English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Saint-Just and the syllogism of happiness 0:00 I wish you a happy year, participants. Not just a good one, mind you, we've probably already wished you that, but a happy one all the same. Happiness is a new idea in Europe, isn't it, said a great revolutionary, at the time of the Convention, a great and young one. I'm thinking of Saint-Just. It's one of our finest quotations. I remind those who were kind enough to attend some talks I gave in the gardens of the Tropiques bookshop on Rousseau.
0:33 I had the opportunity to repeat this within Rousseau's own walls, in Chambéry, at Les Charmettes. If you pass through there, go take a look, what a lovely spot it is. And speaking about Rousseau in that setting is quite a privilege. And I take this opportunity to thank, back then, Sabrina and Hugo, who will recognize themselves, who with dedication, great modesty, and great efficiency had organized that talk on Rousseau in that little paradise on the outskirts of Chambéry, where we would return, as you like, from Les Charmettes.
1:09 Yes, I'm thinking of Rousseau, because Saint-Just often thought of him too. And during those talks I had the occasion to recall this, to go straight to the point. A syllogism. A syllogism isn't just some kind of grammar of historical and dialectical reality. Here I'll say something a bit enigmatic, but we'll have plenty of time to clarify it, that's not the most important thing. Especially since, stated abstractly and generally like that, it says something much more concrete — the content of the syllogism in particular.
1:45 In a syllogism, there are extremes and a middle term — that's what interests me for now. So, three terms. There, I've already introduced them. Namely, at the end of the eighteenth century, that period between Rousseau and Napoleon's coronation, or Waterloo, whichever you prefer. One wonders when this period ends. The time of hope, when everything seemed possible. Was it Bonaparte who put an end to it?
2:15 Or was it the Anglo-Saxons, or Waterloo? I leave the question open in any case. There was the Old Regime, before the storming of the Bastille. There is the New one, after the Restoration. Between the two, there is this open period. The dice hadn't been cast yet. That's what Beethoven's music expresses. So, here's a syllogism. We had a choice as to how to enjoy life between two extremes.
2:45 Sorry to those who've already heard this. The extreme of pleasure and the extreme of virtue. It so happened that people were guillotined in the name of virtue, as you know. And at the same time, some also found themselves, in the games of the Revolution, speaking as the counter-revolutionaries would, people like the Marquis de Sade, who were more on the side of pleasure than of virtue.
3:19 When he told us about virtue, only misfortunes followed. There you have two extremes. Happiness is the middle term. And yes, it's a concrete middle term, because in both extremes — this is the nature of extremes, whatever the syllogism — you gain one thing and lose another. You leave some feathers behind, while gaining something.
3:50 For every determination is negation. If I establish a field, it's because I've cut down the patch of forest that was there, or drained the patch of marsh that was there, as you like. I'm no longer in abstract logic here, I'm in the real, you see. "Every determination is negation" sounds abstract. But you see, all of a sudden, the Flemish, Dutch, Netherlandish peasant, who conquered his land from the sea, means that in Hegel's aesthetics we find that a sheen on a glass of wine, something trivial, everyday — objects that were never present in grand Italian painting, as we've seen elsewhere, these aren't saints, no, it's a sheen on a glass of wine, or on the lip of a servant girl returning to the kitchen in Vermeer, or in De Hooch — that extraordinary presence characteristic of Dutch painting comes from the fact that everything everyday had been miraculously conquered from the sea, and that for a glass of wine to rest on a table in Flanders,
Repetition, lullabies and fleeting pleasure 5:00 a great deal of work was required — that's what's glorified in that painting. So, two extremes — there are always two extremes — in which, if we only had those two, without a middle term, if we were binary without going as far as ternary, you see, I'm picking this up again to show you we haven't wasted time, in the realm of appearances we're forced to leave some feathers behind, or else — and this is somewhat the subject I'm debating this year — or else we have repetition, which is at least security, remember what we said last time about lullabies: you rarely see lullabies modulate, do you, to the rhythm of a jig, or of hard rock, or worse, in classical music, as in jazz, as elsewhere, as in what's called, at the current Ministry, under the Directorate of Contemporary Music — yes, we've made distinctions between contemporary music, modern music, current music, you'll see —
6:10 so there you have it, no, lullabies need to be quite repetitive, ridiculed, hypnotic — "the flux and reflux of that water, its sound, continuous, but swelling at intervals" — Rousseau sinks into reverie, into the uniformity of that continuous movement which lulled me, lulled me — ah, there we have security. But still, as Nietzsche said, the Romantics always confused the pleasure of waking up with that of falling asleep. That's well put — I really see that: Romantic enthusiasm, they don't know they're falling asleep, they're dreaming, while I believe myself wide awake. In their enthusiasm they heard the call of the Queen of the Night, they lacked the vigilance of the Enlightenment century, where Sarastro reigned, the sun king — I'm in The Magic Flute here, no, I'm not in The Magic Flute, it's the same character, but in The Magic Flute he is strongly opposed to his ex-wife, the Queen of the Night, isn't he, and to her spells — so you see, with pleasure, that's fine, we have pleasure, I would never say a word against something that feels good,
7:22 as such anyway, there are plenty of ifs — if it's not at someone else's expense, etc., it does no harm, as long as it feels good and bothers no one, you'll never hear me say a word against it — but pleasure, the pleasure of enjoyment, is short-lived. Time is passing, time does not tire, my lady, but we ourselves are passing away, says Ronsard in a beautiful poem — isn't that lovely? Time is passing, time does not tire, my lady, but we ourselves are passing away — time will remain there, and we will be gone. Or else the same Ronsard says: matter remains, and form is lost — form is us, matter is what remains of us once we're dead: matter remains, and form is lost. That's what pleasure is. And then come the libertines, you know, it's a great philosophical tradition — I'm being serious — it's not only a literary tradition, though a highly developed one: Les Liaisons dangereuses is one of the best-written works in our entire literature — but there is a philosophical seriousness often linked to atomism, to the ancient tradition, to Epicurus's theology. The libertines have the merit of keeping the materialist tradition alive at a time when it was truly
The seriousness of libertinism 8:33 at its most repressed — so, between the sixteenth century, which shakes off ten centuries of the Middle Ages, extraordinary, the Renaissance, and the eighteenth century, which takes up the sixteenth century's torch — you see it like two parallel lines on a parallelogram — between the two, it's blocked, locked down, by the longest reign in the history of France, that of Louis XIV. "L'État, c'est moi." But otherwise the movement wouldn't have resumed. The Enlightenment, as I've told you, takes up again, the movement of the Enlightenment takes up again the great movement of humanism, of the sixteenth century — but that wouldn't have resumed if the movement had been completely stopped, blocked, locked.
9:11 But a repression is never 100% successful, we all know that — in dotted lines, beneath the great arch of Versailles classicism, and you know how passionate an admirer of it I am, but in dotted lines, there is libertine thought — well, the thought of the libertines, one didn't yet say "libertine" at that time. Gassendi — there's a street named after him in Paris — the meridian, you know — one of the major parts of Descartes's work is the Replies to the Objections, because he had published the Meditations; the Discourse on Method is a summary, a condensed version, we don't go into detail, so one doesn't always feel concerned, especially if one reads a bit fast — it's a masterpiece — but the Meditations, there, we really get to the heart of the matter. The Discourse was in French — that was political, they wanted it to have maximum circulation; at the time it wasn't obvious that a great author would write in French — and the Meditations in Latin, addressed to the learned world, not to ordinary readers, addressed to the scholar, not to the priest. And after the Meditations, there was of course a great movement in Europe — I like to say, at the time,
10:21 telecommunications — sometimes there are bugs, as we say, it doesn't work, the email hasn't arrived, or it went into spam — knowledge had its problems too; you realize what it must have been like back then, honestly, with the letters Descartes sent, roughly, to Locke, in England, across the Channel, the storms — I'm making a parenthesis here, I do admire that abundant correspondence they exchanged — and so, one of those who gave Descartes the most trouble in the Replies to Objections, because he received objections from Locke — those are famous — from Hobbes too, that's it, but the ones that put him in the greatest difficulty were Gassendi's objections. So I'm not talking about a minor author — who besides was an immense scholar for his time. So, a small parenthesis on libertinism: there is a seriousness to libertinism, just as there is a seriousness to pleasure, and that seriousness is death, disappearance, flight. There is pleasure, but what makes it not happiness, what makes pleasure unable to be conjugated in the imperfect tense, is that at most it belongs in the simple past, all right,
Beatitude, happiness and thanks 11:32 "then I stole a kiss from her" — all of that is in the simple past, it passes quickly, but it's not every morning that I took the path to school, does it bring back the taste of my coffee — I'm improvising, very badly — coffee, Bach wrote a cantata about coffee, well, I'll stop, because it's... no, coffee was subversive, the revolution happened in the salons, over coffee, not at Versailles — I can't neglect the importance of coffee, so let me mention it anyway, with the Coffee Cantata — it's rare for Bach to write secular cantatas, so let's talk about it — every Sunday he wrote a cantata on commission, meant to be performed for the Protestant service — no joking, no opera, no story about a homosexual and a prostitute, that's the world of opera, I'm speaking as it was used then — a cantata every Sunday, with a few exceptions, very few: the hunting cantata, marvelous, I recommend it, and the Coffee Cantata, marvelous too, in any case — but look, the very first laugh is the father scolding his daughter because she's drinking coffee — she's smoking joints, basically — no, that's exactly it —
12:42 "How do I learn that you're drinking coffee?" — "I can't do without it, Father" — "Coffee, you don't know what it is, it's..." — she's possessed. And at the end of the cantata — I'll leave you to discover it, but what's wonderful is that the grandmother drinks coffee, the cat drinks coffee, Germany is going to the dogs — there, I wanted to close that parenthesis. Fleeting pleasure — you have virtue, on the other hand, trying to settle into eternity, doesn't it, already worthy, in this life, of God, etc., there is salvation in the afterlife — well, that's beatitude. That's neither pleasure nor happiness, neither fleeting pleasure nor happiness, which does have a certain thickness of duration, as much as a human being can allow himself — but to speak outright of eternity, positively, that's beatitude. That's the century before — that's Pascal, who promises us beatitude, if and only if — you know the rest — whoever wants to save his life will lose it. That's the logic of Christianity, as opposed to happiness. And now this century dares to speak of happiness, can you imagine — that is, the pleasure found in enjoyment, but with duration — something I've already associated with beatitude,
13:54 we mustn't despise happiness, no — because there are those who look down on it a bit — happiness, how bourgeois, can you imagine saying that to the Malian woman who walks 10 km every morning to fetch water, then 10 km more to fetch wood, to fetch water, who pounds grain all day long — still, happiness ought to be granted to her too, it is a rightful due of humanity. So Saint-Just is entirely right to say — since I'm in the middle of fighting those who snub happiness — that happiness is a new idea. So there, I wanted to recall this syllogism, between the two extremes: pleasure, which is fleeting and extremely intense, which is what Kant mysteriously calls — well, he's actually very clear, he defines it, but it remains a mysterious idea — intensive magnitudes, not magnitudes like one billion, ten billion, that's extensive — intensive magnitudes, magnitudes of intensity, of pleasures — between fleeting pleasure, however intense it may be,
15:04 and the beatitude of the saints, or of God, the blessed one — the Christian blessedness, as with human beings, the blessed one, it's all coherent — well, you still have the possibility of extending, as if extending the radius of a circle, the surface — happiness, possible in order to make it real. So there — I wouldn't want to depart from our new custom of answering questions, but since this was after all New Year's greetings, this whole long detour was meant to wish you a happy year, but you see that in my mouth, it still comes from a good intention. Second little preamble, before moving on to the questions: a big thank-you — well, here's the equipment, we'll take a photo to immortalize the trophy — honestly, morally, we are overwhelmed, we, the association, who launched this appeal, since the previous camera belonged privately to someone,
16:15 it was made available to me, and it gave up the ghost — we were quite stuck. So honestly, this fundraising appeal, as they say, crowdfunding, satisfied in less than three days — I can't get over it, honestly, I can't get over it. I thought I'd be following in the footsteps of our patron Socrates, who reproached the Sophists for doing pseudo-philosophy for real money, and here we are, almost following in his footsteps, aren't we — you see it's not for a good cause, ha — so, honestly, thank you, and one last thank-you to all of you for being here tonight, so numerous, despite the tempaccio, as we say back home — no, that's Italian, tempaccio, that's good Italian, tempaccio, people still say it — it means terrible weather, having braved it to come attend this third workshop of the new season. So, I received a long question, which I'm asked to give my opinion on — forgive me, but I brought my tablet to read it, it's very long,
The question about M. Soler and the end of Marxism in power 17:25 and — I'm going to stop people — I made a slip, maybe a successful one, or a failed one, I don't know — now I can't read it to you, but I remember quite well, it presented me with the thought of a certain Mr. Soler — maybe you know him — I'll be a bit blunt, but I said right away, there's no need to know him, that's already an anticipated answer to the question — I didn't even want yet — I was asked to give my opinion on this Mr. Soler's thought — so I'm going to discuss this gentleman's thought, but I mean, it's the 327,000th rehash of an old counter-revolutionary thought, that's why it's false and it's stupid. I mean, Baudelaire worshipped the one he called "the impeccable one," de Maistre, who really is the counter-revolutionary in chief of the nineteenth century, a French thinker who had been forgotten — so I'm getting there, I'm getting there, the question I was asked about Mr. Soler, who's coming back into fashion thanks to this formidable counter-revolutionary thought sweeping over us, ever since... ever since what?
18:32 So you have a choice: since the crisis? Or since Marxism has no longer been a danger? What have I seen of Marxism? Marxist thought is there, I even think there are as many people who've had it. Historically, it should be easy to cure. Yes, but it's books, it's ideas — you know Marx, we can quote him on this: it's not ideas that run the world, it's not...
19:04 On the other hand, when there was a Marxism — well, people claiming to be Marxist in power — oh, that was much more worrying. You know, I was born in Vietnam. I was born in Vietnam, under American bombs, which were driving out the Japanese at the time. Well, they used to bomb the American way — they'd fly very high, they killed twice as many Vietnamese as the Japanese did, we know that suited them fine. I'm telling you what I heard, since I was newborn, I can't remember it myself — from my mother, who wasn't at all progressive, mind you, may the earth rest lightly on her, so I don't remember it myself.
19:44 She used to say, the English are for accuracy, they're within 400 meters, the Americans do whatever they please. I'm telling you what I heard. I later learned that the English had razed Dresden, as many deaths as Hiroshima. Well, I'm not here, I don't want to point fingers at the good guys and the bad guys. I love America, for lots of reasons. So, I was born in Vietnam — well, the problem is that immediately after my birth the Indochina War begins. That, you know.
20:18 Which lasts a long time. Which ends in disaster for us. I believe across four generations, the flower of the officer corps was mowed down in that basin, at Diên Biên Phu. And barely — the war against the French ends, when the Vietnam War takes over from the Indochina War — poor country, can you imagine. It confronts one of the greatest powers on earth, France, at the time. And no sooner is that over than it confronts the mightiest power of all.
20:51 And it comes out victorious again. There was the same commander-in-chief — homage will be paid to him here — General Giáp. Never pursued a political career, if I may say so. All the same. Among the great soldiers of history — Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon — nothing. He didn't become a quasi-king of Rome like Caesar, a dictator in the Roman sense, he didn't become emperor like Alexander, or emperor like Napoleon.
21:27 He withdrew. So, poor — can you imagine the resistance of this people, the suffering, tens of thousands of victims still today, from defoliant gases, from Agent Orange, and other atrocious things. In short, I don't want to wallow in the gore. You know that more bombs fell on Vietnam than on all the battlefields of the Second World War combined. My point is that if a country is fought like that simply for having had the misfortune of taking a Marxist direction, a country 10,000 km from the United States, well, that's really extraordinary.
22:12 It really is extraordinary. And before that, there had been 3 million deaths in the conflict of the two Koreas — barely, a few years earlier, 3 or 4 years earlier — the corpses of Korea were still warm, 3 million dead. I'm telling you this because those who now lecture the whole world about morality have all those deaths on their conscience too. So this formidable counter-revolution could not have happened while progressive humanity was looking toward Beijing and Moscow, toward Havana.
22:49 I remember, as a kid, that Castro was not communist at all, he wasn't pro-Russian at all, and even less pro-Soviet. I even remember demonstrations in Cuba — but Jean de Pontra knows Cuba well, he'd correct me if I'm wrong — there were demonstrations, and the slogan of the pro-Castro crowd was "Cuba sí, Rusia no." At the start he was almost a reactionary, you know — you know what he had under his arm, in the Sierra Maestra, when he was still underground? The Social Contract.
23:25 Well, that led him where I was saying — I thought I was making a detour, do you follow me? No, it's not me making the detour, it's history. And then, you see, the Americans wanted to destabilize him, you know the rest, the Bay of Pigs, how many assassination attempts against Castro, I don't know, an astronomical number. 500? Sorry? More than 500. There. Sorry? I heard more than a thousand. No, maybe that's my Mediterranean side, I suppose.
23:55 Well. Ah yes, yes, no, I understand, with nature, yes, that's it. That's it. And so, at that point, he goes looking for a protector. Second example — I'm not defending one side or the other, I'm asking since when has there been this formidable — look at the continuity — flood of counter-revolutionary thought, and so counter-revolutionary that most of you, I'm sure, don't yet recognize them as such. Because it doesn't take me to see how reactionary some are, while others are much less obviously so.
Romantic and revolutionary alternation 24:29 That's why I'm dwelling on this. And for all this I thank Zévin — Zévin, that's now the pseudonym of the young man who kindly sent me this question. Thank you for asking it, it lets me clarify all this. And I'll now go on with the answer to the question I had left a bit hanging last time, since it lets me illustrate the same problem — I'm making here a very quick digression, but one we need in order to understand the continuity of my remarks between the last workshop and tonight's.
25:06 Last time I had shown how there's been, since the French Revolution, an alternation — this is a hypothesis I allow myself to put forward — broadly speaking, between a roughly neo-classical tendency and a roughly neo-romantic tendency contesting the cultural terrain ever since Romanticism's first emergence. At one point we come out of it, then Romanticism returns in an even more exasperated form. I hadn't gone — I say this as I close the sequence — as far as Surrealism, which may be the latest manifestation to date — if you look closely at the shared themes, it's striking — of an unbridled Romanticism, against the neo-classicism that a Gide in the novel, or a Valéry in poetry, tried to lock down — there's nothing pejorative in any of this, I myself love Gide's novels and Valéry's poetry — and the explosion against Valéry's poetry that you see with a Desnos, a Michaux, whoever — all that irrationality, the reference to the unconscious, automatic writing — nothing more Romantic than those themes. Well, in short, that's my hypothesis: since Romanticism, there has been an alternation
26:16 of attempts to rein in the Romantic impulse, and this — how shall I put it — this repression is thwarted, and so each time there's a return, but not a return to zero, rather a spiral return, as we said, because Romanticism comes back even stronger, more intensified — Baudelairean spleen has a more painful physical dimension than Romantic melancholy, and so on, I won't go back over it, there. Now, thanks to Zévin's question, let me finish my little recap by showing that the same thing happens in ideology and in politics.
26:54 Since the French Revolution, we haven't stopped alternating between revolutionary thought and counter-revolutionary thought — that's what I'm saying here. Now, don't make me draw one-to-one correspondences — as the logicians, the mathematicians say — as if revolutionary always went hand in hand with Romanticism and counter-revolutionary with classicism. Sometimes, statistically, it works, it works fairly well, but still, that would be a bit too mechanical.
27:28 What would we do with someone like Baudelaire, who is hyper-Romantic in content and hyper-classical in form? Because indeed Rimbaud reproaches him for one thing. "Baudelaire is the first of the seers, king of poets, a true god" — but the form, so vaunted in him, is petty; "he lived in too artistic a milieu." He's seventeen years old, that's bold, and it's genius, because it's actually quite perceptive. He's wrong on substance — this Baudelairean synthesis of the Racinian verse and new content is formidable.
28:04 But it is perceptive in a way — "he lived in too artistic a milieu." There. So, the same alternation, you see, in ideology. Well, that's why I may seem a bit blunt, and I apologize in advance for it — no, actually, I won't apologize, because that would mean I'm wrong on substance, and that's not the question. I do apologize to him, though — that's different, I'm making a distinction. I apologize to him because it's not against him that I hold this — he's a victim, as newcomers often are; it's the privilege of youth to believe that a thought is new when it's actually the nth repetition of something going back to Chateaubriand, for instance.
28:43 He's good, Chateaubriand, he's a marvel. But let me tell you roughly the themes of this Mr. Soler that he quotes, which are the same ones. There's Schopenhauer, there's Nietzsche, there's... de Maistre, I've told you about de Maistre, but there's also the Englishman who preceded them. Good grief, his name escapes me, but you'll remind me. One of the first counter-revolutionaries. So, the one who said... "Man — man, I don't know man, I've never met man, I've met Englishmen, Hungarians..." Sorry?
29:14 Ah yes, thank you, Edmund Burke. Thank you very much. There's the name. So, that's right. All these people, aren't they, end up doing this too — it's typical. This Soler — I don't want to muddy the waters — puts on trial above all... I seem to be going off topic, as you can see — the long excerpt, which he kindly transcribed in the message he sent us, that he addressed to me.
29:50 I've just gone off topic, because he doesn't talk about any of what I just said. He barely places himself on an ideological plane — well, a bit, when he talks about the Marxists — but he stands mainly on a religious plane. He criticizes above all — let's be clear — he criticizes religion, the monotheistic religions, the appearance of monotheism, basically almost all our ills — the plague, cholera, so-called "asiatic" diseases, etc. All the ills of history, all the crimes, the deviations, the depravities, shall we say, of man throughout history, exploded with the appearance of monotheism, of transcendence.
30:24 It's as old as... as the counter-revolution. I could say better. Maybe he's right on the substance, who knows. You see, I'm not passing judgment on the substance. What I'm rebelling against is those who make people believe these ideas are new, in order to seduce a youth that legitimately seeks novelty because, given the air it breathes, I understand it needs a breath of fresh air. There you go. We must be careful not to mistake old moons for new struggles.
30:55 I say that because in '68, people talked about problems. The old ones, that was about wages, retirement, contemptible stuff like that. No, but I'm not exaggerating. I'm not exaggerating that we treated it as categorial grievance. That's changed a bit. Now young people, it's also about retirement, to really believe that we've socially gained since then. It's good, it's good that you're getting into it now for those close to you. Well, at the time, that's how it was, and now we're very happy when we're enrolled in a high school that works well with good teachers.
31:30 At the time, it was attacked head-on, not yet on the central committee, to use a famous phrase, but against the French Napoleonic lycée. It's one of the rare places where inequality of birth is regulated a bit, isn't it, is balanced out a bit. A bit, still, yes, that makes me think of these school stories. Still, you know, I spent part of my childhood in Africa and I remember looking from behind the window of my air-conditioned living room at the classmates I'd seen during the day studying their lessons by streetlight.
32:15 So, I mean, metro, work, sleep, that was the slogan. Most of you, metro, work, sleep. There's this contempt, I have to put it that way. The contempt for the masses that's common to that whole line of thinking. A certain environmentalism too, which found itself, we're not that many cases like that. Curious convergence of the most reactionary Malthusianism and the most avant-garde environmentalism.
32:45 and of the good old counter-revolution that Edmund Burke, the first one over there, in England, at the time — I have nothing against the English, I love them — but well, that's still how it was. It was England that financed, wasn't it, the Germanic countries provided the cannon fodder soldiers and England paid. Already, already. It was Arabia without the title of the state.
Modernity is not ethnic 33:15 Well yes. And thrones were crumbling like dead leaves, to put it as Hugo did. So, that, first and foremost, this line of thinking is not new. When she says, I'd like, especially for the sharp minds who deserve to raise the question, to be a bit more transversal now, because it's a cultural richness in this question. It's about the conflict.
33:45 Roughly, between Christianity and paganism. And here we come back to familiar ground. In our exchanges, I already told you, since last year, and even the seminar before that, about being modern, about this modernity which first appeared in what we call the West, but which has nothing ethnic about it. We must not forget that we were living in smoky huts while Egypt was already building in stone and knew the number pi, at a time when the Gauls were illiterate. And while the people of the Far East, from China to the Nile, passing through the Tigris and Euphrates, had already been using writing and calculation for a long time, hadn't they?
34:35 No. I say that because there are people who believe there's an equation between the West, technical progress, industry — but there's more to it than that. First of all, there would have been no industrial revolution without the scientific revolution. On that, we all agree. When we use reason, we make an argument. It's worth continuing. The scientific revolution would never have been possible without mathematics. Isn't that right, Thomas? No, no, you'd better ask a physicist whether he agrees.
35:08 Erwan, I saw him coming. You agree, right? I know very well there's a conflict with mathematicians, like all physicists. It's a structural conflict, it's psychological, not scientific. Fine. Fine, let's drop the math-physics thing. Scientific. There's the best question the ancients asked: is the Earth cube-shaped? Now, mathematics — we say, why, don't we need the Arabs?
35:39 It's the Greeks — well, I'm not talking about the early beginnings. I do admire the Chaldean, Mesopotamian beginnings, the duodecimal system we still use for calculating time, I don't know — it's sexagesimal, it's the same thing. A minute, a second, that's Babylon, which was even more advanced than the Egyptians in arithmetic. The Egyptians were fine in geometry, but arithmetic, not so much. Well, and at that point there still was no algebra.
36:10 Today's mathematics is algebra — it algebraizes everything, it algebraizes geometry, roughly speaking, and even physics. That's what bothers you. No, no, I know it doesn't bother you and that it's helping you make progress, that's good. Algebra is an Arabic word. You should know that. Al-jabr, I unfortunately can't pronounce this magnificent language well, but I believe it means a dislocated limb that has been set back. You see, a member of equations.
36:43 And above all, it's between Damascus and Baghdad — there are places like that, you know. Damascus and Baghdad, essentially between the 11th and 13th centuries — before that already, and after too, but especially in that period I'm referring to, between the 11th and 13th centuries, is when the whole of analysis as we have it was worked out. It's a magnificent branch of mathematics, analysis — the second degree, you know, the quadratic, was initiated and developed by musicians — excuse me, nice slip — by Arab mathematicians.
37:22 At the time, the caliphate had moved from Damascus to Baghdad. And there you go. And even the notion of the algorithm is just a euphonic reworking of the name of a great Arab mathematician — I won't try to pronounce his name so as not to disfigure it, but 'algorithm' is the francization of his name. So, in passing — what is Western in all this? What is true, and that's why I insist on it, is that what began in the West is the convergence of all this.
38:00 For example, by the end of the 16th century, Christianity had long been established in Europe. I'm telling you this in passing — transcendence and monotheism. So, slavery had long since disappeared. Slavery — the slave is the basic productive force of Antiquity, for animal traction it's the slave. Yes, just as the draft horse is the basic productive force of the Middle Ages, thanks to an invention of the harness, that is, the collar which let it pull without choking — those are the great turning points of evolution.
38:35 Moving on to the Middle Ages — the slave is the pillar on which the whole economy of Antiquity rests. That's no small thing, people. There you go. You understand why Christianity first spread in the cities and not in the countryside, because it was in the cities that there were the most slaves, and it's of course among the slaves that this message — that we bow down before no one but God, before no master — struck home, the fact that there are differences among us.
39:05 But well, in relation to God, that's a negligible difference. That was revolutionary, and it spoke to the ears of slaves. And my name comes from that. Ah, I'm going to talk about myself. No, about my name. Yes, because Pagani, in fact, originally means the peasants. Pagus is the pasture. It's the most primitive stage, before even farming — pasture, that's not even agriculture yet. There you go, sheep, oxen — oxen when you have a bit more money than for sheep and goats.
39:36 And... But as what I just told you, Christianity began in Urbs, the city — 'urban' is how Rome was designated. The Latins said Urbs, just like that, without specifying — it's not 'the city' in general, it's Rome. The countryside remained pagan much longer. City centers were already christianizing at top speed while the countryside was still — and in some places still today, if you go to Berry, you know, there are witchcraft rites in Berry, there's no one from Berry here, it's not meant pejoratively.
40:19 But they still cast spells on cows, I don't know. And — 'ouida,' that's what they say there. And so, in the end, Pagani ended up going from peasants to pagans. There you go. I'm coming back to my conflict, which this Mr. Soler takes a side in. But, once again, as an avatar of a theme that is old, as I told you, like the counter-revolution.
Restoration and the century of revolutions 40:49 How to put it — it's almost as old as the revolution. It's practically as old. Thermidor happens — let's say — Thermidor occurs when, let's say, Robespierre's corpse is still warm. Does that work? And then afterward comes the counter-revolution, the return of royalty, one of the least sharp kings we've had — no, not Louis XVIII — the return of those who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. A fine turn of phrase. In fact he was so dim-witted that in the end it didn't last too long, the people rose up.
41:23 He had some popularity at first, people were tired, after the wars of the Empire, of the revolution, they were somewhat content that things settle down. You really had to see how that opportunity was squandered, how brutality returned worse even than under the old regime, because the conservatives had turned reactionary. Reactionary is the conservative who's turned nasty. Often, yes, not the same thing — there are conservatives from the 18th century who went very far in generosity, all that.
42:00 Madame d'Épinay, who offers Rousseau — I won't get into that, but there you go — when Louis XVIII comes back, the émigrés, those who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, that's not it. If you want the best literature on this, it's a rather little-known author, perhaps one of the summits of French prose, with a plaque dedicated to him on Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques — I name Paul-Louis Courier, not very well known. 'Gentlemen, I am from Touraine, I live in Luynes, a small town of 10,000 inhabitants which risks being reduced further if your prudence does not step in to prevent it.'
42:33 Open letter to Parliament, a text I recommend to you called 'Petition for the Peasants Who Are Prevented from Dancing.' He's a man who only wrote pamphlets, petitions, who seems learned, who did a translation still considered a reference of Daphnis and Chloe, well, Greek bucolic poems, that's another matter — but look it up, on the internet you'll find everything you need, look up 'Petition for the Peasants Who Are Prevented from Dancing.' It's a marvel. Because it was already a return to puritanism — you mustn't dance, you mustn't smoke, you mustn't drink — that last bit I added.
43:04 You mustn't smoke, I say that seriously. I tend to — I just had a heart attack a year ago, it's fine. But anyway, I mean, there's the crisis of '29, you see, the one that comes before, the one we're living through now — bang, Prohibition, you'll be unemployed and on top of that you won't drink. Now you're unemployed, but you don't smoke either. Damn it, in the end, I mean, the Republic, there you go. So I mean, he wanted to stop the new priest who'd come back there, young on top of that, he wanted to abolish a tradition going back to the year 1000, whereby the peasants danced after the market where they hadn't sold their goods.
43:41 Well, that was too much. You don't dance in front of the house of God, because in the village square there was the church, you see. That's what Courier of Méré said. There you go, so you see, boom, we're back to the Revolution. Louis XVIII left. In comes the bourgeois king, that's what he's called I believe in history, Louis-Philippe. Ah no, it's Charles X then. There you go, Charles X. Well he wasn't toppled either. Louis-Philippe, maybe not much smarter. He even had a Giscard side to him, I'd compare him.
44:11 No, because Giscard used to walk to the Élysée. And Louis-Philippe, apparently it was the same, he'd stroll around Paris with his umbrella. And Giscard scored a goal in football, just one, right before the presidential election. Then he played a bit of accordion, well. Louis-Philippe is a bit like that. But in between there's Charles X. Now him, he doesn't have just one anecdote. He's visiting the Musée des Arts et Métiers, which I recommend to you.
44:42 It's a splendor. With one of our greatest scientists, Arago. And Arago explains to him how a machine works, and poor Arago, who is an honest man, a scholar, not an orator, gets a bit lost. He sees that the other man understands nothing. And he comes out with this magnificent line. He stops himself and says: 'Sire, I give you my word of honor.' I find that magnificent. 'I can't tell you everything, but it works, trust me. Sire, I give you my word of honor.' You see. Well. And then there's the revolution of 1830 which drives him out.
45:16 Then afterward, there's Louis-Philippe. There's '48 which drives him out too. You see this alternation of revolutions, I'm serious. Before that, there's the Age of Enlightenment. Before the Age of Enlightenment, there's the age of Louis XIV. Before the age of Louis XIV, there's the age of humanism, the Renaissance. And the 19th century, which has no nickname — I propose, let's baptize it together, the century of revolutions. That's all there is. It doesn't stop until 1917. I haven't even mentioned the Paris Commune, etc., etc. You see, we could go on with the list.
Greek measure and Christian infinitization 45:48 So, when I tell you that the counter-revolution is as old as the revolution, it's so you don't take these ideas as new. But I'm not settling the matter. Well, yes, I am settling it, to tell you that we shouldn't settle it. Let's be like Nerval. Let's modulate in turn on Orpheus's lyre the sighs of the saint — that's for Christianity — and the cries of the fairy. You see? Being European is precisely that beyond.
46:20 If there were an identity, it lies in that schizophrenia. It's very enriching in a way, but that's not the point. We are all, whether we want it or not, caught up in it. We have a Greek heritage, we have a Christian heritage. Do you want me to spell it out? An inheritance that demands measure, limit. We've already talked enough about that, so I won't insist. And which fears and punishes above all else excess, hubris, isn't that right? You recognize the world of ancient tragedy. And then there's the world of cathedral spires, of minarets. 'Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.'
46:52 That's what Jesus says in the Gospel — you must be like God. Ah! Infinity, all of a sudden. Romantic indeterminacy is already there in the Christian ages. Man without qualities, you know, that's a fine title by Musil which defines modern man. Man, because having a quality means having a determination. It's almost the same word in German — having a property. Lead has the property of melting at such-and-such a temperature. Those are finite things. You can state their property.
47:22 That's not man. Man defines all things. He himself cannot be defined, otherwise he'd be finite. But yes, it's serious. It's very fashionable in Sartre's time. It's perhaps the best of Sartre, the one who lives within that theme. Isn't that right? Man exists first. Before having an essence, to be assigned an essence from the start would already be a limitation. A triangle, you can — it's the polygon with the fewest sides. That's not its real definition, though. It could work.
47:54 You see? There are things that can be defined. They are limited, they are finished — determined, defined. Listen closely to words. Often what seems like chatter is actually listening to what the word says instead of speaking in its place. I'll quote Mallarmé: 'The pure work implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who yields the initiative to words.' There you go. So there's already something pre-revolutionary, pre-romantic, in the simple fact of setting, as an ideological program — sorry, I'm reducing the Judeo-Christian religion to an ideology, I mean it in the broadest sense, as politics, as morality, as ethics, whatever you like.
48:43 Infinitize yourselves. But yes! The Greek prescribes measure. So what does Baudelaire tell us, the first of the moderns? It seems, according to a saying, by unanimous agreement of those who teach literature, the first of the moderns in the current sense, modern poetry — what does he tell us? 'Get drunk,' you know, that famous prose poem you find in Paris Spleen, in that collection of prose poems.
49:13 'One must always be drunk, that's the whole point.' That's the refrain I believe. Thank you, Jean. 'One must always be drunk, that's the whole point.' On what? It's Baudelaire — 'on wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.' You know what you want. And the same Baudelaire, in the same collection, in another poem even shorter and less light, less sexy, less fun in tone — 'The Stranger.' Read it, it's very short. It's a series, a dialogue of questions and answers.
49:45 A question from an anonymous voice, who must be the reader. 'Stranger, you're pulling a face, what are you looking for?' No answer. 'Do you want this? Or that?' So they suggest — I don't mean beauty, beautiful landscapes, beautiful women, worries, money, health, or not. He shakes his head. 'Well, tell us at least something.' Yes, he's looking for a determination of his desire — for something that could determine, define what the desire of this stranger is. And finally, the stranger opens his mouth at the end to say: 'What I love is the clouds over there, the marvelous clouds.'
50:21 You understand why clouds? Because their shape is indefinite. Desire has no end there. You see? And Baudelaire will say in 'The Voyage,' the last poem of Flowers of Evil, the one that ends with: 'O Death, old captain, it is time, let's weigh anchor, this country bores us, O Death, let us set sail, if the sky and the sea are as black as ink, our hearts, which you know, are full of rays of light.' I'll go all the way because it's relevant to what I'm saying. 'Pour us your poison so that it may comfort us, we want, so much does this fire burn our brains, to plunge to the bottom of the abyss, Hell or Heaven, what does it matter, to the bottom of the unknown, to find something new.'
50:56 Well, there you go! We still don't have the shape, here, of the object we desire. What we know is that it must be unknown, this 'new.' There you go! Because the rest bores us, the rest wearies us. 'This country bores us, O Death, let us set sail.' Now, in that same poem, he compares those who leave to flee some danger, those who leave because of some heartbreak, astrologers, drowned in the eyes of a woman.
51:26 'Some, joyful to flee an infamous homeland, others, the horror of their cradles.' A few, astrologers, drowned in the eyes of a woman, the tyrannical Circe with her dangerous perfume. He's a misogynist. And harsh, in short — except when he calls her 'my sister.' 'My child, my sister.' 'But the true travelers,' he's the one speaking, 'are only those who leave...'
51:57 Go on, you know the answer. Thank you. So, Tristan, it's a pleasure. '...to leave for the sake of leaving. Light hearts, like balloons, from their fate they never stray, and, without knowing why, always say: onward.' Those ones — and here we get to the cloud, look — those whose desires have the shape of the clouds, cloud to cloud, and who dream, as a conscript dreams of the cannon, of vast, changing, unknown pleasures whose name the human mind has never known.
Contradiction, a catastrophe for science 52:31 Well, that's not Greek. All that's missing is not even knowing the name. The Greek, of course, has logos, the concept, the definition — Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. But yes, you see, there you go — I'm not saying one is right and the other wrong, I'm showing you that we inherit both these traditions, which are not merely different. If they were only different, well, we wouldn't have all these problems — the fact is they're contradictory. We have scientists here. Everything is permitted in science, even bold ventures, but not contradiction.
53:01 Ah, contradiction, that's a catastrophe. Yesterday I had a discussion about Gödel's theorem. I won't tell you what it is, I'll get myself mocked by Thomas — I know that every time non-mathematicians talk about it they say nonsense — but well, we'll have time to talk about it another time, it's very important. But in any case, the discussion was really about contradiction.
53:37 Yes, Gödel said we had a choice between incoherence and incompleteness. That's it. And it's better to have a theory that is perhaps incomplete, that at least moves forward a bit, than incoherence. Because then it's a catastrophe, everything is ruined. And incoherence is a contradiction somewhere, and everything is done for in a scientific discourse. You remember Descartes, those long chains of reasons, all simple and easy. A chain is a chain. If you remove one link, boom, it all falls down. The metaphor is serious.
54:07 Now, here comes the contradiction — ah yes, sorry, one last mediation before I get back to my subject, Christianity, paganism — it's by carefully fleeing, by carefully avoiding contradiction, I'm speaking like Descartes here, by carefully avoiding prejudice and hastiness, that man has appropriated reality — that man, Newton, Einstein, not me — reality, empirical reality, natural reality; the human sciences are much more doubtful.
54:41 Neither Newton nor Einstein claimed to be sociologists or politicians. But there you go, in any case, in their equations. But these are enormous, enormous little sentences like that from Newton that account for almost the totality, almost the totality, of the movements of nature, at least those that don't go too, too fast. So there is indeed a relation between non-contradiction and reality. And I am telling you: here is an existing non-contradiction. The proof is you and me.
55:13 That's where there's a problem. Isn't it? And when, when there was the project for a European constitution which you magnificently voted against? Yes, our vote wasn't taken into account, but it passed anyway. It's nothing, but at least we made our position known. You remember that Giscard had — he wasn't the only one, but anyway, no particular desire to bring him up tonight, no one's left to hear about him — but had insisted; it really took an enormous amount of negotiating to give it up, because we weren't even sure they'd say no rather than yes.
55:48 If on top of that, you add — they wanted to put the reference to Christianity into European identity, into the European constitution. You remember that, I'm not making it up. Personally, it doesn't shock me that Christianity is referenced to define — I don't know what an identity is, but let's say, in any case, the history, or Europe. But then, we can't leave out Marathon, Salamis, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes either — after all, that counts too. So you see, I'm not choosing one or the other, I'm telling you, we have both.
56:20 And I'm not saying that if we remove the Greeks, we're still left with all that, the Christian kings. No, because Versailles is a reference to Greece, aesthetically. All of classicism — we've seen this together, you've already learned this in class — all of classicism consists in saying: we do what we can, but the Greeks are the unsurpassable model, that's what I mean when I say Racine — it's true, let me tell you. Molière draws on Aesop, Racine draws on Sophocles. You want us deprived of all that? Come on, that's my heritage — why are you robbing me of it?
56:55 So you see, you understand better now what I meant, what I hold against this Soler and others — it's not taking sides against monotheism, especially since, in the name of monotheism, in the name of that God, what atrocities have there been in the history of Europe? I'm the first to say it. I don't believe it was prescribed in the Gospel to pour molten lead into the anus and eyes of Jews as the Inquisition did. Well, no — because there are those who say it was already in the Gospel, already in the very notion of monotheism, which is what this Mr. Soler says.
57:27 He says this God — this God of the Jews, this God of the Old Testament — that's him speaking there — came in the baggage of Christianity, that's a way of putting it. The Jews who introduce themselves... You see, beware of that kind of thinking. You see why I speak somewhat harshly of this Mr. Soler. I don't know — Nietzsche handles it better, after all. I would have been tempted, like any petty German bourgeois of the time, to be antisemitic. I would have been antisemitic if I had been a petty German bourgeois steeped in music and culture.
57:58 At the time — I'm not moralizing here. My name isn't Bernard-Henri Lévy, my name isn't Onfray, my name isn't Bush — 'behold the empire of evil, so I must be good.' It's not that. Maybe — maybe I would have been worse than Heidegger. What I hold against Heidegger is re-enlisting after the war, continuing to put technology on trial while siding with NATO, and continuing to fight against what had always been the enemy of the Third Reich — Judeo-Bolshevism. There you go. You see, it's not the same thing.
Bad reasons for being anti-monotheistic 58:29 I'm not moralizing. So I don't want to defend monotheism against polytheism, but I'm warning against very bad reasons for being anti-polytheism. There — we've made progress in our debate, you see. I'll keep answering the question. I'm being asked to say what I think of it. And here I'll make a little detour through De Gaulle. Ah, this will be very useful. Say someone comes up to my table and says, 'so you voted against De Gaulle.' I belong to a generation for whom De Gaulle came to power at the end of the elections.
59:02 Well, I'm going to vote against. I found the ordinances pushing through Social Security to be villainous ordinances. That is, this Pompidou, etc. Well, I'm going to vote against because that bastard is killing French Algeria. Damn it. I was ready — I was ready to sympathize with them. Don't be fooled. Do you understand my comparison? I'm anti-monotheist, why not? Hmm? What does it mean to be anti-Catholic, anti-Inquisition, anti — you know — papal arbitrariness, papal infallibility?
59:36 Well, we should credit — what's his name — Prévert. In Paroles, you know, there's a magnificent, magnificent poem. There's this hybrid, Barnabé. They didn't see it coming like that. He goes off through life. He's a traitor, a guy who's capable. He plans to go to Rome because all roads lead to Rome. Yes, precisely, Rome, the sole object of my resentment. He arrives, he arrives, he's received by the Pope.
1:00:07 The Pope says, 'close the window, Barnabé.' Barnabé — he's already closed it, Your Holiness. The Pope replies... it's true I'm only touchy about matters of dogma. It doesn't bother me at all when people joke about it, etc. Not at all. I laugh heartily, I need to, especially when it's Pope Pius XII, who said the great danger was under Hitler — when everyone asked him to speak out against Nazism, he'd say, 'ah no, no, or else speak out against communism.' Clever, that.
1:00:40 We hadn't yet worked out the notion of totalitarianism, this was before the war, but the notion of totalitarianism would perpetuate that: there are two bad guys, communism and Nazism, but since I'm neither one, I'm good. Fantastic. It's fantastic. And all of this was devised by those who used to say 'rather Hitler than the Popular Front.' And who then hastened — here I'm being much more precise — after the war, in Germany — you know, I'm as pro-German as any Frenchman, so I'm not bashing the Germans.
1:01:12 Well, one should always bash the Boches, but not the Germans — under American orders, to appoint as head of the secret services of the BND, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, that special service — who was it? You know, someone, what's his name, the general? Sorry? Gehlen? Bravo, thank you. General Gehlen, that's who they called on. This was the man Hitler had recruited to gun down as many communists as possible.
1:01:43 There were twenty of them, USSR, Poland, everywhere — not to go into detail — he ran the recruitment service. He ran all the federal services, he was never touched, he died in his bed, he did his job well. He did his job well — meanwhile it seems the best of the Germans died in the war. There you go. So, as — I won't quote a communist, I'll quote an old Catholic Gaullist, Mauriac — who said: I love Germany so much that I prefer there to be two of them.
1:02:20 Ah yes, listen, the moment it's reunified, it causes problems. I can't help it, that's history. Every time Germany has stirred, from the Teutonic Knights right up to now, there's been trouble. Even Mélenchon understood that, I mean. Well. But he's bashing the Boches all the same. He's bashing the Germans in passing. No, no, I'm not playing the Corsica-Mediterranean card. How does he...
Being dialectical; transcendence and nature 1:02:50 France has problems, Germany is a problem. So there you have it. You understand better now what I meant when I said... It's not that I... I'm not asking you not to decide. I'm asking you to decide in favor of not deciding. Not deciding means sending both back to back. It means assuming within oneself the necessity of each of one's opposing determinations.
1:03:20 That's it. Not doing dialectics — any fool can have a contrarian spirit in a café. But being dialectical, which is much harder, means assuming one's own contradictions. I often refer to Freud, as you may have noticed, even though I don't situate myself especially within the Freudian field. But we can't ignore him. Because Freud admirably shows us that our pseudo-identity is based on conflicts, and that this is even what constitutes our identity.
1:03:51 Because there are those who misunderstand Freud, who believe our truth is the unconscious, is the id that wants all sorts of disgusting things. No. No, no, I'm not thinking of crude things, I'm thinking of the fact of being, say, neighbors. Yes, that's nothing. The taste for men and women, as someone would say — that's not serious. No, no, there's something more serious still. Saint Augustine, very Freudian — Saint Augustine, the Confessions are marvelous — he speaks of a baby he had watched who already had, toward his twin brother, a gleam of hatred in his gaze.
1:04:28 Saint Augustine had already noticed that. Already, Saint Augustine had anticipated the criticisms leveled at Freud, who was found monstrous for saying that a child has a libido. But how? After all, they're angels. They're angels. Better than angels — they don't do evil. They're beneath good and evil, not yet beyond it like Nietzsche's 'beyond good and evil.' Well, they're beneath it. But there you go — he already had that look of hatred, you see. If a child is taught not to go around killing his father, not to smash his neighbor's skull to take his food, etc., well, that's going to create a few internal conflicts in him.
1:05:08 This is what I most often illustrate with my story that sounds trivial. I'm sorry to repeat it, but it's when at the table someone says to the woman next to you, 'help yourself first.' We have a conflict within ourselves. A conflict between... it's a bit long, 'help yourself,' we hold back, etc. Especially failed anorexics like me. Someone once told me that's what I am, a failed anorexic. What I actually eat...
1:05:38 But that's not it, I stop myself fairly quickly. There — I'm always hungry, that's what I mean. So sometimes I hold back, I say no, I'm quite taken. It's a conflict. Being human, I was saying — being European, is assuming a conflict. Being human means assuming a conflict. I won't lose myself in abstractions. Being European is a matter of a specific content — it's that very conflict, the one between monotheism and polytheism. Between Christianity, transcendence and immanence. To convert it into philosophical rather than religious or historical terms, it's the conflict between transcendence — monotheism, meaning there is a god, but one so far beyond — trans in Latin, meta in Greek, beyond — that we never encounter him.
1:06:23 Which is very convenient for a society that wants to be scientific. I'm showing you that it's no accident that it was in Europe that the scientific and technical revolution took place, because it required a civilization — whether or not one believes in God — a civilization nourished by Christianity, nourished by transcendence, to say: no, there's nothing divine here, there are no nymphs behind springs, it's H2O, we can build a dam. Period. You understand? We don't tremble before nature, before the...
1:06:53 It can take revenge, yes. These environmentalists are neo-pagans who use — neo-paganisms — to say that if you touch the frogs, you're harming the frogs. No, I always use this example because I'm still furious that an entire population's way of life was made to depend on frogs. I knew someone, I'm telling you in any case, I still remember it — no, he was quite a fellow, he was a saint, a Polish Jew I met who was a local contract worker, not even a volunteer cooperant, in Côte d'Ivoire, earning his salary.
1:07:29 An Ivorian was crazy about avant-garde music, an extraordinary person, materially poor, but he loved what he did, a Spanish teacher, stuck out in Bingerville, married to a local woman, la Yuna. And precisely — we get to the marsh, ha ha, back to it — he'd listen to records on his terrace in the evening like that, and you know, over there, as soon as there's a bit of rain, there are millions of toads, or even little tree frogs — vile toads, covered in warts — he'd grab his machete, he'd skewer them, get skewers of five or six, he'd say to me, 'listen, there are still millions of them.'
1:08:10 So there — some say he was wrong to go about it that way, maybe, I don't know, but I guarantee you they're not going extinct. What's ridiculous is claiming that if man takes any initiative, the whole balance of nature and providence come undone. Try explaining to certain peoples of the Earth that there's a providence in nature — that's a fine one, they'd love to hear it. Anyway, all that would supposedly collapse because I've built a dam that stops salmon from swimming back home.
1:08:43 I thought hydroelectric power was good — it's neither coal, nor oil, nor nuclear, there isn't even the waste problem, it's supposed to be good. Ah no, no — it disrupts the fish. So, under the guise of pseudo-science, this pseudo-science that is environmentalism — because I do love the environment and find it ravaged and think we should organize politically to preserve it, but not in the sense of preserving 'nature.'
1:09:17 I'll never say this parenthesis enough. But on the contrary, I mean, if we must precisely shape our environment, it's because as it stands, before we act on it, it is not at all the effect of some providence. Because it's a form of providence to say that every species is necessary, etc. Moreover, it's a contradiction, because nature has gone through millions of species, long before man appeared on Earth. But then, quite carelessly, you know, the worst extinction event happened about 250 million years ago, when there was the phenomenon called the Siberian Traps, roughly speaking — there were other volcanic phenomena too, over several million years — but it was terrible, and it wiped out, I believe, 96% of species.
1:10:08 That is to say, everything that lives, flies, swims, or crawls. And, luckily for me, I get to walk through a forest that still has animals in it. So I'm for protecting them, but for the pleasure of seeing them — not for the sake of some balance that doesn't exist anywhere. All those that exist now are the descendants of that remaining 4%. Life is tenacious, isn't it. So, you see, this neo-paganism fits together perfectly.
Parmenides and Heraclitus, peras and apeiron 1:10:44 Broadly speaking, all the 'neo-' movements are reactionary. I'll come back to this another time because I'm stating it rather dogmatically like that. But we must see to what extent it's no accident that this neo-conservatism restores certain notions — well, we've got that with ecology, with identity. Well yes, not everything comes down to class or social issues, etc. There's something — there's 'Frenchness,' there's 'Germanness,' there's 'Corsicanness,' and even 'bravitude,' if we're to believe Ségolène Royal. Isn't that right?
1:11:14 Isn't it 'bravitude'? The notion of identity is ontologically marked — how shall I put it, in philosophy — it presupposes that there is being rather than becoming, that Parmenides was chosen over Heraclitus. I'm not saying Heraclitus is right that everything flows, as against Parmenides who says 'what is, is; what is not, is not.' You see, you're doing what my students in Africa did — you burst out laughing when I quoted that. When I said Parmenides is the one who said 'what is, is; what is not, is not.'
1:11:47 Bursts of laughter. You don't need to study philosophy to understand that. They hadn't understood it was serious. They had just formulated with rigor the principle of the excluded middle — without which there would be no mathematics, no non-contradiction. Either this is a pair of glasses, or it is not a pair of glasses — there's nothing in between. The third is excluded. A or not-A, that's how we say it in logic. A or not-A. No joking around. He doesn't say, 'well, you're my friend, I'll give you a good price.'
1:12:24 But yes, it's a trading people who invented dialogue. So this is important, what we see here. I'm not choosing Heraclitus over Parmenides. Even if I lean toward philosophies of history, of the future, etc. But precisely, I try to rise to the dialectic of reality, which is that for there to be movement, there must be a fixed point. You need both to account for reality.
1:12:54 You've all had the experience of thinking your train had started moving, but no, it was the train next to you pulling away. And we've known that since Galileo. Well, most people don't know it — the relativity of motion. They're quite sure that motion is a thing that exists, that is real. No — there is only motion relative to a fixed point. Likewise, this table is motionless here, now, and yet it's also true, at the same time, to say it's moving at 30 km/second like everything on Earth around the Sun. It all depends on the frame of reference from which we observe, or speak of, this table.
1:13:33 So the fixed point is Parmenides, and motion is Heraclitus. There you go. Yes, I am indeed rehabilitating the good old dialectic of nature. Well, nature — philosophy, how shall I put it — is something contradictory, that's it. Just as, before, matter, inertia, and energy were opposed to one another, whereas the most famous physics formula of the twentieth century shows that there is a relation of equivalence between matter and energy. E equals MC², that's what it means.
1:14:03 expresses — sorry — this equivalence. We can move on, Erwan, I'm not saying nonsense. Thank you. We can say it out loud, we can say it out loud, because it needs clarifying. We need to specify with MC², yes. There... we need to specify it's at rest. Sorry? We need to specify that MC² applies in a rest frame. In a rest frame, absolutely. It's good to specify the conditions, temperature and pressure, so to speak.
1:14:35 Thank you. So, there you go. We have no choice, we, as... and yes, I'm no longer saying 'Europeans' here — as moderns, even if this modernity is one that tries to make the Christian-romantic infinitism cohabit within us with the Greek peras — that's Anaximander, a pre-Socratic, who opposed the apeiron, you see, without perimeter, an apeiron, and without contour — Paris without the ring road.
1:15:13 There you go, we no longer know where — my God, I'm not being serious, I paid dearly for this, we can't get through. The apeiron, or the peras — the peras is what is well-determined, a contour, a right angle, a circle, etc. That's opposed to the apeiron. Clouds over there, those marvelous clouds, as Baudelaire would say — the apeiron triumphed with Impressionism, you see. The fact that it was in Europe that, chronologically speaking, this form of modernity first appeared does not at all mean that it rests on some ethnicity.
1:15:53 It concerns all those who have received this double heritage, quite simply — who invest themselves as much in the one as in the other. And we have seen that these are values as universal as one another. I won't go back to talking about my teapots again to remind you that a minimum of regularity is a universal value — I'm opening a parenthesis for the teapots. But I can't help but suddenly recall that, at the end of his preface to the Philosophy of Right, in his political testament, old Hegel, rather tired of having played the game a bit too much...
1:16:27 It's a bit more incisive, brief, and elliptical. In fact, that's it, it's patiently applied to demonstrating everything. And at a certain point, he says, look, this is a work of political philosophy and not of politics, which teaches us to consider the state as it is, not as it ought to be. He's first, like Marx will be with capitalism. We study how capital functions. But that's not it. That's where he says the philosopher must not concern himself with the detail of this or that particular political prescription.
1:17:01 And here he says Plato could have done without prescribing, in Book VIII of the Republic, that midwives run back and forth so that babies get used to being uncomfortable and the citizen becomes a good warrior. Even so, the baby had a little cradle of peace and quiet. Plato — there's that, he's harsh, Plato. And Fichte demanding that criminals' portraits be put on their passports. There were no photographs yet, and Fichte — who was judged on his passport, there was no identity card yet.
1:17:39 There's no hospital yet either. And I love the nursemaids of Plato's Republic running back and forth, shaking the baby so that it doesn't get used to comfort and doesn't go soft, you see, in its infant sleep. There you go. So that's universal. It's not Greek, it's not Christian, it's not European, it's not Inuit. It's common to all peoples.
1:18:10 And so I gave this long answer to this question because it allows me to show that the alternation between classicism, neoclassicism and neo-romanticism in the literary expression of the French Revolution up to today is also found in political ideology, through the alternation of revolutionary thought and counter-revolutionary thought. There we are. I'll provisionally close the debate on...
NATO as a common target; Nerval's poems 1:18:44 I say to Zébin, bravo for the question, bravo for the theme — you've seen it's not a neutral one, but on the other hand it's illustrated by others than Mr. Soler. Yes, I didn't tell you — I'm going to put it a bit harshly. Of course, he condemns all of Christianity, and then he says Marxism, all revolutionary movements are influenced by this monotheism of the Gulag. Anyway, I don't know. So in the end, we're always on NATO's side.
1:19:15 That's the common point, you see, in all these ideologies — they always end up having as their target, including Islamist fundamentalism. Ah, you weren't expecting that one. Look seriously — Bin Laden, historically speaking, that is before the events that eclipse memory, that is, afterward there are events so significant that they make us forget what came just before. You see, like May '68 — we mustn't forget that in '67, in 1967, it broke the record for the number of hours of strikes there had ever been in France since the Liberation.
1:19:46 We can't go on like this. We confuse revolutions and counter-revolutions. Back to Bin Laden. They had the same protectors. In any case, what's certain is that this Bin Laden — it's the era when his family already frequented the Bush senior family. I mean, everyone knows that, I mean, I don't know the reality, but it can't be denied, it's archived.
1:20:18 I'm not going to go dig up documents, doctored photos. Not the trash bins of the internet — no, it's archived. But who was he against at that time? Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Arafat. That is, the only three leaders in the region who, though not the most commendable, weren't focused on the religious question.
1:20:48 It's these three against whom NATO will declare and wage war. Even so, huh? Even so. He deserved well of the Atlanticist fatherland, I mean. Well, again, we get rid of them. As I told you last time, reason got rid of Napoleon at Saint Helena the moment Napoleon had brought forth the modern state — reason no longer needed to use cunning, right? It could put him in his cell at Saint Helena.
1:21:18 There you go. So that's why it's better that it be — I think, of course, this form of thought that plays the card of the pagan gods against the avenging, jealous, and unique god. Yes, I understand very well. Yes, I am one of those inspired by the avenger. He has marked my forehead with his lip, and the result — this is someone who knows that, for whom that means something.
1:21:49 Yes, I am one of those inspired by the avenger. It's nothing, you know. You know the beginning, you didn't remember what comes after. There's a chimera. You ask why I have so much rage in my heart and, on my flexible neck, an untamed head — it's because I come from the race of Antaeus. That's from antiquity's roles. He's the one hard to kill because he's a son of the earth, of Gaia. So every time his feet touched the ground again in combat, he regained all his strength.
1:22:20 So Heracles had to strangle him in the air. That's what the myth says. So much for Antaeus. Yes, I come from the race of Antaeus, I turn the darts back against the victorious god. You can guess this is someone playing the role of the pagan gods' game, wanting their revenge against the victorious god, the Christian god who has come over the whole planet. Yes, I am one of those inspired by the avenger. He has marked my forehead with the pallor of Abel, and, bloodied, I sometimes have Cain's implacable redness.
1:22:51 Yes, this is someone playing the Cain card, the one designated in the Bible as wicked by the jealous god, right? Well, I have the temptation of Cain — it's Gérard de Nerval. That's it, because they called him kind Gérard. Why did it hit him so hard, killing himself? He was charming. Well, he was a bit strange. He had fantasies, he had visions. But still, what beautiful writing, what a shame. His friends, what loneliness. It shouldn't be like that. There he says, why do I have so much rage in my heart, kind Gérard?
1:23:23 The pallor of Abel, alas bloodied, I sometimes have the redness of Cain. He takes on both, to the point of madness. Right? It's because he's alone. This will be my conclusion, I'll tell you now, because I'd like you to hand over the floor for the last half hour. This will be my conclusion: the great danger of this contradiction, when it passes into reality, is that it risks imbalance. And therefore irrationality and madness. And so the best way to avoid it is synthesis, being either in the lie that denies this contradiction or in madness when one takes the risk of sharing it.
1:24:03 What's terrible about the accursed poets, wonderful as they are, is — remember what we said about the cracked bell, remember — that we isolate the one who assumes these contradictions as being sick, a lunatic, not one of us, that one's a cursed poet, he must be condemned, that's important. The poet, Mallarmé says, is rather, on the contrary, the one who gives a purer meaning to the words of the tribe. And here, I'm creating words with the words 'TS' as Mallarmé does, or 'M-A-U-X' [ills/evils], it amounts to the same thing here.
1:24:35 So, they plunged me three times into the waters of Cocytus — you heard, the angels of the new god plunged me three times to drown me in the waters of Cocytus. That's one of the rivers of hell — they tried three times to kill me. In fact, these are the three bouts of madness, his three internments. It's a psychic death. They plunged me three times into the waters of Cocytus, and, alone, protecting my Amalthea mother, I sow again at their feet the dragon's teeth. Sounds good, doesn't it? And then you saw I quoted his most famous poem, 'the dark one, am I Love or Phoebus?'
1:25:14 Ah, it's very good, isn't it? 'Lusignan or Biron? My brow is still red from the queen's kiss.' It's more beautiful in our language. My brow is still red — even though it happened 10,000 years ago, the kiss, and everyone still feels its warmth. My brow is still red from the queen's kiss. I have dreamed in the grotto where the mermaid swims — on a little... it's not Christian, that. The mermaid, can you imagine? Fish tail. I have dreamed in the grotto where the mermaid swims, and twice victorious I have crossed the Acheron. So there we are, we're among the Greeks, the river that surrounds hell, modulating in turn, in turn, on Orpheus's lyre.
Nietzsche, Wagner and the shift to Parsifal 1:25:46 So there it is, absolute poetry, the sighs of the saint, the cries of the fairy. There, one must assume this contradiction. That's him. There's perhaps someone further along in thought — I don't say in philosophy, because he himself often mocks philosophers. But I'm thinking of Nietzsche. I don't know. Nietzsche, now, waged the greatest trial ever conducted — the most virulent in any case — against Christianity, not the most obsessive, because there are others with 540 volumes, but I mean the best argued, above all the best written, and best supplied with apt examples.
1:26:24 And he often says 'aut Christus,' which in Latin means 'either... or.' It's like the excluded middle from earlier, there's no in-between. Aut Christus, aut Zarathustra. Either you hold to Zarathustra, who is my own prophet, the prophet of the Great Noon. Noon is not the morning or the twilight, it's not the West, it's not Christian, it's not twilight-like, melancholic, you see, it holds together. It's good. Paul says, on the left you fall, on the right you fall — it's at noon.
1:26:56 It's the matter of the Great Noon. There you go, one can't be both Christian and Nietzschean, roughly speaking. And then, I quoted you last time this admirable retraction that Nietzsche made of his own words, when he had, right, upon reading — which he had just discovered — the libretto of Parsifal, Wagner's last opera, his testament, which, unlike — we're right in the subject. Wagner had devoted his immense work, the longest work in all of Western art, since it lasts four days.
1:27:30 There are those who find Mahler's symphonies long — well, I mean, that's not quite an hour, this is four days. Actually, no, it comes from the Greeks — the Greeks had the habit of making a trilogy, for example for the House of Atreus, Agamemnon, Orestes, all that, done over three days, we know what we're doing. And then afterward, a comedy is performed at the end, so people part on a somewhat more fun note, and the whole was called a tetralogy. Three plus one, four, a tetralogy. Wagner comes to take up that tradition a little, since he wants to reconstitute this unique way the Greeks had of gathering the people — dispersed, individualized, modern people — together on the tiers of a theater.
1:28:12 Let me open a small parenthesis, but in general, kings sometimes take a fancy to poets of worth, or even musicians of worth, as Frederick did with Bach. Bach was an obscure little provincial musician, he hadn't had the luck, like Handel, of being attached to the great English court, even though they were born 13 kilometers apart. Leipzig, Bach, Halle! Well, Handel — the two titans of the baroque are really neighbors. Saxony is quite a nursery. Schumann was born there, Wagner is from Leipzig, well anyway.
1:28:43 Except that Handel, by biographical chance, had the luck to go live in England, and Bach always remained employed by the austere Protestants of Leipzig, who'd say 'you'll do your little cantata next Sunday, no opera.' And so, fairly obscure — you see, the greatest musician of his time, some say of all time, well, everyone, so to speak, one of the musicians' own musicians — he's quite the master, you know. So, everyone — his fame, not as a composer, they didn't rename him that, but he was so fabulous as an organist at the Thomaskirche, he could improvise a fugue with a little... well, you know, playing a double keyboard with his feet too, heel-toe, he'd give you a fugue in three voices, how do you say?
1:29:19 So his reputation — people love a good sideshow freak when they don't really know music. And so, there, the king, who was an excellent flutist, gave him a fugue theme and Bach worked a miracle of a fugue, sir. That could happen, well, it's already something, that artists get invited to court. With Wagner, it's emperors and kings who travel to go to Bayreuth to the artist's place. Wagner — now there's someone. He allowed himself that, didn't he? Well, he just took it upon himself.
1:29:49 And his motto, this odious man, was 'the world owes me what I need.' The man was odious. I'm telling you the truth, it's documented — he hit people up, his wife, her money, because he was broke. Well, there are several stories like that. And to be perfectly honest, everyone who knew him says, 'you don't know him, he's bewitchingly kind.' Note that. And, come now, let's take his most famous cuckold, Hans von Bülow, Cosima's first husband, the future Mrs. Wagner.
1:30:22 It's not an obvious thing at the time — sorry, I'm closing in on it, but it's a bit the subject. It's a bit the subject because I'm talking about the moment when Wagner will move from his pagan, neo-Germanic inspiration — making Brünnhilde, Siegfried, Wotan, Valkyrie, etc. — to his testament, Parsifal, Perceval the Welshman, the quest for the Grail, the matter of Britain, Christian, Breton, Celtic, against pagan Germanism, for some reason. So, yes, he's between the two, he's about sixty, Cosima, twenty-five years younger, has for husband the greatest conductor of the era, Hans von Bülow — Karajan is nothing next to him.
1:31:01 And a great Prussian family besides, I mean, Prussian nobility — quite refined, in a fine sense. In those circles, already at the time — the bobos, the bourgeois-bohemians, Buddhists and bonobos. A very great conductor. And there she goes, abandoning everything for this broke little musician-fellow, who hadn't even answered the first emissary sent to him by King Ludwig II, who was searching for him all over Europe to make him his own musician, because Wagner was afraid it was bailiffs looking for him, creditors.
1:31:39 I mean to say how broke he was. So, I'll skip some steps — Bülow conducts Tristan. No, no, but listen, you may not know it, but for those who don't, it's five hours of the most torrid passion ever dared put into art in general, and music in particular, celebrating loves — I mean, it's his rival expressing himself there. You see, he's conducting his rival's eros in an incandescent manner. You know what he says at the end of the rehearsal?
1:32:10 Here's what he says to the orchestra: a man who has done that, one must forgive everything. You see, so — he wasn't promised anything, one must be honest. So, Nietzsche, who was delighted with the character of Siegfried, because Siegfried is young, breaks the old values, has contempt for pity, like that. Yes, no pity for Mime, the smith — I could tell you the whole story, since it's even longer than The Lord of the Rings.
1:32:41 But it's roughly the same story. So, as for its fundamentals. And then all of a sudden his hero is a fool. Perceval strikes just anyone at random. They bring him into the domain of the Grail. Now, some people search their whole life for it, he's brought there directly. And they wait for him to ask the question that would lift the curse hanging over the world. He says nothing. Silence.
1:33:11 Well, the first act, the curtain falls, simply because there's no money left. And we don't even know his name. No, well, that's forgotten in the second act, three hours in and we still won't know. And then finally his name comes out: 'you call me, I who have no name.' So Nietzsche comes upon that text, and he gets a bit angry. People are starting to fall out with the Wagners. He says, it's hatred, it's impossible. There, Nietzsche becomes philo-Semitic. I'm serious. That, they never tell you about the Nietzscheans. It's true. It's true Nietzsche wasn't like that.
1:33:42 I tell you, one should marry pure Prussian bloodlines with Jewish women to properly rejuvenate German blood. You see, those aren't antisemitic sentences. And then even in his notebooks of madness, at one point, he writes 'I have all antisemites shot.' You see, it's clear. It's clear. But he wasn't always like that. Like everyone — I told you — like nearly all the educated German petty bourgeoisie, he was antisemitic in his youth. And if he became philo-Semitic, it was out of hatred for Wagner.
1:34:12 Who himself had nothing of a Nazi except a pathological antisemitism. Whereas Nietzsche has all the traits of Nazism except antisemitism. There, I give you the file as it stands. Don't take my word for it, dig into it. Because it's interesting. It really is interesting. Well, I tell you, France has problems, Germany is a problem. And so he comes upon the text, it's not possible, I can't say it again, but he's gone senile, the old man. It's true, this is my last dream, that's the road to Rome.
1:34:43 If we're really honest, the road to Rome means returning to Catholicism. There's the great conflict of German history, the conflict of emperors and popes. You have to know that. The road to Rome is really total surrender. Let's not forget that Luther — that's what it was — the Reformation, it's that people were fed up paying taxes no matter what we do, us — Merkel, Chirac, that's not it. No, but even so. So Nietzsche is furious to see the other one suddenly gone soft in Christian romanticism — pessimistic, anti-flesh, anti-whatever, anti-sensuality, guilt-inducing, with blood everywhere, the blood of the swan splashed about that shouldn't have been because he was a vegetarian, the blood of Christ, the blood of the Fisher King — sure it doesn't resolve all this unhealthy stuff that Nietzsche detests.
1:35:35 That's not Greek at all. Honestly, well, really? It's Venus rising from the waves, isn't it? It's not... it's not the... what do you call them? The recumbent tomb figures, gnawed by worms, sculpture from the late Middle Ages. Not that — it's the glorified body, the glorious body. And then, I told you last time, I think I'll repeat it for those who weren't there — a few weeks before his psychic collapse, a few weeks before the mistreated horse in Turin, which he'll go embrace so movingly, and here I speak without any irony, he proves that pity — he hadn't managed to entirely repress it in his soul — and when his madness begins and he no longer recognizes anyone, in short he'll die in that loneliness in the asylum, he'll go out a little, come out again sometimes, saying to a fellow patient in the hospital bed, 'sing me a song.'
The prelude to Parsifal and the poet's solitude 1:36:28 That's beautiful, isn't it? And, or writing little notes to Mrs. Wagner where it says 'Ariadne, I love you, signed Dionysus.' These are people caught up in mythology, that is, he's a wanderer, one must make peace, 'I will be faithful to Dionysus.' It's beautiful, it's Ariadne. There, in short, meaning: I would not have left you at Naxos. And so, a few weeks — months, sorry — before the collapse, he hears for the first time, this time, the music — because until then he'd only spoken of the text, he hadn't heard the music.
1:37:05 You see, in Monte Carlo, he hears the prelude, and there he is more Wagnerian than anyone has ever been, more Christian than anyone has ever been. You see, these alternations. I'm nearly at my conclusion, I'll hurry it along a bit actually, namely — I told you, one must assume these other contradictions, I'll pick the thread back up for Nietzsche, don't worry — and this alternation, which occurs from one era to another, can also occur simultaneously, within the same person, as we saw with Nerval, torn between the sighs of the saint and the cries of the fairy, and as we now see with Nietzsche.
1:37:44 And you see I'm speaking of two madmen, two who ended in madness, and that's what happens when destiny is individual — that's my conclusion — when, as Hölderlin says, the poet is not alone in standing bareheaded before the divine fire, but when it is shared, as was the case in Greece — because that's the Greek reference, it's not Apollo, it's not a matter of law — it's that, as Hölderlin says, no one was alone in bearing life in that world of citizenship, not the world of the private, the world of citizenship. So I'll finish anyway, because Nietzsche goes so far as to say — it's as if, when I listen to this prelude, as though it were speaking to me and telling me the truth I had never admitted to myself, that of Christianity, that is, the strongest discourse — he uses the word 'strong,' among the Greeks that's a strong value, it's said in Latin, virtus, that's the true translation, for those who are good Latinists — it's strength, not virtue, not in the same sense anyway.
1:38:39 There you go, you see, this retraction is magnificent, and so I ask Zében to reflect carefully on Nietzsche's example, who at least goes all the way through his contradictions, unlike those who, because the agitation of the proletariat gives them hives, become anti-monotheism, anti-transcendence, well, no, I don't know. There. I wouldn't want, on a subject that concerns each and every one of us, to monopolize the floor — we still have time to ask questions. I don't remember anymore if it's in Matthew or which other apostle it's said, there cannot be a Christian priest, there cannot be a Christian church.
The Gospel against culpabilization 1:39:15 The church, the word ecclesia — I don't want to do theology in the theologians' place, but still, ecclesia, as philologists know, means the assembly of those who believe in the word of the New Testament. Period. There is no privileged caste — that's actually the essence of Luther's Reform, in his most famous work, The Freedom of a Christian. Before him, it was said: outside the church, no salvation. I cannot reach heaven if I don't go through the mediation of a priest whom I ask what is good, what is evil. In short, I ask the local priest, at the parish, what's good and what's evil for us.
1:39:49 What's this like? I never knew a communist party in history. We saw this organization... in every parish, it's nothing, a neighborhood cell right next to it. In every parish—and I'm not saying this ironically, it played a great role in history, and not at all a negative one. No, it's a guy who was killing each other, and there was the Truce of God, that was still better. But in every parish, they even probe kidneys, hearts, and souls. Can you imagine? I could find out who Madame is cheating on her husband with, it's fantastic.
1:40:20 I'm speaking only at the political level, it's tremendous. So, we know that. Well, and we're far from the Gospel of John. We're far from "whoever wants to save his life will lose it." We're far from the parable of the rich young man. I don't know if you know, in the Gospel there's a rich young man who approached Jesus. Here, I follow the 10 commandments, I keep them, what else must I do to deserve the kingdom of heaven? And Christ tells him, leave your possessions and follow me. And the text adds, and the young man went away very sad, for he had many possessions. It's touching.
1:40:50 That's when, seeing him move away, Jesus says to his disciples, I tell you truly, it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. It's impossible. It's harder. There. And I could go on. Well, I think—no, but your question is interesting. Because there's such a perversion, not an inversion but a perversion, a real perversion of the concepts, that we've gone as far as founding the concept of "Judeo-Christian" to symbolize everything that, roughly speaking, represses our libido.
1:41:22 Roughly speaking. No, no, but that's normal. Well, let's be clear. Fine. Unfortunately, he's rather libertarian. So, I'm quoting the Gospel, I'm not taking a stance, I'm not interpreting it. When there's the scene of the adulterous woman, he says to the Pharisees, you, you judge according to the flesh, I judge no one. First, I don't judge according to the flesh. That's enormous for someone who's supposed to have founded Judeo-Christianity.
1:41:52 Second, the only unforgivable sin—in the religion of forgiveness par excellence, it must be serious—but the only unforgivable sin, as you know, is the sin. No, not against the flesh, but... Yes. Yes, thank you, against the spirit. Well, there you go, people with a good education. But yes, against the spirit. Roughly speaking, the lie. Because some need it to be serious. No, not the child's lie who says "it wasn't me who wanted the candy."
1:42:23 No. Well, well, the lie to oneself. It's interesting, the weight of ideology on the individual. Things I think because it suits me and not because it's true. The lie. That, that is a deprivation, a deprivation of truth within oneself. There. We're at the opposite of the Christianity you're thinking of. The connotations behind the word "Christian" that are tied to a church, tied to...
1:42:53 ...interest in... There. And if you masturbate, you'll go crazy, you'll get pimples. Well, I mean... There. Of course. So, you, I'm searching, I judge no one. The sin, the unforgivable one, is the sin against the spirit. But above all, above all, this is more important because it goes well beyond just the history of religion. And I come back to ecology, I see you, nothing in it. But, because there's a lot of guilt-tripping in ecologist discourse.
1:43:24 Once again, me, I'm a... When I go into the forest, you have to put up with me as much as with an eco-warrior. They're sad in the forest. That, it's a matter of, I'm a country person. That holds up like that, but it's the sourest ones who spoiled Caesar. That's fine, there. No, no, no, but the apocalypse, at the end, when the last catastrophes, the seventh seal, where it collapses, the lake of fire, sulfur, and Satan, who is thrown into the lake, suffers.
1:43:54 And the voice says, there he is, defeated, the ancient serpent, the one who accused our brothers before the Eternal. Evil is the one who accuses. Now, we've made a religion of guilt out of it. That's what perverts it, rightly so. I'm not for... I'm not for building a statue to Mr. Soler. There. Defeated, the ancient serpent—in the translations, the dragon, the reptilian side, in evil.
1:44:28 Aristotle said that the serpent—but he's a naturalist, Aristotle, you'd think it wasn't mentioned. He said, he has his mouth on the ground. He's not even like Ovid's man, who from his head can raise himself toward the sky, because even quadrupeds have trouble doing that. The opposite of man—it's Ovid who said that man is the only animal who can look toward the sky. Toward the sky, sometimes, like Ovid's man, toward the sky, "ironic and cruelly blue," Baudelaire will say elsewhere, whereas the serpent, the opposite, has only its belly, its mouth drags on the ground.
1:45:00 Maybe that's why. Well. Then it gets a bit filtered. So, the ancient serpent, the one who accused our brothers before the Eternal. You see, there's a repudiation here of guilt-tripping. There, because I've partly answered. There. So already, historically, Christianity doesn't mean the same thing as the history of the Catholic Church and/or Protestant. So it's not a question of established churches.
Impressionism, Christian in the conceptual sense 1:45:30 There, you're right to speak of the institution. Sorry, let me tell you. And there. On the other hand, I mean, conversely, I'd say, you can find in phenomena that apparently have no connection to religion—Impressionist painting, for instance. It's not a religious movement. But there's already a dissolving of the outline of the thing, of what makes it a finite object, clean-edged, that makes it a table and not a chair. Right? And not a window. The fact that in Monet's admirable sunset over the Thames, for example, whoever can tell where the water ends and the sky begins, or whether it's the mist or the smog or the smoke of industry, in the whole shimmering blur that Monet renders in that painting, is quite clever.
1:46:20 Now that is Christian in the conceptual sense now, even though we're not within the framework of religion. It means there's an indeterminacy, hence an infinitude of some kind. We come back a little to a period that would predate the separation of elements. The creation of the world, we separated water here, earth there—that's Greek. And there, all of a sudden, here it is again, a bit like the man without qualities. The difficulty the modern hero has, including in the novel, in defining his identity.
1:46:55 Quite simply. I've partly answered afterward. Very good question. I've partly answered.
