interpret—"And in what place, my lord, will you go seek him?" Already, to satisfy your just fear, "I have scoured the two seas that Corinth separates"—suddenly there are a lot of proper names—"I go to ask of Theseus from the people of those shores, where one sees the Acheron lose itself among the dead"—I told you it's a formidable mythology, that the Cretan world is already at the edge of the river separating living men from the world of the dead, of Hades, right?
22:18 "I have asked of Theseus from the people of those shores, where one sees the Acheron lose itself among the dead, I have visited Elis, leaving Taenarum, passed on to the sea that saw Icarus fall"—that too ends badly, Icarus, as you know, he's also a son, one who turned out badly, not a king's son, the son of a slave who freed himself, Daedalus, Minos's slave—he made himself wings, he emancipated himself, remember Daedalus, there's Prometheus and Daedalus, who have a somewhat Marxian side, not literally in Greek mythology, emancipators of humanity, there—and Icarus is his son, it's a bit unsettling, all these references—"passed on to the sea that saw Icarus fall, under what new hopes, in what happy climes do you believe you'll discover the trace of his steps?"
23:02 First reason: what's the use, I've already been there, or over there, found nothing. Second reason: who knows, who knows—with all due respect, on behalf of the king—if the king your father wants the mystery of his absence to remain known—you heard that, maybe he's off somewhere with a woman, leave him be, huh, no, but don't put it that way—"wants that of his absence the mystery be known, and if, while with you we tremble for his days, tranquil, he hides new loves"—doesn't wait, that this hero, that some deceived mistress—"dear Theramenes, stop, and respect Theseus"—doesn't even let him finish, the son, you see, he doesn't like people saying that about his father, he doesn't like people talking about love in general, and on top of it talking about his father's mistress—you can guess it's becoming Oedipal, there's an aggressiveness, politely expressed, you see, completely unconscious for now—I'm a good son, I'm going to look for my father, but already here, you see, there's a whole half of his father that he doesn't like. He adores his father, the tamer of monsters—he loves hearing the story of Theseus, of Procrustes, of Sciron, etc., told over and over—but when it comes to women, he cuts him off, and he even goes so far as to say, you know how much my soul, attentive to your voice,
24:14 he's speaking to his confidant, "grew warm at the tale of his noble exploits, the monsters strangled, the brigands punished"—Procrustes, Sciron, Sinis, and the scattered bones of the Epidaurian giant, and Crete steaming with the Minotaur's blood—that's positive for him, but "when you recounted less glorious deeds," less glorious ones, referring to the king—he's attacking the king's glory, well, after all, we're at Versailles, you understand, he's attacking Louis XIV somewhere in there, glory, and his own father besides, which is a lot within the ethics of the society we're discussing, it's a terrible transgression, it's a son lecturing his father, telling his father, you should stop chasing women and get to work—well, it's the world upside down, usually it's the dad who says that to school-age kids, we won't always be behind you—it's the world upside down, yes, this Hippolytus never learns it, but it's in the text, I'm not interpreting, I don't know, it's even conscious for Racine, but there it is, Racine does better than think it, he expresses it, and it's not over, you'll see, it goes further—so, "but when you recounted less glorious deeds, his faith"—meaning his fidelity, in the language of the time,
25:24 it's the same word as the Latin fides—"his faith, offered everywhere, was received in a hundred places"—that's when he lists it: Salamis, witness to the tears of Peribea, stolen from her parents in Sparta—he ends up concluding, "happy if I could have stolen from memory an unworthy half of such a beautiful story"—well, in 3D terms, that's called a castration, that's the son castrating the father, we've never seen the like, it's really the world upside down, I cut my father in two, I keep the exploit against the monsters, and I cut out all these stories of skirt-chasing—there, you see, I'm inventing nothing, and so, in the standard exposition of the play in general, one gets the impression there are two couples—that's how the characters of Phèdre are generally represented, even by those who know it well, I think that's the impression they retain from the teaching we all received—there's a couple of guilty ones, Theseus, a bit of a careless philanderer, Phèdre, let's not even get started, so I'll come to Phèdre, who is thus Theseus's latest woman, with whom he's settled down, since he's been with her he seems fairly stable, "and fixing on his vows the fatal inconstancy,"
Phèdre, a tragedy of confession 26:35 "Phèdre, for a long time now, fears no rival," says the reassured confidante, and besides he's a bit old too, with Phèdre he's settled—and then, isn't it just, that barely does word spread that Theseus has disappeared, than Phèdre falls in love with her stepson, says the confidante, it's a terrible sin, we're against it, because here, that's infidelity again, to her husband, to her royal husband, a triple crime—against the king, against the husband, and against the father, against the prohibition of incest—fortunately, even if it's not a matter of blood here, it's still enormous as a crime—"when you know my crime and the fate that overwhelms me, I shall die no less, but I shall die more guilty"—it's a tragedy of confession, which someone like Roland Barthes recognized, that it's a tragedy of confession, Phèdre—the whole scene I'm telling you about, the confidant tries to wrest from Hippolytus the confession that won't come, about going to seek his father, and for other reasons too, he almost succeeds, until the other turns on his heel, as I was just about to say—then afterward there's the confession, I'll go quickly, there's Phèdre's confession to her confidante first, well, that stays a bit within the household,
27:46 I don't know, but there, you see, by telling her all this, she presses her so much, by threatening to kill herself in front of her, that she finally breaks down and confesses to her, but with this argument: "when you know my crime and the fate that overwhelms me, I shall die no less, but I shall die more guilty"—yes, because the moment the crime is spoken, expressed, it's in language, it's public, language is communication, it becomes notorious, Caesar's wife must be above suspicion, as the Latin proverb says, you understand what I mean, it becomes political, that's what I'm saying, from the moment it's said, murmured—in Britannicus, for example, Britannicus, who's a bit of a fool, says to Nero, who may be a monster but is at least of another class, says to Nero, yeah, all Rome knows your crimes, your plots, and Nero replies superbly, "Rome is silent, at least imitate its silence"—you can think what you like, I know full well that all Rome... but because I'm a tyrant and all, but Rome keeps quiet, a bit of a fool, you see, the crime is saying it, at the time, and so there's a whole series of extorted confessions—so I was at Phèdre's confession to her confidante, and then even worse, the confession of confessions,
28:56 Phèdre to Hippolytus, to her stepson—but here again, she hadn't come for that, she'd come for politics, since Phèdre, since Theseus is supposed to be dead, the problem of succession arises—here we're in Corneille territory, not skirt-chasing stories anymore, we're not in Racine anymore, it's a serious matter, it's honor, well, power, and there are many claimants: there's Phèdre's son, Theseus had had a child with her too; Hippolytus, he's the son Theseus had with an Amazon, because he even went off to chase the queen of the Amazons, he's the only mortal who managed to tame the formidable queen of the Amazons, to the point of having a son with her, that's why Hippolytus has a bit of a wild-child side, always in the forests hunting boar, and shunning women, a bit of an Amazon himself, if the term existed for a man, right—so, she came to discuss the succession a little, and it comes out, it comes out like the unconscious, but there, that's what we'll see—"I stray, my lord, my mad ardor despite myself declares itself"—that's an example, perhaps the summit of our language, one of its summits, but still, it's a confession from Phèdre to Hippolytus, and then there's the legitimate confession at the end, when she dies, right,
30:06 she takes poison—"I wished, by a slower path, to descend among the dead"—to exonerate, because Theseus believes it's his son who assaulted his wife while he was away, and so she comes to exonerate the son by saying she had contrived it all, and so she makes the one legitimate confession, the one she owes her royal husband at the end, there, in short, it's a tragedy of confession—but let me go back to that scene, where, first reason: I'm going to search, I'm leaving—first he leaves, if he really leaves, he transgresses the unity of place, you know that, the unity of place, he won't leave, he'll die first, it's a hubris to want, from the very beginning of the play, to break the unity of place, that's it, and it's interesting to see with Racine, and not only in Phèdre, there are always sails swelling in the harbor, waiting for the hero to leave, waiting for him to have a reason to leave, you see, we're not at the center of the circle, nor entirely outside it either, we're classical, we're not romantic, we're not eccentric, but we're borderline, as they say today, we're at the periphery—the sails are in the port, swollen to bursting, ready to receive you, "our vessels, we await you, and from the foot of the altar you may embark,"
"I shall flee these places": the alibi and the bad faith of the unconscious 31:16 "sovereign of the seas, who must bear you"—that's Mithridate, you see, that's how it goes in these plays—so, for now, I'm still in my conscious mind, a good son, I'm going to look for my father, yes, but there, me, Theramenes, I've scoured the whole Mediterranean, and your father is nowhere to be found, and besides it's not even certain he wants to be found, where he is, where he may be quite content. And, third argument Hippolytus gives to say it's scandalous to suggest that his father might be off courting someone, far from Trézène—and he says, even granting it were true, he can do it, I can't, because he's tamed monsters and all, he says it himself, "a long accumulation of honors makes Theseus excusable, whereas no monster tamed by me until today has earned me the right to fail as he does"—poor boy, he inflicts that on himself, you see, he considers that having killed neither Minotaur nor any monster yet, he cannot allow himself to confront a woman—it's magnificent, you see, and there the other one stops him, the other one sees he's overdoing it a bit,
32:26 Then the other one, he admires Theseus, the confidant, he'd really like the son to know a bit about women, to be normal, to be a young man, and there, you see, he's a real psychoanalyst, he pushes him, ah my lord, if your hour is once marked, the heaven that guides our reasons knows not how to be consulted, look how he does it, so there, absolutely the psychoanalyst, he even goes so far as to say, in fact, by forbidding any Athenian to approach Aricie – who is Aricie? She's the character I'm bringing in now. Aricie is the last living descendant of the family that politically governed Athens before Theseus's clan took power, and Theseus decided that no boy should approach her, so that this enemy family wouldn't produce offspring, quite simply, for political reasons, so that the race and the clan would die out with her. So she lives under house arrest, poor thing, deprived of any boy, and now we're going to learn that it's her that Hippolytus is in love with. He had his pick of all Athens, he was the best match, plenty of girls asking, and Hippolytus's eyes turn away toward her, and he's going to choose the one forbidden by his father. What is that, you see, I'm not inventing anything.
33:36 So how do we get to his love for Aricie? Very cleverly, when the other one says, when he's just said, let's not speak any more of Theseus's amorous exploits, well, following him — sorry, well, seeking him — I will follow my duty, says Hippolytus, and I will flee these places I dare no longer see. Ah, for the first time, he starts telling a bit of truth, without knowing it, you see, as language says more than what I think, says more of my truth. I will flee — earlier it was, I'm leaving because there's something I'm going to seek; now he's leaving because he's fleeing something behind his back. Ah, you see, and I will flee these places I dare no longer see. You'll recall, I spoke perhaps of the most illustrious contemporary of Racine, Pascal, like Racine, John — remind me, their sect there, thanks — the Jansenists. Yes, Jansenists like Racine, I had a blank. So both belonging, yes, to the same school of thought, that's no accident, not with predestination, fatality. And I had told you about Pascal's great originality.
34:46 His unique contribution to the history of thought is that for the first time, quite the opposite of today's cognitive sciences, instead of explaining human behavior from carrots dangled in front of man's nose — not pheromones, you know, that's your generation — more or less sensitive stimuli, rather more than less, he explains our behavior, Pascal does, starting from what we flee, not from what we don't know and what is in front of us, but from what we know only too well and don't want to know: diversion. "When I set out to examine men, I noticed that all unhappiness comes from man's inability to sit still in a room."
35:24 And there's Hippolytus, a good Jansenist, right, "and I will flee these places [he] can no longer see." Bang, the other one takes advantage of it, you see, each time there's the little line at the end that pushes further into the truth. "And since when, my lord, do you fear the presence of these peaceful places?" You're well off at Versailles, you can go hunting and all, you don't like Paris. Right? You're well off at Troezen, you don't like Athens. Well, now you want to flee the countryside too? "This peaceful place, so dear to your childhood, and whose stay I've seen you prefer to the pompous tumult of Athens and the court."
35:55 He's no man of the world. "What danger, or rather what grief, drives you from it?" Sly. The other answers, "That happy time is no more, everything has changed face, since on these shores the gods brought the daughter of Minos and Pasiphae." Ah, all the same, all the same, he doesn't yet say he's fleeing a woman. But he doesn't say which one, he makes it seem he's fleeing — that stops me. A young warrior like that, saying he's afraid of what? That he's threatened by a woman whom all of Athens and Troezen know is dying and seeking to die.
36:27 Not afflicted with some mysterious illness for a long time, like that. So, and there, of course, the confidant shows him more and more his contradictions. "And what danger can a dying woman, who seeks to die, pose to you? Phaedra, afflicted with an illness she insists on hiding, unlike the confession — weary at last of herself and of the daylight that shines on her, could she form any designs against you?" He's cornered, politically. Everything collapses, each time the arguments, you see, it's a thriller, isn't it. This dialogue is a thriller.
36:58 Answer: "Her vain enmity is not what I fear" — all the same. Hippolytus, in leaving, flees another enemy. "I flee, I'll admit it, this young Aricie." There we go. "Remnant of a fatal blood conspired against us." Last lie: I flee her because it's dangerous, it's the opposing political camp, a girl locked up, under house arrest, with twenty guards protecting her from anything. And him, who chases boars in the forest, is now afraid of little Aricie. Really, it's not serious. You see? The bad faith of the unconscious.
37:28 It's terrible. "And since when, my lord, do you fear..." Merciless, the confidant. "And since when, my lord, do you fear the presence..." Hmm, no. And what? "Never did the amiable sister" — you see, he already says she's amiable, worthy of being loved, Aricie. Whereas in principle her father said no one should love her. "Never did the amiable sister of the cruel Pallantides join the plot of her treacherous brothers. And must you hate her innocent charms?" "Appas," at the time, means tits, let's be clear, it's the well-coded Racinian language.
37:59 Right? "And must you hate her innocent charms?" "If I hated her, I would not flee her." You see? Well, we're getting there. We're getting there. But not quite, because he still won't go all the way to confession. But we're not far off. And let me tell you the last analyzing attempt by Theramenes and the confidant, who, seeing the other get excited saying what I told you earlier — that even granting she's not forbidden by Theseus, he has no right, since he hasn't tamed monsters, to be in love with a woman in general and with her in particular.
38:35 There, Theramenes lets it slip, he says: "If your hour is once marked, the heaven that guides our reasons knows not how to be consulted, Theseus opens your eyes by trying to close them." Isn't that psychoanalysis? His prohibition makes her all the more attractive. That's what he says. "Theseus opens your eyes by trying to close them, and his hatred, contrary here, irritating a rebellious grace" — no, "irritating a rebellious flame, lends his enemy a new grace." "So why be frightened of a chaste love?" He pushes him a bit, pushes him to become a man.
Aricia: the sadistic drive of the innocent 39:09 And it ends with a question. "Has the charming Aricie managed to please you?" Answer: "Dear Theramenes, I'm leaving and going to seek my father." There it is, it won't be — but still. The end of Act One. That's the time of gifts. So much for the first likable character. I told you, there's a guilty couple, Theseus, the philanderer, the fickle one, aging and neglectful, and Phaedra with her monstrous crimes from the standpoint of morals, and a likable couple of innocents, young Aricie, the poor victim, the Cinderella, locked up, and Hippolytus, the prince, guilty of nothing except having an almost too cumbersome father.
39:52 And I'm going to turn everything around for you now. I showed it to you for Hippolytus: there's a happy aggressiveness — "if I could have snatched from memory an unworthy half of such a beautiful story" — that is, that is, that is where his castration of the father by the son culminates. But as for the little goody-two-shoes, what's her name, Aricie — I'm skipping many passages, it's a shame, it's magnificent — it's the moment when he still hasn't left, from the very first line he says I'm leaving, Hippolytus, but he still wants to say goodbye to Hippolytus before leaving. Perilous moment.
40:22 And so, she's just been told, her confidante has just told her that the prince who's arriving, Hippolytus — for now, officially it's still about Phaedra's love for Hippolytus. That's an enormous crime. So that makes her say the following. Of course, the confidante too, who knows very well, a bit like Theramenes, being older than her mistress, knows very well that she's noticed, from a lofty look, from every deep sigh, that Hippolytus is in love with her mistress.
40:58 And she's quite pleased for her: expect to see all the hearts of Greece arrive, starting with the son of Theseus, you'll get your revenge, well, anyway. Aricie replies: "That my heart, dear Ismene, eagerly listens to a speech that may have little foundation" — you heard, I'd love so much for it to be true — "O you who know me, did it seem credible to you that the sad plaything of a pitiless fate" — Cinderella, I tell you — "a heart always fed on bitterness and tears, should know love and its mad sorrows, remnant of a king's blood, noble child of the earth, I alone escaped the fury of war, I lost in the flower of their youth six brothers, massacred by Theseus, what a story for an illustrious house, the sword mowed down everything and the moistened earth drank reluctantly the blood of Erechtheus's descendants." Well, so, since their death, what a severe law forbids all Greeks to sigh for me — that's precise, they fear that the sister's — sorry, the sister's — reckless flames might one day rekindle the ashes of her brothers.
41:53 But, and now she'll say it actually suits her a bit, she's a bit proud like Hippolytus — Hippolytus is supposed not to love women, and she'll show that men, love, she views it from very far off. "You also know with what disdainful eye I regarded that concern of a suspicious conqueror, you know that having always been opposed to love, I often gave thanks to unjust Theseus, whose fortunate rigor seconded my scorn. My eyes" — well, my eyes hadn't yet seen his son." Not that — so you'd say, well, he's handsome, so she falls for him...
42:23 No, no, no, that's not it, you'll see how the unconscious will appear. So maybe someone among you — you know roughly, almost all the characters and the play — in your opinion, what does she like about Hippolytus? Apart from him being good-looking. But maybe good-looking is the result of all that. What is it? Before she says it, I've told you enough, even for those who don't know the play, to guess. Yes.
42:54 On one hand — there you are, you're a Marxist. It shows. But yes, well yes, it's already not nothing, the king's son. He could be handsome even if he's fat and missing a tooth. Sorry? Ah, now that's interesting. That's the case, but that's done there. That's magnificent, it will be Phaedra's confession, Hippolytus, where she'll let slip that she'd have loved so much to have lived in the time of the Minotaur, and for it to be him, him, the young Theseus she never had — it was her sister who had him.
43:25 Anyway, let's not mix everything up. No, but what does she love? Well, precisely the fact that he doesn't love women, that he's hard to conquer. She too has a bit of a sadistic streak, she'd like to be the one, be the first, to bring the pain of love into the heart of this fellow who's only anxious when a boar escapes him. But you'll say I'm interpreting. You're quite right to be suspicious, and you'll see why. On the contrary, I'm doing nothing but staying at the very letter, at the very surface of the signifier, as they say in Parisian salons.
43:59 So, the eyes — yes, he's good-looking, but "not that by eyes alone basely enchanted" — that's the Jansenism — "if I loved only his beauty, I'd have no virtue. I love in him his beauty, his so-praised grace, a gift with which nature wished to honor him." Well, we learn along the way that he's handsome, which he himself scorns and seems to ignore. "I love, I prize in him a nobler wealth, the virtues of his father and not at all his weaknesses." There, she too, she cuts Theseus in two, and — "the virtues of his father and not his weaknesses." "I love, I'll admit it, this generous pride that has never bent beneath love's yoke."
44:31 "Phaedra vainly prided herself on Theseus's sighs" — Theseus sighs after any pretty woman, that's not the point. "Phaedra vainly prided herself on Theseus's sighs. As for me, I am prouder" — already she's in rivalry with the queen, with Phaedra — "I am prouder and flee the easy glory of wresting homage offered to a thousand others, and of entering a heart open on every side." But, look at what Freud would have called a sadistic drive in this little innocent girl. "But of making an unbending courage bend, of bringing pain into an insensible soul."
45:03 What is sadism? It's taking pleasure in inflicting pain on the other, I mean, there aren't 36 definitions. "Of bringing pain into an insensible soul, of chaining a captive astonished by his own fetters against a yoke that, vainly mutinous, pleases him nonetheless, that is what I want, that is what excites me." And then comes this extraordinary line: "Taming Hercules would have cost less than Hippolytus." Hercules is nothing next to Hippolytus. All the same, you see, I'm not inventing anything.
Hippolytus's confession: a coup d'état and the common law 45:34 It's in language, in the relation to the other, that suddenly the other that I am — the one of whom Rimbaud says "I is an other" — suddenly appears. I'll give you one last example, always still, one last example: it's Hippolytus's own confession, because he's about to arrive, she's in the middle of talking to her confidante, and she's preparing herself because Hippolytus is coming to say goodbye. So he's finally going to leave — in principle, he shouldn't be allowed to leave just like that. But at the same time, it's hard, well, it's hard to wring a confession out of the other fool, you know, out of Hippolytus.
46:05 Now, I love this, Hippolytus — that's not the point, but so, he arrives, he enters the scene: "Madam, before departing, I felt I owed it to you to inform you of your fate." Ah yes, I've come to talk politics, I'm being serious, I felt I owed it to you — you see, he's already dispatched the father, we're not even sure Theseus is dead. He'll come back before the end of the play, it'll be the catastrophe, the catharsis, as they say in theater. When the cat's away, the mice will play, so we can catch them in the act when he comes back, gifts, huh. What's been happening since I left?
46:36 "Madam, before departing, I felt I owed it to you to inform you of your fate. My father is no more." Well, it's no longer a hypothesis, it's become an indicative. "My just distrust, foreseeing the reasons for his too-long absence — death alone, capping his brilliant labors" — in his head, he's still admiring, you see — "could hide him from the universe so long. The gods finally deliver to homicidal Fate the friend, the companion, the successor of Alcides." Alcides is another name for Heracles, as you know, Hercules, right? Well, after all, he's speaking to his worst enemy, so — "I believe your hatred, sparing his virtues, hears without regret the names owed to him."
47:10 "A hope softens my mortal sadness" — yes, I'm in mourning nonetheless. "I can free you from a strict tutelage." Well now, politics changes fast there. Barely is my father dead, or his corpse still warm, well, I abolish Theseus's ban, you are free. You can associate with whomever you want. "And in this Troezen, today my share of my ancestor Pittheus, the ancient heritage that has, without hesitation, recognized me as its king, I leave you as free, and freer than I." That's the last line. You see what a confession.
47:40 "I leave you as free, and freer than I." You may dispose of yourself, of your heart, "and in this Troezen, today my share of my ancestor Pittheus, formerly the heritage that has, without hesitation, recognized me as its king" — which is false. It's false, he's one of the well-placed parties, but there are others. "I leave you as free, and freer than I." So here, of course — "Moderate the kindness whose excess embarrasses me, honoring my disgrace with such generous care, my lord, it is to bind me more than you think, under those austere laws from which you exempt me."
48:15 And now, we're talking politics. I hear the wind between the doors. There's the sound of sails in the sea. Because we've basically finished with the you're-free-do-as-you-please part, all that's left is to cast off and leave. You see, there's the wind. There in the Mediterranean, there's a terrible wind around 1 pm. There's a light. That light that's at the crossroads, at the place called Delphi, when Oedipus, with sweat and heat, killed that old man who blocked his path without knowing it was his father. Watch out at moments like that.
48:45 "Concerning the choice of a successor, uncertain Athens is talking about you, naming me, and the queen's son." Ah well, all the same, suddenly there are three parties. "Of me, my lord" — the little coquette. Me, me. I'm in the running. "I know, without wishing to flatter myself, that a proud law seems to reject me." Well yes, a son of an Amazon, not serious, he's got a slightly animal, handicapped side to him. "Greece holds against me a foreign mother, but if for a rival I had only my brother" — that is, the son of Theseus and Phaedra, no less.
49:15 "Madam, I have real rights over him that I would know how to save from the caprice of laws." In short, that will be settled by the sword. "A more legitimate restraint stops my boldness. I yield to you, or rather, I return to you a place." He's playing full-on collaboration in political terms, isn't he? His father's opposing party, no less. "I yield to you, or rather, I return to you a scepter that your ancestors once received from that famous mortal whom the earth conceived. Athens, increased and protected by my father, joyfully recognized so generous a king and left your unfortunate brothers in oblivion."
49:46 That's called political revisionism, what he's doing. He's rewriting history by saying it's a shame about your unfortunate brothers. "Athens, within its walls, now recalls you" — enough with the excursions. "Troezen obeys me" — he's making a division, you see, a geographical one. "Troezen obeys me, that's enough for me" — the little hunting lodges there. "The countryside of Crete offers Phaedra's son a rich retreat." If you ever go on holiday to Crete, you'll understand that line. The countryside is magnificent in Crete.
50:18 Holidays, holidays — "the countryside of Crete offers Phaedra's son a rich retreat. Attica" — that is, the region of Athens — "is your own. I am leaving" — that's the tenth time he says I'm leaving in this play — "and shall go to unite for you all the shared wishes between us." And so he turns on his heel. Cinderella: "Astonished and confused by all I hear, I almost fear, I fear a dream deceives me. Am I awake, can I believe such a design, what God, my lord, what God put this into your heart, that your glory is rightfully spread everywhere and that the truth surpasses the fame."
50:52 "You yourself, in my favor, wish to betray yourself, was it not enough not to hate me?" She's sly. She says, frankly, you're almost performing an act of love, it was already something not to hate me and to have been able for so long to defend your soul from that enmity. There, she got him. "Me, hate you, madam" — he was about to leave, he was turning on his heel. "With whatever colors my pride has been painted, does one believe that in her flanks a monster bore me?" Yes, the queen of the Amazons was regarded as a monster among the Greeks. "What savage customs, what hardened hatred could, on seeing you, fail to be softened?"
51:22 "Could I resist the deceptive charm?" — I've rarely seen such a strange line. What does "deceptive" mean here? It's odd. It doesn't mean she deceives him. You see how strange the phrase is? "Could I resist the deceptive charm?" It means your charm, the fact that, for the rare time I feel the fires of love, makes me very disappointed in myself, in the image I had of myself in my conscience as being someone far removed from the ravages men expose themselves to in love, etc., and who stayed in virtue and far from all that... Well then, she, of course, having understood perfectly, contents herself with saying what, my lord, so he'll elaborate a bit?
51:56 "I have engaged myself too far, I see that reason yields to violence. Since I have begun to break the silence, Madam, I must continue." There's another confession. Painful. "I must inform you of a secret my heart can no longer contain. You see before you a prince" — a monument of narcissism, he exhibits, I don't know, his own character. "You see before you a deplorable prince, of reckless pride, fiercely rebelled against love, who long insulted the fetters of its captives, who, deploring the shipwrecks of weak mortals, always thought from the shore he was contemplating the storms" — hubris.
52:29 Hubris of believing one is different from others, that one is outside the law, outside the common law. Of believing one is on the shore and that others are caught up in their own affairs. I don't know — the hatred of the masses, the ecological hatred of the masses. Excuse me, I can't help slipping in a little jab each time. But there's something of that, you know, in ecology, the fear that there are too many of them. Anyway — "who, deploring the shipwrecks of weak mortals, always thought, from the shore of my unpolluted second home, to contemplate the storms" — and here's the capital line, look how important it is for understanding the unconscious.
53:03 "Enslaved now under the common law, by what disturbance do I see myself carried away from myself?" And there, I'm about to become an other. "By what disturbance do I see myself carried away from myself?" How do I notice I'm far from myself because I'm now subject to the common law? It's not that I notice for the first time that I have something human in me, that I'm a bit like everyone else. Well yes, but that's disappointing. I thought I was a modern hero, romantic — the word doesn't exist, nor the feeling. Of course, because one doesn't boast of it at the time.
53:33 The proof: he's going to be punished, precisely, for having believed himself outside the common lot. But there we are — "enslaved now under the common law" — I can close it there, everything's been said, for our topic. I won't tell you, despite the temptation, the most beautiful text is Phaedra's confession to Hippolytus. "By what disturbance do I see myself carried away from myself?" There, we clearly see that in his mind he was sincere when he said I'm a good boy, a good son, I'm going to look for my father because this isn't normal, I'm the one most concerned, we've had no news of him, I'll go and see.
54:05 And now, we're far from all that. This is someone who's going completely against his father's entire political effort, handing power to the enemy clan, when Theseus jealously made sure she'd have no descendants and that no one would approach her. It's extraordinary, all the same — not only can she associate with whomever she wants, but moreover, he, who isn't even the officially instituted and recognized successor, decides — it's a golpe, as they say in Latin America, it's a coup d'état. A coup d'état, moreover, for the benefit of someone else, you see?
Abstract self, anarchism, and the man without qualities 54:37 He decides to hand over power. There. I preferred, in order to express the depth of Rimbaud's "I is an other," and thus of the negativity inscribed within the subject itself, typical of modernity — I can become abstract again. We've earned it, after being as concrete as possible, haven't we, unable to be more embodied. There's flesh and blood in everything we've just read, isn't there. I can go back, make an abstract assessment, just as, parallel to Rimbaud's text about that somewhat Caligula-like prince, and even very much so, who destroyed the entire universe because he wanted to see the hour of desire and satisfaction, the hour of truth, even if it meant absorbing, like an ogre, almost the entirety of the universe — I read to you afterward the frightening text where Hegel analyzes the abstract form of freedom, and I told you that it was perhaps the first modeling of what became embodied in the contemporary world under the terrible aspect of the Khmer Rouge, I don't know, of genocide, I don't know, that is, of the total annihilation of any individual will to order, suspected of coming to light,
55:48 etc. In short, I had shown that there was indeed a parallel between the abstract self, and so I now come back to the text we all started from, the cracked bell, which had the merit, you see, of opening up, of posing the problem, but you see it gets enriched as we try to bring a solution to it, namely that we had already understood that the society of the good bell is not society in general but community in its terrible abstraction, in its exclusive homogeneity, in the sense, moreover, that the language itself says it — "je fais abstraction de" doesn't mean I exclude, it means, you see, to abstract is to isolate through thought, that's what abstracting is, better to start from the verb: to abstract is to isolate through thought, implicitly, what in reality is not separable, what is excellent in the order of knowledge is terrifying in the real order — yes, which makes me think I haven't finished my story about the ashtray earlier, maybe it's time to get back to it: if I have the form of the ashtray, well yes, we've all distinguished the form, let's say it's round, circular, of the ashtray, and its matter,
56:58 The glass, out of which one could have made a square object, an octagonal one, whatever you like — the fact remains that I cannot have the form in my left hand and the matter here, because for me to have it in my left hand, that form has to be embodied in some matter, whatever it may be, cardboard, straw, and conversely, any matter, even if kneaded, etc., has a certain form, even if it's not a very geometrical form, etc., even if we have to think chaos — that's it, it's important to see that these are things we can distinguish but which are not separable.
57:35 So, the first society, we had seen, we understood that it was abstract, but what we understood last time, thanks to Rimbaud's text and its explication through Hegel's analysis of the abstract will and the havoc it wreaks in reality when it turns toward action and does not content itself with being a theory, as he says very clearly — we noticed that the individual too, just as there was an abstract society, there is also an abstract individual, there is also an abstract self, the self, let's take it literally, which becomes conscious of itself only insofar as it abstracts from everything it thinks is not itself — negativity: I am not this, I am not a man, I am not any sex I want, I am not French, I am not that — that's what Hegel says, I exclude every determination, indeed, I remind you of Hegel's text, given immediately by nature, I am a male, not a female for example, or by history or mediations, by actuality — I remove all determinations, what's left is the mouth of an ogre, there's still the mouth of a man — that's what we had, the result when we arrived
58:45 last time, which was important, the cracked bell — we must not think it's merely an abstract society facing an abstract individual seeking to abstract himself from society, pure anarchism if you like, if you want an example of that — but anarchism taken in its radicality, I'm not thinking of historical anarchism, there's an excellent, well, excellent — there's an anarchism I salute in passing, with which I'm even ready to ally myself, which has often been a companion of the working class and the oppressed, which I salute in passing, and there's also a right-wing anarchism, I'm thinking of Céline — so there's the worst and the best in anarchism, you know — but in its concept of an absolute anarchism, that's why I take it in its concept, the refusal of every arche, every principle, every order — well that's exactly the analysis Hegel makes of the formal will which never gives itself a content, you see, which unlike its admirable characters does not invest itself in a profile, a character — Hegel reflected a great deal on this opposition with ancient thought, where the self recognizes itself only through an engaged character, we would say today, isn't it, I am an old Roman attached to virtue and heroism, I am, isn't it, an oriental attached to the infinite and the beyond, my kingdom is not of this world — each time there is
59:55 a determinate content, if you like, whereas what is proper to modernity is what the title of a famous novel admirably expresses, the man without qualities, without character, without property in the chemical sense of the term, if you like, without virtue, in the sense in which we say that, I don't know, acid has the virtue of making bubbles on limestone — property, quality, there you go. It's interesting, this opposition, you see, if you read the plays of Molière as well as Racine, Corneille, you're struck by the powerful unity of character of the characters compared to the modern, romantic hero.
The hateful self of the classics: the unity of character 1:00:31 And there, since we're talking about the self today, we're not far from "I is another," and I remind you, I had made you a little serial, a little tragicomedy of language in the Bible, isn't it, in three acts — first act, the earthly paradise where God gives Adam the power to name creatures, where Adam, in that paradisiacal moment, calls things by their name — we don't have the problems we have, what do they call this, what do they call that. Then the antithesis, the Tower of Babel, where suddenly, however much we speak, we no longer understand each other, confusion of languages, and finally, redemption, we are saved from the curse of Babel by the Epiphany, where suddenly the apostles start speaking every language and are able to preach the good news to the Gentiles of the whole world — for no one is a prophet in his own country.
1:01:16 And in the same way, I'm going to show you that there is a little tragicomedy of the self, even a great one, if we simply move into the literary sequence this time, no longer the religious one, the literary sequence which goes, for example, from classicism — because here we're with the 17th century and these are well-known references, both Corneille and Molière, we have an ideal type of classicism, of the refusal of excess, of measure. That is to say, the representation we make of the self, roughly, from Racine, Molière, up to today.
1:01:51 I mean, the literary expression. And I'll give it to you in three stages, three quotations. I'll start with Pascal, in the classical century. The self is hateful. It couldn't be clearer. I've already told you that we'll never know — you know the model for the classical writers is Antiquity, and Greek Antiquity in particular. Racine spends his time saying, that's the model, one can try to reach it, and even then, but never surpass it. Well, there you go. So, at best, Racine is Sophocles, whom he never quite reaches.
1:02:24 All this, to remind you of what? That in Antiquity, we will never know, I told you, whether Achilles liked peas with bacon, I don't know, or whether Hector had a beauty mark on his left nostril, I believe, I had said. All these details that we're not spared in a modern novel by Balzac or whoever — you get all the details of what's lying on the mantelpiece or in my nightstand, I mean, all the better, I mean, these are different and complementary moments. It makes for the richness of literary history, we go from one extreme to the other. Sometimes you have 100 pages of description of what's in the apartment before the action even begins, I mean, we get everything, a big chest of drawers, that's Baudelaire, it comes back to mind, cluttered with balance sheets, verses, love letters, lawsuits, ballads, with heavy locks of hair rolled up in receipts.
1:03:07 That's well observed, it's a mixture of sentimentality and bailiff's papers. Well, that's the modern world. Le Bins, as we say colloquially. So, the ancient world doesn't concern itself with particulars pertaining to such-and-such an individual in a determinate here and now, some real individual, I mean. Name, first name, address, profession, place of birth — it doesn't care about that. The self is hateful. It's vanity in the double sense.
1:03:40 It's presumptuous, that's the first sense of vain, and it's vain in the sense of idle, useless, good for nothing. So, the self is hateful. Besides, when Pascal speaks of Montaigne — since this is a serial, all this — Montaigne, he liked to talk about himself, he does nothing else throughout the Essays. He even talks about his kidney stones, it's magnificent, when he talks about his pain while in pain, he writes.
1:04:10 Kidney stones, that's really something. And he says, I am the matter of my book, isn't it. Pascal says, the foolish project he had of painting himself. You see, Pascal's classical severity, I mean, you see, it corresponds to an architecture like that of Versailles, it's not baroque profusion, I mean, it's not the abundance of detail that matters in classical architecture. Look at the beautiful Parisian façades, I don't know, they're sober. There's no trompe-l'oeil like in Florence either. So, first stage, the unity of the self.
1:04:44 But, precisely because we don't burden ourselves with details, in other words, I'll drop the word now, because the self is not expressed in its totality, it has a powerful unity. You see the tension beginning to build up between unity and totality. The characters, you see, the miser, is a character of extraordinary unity. Forever, we see what avarice incarnate is. It's Harpagon. In fact, everything about Harpagon that doesn't concern his avarice is stripped away, it doesn't interest us much.
1:05:17 Was he blond, was he dark-haired, you don't care, and you're right. You see, we don't know. No importance. What are his culinary tastes, his literary tastes, we'll never know. What matters is his relationship to possession. And there you have it, and Roxane, jealousy, and Andromache, fidelity — each is characterized by a character trait, precisely, the capital notion, character. Character is what specifies, it's between genus and individual, the species, isn't it, between the vagueness of the genus and the infinitesimal precision of the individual, which made Aristotle say — remember this capital phrase for the philosophy of science — there is science only of the general and existence only of the individual.
1:06:09 How can we have scientific knowledge of Minou? I use a proper name to speak of my cat, not of the cat in general. Isn't that so? Well, Aristotle says, we start by classifying it. It's genus animal, species feline, you see, we nest things like that, we get closer and closer, but without ever arriving, because to arrive at the concrete, real individual, there are too many things. Agreed? Look in this book, we'd have to talk about the little stain that's there at the bottom left, reality is infinite. There is too much determination. There is no knowledge of the individual, there is knowledge only of the general.
1:06:39 We can only approach it through successive bracketing — there is knowledge only of the general and existence only of the individual. If you translate that sentence, that is, if you make it say exactly the same thing but in a negative way, it means the individual is unknowable, since there is knowledge only of the general, the individual is unknowable and the general does not exist. So, we only know what does not exist. Aristotle, that's nominalism.
1:07:11 It's in words — in reality, there's always a margin of uncertainty. There you go. Anyway, that's the parenthesis. So, it's a bit of an application of this point of view, the fact that the self is hateful and that we don't lose ourselves in all the details attached to real existence in a determinate here and now, psychological, historical, whatever you like, of Harpagon — a powerful unity of the miser emerges, for eternity. There you go.
The romantic self: totality and the mal du siècle 1:07:41 So much for classical character, in general. Good. Now, the antithesis. Romanticism. Yes, the antithesis of classicism. I move on to Hugo. The emblematic figure of romanticism. What does he say about the self? Ah, him, he says... The romantics, they talk about themselves. That's all they do in their work, isn't it? But yes, Hugo warns us: when I speak to you of myself, I speak to you of yourselves. So, I can talk about myself as much as I want. In fact, I'm talking about you. Isn't that beautiful?
1:08:11 Nerval, in his own way — who was a companion much less known, much less glorious in his time, somewhat in the shadow of the great figures, and who took part in the Battle of Hernani. It seems he used to say, where Genefranc said, each one's experience is the treasure of all. Let me read that: each one's experience is the treasure of all. Well, there you go — Hugo, when I speak to you of myself, I speak to you of yourselves. There, the self is rehabilitated. You must speak of yourself even more, because the more truthfully you speak of it, as only a poet can, the more you attain universality. You see?
1:08:41 In fact, the poet is never anything but the expression, the bard, like the griot. The parallel has been drawn, hasn't it, by Hugo himself. He's not thinking of the griot — that wasn't very familiar to him — but he's thinking of the bard, of the aoidoi of ancient and traditional societies. And he wants to restore, isn't it, this function of the poet who is always at the vanguard of a people. It's important for him, isn't it? You find it very well expressed in a poem like Stella. In the famous letter of the seer, where Rimbaud ruthlessly reviews the whole history of poetry in two pages, in a letter written to his rhetoric teacher, from the Greeks up to himself, passing through Hugo, he says Hugo saw well in the last volumes — he makes this concession, all the same.
1:09:27 Fabulous, the last volumes. Poems like The End of Satan, God — I recommend them, they're poems of such topicality, such modernity. Unfathomable. In Hugo there is everything, absolutely everything. There's also dross — someone who wrote several pages a day for 60 years, it's not like Mallarmé's body of work. Mallarmé holds together. I like it very much, but still, it's not heavy. So the fact that he makes an exception, he says Stella gives roughly the measure of Hugo's vision.
1:09:59 He's serious about it. The poem Stella gives you the qualities and the flaws. He quotes it, it's no accident. I don't know if you remember this poem. I had fallen asleep in the night near the shore, a fresh wind woke me. It was pure poetry alone. You see? It's not just eloquence and things poured out. In Hugo, there is this marvel. I had fallen asleep in the night near the shore, a fresh wind woke me, I emerged from my dream. I opened my eyes, I saw the morning star. But then, it quickly turns to prophecy.
1:10:31 Because the star becomes the angel liberty, the giant light who guides the peoples. It's very beautiful politically, but it suddenly turns into thought set to verse. That's what Rimbaud means, isn't it? I am the angel liberty, the giant light, whereas at the beginning there are only concrete things. One would think one saw a soul through a pearl, it grew pale over the reef where the wave breaks. Read Stella, it's not long, it's a short poem, you have all the incomparable qualities, when he wants to, he's the best, and the flaws. So, nonetheless, we saw it well for romanticism — it is the literature of the self, romanticism, quite simply.
1:11:06 Either in the form of confidence, of memory, isn't it? Of nature, which is all the more worthy of being loved because it reflects back the image of the person speaking — it's happy like him in spring when he's in love, it's in mourning when he has a sorrow, nature, in fact, is the landscape he's talking about. You know that I taught you, we learned together to distinguish the two, at least for my part I try to. It's a quip, but I remind you it takes several thousand years to transform nature into landscape, with a lot of effort of what Marx called praxis, no less.
1:11:38 To make the Norman hedgerow landscape, it takes mediations, we draw it out of the marshes and forests of our ancestors. And as Marx says, one must leave the Teutonic forests in peace. It's fearsome to awaken the Teutonic forests, says Marx, who knew about such things. So, I speak to you of myself, I speak to you of yourselves — that's the antithesis, I'm going quickly. And finally, third stage, our modernity, the contemporary one, starting from Rimbaud, from Baudelaire in literature, the Baudelairean revolution, but which Rimbaud carries, isn't it, to its paroxysm — I'm moving to another. You have the three stages of the self.
1:12:09 The hateful self — we never talk about it, we only talk about universal problems, salvation in Pascal, isn't it, passion, the ravages of passion in Racine, or man as character who exists only insofar as he defends his honor, as in Corneille, or what is human in Molière is to be wary of excess. Let me take the example of The Learned Ladies. There's a bit of an anti-feminist side to The Learned Ladies, all the same. You see, now women meddle with astronomy, literature, grammar and what else.
1:12:40 We mustn't exaggerate either, but that said, the one who criticizes this side of the learned ladies is not Molière's hero, it's not — what's his name — Clitandre, the young positive hero of the play. It's Chrysale, who we understand from the start is a doddering old fool, the father of the family, the one who says "Besides a fat Plutarch to hold up my bands" — my bands, that's my socks, it holds my socks up — "Besides a fat Plutarch to hold up my bands, all this useless furniture should be burned and science left to the town doctor." Well, that's a bit — that's the extreme of the one who wants women to know nothing but cooking.
1:13:11 "In my house, we know how the moon, Mars, and shooting stars go, but we don't know how my stew is doing, which I need." Everyone says, it's a work of genius. There you go. And Clitandre, who's annoyed by the learned ladies but is more honest, says to the sister of one of them, the more likeable one, less snobbish, the one he's in love with: "I respect greatly, Madam, your mother, but I cannot at all approve of her fancy, nor be the echo of the things she says.
1:13:46 Her Mister Trissotin annoys and overwhelms me, and I'm enraged to see her esteem such a man, a fool everyone hisses at for his writings, a pedant whose overly liberal pen — meaning he lets himself go, writes a bit too readily — supplies the whole marketplace with officious papers. And I love it when a woman can often, as they say, respond wittily to the things she knows, without quoting authors, without using big words, without nailing wit onto her slightest remarks. I grant that a woman may have insight into everything." Ah, that's not Chrysale. "I grant that a woman may have insight into everything, but I don't want her to have the shocking passion of making herself learned merely to be learned."
1:14:21 There you go. There's always a balanced point of view in Molière. That grace Molière has for a livable man, a livable humanity. I don't know. There you go. All the same. So that's the classical self. Then the romantic self. So, you see, I had told you that a tension is established between unity and totality. Classicism, and/or Antiquity, which is its absolute model, isn't it, brings out unity by neglecting the detail whose sum would give totality.
1:14:53 That's clear enough so far. The romantic world is going to try to express the self in its totality. As thought, as feeling, as affect, etc. But then, it becomes infinite. You understand Aristotle now. There is knowledge only of the general and existence only of the individual. Yes, but the individual — precisely because there's too much determination — cannot be known. That would require infinite work. It borders on madness. You begin to understand that a world of pathology invades poetics starting with modernity, and that the century of romanticism suffers from the mal du siècle.
1:15:30 The malady in the sense of pathos. This sickness which is not a sickness in either the physical sense — it's not like the plague which came from the Nile via rats living in upper Egypt — nor is it, isn't it, the fact that there are a few neurotics, that's their problem. No, it's collective. There's a problem. I've told you about German romantics who almost all end up dead or suicided, even though they all have different characters, different fathers and mothers, different lives and histories. If suddenly they all have the same pathos, it's because there's a problem that exceeds the psychic field and is of a historical order. That's what I'm saying. Collective, isn't it.
1:16:00 sociological, as we'd say today, rather than psychological. So, the mal du siècle is one of those phenomena, isn't it, which largely exceed the contingencies of individuals and which define an era, a moment — we'd say in dialectical terms, not a moment exactly but a moment of historical becoming — which is precisely the one in which totality, for the first time, has a chance to express itself. But then, with the consequences that entails. We've just seen it in Racine: as long as I think I'm a good boy, a good son who continues to do as his father did, that is, face danger, well, a bit watered down, chasing after animals and game rather than monsters, but still, I mean, someone wary of excess — I have no idea, I'm far from knowing my totality.
1:16:55 In fact, I am in love like everyone else, I am susceptible to love like everyone else, but I had repressed it until then. Before I realize that, now enslaved beneath the common law, by what trouble do I find myself swept away from myself. This trouble is the eruption of his totality into what, until then, was for him his unity — but that unity was abstract, and the contact between the two makes precisely for tragedy. What is tragedy in the classical century will be encouraged in the romantic era.
What a synthesis is: Plato and the criterion of the beautiful 1:17:25 And now, I'm going to make a synthesis, arriving at "I is another," which I haven't yet modeled, if you like, so far. It's the fact that — let me remind you of a bit of methodological backtracking, in order to make a genuine synthesis and not an attiéké — attiéké is an Ivory Coast dish, forgive me, there's semolina, you dip it in the sauce, you mix it up a bit like that. Well, that's not a synthesis. Yes, oops, sorry, but it's known to be part of some rather hazardous syntheses.
1:18:01 Well, the real synthesis is not the attiéké, it's really the sublation of the contradictions at work — sublation in the sense of taking them on, not of turning one's back on them, going off to do something else, otherwise there's no point. That is, by entirely satisfying each of the opposing points of view, which is much harder — and at the same time, making them collapse. I gave you an example of this earlier with the way Plato talks about the beautiful, for instance. Look, look. Thesis. The empiricist thesis, the sophists' thesis. The beautiful is relative, there you go.
1:18:34 Here, in Athens, it's the Parthenon. Among the Hottentots, among the steatopygous women, I mean, it's not quite the same Venus, etc. And so, the beautiful doesn't exist, or rather it's entirely relative. I'm talking about the sophists of the 5th century BC, but it's extremely widespread today too, especially with the vogue of what's called culturalism. Ah, it's not part of their culture. It's not part of their culture. Oh yes, yes, yes. Look, they eat people raw, they're cannibals. Yes, but it's part of their culture. Well, why not. Always.
1:19:04 Then the Germans, they don't like Jews, and no, that's not part of their culture. Jews, it's not part of their culture. Well yes, we can also — culturalism, we can do it that way too, huh? The Germans, the Germans, the Nazis, it's true there's gold in Germany. That's why I distrust it. Relativism. And then, there's the opposite, the dogmatic one, the opposite of the skeptic who says everything is relative — the dogmatic, the good old Athenian who says the beautiful is the Parthenon, and that's all.
1:19:34 Or else it's the Venus made by Phidias, there. Everything else is barbaric. It's ugly. That's generally, if you look closely, how the aesthetic discussion goes — you can refine it a bit, but it's always that. A prejudice, and then others who say your thing doesn't exist, old boy. Wine tastes sweet to you, it's sweet. Wine tastes bitter to someone else, well it's bitter, there's no wine in itself. That's Protagoras. Each individual is the measure of all things. What does Plato do? He sees what's common between them.
1:20:06 So far, we've seen the opposition between the two. It seems irreconcilable. What's common? The act of looking. The act of seeking beauty outside oneself, with one's eyes. Except that there's one who looks at us without ever having left Athens — that's the old dogmatist. Everyone judges by their own doorstep, as we say in French. He's never traveled, he's never seen any other form of beauty than the Parthenon, so for him, it's absolute beauty. There you go, we've all been a bit like that. It's the child at school who says the most beautiful of all cars is — I'm making this up, since the models have changed — the, I don't know, I'll say the 504, I don't know, why?
1:20:41 Because it's my father's car, so it's the most beautiful, there you go. Yes, but across from him there's the other one who says no, it's the Renault R16, why? Because it's my father's car — so it's the same criterion producing two different visions. There you go, that's dogmatism. As long as these young people haven't left their family a bit, and the schoolyard serves a bit for that, that's why school is public. And, whereas — so I do give an advantage to the sophists, the relativists, you'll notice, I don't put them exactly on the same level. In both cases they're empiricists, that's what's common — sense experience, that's what I base myself on to define the beautiful, except that one has limited experience, and the other has traveled, a bit of a Greek-style merchant, who went around the Mediterranean, who saw that, well, the Egyptians don't quite have the same point of view as the Chaldeans, who don't have the same point of view as the Persians, etc., nor as we do, there you go.
1:21:26 So there's a limited experience, an extended experience, Plato, who has the eye of thought, sees that there's experience in both cases. So let's stop looking outside, and, know thyself, sends it back ping-pong, you see, from the outside toward the inside. What is common to the man who loves the Hottentot woman, callipygian as they say, and to the classical Greek model of feminine beauty, the Venus de Milo, what do they have in common?
1:21:56 It's the fact that whoever says "it's beautiful" each time feels a pleasure. Yes or no? An aesthetic pleasure. I didn't say the gustatory pleasure one has at the table, but it's a pleasure. If I say it's beautiful, that means it pleases me, roughly, all the same. You see the implication, it's in the rigor. And here we have a turning point. Know thyself. If you knew yourself, you would know that where there is pleasure, a desire has just been satisfied. How do you want to have pleasure swallowing water if you're not thirsty as a dog?
1:22:27 Well yes! So, by seeking the nature of the beautiful solely in pure objectivity, we're going the wrong way. We mustn't forget the essential point that made Spinoza say, and it's nicely put, we do not desire things because we judge them good, we judge them good because we desire them. That looks all very simple, but if you manage to meditate on that, you already have the whole of psychoanalysis right there. There's often, moreover, some pre-Freud in Spinoza. For example, the soul is an idea of the body.
1:22:58 It's the body that thinks itself through the ideas we have. That's very interesting. Even if it's not quite the body Freud was thinking of, it's still a mechanical body in Spinoza, Cartesian, well, of the period, I'd say, somewhat geometric, it's not yet the symbolic body, but we'll get there. It's not yet the split subject we see today, but still, I mean, the soul is an idea of the body. And above all, the idea that Peter has of Paul expresses more the state of Peter's body than the state of Paul's body. That sounds complicated, it's very simple, it's nicely put.
1:23:31 That means, when I say, "I don't like this music," I've said nothing about this music. I've spoken about myself. It expresses the state of my body. That is, the way my own body is affected by that music. That's what Spinoza says. The idea that Peter has of Paul teaches us nothing about Paul. That's what he's saying. It expresses more the state of Peter's body than the state of Paul's body. There you go, I saw a black man at someone's place, you see, at the time, you know, I don't know, deep in Russia, when you saw a black man, that wasn't obvious.
1:24:03 It's not a country that had colonies and all that, you see. The fact that they're uncomfortable when they see a black man expresses the way the sight of a black man affects my body. As a result, one ends up imagining that they have an appalling odor. You know all this, it's familiar, plenty has been written about it. I recommend an excellent book, not because he's a friend, but its title is L'Afrique Fantasme, by François de Negroni, I recommend it if you want to educate yourself while laughing.
1:24:35 It's very erudite, it's serious stuff, though it doesn't look it, but it's funny. L'Afrique Fantasme. So, once again, we had underestimated—that's why Plato is indispensable here—in our search for the criterion of the beautiful, sometimes we say it exists, sometimes we say it doesn't exist, but in both cases, we entrust the existence of the criterion of the beautiful solely to empirical exteriority.
Judgment of value and judgment of existence 1:25:05 We forget that it's a value judgment, "it's beautiful," and that value presupposes an investment by the subject. We'd already seen this together, so I won't insist too much, I won't elaborate too much, but you remember. And that's why the value judgment is not spontaneously scientific, it's even very badly placed to be scientific. When astronomers say the sun is a star and Venus is a planet, or Mars is a planet, those aren't value judgments, they don't say it's good, it's bad, it's beautiful, it's ugly.
1:25:39 Those are judgments of existence, as they say. I took the example of the stadium, I believe, if you recall it well. When I say this stadium measures 600 meters, I'm making a judgment of existence, or 400 meters if it's the athletics track. It's a judgment of existence; if you don't believe it, you measure it, we'll quickly agree, that's all. No opinion is dogmatically imposed on you. On the other hand, if I say this stadium is really well made, that makes no sense, unless we turn to the subject and ask, what did you want to do with it?
1:26:09 Ice hockey or soccer? Those aren't the same criteria for knowing whether it's well or badly made. You see what I mean? Here, we're no longer in objectivity in the empirical sense. One can say objectively that a stadium is well made once we know it's made for ice hockey and we deduce that it has what's needed, that it's not too hot. There you go. So I'd like us to retain what I've recalled here.
1:26:39 What a synthesis is, a true synthesis. You see, we sent the dogmatist and the skeptic back to back. The old sectarian Athenian and the clever sophist. We sent them back to back and at the same time we satisfied both, because we have a criterion, which is what the old man wanted. And at the same time this criterion isn't imposed from outside, it's indeed tied to each person's desire. And the question becomes: is there a desire common to all men? Then there would be a criterion of the beautiful.
1:27:09 You see? And we end with a question that I of course leave unanswered. We're not doing an aesthetics course today. But if we posed the question of the criterion of the beautiful this way, we'd already go a bit further than the usual discussion where people say tastes and colors aren't to be discussed, and they say that amid blows and pains. There you go. So I'd like to give you the floor, but before that, I'll give you one last, one last little example. I won't read the text word for word, it's not a piece of literary writing, it's a text by Freud.
Freud and the forgetting of "aliquis" 1:27:39 But still, an example to show that the unconscious, as I told you last time, is above all not the unconscious in the sense well known before Freud, that my breathing, my digestion happen unconsciously without my thinking about it, and we'd seen moreover that fortunately so, because if I got involved, my goodness, it wouldn't go, it wouldn't feel as good. And so, what is scandalous in Freud's conception, what caused a scandal and continues to cause a scandal perhaps even more so now, which is saying something even for his time—just look at the reactions of a Deleuze or an Onfray, it's now been two generations that they've been furiously, you know, throwing Freud's work into the bonfire, into an auto-da-fé, well yes, Deleuze started by writing Anti-Oedipus, and as for Onfray, you know everything he's done, he taught us that Freud had mistresses.
1:28:26 Did you know Freud had mistresses? It's appalling. Well. What a waste of time all the same. Let's get back to serious things. What is scandalous, and why it's hard to swallow, is that Freud says no, it's not that we have a physical unconscious, that we already knew before me, we have a psychical unconscious. I have thoughts that I do not think, I have wishes that I do not will. That's harder to take in. And well, because logically it's scandalous.
1:28:56 That means, I have wishes that I do not will, one would need to know where I will and don't will. And we've seen this now. Hippolytus—we thought he didn't love women, that he didn't want them, but he does want them. Well yes, well there you go, once his father is no longer there, he wants them. Yes. He never learned it, said, more Racine. He doesn't need to think it, that's why the form is beautiful, because the content is elevated and profound. I won't say more about aesthetics. I'll come back to Freud very quickly, before giving the floor, because I think everyone wants to talk about it.
1:29:29 One example, that's all, just one. Freud is on the steps of the university, of the medical school, with a friend who, like him, is Jewish, and like him a medical student—this is to understand the anecdote. And what are they talking about? The big problems that are starting to affect Jewish students at the university, there's the rise of antisemitism, etc. Freud has already started to model psychoanalysis a bit. But they're not talking about psychoanalysis, they're talking about this, about what's going to become of them. And Freud's friend says, "I'm going to go abroad because it's becoming unlivable."
1:30:00 And then, he makes a Latin quotation—at the time, Latin was very common among students—a quotation, you're not at all obliged to know Latin to understand the anecdote, which consists of quoting an excerpt from Ovid where Ovid says, "Let this ungrateful homeland not see my bones, I shall not die here." And when he makes the quotation, it happens to all of us, we make a quotation, to me too, haven't you noticed, I quote it and I feel it's not quite right. I've distorted a word or forgotten a word. You see, the same quotation, we feel it's not quite faithful, our memory is a bit shaky.
1:30:31 And he has forgotten a word. And that word, the word, remember this well, don't remember the quotation, but the word he forgets, is aliquis, which means "someone, anyone" in Latin. But you wouldn't need to know that, it changes nothing about the matter. No need for me to tell you tedious Latin. Aliquis. "Alcuno" comes from that. "Aucun," etc. Aliquis, means "someone." And so, saying it, he says, "Ah, that's not it." And then he sees a little smile on the mouth of his friend Freud and he says, "I see you coming, you're going to say again that my unconscious, etc." He says, "Yes!"
1:31:01 Yes, meaning, for Freud, there's no such thing as chance. If we made this particular slip, it's not entirely by chance. Isn't that so? So he says, "If you're willing to play the game, the game consists of you telling me right now, everything that comes to your mind, without reflecting, without censoring, without starting by saying this is important, this isn't important, whatever comes to your mind when you think of the word you didn't think of. Aliquis. Now that I've given it to you" — because Freud had restored it for him. He told him, "No, you mean such-and-such, ex ossibus, aliquis, ultor." "Ah yes, that's it." Well, there you go, it's aliquis, you forgot aliquis.
1:31:33 What does that word make you think of? So he says, "Well, first thing, I don't know, the first thing that comes to mind is to split A from liquis, and then, aliquis makes me think of liquid, of course, in German it's even the same root, liqueur." It makes him think of liquid, and then, "but I don't know if it's important." Freud says, "No, don't worry about what's important and what's not important. Keep going with what comes to mind." Without censoring, as they say, in the analytic method. Free association, to put it as Freud does.
1:32:06 Well, then, liquid makes him think of relics, there too it's the same root in German, and his relics make him think, "Oh, of my vacation in Naples, because I visited the church of San Gennaro—if you've been to Naples, you know the patron saint of Naples is San Gennaro." And I'm telling you, this is in reality, it's not in their story. You visit the relic of San Gennaro, where they keep a little vial said to contain the blood of the martyr San Gennaro. There you go. And once a year, on the feast day of San Gennaro, the blood is supposed to flow. It's the miracle of San Gennaro, a Catholic country.
1:32:39 And if it flows, it's a good sign, you can declare war on the Turks, or undertake a journey, or get married, there you go. If it doesn't liquefy, things look rather bad, it's rather a bad omen. There you go, that's the traditional given. And then afterward, I think of my relics of San Gennaro, and I think of other saints, of Saint Augustine, and then I think of something very unpleasant, which I don't want to talk about. "You have to tell him that your mistress is expecting a child." He says, "That—how did you guess that?"
1:33:10 Didn't you understand how he guessed it? Sorry? Yes. Lukewarm. Not bad. But that's already too much thought-out. I want to show you that the man made poetry without realizing it. He made us a poem, the other one, the one who forgot the word and who... with those associations there. Look closely. At the time, in the bourgeoisie of that period, among doctors, it's not the Viennese proletariat.
1:33:43 It's a real scandal if people find out about his mistress. So we understand why he forgot the word. It's because, had he thought of it, it would have made him think—we still don't know why—it would have made him think about his main worry, which wasn't the Jews at the university, it was, good grief, if only I could make this baby go away, or if it could... In short, if it could be normalized, that would suit me well. That was his real worry of the day. It haunted him, and so he didn't want to think about it, it was his unthought. Well, I'll go quickly. He had unrolled a calendar, that puts you on the track.
1:34:14 Saint Augustine, that's August in German, "August," San Gennaro, that's January. He's laying out a calendar. The good news is that the blood liquefies. If you haven't understood by now, honestly—and the bad news is that it stays hardened in the vial. Well there you go. Well yes. If she has her period, that's good, it's a false alarm. And if not, things look bad. He wasn't thinking about any of that at all. He was thinking about his vacation in Naples, about things like that. He's making a poem. That is, he's expressing—now you understand better what "expressing" means, and the depth of expression in man, symbolic expression.
1:34:51 That's why we'll never explain language starting only from stimuli and things like that, or from the forms of communication of dolphins and bees. We're a long way from that. And when I say it's a poem, I mean he makes a symbolic association such that there's something repressed, isn't there, of the true content that's spoiling his day and his period—someone said it—and instead, he allows himself to speak of these symbolic equivalents, which are his vacation in Naples and the miracle of San Gennaro, etc., but only on condition of forgetting the word that would have brought him back to all that, had he thought of it, had he fixed on it.
1:35:30 There you go. I'll give you back the floor, but I drew this example from a book I recommend if you want to laugh, because Freud isn't funny. I had a professor who used to tell us, psychoanalysis, if you want to start psychoanalysis today, is something mean. And then he'd bang on the podium. It strews our path with corpses. Well, that one's funny. You see? Look at the title. Psychopathology of Everyday Life. For once, he's not talking about the crazies, for whom there's a lot of respect as you know, but he's talking about you and me. A psychoanalysis of everyone.
1:36:01 It's not the neurotic, psychotic cases, etc. It's all the little, minor neuroses, not serious, not pathological, that we all engage in all day long. When we lose—I can't find my keys, good grief, you know it, we find them again, they were sitting on the electricity bill, obviously. Which we still hadn't paid. In other words, the unconscious saw where the keys were going. It's not that I don't see them, it's not that I forgot, I remember all too well, they're right there, but I don't want to think about it. At some point I'm going to go have a drink with Marceline and I need to deal with that bill I haven't paid. Yes, there you go.
1:36:31 I'm simplifying, but roughly, that's how it works. So it's full of anecdotes which, once again, belong to normality. The pathological case only exaggerating things and thus letting us better see things that are a bit more confused in the general case, in the normal case. There you go. Are there any questions about this modern, split self? You saw in what sense, right? Between him and himself. Yes. I have two questions. Thank you for your talk.
Memory, form without matter, and the Baudelaire break 1:37:03 in particular. I was struck by the fact that you knew whole passages by heart. I'll be careful not to quote the ones I've forgotten. I mean. Is it also a generational effect, that generations either know things or don't? That's very true. Sorry to interrupt you for a second because what you're saying is important. I said it historico-politically. Let me just make a small remark. It's a catastrophe. No, just a second. I'll get back to you right away. It's a catastrophe. I've taught. I'm not the only one. You've noticed I'm not at all in the hyper-traditionalist pedagogy, etc.
1:37:36 Well, still, there's also the opposite, which is a catastrophe. Teaching... I don't want to say lax, because then I'd be talking like the right. That's not at all what I blame it for. But teaching that destroys heritage and partly manufactures amnesia when it rails against learning by heart. If you don't learn by heart at a certain young age, it's like a muscle, memory. You won't be able to memorize multiple-choice questions in first-year medicine. Memory is trained. I'll give one example among a thousand.
1:38:06 I'll give you back the floor right away. Sorry, I'll use "tu" with you. There you go, I mean, what you're saying is very important. It's true that, generationally, erudition is not... it's rather a counter-value. It's become almost a counter-value, hasn't it? I'm speaking about the media and all that. There you go. I'll give you back the floor. But I'm not the erudite one. Moselle, I'd like... No, but I admire true scholars. And it's true, that's it, it's not certain. I had two questions to be sure I understand where we're headed with this, let's say.
1:38:40 Whatever suits you. The first thing is a very short remark, it's the fact that we can't separate form and matter, with the example of the ashtray. So I wonder, I say to myself, if someone decides to make a very precise drawing of the ashtray, to represent it in 2D, even in 3D, a rendering on the computer, we'd have the form, we wouldn't have the matter anymore. So how to resolve... How to reconcile, exactly. And is that connected, for the first question, is that connected to what you were saying just before about thought not being separable from language?
1:39:19 Which, in my opinion, well, which, you know, is debated in the history of the book, etc., but which is at the same time a fundamental question that's not really... we shouldn't let go of reason. Of course. It's good to see the relationship between thought, language, and form and matter. Of course. Second question, it's to make sure I've... Since it's ultimately, if I understood correctly, about making a kind of synthesis between the first part, which was the analysis of classical literature, well, of classical poetry...
1:39:52 "The self is hateful"—of the self, etc., of the character expressed in classical poetry. The second part was Romantic poetry, and so with another form of expression, of an affect. With a demand for totality, yes. And so, how does the synthesis work? Is that what you... Very good question. I'll refer it to next time, but this lets me make a prelude. We'll do the fugue next time. The synthesis is Baudelaire, starting from poetic modernity.
1:40:23 I'm doing this on purpose, following the outline found in textbooks. It's not me who's setting it up. Namely, Baudelaire says, watch out, Hugo's self is only the conscious self. You see why I'm bringing this up tonight. It's the self of consciousness, the self of feelings, the self of feelings. That's part of consciousness. I feel hatred, or else I feel love. I don't imagine I could have both at once. It's not like the politicians earlier. And, what does that mean? Starting with Baudelaire, we're going to replace feeling with sensation. That will give rise to Impressionism.
1:40:54 That's what I'm saying. The body will finally enter the fray. For the soul—Baudelaire said his was a poetry of the soul. And the soul is much closer to the body than the heart is. The heart is a part of the self. But the soul pertains to the totality. You have the most beautiful text by Baudelaire on this. It's a critical text. He's an immense critic. It's the "New Notes on Edgar Poe." The preface he wrote to the New Extraordinary Tales of Edgar Poe. There are the Extraordinary Tales. Then Poe made a sequel, a second collection of tales, the New Extraordinary Tales.
1:41:24 Take the preface to the New Extraordinary Tales. This preface is called "New Notes on Edgar Poe." There's a paragraph. You can look it up on Google since everyone's on Wiki. "It is admirable, this immortal instinct for the beautiful." You write just that. "It is admirable, this immortal instinct for the beautiful." And it refers you to the text, to the paragraph where the passage I'm drawing your attention to begins. An excerpt from the "New Notes on Edgar Poe."
1:41:54 Or Baudelaire. And that answers your question. I'm only doing it programmatically. We'll develop it afterward. He shows that there's a heresy. Since, for him, poetry is a religion. A fault in poetry is a heresy. I want you to picture it. There's a heresy that runs through all the poetry of his time, including Hugo, etc. It's the heresy of teaching. That's how he puts it. He underlines "teaching." Poetry has nothing to teach. You see, we're starting to understand. He understood that Racine expressed without knowing. Without needing to theorize it. He wasn't teaching.
1:42:24 What he wants is to entertain. He wants to please Madame Racine. He says so. "Our aim is to please your royal highness." "The essential thing is to please and to touch," says Racine. And not to say profound things. He's clever after all. So, the heresy of teaching. He says poetry's purpose is not to teach, as with Hugo, the emancipation of peoples. He doesn't say that poetry mustn't do good. He says that if it wants to do good, that mustn't be its aim at the outset, before the poem.
1:42:57 That the poem does good, of course, says Baudelaire. He asks for nothing better. But it will do all the more good for not having been thought up to do good, but to make beauty. We are in poetry, we are in aesthetics, we are not in politics. It's important, this Baudelairean cut. There was a mediation between the two, since we're a bit in literary history here, a philosophical reflection on literary history, that's where we are. Between the two there was a passage that made the Baudelairean cut possible, but which could not make it itself, because it was another one-sidedness, in romantic opposition — that was the Parnasse.
1:43:29 The Parnasse, which said, we're fed up with feelings, with this and that. We must return to objectivity, to hard things, which have clear, well-defined forms, to the plastic arts, and not to the mush of feeling. In short, the Banvilles, the Gautiers, etc. We must return to art for art's sake, they said. Art for art's sake, and not art for politics, art for this, for that, for morality, for good manners. Now that's exactly Onfray. I come back to Onfray, right? A beautiful work is a work that expresses good feelings, how nice. We know very well that good feelings have caused millions of deaths.
1:44:04 It's Pascal, isn't it? He's no monster, Pascal, but when he says man is neither angel nor beast, but the trouble is that whoever wants to play the angel plays the beast. Precisely because he would want to cut this totality that is man in two and keep, by abstraction, only the angelic part. At that point, he plays the beast. When you plunge a ball into a bathtub, it wants nothing more than to come back up and jump in your face. Do you see what I mean? If I repress the demonic part of myself, that's the best way to unleash it.
Plato, Mallarmé's flower, and the materiality of form 1:44:35 There you go. So, there was the Parnasse which, by tending to form, put Baudelaire on the path. A poem must be made so that it is beautiful. No doubt, art for art's sake. But, from there, it's not true that art has no content, says Baudelaire. He goes so far as to make a kind of neo-Platonism. You know that for Plato, our whole surrounding world, the empirical world, is only the reflection of a world beyond, which is transcendent to the sensible world, which he calls the intelligible world. And if all the flowers we see around us are only copies of the idea of flowers, which alone exist, that's troubling, Plato.
1:45:12 He doesn't say — he doesn't say there is the general concept of flowers and particular flowers, because on that, Aristotle agrees. But Aristotle is scandalized that Plato goes so far as to say that only the general flower exists. You saw earlier that Aristotle had said there is knowledge only of the general and existence only of the individual. And here Plato says no. What exists is the idea of flowers. It must be something other than abstract generality, the idea in Plato. And to show you that I'm not straying from your question, Mallarmé, then — I'm in the immediate succession of Baudelaire, right, especially when you read a poem like Sea Breeze, which is still very Baudelairean, before Mallarmé becomes almost hermetic.
1:45:49 Mallarmé, in a famous prose text, where he reflects on these problems, which I recommend to you, called Variations on a Subject. This subject is simply the crisis that the poetry of his time was going through. It's not an exquisite crisis, as he says. And in an excerpt from Variations on a Subject called Crisis in Poetry, which fits rather well into our seminar, between Crisis. We're not far from the war of 1914, which is drawing near as Mallarmé writes. Everything that expresses itself through modernity since Rousseau is going to be swallowed up in the carnage of 1914.
1:46:22 And Proust's In Search of Lost Time ends with airships above the Place de la Concorde, glowing red from the battle of 14-18. Well yes. Whereas it had started out from the gardens of Combray. So Mallarmé says, I say a flower — it's a famous passage. Implied: when I say a flower. Without specifying, I haven't said a tulip, I haven't said — I'm not in empiricism, I haven't said a rose, a chrysanthemum, etc. In short, the known calyxes. He says the known calyxes. Not that you understand — because it's always a bit tricky to understand Mallarmé right away.
1:46:53 I say a flower, and out of the oblivion to which my voice relegates — implied, let's not pay attention — any outline, insofar as it is other than the known calyxes, that is, far removed from all known, determined flower-shapes, the tulip, the rose. And out of the oblivion to which my voice relegates any outline, insofar as it is other than the known calyxes, musically arises — when I say flower, a flower, musically arises, it's beautiful, because at first we see something, now we hear musically. You see the correspondences of Baudelaire. Musically arises, the very idea, Plato, and sweetly.
1:47:25 So now there's something for the nose too. And for the tongue. Musically arises, the very idea, and sweetly, the one absent from every bouquet. The absolute flower, that's this flower, which will never quite be either the tulip or the rose, etc., which corresponds — and I said this earlier about the Parthenon — to a desire. And here we come back to Freud. Freud has great developments on smells. You see, we're not far from flowers.
1:47:56 A great development on smell. Why is the sense of smell so diminished in man, whereas in mammals it is crucial? Look at a dog's snout. It smells things from afar, scents, etc. Cats too. For mammals, it's vital. Smell — and you can imagine the role smell plays in the sexuality of mammals. And Freud says, it's no accident that this sense is repressed in human culture. And if it is sublimated — a Freudian term — that is, once it has been repressed, it comes back symbolically, but in sublime form, throughout the whole history of perfumery.
1:48:32 which goes back, as you know, like jewelry, like all of that besides, to the highest antiquity and even to prehistory. That's what I'm in the middle of saying. That's what he's in the middle of saying. It's taking us far, your question. So bravo for having asked it. Yes, yes. So, small mistake. It's very good to ask it — I'll say it naively, but it's the right kind of naivety, the one that makes us progress. Because you're going to help us understand what makes what's left of naivety in your question collapse.
1:49:03 You're going to help us understand what Plato calls transcendence, the intelligible world, form, the eidos, the idea. It's not your story of a shape on a design today, on a computer, in 3D, in HD besides. Why? Because it's not true that it's immaterial. I'm sorry to remain a materialist. But it doesn't reduce to matter either. If there's no form, there's no interest at all. But on the other hand, there are indeed — it's ionized.
1:49:34 There is indeed a screen. For it to exist, for it to be in the sensible world, it has to pass through some materiality. Even if it's a materiality somewhat less familiar to us than that of the carpenter or the blacksmith, of course. Is that a way of saying there can be no idea in itself as long as it isn't given form? As long as it isn't — go on — expressed. There's no in without an ex. That's dialectics. That's interesting. And we come back to thought and language. Yes, and we also come back to the critique of cognitivism.
1:50:04 I fully agree with you, because today there's an obsession among cognitivists to think that we naturally have, say, the concept of dog — which made some philosopher say that the concept of dog doesn't bark. Spinoza. Spinoza's magnificent nominalism. Right? Concepts are concepts. Realities are realities. The concept of dog doesn't bark. And since we're talking about dogs, the same Spinoza says we mustn't confuse, when we say dog, the barking animal dog and the dog constellation in the sky. That's nice.
1:50:35 You have to make words speak before using them. Otherwise you're in confusion, in propaganda. And you change meaning in the course of the conversation while keeping the same word, which is very dangerous. Take the word democracy, freedom. I crush Vietnam, right, under bombs, under napalm, in the name of defending the free world. And, you see, so there's no jealousy, on the other side, I'm fighting communism, but on the other side too, they speak of people's democracies. They also claim to defend democracy and freedom. So, you see, if we take the same words with exactly opposite predicates, it's better to take other words.
1:51:08 And to change the subjects, the grammatical subjects, along with the predicates. There you go. Aren't we down to the last question now? We can, we can — a lady — you can pass them along a bit, at the end of the minute, if there's a question on this. I admit I arrived a bit late. Since we're given the happiness of being allowed to ask a few last questions. Yes? Romain? Aliocha, sorry.
Beethoven and the unconscious as totality 1:51:39 Yes, well, to begin with, there's the classical self. The self from which I obtain powerful unity on condition of excluding from it everything that would make it a totality. Right? I think — you understand this well — I know your culture on this level, and I'd even like to have the cinephile culture I don't have.
1:52:09 We're talking about erudition, I'd love to have his cinephile erudition. And I know lots of films, films I like, I have no order in it. And so, unity at the expense of totality. And it's deliberate — we don't have — it would be obscene for a classic, right, for the totality of the individual to be expressed. There you go. Obscene, that is, that's what's there, in front, on the stage, right? That would be the last straw.
1:52:39 Today, it's talking about class struggle that's obscene, for example, in the contemporary consensus. It has to stay underground. Like the Titans in relation to the gods. And so, second phase, the opposite: we should only talk about the self, and if possible, in its totality. The Romantics — there, the self, instinct, inspiration, and not only the reasoned self of the classics, the self of consciousness, clear and transparent to itself — not at all, letting it express itself. The great musical break is Beethoven.
1:53:11 That's clear. With Beethoven, all at once, forces are unleashed, right, forces that had been held back in the music now called baroque, which I simply call classical, right? Everyone can quibble as they like, but what's certain is that baroque musicians never called themselves baroque, and were kept, in any case, under the bushel. The Gospel says you don't put a lamp under a bushel. And you don't put a lamp in a cupboard. And there, suddenly, with Beethoven, the forces break loose. To put it more rigorously: starting with Beethoven, rhythm is no longer an independent factor, as a great conductor once said, right?
1:53:47 Because up to Beethoven, the meter is constant in baroque music — tida-dim, tada-dam, tida-dim, yes, roughly, nine out of ten statistically, you take the nine-eighths of the music before the French Revolution, it's subject to what's called isometry or homometry. And starting with Beethoven, there are holes in the rhythm. You have no idea at all whether it will go left, right, or even whether the music will start again. I don't know, silence and all that. What happened in between? A trifle — the storming of the Bastille and the Napoleonic epic.
1:54:19 I mean, that's just what happens all at once, and there's no longer this old world — which wasn't so old, being that of people still around — where there was a place for everything and everything in its place, as in La Bruyère's Characters. Well, that's over. There you go. So with that, a world has to be remade. I've just summed up Beethoven's aesthetic. Order is not given in Beethoven. We inherit chaos. You see it in the first movements of Beethoven's works. And we're granted a triumph at the end, the most famous being the Ode to Joy, right, for instance in the Ninth — we're granted a synthesis, a victory over chaos, but because we've gathered up the scattered pieces here and there, whereas in the musicians before, there's order from the very first bars, right?
1:55:01 There you go. I wanted to give a bit of flesh to my answer to your question. And the synthesis consists in saying it's the unconscious that must express itself. It's totality more than ever. In other words, it wasn't yet the total self, romanticism. It had the pretension of totality and it confused the self with consciousness. A bit like the young Marx naively reading Hegel, right, saying, surely it's not consciousness that makes history. Hegel never said that. Hegel speaks of spirit, but spirit is not consciousness.
1:55:33 It's the totality of the self, precisely. It's certainly not just the conscious part of the self, which is only ideology, the little flower floating on the surface, whose roots plunge into rich soil full of snails, as Flaubert will say. Did I somewhat answer your question? Yes, but definitely. It's almost an antiphrasis, that 'definitely,' because precisely it has no end. To express the self in its totality is to realize all at once that nothing comes to bound it.
1:56:04 hence the risk of pathology, hence madness, neurosis, the Artauds, the Van Goghs — modernity is that too. It's no accident that it begins with German Romanticism, which is very close to this post-Baudelairean modernity. In France, Romanticism was delayed in its full force because the French language and the classical model meant that even French Romanticism remained very classical in expression. It was Rimbaud who noticed this. The Romantics are strangled by the old form, as he says with his young man's impertinence.
The beautiful and the hypothesis of a common desire 1:56:34 There you go. I won't dwell too long since it's late, but I'm giving you the lead for an answer to your question. I know you know enough to develop it further to advantage. Yes? I wanted to come back to the dialectic of the beautiful that you mentioned. The Sophist, Plato, and... Yes, in opposition, the dogmatist and the relativist. The dogmatist: there is a beauty in itself that one can find if one is sufficiently sensitive to it; and then the other, who holds that beauty is a construct, constructed by a particular complexion, etc.
1:57:05 You said that Plato, to lift these contradictions, looked at what was common to the two — it was the gaze, the very fact that, through the gaze, one seeks, outward, this beauty one is looking for. Through the gaze, very well. The very fact that it's the gaze — the gaze pushes us outward, the opposite of 'know thyself.' But even if beauty seems to be at the center of an opposition between the mind — is it relativist, is it dogmatic, is it a thing-in-itself — in any case, the idea of the beautiful seems to be a thing-in-itself since we constantly want to seek it outside. So that's it, that's the first question. And secondly, I was wondering how 'know thyself,' which comes finally as a synthesis of Plato's reasoning about this opposition — how the idea of the beautiful relates to this question.
1:57:45 What is the relation between know-thyself and beauty? Well, that's a bit where we left off when we spoke of this problem. We saw that — and it's the mediation you're forgetting if you want to find again the positive lead that keeps us from reaching dead ends — that the great turning point was when we said: it's beautiful equals it pleases me. I have a pleasure, and this pleasure may be given to me by the Parthenon or by an art form that is exactly its opposite. In both cases, if I say it's beautiful — the Romantic caricaturists, showing the Romantics with a banner reading 'the beautiful is the ugly.'
1:58:20 Still, in every case, it gives me pleasure. I go to a concert to hear music the classics find ugly — Beethoven's, for instance — too noisy or whatever, or too dissonant. Fine, but in both cases I feel pleasure, that's why I go. If I feel pleasure, it's because a desire is satisfied. That's the turning point. And so, desire happens in, not ex. It's expressed outwardly. We saw this with my examples of slips of the tongue, of psychoanalysis, of Freud's friend on the university steps. Desire expresses itself, it comes out, but it's not like an image that comes to me from outside, like a perception of the stars, for example, stars on my retina.
1:58:59 It's not the same thing at all. It's not a path that goes from outside toward the inside, which also exists. Here, it's the opposite. It's a bit like the cry I let out in a dream in the night. It's something that comes from inside and goes out toward the outside. That's expression, precisely. The movement that goes from within outward. But which comes from within. So your question becomes: to arrive at the in-itself of the criterion of beauty, either we all have desires that separate us from one another, and in that case, let's stop listening to politics and let's fight.
1:59:29 Let's stop going to listen to this fool Pagani and let's make war. To put an end to the crisis. Or else it's in desire that we come closest together. Which I have the audacity to think, deeply. It goes against everything you're being led to believe. I think we all desire the same thing. There you go. But that we are not at the same point in the journey that connects us to that desire. Quite simply. We are not always all at the same point, like in a game of the goose.
1:59:59 In the sense of a game of the goose, I don't mean that one is ahead, another behind, because it turns in a spiral like that. But basically, if you like, to caricature a bit, let's take eight guys. I said guys on purpose, meaning men caricatured as we most often are. I'll say 'us,' guys. Eight guys together at a table in a café talking about women. It happens often. And saying, ah me, what I like is the little curly brunette. Ah no, no, me, it's the tall blonde with flaxen, glowing hair as Hugo and Nodier used to say. Ah no, no, me, it's the little Irish redhead with freckles.
2:00:29 Well, each of them apparently separated by their criteria of preference, right? And then, all of a sudden, one goes by. I won't tell you how — whether she's blonde, small, tall, or whatever. What's certain is that all eight turn around, dumbstruck, and stare at her, drooling. That's it. That's my hypothesis. We could reverse it — women talking about men, I mean.
2:01:01 Thank you, Dominique, thank you all. Thank you.
