English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The texts sent and the preface to Les Filles du feu 1:46 So, I'm going to answer Jacques, but before that, I'd still like to read a few of the texts that were sent to you beforehand on our Facebook page, related of course to the themes of amnesia and anamnesis, memory and forgetting, if you prefer. We'll comment on these differences, but I'll start by reading these texts, most of which — not all, but most — plunge into the material of Greek mythology.
2:37 It's about, in particular, the figure of Mnemosyne. Mnemosyne — if you want to pronounce the Y in Greek, that is, as a U. I had a German father-in-law who used to say he'd gone from Paris to Nice via Lyon. So, I'll start by reading some of these texts, leaving aside for now Hölderlin's poems — I'll get to them very quickly afterward — precisely because on a first reading they often have sides that seem obscure or hermetic, if you like, or difficult. That doesn't stop you from tasting incomparable beauties in them. Yes, one could say of Hölderlin what Nerval asks of Alexandre Dumas at the end of his preface to Les Filles du Feu, for those who remember it.
3:38 I had cited this ending when I did my series on Angélique, which consisted of Nerval saying, very precisely, to Dumas — and since you were imprudent enough to quote one of the sonnets, he was talking about the Chimères, which have the reputation of being hermetic, that series of poems by Nerval, isn't that so? And since you were imprudent enough to quote one of the sonnets composed in a state of supernaturalist reverie, as the Germans say — written in the 1850s, and the word surrealism, as you can well imagine, didn't exist yet, it was almost a century too early. But I find the expression even better suited.
4:22 In a state of supernaturalist reverie, as the Germans say — you'll find them all at the end of the volume, you'll see they're hardly any more obscure — here he's being a bit ironic, knowing that Dumas won't understand much — they're hardly more obscure than Hegel's metaphysics, so you see he's not exactly a model of transparency either — or Swedenborg's Memorabilia, a Swedish mystic — and would lose their charm, and here I get to Hegel, and would lose their charm if explained, were that even possible; grant me at least the merit of the phrase.
4:56 I can't help going all the way to the last sentence, which forms the punchline of the preface, because first it applies, alas, to Hegel, but it's so fitting: 'The last madness that will remain to me will be to believe myself a poet; it is up to criticism to cure me of it.' One has never seen a madman with such self-control, and so reasonable, so to speak, and so apt, in a sense that is not incompatible with impertinence.
5:27 So, in order not to add to the difficulties already inherent in Hölderlin's text — difficulties that come from ignorance, which quite a few of our listeners share, naturally, since it's no longer part of basic schooling — mythology, before, that was called getting a classical education, meaning learning Latin and Greek, to put it quickly. And mythology played a large role. So, I'm citing here the rare passages relating to the figure of Mnemosyne. I'll start right away with Hesiod's text. You see?
Hesiod: Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, and the order of Zeus 6:14 You have it... it's the text numbered 2 in what was sent to you. I'll read you the French translation, of course. 'It is in Pieria that, united with the Cronid' — I won't comment, — 'it is in Pieria that, united with the Cronid, Zeus, their father, engendered Mnemosyne, Mnemosyne, queen of the hills of Eleuther, to be the forgetting of misfortunes, the truce from cares. With her, for nine nights, the prudent Zeus lay united, mounting far from the immortals in her sacred bed.'
6:49 'And when the end of a year came, and the return of the seasons, she bore nine daughters of like heart, who have in their breast no care but for song, and keep their soul free of sorrow. Near the highest peak of snowy Olympus, there are their bright choirs and their beautiful dwellings; the Graces and Desires have their abode near them.' There, I believe the reference was left for you on Facebook — an extract from the most important of Hesiod's works to have come down to us apart from Works and Days.
7:23 It is the Theogony, which recounts the whole genesis of the divinities of the Hellenic world, from primordial chaos down to the demigods and the later heroes. And this is taken from the Theogony, lines 67–79 and 135–136. I allow myself to add these details in order to urge you, to exhort you, or even, in today's more forceful terms, to pressure you into becoming acquainted with these texts which have...
8:07 Hesiod is almost as ancient as Homer, it's archaic Greek, it's miraculous that it has come down to us — and we have it. We have it on Wikisource, of course, all these texts — well, you search 'Hesiod, Theogony,' and you won't be disappointed. Something most of you have heard of, either entirely, or it's at least familiar to you, or some of you, at least in pieces, in fragments.
8:41 Like the relations between Zeus and his father Kronos, between Kronos and his father Ouranos — that's where you'll hear about Gaia. And now everyone knows Gaia, don't they? And there you see how she is engendered, and above all how she engenders almost everything that follows, the Titans and the gods and so on. So, I'll come back now to this text, which I hadn't yet commented on from the inside. 'It is in Pieria, united with the Cronid' — the subject is Mnemosyne, the sentence is a bit inverted. 'It is in Pieria, united with the Cronid' — why 'the Cronid,' in parentheses, meaning Zeus?
9:22 Because Zeus is the son of Kronos. Like the gods of Olympus. Don't confuse the gods with the divinities. We're going to insist on this today, since you saw in my outline — the outline I proposed to you, whose overall title is 'From mythos to logos,' which is a fairly classic dichotomy in philosophy — I speak of the fabulous origin that merges language and memory in the figure of Mnemosyne, but above all afterward I speak of chaos, of the titanic passing to the divine, and of Chaos — not 'chaos' as a common noun for the Greeks, it's someone, not something, even if it's someone very crude — from Chaos to Zeus.
10:15 So why do I insist on these reminders? First because the one who concerns us as a priority, Mnemosyne, who is not an Olympian goddess, even though she is the daughter of Zeus — sorry, even though she united with Zeus — she comes from the Titanides.
10:45 That is, from... The gods of Olympus, the Olympians, are a later generation in Greek mythology, I want to stress that. Roughly, disorder, chaos, preceded order. The indeterminate preceded the determined, for Zeus is also the guardian of laws, of cities. That's why his favorite daughter is Athena, the city par excellence, who, under the Latin name Minerva — the same figure — is at the same time the goddess of wisdom.
11:27 You know, it's in alluding to her that Hegel concludes the preface to the Philosophy of Right by saying — and I'll come back to this shortly, because some of you already sense the connection of this quotation, for those who know it — with memory: 'It is only at the onset of dusk that the owl of Minerva takes flight.' Minerva being the goddess of wisdom, everyone knew that at the time Hegel published — well, the literate world, when I say everyone, I don't mean the majority of the population.
12:01 Even though, since the birth of printing at the Renaissance, there were starting to be quite a few. The owl of Minerva — Minerva is wisdom, that is, quite simply, philosophy. Philosophy, says Hegel, takes flight at the end of a cycle, when it's too late, as he himself says. 'It is only at the onset of dusk that the owl of Minerva takes flight.' Now, why do I insist on this quotation? Because it's timely. We are completing the cycle of the seasons with autumn. Yes, I'm not joking. Autumn is the season of remembrance and memory. It's so obvious that you've forgotten it.
Autumn, the season of remembrance: the day of the dead in Nerval 12:47 And those who followed the series we did on Nerval's novella Angélique must remember that I pointed out that Nerval — I'll skip over his digressions, mine are nothing next to his — Nerval, in that text, spends his time changing the plotline. And digressions in the ordinary sense are a break in the diegesis, as they say in literature — that is, what today we'd call the 'pitch,' the plot, there you go.
13:26 He suspends the plot to say, 'this makes me think of something I'm going to tell you' — a digression in the ordinary sense. But the digression is even more serious when it lies not only in the plot, in the continuity of the action, but in the tone. Now, the first digression in tone — up to that point he'd had a journalistic tone, amusing, amused, with a slightly ironic verve — and suddenly, at the moment he leaves Paris, having failed to find the book he'd been looking for since Frankfurt, since the story began on the banks of the Main in Frankfurt, continued unsuccessfully looking for that book which can't be found on the banks of the Main in Frankfurt, on the banks of the Seine, and continues on the banks of the rivers of the Valois, the Oise, the Aisne.
14:18 There, just as he's finally leaving the Parisian conurbation, with much difficulty, because like a black hole, the Parisian conurbation has such density that it resists letting one leave. Even now, you know, when you want to leave on the first long weekend of the month, the hardest part is getting out of Paris, with the traffic lights and the traffic. So, seriously, when he finally leaves the Parisian conurbation and is at last in the countryside, he suddenly says: 'It is the day of the dead that I write to you, forgive these melancholy thoughts.'
14:52 For the first time here, Nerval turns serious, whereas he'd had, up until then, the amused and amusing tone and the verve of journalistic style. And when he says 'you,' he's addressing the editor of the newspaper to whom he sent this novella, which, I remind you, appeared as a serial in a paper called Le National. There you go. So, what am I bringing back to the memory of those who followed this seminar?
15:23 Because I had lingered over this digression, which alters not the plot but the tone. When Romanticism was going out of fashion, and when Nerval was writing, it was already finished. Toward the middle of the 19th century, Romanticism gave way to Realism in the novel, to the Parnasse in poetry. I'll go quickly. In short, in both cases, there's a return to things, to objectivity, to what is hard and not soft, like feeling, like self-introspection. I'll go quickly. To the point that it was so out of fashion that Nerval feels the need to apologize.
15:57 For having a tone that was already dated at the moment he was writing it. But then, how can one apologize, ask the reader's forgiveness, for having a melancholy tone, to quote him exactly, on the day of the dead — that should concern all of us. You see how we come back to memory? I'm telling you all this because tomorrow, in a few days — it's a metaphorical 'tomorrow.'
16:32 Tomorrow, we're going to celebrate All Saints' Day. No, I'm not a fetishist, I'm not going to go to a cemetery, but 'it is the day of the dead that I write to you, forgive these melancholy thoughts.' How can one apologize for being melancholy on the day of the dead? All this to remind you that it's the season of remembrance. Here, I'm going to needle Philippe again, who is very patient, because I'm going to quote yet another text that wasn't sent — but rest assured, if I had to send every text relevant to our topic, there would be 2000 pages.
Baudelaire's Chant d'automne, Proust, Chateaubriand 17:09 So that's why — but I'll tell it to you orally. It's called 'Chant d'automne' [Autumn Song]. You'll see how timely it is. 'Soon we shall plunge into the cold darkness; farewell, bright light of our too-short summers. I already hear falling, with a funereal shock, the wood resounding on the pavement of the courtyards.' Ah yes, those were the good old days. I'll make an anti-ecological aside, as usual. Those were the good old days — 'the wood resounding on the pavement of the courtyards.' Forests were being decimated back then, in the days when things were 'good' according to our environmentalists.
17:48 All our misfortunes supposedly came with industry, but before industry, people heated with charcoal. And that was far more polluting than any energy we use today. Even the dirtiest fossil energy you can find today, even coal, which is much dirtier than oil, which is dirtier than gas — even coal is cleaner than charcoal. And when Rousseau — I'll finish my aside, don't worry — Rousseau arrives for the first time at Ermenonville, invited by the Marquis de Girardin, not knowing he is living out his final weeks.
18:26 In fact, he is ecstatic to see the trees in the middle of the forest, because he says, 'in Paris, all the trees are black.' But that wasn't a figure of speech. There was no industrial revolution yet. He says this around 1770-80, let's say, at most. There were no factories blackening the walls of Paris. It was charcoal. So there, that explains Baudelaire's line: 'I already hear falling, with funereal shocks, the wood resounding on the pavement of the courtyards.'
18:57 'All winter will enter into my being: rage, hatred, shivering, horror, hard and forced labor.' And, unlike Nerval, Baudelaire is a bit more violent — 'And like the sun in its polar hell, my heart will be nothing but a red, frozen block.' 'I listen, trembling, to every log that falls; the scaffold being built makes no duller echo.' It's as if a coffin were being nailed shut somewhere. Let me go back to the text: 'For whom? It was summer only yesterday; this mysterious noise sounds like a departure.'
19:37 We come back to it. Autumn, the season of... why? Of remembrance, of memory, because it is always a departure from that memory. We take off from whatever we were engaged with. Not just any memory — not 'oh right, I have an appointment with Martin.' No, no. The reminiscence, the happy memory, the one we weren't expecting, the one that suddenly makes us think of something entirely different from the context we were immersed in — as we saw with Proust's admirable text last time, at the moment when he's exasperated by the people around him, by that social gathering where no one knows Odette, where she's very unlikely to show up that evening, and to whom he can't even confide his sorrow, because they would have taken it as mere childishness — you know, everyone is quite alone, as Proust says elsewhere too, speaking of his grandmother.
20:36 And when suddenly — and Proust adds, 'but suddenly it was as if she had come back' — because the musicians hired for the evening have just struck up a little musical phrase that, all at once, he wasn't expecting — poor Swann. I say 'poor Swann' because he receives it right in the heart, one might say — the musical phrase that comes, in a few seconds, mercilessly, as Proust says, for his heart and his soul, to restore to him the most beautiful days of his past life.
21:06 I don't know. And which had flowed away, but, as far as the depths go, it had never rained there. As far as the depths go, it never rained, right? So these departures, in that sense, take off from the here-and-now that was caught up in some action, as we all are, bound by duty. These actions, as Rousseau says, prescribe our duty to us, obligation prescribes duty to us. I could give you many more examples. Take Chateaubriand. Chateaubriand speaks of autumn, of the season, and says he sees the migratory birds passing. There, in Brittany, if he knew his region well, if he was in tune with the Breton autumn, he would see the wild birds passing and would say 'take me away,' take me far from here.
22:03 Memory, departure, remembrance. There's a link in all this. There's a link. So, I'm going to take this up again more rigorously on the philosophical level. Last time I told you I had circumscribed our problem through flagrant instances found in texts, mostly literary expressions. And there you had a musical one before we began. I'll come back to that later.
22:35 But right now — I'll come back later to the exegesis of these texts — I'm going right back to reading texts. So I return to the commentary on Hesiod. 'It is in Pieria, united with the Cronid, Zeus, son of Kronos, their father, engendered Mnemosyne.' The sentence is inverted. Mnemosyne engendered the gods — sorry, engendered the Muses, excuse me, the nine Muses, once she was made pregnant by Zeus, the Cronid, the son of Kronos.
23:15 So what do we learn? There are those who say that memory, Mnemosyne, is the mother of the Muses, the Muses being the whole set of the arts, but with a very clear dominant strand of arts that speak almost entirely to the ear. Music and dance are by far dominant when you look closely at the specialties of Calliope, Euterpe, Cassiopeia — Clio, Erato. You know, there's a classical record label called Erato.
23:49 So it's a relation to the mousikè — I don't say 'music,' but mousikè in the Greek sense, that is, the union of poetry, prosody, rhythm, melody, dance. And that's how we must understand the rest of the text when it says: 'And when the end of the year came, and the return of the seasons, she bore' — Mnemosyne — 'nine daughters, the nine Muses, of like heart, who have in their breast no care but for song, and keep their soul free of sorrow, near the highest peak of snowy Olympus. There are their choirs, their bright choirs, and their beautiful dwellings. The Graces and Desires have their abode near them.'
Diodorus Siculus: Mnemosyne imposes names on beings 24:35 There we are — I'll skip further comment and move on to Diodorus Siculus, geographer, historian, naturalist, who left a considerable body of work. All these authors are available online, out of copyright, after 2500 years for the most part. So, he says this, still speaking of Mnemosyne: 'Among the Titanides' — notice he doesn't say the Olympians, she predates the Olympians — 'among the Titanides, the art of reasoning is attributed to Mnemosyne, for Mnemosyne is the daughter of Uranus and Gaia' — of Ouranos and Gaia, the Earth — 'that is, of Sky and Earth.'
25:23 She therefore predates the gods, for Ouranos and Gaia have nothing of the gods about them — they lack the harmonious, balanced quality of Olympus. It is chaos, not yet cosmos. Because in the Greek notion of cosmos — which is nothing at all like what today's astronomers mean by 'universe,' since some of them get carried away with a delusional harmonious cosmology, rather like doing alchemy instead of chemistry, or astrology instead of astronomy—
25:53 No, the notion of cosmos among the Greeks indicated something harmonious. And that even comes from... And moreover, their notion of physis, nature, comes from a root, from a verb meaning 'to grow,' as if the universe were a plant, or at least a living being. So, among the Titanides, that formless, chaotic world — you understand, in a moment I'll speak philosophically of the indeterminate that preceded the determined.
26:23 The world of words and language, of determination and logos — you understand better now why I go from mythos to logos. But in myth, one doesn't begin with order, with rationality. No. That's a later conquest, hard-won. Everything began in wailing cries, not in order and light. We remember our childhood as luminous. But that memory is what, in Freudian terms, would be called a screen memory, one that hides something older than our memory — the true, very first infancy, which is a wailing distress.
27:10 So when we speak of the Titanides, the Titans who were, moreover, at war with the gods — some of them had a hundred arms, you know, well, I'll skip it, look it up, read Hesiod, at the beginning of the cosmogony, it's all told there. 'Among the Titanides, the art of reasoning is attributed to Mnemosyne.' Well now — we already knew she was the divinity, I don't say the goddess, the divinity of memory. Now it turns out she's also the divinity of language.
27:41 She gave names to all beings, which allows us to tell them apart. We are no longer in chaos. There is distinction. There is an up, a down, a right, a left. We are in order. No, no, this isn't physical order. It's not the order studied by astronomers. They already have enough trouble introducing metron, measure, into it. It's not that kind of order, for in scientific astronomy there is no up and down. You know that well; there's no left and right. Turn around, and left and right are reversed — they aren't substances, they're relations. Relations are what exists only, as the name indicates, in relation to something else. It's what doesn't exist by itself, unlike the subject or substance, which we saw not so long ago.
28:37 So I'll repeat this crucial passage from Diodorus Siculus. Among the Titanides, Mnemosyne is credited with the art of reasoning. She gave names to all beings, which allows us to distinguish them and to converse with one another. We also owe to Mnemosyne the means of recalling the memory of past things which we wish to remember, as her very name already indicates. Yes, because in Mnemosyne, you know that memory itself, the French word 'mémoire' is a contraction, the 'n' was dropped, wasn't it?
29:15 The N was dropped, sorry, wasn't it? And you find it again in Amnesia, in Anamnesis, in everything related to memory, to its return or its loss, right? So I'll reread the second line: she gave names to all beings. Now, this is among the Greeks, but it reminds us of the Old Testament. God gave Adam the privilege of naming the creatures.
29:47 We have to wait for man, the animal that speaks, for creatures to have a name, for this to be a donkey and that to be an ox. This was not the case in Chaos, everything is mixed together, isn't it? And don't think I'm exaggerating. The world of chaos, when you read Hesiod and the Theogony, the world prior to the Olympians, before Zeus came to put order into all that, even resorting to the thunderbolt when disorder resisted order, see his war against the Titans.
Uranus, Gaia, Cronos: the pre-Olympian world and the birth of Venus 30:34 If you can't imagine it, I can't help giving you a few examples of what the pre-Olympian world was like. Take Uranus, one of the very first, Uranus, the sky. It was by fertilizing the earth that the other Titanide, titanic divinities were born. Only, don't think he courted her gently. No, no, he violated her every night.
31:19 And I'm going to read you this passage, here it is. And as Gaia, the Earth—this is the only example I'll take to show you what a pre-human world is. Man doesn't mean... There is no worse bestiality than that of humanity when it does evil. I'm not idealizing man. I'm showing that it's a concept, a tendency toward which all of history strives. As Rousseau magnificently says, no one has said it as clearly as he did, speaking of Émile, of the king who is indifferent to losing his crown, but he who loses it and does without it is then above it.
32:11 From the rank of king that a coward one day, a fool, a wicked man can fill as well as anyone. He, the king, only rises to the state of man that so few men know how to fulfill. It's that man I'm talking about, whom so few men know how to fulfill. And it's not an idealized man, it's all of history working to embody him, to realize him. And it starts right from the Titanides. But listen instead—as she is tired of giving birth for nothing and of being violated every night, just imagine, I don't even dare ask you to visualize what that might look like, the violence of Uranus and the sky.
32:48 And so she complains to her children, who tremble in the depths of chaos—there she complains, and among them is the subtle Cronus. That's Time, of course, that's Time, who will soon be the father of Zeus, but we're not there yet. So, of all the children born of Gaia and Uranus, they were the most powerful, they were hateful to their father from the very beginning. Well, and as they were born one after another, he, Uranus, buried, yes, these children—look at this world—he buried them, depriving them of light, in the depths of the Earth.
33:25 So there you have it, just when you would idealize Uranus, the sky and the cosmos, wouldn't you? He began by burying the children he had fathered, mistrusting their violence. And he rejoiced in this evil deed, and the great Gaia groaned within herself, full of pain. There already is the Mater Dolorosa, as it will later be called in Christianity speaking of the sorrow of the Virgin Mary, isn't there, the Mater Dolorosa. Then she conceived an evil and cunning plan. As soon as she had created the race of white steel, the blade, she made from it a great sickle and, warning her dear children, she roused them and said, her heart full of sorrow—well, I won't waste too much of your time—she told her children, it must be done, yes, it must be done, to cut your father.
34:15 A counter-castration: the children are going to castrate the father with the weapon their mother will give them, a sickle. When I tell you I'm not idealizing this pre-Olympian, pre-rational world, because for a man like Heidegger, for whom the rational is the beginning of the end, isn't it, it's the withdrawal of Being—we're going to learn some fine things about Being, aren't we—and Cronus, among the children to whom the mother makes this request, answers: 'Mother, indeed, I promise, I will accomplish this vengeance, I no longer have respect for our father, for he was the first to devise a cruel design.' We're far from honor, family, fatherland.
34:56 He spoke thus, and great Gaia rejoiced in her heart. She hid him in ambush and placed in his hand the sharp-toothed sickle, and confided to him her whole plan. And great Uranus, the sky, came bringing the night, and over Gaia, in the proper sense, above her, full of desire for love—one must hear Eros here—he stretched out entirely in love, he stretched himself out entirely on all sides, and from the ambush his son seized him with his left hand, and with his right he seized the huge, terrible sickle with its sharp teeth, and his father's genitals he quickly cut off and threw them behind him, and they did not fly from his hand in vain.
35:39 All the drops—I know where I'm going to stop, don't worry—at the birth of someone you know. All the drops of blood that flowed, Gaia gathered them, and as the years went by, she gave birth to the mighty Erinyes, the goddesses of vengeance, and the great giants with shining weapons. I'll go to the next sentence. And the parts he had cut off, Cronus mutilated with the steel and threw them from the mainland into the stormy sea. They floated long upon the sea, and a white foam sprang from the immortal flesh. And there is the one you know, but you would never have imagined the conditions under which she was born. And a young girl came out of it.
36:24 And first she was carried to divine Cythera, and from there to Cyprus, surrounded by the waves. So I'll translate for you: Cythera is the island of Cythera in Greece, and Cyprus is of course Cyprus. And you've recognized Venus. But you know her as painted by Botticelli, emerging from the waves on a shell, already whitish, the shell. You see what Freud calls sublimation. There's horror behind all that, but it has been sublimated. What does Baudelaire say about Paris, which inspired his most beautiful poems? 'You gave me mud and I turned it into gold.' That's sublimation.
Reply to a listener: Max Planck and Voltaire's Zadig 37:03 There, that was to tell you—when I speak, I come back to my dichotomy, I don't lose sight of the essential. From mythos to logos, from myth to language. The importance of Mnemosyne who gives birth to both memory and language. And now I'm going to start answering Jacques Carsin. I couldn't do it before this precise point on which Diodorus Siculus enlightened us, when he reminds us that our heroine—that's the main question tonight.
37:48 The Titanide Mnemosyne, I'll say it one last time: she gave names to all beings, which allows us to distinguish them and to converse with one another. We also owe to Mnemosyne the means of recalling the memory of past things which we wish to remember. What does this have to do with Jacques Carsin's questions? So, first, I'll answer his last question. There. He was asking me for the references of two quotations I had cited in a previous session.
38:27 I had cited Max Planck's sentence, the father of quantum theory, who said in a text called 'What is called a physical law?' I'll go quickly, I interrupt to say right away. The philosophical summary—what is called, that's the question of essence. The definition, what is called a physical law? We're in the realm of words. And he answers—a good physicist—a physical law is a constant relation established between two variables. Very well. Heat expands bodies.
39:05 And all of a sudden, he moves to a new line and says: that being said, do physical laws exist? And there, we move from the question of essence to the question of existence. One can perfectly well define a thing without it existing. Or without worrying about whether it exists or not. I can say an angel is a divine figure that has the form of a man and has wings. I define it, that doesn't mean it exists. We're in the world of words, of essence. I can imagine a polygon with 12 million regular sides. Why not? I can't see it, it would be too small next to us, but I can conceive it, it's very easy. It's no harder to conceive than a square with 12 million sides.
39:50 So by saying 'do physical laws exist?' we move to existence. The second reference I had made was this king whose text Jacques Carsin asked me about, this king who, every morning, was showered with praise, a whole obsequious court telling him he was the best, the most handsome, the wisest, the most intelligent, which he found delightful because he was very vain, and which became unbearable to him after two, three, four days.
40:32 Like the dish you prefer in cooking, I mean, if I serve you nothing else every day for a month, you'll start turning up your nose. And the longer it lasts, the truer it will become. I'll answer right away for the second text, which is Voltaire's Zadig. That too exists on Wikisource, I refer Jacques to it. I thank him for asking for clarification, it means he's paying close attention to what is said.
41:06 These are philosophical tales. Voltaire takes the opportunity to poke fun at the vain side of vanity. I'm making the pun on purpose, which works very well in French. On Wikisource you have practically the complete works of Voltaire, even a good part of his correspondence. And you have, of course, first and foremost, his philosophical tales, and his Zadig, which is not the least known among them. As for the first question, that is, in what text does Max Planck speak of the essence of a physical law and calls into question, and says—is it possible?
41:46 That one fine day bodies might fall upward instead of downward—he doesn't put it that way, but in short, that nature might no longer obey the laws we have derived. I'm sorry to tell Jacques that I can't give him the exact reference because this text was kindly shown to me by a colleague in a staff room. It was when I was teaching—a physics teacher, a physics agrégé, it was in Côte d'Ivoire actually, a Frenchman, an aid worker who showed it to me to illustrate our discussions, which were very, very fruitful, indeed I owe him a lot.
42:33 It was in an anthology of texts for science-track final-year students in philosophy. I believe I recall—you see, I gave a lecture on memory and here it becomes uncertain—I believe I recall it was published by Hatier, but I can't tell you the exact year. What is certain is that it was before 1985, that's certain, in the 70s-80s, an anthology of philosophical texts for final-year students, Hatier, there you go.
Appetite is enslavement, institution makes freedom possible 43:07 That's a meager result, but I can't say more. That said, that was for his last message, but in a previous message—I don't know—he says this to me, Jacques Carsin, you see, he's referring to a passage where I had quoted Rimbaud's 'I is an other,' and I had linked it to Rousseau's sentence, isn't that right: the impulse of mere appetite is slavery. The impulse of mere appetite—in short, when I eat only because I'm hungry, with no other consideration, that is not when I express my freedom, quite the opposite. I show that I am a slave to natural law.
44:06 On the other hand, when I eat with chopsticks rather than with forks, at 7pm rather than at 9pm—no human society eats without one of these rules when it has the possibility to. I'm not talking about those who, in the desert, suddenly find water, isn't that right, and say 'yours first.' No, no, no, again. There. So this is very important, and he had understood very well the anthropological, ecological importance of this passage from Rousseau, and he had very intelligently connected it—forgive me for making a value judgment, but I'm very glad he made the connection—with Rimbaud's phrase, 'I is an other.'
44:47 Because each of us, as a human being, is at once plunged into natural necessity, into the slavery of instinct, and into the freedom made possible by institution. I no longer say instinct. Hunger is an instinct, the meal is an institution that can be modified. So there's room for freedom. And he alludes to my famous red light, doesn't he? I have to obey the red light, it's not at all like having to eat to live. I can't live without eating, but I can transgress the red light. But wait, are we drifting away from memory here? Not at all, quite the opposite. And here I quote the end of Jacques's question.
45:28 And you'll see how, in speaking of the plane of language, we come back to memory. Which justifies why Mnemosyne presided over both. Listen instead, it's Jacques speaking, may he forgive me for quoting him: In the city, we do what we can; in nature, we do what we want. Again it's a 'one' and not an 'I,' that's what troubles Jacques, that's why he was questioning me. This 'one' is a bit indefinite, he's right, it's even what grammar calls an indefinite pronoun. In this sense, individual freedom, deciding to cross or not when the light is red, could only exist within the prior framework of a collective freedom.
46:07 Forgive me for making value judgments again, but I rejoice in the relevance of Jacques's reading and reflection. Not everyone sees so clearly how much freedom, our individual freedom, each one of ours, supposes and presupposes institutions, that is, a prior collective freedom. Otherwise, it's force that rules, not right. So I repeat, I continue reading Jacques Carsin: in this sense, individual freedom—I wish the parenthesis—could only exist within the prior framework of a collective freedom, the one that wanted the rule of the game. He underlined 'wanted.' This overlaps again with the analogy of language. You see we're arriving at language.
46:57 In order to be able to say what I want, I must comply with the rules of a particular language that preexists me. Yes indeed! If I say 'pass me the salt' at the table, and so that I'm not given sugar instead, I need to speak the language that preexists. I must submit myself, but not the way I submit to hunger, to the instinct to eat. I must have learned to speak a language the other understands, right? Otherwise they won't pass me the salt. So, a particular language that preexists me and is not a one-off invention by eminent academicians—he sees this very well, Jacques—French was not created by the Académie Française, it is created by you, by me, and by our children who modify it at every moment. And that's how speech makes language evolve, isn't it?
47:48 And which is not a one-off invention—I say this because with inclusive writing and all that, you know, there are those who would like to institute. No, no language comes from institution. Institution can codify, recommend, sometimes forbid. It doesn't manage to prevent speech from transforming institution. Language, tongue, speech. I must comply with the rules of a particular language that preexists me and is not a one-off invention by eminent academicians but rather a kind of apparently spontaneous order. I really like Jacques's perplexity.
48:25 I'm going to bring together a problematic that I'll come back to. Hence the 'one' rather than the 'we' or the 'I.' Rousseau doesn't say 'the impulse'; obedience to the law one has prescribed to oneself is freedom—he says obedience to the law that 'one' has prescribed to oneself. So then, what triangle—power, will, decision—superimposed on another—nature, humanity, individuality—would be relevant?
48:56 For now, this is how I manage. You see someone doubting and hesitating like this over words. These are the most fruitful moments. This is what Socrates called the pains of childbirth. It's fruitful. A child is going to be born. A new piece of knowledge. For now, this is how I manage, but as you will have understood, I remain in a fog as to the relations between the 'one' and the 'I,' hence my question. So I take up this question again. Yes, he saw it very well. I go back to the middle of his quotation. In order to be able to say what I want, I must comply with the rules of a particular language that preexists me, but which is not an invention.
Nature or convention: the pact and the memory of names 49:31 So what is... I ask him to recall, if he attended this session, I'm not sure, but it seems he attended quite a few, where I recall the old way of posing the problem of the origin of language: is it by nature or by convention? Does language imitate natural sounds? That's not the case for a few words like 'splash,' and yet, you know, the Germans hear 'kikeriki' where we hear 'cocorico,' even though our ears are constructed roughly the same way.
50:09 And as for the English, who never do anything like everyone else, they say 'cock-a-doodle-doo' for the rooster's crow. So, this is an old problem that Plato studies in the Cratylus, in an almost humorous mode, but very learned and well documented. The Cratylus, or on words: by nature or by convention? We saw, for example, earlier, that sexuality is something that comes from nature, but marriage, for example, is an institution.
50:42 Hunger comes from nature, the meal is an institution, so it presupposes conventions. In 'convention' there's 'con-,' which comes from the Latin 'cum,' which implies, as Jacques rightly says, that I am in relation to a community that preexists me, whether I want it or not. Now, I had said that everything essential in human history, everything concrete, is never clear-cut, is never purely natural, nor purely conventional.
51:12 Except for a few things like the highway code, well. But I'm talking about what has truly shaped us for millennia. But between the two, I had, if you recall, suggested the notion of the pact. The pact is more murky than the contract or the convention, which are clear things, made in broad daylight. You take out the contract to see at what article, at what clause, it was stipulated that if a slave dies—sorry, a debtor, one of my debtors, I'm the creditor, that doesn't happen to me often—dies before settling his debts, his creditors can cut him into pieces, it's in Roman law, I'm not inventing anything, they can cut him into pieces and share out a thigh here, an arm there, etc.
51:58 Well, that's clear, it's in the law, and no one is supposed to be ignorant of the law. But I'm talking about the pact, the connivance, you see, words less clear than contract or convention, but which, far from nature, suppose that human beings among themselves have brought forth a new world. But a world that doesn't dare name itself. You see why I'm dwelling on this? Why Mnemosyne is at once the mother of language and of memory, in that order, and of language? Because you need memory to say, look, a doe crossed the road. And you need even more to say not just a doe but a Buffon's kob, suppose I'm in Kenya, or a roan antelope.
52:49 Or a Defassa waterbuck, or a waterbuck, a reedbuck if you prefer in French, or a Thomson's gazelle or a Grant's gazelle. The more differentiated the words, the more we see distinctions that were drowned out in the generality, in the grayness of the word 'doe.' Which, zoologically, is a grayness—in poetry it's something else—but it suggests other very precise details.
53:21 So once again, this presupposes memory. I see a dachshund and then I see a Saint Bernard and I say, both are dogs, for heaven's sake. I have memory. It's not my eye that saw a common point there. Oh no. I remember that they belong to the same species and that I belong to a community that calls them both dogs and must have certain reasons for doing so. You see? So what am I saying? I'm saying that we will never fully clarify the problems we raise in philosophy. Not because it's so difficult that we'd need infinite time. That's Kant.
A force that refuses to remember: Suddenly, Last Summer 54:06 We draw asymptotically closer to happiness but never reach it when we follow the moral law. It's an infinite duty-to-be. No, no, no, no, what I'm saying is more serious. And at the same time less bleak. I'm saying that there is within us a force that does not want to clarify the words of language, that does not want to remember. And that is why Diodorus Siculus was quite right to say that Mnemosyne invented the memory of the things we wish to remember.
54:43 For there are memories we don't like being reminded of, that we don't like to recall, isn't that so? The proof is that there are people who have been in analysis for 20 years and still can't bring them to the surface. And they've spent a fortune. Yes, I know. I have friends, and I'm thinking of them. There. I'm not telling them to stop at all. I'm just noting that it's very difficult, even when we make efforts, sweating heavily. Let me give a cinematic example, a striking film that film buffs know much better than I do. I'm a poor film buff.
55:23 Compared to those who know everything by heart, but Suddenly, Last Summer by Mankiewicz, with a Liz Taylor who was 17—forgive me for starting with her, but she wasn't yet Liz Taylor, she wasn't yet a sacred monster. She played to perfection the role of a girl locked up in a psychiatric asylum, and Montgomery Clift, whom I hold a bit of a grudge against because he was my wife's favorite actor. The same one who plays wonderfully in 'From Here to Eternity.'
55:56 And the whole film consists in trying to say clearly, but what happened last summer? Only, throughout the film, for nearly two hours, we're constantly on the verge of remembering the girl, Liz Taylor, in the psychiatric asylum. As a result she's locked up. By an aunt, etc. Even though she isn't mad at all, but she witnessed terrible words from her brother, and her mother doesn't want anyone to remember, because she adored her brother, who died in a tragic way. But I'm not going to tell the whole film.
56:33 Throughout the whole film, the pitch, the essential thing, is that she's on the verge, and each time she's about to get there, it gets blurred, she breaks out in a sweat and has anxiety attacks. I won't tell you the ending. But this is to illustrate for you that we will never clarify the words of everyday language, and you understand why mathematicians, since Antiquity, chose another mode of expression, when it's not a matter of knowing ourselves, but of knowing the world around us in order to be able to act on it, to make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of the world around us, of nature, to speak like Descartes.
57:11 You understand why in our own language, which has nothing to do with mastery of nature, language which is a barely assumed mastery of ourselves, since we use it, but not all the way. That's Mnemosyne. You see, there's an ambivalence. I remember up to a certain point. Right? And that explains why, in the plan we sent you, I attach great importance.
57:45 I attach great importance in the plan to these items, memory and forgetting. I haven't yet quoted the text of Pausanias, the last ancient text I'm going to quote, and I raise the question: can there be memory without a hole in it? You understand better now. The effort I make to remember makes me pass over something else in silence, as in crosswords, there are black squares.
58:15 For me to see the white ones appear, I have to hide, like a grid — it's just a grid. You place it, you pass it over something, it reveals certain things and conceals others. At the cost of concealing others. In the effort I make to remember, that same effort, you know, that I make with my right hand, holding my head, I don't see that meanwhile my left hand is pushing the ball down into the bathtub, under the water, preventing it from coming back up to the surface and jumping in my face. Can there be memory without a hole? Is it even desirable? You see, I'm speaking here at the individual level, I haven't yet spoken at the collective level.
58:56 I'm telling you that for seven years I haven't stopped talking to you about the same subject, that is, philosophy, which is a reflection on words, that is, on the domain of Mnemosyne. And Plato said: all knowledge is recollection, all progress in knowledge is a re-remembering, not a memory, a re-memory, something we once knew, that we had forgotten and that comes back. Good grief! You understand better now why I put this... I asked Philippe. And I thank him for including this admirable excerpt from the sublime E-flat major trio by Schubert, which is used.
Schubert's E-flat trio and the return of memory 59:38 That's why I included it, because I know quite a few of you will say, but I've already heard this admirable melody somewhere, the cello phrase, which doesn't come right away — I do that on purpose, at the beginning the music is brilliant, which is very rare with Schubert. It shows all the possibilities of the instrument admirably. No, no, no, no. Schubert is perhaps the most thoroughly lyrical of all composers, strictly lyrical, who doesn't have the dramatic courage of a Beethoven, who avoids shutting himself into a single feeling and who makes victory triumph at the very moment when things seem most desperate — Beethoven's great finales in major.
1:00:19 Beethoven is a hero who leads us collectively to a common salvation. No! Schubert is either in ecstasy or in dejection, right? And here, why did I play you this passage? Because he creates a finale like he never did before. For once he's solar, Apollonian, happy, light, Viennese, as controlled as ever. And suddenly, this haunting melody on the cello comes back, rises again — the one we discovered with astonishment, it's so beautiful, in the second movement, and which returns at the end of the fourth movement, the finale. I ask you to listen to this Schubert trio.
1:01:01 And especially in this recording — it's old, but with excellent sound quality for the time, because it features members of the Busch Quartet, with Serkin, who had married Busch's daughter. Yes, you couldn't make this up. I mention it because a book has come out about Busch, right? A righteous man among the righteous, one of the rare heroes of German music. Most of the great violinists are Slavic, Slavic Jews. Take the top ten, you're still among Slavic Jews. David Oistrakh, Yehudi Menuhin, Jascha Heifetz, Leonid Kogan, Nathan Milstein. We're still at the summit. Even now, Vadim Repin. And here we have a German, right in the middle of the Nazi era, Adolf Busch.
1:01:56 Who said, this is the barbarism we're living through, when the Nazis wanted to worship him, wanted to make him the national hero, he went into exile. Forgive this parenthesis, but if I chose this version, it's first of all because connoisseurs, as they say, all agree it's by far the most beautiful, musically — Busch's integrity. So, I recommend the book by a very great musicologist, whose name doesn't come to me right away because I got worked up, but I'll find it before we finish.
1:02:28 André Tubeuf, excuse me, Tubeuf like 'boeuf,' B-E-U-F, sorry, whom listeners of France Musique know well, and who is one of our greatest musicologists on Busch. So again, in this version, it really shows the return of this haunting melancholy that we thought had been repressed by the cheerfulness of the finale.
1:02:59 Because the purpose of a finale in sonata form — I don't want to bore you, but you see this in the classics, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, classical in the sense of music history. There's a romantic sensibility, sometimes I mix things up, but that's not romantic. And in sonata form, the finale, the last movement, which is the third or fourth depending on whether there's an interlude or not, must leave — it's a rule — must leave the listener with a sense of release, with a rather resolved feeling, right? And not with something tragic.
1:03:34 The only exception in all of Mozart is the famous G minor symphony that you all know because Samsung and iPhone use it as a jingle, and which ends with a violent minor chord, which is extremely rare in classicism. There, I'll stop, otherwise someone will have to stop me with a rifle when I talk about music. This memory, which I thought I'd gotten rid of, right? Remember Proust, the text from last time, when suddenly he hears the musicians strike up Vinteuil's little phrase, just when he was least expecting it, and suddenly he says, 'My God, it's Vinteuil's little phrase, let's not listen.' Let's not listen, but it's too late.
1:04:21 And that gives us one of the most beautiful pages in the history of literature. So that's why I put memory and forgetting in the plan, you see? If the origin of the myth is fabulous, in the sense of fable — the myth, so it's not clear — the fabulous origin merges them into the figure of Mnemosyne, that's why I centered everything on her. She stands at the boundary between the rational, language, the logos, and myth. She descends from Uranus and Gaia. And she predates the Olympian order, good grief.
Pausanias: drinking from Lethe then from Mnemosyne 1:05:01 And so, I can now read you, still from an ancient text, the text of Pausanias, likewise a geographer, historian, naturalist, who speaks of the rites connected of course with death — by the way, you know that among the Greeks, to die is always to cross a river, or a lake, or a body of water, you know, Charon, the ferryman, Charon, Charon, the ferryman, 'when Don Juan had descended to the underground wave, and when he gave his obol to Charon' — that's a poem by Baudelaire that begins like that, Don Juan in Hell. So dying is making a crossing, a crossing with no return. Only Orpheus tried to come back from it, right? Or rather, to bring back the one he loved and who had died, since he himself wasn't dead — Eurydice, right? And she was snatched from him because he turned around. Now, Pausanias says, you are led, you, the one who is dying.
1:06:13 The one who is dying. You are first led at night to the river Hercyna. Once there, two children born to citizens, about 13 years old, called the Hermai, wash you. You see, thanks to Pausanias, we learn about customs. They anoint you with oil and perform everything that belongs to their ministry. These are the rites, we're in the realm of rites. The priests then take you and lead you not to the oracle, but there are springs very close to one another. You must first drink the water called 'the water of Lethe,' good grief, of forgetting, to make you forget everything you had been occupied with until then. That's what dying is.
1:06:59 Afterward you drink the water of Mnemosyne, so that you remember well what you will see as you go down. Do you realize? To die is to remember and to forget. When I told you there are holes in memory... But necessary holes, not holes just because I didn't leave any traces, I forgot to note it down. No! No, maybe it's because somewhere deep inside myself, I see it very well, I don't want to know it, and I don't want to see it. I thank Jacques, without whom I wouldn't have been able to dig into all these developments in the order I just did.
Rimbaud: language remembers for us 1:07:42 When he reminded us that it was a matter of words — I had linked, when I tell you that I spend my time saying the same thing, good grief, in my very first recorded talks, I'm thinking of 'Between Crisis and War, Philosophy,' number 2, number 1 we'll never be able to recover, because the sound track was badly damaged. So, number 2, if you look on our YouTube channel, 'Between Crisis and War, Philosophy' number 2.
1:08:12 I give an example of linguistic unconscious with a line from Rimbaud, taken from 'The Drunken Boat': 'The exalted dawn like a flock of doves.' It's the boat speaking. 'I have seen at times what man thought he saw, I have seen the low sun stained with mystic horrors, lighting up long violet clottings, like actors in very ancient dramas, the waves rolling far off their shudders of shutters.'
1:08:44 Well, moving on, and suddenly, 'the exalted dawn like a flock of doves.' I tried to analyze this line — not interpret it, heaven forbid, how could one interpret such splendor — analyze it. As it stands, it says 'exalted dawn like,' I analyze 'like,' and I say it's a comparative element, that's not interpretation, that's grammar. Which means that on the right and the left of 'like,' there must be something in common, otherwise it makes no sense. Now if I say 'he's as black as ebony,' I'm not going to reflect for long on why there's a 'like' in that spot.
1:09:21 We agree, right? If I say 'he's as sharp as a needle,' 'he's as slanderous as a viper,' fine, I don't need — literally or figuratively — to explain the elements of the comparison and why there's a link between the comparing term and the compared term that everyone grasps immediately. But here, what is it? On the left, there's the exalted dawn, on the right, a flock of doves. Do you see a connection? Consciously, no. Immediately, no. And yet — and thank you Jacques Carsin — I'll bet you anything that the language we speak remembers. He was right. Let me reread what Jacques was saying. No, no, because we really need to look at this. Afterward, look.
1:10:10 This once again overlaps with the analogy of language. In order to say what I want, I have to submit to the rules of a particular language — French isn't English — a particular language that preexists me, it's not me who invented French, and which is not a one-off invention by minor academicians, but rather a kind of apparently spontaneous order. 'The exalted dawn like a flock of doves.' Let's move fast now. The common elements. Those who have the memory for it — it's the case to say so — remember that 'aube' [dawn] is a variant, A-U-B-E in French, of 'alba.'
1:10:45 And so it connotes whiteness. You say, but what are you going to dig up there? You're cheating. After all, not everyone has studied Latin. You don't need to have studied Latin. The French language knows what an albatross is, an albino, alabaster. And 'perfidious Albion,' you know, our ally England — as they used to see from afar the chalk cliffs around the Dover region, French knights got used to speaking of England as 'the perfidious white one,' perfidious Albion.
1:11:20 The language knows this, you've forgotten it, we had forgotten it — not everyone, but most of us — but the language is there like a deposit, it remembers it for us since it makes it vary through words we can't help using every day. Look, I gave you an alabaster ashtray, see how white it is, how beautiful. Look, you went on vacation in Normandy, don't confuse gulls, seagulls, and albatrosses. You see? Whiteness. And an albino, and so on. So Saussure, linguists have shown very well that every speaker, at every moment, has a computer in their head. Yes, a computer that, as the other person speaks or as I speak, goes through all the possibilities like a search engine — but those working on artificial intelligence, I'd love to find one as effective. Yes, yes, yes, yes. If I say, should we say 'radiologiste' or 'radiologue'? Our ear, as soon as I say 'radiolo,' knows very well, through everyone's internal computer, every French-speaking speaker's — I didn't say French, it could be a Togolese, it could be a Chinese person with an agrégation in French teaching in Beijing.
1:12:46 But every French-speaking speaker knows very well that after 'radiolo,' there are only two possibilities left. 'Radiologue' or 'radiologiste,' and so we'll choose the more economical one. That's how language works. It has memory, and it has even more than search engines, incomparably more, because it reaches back into millennia, and it reaches back to a time when there was no writing. Good grief! So, prehistoric.
1:13:16 Remember when I told you it's incredible that the literary genre par excellence, poetry, the truly literary genre — because there are lots of genres in literature that border on literature, that serve what Mallarmé called 'universal reportage,' right? But here, really, we can't deny it has a properly literary interest — poetry, which is moreover the oldest. Now, for millennia, poetry was oral before it was written, before it was transcribed. The poem of the people, thanks to Jacques Carsin, the collective poem, the myth, the mythos, preceded singular writing.
1:13:58 Before Homer, before the bard, before the aoidos, before the griot, there is oral transmission. You have to have seen in Africa how a griot transmits to his disciple the music, the texts, the poems, making him repeat them by ear, from mouth to ear. So you see when I was saying this memory plunges deep. How could you expect the clarity of water flowing straight from melted snow? I mean, really. That's why I say, can there be memory without a hole in it? I come back to my central question.
1:14:46 And so I attach great importance to this text of Pausanias, where he says one must both drink from the river of forgetting, the Lethe, and drink — there are several translation versions — from the river or lake of Mnemosyne, right? In one case you forget everything, in the other you remember everything. I remind you that 'lêthê' is found in the Greek word 'alêtheia,' which means truth. The alpha being privative, 'alêtheia' literally means unveiling. Among the Heideggerians, there are sometimes very interesting developments, one must be fair, on this way of lifting the veil that signifies truth, which consists in unveiling while at the same time covering over. I won't dwell on it, you'll find that elsewhere.
1:15:41 But 'lêthê' is the veil. So it's no accident that here, the veil of forgetting, the mortal must drink the river of forgetting. And here I'll add a small extension. All this is well and good, but it's mythology. Oh really, but no, it's serious. It's serious. Everything religious expresses, in a fantasized form that sometimes needs to be turned around, even reversed.
Paradise and forgetting: Wagner's Walküre 1:16:17 It expresses profound truths, but unbeknownst even to the one who takes them at face value. What am I alluding to? I'm alluding to the notion of paradise, or rather of eternal life. If someone tells me, listen, Dominique, I have a sure bet, give me 100 dollars and I'll give you eternal life — it's worth it, frankly, it's not expensive. Well, I hesitate, even for 100 dollars, even for one dollar, because I would ask preliminary questions.
1:16:57 The questions asked by those who are attached to other beings and who ask, at the moment of dying, whether those other beings will follow them into death. You're beginning to guess where I'm going with this. It's not paradise that interests me. Because if Saint Peter opens the door for me and I see an ecological paradise, all green, needing no effort to feed myself, everything I desire comes to me just like that — yes, but will I find again the one I love? Oh no, no, no, no, with the Lethe you'll forget them, it's another life. Oh well, that doesn't interest me. You see? Do you see what's at stake in forgetting everything or remembering everything? Do you see what's at stake? Oh no, that doesn't interest me.
1:17:48 There are several examples. One of the most sublime is in Die Walküre, the second day of Wagner's Ring cycle, when the Valkyrie suddenly appears to the warrior Siegmund to tell him he will die in the duel awaiting him at dawn, just as he has spent a night with the one who will soon be Siegfried's mother. Well yes, it's not very moral.
1:18:23 That's how it is in mythology, whether Germanic or Greek. So she comes to tell him he's going to die, because the Valkyries can only appear to the eyes of those who are about to die. Mortals can't see them, they are divinities. And their mission is to gather up on earth the warriors who died valiantly in combat, to bring them to form an elite army to defend Valhalla — that is, the Greek Olympus, the world of the Greek gods — against the schemes of the underworld. We're not very far from things quite familiar to you, right?
1:18:57 Between the laser sword and the dark force and Star Wars, you know, it's not far off — there are galaxies like that where there are beings of light, you know this better than I do, and others, right? What's his name? Dark, Dark something, Darth Vader, Dark, not luminous, that one. So there, the Valkyrie, because she's a warrior virgin like Athena, has never known love, she's devoted to battles, she's the favorite daughter of her father Zeus, she's never known love, she's overwhelmed, because for the first time she sees someone who says no to her — if I can't take the one I love with me — and speak more softly, you'll wake her up, she needs to sleep before my battle tomorrow morning.
1:19:42 If I can't take her with me, I'd rather die right here with her. I won't tell you the rest, that's for you to find out, but this is to tell you, paradisiacal happiness isn't being in a world where my everyday difficulties have vanished as if by magic, even if that's possible. Let's grant that's possible, which is already granting a lot, because if it means not finding again what gives meaning to our life, I'm not sure that's the place of happiness, of peace, or of pleasure, whatever you like. There, at any rate, those would be very fleeting pleasures.
Recollection in the Meno, a democratic thesis 1:20:28 How much time do we have left, Philippe? Well, I've answered Jacques's questions so much — I'm not saying I over-answered, but that I've eaten into time that could have gone to other people's questions. I also want to take this opportunity to greet someone — I've forgotten their first name — who asked me... likewise, it's a request for a reference, but it was for, for, for — it'll come back to me, excuse me, I'll tell you right away.
1:21:24 There, there, there, there, I have a lot of texts. So listen, first let me tell you that the texts of Hölderlin, which I didn't want to deal with at the start, I gave priority to what helps illuminate them, because he's going to allude to Mnemosyne, but you'll understand better now what he says about it. I'll deal with them next time. As I told you, it's a seasonal theme. We have until December 21st, the end of autumn, to talk about autumn, and so about farewell, and so about memory and remembrance, and so about departure.
1:22:11 There we are. Yes, gladly. I greet our Norwegian friends at Algarbra. Thank you very much. I'm amazed by the relevance of the listeners I'm lucky enough to have. Right? I don't know if you heard Philippe's question, so as a precaution, I'll repeat its substance. Our Norwegian friends pay tribute to Plato's theory of reminiscence. Not because of its mystical resonance, as it's generally cited for — the allusion to previous lives, the soul being eternal, and sometimes in this life something reminds us of our previous lives.
1:22:52 That's the embellishment Plato develops, who is an immense political thinker, right? And who knows what it means to disguise in myth a truth that is otherwise inexpressible. No, no, I want to be much more precise. Our friends from Algarbra say that what's extraordinary is that in perhaps the most famous passage in Plato on reminiscence, that is, the interrogation of the slave in the Meno, that is — I assume that's what they're alluding to — in order to make his interlocutor, Meno, a sophist, understand that all knowledge is recollection, which is Socrates's thesis, Socrates-Plato's thesis.
1:23:32 Socrates, to demonstrate this, in vivo, brings in a slave and says, look, you see, he knows nothing about mathematics. That one, right? That one — there are other slaves who... know geometry, right? But I'm going to show you that by asking him the right questions, he will find on his own the ratio of the diagonal — it's not simple, you know, in mathematics, especially at that time — the ratio of the diagonal of the square to its sides.
1:24:04 That's not the law of this relationship. And of course the slave gradually arrives, through Socrates' questioning, at confirming here that he is indeed the son of Maia. His mother was a midwife. Maia, maieutics, the art of delivering minds. That is to say, not creating knowledge. The good teacher is not the one who takes the knowledge he has in his head and pours it like a liquid into his pupil's skull. No, it's the one who helps the pupil recall the knowledge he already has within him.
1:24:43 In other words, there is a complicity between Plato's reminiscence and the first sentence of the Discourse on Method. Good sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world. And that's why our friends—and I thank them, our Norwegian friends, Anne and Branco, whom I greet here again very warmly—say that there is a democratic force in this Platonic theory of reminiscence, and that it is linked to acquired knowledge. Linked themselves to the history of praxis. But we'll develop that next time—how, if words allow us not to let the chaos of time, the flight of time, disappear without leaving traces, but how thanks to words, first, for millennia, spoken words, words that fly away, then writing which fixes them, all the more so, we were able to free ourselves from chaos. For that, it took—and they are quite right, our Norwegians, to speak of praxis—it took the tool, because the tool is humanity's first victory over chaos, over time.
The tool against chaos and the first philosophy of spirit 1:25:56 Because the form of the tool—a monkey can pick up a stone to crack a nut, but that's not a tool, it's an instrument; it's already huge in evolutionary terms to be capable of doing that. And don't think that's reserved for mammals, etc. There are seabirds that pick up a shell, fly up into the air, and drop it to crack it open and eat what's inside. But there's no prior production of a tool having what the great Vietnamese communist and philosopher Tran Duc Thao, in Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness, calls the typical form.
1:26:34 All the tumuli from the Mediterranean to Ireland, passing through the Atlantic coast—the Neolithic tumuli contain the same funerary axes. We even speak of a civilization of funerary axes, for heaven's sake! There is a typical form, with a handle, a blade on one side, etc. You see? Likewise arrows, from a certain date onward—it's no longer just a chipped stone, there are flint arrowheads with shapes, but which are going to have a prodigious commercial success as early as prehistory.
1:27:07 There you go, I don't want to give away the subject, but I thank our Norwegian friends for pulling off this feat, allowing us to announce what's coming next—that is, how we're going to move on to a youthful text of Hegel's, of extraordinary richness, which I recommend to you, what's called the First Philosophy of Spirit, a bit hard to find, but look it up online, First Philosophy of Spirit, Jena. In which, precisely, we're going to find—how curious—we're going to find Mnemosyne and the tool, this time brought together.
1:27:44 Because Hegel is going to say the three powers—he still has a Schellingian language at the time, I'll end on this—powers here means the sources, the roots. The three conditions without which spirit, in the sense of human history, in the Hegelian sense, would never have appeared, are, first, memory. Language belongs to the order of mythology that we just looked at. Up to that point, we didn't need to wait for Hegel to say that memory and language are important in the history of thought. We see that since Plato, since Hesiod. Hegel adds—first, and before Marx—the tool. The tool! Because the advances of human technology are made not by starting over from zero each time, like the little animal that is—the first one—but by improvement; the tool already presupposes millennia of refinement. Arrowheads—that is, what I'm talking to you about—it took millions of years to go from chipped pebbles to those arrows. But we don't start from zero again. There you go. What comes next is fascinating.
1:28:51 Just to let you know, as at the beginning, there were some technical problems, we didn't hear Schubert well, so we'll broadcast it at the end. There's a comment. Should I announce it now? There's a comment from Rémi Cardinal, who says: "Sublime second trio by Schubert, whose military style, fashionable at that time, runs through the whole work, even the slow movement. The theme you're talking about has a nostalgia reminiscent of Schubert's famous lost happiness. The soldier's memory, remembering where he comes from, singing this cantilena to himself to give himself courage."
1:29:30 The courage to go to the front. A big thank you to Rémi Cardinal. I don't know if you heard Philippe's remark, but I'll sum it up. We have Rémi Cardinal's comment, whom I greet very warmly in passing, and who founded on Facebook a page I recommend to all of you. It's called "la convergence des luths" [the convergence of lutes], because he's a professional musician, he's a tremendous pianist—you just have to listen to him.
1:30:01 Performing some of the most difficult works ever written for piano, Liszt's Sonata in B minor, which he, Rémi Cardinale—with an E at the end—recently recorded on YouTube, and who has no doubt played this Schubert trio so many times, and who indeed reminds us that at the moment we least expect it, while Schubert is striving to be heroic and martial—he always dreamed of having the heroic, dramatic force of a Beethoven, for instance—he is overtaken by his deep-seated lyricism, with this admirable theme on solo cello. Thank you, Rémi, thank you for this musical presence which truly echoes Mnemosyne's daughters, the nine Muses.
1:30:54 So I'm letting you know that, since there were acoustic problems at the start—the connection wasn't good, and apparently it's improved—Philippe is doing us the great favor of replaying this short excerpt from the finale of this Schubert trio, which begins, then, in a brilliant, cheerful manner—well, the excerpt I'll play for you. It's already been a while since the finale began, and it's gone through all sorts of episodes, both heroic and luminous, sun-drenched. And all of a sudden—I won't say any more—as soon as the cello phrase resounds, I won't need to spell it out for you.
1:31:28 We won't need the eye anymore, but the ear. Thank you, Philippe, thank you everyone, and until next time.
