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Voltaire, a world ends; Rousseau, a world begins 0:00 Because Rousseau said, to be free is less a matter of doing what one wants than of not depending on the labor of another. Very willingly, first things first, this beautiful formula with Voltaire: a world ends, with Rousseau, a world begins, and it comes from Goethe.
0:30 Goethe belongs to the generation immediately after Rousseau, those who took part precisely in the birth of what has been called, with much misunderstanding, Romanticism. Well, it's simply modern sensibility. And Goethe, who was quite wary of the Romantics, and had some reasons to be, had, typically of his way of writing, in a single sentence, posed the problem. He pays homage to both, to the two enemies who couldn't stand each other, as they say, to use a familiar expression.
1:01 He pays them homage, exactly as the people of France did, in particular the people of Paris. I'm alluding to the very famous passage from Hugo in Les Misérables with Gavroche, who as he falls sings, 'it's Voltaire's fault, it's Rousseau's fault,' to mock what the conservatives said, the reactionaries already back then. 'It's the intellectuals who got us into this mess, it's Voltaire's fault, it's Rousseau's fault, people are dying in Nanterre, it's Voltaire's fault, people are dying in Puteaux, it's Rousseau's fault,' etc. And in fact it's very perceptive, because we need both. Voltairean critique was necessary, like the termite gnawing at the building, all the same.
1:34 Voltaire, a world ends: he above all criticized the Church, religious fanaticism, intolerance—Voltaire. The pillars, a bit, of the ideology of the old world, ideology, I'm using modern terms. Well, but thanks to Voltaire, in part thanks to him, the house was on the ground, but afterward, to build, you need Rousseau. There, a world begins. What is a world without religion? I'm trying to locate what is essential in Rousseau, because you can think what you like about religion.
Rousseau and Clouscard facing the intelligentsia 2:09 I'm not going to open a metaphysical debate, this isn't the place for it. But what is certain is that religion still plays, for billions of human beings, the role of social bond, of communal reference. I lived long enough in a country where the religious factor is decisive, where it's even unthinkable to be without a religion. I took part in a census in Ivory Coast. I remember the little clerks—because you need a lot of people for a census—they'd ask me, religion, that was part of the questionnaire. He said 'none.'
2:39 'Oh no, sir, we have Catholic, we have Animist, but we have to give a religion.' 'You don't understand, you can't say none.' It was rather charming. Well. And Rousseau saw the problem clearly. People mock the organizing of the Festival of the Supreme Being by Robespierre, etc. Personally, I pay homage to that government which took care to make reason sensible. Usually reason and the senses are opposed. And we'll come back to that. But Rousseau is the man of number three, if I may be a bit abstract, that is, of synthesis.
3:12 Because those who remain stuck at thesis and antithesis will keep spinning in circles for millennia and centuries. If you don't rise to level three, you understand nothing of things. Clouscard talks a lot about this sequence of numbers. Absolutely. I see you've tackled that work, which is one of the most difficult. And the most difficult part is the one you're kind enough to allude to. It's the whole first part of the Critique du libéralisme libertaire. Beautiful title. Whose original title, as you probably know, since it's a reissue, was De la modernité: Rousseau ou Sartre.
3:47 It was written back in the 1970s, and it was already called Rousseau ou Sartre. Clouscard meant to say: for heaven's sake, we had Rousseau, why did we go looking for Sartre? When you have as radical a break as Rousseau, why go looking for Sartre? He's a decent fellow, I'd honestly rather have Sartre than the little neo-Nazi extremists we now have in the way of ideology. But what was his problem? 'How to be on the left without being a communist?' That was Sartre's problem. Well, that's his problem, he's entitled to it.
4:19 One can have excellent reasons for being non-communist, even anti-communist, reasons I would understand quite well, which I even sometimes approve of. So there, I'm not being clear at all. But Rousseau occupies that position—and by the way I'll come back around to this, not at all randomly—I've often drawn the parallel. Clouscard occupies, in relation to the intelligentsia, let's say of Parisianism—I don't like that term, because you can find it just as well vacationing in the Luberon, or in Corsica for that matter, yes roughly, or with Glucksmann, BHL, or Minc.
4:51 Clouscard's position with respect to that intelligentsia is the same as Rousseau's with respect to the Enlightenment. It's striking. The Huron, the savage who suddenly arrives in a hyper-coded world, where you're supposed to instantly get the witticism, where what matters isn't being true or false, what matters is being—watch out not to be square. You have to be plugged in. Which once led me to tell Sollers: I'd rather play the role of the square progressive than the plugged-in reactionary.
5:21 There you go, because starting from '68—I won't say which '68 I'm referring to—starting from '68, the problem is no longer being progressive or conservative, it's that, no, that's square, going on strike, that's 19th century stuff, that's not possible anymore, those things are finished. Which is funny, because those very people want to privatize the SNCF, that is, go back to the truly 19th-century era. In fact, it's like when they say Marxism is outdated. I hope—well, I'm all for going beyond whatever needs going beyond, I mean, I hope there's no discourse that definitively closes off human inquiry, that would be unfortunate.
5:58 Well, if Marxism is outdated, let's take that hypothesis as valid—in that case, capitalism, which is much earlier, is even more outdated. If you overtake a car going from Lyon to Paris, if one is at Mâcon and the other at Dijon, I mean, one is further behind than the other. If Marxism is outdated, what should we say of liberalism, which came well before it? I mention that in passing, all the same. So there, Rousseau's role is unavoidable, because he didn't content himself with echoing the great economic changes then occurring at the end of the 18th century—there was a whole class, the rising bourgeoisie, that suddenly realized...
Rising bourgeoisie, feudal order and property 6:41 For better and for worse—there were excellent things—this bourgeoisie was the most dynamic class of the era. Indeed, Marx's Communist Manifesto begins by paying homage... it's the finest homage ever paid to the bourgeoisie, the first fifty pages are about the progress the bourgeoisie brought about. Marx says it liquidated the family and religion. Nice job, as they say. There you go. An extremely dynamic class that was at the cutting edge, not yet timidly clinging to positions of power, because it didn't have them yet, and not yet haunted by the rise of the proletariat.
7:17 The bourgeoisie profited magnificently, from the Middle Ages up to the French Revolution, from the antagonism between aristocracy and peasantry. That's the key to the problem, and it's well understood. There you go. Because the terms of the problem, traditional France up to the 18th century—what was it? It's quick, don't worry. There's the lord who protects the land. At the time it was true, I'm not being ironic. There was an era in which feudalism was justified. You see, Marxism isn't what people think it is, it's not a blank slate. It's about giving things meaning.
7:47 It shouldn't take too long. But at the start, you had to defend the field against the neighboring lord who would come—it was the war of each against all at the outset. Feudalism, the fief. I mention this because we're coming back to it a bit with today's invasive Pétainist localism. With the decline of the nation, the fief is becoming important again. The Bonnets Rouges. So, the lord protects material goods. The clergy, the priest, protects us against the devil.
8:19 That's not trivial for people of that era. And then you need a third to feed the first two. That's the feudal order. So there's nothing between the peasant and the lord-bishop. And then, little by little—it's been studied—in the 11th, 12th century, merchant networks start to appear. And then the bourgeoisie gradually rises. It really asserts itself in the 16th century. Of course, it went through a decline. Once it had overcome the guilds, which had long blocked its development.
8:51 With the crossing of... You find this in a magnificent description in L'Être et le Code, which for me is perhaps Clouscard's masterpiece, the least read, which is his doctoral thesis. And it's one of his rare works not written hot off the press, not like a pamphlet, because it's worth more than that. It's not a book, it isn't just a book—it's a book that crosses swords. It's really the superb result of long research: 'the production process of a precapitalist ensemble.' In plain French, it's a history of France, essentially, from the dark ages, the very beginning of the Middle Ages, up to the French Revolution.
9:23 That's why I allow myself to use it to illustrate the point. So this rising bourgeoisie had posed the problems clearly in terms we would today call societal. Obviously the salon of Madame de Lambert, of Madame d'Épinay—women were emancipated. Yes, within the aristocracy. In the countryside, there was the scythe. I don't know if you've ever used a scythe, but you get a twisted back very quickly if you're not used to it. It was brutal. Anyway.
9:55 And so he was the first to pose the political problem. It's good, it's good to move beyond industry. But I mean, and that's why he was so poorly regarded by everyone, by the powers that be, because he's the most radical of the Enlightenment thinkers, since he goes so far as to question property. And even for the Enlightenment thinkers, who are supposed to be the vanguard of the era, he's treated like a dead dog, as was said of Spinoza, precisely because he calls into question their very foundation, namely property.
10:26 To the point that Voltaire—and you have to believe it, I do pay homage to Voltaire, because when he wages his fight, with his motto 'crush the infamous thing,' against intolerance, fanaticism, he's right. Well, that same Voltaire, who so resents fanaticism, demands the head of Rousseau on a block—pardon, he could barely get it out, it's so outrageous—in his famous published letter, after Rousseau had suggested that theaters should be banned, theaters which Voltaire wanted to open in Geneva.
11:03 So, the Letters from the Mountain. And it's striking indeed to see this Voltaire lose his composure, calling for Rousseau to be seized, demanding he be physically arrested—it's enormous, it's remarkable. There you go, simply because—this reminds me of your earlier question about strikes—because Rousseau said: to be free is less to do what one wants than to not depend on the labor of another.
11:38 Well yes, when you see the garbage piling up because of a sanitation workers' strike, whoever has never used their own hands to dispose of their trash is far more inconvenienced than someone used to hard labor, quite simply. This is beautifully illustrated in a masterpiece, a film by Losey called The Servant. So, this Rousseau is exceptional from every point of view, because he's full of contradictions—apparent ones, that is, contradictions that dissolve once you take all his texts together.
Reading the Social Contract: from the state of nature to the civil state 12:08 But they are contradictions for himself. Here's someone who spends his time deifying nature and cursing man. And yet, in fact, he does exactly the opposite. Famous quote: 'Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Creator, everything degenerates in the hands of man.' Yes, but—I quoted from memory—in The Social Contract you find this. Chapter 8, on the civil state. Sorry—Book 1, Chapter 8, 'Of the Civil State.' So, this is the passage about the transition from the state of nature to the civil state.
12:40 'This passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a very remarkable change, substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they previously lacked.' So we already learn from Rousseau's own pen that in a state of nature there is neither morality nor justice. 'Although in this new state he deprives himself of several advantages that he holds from nature, he gains such great ones in return. His faculties are exercised and developed. His passions are ennobled.'
13:10 Let me comment briefly, off to the side. It's not just that they're exercised, they're developed. You don't need to be a great scholar, when properly attuned, to see the effect of language on thought. What would our thinking be—would we even have any—without language? That's unlikely. Let's set that aside. 'His faculties are exercised and developed. His passions are ennobled.' Tristan and Iseult—it's not just about sexuality. Love becomes—pardon—sexuality, which in the natural order has meaning only at the level of reproduction of the species, will suddenly come to serve the individual.
13:41 Well yes, that's not nothing. And then the institution of marriage, in every society. Anyway. 'His passions are ennobled. His entire soul is elevated to such a degree that'—I'm deliberately pausing the sentence there—because we get the impression, we've been badly taught about Rousseau, that he's saying we gained everything by entering society. So why make him an apostle of nature? And here's the rest of the sentence: '...to such a degree that, if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below the condition he left'—that is, below the animal—'he ought ceaselessly to bless the happy moment that wrested him forever from it, from the state of nature, and that, from a stupid, limited animal, made him an intelligent being and a man.'
14:25 So it's a clear text, unambiguous, there's no reading between the lines needed. Rousseau fully praises this process that brought us from the state of nature to the civil state. When you express contradictions like that, it's because you have a richer, dialectical mind—as Clouscard says very well in the work I mentioned earlier—dialectical because Rousseau rises precisely to what I called the third position earlier, which sends both sides back to back. So there, I hold to this a great deal. If you'd like me to sum up the essence of what I think about Rousseau, since I presume there will be other questions, I'll borrow an image I owe to Gérard de Nerval.
Nerval, Rousseau and the beautiful Gabrielle 15:05 I like using it, because Nerval was a great reader of Rousseau. As it happens, coincidentally, Nerval spent his childhood in his mother's homeland in the Valois, not far from Ermenonville-Chantilly, where Rousseau's tomb is. So the reference to Rousseau was familiar to him since childhood. And he recounts a little anecdote, a story—I don't recall exactly—very quickly, a short story, written for a newspaper as a serial at the time, in which they climb up into the ruins of Chaalis, which you can still admire, 3 km from Ermenonville, from Rousseau's tomb—the ruins of the Chaalis abbey, where Henri IV sheltered his love affair with the beautiful Gabrielle d'Estrées.
15:40 You'll see why—I'm suddenly going glitzy. Because at one point, Nerval, in his story, mentions the son of the keeper of Chaalis, who shows them around and tells them: 'This is the tower of the beautiful Gabrielle. Every evening Rousseau came to strum his guitar beneath her window, and the king, who was jealous, eventually had him put to death.' Of course, Nerval starts off laughing. Because he's like you, like me, among educated people, faced with peasants who don't even know that Henri IV and Rousseau are separated by two centuries.
16:14 Anyway, he draws these analogies, then says Rousseau isn't dead at all, because the king, there. And then Nerval goes on, in a new paragraph, and says—it's like a madman writing with total lucidity—he says: 'This anecdote is perhaps truer than one thinks. By refusing the hundred louis offered by Madame de Pompadour, Rousseau ruined the monarchical edifice founded by Henri. Everything collapsed; his immortal image remains standing upon the ruins.' And there, suddenly, the figure of Rousseau expands like a statue looming over the ruins of the Ancien Régime.
16:44 Now Nerval sees three things. He's got that ternary viewpoint. He sees three instances: the king, his mistress, and Rousseau, the challenger who comes to strum his guitar beneath the king's mistress's window. It's charming, the way peasants arrange things that way. Well, Rousseau as Casanova with the silk ladder, that's odd. And what does it mean? It means he clearly saw, in some sense, that economic relations aren't confined to statistics or the Financial Times. That the relation to eros, to love, to our aesthetic standards, is also crossed by the class struggle.
17:20 What does Rousseau do? He goes to dispute the property of the master. And even his supreme enjoyment. The woman here being, as they'd say in linguistics, a metonymy—an allusion to millennia of extraction of surplus value, in Marxist terms. The quintessence of enjoyment, of property, of profit, quite simply. That's what he could have—and indeed did—done: he married an illiterate peasant woman, as you know, Thérèse, who made spelling mistakes. There you go. But it's no accident that the greatest romantic passion of Rousseau's life was Madame d'Houdetot.
Rousseau and the modern sentence 17:55 Great aristocracy if ever there was one. And there you go. So I hold onto this triangle that sums up what I think of Rousseau. He's the only one who leaves nothing aside: the political, the economic, the social, the poetic, aesthetics in general, and poetics in particular, since we owe to Rousseau the transition to the modern sentence, no less. Let me open a small parenthesis on that too, because it matters. Voltaire writes to perfection. Voltaire went to school very early, learned to write verse—well, Rousseau was in his uncle's attic, a vagabond on the roads, you couldn't have a more symmetrical opposition.
18:30 And so Rousseau took time—he's not a spontaneously good writer, you read his early works, the famous Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, from a message standpoint it's excellent, indeed it caused a shock, but the style is a bit bombastic, still somewhat overwrought, full of 'O's, 'O's. And then you suddenly arrive—I'm jumping to the other extreme—at his last publication, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, and there you see the kind of sentence that all of the 19th century would dream of, that is, this sentence, a fusion of prose and poetry, in a kind of continuous flow—I'll close with a quotation, if you like, from the Fifth Walk: 'the flux and reflux of this water, its continuous sound, swelling at intervals, striking my ear and my eyes without respite, supplied the internal movement that my reverie was extinguishing within me, and sufficed to make me feel my existence with pleasure, without taking the trouble to think.'
Critique of political economy and scientific continents 19:30 Sentences like that had never been seen before. There you go. With Rousseau, the world begins. Your question reassures me a great deal, because indeed—you're not a victim of a very widespread misunderstanding, namely that Marxism would first and foremost be an economics, an economic theory, a leftist, far-left one, set up in opposition to so-called liberal or capitalist economic theories, call it what you will.
20:01 In fact, that's a misreading. As you rightly say, you only have to look at the title. That's the original title of Capital. You know, it was supposed to be called Critique of Political Economy. And the title of a work Marx would publish, but with that famous preface which, in my view, contains the most Marxism in the fewest pages—for those short on time, there remains the famous 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
20:35 The title is clear. It is not political economy. On the contrary, it's a critique of political economy's pretension to constitute itself as an autonomous science. Autonomous from what? I'll leave that question in parentheses for now, very quickly, because today we see a proliferation of human sciences—sociology, social psychology, well, the list is long. Now, this is one of the rare points on which I agree with Althusser, so I must give him his due there.
21:12 Especially since this point he owes to the great French epistemological school, to Bachelard in particular—namely that, just as Euclid (the collective figure behind this name, whatever, we don't really know) inaugurates the mathematical continent, the continent, with its sub-regions—geometry, algebra, topology—and afterward you have to wait some fifteen centuries, Galileo opens up the physical continent, for the first time there's a theory applied, which applies to the world we actually live in, which is no small thing.
21:45 There too, a continent, inside which you have chemistry, most of biology—that's the part of physics students understand well, I think you see what I mean. And what's left? So, mathematics, physics, biology—we're done with the hard sciences, as they're now called, the natural sciences, to be more precise—so what remains are the human sciences. But note: mathematics, Euclid, roughly between the sixth and fourth century BC, all that movement—afterward you have to wait until the transition from the 16th to the 17th century to start seeing Galileo, physics; after that it accelerates, chemistry, Lavoisier, late 18th century; then biology, Claude Bernard, the one who said 'the living is the dead.'
22:32 And we clearly see a progression in this history of the sciences—by way of a detour, to answer the question, but I think it's important to put it this way—one that, broadly speaking, moves toward us, that is, from what is farthest, most general—if A equals B, B equals A, fine, that holds for everything—then physics, already closer to the world we live in, chemistry, biology, we'll be close to living beings, that's us—and at the end there ought to be politics, an exact science that would come to close the edifice of the sciences. That's the great dream of philosophers since forever, since Plato—as you read in The Republic, all these problems will not cease until either philosophers take power in the city, or those who hold power in the city devote themselves to philosophy—quite simply stated in Book Six of The Republic.
23:19 Well, here, you already see, the prince's advisor. So it's very important to see that. And, you see, since everything holds together, your questions are very much in keeping with the fields we're dealing with. I'll come back to Clouscard, since you're bringing me back to him. Clouscard used to say, in the form of a joke, once—and I knew him well, there was always seriousness in his jokes—he'd say, the human sciences, because he had the accent of the Tarn, were invented to lock down nascent Marxism.
23:52 It's a dubious scientificity, in a way. So economics is part of that, and now, I'll answer the question that was suspended earlier—this pretension, Marx, by saying critique of political economy, wants to cast doubt on political economy's claim to constitute itself as an autonomous science, of history. There, I'll go over it one last time and then move on: Euclid opens up the continent of mathematics, Galileo opens up the continent—when I say mathematics, I mean Galileo opens up the continent of physics—then biology, Marx opens up the field now called the human sciences, but he opens up the continent of history.
24:33 For the first time, there's the possibility—he barely sketched it out, he's the first, so it's necessarily the worst. This is very Hegelian, what I'm saying. The first part is always the most false, in fact. Or the most abstract—false in the abstract sense, not false in the sense of inexact, but false in the sense of saying: what is Mozart? He's an Austrian musician. Well, that's not inexact, but we haven't really answered much yet. Hitler is also Austrian. So, it's very important to see this: Marx opens up the continent of history, inside which lies everything you like.
25:06 Human geography, as they say in academic circles—when you fly over the Amazon, I don't know, there's no history there, that's nature, watch out. And moreover, for once, a nature that's more or less untouched, because what we call nature here, in discourse, including ecological discourse, is really the landscape, which is quite different. There are 10,000 years of human effort on nature, in the landscape. To end up with the bocage of Poitou, you know, steeped in historical mediations. And that's why it's so beautiful. So, the Amazon, and then all of a sudden, look—ah, a clearing, that's order, that's man.
25:39 An Indian village, I imagine, seen from a helicopter. It's an imaginary helicopter, thankfully, because real helicopters used to machine-gun the Indians, or send them death by poison to clear good land. The men's house, the women's house, an organization—and there, all of a sudden, we see things that exist just as much as men do, but whose appearance, let alone organization, cannot be deduced in purely physico-chemical terms. Right? I know that the prohibition of incest—I don't want to go over all the little details—the prohibition of incest, for example, which is fundamental in all human societies despite their differences in customs, is that it doesn't exist in the animal world.
26:16 You put rabbits somewhere—that's what they did in Australia, as we know—there were millions of them, all inbred, so to speak. So it's important to recall that. Marx opens up the continent of history, and here again, we owe this break to Rousseau. Even if Marx criticizes the aspects that remain abstract, bourgeois-abstract in Rousseau—the dream of small individual property, and above all the emphasis on the rural economy, much more than the industrial economy, in Rousseau.
Freedom as foundation and the occultation of history 26:55 But that, Marx could not approve of, and I'm not settling the matter. But in any case, he understood very well, as Hegel had before him, that the decisive break with Rousseau is that the foundation of man is freedom. As a foundation, not as a goal or ideal to be reached. That is to say, the human world could not have appeared if there hadn't been some room for maneuver, unlike the moon which revolves around the Earth and has no choice at all. That's real hardcore determinism, I mean. If the moon said to itself, hey, what if I went and revolved around Mars for a change—no, the strongest wins, the mass of the Earth, that's Newton, I mean, makes it so that the moon, which might have wanted to go that way, well no, there's a compromise between falling straight down onto the Earth or going straight ahead, and that's what it does.
27:38 It's the problem of the sector, the derivative, as they say. So, there, let's remember first of all that Marx inaugurates the continent of history, and at that moment, as if by chance, Durkheim and others appear—these are great men, I'm not saying they're fools, it's not because there's an ideological operation behind it that they're saying stupid things. One can be an intelligent reactionary, but still, I mean, it's clear that the confusion the human sciences find themselves in today comes a little from this original sin that has never been laid bare.
28:10 In a way, they all have accounts to settle with Marxism, whether it's Bourdieu, whether it's Lévi-Strauss—it's enormous. But Lévi-Strauss does extraordinary work, particularly on kinship studies, I mean, I devour Lévi-Strauss's works, but there's somewhere a blockage, and it's always that same one. As Lévi-Strauss says—why am I talking about him? I'm fortunate to be able to speak of Marx here, because he said, I deal with societies without history. A nice play on words—societies both outside history and peaceful, without endless palavers, as they say in Africa.
28:40 There. So, it's no accident. It's no accident. Anticipating here that structuralist wave whose most important aspect for me isn't so much the structuring side, because what science doesn't structure, in a way? What form of thought doesn't structure? I have nothing against structures myself. On the other hand, it's the negation, the tendential negation of all historical, even temporal, references in that kind of thinking.
29:10 You see, forgive me for being a bit abstract, but it's from Lévi-Strauss onward that suddenly synchrony is privileged in the approach of the human sciences, even though the notion is borrowed from Saussure, who was the model for Lévi-Strauss, as for all of... the sociology of the period. There, very quickly. Marx, for his part, did not want to sell so cheaply this break that Rousseau had inaugurated. Which one? The historical break. I mean by that, that it's not that Rousseau wrote history.
29:41 Voltaire was an excellent historian, The Age of Louis XIV, a magnificent historical work. I don't think Rousseau wrote history about practically anything. But he brought, for the first time, materials to actually do history. What am I saying here? He shows that history is constitutive of our innermost being. That it's not an extra part tacked on from outside onto some essential, natural and innate core. This philosopher who is taken for a naturalist is the most anti-innatist there is.
30:11 I mean that when he talks about slavery, for example, Rousseau, in The Social Contract, it's no accident. The beginning of The Social Contract deals only with the famous right of the strongest. It's no accident that it starts with that. He gives the example of Aristotle who, unlike him, said there are men born to command and men born to obey. And Rousseau adds, somewhat ironically, Aristotle was right, but he mistook the effect for the cause. Men lose everything in their chains, even the desire to escape them.
30:43 If there are slaves by nature, as Aristotle says, it's because at the origin there were slaves against nature. So he restores this dimension of history which is almost always concealed, and never more so than today. I've never seen a generation—I don't mean, I hate generational discourse, if you want to keep the term generation, I mean pedagogical generation here, I'm thinking especially of the school textbook—I'm appalled at what's left of history in today's textbooks. The Soviet Union is more or less reduced to the gulag.
31:15 On the other hand, the European institutions, the European Council, the Assembly and all that. And then, we don't know whether Erasmus came before or after Jesus Christ, it's all secondary now. So I told you earlier that I would probably have been among the first shot under Stalin, so I'm not defending that political system. But still, if you and I aren't under the Nazi boot today, it's thanks to the Red Army. We recently celebrated the landing. I pay tribute to the 50,000 young men who left their lives on the beaches. They were magnificently heroic, that's not the question.
31:47 But still, all the same, I'd even say they could have been sent earlier. The Soviet high command, the Kremlin, had been asking Roosevelt for years to open a second front for us, we can't take it anymore. You know, the West thought, if we can let Germans and Soviets kill each other, we'll pull the chestnuts out of the fire, either way the Germans will win. They hadn't foreseen Stalingrad. We'll pull the chestnuts out of the fire. We're made to get along. That guy who crushed the unions and Hitler get along fine. You know, with the slogans of the French bourgeoisie before the war, you read it in the press, rather Hitler than the Popular Front.
32:20 Hey, that reminds me of something. Rather the little Nazi thugs of Kyiv than the miners of the Donbass. It's worse than that. Now they're making the miners out to be fascists. Basically, Putin is a fascist. You've seen it, the shaved head, the commandos, that's not my cup of tea. We shouldn't go overboard for him about Russia. But still, when we have the discourse we have in the West, there's no need to go looking elsewhere. Putin, accused of rehabilitating the Nazis—let me remind you there's a masterpiece by Clouscard called Neo-Fascism, the Ideology of Desire.
32:53 And it's Deleuze and Foucault whom he designated as neo-fascists there. It wasn't Le Pen. He didn't mistake his adversary, Michel. So, I insist on this aspect of Marx opening up the continent of history and taking up Rousseau's break. That is to say, between the natural order and the human order there's an unbridgeable gulf—I'm borrowing this from Kant—an unbridgeable gulf, which is freedom. That is, I'll take up the quotation from Émile: in Émile, you have that superb passage where he insists that his pupil learn a trade, so that the pupil—yes, his pupil—he speaks with the mother, who belongs to the old regime, who is an aristocrat, and he says, madam, your son must learn a manual trade.
Emile: what men have made can be undone 33:34 It's an evil. First of all, the aristocracy doesn't work, manual or intellectual, doesn't work. And already, working is already a form of debasement, but on top of that, manual labor—poor Rousseau has lost his mind. Thank you. And there. So, a trade for my son, my son a craftsman, sir, are you thinking straight? I'm thinking about it better than you, madam, who never wanted him reduced to anything less than a marquis, a lord, and perhaps even one day less than nothing. I intend to raise him to the state of man, which so few men know how to fulfill.
34:06 And there, in that passage—well, we alluded earlier to that beautiful phrase where he says that to be free is to not depend on the labor of others, much more than to do what one wants, or rather to believe one is doing what one wants when one is really only doing what pleases one, which is not quite the same thing, I'll come back to that. And he says, everything that men have made, men can destroy. Nothing is ineffaceable except what nature imprints, and nature makes neither rich man, nor prince, nor great lord. An extraordinarily liberating phrase, because he shows that these things which were said to be in the order of things, as God had willed them, in short, natural—that one is simply born that way.
34:42 Well yes, my poor friend, I come from peasants so I'll die a peasant. One can't, as we said earlier, become noble—you have to be born noble in order to be noble, etc. So this curse of the definitive—here comes Rousseau saying no, everything that comes from what men have made can be undone. We must keep the good; it's not enough to wipe the slate clean, one can remove the evil. So, if differences of social position, of class—one mustn't speak of that obscenity, because we're no longer supposed to speak of social class, here I'm opening important parentheses—but we're killing each other on all sides now between identities.
35:15 Corsicans against the French, Shiites against Sunnis, Hutus against Tutsis, men against women, feminists against—young against old, we set the young against the old, as we said earlier, those who have a job against those who don't, generalized civil war—Clouscard said capitalism will bring civil war to the poor. A very fine quote. Because it's mostly the poor who are victims of these civil wars, as we see in Ukraine or the Middle East. So all oppositions are fine, as long as we no longer talk about class struggle.
35:47 It's a terrible age, I have to say. Better fantasized identities, apparently, than class struggle. So sometimes people say what's wrong with Marxists is that they're for class struggle. It's an amazing misreading. As far as I know, Marx's principal wish is a classless society; there can only be class struggle where there are classes. It's completely contradictory. And moreover, when workers—yes, we always come back to this—when employees, wage earners, go on strike, it's generally an act of defense.
36:19 Class war doesn't come from them. I mean, it's not they who instituted the ownership of the means of production and exchange. It's not they who suddenly decided what has happened over the last 40 years—you remember the '40 shameful years'—that is, a transfer, as economists know, of between 10 and 15% from labor to capital. So it's a reaction, sometimes a desperate one, when there's not much left. So there, I wanted to recall this point because there are enormous misreadings about Marxism as a political economy that would be all the more outdated.
Critique of economism: Greece, Poland, Thiers and fascism 37:03 Moreover, economics itself is open to criticism. Marx, on the contrary, offers a critique, once again, of economics' pretension. It's a critique of economism. A claim by economics to establish itself as an autonomous discipline. I have nothing—there are very brilliant economists. One must work on what is called today economic science, provided—which economists rarely do—provided one shows that we're in a field that is swept by other fields which are often more decisive.
37:33 There. Let me take one last example. If you take just the purely accounting logic that says there are grasshoppers, as you know—people like me, people from the Mediterranean, Spaniards, Italians, they're good-for-nothings. I mean, they do nothing and are parasites. And then there are serious people in northern Europe who work. The grasshopper and the ant—that's roughly what we've been hearing since the beginning of the crisis, and in a way, if you read the German press, I'm barely caricaturing.
38:04 It's much more violent than that. I mean, to speak about the Greeks or... I'll come back to that division. I mean, it's quite an extraordinary story, because after all, if Greece has an enormous debt—it's true—one of the biggest parts of that debt and of its trade balance deficit is the arms purchases it made from Germany.
38:34 Germany sold huge quantities of weapons for years because of the chronically tense situation with Turkey there. I mean, the Germans invoice them, and then afterward they say, you're in debt, that's not good. It's as if—well, in any case, that's how it works. So, this kind of paradox helps understand better what I mean when I say Marxism...
39:04 People don't say it, but professionals know it very well: they know very well that the European Central Bank is a disguised Bundesbank—a 'Buba.' People say Germany is being stingy while the others are being lax. But there's no stinginess everywhere and in every direction, not even from capital. Capital is very generous—not toward Spain or Greece, but toward Poland. Did you know that Poland receives the largest amount of funding from the United States right after Israel and Egypt, which are the priorities?
39:35 Already, people don't know very much that Egypt is the biggest recipient of American foreign policy funding along with Israel, right after Israel. And Poland is right on its heels. It's vital for reasons, as you can well see, that go far beyond the accounting and economic plane—it's about containing Russia, holding Russia back with Poland. You've seen it, there's a need for our Mirages that went over there, we flex our muscles, F-16s have arrived. There. And I have nothing against the Poles, poor souls, they were among the greatest martyrs of the last war, along with the Russians, after all.
40:07 But I don't care about national identities, I'm neither pro-French nor anti-French—there's the France of Pétain, there's the France of De Gaulle, everyone will choose theirs, as for me, I choose... The France of the Popular Front, there, that's one France, there are others. There's also the France of Mr. Thiers, I mean. I mention him because he had said, repression won't work every time, the dragoons, we won't manage it that way, now we must learn to win elections. One must read Thiers to understand what has happened since.
40:38 Well. We were talking about fascism earlier—precisely, fascism has always come, precisely, against social struggles and supposedly socialist ones, supposedly arising out of socialism, precisely in order to counter socialism, and with Thiers it inaugurates, in part, this formula of putting that in place. We understand each other well. I'm 150% in agreement with what you just said, but unfortunately, when you speak like that, you'll be branded by BHL as an antisemite simply for insisting on social struggles and attacking capital.
41:11 That's it. That is to say, it's supposed to be as if... People make it out as if one is only alluding to Jewish bankers, which is monumentally stupid, when there are also the bosses of General Motors and so on, believe me. Anyway, let's move on. So Mr. Peugeot, I would say, has nothing to do with international Judaism and other fantasies. So, yes, you're right to point that out. It's always concealed because it's a taboo, what you just said. It takes a lot of courage to say it. People always insist on the racist side of Nazism.
41:45 I'm not trying to marginalize it. Not at all. On the contrary. But it needs to be placed in its context. It's above all, I mean, a reaction, Nazism. A reactionary is much more dangerous than a conservative. A reactionary has felt fear. He reacts against a social advance. We shouldn't forget that Nietzsche volunteered as a stretcher-bearer in order to help crush the Paris Commune. Yes indeed, the mentor of our postmodernists. One mustn't speak ill of Nietzsche, poor boy whom they're trying to pass off as a great debunker.
42:16 Well, we'll come back to it. Well, there, I'll say, he volunteered to go fight in the Prussian armies against the Paris Commune. All the same! They were scared out of their wits. 1917. You wake up one morning, the Muzhiks are on the Elbe. That's not possible. The inferior races, there, on the Elbe, that's not possible. You see? And in 1945, they're even closer. It didn't last. So there was the Holy Alliance in the 19th century to protect Europe from all the emanations of the French Revolution. After 1945, after the advance of the Muzhiks, they gave them 20 million dead.
42:47 We went looking for them. All the same, if they advanced westward, it wasn't them, it wasn't Russian imperialism. On the contrary, they went so far as to sign a non-aggression pact so that the war wouldn't begin on their doorstep. So one can't say they were belligerent and invasive. It was the Germans who went looking for them—the Nazis, I mean. So one day we wake up, and there is the successor to the Holy Alliance, called NATO. There. There's a rather staggering and tragic continuity. I seem to be having fun with all this. None of it is very fun.
Restoring history, down to the silent history of praxis 43:17 So, simply restoring history is a revolutionary act today. Simply restoring it, not giving this or that interpretation of it. Restoring a historical sequence. Simply. You see? Reminding people that Pétain was a fierce opponent of the income tax that France adopted quite late. There. I say late because you have to wait practically until the beginning of the 20th century for France to adopt income tax.
43:47 whereas people believe it's in the genes of the egalitarian Republic. One of those who fought most fiercely against the birth of this tax was Pétain. And at the time, it was only a matter of taking 5%. 5% was already a thousand times too much for the capital of the time. What do you want me to say? So, these aspects aren't restored. What you just said isn't restored either. The thousand examples—there's nothing but that—showing the conspiracy in the Leibnizian sense, that is, even if it's not in people's heads. I'm not at all into conspiracy theory.
44:18 There's no need to think in order to follow the same slopes. You just have to look at what a geographic watershed is, where all the rivers—one goes this way, one goes that way, but they all end up flowing into the Rhône. There's a convergence of capitalism toward fascism, which I illustrated earlier with that formula, rather Hitler than the Popular Front. I'm not saying capitalism is fascist. I'm saying capitalism will play the fascist card, even the Nazi card, without hesitation, if its vital interests are at stake, as was the case with the Soviet Union.
44:49 And so, if we don't restore these sequences, we don't understand. I pointed this out to someone, an economist also distinguished, who has taken quite marked commitments on the left, even to the left of the left. I'm thinking of Frédéric Lordon, who has a political discourse that, in truth, could see us standing side by side on this or that point. For example, he was not at all enthusiastic about the famous European treaty that Sarkozy signed and that Hollande ratified, so to speak.
45:23 But, on the other hand, as soon as it comes to ideology or philosophy — because he fancies himself a philosopher, particularly of Spinoza, whom he reads through Deleuze and Foucault, though Spinoza deserves to be read for himself — I pointed out to him, this was in a debate at the Tropiques bookshop, that in his whole model, we couldn't understand why the European Union had just granted a loan five times greater than what it refuses to countries in serious difficulty like Spain, Portugal or Greece, it had just granted that to Estonia and then to Poland.
46:02 On the other hand, Estonian pensioners have had 50 euros a month since Europe came through. 50 euros a month. That's what awaits us if the comrades at the SNCF fail. Well, that's where they want to bring us. So, to be revolutionary today in knowledge, I mean, isn't to stay informed about cognitive science, where there's a lot of nonsense — well, you always have to stay informed, let me correct what I just said — but it's not to subscribe to it blindly, it's to reintroduce history where it was, and history, not the legend that stands in for it, of course, where it had been most erased, but the real history that Marx slowly came to understand, the first to do so, that we could do better, a history that is silent, that isn't made of battles and so on, I mean, the invention of the horse collar which allowed the horse not to strangle itself while pulling the plow, an invention that practically caused an explosion in medieval agriculture — these are true silent revolutions, in a way, and where I'm from, in Corsica, the gradual disappearance of the language, even though it's spoken much more than in Brittany, etc., as in Alsace, or even a senior manager
47:13 as soon as he's among his own, so to speak, through the regional language — television, the introduction of television into homes did much more than anything, much more than the directives of the Jacobin state, to gradually make French disappear, from the moment it was Elkabbach who was inside the village, well yes, and no longer the evening gatherings, the tales where people spoke in Corsican, where things were passed on — well yes, that's it, real history is silent, it happens slowly, step by step, it lies — forgive me for using obscene terms, but it's been obscene to talk this way since '68 — in the relation between the productive forces and the relations of production; I told you I'd clarify about '68 earlier, I'll go very quickly, I'm being ironic about '68, there, but I'll still point out that I criticize Cohn-Bendit's '68 in order to pay tribute to the '68 of the CGT, the unions, and the people who fought to triple the minimum wage, etc.
48:06 I distinguish May '68 from June '68, there. But the deepest connection between Rousseau and Marx is precisely this: showing the dimension of liberation within human history, and in particular in what Marx will designate with a key concept for Clouscard, praxis — praxis, every practical relation to the world that pushes back the initial determinations, even the fitting-out of a cave under Neanderthals is already praxis, I mean, the passage from chipped stone to polished stone, and even more so to more developed stages like the Aurignacian or the Magdalenian with their very elaborate fish-hooks, etc.
48:54 These are advances in praxis. Besides, official history, which rages against Marxism, is very Marxist without knowing it, in its major periodizations. We speak indeed of the age of chipped stone, the age of polished stone, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age. So we do indeed take advances in the productive forces to sequence history. I note that in passing. There. But there's something in Marx that belongs to a youthful anarchism, we mustn't forget, I mean, before becoming an opponent of Proudhon and Bakunin, I mean, there's a libertarian side to him, so to speak — not libertarian in the American sense, but libertarian in the French sense — that he'll lose fairly quickly, especially from The German Ideology onward.
Converting force into right 49:43 But it's really Rousseau's critique of the relation of force that makes us leave the naturalistic explanation behind for good. Let me explain. Force is what reigns in nature. Your first physics class is about the concept of force. Then, from the concept of force, you get the concept of work, force over a certain distance. From the concept of work, you get the concept of power, in watts, which is measurable, that is, that same work, but per unit of time, because transporting a ton ten meters in one second or in one hour is not quite the same power.
50:15 And so on, all the great basic concepts of physics are built, still, from the concept of force. Rousseau says: the strongest man is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms his strength into right, and obedience into duty. If I obey out of fear, that's not a stable society. Unless he transforms his strength into right and obedience into duty. I am bound to obey the law when it expresses right, but I have the duty to rebel against it when it expresses nothing but force.
50:49 That's what he's saying: force made the first slaves, their cowardice perpetuated them. I love that formula, because it almost puts on trial people who remain in what we'd call today voluntary servitude. Who stay, oh, we have a boss, better that than changing, I never know what tomorrow holds. Well, yes, there it is. I understand it from below, but there it is.
